The Third Crusade: Causes, Acre and Arsuf
A crusade was a holy war called by the Pope and waged by Christians for spiritual reward. The First Crusade had captured Jerusalem in 1099 and established a string of Latin Christian states along the eastern Mediterranean. By the 1180s those states were under enormous pressure from a unified Muslim power based in Egypt and Syria under Saladin. On 4 July 1187 Saladin destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin, capturing the True Cross and the king. Within months Acre, Sidon, Beirut and other cities had fallen. On 2 October 1187 Saladin entered Jerusalem itself. The shock in Western Europe was immense.
Saladin destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187 and entered Jerusalem on 2 October 1187. The fall of the Holy City triggered Pope Gregory VIII’s call for a Third Crusade in his bull Audita tremendi.
Crusading Attitudes in England
When the news from the Holy Land reached England, attitudes were shaped by a century of crusading culture. Sermons in parish churches told stories of First Crusade heroes; the great religious orders (Templars and Hospitallers) had houses across the country; pilgrimage badges from Jerusalem were valued relics. Pope Gregory VIII’s 1187 bull Audita tremendi framed the loss of Jerusalem as a punishment for Christian sin and called for armed pilgrimage. Anyone who took the Cross gained an indulgence — the remission of the punishment for their sins — and protection of their lands and debts while away. Henry II and Philip II of France immediately took the Cross at Gisors on 21 January 1188. Richard, then count of Poitou, had already taken the Cross at Tours in November 1187, ahead of his father. He was the first ruler in north-western Europe to swear the crusading vow. He never took it back.
The English Crusading Army
Who actually went on crusade from England? The army that left in 1190 was a cross-section of Angevin society, not just the king and his knights. Tenants-in-chief took the Cross with their household knights; bishops — including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Baldwin of Forde — led contingents from their dioceses. Below them came mounted sergeants (men-at-arms without the full knightly equipment), foot soldiers raised from the shires, archers, crossbowmen, and a large body of non-combatants — cooks, smiths, surgeons, clerks, and pilgrims of every social rank. A separate seaborne contingent from the Cinque Ports, London and the East Anglian harbours sailed on around a hundred ships, called at Lisbon on the way, and met the king in Sicily. English crews in an earlier northern fleet had already helped the Portuguese take the Moorish town of Silves in 1189. Total English numbers were perhaps 8,000 fighting men and several thousand non-combatants.
Why did they go? Motives were mixed. Many were genuinely moved by the loss of Jerusalem and the chance of an indulgence; some hoped for booty and lands in the East; some came to escape debts or law-suits; some were summoned by feudal duty to a lord who had taken the Cross. The crusader vow gave each one a moral and legal status that bound them all together for the journey.
Students sometimes assume that crusaders went East purely for plunder. The financial reality argues against this: crusade was breathtakingly expensive. A knight had to provide his armour, three or four horses, supplies for a campaign of years, and probably had to mortgage land or borrow heavily to do it. Many came home poorer than they left. The indulgence and the religious framing mattered. The 1188 Saladin Tithe and the 1193–94 ransom both show how seriously the wealthy laity were prepared to pay for the cause. Profit was a hope; piety was the engine.
Richard’s Motives
Richard had personal as well as political reasons to go. As Duke of Aquitaine and a man raised on the chivalric culture of southern France, he had grown up on stories of Roland and the First Crusade. The fall of Jerusalem stirred a genuine religious response. But there were also kingly calculations. The crusade was the most prestigious enterprise a Christian ruler could undertake; success would set him above every other monarch in Europe. He had taken the Cross before becoming king, and to renege after his coronation would have damaged his reputation across Christendom. Practically, the crusade also gave him a cause around which to organise the Angevin Empire and to extract enormous taxes from England and his French lands.
Quarrels with Philip II
From the start the Third Crusade was a fragile alliance. Richard and Philip II of France had been allies as princes against Henry II, but as kings they were rivals for the great Angevin lands in France. They wintered together in Sicily in 1190–91, where their tempers frayed: Richard repudiated his betrothal to Philip’s sister Alys (alleging she had been Henry II’s mistress), seized Messina from its Norman ruler, and chose a Navarrese bride instead, marrying Berengaria at Limassol in Cyprus in May 1191. He then conquered Cyprus from its Byzantine renegade lord Isaac Komnenos in May 1191. Philip arrived at Acre first; Richard joined him in June. Both contributed to the siege, but the personal hostility between the two kings was barely concealed and it would shape the strategic disaster of the next year.
The Siege and Capture of Acre, 1191
Acre was the great port and economic capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. King Guy of Lusignan had been besieging it since 1189 with a small force; the besieging Christians were themselves besieged in turn by Saladin’s field army. The arrival of Philip II’s contingent in spring 1191 and Richard’s in June transformed the operation. Richard brought up siege engines, mantlets and trebuchets — including a giant trebuchet known as the ‘Bad Neighbour’. Mining undermined the towers. After heavy losses on both sides Acre’s garrison surrendered on 12 July 1191. The terms included the return of the True Cross, the release of 1,500 Christian prisoners, and a ransom of 200,000 dinars. When Saladin delayed payment Richard ordered the execution of around 2,700 Muslim prisoners outside the city walls in late August — a decision still debated by historians and a permanent stain on his reputation. Philip II, citing illness, sailed home shortly afterwards.
Acre fell on 12 July 1191 after a two-year siege. Two months later Richard defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf on 7 September 1191. Saladin lost around 7,000 men; Richard lost around 700.
The March to Jaffa and the Battle of Arsuf
Richard now needed to secure the coast as a supply route before any move on Jerusalem. He marched south from Acre towards Jaffa in late August 1191, hugging the coastline so that his fleet could shadow him with food and water. Saladin shadowed him inland with mounted archers, harassing the column day after day. Richard kept tight discipline: knights did not break ranks despite the provocation, crossbowmen replied from within the marching column, and the army moved in three solid blocks — van, centre, rear — with the baggage shielded between army and sea.
On 7 September the column reached the wood of Arsuf and Saladin attacked in force, hoping to break the rear of the column under the Hospitallers. The Hospitallers held until they could hold no longer; their charge, joined moments later by the rest of the line, broke the Muslim army. Saladin lost around 7,000 men, Richard about 700. The victory at Arsuf restored the prestige of the Christian arms after Hattin and proved that a disciplined western army could survive in the field against Saladin. It opened the road to Jaffa, which Richard took and refortified.
Acre was the gateway to the Holy Land — without it no large crusader army could be supplied. Its fall in July 1191 reopened the supply line to Europe and gave the crusaders a base from which to march on Jerusalem. Arsuf showed that Saladin’s field army was not invincible. Together the two victories built the legend of Richard the Lionheart in Christendom and reset the strategic position. They could not, however, replace the loss of Christian numbers, of Philip’s troops, and of the political will to take Jerusalem itself — problems that Lesson 4 will examine.