The Third Crusade (1189–1192) was western Europe's answer to Saladin's capture of Jerusalem: three kings set out, one drowned, one went home, and the third failed to take the city and settled for access to it.
Saladin destroyed the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin in July 1187 and took the city itself in October. Within two years almost every Latin possession in the Holy Land had fallen except Tyre.
The response was the largest crusading effort yet mounted: the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip II of France and Richard I of England all took the cross, in what was intended to be a decisive reconquest.
It was not. Barbarossa drowned in Anatolia before reaching Syria, Philip went home after the fall of Acre, and Richard — who won every battle he fought — twice advanced within sight of Jerusalem and twice turned back. The crusade ended in 1192 with a treaty that left the city in Muslim hands and the coast in Christian ones.
The kingdom of Jerusalem had been living on borrowed time for a generation, and the succession crisis after the death of the leper king Baldwin IV brought it to a head. Guy of Lusignan took an army into waterless country in July 1187 and lost it at the Horns of Hattin.
The True Cross was captured with the army. Jerusalem, defended by a garrison of the men Hattin had not killed, surrendered on terms in October, and Saladin permitted the Christian population to ransom itself rather than sacking the city — a deliberate contrast with the crusader conquest of 1099 that western writers found difficult to explain.
News of the fall reportedly killed Pope Urban III, and the crusade was preached across Europe. England and France raised the Saladin tithe, a general tax on movable property, which was resented in exactly the way general taxes are.
Frederick Barbarossa left in 1189 with the largest army of the three, marched overland through Hungary and Anatolia, beat the Seljuks at Iconium — and drowned crossing a river in Cilicia in June 1190. Most of his army turned round and went home.
Richard I and Philip II travelled by sea. Richard took Cyprus from its Byzantine ruler on the way, which was not part of the plan and turned out to be the crusade's most durable acquisition — it remained a Latin kingdom for four centuries.
The two kings loathed each other. Philip left for France within weeks of Acre falling, having secured what he needed, and spent the following years attacking Richard's continental possessions while Richard was still on crusade.
Guy of Lusignan had begun besieging Acre in 1189 with a force too small for the task, and the siege became the crusade's centre of gravity: a Christian army besieging a city while itself besieged by Saladin's field army outside.
It lasted two years, killed enormous numbers on both sides through disease and starvation, and ended in July 1191 when the city surrendered shortly after the kings arrived. Richard then had some two thousand seven hundred prisoners executed when the surrender terms were not met on time — an act his own admirers found hard to defend.
Marching south along the coast, he beat Saladin at Arsuf in September 1191 in a battle that demonstrated what disciplined crusader cavalry could do when it did not charge too early. He took Jaffa, and the road to Jerusalem was open.
Richard advanced towards Jerusalem twice, in early 1192 and again that summer, and turned back both times without attempting a siege. It is the decision the crusade is judged on and it was almost certainly correct.
The military argument was that taking the city was possible and holding it was not: Saladin's field army was intact, the crusaders' supply line from the coast was long and exposed, and most of the army intended to go home once the city was taken, leaving a garrison too small to keep it.
The political argument was that Philip II was attacking his lands in France and his brother John was intriguing in England. Both were true. The tradition that Richard refused to look at the city he could not take is a later embellishment, and a good one.
The Treaty of Jaffa in September 1192 ended the crusade. Saladin kept Jerusalem; the Latins kept the coast from Tyre to Jaffa; and Christian pilgrims were guaranteed access to the holy places.
Richard sailed home and was shipwrecked, captured by the duke of Austria — whose banner he had thrown down at Acre — and handed to the German emperor, who held him for a ransom that took a special tax in England to raise.
Saladin died in Damascus in March 1193, six months after the treaty, having spent his last years exhausted and his treasury empty.