Up to this point, Richard had been able to focus upon the prosecution of the Third Crusade. With Philip by his side he had enjoyed a degree of confidence about the security of his western realm. From now on, his concerns would mount–each day spent in the East was time gifted to his rival. Never again could the Lionheart afford to be so single-minded in the pursuit of the Holy Land’s recovery.⁶²

IN COLD BLOOD

Richard’s first concern, now that he possessed sole command of the crusade, was to see the terms of Acre’s surrender fulfilled so that the reconquest of the Latin East might continue. With time now a burning issue, the maintenance of momentum became crucial. Barely two months of the normal fighting season remained, so a near-immediate march south would be necessary to achieve overall victory before the onset of winter. Richard needed a few weeks to rebuild Acre’s fortifications to ensure that the city would be defensible in his absence, but at the same time he began pressuring Saladin for a precise timetable for the implementation of the peace settlement’s terms.

Both sides now entered into a delicate, but potentially deadly, diplomatic dance. The sultan knew that, for Richard, speed was of the essence. But so long as the king still had thousands of prisoners and an immensely profitable treaty to cash in, he would effectively be immobilised. If negotiations could be strung out, the crusaders might even find themselves mired at Acre throughout that autumn and winter. The Lionheart, too, was clearly aware that his opponent would seek to employ just such delaying tactics. Both he and Saladin recognised that a game was being played; what they could not yet gauge was their adversary’s temperament. Would the rules be adhered to, indeed, were their respective rules the same? And what risks and sacrifices would the other be prepared to countenance?

For both parties, the dangers inherent in a miscalculation were grave. Richard stood to lose a considerable fortune in ransom, and to forgo the repatriation of more than 1,000 Latin captives and Outremer’s most revered relic. But more significantly, if he permitted postponement and procrastination to creep into proceedings, he risked the collapse of the entire crusade. For without forward progress, the expedition would surely founder under the weight of disunity, indolence and inertia. The equation confronting Saladin was perhaps simpler: the lives of some 3,000 captive Muslims balanced against the need to stifle the crusade.

The pact agreed on 12 July originally stipulated a timescale of thirty days for the fulfilment of terms. While Saladin showed a willingness to accommodate Frankish demands–allowing one group of Latin envoys to visit Damascus to inspect Christian prisoners and another to view the relic of the True Cross–he seemed equally determined to buy himself more time. Richard, inundated by delegations of silky-tongued, gift-laden Muslim negotiators, appeared to relent on 2 August. Even though his forces were nearly ready to move out of Acre, the Lionheart agreed to a compromise: the terms of the surrender would now be met in two to three instalments, the first of which would see the return of 1,600 Latin prisoners and the True Cross and the payment of half the money promised, 100,000 dinars. Saladin may well have read this as an indication that the English king could be manipulated, but if so he was badly mistaken. In fact, Richard had his own reasons for acceding to a short delay in proceedings–with Conrad of Montferrat stubbornly refusing to return Philip Augustus’ share of the Muslim captives, now ensconced at Tyre, the Lionheart was, for the moment, in no position to meet his end of the bargain.

By mid-August, however, this difficulty had been redressed, the marquis forced into line by Hugh of Burgundy and the captives returned. With everything in place Richard was now eager to proceed. From this point forward, the contemporary evidence for this episode becomes increasingly muddled, with both Latin and Muslim eyewitnesses peppering their accounts with mutual recrimination, clouding the exact details of events. It does appear, however, that Saladin misjudged his opponent. Modern commentators have often suggested that the sultan was having difficulty amassing the money and prisoners required, but this is not supported by contemporary Muslim testimony. It seems more likely that, with the deadline for the first instalment–12 August–now passed, he began deliberately to equivocate. To Richard’s evident disgust, Saladin’s negotiators now sought to insert new conditions into the deal, demanding that the entire garrison should be released upon settlement of the first instalment, with hostages exchanged as guarantors that the later payment of the remaining 100,000 dinars would be made. When the king responded with blunt refusal, an impasse was reached.

Settled in his camp at Saffaram, the sultan must have imagined that there was still room for negotiation, that Richard would tolerate further delay in the hope of an eventual resolution. He was wrong. On the afternoon of 20 August, Richard marched out of Acre in force, setting up a temporary camp beyond the old crusader trenches, on the plains of Acre. Watching from their vantage point on Tell al-Ayyadiya, Saladin’s advance guard was puzzled by this sudden flurry of activity. They withdrew to Tell Kaisan, dispatching an urgent message to the sultan. Richard then showed his hand. The bulk of Acre’s Muslim garrison–some 2,700 men–were marched out of the city, bound in ropes. Herded on to the open ground beyond the Frankish tents, they huddled, rank with fear and confusion. Were they to be released after all?

Then as one man, [the Franks] charged them, and with stabbings and blows with the sword they slew them in cold blood, while the Muslim advance guard watched, not knowing what to do.

Too late to intervene, Saladin’s troops mounted a counter-attack but were soon beaten off. With the sun setting, Richard turned back to Acre, leaving the ground stained red with blood and littered with butchered corpses. His message to the sultan possessed a stark clarity. This was how the Lionheart would play the game. This was the ruthless single-mindedness that he would bring to the war for the Holy Land.

No event in Richard’s career has elicited more controversy or criticism than this calculated carnage. Describing a search of the plain made by Muslim troops on the following morning, Saladin’s adviser Baha al-Din reflected on the event:

[They] found the martyrs where they had fallen and were able to recognise some of them. Great sorrow and distress overwhelmed them for the enemy had spared only men of standing and position or someone strong and able-bodied to labour on their building works. Various reasons were given for the massacre. It was said that they had killed them in revenge for their men who had been killed or that the king of England had decided to march to Ascalon to take control of it and did not think it wise to leave that number in his rear. God knows best.

Baha al-Din noted that the Lionheart ‘dealt treacherously towards the Muslim prisoners’, having received their surrender ‘on condition that they would be guaranteed their lives come what may’, at worst facing slavery should Saladin fail to pay their ransom. The sultan met the executions with a measure of shock and rage. Certainly, in the weeks that followed, he began ordering the summary execution of any crusader unfortunate enough to be captured. But equally, by 5 September, he had sanctioned the re-establishment of diplomatic contact with the English king and some members of his entourage went on to develop close, almost cordial, relations with Richard. On balance, they and Saladin seemed to have taken the whole grim episode for what it probably was: an act of military expediency, designed to convey a brutal, blunt statement of intent. More generally, the slaughter seems to have sent a tremor of fear and horror through Near Eastern Islam. Saladin recognised that, in the future, his garrisons might choose to abandon their posts rather than face a siege and possible capture. But even for Muslim contemporaries, the events of 20 August did not prompt the universal or unmitigated vilification of the English king. He remained both ‘the accursed man’ and ‘Melec Ric’, or ‘King Ric’, the spectacularly accomplished warrior and general. In time, the massacre took its place alongside other crusader atrocities, like the sack of Jerusalem in 1099, as a crime that did not, in reality, spark an unquenchable firestorm of hatred, but could be readily recalled in the interests of promoting jihad.⁶³