Historians have lavished praise upon the Lionheart’s generalship in this phase of the expedition, describing the advance from Acre as ‘a classic demonstration of Frankish military tactics at their best’ and commending the crusaders’ ‘admirable discipline and self-control’. In many ways, this was Richard’s finest hour as a military commander. One of his greatest moments of genius was the formulation of a strategy coordinating the land march with the southward progress of his navy. With the eastern Mediterranean now firmly in Latin control, the king sought to maximise the utility of his fleet. An army engaged in a fighting march could ill afford the burden of a large baggage train, but equally could not risk running out of food and weapons. Thus, while the land force was to carry ten days’ supply of basic rations, made up of ‘biscuits and flour, wine and meat’, the vast bulk of the crusade’s martial resources were loaded on to transport ships known as ‘snacks’. These were to rendezvous with the march at four points along the coast–Haifa, Destroit, Caesarea and Jaffa–while more lightly stocked smaller boats would sail close to the shore, keeping pace with the army to offer near-constant support. One crusader wrote: ‘So it was said that they would journey in two armies, one travelling by land, one by sea, for no one could conquer Syria any other way as long as the Turks controlled it.’ Richard’s coastline-hugging route south also promised to offer his troops protection from enemy encirclement. Wherever possible, the crusaders would advance with soldiers on the right flank practically wading in the sea, thereby eliminating any possibility of attack on that front. By these measures Richard hoped to minimise the negative impact of marching through enemy territory. This sophisticated scheme was evidently the product of advanced planning and probably relied in part upon the Military Orders’ local knowledge. Success would depend upon the maintenance of martial discipline and in this regard Richard’s force of personality and unshakeable valour would be critical.

In spite of all of this, neither the Lionheart’s achievements nor the mechanistic precision of this march should be exaggerated. Even in this phase of the crusade Richard faced difficulties, a fact generally ignored by modern commentators. Indeed, his first problem–the actual commencement of the march–was nothing less than an embarrassment. One might expect that, as the expedition’s only remaining monarch, Richard’s authority would have been unquestioned; after all, he had even taken the trouble of paying potentially intractable French crusaders, like Hugh of Burgundy, to ensure their loyalty. Nevertheless, the English king had an inordinate amount of trouble actually convincing his fellow Franks to leave Acre.

The problem was that the port had become a comfortable, even enticing, refuge from the horrors of the holy war. Packed ‘so full of people that it could hardly hold them all’, the city had transformed into a fleshpot, offering up all manner of illicit pleasures. One crusader conceded that it ‘was delightful, with good wines and girls, some very beautiful’, with whom many Latin crusaders were ‘taking their foolish pleasure’. Under these conditions Richard had to work hard to educe obedience. On the day after his massacre of the Muslim captives, he established a staging post on the plains south-east of the port, just beyond the old crusader trenches. His most loyal followers accompanied him, but others were reluctant. One supporter admitted that the Lionheart had to resort to a mixture of flattery, prayer, bribery and force to amass a viable force, and even then many were still left in Acre. Indeed, throughout the first stage of the fighting march stragglers continued to join the main army. To begin with at least, the restrained pace of Richard’s advance–now so admired by military historians–seems primarily to have been adopted to allow these recruits to catch up.⁶⁶

The march begins

The main army struck out south on Thursday 22 August 1191. To stamp out any residual ‘wantonness’ among his troops, Richard ordered that all women were to be left behind at Acre, although an exception was made for elderly female pilgrims who, it was said, ‘washed the clothes and heads [of the soldiers] and were as good as monkeys at getting rid of fleas’. For the first two days, Richard rode in the rearguard of his forces, ensuring the maintenance of order, but despite expectations only negligible resistance was met. Saladin, unsure of the Lionheart’s intentions and perhaps fearing a frontal attack on his camp at Saffaram, deployed only a token probing force at this stage. Having covered barely ten miles in two days, the crusaders crossed the Belus River and made camp, resting for the whole of 24 August, ‘wait[ing] for those of God’s people whom it was difficult to draw out of Acre’.⁶⁷

Richard the Lionheart’s March from Acre to Jaffa (1191)

At dawn the next day Richard set out to cover the remaining distance to Haifa. The army was split into three divisions–the king taking the vanguard, a central body of English and Norman crusaders, and Hugh of Burgundy and the French bringing up the rear. For now, coordination between these groups was limited, but they were at least united by the sight of Richard’s royal standard aloft in the centre of the host. As the crusade inched south, so too did the king’s dragon banner at the army’s heart, affixed to a huge iron-clad flagpole, drawn on a wheeled wooden platform and protected by an elite guard. Visible to all, including the enemy (who likened it to ‘a huge beacon’), so long as it flew this totem signalled the Franks’ continued survival, helping men to hold their fear in check in the face of Muslim onslaught. That Sunday, such resolve would be sorely needed.

To reach Haifa, Richard had led the crusade on to the sandy beach running south from Acre. Unbeknownst to the Latins, Saladin had broken camp that morning (25 August), dispatching his baggage train to safety and ordering his brother al-Adil to test the strength and cohesion of the Christians’ fighting march. A confrontation was coming. As the day wore on an atmosphere of palpable unease settled on the slowly advancing crusader army. On their left, among the rolling dunes, Muslim troops appeared, shadowing their march, watching and waiting. Then a fog descended and panic began to spread. In the confusion, the French rearguard, containing the light supply train of wagons and carts, slowed down, breaking contact with the rest of the army, and at that moment al-Adil struck. One crusader described the sudden Muslim attack that followed:

The Saracens rushed down, singling out the carters, killed men and horses, took a lot of baggage and defeated and put to rout those who led [the convoy], chasing them into the foaming sea. There they fought so much that they cut off the hand of a man-at-arms, called Evrart [one of Bishop Hubert Walter’s men]; he paid no attention to this and made no fuss…but taking his sword in his left hand, stood firm.

With the rearguard ‘brought to a standstill’, and disaster impending, news of the attack raced up the line to Richard. Recognising that direct and immediate intervention would be necessary if a deadly encirclement of the French was to be avoided, the Lionheart rode back at speed. A Christian eyewitness described how ‘galloping against the Turks [the king] went into their midst, quicker than a flash of lightning’, beating off the Muslim skirmishers through sheer force of arms, reconnecting the rearguard with the main body of the army. With the enemy melting back into the dunes, the Latin army was left shaken but intact. Having survived this first challenge, the crusaders reached Haifa either that night or early the next morning, camping there throughout 26 and 27 August.⁶⁸