Ah, the Third Crusade! The Crusade of Kings! The one with Richard the Lionheart and that Arab guy! The one where everybody was real chivalrous to everybody else! I mean, no less an authority than the
International Institute for Christian Culture says this about the Crusades in general:
(All emphases and grammatical errors courtesy of The Rev. Brian M. Abshire, Ph.D., author of this drivel)
The real history of the Crusades of course must take second place to political correctness of modern humanism...the Crusades were NOT offensive wars of conquest motivated by greed, but defensive wars against the bloody and barbaric Islamic religious ideal of Jihad or "holy war"...where Islam MUST be spread to "infidels" by all means possible including murderous conquest. The entire history if Islam from the time of Muhammad is one of invasions, rape and slavery.
Yeah, right. Follow me into the Cave of the Moonbat, and let's see if we can't uncover some truth.
It'd be a blast to sit here and rip apart blockquotes by The Rev. Brian M. Abshire, Ph.D., but I won't (can't, really, as my sense of chivalry - partly defined by the Crusades, ironically - won't permit me to beat the crap out of a defenseless idiot). Still, the good pastor's pedantic take on the Crusades is reflective of the views of many people who haven't studied 12th-century religious wars since high school, and that lack of balanced perspective is a major reason why the Religious Right in the United States is so confounded in trying to understand contemporary Muslim thought. The Rev. Brian M. Abshire, Ph.D., and "scholars" of his ilk are simply repeating half-remembered facts from their own high school days, bolstering them with selected anecdotes that are either taken out of context or wildly misinterpreted. It's bad history, and that's impermissible in the Cave of the Moonbat.
Setting a vast, arid stage
As we discussed last week, the Second Crusade, disorganized and haphazard from the git-go, ended especially poorly for the Christians. After making a number of poor tactical decisions, the Crusaders got their asses handed to them (well, the ones who lived through the battle) at the Horns of Hattin by Saladin and his highly factional Muslim army. Saladin held things together long enough to capture Jerusalem and boot the Crusaders out of every major city in the Levant except Tyre (which he besieged), but his reign, contrary to popular belief - talkin' to you, Rev. Brian M. Abshire, Ph.D. - he was hardly able to present the Crusaders with a united front. Far from being a single-minded horde of jihadists, the Muslim army was made up of a combination of Shi'a, Sunni, Turkish, Egyptian, and Arab warlords who unified only behind the most singular and achievable of objectives (e.g. the destruction of the Crusaders at Hattin), but otherwise played the same political game as everyone else who was trying to carve a place for themselves in the 12th-century Middle East.
Saladin's strength at any given time varied with the fortunes of war. He enjoyed unparalleled unity among his emirs when he was winning - he seemed to do no wrong after Hattin, and the momentum was clearly on his side after the fall of Jerusalem - but after the Crusaders had been driven into just a handful of tenuously-held cities and castles, those same emirs began to quarrel and fell into disputes based on religion, generations-old intertribal enmity, and the divvying up of the Crusader spoils.
Normally such divisiveness among enemy commanders works in favor of an army seeking to expand its base and influence in an occupied land, but the Crusaders proved even more prone to interpersonal pissing contests than the Muslims. Time after time, massive egos trumped good decision-making, resulting in harebrained (but noble) attacks with stupidly high (but valorous) death tolls. Crusader egos and European politics also led to acts of outrageous self-interest, to the point of actually working in favor of their enemy.
It all gets very complicated, and I don't want to test anyone's patience with another 12-page diary, so here's a simplified rundown of some of the causes-and-effects the interactions of Crusader and Muslim politics had on one another:
* After capturing Jerusalem in 1187, Saladin goes on to take much of Outremer. By the time the Third Crusade begins lurching toward the Holy Land four years later, the Crusaders are pretty much isolated in Tyre and a couple of castles.
* Sieges are expensive, boring, and dangerous (Sun Tzu called attacking walled cities the worst kind of warfare), and Saladin began to lose support when that was all he had left to offer those who had once sworn to drive the infidel from their land. Much land had already been taken, his vassals reasoned, so wouldn't an emir's troops be better used expanding the emir's domain than helping Saladin, a foreign ruler - and a Shi'a - root the beleaguered Christians out of their last strongholds?
* Saladin lost even more support when word reached the Holy Land that Fredrick Barbarosa was on the march with a gazillion swordproof German soldiers. Some of them came back when they heard that Fredrick had proven susceptible to drowning and his army had broken apart; others used it as a more permanent excuse to retire from the fray.
* The Crusaders were unable to capitalize on the flagging interest of the Muslims due to internal infighting. The evacuation of so many nobles to Tyre created problems, and the Europeans dithered away a great deal of time debating who was to be in charge. The apparent choice, Guy, the King of Jerusalem, had proven himself a strategic hothead and a tactical moron, which (as always) attracted some followers and repelled many others, but his main challenger, Conrad, was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately who always seemed to want to wait for yet another army to arrive from Europe.
* Tired of being cut out by Conrad, Guy took what supporters he had and laid siege to Acre, a port city in some ways more critical to Crusader success than Jerusalem itself. If he could take Acre, he would become the gateway to the Holy Land, cutting out Conrad in Tyre. He also made himself a burden for all concerned - arriving Crusaders, Conrad, Saladin, and the Muslims in Acre.
* By the time of Richard's arrival in 1191, the situation looked like this: Neither Conrad nor Guy had sufficient power to take sole control of Outremer, and the arrival of European kings was complicating the mix. Saladin was alternating between besieging Tyre and trying to lift the siege at Acre, and wasn't having a whole lot of success at either.
Why Richard the Lionheart made war on his own father
News of the fall of Jerusalem killed the ironically-named Pope Urban III, and so it fell to his successor, Gregory VIII, to avenge the loss. His first bull, issued in late 1187, didn't failed to run the cross up the proverbial flag pole, but over the winter he dispatched archbishops and evangelizers to spin up a Crusade in earnest. By spring 1188, monarchs all over Europe, along with their vassals and knights, were taking the oath of the cross in a mood of righteous fury. Unfortunately for the Pope, who probably preferred that the re-re-assault on the Holy Land start sooner rather than later, the Kings of Europe had matters that they simply had to settle prior to departing.
This part, too, is complicated by familial relationships (by blood and/or marriage) and the prioritization of various oaths of fealty among the various lords. It helps to remember that England and France, while obviously geographically distinct from one another, had not yet emerged as cultures wholly distinct from one another. The Normans had linked together the royalty of England and France, but that was only 130 years (give or take) before the wheels of the Third Crusade started turning. Their language was a mishmash of Germanic and Latin tongues that were slowly incorporating and discarding different elements of the others, and the faith-based politics of the age meant that unification under any banner other than that decreed appropriate by the Church was highly unlikely.
Perhaps the most important difference in geopolitical worldview between the knights of the Third Crusade and we in the early 21st century regards the importance of having one's empire as contiguous as possible. America fought wars throughout the 1800's - against England, Spain, Mexico, and hundreds of native tribes - to expand in a manifestly contiguous way, yet we never did move on Cuba, Alaska and Hawaii didn't become states until the 1950's, and Puerto Rico sits in limbo to this day. We, like the Russians and the Mongols, think contiguously.
The nobles of the late 12th century, like the later Dutch, Portuguese, and British, did not. Since loyalty was sealed by oaths between individuals (and the primitive knuckle-draggers of the era were a lot better at keeping their word than the modern political class), Europe became a patchwork of kingdoms, whose borders were purely political in nature. The strict social hierarchy of the time also ensured that nobles often had some sort of tortured logic to claim to the throne of some far-off land, and wars of succession were common.
It was one of these things that needed to be sorted out before the English and the French could go a-Viking Crusading. Richard, 3rd of King Henry II's legitimate sons and older brother to 2 more, was a favorite of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most fascinating and adventurous women in all of history (an upcoming diary will take a bibliographical look at Eleanor and several other figures from the Crusades, and will try to compare them to today's leadership). Richard also wanted to inherit his father's throne, as did several of his brothers, so he, as the count of Aquitaine and Poitou, joined with them in a losing rebellion. A few years later (and a couple of years after he'd taken the cross), the tides had turned somewhat, Richard rebelled again, and this time was able to compel his father (who was now nearing death) to name him successor. A further part of the deal held that his younger brother - the future King John of Robin Hood fame - would rule as regent while Richard siphoned off the resources of England to take his Frenchmen to the Holy Land. His new subjects marked his coronation by holding a massacre of Jews.
Trodding a well-trodden path
The French would be going on this one, too. King Philip II had taken the cross back in 1188, but had hung around to help Richard and to see that the whole English succession thing didn't come around to bite him in the ass. Besides, he wasn't much for fighting in the first place, being more suited by temperament to court intrigue and royal administration. He was, in this respect at the very least, the diametric opposite of Richard, who by all accounts was huge, handsome, charismatic, and a much better knight than he was a king (a fact that nobody at the time held against him). Philip waited until Richard was ready to depart in 1190, and by different routes they came with their armies to Sicily in the fall of that year.
Meanwhile, another big, bearded badass (even at nearly 70 years of age) was assembling an enormous host in Germany. Fredrick I, whom the Italians had named "Redbeard," was the Holy Roman Emperor, and he was going to personally command his gargantuan army (tens of thousands) as it marched its way to the salvation of Tyre. He left Germany in May, 1189, more than a year after taking the crusader oath, but he did it in the massive military style that only the Germans seem really good at.
But if he was good at the military stuff, Fredrick was a little lacking in the diplomacy department. He was the only Roman Emperor to ever meet face-to-face with his Byzantine counterpart, and he and Isaac Angelus did not get along. The Byzantine was in secret alliance with Saladin (who was terrified at the reputed size of Freddie's host), and purposely delayed the Germans as they tried to make their way past Constantinople.
He didn't buy the Muslims much time, but Angelus did make an enemy of Fredrick. Not that it ended up mattering much: After successfully capturing several cities as he made his way across Asia Minor and into the outlying regions of Christian Armenia, Fredrick drowned in a freak accident while swimming (or riding his horse across, by some accounts) a river in Cilicia. Fredrick's mighty army, without his personality to hold it together, disintegrated as different knights elected to take their men different ways. Some up and went home, some to the coast so as to sail to Antioch, and some marched overland toward Antioch, though their numbers were significantly reduced by disease, the heat, and harassing attacks by the Turks. Only a handful ever fought the infidel at the siege of Acre, and German presence in the Holy Land effectively ended with the death of the Duke of Swabia (Fredrick's son) at Acre in 1191.
Meddling in the affairs of bystanders
Richard and his troops behaved badly in Sicily, but wintering over on the island worked out well for the 33-year-old king. When he left the next spring, he had shaken down the new king of Sicily for a bunch of money (in fairness, he's reported to have left Excalibur itself on Sicily), disrespected Philip's sister (who probably had an affair with Richard's father) by announcing he would marry a woman chosen for him by Eleanor, and secured Sicily as an ally (while simultaneously making enemies in the Holy Roman Empire) by standing with its young king against German claims to his throne.
Richard's bad behavior continued when he arrived at Cyprus. His betrothed and one of his sisters had planned to meet him there for his arranged wedding, but storms delayed the king and the ladies' ship arrived at Cyprus a week earlier than Richard. A much-disliked lackey of Byzantium was then in charge of Cyprus, and he so creeped out the women that they refused to come ashore until Richard got there. When he did, he promptly declared war over the insult to his fiancé. The fighting was over quickly, and left Western Christendom one island larger.
Bouncing a check, Middle Ages-style
After leaving Sicily, Philip proceeded without conquest or matrimonial delay to Acre, where he quickly linked up with his cousin Conrad, who was now styling himself King of Jerusalem. On what was to be, 698 years later, Hitler's birthday, the two joined Guy at the siege of Acre. Since Saladin was lurking nearby (albeit with a much-diminished force), the Crusaders were forced to deploy much of their strength in guarding against Saladin's attacks, and little more than the construction of some siege equipment was accomplished while they waited for the arrival of Richard.
The King of England strode ashore on June 8, 1191, and a little over a month later - a month during which he had proven himself far more energetic and capable than Philip - he was dictating terms to the garrison at Acre. Unable to communicate with their ally Saladin, the Muslims of Acre nevertheless agreed on his behalf to provide Richard an enormous indemnity to go along with their own surrender: Saladin was to turn over 2000 prisoners, 200,000 gold pieces, and the True Cross.
<foreshadow> During the celebration after the Crusaders entered Acre, some guy named Duke Leopold of Austria (actually the head of what remained of the German contingent) tried to put up his flag alongside Philip's and Richard's. Richard's boys threw it in the mud, and Leopold would remember the insult for some time to come...</foreshadow>
He had the prisoners, but that was about it; Saladin was fresh out of gold and True Crosses. Nevertheless, as a man of honor he felt obliged to turn over to the Crusaders a large number of prisoners as collateral against the money that he promised to scrounge up. Richard accepted, and released a number of them when Saladin made a partial payment, but he still had 2700 of them on his hands - and eating from his larder - when he prepared to move on Jerusalem in August.
Against this backdrop, the Crusaders tried to hash out who was in charge. Guy was found to be the King of Jerusalem, but Conrad would succeed him. Philip announced that he was tired, sick, and had fulfilled his crusader oath (technically this was true), and sailed for home in early August, though he did leave a bunch of knights and soldiers as a parting gift. Richard just wanted to kick ass and take Jerusalem.
By the middle of August, Richard was ready to go, and the prisoners had become more trouble than they were worth. Saladin couldn't pay for them in any acceptable time frame, and they were a logistical burden, so Richard resolved to be rid of them. Here's one Christian witness' description:
On the Friday next after the feast of the Assumption of Blessed Mary*, he ordered that two thousand seven hundred of the vanquished Turkish hostages be led out of the city and decapitated. Without delay his assistants rushed up and quickly carried out the order. They gave heartfelt thanks, since with the approval of divine grace, they were taking vengeance in kind for the death of the Christians whom these people had slaughtered with the missiles of their bows and ballistas.
* August 16, silly. The massacre took place on the 20th or 21st
Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, Brundage translation, 1962
link
The Muslims attacked so as to stop the slaughter, but the Christians held them off and completed their grisly, daylong task. Repercussions from this atrocity appear surprisingly limited to the modern eye: As indicated above, Christians saw it as just deserts for the losses they had endured in the capture of Acre; Muslim chroniclers term the dead "martyrs" and don't get especially worked up about it; and Saladin continued to treat with Richard as an honorable equal. It seems the medieval mind had a category of war crime that we in this modern age have hitherto thankfully eschewed; we might call it "regrettable but justifiable." His reasoning seemed to stand up to the logic of the time:
King Richard always hoped to overwhelm the Turks completely, to crush their impudent arrogance, to confound the Moslem law, and to vindicate Christianity. link
Richard versus Saladin
Richard's finest hour was during the march south along the coast, holding his army together by sheer force of will under the most trying of conditions. Saladin harassed him the entire way, but was reluctantly forced to engage in a pitched battle at Arsuf on September 7. There, Muslim light cavalry charges failed, his emirs deserted him in droves, and an against-orders charge by the Templars nearly routed them.
His army exhausted and in need of rest before moving on Jerusalem, Richard halted to consolidate and build a base for the attack. While fortifying Jaffa, in dire need of money, he sold the now-penniless island of Cyprus to the Templars, but even this wasn't enough to continue to bankroll the entire operation (Philip left soldiers, not money to pay them). While taking and fortifying several towns around Jerusalem, the Crusaders were racked by internal dissention stemming from the Palestinian barons' dislike of Guy and his ally, Richard. The King also had to rush to Acre to settle a dispute between feuding Italians, then started getting news about the new and exciting ways his little brother was usurping power back home.
By April, 1192, the Palestinian barons were threatening to abandon Richard if he didn't abandon Guy, and so the Lionheart turned on his erstwhile ally by announcing his support for Conrad as King of Jerusalem. Poor Conrad never lived to see his coronation; a few days after learning about Richard's change of heart, he was assassinated by a pair of real, live hashish-smoking hashishim (gotta do a diary on those guys sometime), hired by who-knows-who?
If it was Guy, he didn't get what he wanted. Richard hastily arranged the marriage of Conrad's widow Isabella (upon whose parentage his claim to the throne had been based) to his nephew, Henry of Champagne. Within a week, the young man was the new King of Jerusalem. Guy was mollified when Richard arranged for the Templars - who were making complaints about having been sold a lemon - to sell Cyprus to Guy, and the island became the stronghold of the Lusignan Franks for the next 200 years.
Back to the business at hand...
Elements of Saladin's army fell into rebellion in the spring of 1192, and Richard took advantage of the distraction to capture Daron, the last of the lost Crusader coastal cities. By June, he felt strong enough to move on Jerusalem, but Saladin recognized that a simple refusal to give battle would be enough to drive Richard (whose forces weren't nearly large enough for a siege) to retire. Richard, too, recognized this, and on July 4th - 5 years to the day after the dreadful loss at Hattin - withdrew, to the great consternation of his army.
It was the right move, and it both saved his army from annihilation on the walls of Jerusalem and allowed Richard to maintain its use as a threat in negotiations with Saladin. Richard went first to Jaffa, then on to Acre, where he was keeping a ship revved up for departure the minute he had Saladin's word on a negotiated settlement - things were said to be really bad in England, and now Philip was making noise like he'd forgotten his promise not to invade Richard's lands while the latter was still crusading.
Saladin and Richard came to respect one another a great deal, and they seemed to get off on trying to out-courtesy one another. When Saladin heard Richard was sick, he sent him snow from the mountains, and once - during the battle that would determine whether or not the Muslims would control Jaffa - replaced Richard's slain horse with two of his own.
As implied above, they might have respected one another, but they were still enemies at war, at least until the peace treaty was signed. Saladin, for whom time was an important ally, obligated Richard to waste a bunch of it by sacking a lightly-defended Jaffa in the wake of Richard's departure. Richard hastily gathered a small force of knights, bowmen, and a couple of thousand Italian soldiers and sailed to rescue the garrison besieged in the city's keep, while the rest of his army followed on foot.
The King debarked straight into battle - just as a priest who had swum out to meet his ship had advised - as the emissaries of the garrison were actually inside Saladin's tent, preparing to sign the surrender. The Muslims were routed from the town in a panic, though Saladin eventually got them back under control and formed for a counterattack before the arrival of the main Christian force.
Richard had only 54 knights and 15 horses along with his few hundred bows and couple of thousand infantry to repel the Muslim charges that day, but that he did. In a stand that took completely the fight out of Saladin's troops, Richard's tiny army threw back seven charges of a thousand men each, and though he was unable to follow up his shocking victory by pursuing the retreating Saladin to Jerusalem, Richard's performance that day completely changed his position at the bargaining table.
European historians of the time are pretty favorable in their descriptions of Richard during the negotiations. Here's an example:
Things were thus arranged in a moment of necessity. The King, whose goodness always imitated higher things and who, as the difficulties were greater, now emulated God himself, sent legates to Saladin. The legates informed Saladin in the hearing of many of his satraps, that Richard had in fact sought this truce for a three year period so that he could go back to visit his country and so that, when he had augmented his money and his men, he could return and wrest the whole territory of Jerusalem from Saladin's grasp if, indeed, Saladin were even to consider putting up resistance. To this Saladin replied through the appointed messengers that, with his holy law and God almighty as his witnesses, he thought King Richard so pleasant, upright, magnanimous, and excellent that, if the land were to be lost in his time, he would rather have it taken into Richard's mighty power than to have it go into the hands of any other prince whom be had ever seen.
ibid
The final treaty, allowing Crusader control of all captured ports save one, a five-year truce, and safe passage of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, was signed on September 2, 1192 - exactly 753 years before the Japanese would sign a document to end yet another war.
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all...
Richard pushed his luck in much the same way the Moonbat does when he writes too long a diary, and he was shipwrecked while in hostile Adriatic waters. Dressed in a Templar disguise he'd been wearing since passing through Byzantine territory, he made his way over the Alps and into the lands of Duke Leopold of Austria (remember the guy with the muddy flag at the capture of Acre?), where he was recognized and imprisoned. Leopold was overjoyed at his good fortune, but eventually had to surrender control of Richard to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who was just as delighted to have him. It's said that Eleanor of Aquitaine herself, now a truly old woman, personally negotiated for Richard's release, and secured it in March, 1194. Richard made a beeline back to England, and upon his arrival set in motion the events so aptly recorded in Robin Hood and Ivanhoe.
At the time, the Third Crusade was considered a failure. It hadn't captured Jerusalem, and didn't bring much more than Cyprus and a strip of coastline into Crusader hands. Still, Outremer had, against all odds, been preserved. Forty subsequent years of near-continuous crusading from Europe would, moreover, make no greater gains than had the Third Crusade, and the Crusader states clung by their tenacious fingernails to their narrow realm, awaiting the day when they would be powerful enough to once again march upon the City on the Hill.
Historiorant
Should Christians, Europeans, or Euro-Americans feel guilty about the Crusades? Should Muslims? Saladin and Richard Lionheart don't seem to hold one another guilty of war crimes - should we? Perhaps we should consult the oracular wisdom of Rev. Brian M. Abshire, Ph.D.:
Like the Inquisition, the Religious Wars during the Reformation or the Witch "Burnings" in Salem, the Crusades are supposed to be another one of those "embarrassing" events for which Christians are expected to grovel for forgiveness as they hang their heads in shame...< big snip >...But getting back on track, when one really LOOKS at what happened and why it happened, clearly, there is nothing in the Crusades per se that Christians ought to feel guilty about. True, medieval warfare was often brutal; many of the actions taken were not in anyway "Christian" and clearly, we Reformed (Presbyterian) types understand total depravity constantly affects EVERY aspect of human life.
Yeah, brother, I'll bet you do. But I'm afraid the little scenario you've cooked up is going to need a dash of humility and another whole cup of research. My God, man, it was 800 years ago - give the jingoism a rest and look at what happened analytically.
And how about you, Kossacks? What's the most egregious example of "my-ancestor-kicked-your-ancestor's-ass" you've ever seen?