When the crusaders marched from the Rochetaille, soon after dawn, they were greeted by a menacing vision: there, where wooded hills ran down to the left edge of the plain, Saladin had arrayed the full strength of his army. Line upon line of troops stretched out before them, ‘piled up, like a thick hedge’. Facing around 30,000 Muslim warriors, many of them mounted, the Franks were now outnumbered at least two to one. Around 9 a.m. the first wave of 2,000 enemy skirmishers raced down towards them and fighting began. As the morning progressed, Saladin committed practically his entire force, holding back only an elite unit of some 1,000 of the Royal Guard to spearhead a targeted assault, should a break appear in the Latin formation. For hour after hour, with the blistering sun now beating down on them, the Christians marched on, pummelled by the incessant onslaught.

One crusader described the overwhelming cacophony of the battlefield–a jumble of troops ‘howling, shouting [and] baying’, enemy trumpeters and drummers pulsing the terrible rhythm of combat–so that ‘one could not have heard God thundering, such a racket was made’. The Muslims’ primary weapon was an aerial bombardment of appalling intensity: ‘never did rain or snow or hail falling in the heart of winter fall so densely as did the bolts which flew there and killed our horses’, recalled one eyewitness, remarking that armfuls of arrows could have been gathered there like corn cut in the fields. Also among the enemy were troops few crusaders had encountered: terrifying black Africans. A Latin eyewitness declared that ‘they were called “blacks”–this is the truth–[coming] from the wild land, hideous and blacker than soot…a people who were very quick and agile’.

The horror of the relentless assault that morning was almost unendurable.

[The Franks] thought their lines would be broken [and] did not expect to survive one hour or to come out of it alive; know in truth that [some] cowards could not help throwing down their bows and arrows and taking refuge in the army…No man was so confident that he did not wish in his heart that he had finished his pilgrimage.⁷⁴

King Richard’s priority through all this was to maintain troop discipline and keep his army moving forward in formation towards Arsuf. Any pause or break in the line would be lethal, but the temptation among his men to launch a counter-attack was nearly irresistible. A messenger raced up the line from the Hospitaller rearguard, begging for permission to retaliate, but the Lionheart refused. For now, at least, order held. It was a testament to the king’s force of will and charisma as a general that, for so long, his authority held in the face of such extraordinary pressure. The Christians were now ‘surrounded, like a flock of sheep in the jaws of wolves, so that they could see nothing but the sky and their wicked enemies on every side’. And yet, their advance continued.

With the Templar vanguard nearing the orchards of Arsuf, the master of the Hospitallers himself, Garnier of Nablus, rode forward to make a second petition to the king, bewailing the shame of inaction, but once again the king demurred. Crucially, Richard’s own letter of 1 October indicates that the front ranks of the march now reached the outskirts of Arsuf and began ‘setting up camp’, a fact confirmed by Baha al-Din, who wrote that ‘the first detachments of [the Christian] infantry reached the plantations of Arsuf’. This gives the lie to the notion that Richard was, throughout 7 September, harbouring some grander strategy; holding his forces in check only so that they could be unleashed in open battle. Just as it had been throughout the journey from Acre, his priority at Arsuf was security and survival. But with that objective so near to realisation, the Lionheart’s hand was forced.⁷⁵

Looking back, Richard suddenly discovered that a crusader charge had begun. Without warning, two knights towards the rear–the marshal of the Hospitallers and Baldwin of Carew–had broken ranks. Driven by a mixture of anger, humiliation and bloodlust, ‘they burst out of the line [and], with horses at full gallop, charged the Turks’, screaming the name of St George. A ripple of realisation spread through the army and, within moments, thousands of crusaders had turned to follow their lead. The Hospitaller rearguard raced into battle. Then, as Richard watched in horror, Henry of Champagne, James of Avesnes and Robert, earl of Leicester, also committed the left flank and centre of the army to the charge.

This was the moment of decision. Richard may not have wanted battle, but with no hope of recalling his troops it was now upon him regardless. A failure to react would have been catastrophic, but the Lionheart showed no hesitation: ‘He spurred his horse to the gallop [riding] faster than a bolt from a crossbow’, leading his remaining forces with him. Not surprisingly, Ambroise’s supposed trumpet signal was never sounded.⁷⁶

A scene of carnage now lay before the king. The first crusader charge had resulted in a chaotic bloodbath, as the shocked front ranks of Saladin’s army were routed and overrun. The injured were screaming, ‘while others, wallowing in their own blood, breathed their last. A very great number were but headless corpses trodden under foot by friend or foe regardless.’ But as Richard raced into the fray, the sultan rallied his troops and mounted a counter-attack. The king’s own contribution to the battle is unclear. Richard downplayed his own prowess, offering this terse account of the encounter in his letter to the abbot of Clairvaux:

Our vanguard was proceeding and was already setting up camp at Arsuf, when Saladin and his Saracens made a violent attack on our rearguard, but by the grace of God’s favourable mercy they were forced into flight just by four squadrons that were facing them.

Other Latin contemporaries, Ambroise among them, painted a more stirring scene of royal heroism, in which the Lionheart practically won the day single-handed:

King Richard pursued the Turks with singular ferocity, fell upon them and scattered them [and] wherever he went his brandished sword cleared a wide path on all sides…He cut down that unspeakable race as if he were reaping the harvest with a sickle, so that the corpses of the Turks he had killed covered the ground everywhere for the space of half a mile.⁷⁷

Perhaps his martial gallantry did not reach so epic a scale, but Richard’s personal contribution may still have been the decisive factor that tipped the balance of the encounter. Time and again in the Middle Ages, warrior-kings, seen by their men in the thick of fighting, turned the tide of battle, assuring victory. Whatever the explanation, the Franks at Arsuf managed to repulse one, perhaps even two, Muslim counter-attacks. In the end, with most of his troops routed, Saladin was forced into a shameful retreat. Hotly pursued, he and the beleaguered remnants of his army melted into the surrounding forests, gifting the victory, such as it was, to the Christians.

The battle-weary Franks regrouped to limp into Arsuf, finally establishing a secure camp. Most collapsed in exhaustion, but as always there were some scavengers, ‘greedy for gain’, who were itching to pick over the dead and dying. As evening fell, they counted thirty-two Muslim emirs among the fallen, as well as some 700 enemy troops, most of whom had been slain in the first Latin charge. Meanwhile, at first count, Latin casualties appeared to be minimal.

That night, however, an unsettling rumour spread through the army. James of Avesnes, the respected crusader knight from Hainaut, was missing. At dawn the next day, a search party of Templars and Hospitallers scoured the battlefield, and eventually, there among the dead of Christendom and Islam, they located his mutilated corpse. It was said that, in the thick of the fray, his horse had fallen; thrown from his saddle, James had fought like a lion, but as the tide of the battle turned, his old comrade in arms, Count Robert of Dreux, had ignored his calls for aid. Abandoned, James made his last desperate stand, felling fifteen of the enemy, before being cut down. He was found, circled by Muslim dead, his ‘face so smeared with congealed blood that they could hardly recognise it until it had been washed with water’. With great reverence, his body was carried back to Arsuf and buried in a ceremony attended by King Richard and Guy of Lusignan. ‘Everyone wailed and wept and lamented over’ his death; the Third Crusade had lost one of its longest-standing and most renowned warriors.⁷⁸