THE BATTLE OF ARSUF

Richard was now just twenty-five miles from Jaffa. Perilous and exhausting as the march had so far been, it had also proved a stunning success. But the king must have suspected that Saladin now would commit his every resource to halting the Frankish advance, for the loss of Jaffa would be a grave blow to Islam. The route ahead ran through the Forest of Arsuf to an obvious campsite beside the River Rochetaille, but beyond that a wide, sandy plain opened out before the small settlement of Arsuf itself was reached. Rumours were abroad in the Latin army that some sort of ambush or attack was imminent. Richard let his troops rest beside the River of Reeds on 4 September, but that evening he made a masterful move. The unpredictable pace of the crusader march had already sown seeds of confusion and doubt in Saladin’s mind, stifling his attempts to seize the initiative. Now the Lionheart played an unexpected and devious card, dispatching envoys to the Muslim advance guard to request peace talks with al-Adil.

The sultan had spent the day hurriedly scouting the forest and plain to the south, searching for a battlefield, before racing back north. Indeed, he moved with such haste that come nightfall many of his men were ‘left scattered amongst the woods’. Saladin was beginning to lose control of his army. When news of Richard’s request reached him that night he acceded, instructing his brother ‘to spin out the talks’. With time, the sultan might be able to marshal his forces and mount an offensive.

Once again, however, the king of England had comprehensively outmanoeuvred his opponent. Richard was in no mood for actual negotiation; instead he had called for a parley to mislead Saladin as to his own intentions and, perhaps, to garner some intelligence regarding Muslim plans and preparedness. The Lionheart duly met al-Adil at dawn on 5 September in a private audience, but their conversation was neither prolonged nor cordial. The king bluntly demanded the return of the Holy Land and Saladin’s retreat into Muslim territory. Unsurprisingly, al-Adil was outraged, but no sooner had the talks broken off than Richard ordered his army to advance into the Forest of Arsuf. Caught entirely flat-footed, the sultan was unable to respond, his troops left in disarray. Most crusaders still entered the forest in a state of anxiety, ‘for it was said that [the Muslims] would set light to it, causing such a great fire that the [Christian] army would be roasted’. But thanks to their leader’s skilful dissimulation, they passed through unhindered and unscathed to reach the Rochetaille. Richard rested his men on 6 September–taking this one last chance to draw breath before running the gauntlet to Arsuf and beyond. Saladin, meanwhile, held closed talks with al-Adil, furiously seeking a stratagem that might avert disaster.⁷²

As he awoke on Saturday 7 September, the Lionheart must have known that the enemy would use the space afforded by the open plain ahead to mount another blistering assault. Perhaps he even sensed that the confrontation would be on a larger scale than that faced on 3 September. For the crusaders, that Saturday began as every day of the march had since leaving Haifa, with the rigorous structuring of troop formation. By this point the army contained some 15,000 men, of whom 1,000 to 2,000 were mounted knights. One crusader recorded that ‘Richard, the worthy king of England, who knew so much about war and the army, set out in his own way who should go in front and who behind’. The Templars, as usual, were to take the lead, while their Hospitaller brethren held the rear with a strong force of archers and crossbowmen. With a mixed group of Poitevins, Normans and English holding the centre and Henry of Champagne commanding the left, inland flank, Richard and Hugh of Burgundy were to lead a mobile reserve that could range throughout the army, reinforcing points of weakness as necessary. As always, a tightly ordered formation was paramount; indeed, it was said that the Franks left the banks of the Rochetaille ‘in such order, side by side and so close that any apple [thrown in their midst] could not have failed to strike man or beast’.

But according to the crusader Ambroise there was something different about that day’s preparations. In his account, the king was readying his troops not just for a fighting march, but for battle. Ambroise, who followed Richard east on crusade and later composed an epic Old French verse history of the expedition, depicted 7 September 1191 as a day of deliberate confrontation; a day of glory on an almost Homeric scale. His hero, the Lionheart, was shown making a conscious, proactive decision to challenge Saladin head-on. Perceiving with almost supernatural foresight ‘that they could not go forward without a battle’, the king planned to deploy the Christians’ most powerful weapon–the heavy cavalry charge–the moment the sultan overcommitted his forces. Timing was to be crucial, but with only the rudimentary medieval forms of battlefield communication available, Richard had to rely on an aural signal to initiate the attack. Ambroise described how ‘six trumpets [were] placed in three different places in the army, which would sound when they were to turn against the Turks’.

Ambroise’s account of Arsuf has been hugely influential: widely copied by contemporaries; often uncritically regurgitated by modern historians. The epic image of that Saturday morning on the coast of Palestine engendered by his depiction has long held sway: the resplendent crusader army beginning its march, primed, practically straining for the fight; like a nocked arrow, held quivering at full draw, ready for release. But detailed, colourful and alluring as Ambroise’s vision is, other eyewitness reports challenge his narrative. Chief among these is a letter–one that has been extraordinarily undervalued by historians–composed by King Richard I himself. This missive, effectively a dispatch from the front lines to Garnier of Rochefort, Cistercian abbot of Clairvaux, was written not, like Ambroise’s verse history, some six years later, but just three weeks after the Battle of Arsuf, on 1 October 1191. Its brief, almost passing description of events on 7 September, suggests that the Lionheart’s primary concern that day was to reach the relative safety of the orchards at Arsuf with his army intact and not to seek a definitive confrontation with Saladin.

In the age of the crusades pitched battles were extremely rare. The risks involved, the element of chance, meant that shrewd generals avoided open conflict at all costs unless in possession of overwhelming numerical superiority. Richard’s overall priority in this phase of the crusade was to reach Jaffa, and from there to threaten Ascalon and Jerusalem. To look for a decisive fight with Saladin when the sultan commanded equal, or perhaps even greater, military strength, and could chose his own ground, would have been tantamount to gambling the fate of the entire holy war on a dice roll. Perhaps the king did ready his men for battle at Arsuf, should it be thrust upon him–his letter does not say–but, even so, there is a significant, albeit subtle, difference between the preparation for conflict and its active pursuit.

For Saladin, in contrast, a decisive confrontation was all but essential. Facing the seemingly unstemmable Latin advance, he knew that without action he would be forced, in just a few days, to watch in abject impotence as the Lionheart reached Jaffa. Coming hard on the heels of Acre’s surrender, the strategic and political consequences would be horrendous, Islam’s hold over Palestine grievously destabilised, his own reputation as a mujahid gravely besmirched. The Franks must be stopped here, on the dusty plain of Arsuf. As Baha al-Din bluntly stated: ‘[The sultan had] every intention of bringing the enemy to pitched battle that day.’⁷³