They were afraid of the miracle that they now beheld, how the whole world was coming [to] annihilate them; they saw their walls broken down, pierced and destroyed; they saw their people injured, killed and cut into pieces. [There] remained within the city 6,000…but they were not sufficient.

A Muslim in Saladin’s camp meanwhile observed, with stark clarity, that Acre’s garrison ‘looked death in the face’ that July. Fearing that they would be butchered to a man once the city was stormed, the Muslims chose submission and life. Around 6 July Richard and Philip gave permission for Muslim envoys to leave the city under a banner of safe conduct, so that they might discuss terms of surrender with Saladin, but no deal was agreed. The sultan was still nursing hopes that total defeat might be averted. A plan was hatched to break the garrison out of the city during the night, but the scheme was betrayed to the Christians by a renegade mamluk who defected from the Ayyubid army. Forewarned of the attack, the crusaders put extra guards on duty and, although Saladin’s troops spent the entire night under arms, no break in the Frankish lines could be found. At the same time, further Syrian reinforcements were arriving in the Muslim camp, exciting thoughts of a last-ditch counter-attack.

But in the crusader trenches Richard and Philip knew they had the upper hand. In the days that followed they adopted an iron-hard bargaining position, blankly refusing any offer that fell short of their ambitious demands. The precise nature of Saladin’s involvement in these negotiations is unclear. Muslim eyewitnesses took pains to distance him from the entire process, striving to maintain his aura of invincibility. It was even said that, upon receiving a draft of the final terms, the sultan ‘expressed his great disapproval’, but that his planned condemnation of any surrender was wrecked by Acre’s precipitous capitulation. Yet Christian contemporaries testified that Saladin ‘agreed to the surrender of the town when it could no longer be defended’, empowering its commanders to ‘make the best peace terms that they could’. It is certainly unlikely that the crusader kings would have pursued peace talks without firm assurances that the sultan would honour a finalised settlement.⁵⁷

Surrender

In any event, on 12 July 1191 a deal was struck that concluded the siege of Acre. The city and all its contents were to be surrendered to the Franks, the lives of the Muslims within spared. The captive garrison would then be held hostage as guarantors against the fulfilment of further punitive terms: the payment of 200,000 gold dinars; the return of the relic of the True Cross captured at Hattin; and the release of some 1,500 Frankish prisoners ‘of common, unremarkable background’, as well as 100 to 200 named captives of rank. Concessions of such magnitude signalled a categorical victory for Latin Christendom.

After close to two years of embittered struggle, the battle for Acre ended not in a feral, blood-stained sack, but in sudden peace. With the truce agreed, a public crier was sent out among the crusader armies to announce an immediate end to hostilities, ordering that ‘no one should venture to do or say anything to insult or provoke any of the Turks; nor should they fire any more missiles at the walls or at any Turks they might happen to see on the ramparts’. A strange calm descended on the scene, as ‘the Christians watched with very curious eyes as those Turkish people wandered around on the top of the walls that day’. The city gates were at last thrown open and the garrison marched out to make their submission. Witnessing this spectacle, many crusaders were taken aback: the faceless enemy of recent months was revealed, not as a savage rabble, but as ‘men of admirable prowess [and] exceptional valour…unaltered by adversity, their expressions resolute’. Some Franks showed less equanimity, bemoaning the desecration of Acre’s ‘broken and defaced’ churches by this ‘accursed race’, but by and large the surrender passed without violent incident.⁵⁸

Like their Muslim enemies, the soldiers of the Third Crusade had shown enormous resilience at Acre, tenaciously maintaining their siege through blistering heat and biting cold, facing hunger, disease and incessant battle. Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, perished in this endeavour–no accurate estimate of the overall number of dead is possible. Among the aristocracy, who are more readily traced, the losses were unprecedented: a patriarch, six archbishops and twelve bishops; some forty counts and 500 great nobles. The kings of England and France had not begun this struggle, but a good measure of the credit for bringing about its triumphant resolution was theirs. Before their arrival, the combatants had fought each other to a standstill. The resources and renewed vigour that Richard and Philip injected tipped the balance in the crusade’s favour. Ultimately, this was a victory that the two monarchs could, and did, claim as their own. With the city’s garrison disarmed, they moved in to claim their prize.

Back in the West, Richard and Philip had agreed to divide equally their conquests in the Holy Land. Their banners thus were jointly raised above Acre, with Richard occupying the royal palace and taking custody of al-Mashtub and half of the prisoners, while Philip acquired the Templars’ old quarters, along with Qaragush and the remaining captives. However, their acquisitiveness left little in the way of spoils for others. In a move to assert royal rights, Richard stripped from the walls a banner belonging to Duke Leopold V of Austria, a crusader who had arrived at Acre that April. This has often been cited by historians as evidence of the Lionheart’s hot-tempered, brutish nature, but this is to do him a disservice. Richard certainly lived to regret the ill feelings this episode engendered, but at the time his mind was on the robust defence of his inalienable rights and his treatment of Leopold received Philip’s tacit approval. There were pockets of disgruntlement among the crusaders about the pitiful share of the spoils received; but for much of the Frankish host, the taste of life, free for now from the threat of death, was sweet. They swept into Acre ‘with dancing and joy’, where, one Latin contemporary rather primly observed, they were ‘now free to enjoy themselves and be refreshed with much-desired rest’. In fact, before long most had lost themselves in the traditional soldierly recreations of drinking, gambling and whoring.⁵⁹

The effect of Acre’s fall

Acre’s capture was by no means the end of the crusade, but it was a momentous step towards the reconquest of the Holy Land. In part this was because the port now could act as a beachhead for the armies of the Christian West, but this notion of Acre as the vital ‘gateway to Palestine’ should not be overplayed. Tyre, to the north, remained in Latin hands throughout and, had Acre not fallen, could have acted as a secondary foothold on the Levantine mainland. The real significance of Acre’s fall lay elsewhere.

Saladin’s Egyptian fleet, the jewel of his military arsenal, was moored within Acre’s sheltered inner harbour. So essential as a lifeline to the city, the bulk of the sultan’s navy–some seventy ships in all–had gradually been trapped within the encircled port as the siege progressed. The crusaders now took possession of this armada, vastly augmenting their own naval strength and, in a single blow, ending Saladin’s hopes of challenging Christian control of the Mediterranean. For the remainder of the Third Crusade the Franks would enjoy unquestioned supremacy at sea.

Acre’s capture also had less tangible effects. As a boost to Latin morale it was both timely and potentially energising. Perhaps now the crusaders could believe that the corner had been turned: that the horrors of 1187, of Hattin and Jerusalem’s fall, were behind them; that they might once again triumph in God’s war. The task of channelling this burgeoning confidence and conviction towards the conquest of the Holy City fell to Richard I and Philip Augustus.