When Philip II Augustus and Richard the Lionheart arrived in Palestine in 1191 the siege of Acre, which had been going on for nearly a year and a half, had reached a stalemate. The Christian army was not strong enough to storm Acre, and Saladin, himself in difficulties with rebellious Muslim leaders, was unable to gather together a force great enough to dislodge the Christians from their entrenched position in front of the city.
By early June 1191, Philip II Augustus and Richard, having agreed months before to divide between them any plunder won in Palestine, were with the Christian army at Acre, deeply involved in bringing the siege to a victorious conclusion. Richard personally directed the design, building and placement of new siege engines, including one that was said to be able to lob stones large enough to kill 12 men at a blow into the heart of Acre. At the same time, the walls of the town were mined; once tunnels were dug, the crusaders would fill them with combustible materials and set alight to them.
The Muslim garrison commanders in Acre knew they could not hold out much longer, unless Saladin could bring up many more fighting men to take on the by now greatly enlarged Christian army – which he could not do. Nor could he supply them with food and arms, for his ships could not get into the ports now that the Christian fleet had arrived and was guarding them.
Peace negotiations ended on 12 July, when the city’s leaders agreed terms with Conrad of Tyre that were favourable for the crusaders. In return for the lives of the citizens and garrison of Acre, the Christians were to receive the city and its contents, the harbour and its ships, several hundred prisoners, a large ransom and the relic of True Cross lost at the Battle of Hattin. Some 3,000 of Acre’s defenders were to remain as hostages to ensure these terms were met.
Philip II, desperate to leave the Holy Land and ignoring the pleas of his own military leaders and of Richard, set off for home at the end of July, escorted as far as Tyre by Conrad of Montferrat, to whom Philip gave his share of the plunder from the capture of Jerusalem, plus the prisoners he had been allotted. Richard the Lionheart was now in sole charge of affairs in Acre.
Saladin did not hand over the first part of the ransom payment and some prisoners until 11 August. By now, Richard had had plenty of time to consider the Christian position. The importance of maintaining the military advantage far outweighed, in his eyes, the size of the ransom the Christians might eventually get. Those 3,000 hostages were too many to be guarded and could not be allowed to be reabsorbed into Saladin’s forces. Richard decided to kill them.
He warned Saladin of his intentions, threatening to execute the hostages if the ransom, the relic of the True Cross, and those of Saladin’s warriors specifically named in the surrender terms were not produced immediately. Saladin stalled. On 22 August, Richard had 2,700 of the hostages tied together, brought out of the city and ranged alongside a large stage set up below the city walls. One by one, the hostages were taken up onto the stage, blindfolded and ordered to kneel. Men from Richard’s army beheaded them all, in full view of Saladin’s army, powerless to do anything to stop the slaughter.
According to the Norman minstrel, Ambroise, who accompanied the crusaders, the Christian soldiers delighted in butchery, for they saw it as revenge for the killing of so many Christian soldiers during the siege of Acre. Another chronicler relates how the bodies were disembowelled and a great many gold and silver coins were found in the entrails. The massacre at Acre was a reminder to Richard’s contemporaries that ‘lionheart’ could signify ferocity as well as bravery.
By the time Richard left the Holy Land in 1193, the standard of the cross flew over Acre and several stronghold towns along the coast to the south, largely through his efforts. Although the kingdom of Jerusalem was lost, those towns could have been a bridgehead for the recovery of Jerusalem from the infidel. They were not so used and Jerusalem was never regained by the Crusaders.
Richard the Lionheart and Saladin remain heroic figures to this day. A statue of Richard on horseback, sword raised high in the air, stands proudly in front of the Houses of Parliament in London. As recently as 1992 a statue of Saladin as victor of Hattin was erected in Damascus, capital of modern Syria and site of Saladin’s tomb. And because Saladin was born in Tikrit, where the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was also born, Hussein portrayed himself side by side with Saladin (despite Saladin’s Kurdish ancestry) on propaganda posters in the 1980s.
Edward III, Victorious at Crécy, Takes Calais from the French
Almost from the day he became king of England at the age of 15 in 1337, Edward III began planning how he would wrest back from France the rich lands of Flanders that had been lost from England so soon after the death of William the Conqueror. He also began looking for ways of claiming his right to the throne of France, partly because this would ease the task of finding allies for his cause in northern Europe.
Before he sent his first troops across the English Channel to northern France in 1337, starting the Hundred Years War, Edward III had been carefully building up England’s fighting strength. He increased the output of his armoury in the Tower of London and encouraged archery and the use of the longbow, a weapon that his grandfather, Edward I, had first used in significant numbers. Later in Edward III’s reign, an Act of Parliament decreed that all able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 60 must ‘learn and practise the art of shooting’ at the butts every Sunday and feast day.
Edward’s fame as a leader of men grew enormously in 1340 when he put himself in command of a 150-strong English fleet – the first true naval fleet created in England. It attacked and comprehensively destroyed a considerably larger French fleet at anchor in the harbour of Sluys. The longbowmen on the English ships caused havoc among the French crews, emphasizing their value as fighting men. This first, brilliant sea victory for England greatly impressed Europe, and Edward was even offered the title of Holy Roman emperor. He refused it.
By 1346, with the French fleet in the Channel much weakened, Edward III was ready personally to lead his army into battle in France. Accompanied by his 17-year-old son, Edward, the Black Prince, and many of the nobles of England, Edward crossed to France in July 1346 with a force of between 12,000 and 20,000 men (probably nearer the lesser than the greater number, historians believe).
In their march across northern France to Paris, in the early stages of which they captured the large Normandy town of Caen, Edward and his army had to fight many minor skirmishes and battles. By the time they eventually neared Paris, the army had been considerably weakened by heavy losses from disease as well as from fighting. With a large French army massing in front of them, Edward decided he must retreat northwards to the coast. Having crossed the Somme quite near its mouth, he halted in Ponthieu, near a village and forest called Crécy, where he turned to face his enemy.