Richard soon came back with a proposal for an exchange of gifts and, on 1 July, released a North African ‘whom they had captured a long time ago’ as a sign of goodwill. A little later, Saladin received a visit from three Angevin envoys requesting ‘fruit and ice’ for their king. Richard seems to have delighted in asking for such delicacies, possibly as part of a mischievous diplomatic game, perhaps to gauge how far he could push the boundaries of hospitality, but also because he simply seems to have developed a taste for the finer things of the Orient, most notably peaches and pears. Saladin, himself an acute practitioner of the diplomatic arts, had the three Franks taken on a tour of his army’s marketplace so that they might be dazzled by its spectacular array of shops, baths and supplies. Baha al-Din, who as part of Saladin’s inner circle was privy to these early exchanges, soberly observed that such embassies were really spying missions, designed to gauge the level of Muslim morale, and that they were accepted so as to gain the same intelligence from the enemy. Richard was not alone in seeking to negotiate with Islam at Acre. Philip Augustus held his own private talks with the commanders of the city’s garrison, although they similarly achieved little of substance. But the very fact that the two kings were competing in the field of diplomacy suggested that the ingrained rivalry that had so delayed their arrival in the Holy Land was still simmering.50
Rivalry or unity?
The initial signs upon Richard’s arrival at Acre had suggested that unity of purpose might overcome discord. Philip went in person to greet the Lionheart as he disembarked, with the two monarchs ‘showing each other every respect and deference’. The French king even held in check his anger at Richard’s marriage to Berengaria, the final seal on his own sister’s rejection. But cracks in the veneer of amity soon started to appear. Richard went out of his way to prove that his wealth exceeded that of his French counterpart, offering four gold bezants per month to ‘any knight, of any land, who wished to take his pay’ after Philip had tendered three. This may have smacked of pure, arrogant one-upmanship, but it had the very practical effect of further swelling the ranks of the Lionheart’s army, and thus ensuring that he held the balance of military power among the crusaders.51
The thorny issue of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s political future also served to perpetuate Angevin–Capetian rivalry. Ever since his disastrous defeat and capture at Hattin in 1187, Guy of Lusignan’s right to the throne of Jerusalem had been open to challenge. Conrad, marquis of Montferrat, stalwart defender of Tyre, saviour of the Latin East, appeared to many to be the natural choice for the throne. When Conrad refused Guy access to Tyre, after the king’s release from captivity, the dispute erupted into an open feud. The crisis then deepened in the early autumn of 1190 when Queen Sibylla (Baldwin IV’s sister) and her two infant daughters succumbed to illness while staying in the crusader camp outside Acre. Their deaths were a dire blow to Guy’s political security, removing as they did his only blood link to the throne of Jerusalem. With the legality of Guy’s right to the crown now open to question, much of the surviving nobility of the Latin kingdom decided to back Conrad.
In November 1190 a rather unsavoury political solution was engineered. The bloodline of the Jerusalemite throne now devolved upon Sibylla’s beautiful younger sister, Isabella, so a coalition of Guy’s enemies arranged for her to be married to Conrad. There were a few details to be ironed out before this union could be finalised. Rumour had it that at least one of Conrad’s two previous wives was still alive somewhere in the West. Worse still, Isabella already had a husband–Humphrey of Toron. Indeed, the couple were camped with the crusader army outside Acre. Abducted from her tent, browbeaten by her mother Maria Comnena into accepting a dubious annulment, Isabella finally acquiesced and was wed to Conrad. Decades later a papal commission would condemn their marriage as both bigamous and incestuous (because Isabella’s sister had once been married to Conrad’s brother) but for now the need for strong military leadership overruled the niceties of law. Conrad stopped short of having himself and Isabella crowned in Guy’s stead, retiring instead to Tyre, leaving the ‘king’s’ authority in tatters.
By the summer of 1191 the whole affair was in desperate need of resolution. Not surprisingly, Richard and Philip ended up backing different camps. As count of Poitou, the Lionheart was the overlord of the Lusignan family, so it was expected that Richard would lend his support to Guy, a fact confirmed when the latter came to Cyprus in May, supplicating himself before the king even before he arrived at Acre. Philip, meanwhile, promoted the interests of his relative Conrad, who had now returned to the siege. Outside Acre, on 7 May 1191, the French king acted as co-signatory to a charter–buying the support of the Venetians in return for trading privileges–in which Conrad boldly styled himself as ‘king elect’. With the Genoese already allied to the French and the Pisans bought out by Richard, a complex web of overlapping factions and interrelated disputes looked set to rip the Third Crusade apart. And yet, the flames of open conflict never really took hold. With Richard’s support, Geoffrey of Lusignan accused Conrad of treason in late June, but the marquis chose flight to Tyre over possible arrest and the quarrel was, for the moment, put to one side.52
In fact, despite the manifest tension and ill will between Richard and Philip, they managed to muster enough begrudging cooperation to ensure that progress was made on the military front. Throughout June and early July 1191 Angevin and Capetian troops coordinated and rotated their attacks–one force holding the trenches against Saladin while the other assaulted the city. Towards the end of June Philip became impatient with the delay caused by Richard’s continued illness and decided to mount his own frontal assault on Acre, an attack that enjoyed little success. But even on this occasion, Richard’s allies helped to defend the crusader camp, with Geoffrey of Lusignan alone killing ten Muslims with his battleaxe.
The crusaders’ siege strategy
With some 25,000 crusaders deployed around Acre by early summer 1191, Richard and Philip implemented a relatively coherent and coordinated assault-based siege strategy. Teams of sappers were deployed to dig mines beneath the city’s walls in the hope of collapsing its battlements, and intermittent attempts were also made to storm Acre’s walls through frontal assault. Through June, however, the battle plan of both monarchs centred upon the use of incessant aerial bombardment to shatter both Acre’s physical defences and its garrison’s psychological resistance. Together the Frankish kings circled the city with a mighty array of stone-throwing catapults. So dreadful a destructive force had never before been witnessed on the field of crusading conflict and the Acre campaign marked something of a shift in the practice of siege warfare.
Of course, bombardment had been a feature of siegecraft in these holy wars from the very start, with both attackers and defenders using various types of stone-throwing engines. Till now, though, the relative weakness of these machines had limited the size and weight of projectiles that could be launched and their effective range. Besiegers might thus use catapult fire to injure and demoralise an enemy garrison, but usually there was little hope that bombardment alone could demolish the walls or towers of a well-fortified target.
Richard I, and perhaps also Philip Augustus, seem to have brought more advanced forms of catapult technology to bear during the siege of Acre, employing machines capable of projecting larger missiles further and with greater accuracy. The increased tempo of aerial attack established by Philip was further intensified after Richard’s arrival, with more and more sections of Acre coming under near-continuous bombardment. By now the crusaders had christened the most powerful French catapult ‘Mal Voisine’, or ‘Bad Neighbour’, while nicknaming the Muslim stone-thrower that targeted it for counter-bombardment ‘Mal Cousine’, or ‘Bad Relation’. Time and again Acre’s garrison managed to damage ‘Bad Neighbour’, but Philip simply had it rebuilt, focusing its fire on the Cursed Tower in the city’s north-eastern corner. The Franks paid for another engine, which they called ‘God’s own catapult’, out of a communal fund–‘a priest, a man of great probity, always stood next to it’, noted one contemporary, ‘preaching and collecting money for its continual repair and for hiring people to gather stones for its ammunition’.