Another questionable decision proved still more costly. As victor on the field of battle at Hattin in July 1187, Saladin had taken Guy of Lusignan, the Latin king of Jerusalem, prisoner. In summer 1188, however, the sultan decided to release Guy from captivity (apparently after repeated appeals from Guy’s wife Sibylla). The motive behind this seemingly injudicious act of magnanimity is difficult to divine. Perhaps Saladin judged Guy to be a spent force, incapable of rousing the Franks, or possibly hoped that he might cause dispute and dissension among the Christians, challenging Conrad of Montferrat’s growing power in Tyre. Whatever his reasons, the sultan probably did not expect Guy to honour the promises he made in exchange for his release–to relinquish all claim to the Latin kingdom and immediately leave the Levant–pledges which Guy renounced almost as soon as he was at liberty.²¹

If Saladin did take Guy for a broken man, he was sorely mistaken. At first the Latin king struggled to make his will felt among the Franks, and Conrad twice refused him entry to Tyre. But by summer 1189, Guy was preparing to make an unexpectedly bold and courageous move.

THE GREAT SIEGE OF ACRE

The blistering heat of midsummer 1189 found Saladin still bent upon the conquest of the intractable stronghold of Beaufort. But in late August news reached him in the foothills of the Lebanese highlands that stirred feelings of dread and suspicion–the Franks had gone on the offensive. In 1187–8 Conrad of Montferrat had played a crucial role defending Tyre against Islam, yet he still baulked at the notion of initiating an aggressive war of reconquest. Secure within the battlements of Tyre, Conrad seemed content to await the advent of the Third Crusade and the great monarchs of Latin Europe–willing, by and large, to wait out the coming war, looking for any opportunity for his own advancement.

Now, the unlikeliest of figures decided to seize the initiative. The disgraced king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, whose ignominious defeat at Hattin had condemned his realm to virtual annihilation, was attempting the unthinkable. In the company of his redoubtable brother, Geoffrey of Lusignan, a recent arrival in the Levant, as well as a group of Templars and Hospitallers and a few thousand men, Guy was marching south from Tyre towards Muslim-held Acre. He seemed to be making a suicidal attempt to retake his kingdom.

The Siege of Acre during the Third Crusade

At first Saladin greeted this move with scepticism. Believing that it was merely a feint designed to lure him away from Beaufort, he held his ground. This allowed King Guy to negotiate the narrow Scandelion Pass, where, one Frank wrote, ‘all the gold in Russia’ could not have saved them had the Muslims moved to block their advance. Realising his mistake, Saladin began a cautious advance south to Marj Ayun and the Sea of Galilee, waiting to assess the Christians’ next move before turning west towards the coast. Benefiting from his enemy’s circumspection, Guy followed the road south to arrive outside Acre on 28 August 1189.²²

Acre was one of the great ports of the Near East. Under Frankish rule it had become an important royal residence–a vibrant, crowded and cosmopolitan commercial hub, and the main point of arrival for Latin Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. In 1184 one Muslim traveller described it as ‘a port of call for all ships’, noting that ‘its roads and streets are choked by the press of men, so that it is hard to put foot to ground’ and admitting that ‘[the city] stinks and is filthy, being full of refuse and excrement’.

Built upon a triangular promontory of land jutting into the Mediterranean, Acre was stoutly defended by a square circuit of battlements. A crusader later observed that ‘more than a third of its perimeter, on the south and west, is enclosed by the flowing waves’. To the north-east, the landward walls met at a major fortification, known as the Cursed Tower (where, it was said, ‘the silver was made in exchange for which Judas the Traitor sold the Lord’). In the south-east corner the city walls stretched into the sea to create a small chained inner quay, and an outer harbour, protected by a massive wall running north–south that extended to a natural outcrop of rock–the site of a small fortification known as the Tower of Flies. The city stood at the northern end of a large bay arcing south to Haifa and Mount Carmel, surrounded by a relatively flat, open coastal plain, some twenty miles in length and between one and four miles in breadth. About one mile south of the port the shallow Belus River reached the coast.

The city stood at the gateway to Palestine–a bastion against any Christian invasion from the north, by either land or sea. Here Saladin’s resilience, martial genius and jihadi dedication would be tested to the limit, as Islam and Christendom became caught up in one of the most extraordinary sieges of the crusades.²³

Early encounters

When King Guy reached Acre his prospects were incredibly bleak. One Frankish contemporary remarked that he had placed his meagre force ‘between the hammer and the anvil’, another that he would need a miracle to prevail. Even the Muslim garrison apparently felt no fear and began jeering from Acre’s battlements when they caught sight of the ‘handful of Christians’ accompanying the king. But Guy immediately demonstrated that he was developing a more acute sense of strategy; having surveyed the field that night, under the cover of darkness, he took up a position on top of a squat hill called Mount Toron. Some 120 feet high, lying three-quarters of a mile east of the city, this tell afforded the Franks a measure of natural protection and a commanding view over the plain of Acre. Within a few days a group of Pisan ships arrived. In spite of the punishing siege to come, many of the Italian crusaders on board had brought their families with them. These hardy men, women and children proceeded to land on the beach south of Acre and make camp.²⁴

The measured pace of Saladin’s advance to the coast almost had disastrous consequences. Outnumbered and exposed as he was outside Acre, Guy decided to risk an immediate frontal assault on the city even though, as yet, he had no catapults or other siege materials. On 31 August the Latins attacked, mounting the walls with ladders, protected only by their shields, and might have overrun the battlements had not the appearance of the sultan’s advance scouts on the surrounding plain prompted a panicked retreat. Over the next few days Saladin arrived with the remainder of his troops, and any hopes the Latins entertained of forcing a speedy capitulation of Acre evaporated; instead, they faced the dreadful prospect of a war on two fronts–and the near-certainty of destruction at the hands of the victor of Hattin.

Yet, at the very moment that Saladin needed to act with decisive assurance, he wavered. Allowing Guy to reach Acre had proved to be a mistake, but the sultan now made an even graver error of judgement. True, Saladin lacked overwhelming numerical superiority, but he outnumbered the Franks and, through a carefully coordinated attack in conjunction with Acre’s garrison, he could have surrounded and overwhelmed their positions. As it happened, he adjudged a rapid, committed assault to be too risky and instead took up a cautious holding position on the hillside of al-Kharruba, about six miles to the south-east, overlooking the plain of Acre. Unbeknownst to the Latins, he managed to sneak a detachment of troops (presumably shielded by the darkness of night) into the city to bolster its defences and, while skirmishers were dispatched regularly to harass Guy’s camp on Mount Toron, Saladin chose to hold back the bulk of his forces and wait patiently for reinforcement by his allies. On this occasion, such caution, so often the hallmark of the sultan’s generalship, was inappropriate, the product of a significant misreading of the strategic landscape. One crucial factor meant that Saladin could ill afford to bide his time–the sea.