The Third Crusade spent nearly two years and tens of thousands of lives retaking Acre, from Guy of Lusignan’s gamble in August 1189 to the surrender of 12 July 1191; five weeks later Richard I had the garrison of some 2,700 men killed in front of Saladin’s army.
The siege of Acre ran from 28 August 1189 to 12 July 1191 and was the longest and costliest operation of the Third Crusade. Acre was the best harbour on the coast of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the key to any reconquest, and Saladin had taken it within weeks of the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Guy of Lusignan, released from captivity and refused entry to Tyre by Conrad of Montferrat, marched on it with a few thousand men in what looked like an act of desperation and became the fixed point around which the whole crusade assembled.
The result was a siege inside a siege: the crusaders pinned the city, Saladin pinned the crusaders, and for twenty-three months neither could dislodge the other while both starved and sickened. It was settled when Philip II and Richard I arrived with the siege equipment and the money of two western kingdoms. The city surrendered on terms, and five weeks later, with the terms in dispute, Richard had the prisoners killed within sight of Saladin’s army.
Guy of Lusignan had lost the field army of Jerusalem at Hattin and been Saladin’s prisoner for a year. Released in 1188 on an oath not to bear arms against the sultan — which a churchman promptly dispensed him from — he found the only city left in Frankish hands, Tyre, held against him by Conrad of Montferrat, who had saved it and was not minded to hand it to the man who had lost everything else. Guy had a crown, a wife with the better title, and no base.
His answer in August 1189 was to march south with perhaps 10,000 men and sit down in front of Acre, a walled port with a garrison and the whole Ayyubid army within reach. It should have been the end of him. Instead it worked as a rallying signal: Pisan ships were already off the coast, and contingents from Denmark, Flanders, Champagne, Germany, England and Italy came in through the autumn. By late September there were tens of thousands of crusaders entrenched on the plain, and Saladin had brought his army up behind them.
The crusaders dug a double line: one facing the walls of Acre, one facing outward at Saladin. It was the decisive engineering decision of the campaign, because it meant the besiegers could not be swept away by the relief army, only starved, and they could be fed from the sea whenever a Christian fleet controlled the water. Control of the water changed hands repeatedly. Egyptian squadrons broke through in October and December 1189 to reinforce and revictual the garrison, and the crusader camp went hungry whenever they did.
The one large field battle came on 4 October 1189, when the crusaders attacked Saladin’s camp. The Templars broke his right, then scattered to plunder, and Saladin’s light cavalry cut the pursuit apart while the Acre garrison sortied into the crusader rear. Gerard de Ridefort, the Templar grand master who had already led the order into catastrophe at Hattin, was killed. Casualties ran into thousands, and after it both sides settled into a war of trenches, mines, towers and disease.
What killed most of the people who died at Acre was not fighting. The crusader camp sat between a marsh and its own latrines for two years; the winter of 1190–91 brought famine after storms cut the sea route, and prices in the camp reached the point where men ate their horses and worse. Typhus, dysentery and scurvy did the rest, and the chroniclers on both sides describe corpse-carts and mass graves rather than heroics.
The dead included most of the leadership the crusade had begun with. Queen Sibylla of Jerusalem died in the camp in 1190 with both her daughters, which destroyed the basis of Guy’s kingship and opened the succession quarrel that dominated the rest of the crusade — Conrad of Montferrat married the heiress Isabella I within weeks. Frederick VI of Swabia, who had brought the surviving Germans overland after his father drowned in the Saleph, died in January 1191. Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, died on 1 June 1191, days before Richard landed.
Philip II landed on 20 April 1191 with engineers and siege machines and began systematically battering the north-eastern angle of the walls. Richard I arrived on 8 June, having taken Cyprus on the way and married Berengaria of Navarre at Limassol, and brought money, ships and two great stone-throwers his men nicknamed God’s Own Catapult and Bad Neighbour. Both kings fell ill with the wasting sickness the crusaders called arnaldia, and both went on directing the assault from litters.
The pressure told quickly. A breach opened on 3 July, and though the assault through it was thrown back, the garrison had been fighting for two years with no prospect of relief: Saladin’s emirs would not risk a general action against entrenched lines, and his letters to Baghdad and Cairo asking for troops were producing less each season. On 11 July the garrison sent out its terms, and on 12 July, with Conrad of Montferrat handling the negotiation at Saladin’s own request, Acre surrendered.
The agreement was specific: 200,000 dinars, the return of the True Cross taken at Hattin, and the release of some 1,500 Christian captives, against which the garrison of about 2,700 men, with their families, would be freed. It was to be paid in instalments, and the garrison was held as security. Saladin had not negotiated it — his own governor had, under duress, and the sultan found himself bound to terms agreed over his head, with the cross in Damascus and the money and the named captives not readily to hand.
The first instalment came on 11 August and was refused: Richard demanded the specific nobles he had listed, and the sums and prisoners on offer did not match. Both sides had reason to stall, and both were stalling. On 20 August Richard marched the prisoners out to the hill of Ayyadieh, in full view of Saladin’s outposts, and had about 2,700 of them beheaded, with their wives and children. The high-value captives were kept back for ransom, which says plainly that this was calculation and not fury.
It was Richard’s act and the article will not shade it: he killed thousands of disarmed prisoners to unblock a negotiation and to free his army to march south. Saladin killed his own Christian prisoners in reprisal. The one thing the episode is not is proof of simple bad faith on Saladin’s side; the historian Hannes Möhring reads the massacre as a deliberate warning to future garrisons, and Saladin’s subsequent policy — demolishing the fortifications of Ascalon and other towns rather than defending them — suggests he took the warning exactly as it was meant.