The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (48 page)

The battle for the sea

When the Latin fleet appeared, driven down the coast by a north wind, around fifty of Saladin’s ships sailed out of Acre’s harbour in pairs to meet it, flying green and gold banners. The Franks possessed two main types of vessel: ‘long, slender and low’ galleys, fixed with battering rams and powered by two banks of oars (one below and one on deck); and ‘galliots’, shorter, more manoeuvrable warships with a single bank of oars. As the fleet approached, shield walls were erected on decks and the Christian ships formed into a V-shaped wedge, with the galleys at its point. With a cacophony of trumpets sounding on both sides, the two forces ploughed into one another and battle was joined.

Sea-borne combat was still a relatively rudimentary affair in 1190. Larger ships might try to ram and sink enemy craft, but on the whole fighting took place at close quarters and consisted of the exchange of short-range missiles and attempts to draw in opposing vessels with grappling hooks and board them. The greatest horror, as far as sailors were concerned, was Greek fire, because it could not be extinguished by water, and in this engagement both sides possessed supplies of this weapon. The Muslim fleet came close to gaining the upper hand on a number of occasions. One Frankish galley was bombarded with Greek fire and boarded, prompting its oarsmen to leap into the sea in terror. A small number of knights who were weighed down by their heavy armour, and who did not know how to swim anyway, chose to hold their ground ‘in sheer desperation’ and managed to win back control of the half-burnt vessel. In the end, neither side achieved an overwhelming victory, but the Muslim fleet came off the worst, being forced back behind Acre’s harbour chain. One of their galleys was driven ashore and ransacked, its crew dragged on to the beach and summarily butchered and beheaded by a merciless pack of knife-wielding Latin women. In a grim aside, a crusader later noted that ‘the women’s physical weakness prolonged the pain of death’ because it took them longer to decapitate their foes.

This battle cost Saladin control of the sea for the rest of 1190. The crusaders were able to police the waters around Acre, penning the sultan’s remaining ships within the harbour and disrupting any attempts to resupply the city’s garrison. For the next six months Acre’s inhabitants lived on the edge of starvation. By late spring their stores of supplies were exhausted and they were forced to eat ‘all their beasts, hooves and innards, necks and heads’ and expel any old or weak prisoners (the young were kept to load catapults). Saladin made repeated attempts to break the naval cordon, with varying degrees of success. In mid-June, part of a twenty-five-ship-strong fleet managed to fight its way through. Around late August, the sultan arranged for a round-bellied transport ship to be packed with 400 sacks of wheat, as well as cheese, corn, onions and sheep. To beat the blockade it sailed from Beirut under the cloak of disguise. Its crew ‘dressed up as Franks, even shaving their beards’, while pigs were placed on deck in plain view and crosses flown. The crusaders were fooled and the vessel successfully ran the gauntlet. But these were meagre victories for a city that needed near-constant supply. At the start of September, Qaragush managed to smuggle out a letter informing Saladin that in two weeks Acre would be entirely empty of food. The sultan was so alarmed that he kept the news secret for fear that it would break his army’s morale. Three more grain-laden supply ships were due from Egypt, but bad winds delayed their progress. Baha al-Din described how, on 17 September, Saladin stood on the shore ‘like a bereft mother…his heart troubled’, watching as they finally sailed up the coast towards Acre, knowing full well that the city would fall if they failed to get through. After fierce fighting ‘the ships came safely into harbour, to be met like rains after drought’.
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One saving grace throughout all these struggles was that the crusaders never succeeded in taking control of Acre’s inner harbour. Had they done so, the garrison’s position would have quickly become untenable. Late in the summer of 1190 the Franks made a concerted effort to seize the Tower of Flies, the fort built on a rocky outcrop in the bay of Acre that controlled the chain guarding the port’s harbour. They fortified two or three ships, creating what amounted to elaborate floating siege towers, but their assault failed when these were burned down by Greek fire.

With the exception of this attack, the Franks never attempted a naval assault on Acre and, in reality, from their perspective the battle for the sea functioned as a platform and an addendum to their land-based siege. Access to naval support was utterly indispensable in that it continued to furnish the crusaders with reinforcements, provisions and military supplies, and the blockade of Acre certainly added an important element of attrition to their investment, but for most of 1190 their overall strategy was grounded in warfare on land.

The struggle on land

Here the fighting season began again in earnest in late April and early May 1190. With spring, Saladin recalled his troops from Syria and Mesopotamia. On 25 April he moved his camp back to the front line at Tell Kaisan with the support of his son al-Afdal. Over the next two months they were reinforced by detachments from the likes of Aleppo, Harran and Mosul. At the same time, of course, with the sea open the crusader camp was again flooded by fresh recruits, many of whom were early arrivals from the armies of the French and English kings. Chief among them was Henry II of Champagne, count of Troyes, nephew of both Richard I and Philip Augustus. Henry reached Acre in August in the company of his uncles, Count Theobald V of Blois and Stephen, count of Sancerre, along with some 10,000 fighting men, and immediately took over military command of the siege. A large contingent of English crusaders arrived in late September, headed by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, the formidable Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, and Hubert’s uncle, Ranulf of Glanville, once one of King Henry II of England’s closest advisers.
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In spite of the renewed influx of western crusaders, Saladin should have possessed the manpower to balance, perhaps even overwhelm, the Christian besiegers during the long fighting season of 1190. But one factor stayed his hand–the coming of the Germans. As early as autumn 1189 Saladin had received reports that Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was marching to the Holy Land at the head of a quarter of a million crusaders–tidings that, not surprisingly, ‘greatly troubled the sultan and caused him anxiety’. The impending threat posed by the expected arrival of this horde meant that from April to September the sultan was never able to direct the full might of his military resources, nor focus his strategic thinking, upon the problem at Acre. Convinced that the emperor’s vast host would sweep south through Syria and Lebanon like an unstoppable tide, Saladin set about preparing for a bitterly fought war on two fronts. Almost as soon as the sultan’s troops arrived at Acre that spring he began sending them away to bolster the defences of the north. Inland cities were ordered to store their harvests in case of siege, while along the coast Saladin judged that the likes of Latakia and Beirut would have no chance of resisting Frederick, and thus ordered their walls to be razed to the ground to prevent them becoming Latin strongholds. These measures made complete strategic sense–indeed Saladin would have been mad to ignore Barbarossa’s approach–but they also served to cripple Muslim efforts at Acre by forcing a massive redirection of resources. In this way, even before they set foot in the Levant, the Germans made a significant contribution to the Third Crusade.
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Weakened and distracted, Saladin had to adopt a largely reactive approach to the defence of Acre. He could hope to frustrate the Franks’ attempt to seize the city, but any plans actually to make a concerted attempt to annihilate the besiegers were again sidelined. By the first days of May the sultan had re-established a front-line position, penning in the crusaders between his armies and Acre’s walls. This allowed Saladin to mount almost instantaneous counter-attacks to any Latin assault on the city, forcing the crusaders to fight their own draining struggle on two fronts. Meanwhile, the sultan sought to maintain contact with Qaragush and his garrison, but with the city subject to a close land and sea blockade this was no simple matter. Carrier pigeons were one of the mainstays of the communication and intelligence system that spanned the far-flung Ayyubid Empire, but at Acre they seem to have played a limited role, perhaps being too easy a target for enemy archers. Here, Saladin relied instead upon a group of guileful and courageous messengers who would seek to swim into Acre’s inner harbour under cover of darkness, carrying letters, money and even flasks of Greek fire sealed in otter-skin bags. This was perilous work. On one mission an experienced swimmer named Isa, who ‘used to dive and emerge on the far side of the enemy’s ships’, disappeared, only to be washed up drowned in the harbour a few days later, his consignment of messages and gold still tied round his waist.
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For the greater part of 1190, Saladin faced an enemy driven by one core objective–the breaching of Acre’s landward defences. Lacking a single universally acknowledged leader (with power passing between the likes of King Guy, James of Avesnes and Henry of Champagne), their attacks sometimes lacked resolve, but the threat they posed was severe nonetheless. The Franks adopted an assault-based siege strategy, looking to overcome the city’s walls through a combination of bombardment, scaling and sapping. Having constructed a number of catapults through the winter, they now initiated a near-daily barrage of stone missiles. These machines seem to have been of fairly limited strength, incapable of propelling truly massive boulders, so the attacks were probably designed to harass and injure the Muslim garrison as much as to weaken Acre’s walls. Of course, this was no one-sided affair. Within the city, Qaragush had his own array of heavy weapons with which he sought to destroy the crusaders’ siege engines, often with great success. One was said to be particularly massive, capable of loosing stones that on impact would bury themselves a foot into the ground.

Acre’s landward walls were encircled by a dry moat, designed to hamper any ground assault and prevent large-scale siege towers from being drawn up against its battlements. The crusaders made arduous attempts to fill sections of this ditch with rubble, often under the cover of aerial bombardment. The garrison did its best to hamper these efforts, showering the workers with arrows, but they were determined. One Frankish woman, mortally wounded as she carried forward stones, even requested that her body be thrown into the moat to act as infill. By early May 1190, to the Muslims’ horror, a path to the foot of the walls had been opened.

Panic now started to spread. For weeks Qaragush and Saladin had watched a frenzy of construction within the crusaders’ camp, as three massive siege engines gradually rose into the air. Built with wood specially brought from Europe to a height of some sixty-five feet, these wheeled three-storey behemoths were covered in vinegar-soaked hide, to dampen the effect of fire, and hung with rope netting to weaken the impact of catapult attack. One Muslim eyewitness wrote that, towering above the battlements of Acre, ‘[they] seemed like mountains’. Around 3 May, King Guy, James of Avesnes and Ludwig of Thuringia packed them with troops–crossbowmen and archers on the roof, spear and pikemen below–and began inching the machines towards the city. This dreadful spectacle appalled the Muslims. In Saladin’s camp ‘everyone totally despaired for the city and the spirits of the defend[ers] were broken’, while within Acre ‘Qaragush was out of his mind with fear’, preparing to negotiate a surrender. A swimmer was hurriedly dispatched to warn the sultan that collapse was imminent and Saladin quickly launched a counter-attack. Simultaneously, the garrison began pelting the towers with flasks of Greek fire once they came into range, but none of this halted their inexorable advance.

The day was saved by a young unnamed metalworker from Damascus. Fascinated by the properties of Greek fire, he had developed a variation on its formula which promised to burn with even greater intensity. Qaragush was sceptical, but eventually agreed to try this new invention, and the metalworker ‘concocted the ingredients he had gathered with some naphtha in copper vats, until the whole mixture was like a burning coal’. Earlier in the day, fruitless attempts to use standard Greek fire had prompted the Franks to dance about and make jokes atop their towers, but when a clay pot of this new formulation struck, their jeers were silenced. ‘Hardly had it hit the target before it burst into flames and the whole became like a mountain of fire’, observed one Muslim onlooker. The two remaining towers soon suffered a similar fate. Trapped crusaders on the upper levels died in the conflagration, while below those who could escaped to watch their great engines ‘burn to cinders’. For now, at least, Acre was safe.
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In the months that followed, the Muslims’ superior mastery of combustible weapon technology proved a decisive element. In August, when the Franks sought to intensify their bombardment, operating in shifts through day and night, building ever more powerful catapults, Qaragush and Abu’l Haija launched a lightning sortie, sending ‘Greek fire specialists’ to burn the enemy’s machines, killing seventy Christian knights in the process. In September a massive stone-thrower, built under the orders of Henry of Champagne at the cost of 1,500 gold dinars, was similarly dispatched in a matter of minutes. Not surprisingly, the crusaders developed an intense hatred of Greek fire. One unfortunate Turkish emir thus paid a heavy price when wounded in a skirmish beside a Frankish siege tower. He had been carrying a container of Greek fire, hoping to destroy the engine, but now a Latin knight ‘stretched him out on the ground, emptying the contents of the phial on his private parts, so that his genitals were burned’.
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Other, more insidious, battles raged that summer. The careful nurturing of morale within one’s own army and the struggle to break the will of the enemy had long been common features of medieval siege warfare. And, although events at Acre do not seem to have been marked by repeated acts of deliberately callous brutality or barbarism on either side, Qaragush’s garrison occasionally employed such tactics. Latin dead had already been hung from Acre’s battlements in November 1189 in an attempt to enrage the crusaders. Now, in 1190, Muslim troops occasionally dragged crosses and images of the Christian faith to the parapet to subject them to public defilement. This might involve beatings with sticks, spitting and even urination, although one soldier who attempted the latter was reportedly shot in the groin by a Frankish crossbowman.