Acre’s landward walls were encircled by a dry moat, designed to hamper any ground assault and prevent large-scale siege towers from being drawn up against its battlements. The crusaders made arduous attempts to fill sections of this ditch with rubble, often under the cover of aerial bombardment. The garrison did its best to hamper these efforts, showering the workers with arrows, but they were determined. One Frankish woman, mortally wounded as she carried forward stones, even requested that her body be thrown into the moat to act as infill. By early May 1190, to the Muslims’ horror, a path to the foot of the walls had been opened.
Panic now started to spread. For weeks Qaragush and Saladin had watched a frenzy of construction within the crusaders’ camp, as three massive siege engines gradually rose into the air. Built with wood specially brought from Europe to a height of some sixty-five feet, these wheeled three-storey behemoths were covered in vinegar-soaked hide, to dampen the effect of fire, and hung with rope netting to weaken the impact of catapult attack. One Muslim eyewitness wrote that, towering above the battlements of Acre, ‘[they] seemed like mountains’. Around 3 May, King Guy, James of Avesnes and Ludwig of Thuringia packed them with troops–crossbowmen and archers on the roof, spear and pikemen below–and began inching the machines towards the city. This dreadful spectacle appalled the Muslims. In Saladin’s camp ‘everyone totally despaired for the city and the spirits of the defend[ers] were broken’, while within Acre ‘Qaragush was out of his mind with fear’, preparing to negotiate a surrender. A swimmer was hurriedly dispatched to warn the sultan that collapse was imminent and Saladin quickly launched a counter-attack. Simultaneously, the garrison began pelting the towers with flasks of Greek fire once they came into range, but none of this halted their inexorable advance.
The day was saved by a young unnamed metalworker from Damascus. Fascinated by the properties of Greek fire, he had developed a variation on its formula which promised to burn with even greater intensity. Qaragush was sceptical, but eventually agreed to try this new invention, and the metalworker ‘concocted the ingredients he had gathered with some naphtha in copper vats, until the whole mixture was like a burning coal’. Earlier in the day, fruitless attempts to use standard Greek fire had prompted the Franks to dance about and make jokes atop their towers, but when a clay pot of this new formulation struck, their jeers were silenced. ‘Hardly had it hit the target before it burst into flames and the whole became like a mountain of fire’, observed one Muslim onlooker. The two remaining towers soon suffered a similar fate. Trapped crusaders on the upper levels died in the conflagration, while below those who could escaped to watch their great engines ‘burn to cinders’. For now, at least, Acre was safe.37
In the months that followed, the Muslims’ superior mastery of combustible weapon technology proved a decisive element. In August, when the Franks sought to intensify their bombardment, operating in shifts through day and night, building ever more powerful catapults, Qaragush and Abu’l Haija launched a lightning sortie, sending ‘Greek fire specialists’ to burn the enemy’s machines, killing seventy Christian knights in the process. In September a massive stone-thrower, built under the orders of Henry of Champagne at the cost of 1,500 gold dinars, was similarly dispatched in a matter of minutes. Not surprisingly, the crusaders developed an intense hatred of Greek fire. One unfortunate Turkish emir thus paid a heavy price when wounded in a skirmish beside a Frankish siege tower. He had been carrying a container of Greek fire, hoping to destroy the engine, but now a Latin knight ‘stretched him out on the ground, emptying the contents of the phial on his private parts, so that his genitals were burned’.38
Other, more insidious, battles raged that summer. The careful nurturing of morale within one’s own army and the struggle to break the will of the enemy had long been common features of medieval siege warfare. And, although events at Acre do not seem to have been marked by repeated acts of deliberately callous brutality or barbarism on either side, Qaragush’s garrison occasionally employed such tactics. Latin dead had already been hung from Acre’s battlements in November 1189 in an attempt to enrage the crusaders. Now, in 1190, Muslim troops occasionally dragged crosses and images of the Christian faith to the parapet to subject them to public defilement. This might involve beatings with sticks, spitting and even urination, although one soldier who attempted the latter was reportedly shot in the groin by a Frankish crossbowman.
The recurrent issues of any protracted investment–starvation and disease–also cast their shadows over Acre in 1190. Hunger and discontent seem to have prompted poorer sections of the crusader host to launch an ill-disciplined and ultimately fruitless attack on Saladin’s camp in search of food on 25 July, at the cost of at least 5,000 lives. With their corpses rotting in the summer heat and great swarms of flies descending, making life unbearable in both camps, disease inevitably spread across the plains of Acre.
Saladin once again sought to cleanse the battlefield by throwing the remains of the Christian dead into the river, sending a gruesome mixture of ‘blood, bodies and grease’ downstream towards the crusaders. The tactic worked. One Latin described how ‘no small number of [crusaders] died soon after [they arrived] from the foul air, polluted with the stink of corpses, worn out by anxious nights spent on guard, and shattered by other hardships and needs’. The lethal combination of malnutrition and atrocious sanitary conditions poisoned the camp for the rest of the season, and the mortality rate rocketed. Losses among the poor were severe, but even nobles were not immune: Theobald of Blois ‘did not survive more than three months’, while his compatriot Stephen of Sancerre ‘also came and died without protection’. Ranulf of Glanville lasted just three weeks. Acre was fast becoming the graveyard of Europe’s aristocracy.39
The fate of the German crusade
Elsewhere in the Near East another death was to change the course of the crusade. In late March 1190 Emperor Frederick Barbarossa secured terms with the Byzantines and led the German crusade across the Hellespont to Asia Minor. The Germans forged a route south-east through Greek territory, crossing into Turkish Anatolia in late April. Internal power struggles within the Seljuq sultanate of Konya meant that Frederick’s earlier attempts to negotiate safe passage through to Syria had a limited impact on the ground, and the crusaders soon encountered concerted Muslim resistance. Despite supply shortages, Barbarossa managed to maintain discipline among his men–Muslim sources claimed that he threatened to cut the throat of any crusader deemed to have contravened orders–and the German marching column continued to make headway. On 14 May a major Turkish assault was beaten back and Frederick moved on to attack Konya itself, occupying the lower town of the Seljuq capital and forcing the Turks into temporary submission.
With the crossing of Asia Minor almost completed, Barbarossa pushed south towards the coast and the Christian territory of Cilician Armenia. The German crusade had suffered substantial losses in terms of men and horses, but all in all Frederick had achieved a striking success, prevailing where the crusades of 1101 and 1147 had failed. Then, just as the worst trials seemed to be over, disaster struck. Approaching Sifilke on 10 June 1190, the emperor impatiently decided to ford the River Saleph ahead of his troops. His horse lost its footing mid-stream, throwing Frederick into the river–on a scorching-hot day the water proved shockingly cold, and unable to swim, the German emperor drowned. His body was dragged ashore, but nothing could be done. Western Europe’s most powerful monarch, the mightiest ruler ever to take the cross, lay dead.