Richard the Lionheart vs. Saladin- The Final Confrontation

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1:31There are occasionally titanic figures in history. People whose decisions and personalities completely dominate the events and people around them. And there are two such figures in our story today. Saladin and Richard the Lionheart are the figures who completely dominate the events of the Third Crusade. Both of them are daring commanders. Both of them are personally courageous and inspiring leaders. And between them, the struggle for the fate of the city of Jerusalem and the balance of power in the

2:02Near East will be decided. And the story of the Third Crusade has epic battles, assassination attempts, surprising camaraderie, and scandalous marriages. This is the stuff of which legends were made. You are listening to Villains and Virgins Podcast. And this is Episode 4 in our series on the Third Crusade. Now, if you've been listening to our last three episodes on this massive story, you may already have some questions. What about this? Didn't that happen? And I'm happy to let you know that there's an opportunity for you to

2:36ask those questions. Because people who are supporters of Villains and Virgins Podcast on Patreon have access to a live history chat, which I host once a month. So, if you have burning questions or other stories that you've heard about the Third Crusade that I haven't had time to comment on here, and you want even more opportunity to talk about this, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and become a supporting member of the podcast today.

3:06I have to say a special thank you to those of you who are regular supporters of the podcast on Patreon, including those people who support at the very highest level. There are additional benefits available for patrons at different levels on Patreon, including Villains and Virgins merch, extra monthly bonus episodes that are exclusive to Patreon, and even ad-free versions of the regular podcast episodes. So, you can check all of that out on patreon.com slash Eva Schubert. And finally, if you want to come on the road with me and experience a piece of history for yourself,

3:43I'm leading a tour in spring 2027 to London, Canterbury, Bath, and other key historical sites in the area. And you can get all the details of that with a fabulous company called geeknationtours.com. So, you can head over to their website, Geek Nation Tours, and look up Eva Schubert Tour, or you can check out the link in the description of today's episode. And now, back to our story. Our last episode finished with the surrender of Acre after a gruelling two-year siege.

4:15Acre was a city that had been occupied by the men of the Crusader states, but had recently been retaken by Saladin and his men, and the armies of the Third Crusade showed up outside the city and conducted an extended campaign to retake that city for themselves. And they succeeded. So, at the end of that battle, King Richard I of England and King Philip Augustus of France are left in charge of the city and the armies that have conquered it.

4:46But at this critical moment, King Philip of France decides that he's had quite enough of crusading. The rigors of that siege and the extreme levels of disease that afflicted even the kings themselves have been altogether enough for him. And so, he serves notice to King Richard that he is done with crusading, and he's going to be taking a boat back to France as quickly as possible. He leaves behind him, though, most of his armies, some 10,000 Frenchmen, under the command of Richard.

5:18So, they're going to serve alongside Richard's English troops to complete the mission of the Third Crusade. This left Richard I of England, sometimes called Richard the Lionheart, now the undisputed leader of all the armies of this crusade. And the first order of business he had to deal with, after Philip of France's departure, were the garrison of Acre that had surrendered to him. So, these are Muslim soldiers who had served under Saladin. They'd been left in charge of Acre when the city was attacked by the Third Crusade, and they had finally

5:54surrendered after a gruelling two-year defense that even crusaders who witnessed it thought was heroic. So, these men had surrendered as part of a negotiated peace deal in which their lives were going to be spared in exchange for a very large ransom payment, some 200,000 gold dinars. And the deal was that Saladin, who wasn't inside the city but outside it, was going to have to come up with this money to redeem the lives of the men who had defended Acre from the inside.

6:26But it was far too large an amount of money for anyone just to be carrying around in their pocket, so Saladin was going to need some weeks or even months to gather the full amount. And so, an installment payment plan was arranged between Saladin and Richard. The problem was that when the day arrived for the first installment to be paid, which was about a month after the surrender of Acre, so late August, the full amount wasn't there.

6:56Saladin hadn't been able to gather all of the money. So, he offered what he could come up with. He said, You can take the money I've gathered. I'll give you some other very high-profile hostages as well as an assurance that I'm going to pay you the rest, and then you can let these guys, the defenders of Acre, go. Richard says, No. He doesn't think that Saladin is going to actually pay the rest of the money. And so, negotiations break down. There's a mutual lack of trust.

7:30And at this moment, Saladin actually approaches the Templar Knights. So, the Templars, unlike the armies of the Third Crusade, which are going to come and go, are local to the region. They're an order of Christian knights that was founded at the end of the First Crusade, and they've been very active ever since in the defense of the Crusader kingdoms. And so, they are very much embedded with the armies of the Third Crusade, and they took part in the

8:01fighting at Acre. So, they are in Richard's camp in the aftermath. So, Saladin approaches the Templar Knights, and he says, Can you guys guarantee that this King Richard of England is going to do what he says he's going to do? I'm having trouble trusting him, because I've received solemn oaths from many other Crusaders and Frankish knights, who've then promptly turned around and broken those oaths. So, Richard's word is not filling me with a lot of confidence. Can you guys give me some kind of guarantee? And the Templars say to Saladin, We will not take an

8:38oath or give any guarantee, for we fear the betrayal of our own people. So, this is a sort of damning detail that reveals that the Templars themselves didn't have any confidence that Richard was going to release these men just because he assured Saladin that he would. So, the negotiations fail, and the result of this is appalling. On August 20th, 1191, Richard marches some 2,700 men, the defenders of Acre, the resident garrison. He marches them outside of the city walls, and he has his men slaughter them in full view of Saladin

9:14and his army. Even worse, he includes some of the wives and children of these men in the slaughter. And Saladin and his army can see what's going on. They're horrified. Some of them try to charge in desperation to break through Crusader army lines and interfere with the massacre that's going on, but they fail. So, the number of corpses that are left littering the ground in the wake of this massacre is sickening to behold. And it's an incident that will not be forgotten by anyone who

9:49witnessed it. It horrified some of the Crusaders themselves, but it certainly shocked and horrified Saladin and his men. Because up until this moment... Remember, Saladin and his men have been engaged in running battles with the Crusader states for a couple of decades before this moment. A couple of decades before the Third Crusade even showed up. So, they have certain conventions that are already in place. And the locals, the Templars, the Hospitallers, the knights and nobles who live in the Crusader states are aware of

10:24those conventions. And what they are is basically, sometimes you capture some of our guys, and sometimes we capture some of your guys, and when that happens, the highest-ranking ones get ransomed for large amounts of money, and the rest of the ordinary guys, and the men of Acre were ordinary guys, get used as slave labor until such time as they're released as part of another settlement deal or ransomed en masse. So, the Crusaders had Muslim captives that they were using as slave labor, and the Muslim army had Christian captives

11:01that they used as slave labor. So, this had been going on for some decades. Richard is breaking the book on this, and he's basically announcing that he doesn't play by those rules. There had been exceptions, of course, to this operating procedure that had been going on. Saladin was notoriously merciless to Templars and Hospitaller knights who were captured because he regarded them as far too dangerous. They had a reputation as being the fiercest, most disciplined, and most effective fighters the Crusader states had.

11:36And so, we do have examples of Saladin massacring numbers of Templars who'd been captured in battle. The same was true of Reginald de Châtillon, who we talked about in our first episode, the Kingdom of Heaven, because this was someone who had deliberately gone out of his way to break treaties and to conduct aggressive raids, even outside of Crusader Kingdom territory. And so, he was absolutely condemned to be executed after he'd surrendered at the

12:06Battle of Hattin. So, there had been incidents where people were killed after surrendering, but usually in particular circumstances. The men of Acre didn't fall under any of these existing categories, and their fate was something that would not be forgotten by Saladin or anybody else. So, what happens next? Well, if you've ever been a soldier or you've studied military history at all, you can probably guess. This action of Richard's sets a new precedent, and the immediate outcome is that Saladin changes his policy on captured

12:41Frankish or European prisoners. So, no longer are these people going to be sort of held for ransom or used as slave labor, but some of them are going to be killed immediately. As a result of what Richard has just done. Saladin has some 28 Frankish prisoners in his army camp at that moment. They meet a swift end. And we're going to see him engage in retributive killings of other Frankish prisoners in the immediate wake of Acre, because the rules have just changed.

13:16Within two days of the massacre, Richard I is on the move. He's going to lead the combined English and French forces out of the city of Acre, and his goal is ultimately the city of Jerusalem, which the Third Crusade has come to recapture. But he has to get there first. So, remember that Acre is a coastal city, and the most direct route from Acre to Jerusalem would be to go inland. But Richard is not going to do that, and that's because

13:47he knows that now he's going to have to face Saladin and his armies on the open plain. Up to this point, the fighting around the city of Acre has been constrained by siege circles. And so, while there's been fighting between the Crusaders and Saladin's army, it hasn't been in terrain that allows Saladin's troops to perform at their best. But Richard has been advised by locals, the Templars, the Hospitallers, who are all too familiar with the land tactics of Saladin's Turkish-mounted archers.

14:18And so, he's well aware of the dangers that are going to face him as he rolls out of Acre and tries to make his way to Jerusalem. Accordingly, he decides to stick to the coast for as long as possible. So, he's going to go straight down the coast from Acre. And this is because he has his own ships in the water. So, those ships are resupply points. He's also able to control the water side of his army. So, the part of his army that is flanked by the water is going to be safe from attack, essentially.

14:55The other flank of the army, which is going to be exposed to the inland side, is where the attacks are going to come from. So, having been advised of this, Richard organizes his men very deliberately. And he actually rotates his units. So, he has his cavalry in the middle, he has infantry on the outside of them, on the inland side, to try and block the horses from arrow attacks to some degree. But those infantrymen are going to be under attack at random times very regularly as they march their army its

15:30slow way down the coast. And so, Richard will regularly rotate his units so that guys who've been in the hot side, the land-based side, get a chance to rotate over to the quieter coastal side of the marching units and let other men take their place. So, he's organized his men in this way to deal with the attacks that he knows are coming. These attacks begin almost immediately. And they're not pitched battles. They're not intended to be. They are skirmishes. And the guys who are doing these raids or attacks are even referred to as skirmishers.

16:06And their role is to get in, to attack some vulnerable part of the army, to kill some guys, and to get out. Their role is essentially to harass and slow down the forward progress of the army. And Saladin has quite a number of different men that are involved in these skirmish units. He has Sudanese archers, which may sound strange to you. What are these black bowmen doing in Saladin's army? But that's because Saladin is the sultan of Egypt at this

16:36point. Egypt and Sudan share a border and there were definitely black units in Egypt who were now serving under Saladin. So he has Sudanese archers. He has Berbers, who are nomadic tribal fighters as well. And then he has the famous Turkic mounted archers. And so all of these guys are really fast and there are a lot of arrows flying. The Sudanese are using them, the mounted Turkish bowmen are using them. And the eyewitness accounts of the progress of Richard's army describe some of his infantry beginning to look a lot

17:11like porcupines. So the infantry in Richard's army weren't wearing full metal armor like knights. That was extremely expensive. Only if you were a knight from a noble family could you afford high quality metal armor. So if you were a guy running around on your feet, a member of the infantry, you were wearing padded armor. So layers of cloth usually with some leather on the outside that you were wearing as sort of a jacket or a tunic and a hat. And these tunics were being peppered with arrows.

17:44So the arrows would get embedded in these padded leather jerkins and things the guys were wearing. They weren't killing the men for the most part unless you got an arrow in between. But what did begin to happen is that you'd have guys running around with eight or ten arrows sticking out of their armor. So it was kind of a comical sight but this was the everyday for men in Richard's army that are marching along the inland side. There are of course casualties, not massive casualties but the unfortunate guy

18:17who gets an arrow in the eye or the neck or some exposed area. And so at the end of every day Richard has to send his casualties to the ships on the coastal side which he has following along with his army and then rotate his units around. So this is what's going on. It's slow it's aggravating and Richard has to exert a lot of discipline because naturally men in his army want to pursue and go on the aggressive when they're dealing with these skirmish units

18:49that are constantly harassing them like mosquitoes. Mosquitoes on steroids. But Richard refuses to let his men go and pursue any of them because he knows that's a trap. So the men are forced to keep marching along and essentially try and retain a defensive posture while these skirmish units attack wherever they think they see an opening. So while infantry units and cavalry aren't allowed to pursue these skirmishers their main line of defense are Richard's crossbowmen who will fire because these guys are also along the inland

19:21flank of the army and they will fire at attacking skirmish units. So that's the main defense that they have. Any stragglers or people who are lagging behind the main body of the army are easy prey and so stragglers from Richard's army are captured they're taken to Saladin for questioning and then they're summarily executed again as part of a retribution campaign for what happened at Acre. The exception to this however are washerwomen. You might be going wait a second what? Washerwomen? Why are washerwomen involved in the army? Washerwomen were always involved in the crusader armies.

19:56There were some women that were traveling with the army who were not combatants just like there were cooks and other people so washerwomen were following the army and they were taking care of the laundry services of that military force so it was easy for them to end up straggling from the rear guard and for some of them to be captured and taken prisoner they were not executed so Saladin's revenge campaign didn't extend to women and non-combatants. So you can imagine the armies of the third crusade making their slow way along the coast.

20:31They've been doing this for two weeks and so they have the water on one side they're marching along the coast Saladin's army is keeping pace with them. His army is farther inland but they're basically matching the progress of Richard's army step for step and deploying these smaller skirmish units that are bridging the gap and actually attacking Richard's flanks but at a certain point it becomes obvious that Saladin is going to close the distance he's going to bring the bulk of his forces in upon Richard's army and force a pitched battle.

21:05So at the end of the first week of September 1192 Saladin chooses a spot that he knows Richard's army is going to have to cross to get to their next protected campsite and he arranges his armies there he's going to engage in battle. Richard sees this coming he knows that this battle is inevitable and it was only a matter of Saladin picking the time and the place so he's also arranging his units now for a full battle. This engagement will be known as the Battle of Arsuf.

21:38Now King Richard is aware that his main weapon is the heavy cavalry charge. This is the moment of medieval legend when you have these fully armored knights astride their war horses thundering down a field to absolutely demolish an enemy force and that works really well in Western Europe because the way that armies fight there is that you have two armies facing off against each other in an open plain and so they're riding towards each other at the same time or you have one side waiting to receive a cavalry charge

22:13and then counter-attacking. The problem is that Saladin's armies don't operate like that at all. They're not going to be sitting there stationary waiting for your heavy cavalry charge to land and so the major risk here for Richard is that if he lets his cavalry charge fly at the wrong moment Saladin's highly mobile highly rapid Turkish horsemen will just wheel around and vanish and they're not going to be there to encounter this charge they're not going to be demolished by it so Richard has to think very carefully about exactly when and

22:49where he's going to deploy this particular tactic if he picks the wrong moment it could be entirely wasted and now the other side can wheel around and end up attacking from the sides or the rear so it could end up backfiring if he gets it wrong knowing this and being well advised by the Templars and Hospitallers of Saladin's tactics Richard gives strict orders that the men in his army are not to engage in any cavalry charges

23:19until he gives the signal so he's told all the cavalry units this they have to wait until he gives the sign Richard is expecting Saladin's foot soldiers who come out first so Richard's army is arrayed for battle they're waiting Saladin's infantry advances they start assaulting the front lines and then they make way they actually break ranks deliberately to make space for Saladin's mounted archers to come through so these are the Turkic horsemen and their strategies have

23:49been proven to be extremely effective across the Near East Saladin's guys aren't the first to employ this way of fighting there have been wave upon wave of nomadic steppe tribes coming out of the Eurasian steppe that have mastered this including what they call the Parthian shot which is the ability to sit on your horse galloping and turn and shoot accurately behind you with a bow and arrow while your horse is going in one direction you're shooting

24:20directly behind so it takes a lot of skill to master that there are some people who have tried to recreate this and with great difficulty but this is what Saladin's Turkic horsemen specialize in and when they charge they're not coming directly at the enemy like a frontal assault how they would operate was they would have a wave of these mounted archers that would basically ride down the front line laterally so they'd move across the enemy force

24:50from left to right or the other way around as the case might be moving very quickly and firing rapidly and accurately as they went you'll have a wave of these mounted archers that will come by moving very quickly shooting arrows at everyone in the front and then they'll basically turn and circle and go back back behind their own lines and when they do that they're clearing space for the next wave of cavalry or mounted archers to

25:20do the same thing so there are these multiple charges of these extremely accurate very fast moving mounted archers now for Richard's knights this wasn't such a big deal their full metal armor was very good at repelling arrows so they're not in any physical danger from the archers for the most part but what is threatened are their horses because horses were easy targets for these mounted archers they didn't have the same level of protective gear and if you could shoot an arrow into a horse what would happen would be that horse would immediately rear and panic

25:56you'd be terrified and that causes disorder in the lines it causes chaos amongst the other horses nearby the knight is trying to control this animal who might be mortally wounded so what begins to happen are these archers that Saladin is sending are picking off war horses and that turns a mounted knight who's a very formidable opponent into an infantryman in heavy metal armor who is moving a lot more slowly as a result Saladin's forces concentrate their attention on Richard's left flank and his rear guard which happen to be full of Flemings from Western Europe and

26:32Hospitaller knights who are locals so these guys are under a lot of pressure because their horses start to die under them in significant numbers and they keep sending messengers to Richard saying hey is it time for a charge yet is it time for a charge and Richard will say no hold the line stay where you are it's not time yet what Richard is waiting for is for the bulk of Saladin's army to come within range of his cavalry charge he doesn't want to let them go until he can be sure that they're going to make

27:08an impact and so he's telling his men to stay exactly where they are the problem is for the men in the left flank in the rear guard their horses are dying under them at such an alarming rate that they become concerned that there won't even be enough of them who still have horses left whenever the signal is given and perhaps Richard doesn't understand just how dire their situation is and how many horses they're losing finally two of the Hospitaller knights seeing horses dying all around them and fearing that there's not going to be much of

27:44a unit left if this goes on any longer begin leading a charge so they start galloping at full speed on their horses against the enemy and as soon as this happens other knights up and down the line follow suit they figure oh there's the signal it's time to go so there's this cascading wave of cavalry that's now thundering across the field and Richard turns and realizes this is now happening I mean one man is not going to be able to get in the way and arrest a moving cavalry charge so Richard does the only thing

28:20left to do which is get out in front of it and start leading this charge from the front so suddenly the charge is happening and with a bit of confusion because Richard's archers were actually still in the way normally you'd give a signal your archers would clear and your cavalry would go so the archers are kind of going what's happening suddenly there are horses thundering past us and we're trying to avoid getting trampled but the cavalry charge is out of the gate and fortunately for Richard it only happens a few moments before the time that

28:56he himself would have actually signaled it so yes it wasn't on his signal but it wasn't disastrously ahead of the signal he was planning to give anyway Saladin's secretary who was watching this battle unfold from a hilltop gasped at the sight of Richard's cavalry thundering across the field and Saladin's men broke ranks and fled you probably would too if you were facing a wall of fully armoured knights on warhorses thundering at you threatening to trample you into oblivion it must have been a sight to behold and then we have these words from an eyewitness of

29:32the battle not Saladin's secretary but someone from the armies of the third crusade named Ambois and he says as follows quote there the king the fierce the extraordinary king cut down the Turks in every direction and none could escape the force of his arm for wherever he turned brandishing his sword he carved a wide path for himself cutting them down like a reaper with his sickle unquote now these words come from Ambois who was a Norman

30:04poet and minstrel who was travelling with Richard and the armies of the third crusade so we have to take what he says with a little bit of caution because his goal is really to craft poetry and lyrics that make the king look good he's kind of like Richard's own travelling bard who's dedicated to memorialising his exploits in glorified lines so that's who Ambois is but he also gives us further lines about the same battle he says

30:36their soldiers stood aghast for we descended on their foes like thunder and great dust arose then he had seen bearded Turks lie slain as thick and close as sheaves of grain unquote so you can hear the poetic lines here right the meter and the rhyme as Ambois is taking what he's seen with his eyes and he's crafting it into a verse that makes the armies of the third crusade look glorious in their martial abilities now certainly

31:08Richard's bravery and skill in battle inspired his followers it's not just Ambrois who testifies to this otherwise we'd have reason to doubt there are many other people who witnessed Richard leading from the front demonstrating large amounts of personal courage but what was most important for the battle of Arsuf was Richard's skills as a general just being personally brave and being willing to put your body in danger is one thing but having the wisdom to know what

31:40tactics to employ when when to hold back those are the skills of a general and Richard had them in spades so Richard not only holds back his cavalry charge until the critical moment but he also prevents them from pursuing the fleeing foe so Saladin's men had broken ranks they seemed to be in retreat and the natural instinct then would be to pursue these guys on horse and ride them down and just kill them from behind and

32:12this is how a lot of the massive slaughters happened in battles back in western Europe but Richard has been well advised not to do this but Saladin's forces and other armies like them in the region have demonstrated an amazing ability to engage in what looks like retreat it looks like flight but when you run after them they suddenly turn around and in a well organized maneuver they turn the tables and now the disorganized pursuers are on

32:45the receiving end of a highly organized aggressive attack so Richard has been told about this the armies of the first crusade a century earlier discovered it to their detriment and Richard doesn't want to make the same mistake so he calls his men back he doesn't want to pursue Saladin's men and this too was a very important strategic decision no matter how brave the knights and infantry men were fighting under Richard's command if they were badly led

33:17their fighting spirit could have been squandered and large numbers of them would have died on this day as it was the casualties on both sides were relatively low yes people died but not in massive numbers now you might expect Ambrois Richard's chronicler to say things that were very flattering about his boss but more interestingly Muslim sources eyewitnesses of this event also have admiring things to say about Richard's battlefield acumen so Imad al-Din who is Saladin's secretary

33:48and was present at this battle as well wrote of Richard the following quote he was a man of great courage and spirit he had fought great battles and showed a burning passion for war his kingdom and standing were inferior to those of the French king but his wealth reputation and valor were greater unquote so this is a really interesting moment because it tells us that Saladin and his men are aware of the politics of Western Europe they know that in terms of Western feudal hierarchies the king of France outranks Richard on that scale but that

34:25Richard as an individual has qualities that the French king did not and qualities that they respect in terms of being an enemy to take seriously now despite not losing many men the effect of the battle of Arsuf was demoralizing for Saladin and his forces not only had they failed to break the crusader siege of Acre they lost Acre they watched the garrison there get killed but now they've been unable to win this battle with the armies of the third crusade on the open plain so what it seems like is that Saladin's reputation for being invincible

35:02his ability to acquire a string of rapid and significant victories is over however because both armies Saladin's army and Richard's army are still largely intact this is a time when they both have to regroup and proceed with caution ahead of their next inevitable encounter so Richard continues moving his army along the coast toward Jerusalem it's slow going and the weather begins to turn so they stop at the port city of Jaffa and this is a place where they're going to rest and replenish so they end up taking some down time here so much so that

35:40some of Richard's units actually decide they want to go back to Acre which is not that far away if you're traveling in a small unit and not at the pace of a massive army which is inevitably very slow so some of the men say what are we doing hanging out in Jaffa here cooling our heels we would rather go back to Acre because as you might recall from our last episode many of the men in the crusader army were very happy in Acre largely because there was a lively trade with the prostitutes of that city

36:17and some of those prostitutes also remembered the men of the crusader armies and made the journey to Jaffa to continue their lively monetary exchanges so Richard is dealing with a little bit of fragmentation he spends some time in Jaffa he moves a bit farther down the road to another fortress city called Ascalon and he spends the next four months there basically trying to rebuild that city so he's also dealing with units in his army especially the French who are perhaps not so loyal to him and not so willing to respect all of his orders who

36:54are fragmenting and heading off to Acre here or there and not willing to do the boring work of rebuilding a place like Ascalon but this is how Richard and his men are going to spend the cold months of the winter they're going to be holed up essentially in a defensive posture waiting for spring to come again and Saladin and his men have the same situation the weather is terrible the rains are cold and they're pounding and there's mud everywhere and many of his men have the expectation that campaigning season is over it's time to go

37:31home deal with business with our families with our territories there and then return in the spring when the next campaign season begins so during this lull period Richard and Saladin begin negotiating to try and find some kind of a settlement settlement you ask what does this mean weren't these two sworn enemies dedicated to destroying each other well this is one of the really fascinating parts of the story of the third crusade because while Richard and Saladin are each leading armies that are fighting each other they're also frequently engaged in negotiations that are not only civil

38:09but at times downright friendly and so it's a kind of a bizarre mental picture because you have reports of them facing each other in the field and leading their men in battle but then you have reports of their negotiations which have an entirely different tone to give you a sense of just how strange this is to us try to imagine during the bloodiest days of World War I the Prime Minister of England David Lloyd George sitting

38:39down to a lavish feast with Kaiser Wilhelm II and basically you know engaging in a lot of eating and making jokes and exchanging expensive gifts and trying to figure out if they can come up with a deal to end the war this is hard to imagine it never happened it wasn't part of the playbook in World War I or World War II but it is part of the playbook for the Third Crusade because the medieval period

39:09was an entirely different time so what we see are these very cordial interactions where Richard or his representatives are sitting down with Saladin's negotiators they're sharing food they're exchanging gifts sometimes jokes and then the negotiations finish and they go back to fighting for a bit and then they reopen negotiations this may seem very strange for two men who are trying to kill each other but that's because they weren't Richard and Saladin were not personally trying to

39:39kill each other they would happily have captured the other king if that was possible if Richard and his men could have captured Saladin that would have been an incredible stroke it would have allowed them to basically dictate the terms of a settlement and Saladin's men would happily have captured Richard and by the way they came very close a few times Richard has this bad habit in between campaigning seasons of sort of going out with hawks and

40:09hunting and just taking a few guys and you know pursuing the noble sport of hunting as aristocrats were wont to do and then lying down for a nap and nearly being captured by Turkish patrol parties who come upon them so it was a near miss a few times if Saladin's men had succeeded in capturing Richard then that would have put all the cards in their hand but they wouldn't have killed him nor would Richard have done

40:39that for Saladin so what are they trying to do? Richard and Saladin are both engaged in campaigns that are designed to enhance their own standing as leaders in front of their own men and back at home and so sometimes battles are the best way to advance these goals and sometimes negotiations but when you understand that that's what they're after the behaviour becomes easier to comprehend you can think of this as being similar to a game of chess and by the way that's an analogy that both

41:13Saladin and Richard would have understood because they both played the game chess was very popular amongst the Arabs and others in the Near East and some of Richard's men were exposed to it for the first time during the Third Crusade although chess had also landed in Western Europe and other places a couple of centuries earlier so amongst the nobles the idea of chess was a reference point that they both understood and in the game of chess

41:43your goal is to corner the king checkmate by the way comes from the Arabic term shamat so you're trying to put the king into an impossible position that's the goal of the game along the way you're going to try to capture or kill all the pieces around him if you can but the game ends when you corner the king and there are rules you don't treat the king the way you would treat a pawn so when you think of Richard and Saladin each as their respective kings and the negotiations and battles as part of a

42:20game of chess in real time I think it's an excellent illustration of what this looks like so at this point Richard is negotiating with Saladin's brother Saladin doesn't want to meet Richard face to face he thinks it's bad form until a lasting peace deal has been agreed but he does send his brother to represent him and his brother's name is Al-Adul Saif Ad-Din the Franks called him Safadin but I'm going to refer to him as Al-Adul because Safadin sounds a lot like Saladin and it gets confusing really quickly so Richard is negotiating with Saladin's brother

42:57Al-Adul and like his brother Saladin Al-Adul is admired by many crusader sources as a man of hospitality and tact he's quite a likable character and Richard develops some significant rapport with him over the many times that they meet to negotiate in the oncoming months so Richard and the armies of the third crusade have retaken some of the coastal cities and when he meets Al-Adul he says look how about you give us Jerusalem and all the territory west of the Jordan River and then the other territory that Saladin has conquered he can keep so we'll take

43:34this part and you guys have that part and then if you agree to this deal our war is over Al-Adul politely refuses he says Jerusalem is very important for Muslims in their religious tradition it is also a site of significance for certain events in the life of prophet Muhammad and they want to keep a presence there so he says we're not handing over Jerusalem sorry that's a no-go now at this point Richard counters with a startling suggestion and the first time I read this I had to double check because it was so bizarre and so

44:11outside what we would expect given how people talk about the crusades that I could scarcely believe it was true but what he says is this he says to Al-Adul how about I give you Al-Adul my sister Joanna as a wife and if Saladin will agree to give you Al-Adul the city of Jerusalem and Palestine then I will hand over Acre and Ascalon and some of the coastal cities I've taken as part of Joanna's wedding dowry and so Al-Adul and Joanna are going to be married and they can reside in Jerusalem so we're going to have

44:48a Muslim king and a Christian queen ruling over Jerusalem as part of a peace deal that ends the third crusade and Richard says look it's great if Joanna is queen in Jerusalem there's going to be a deal that ensures Christian access to the city so Christian pilgrims can continue to go there but you know you Al-Adul Saladin's brother are the king so this is a deal that can please both sides we can all go home now using marriages to end fights and to make allies out of former enemies was a standard practice in the medieval

45:25world and we've actually seen this in a number of our previous episodes back in France and England as kings and nobles who've been fighting each other then make marriage alliances and they smooth things over so it wasn't a bizarre tactic it was a standard part of medieval diplomacy that Richard is drawing on as a possible solution to this and such an alliance would allow Richard to go home and say the third crusade has achieved peace and we now have this new alliance that ensures peaceful Christian access to Jerusalem so it's a victory that he can

46:02take home and show to everyone else it allows him to walk out of this looking good but the reason why this is so astonishing is that the rhetoric around the crusade makes us think that Richard thought that all Muslims were enemies of God infidels who deserved to die basically something less than human and if that was what you thought then the idea of marrying your sister to someone like this would seem to be unthinkable and that's certainly what Joanna thought apparently when Richard's idea was mentioned to her she flew into a towering rage of the

46:39sort that her family became famous for and said that under no circumstances would she wed a paynim which was sort of the local lingo for a pagan and unbeliever a Muslim it's beyond the pale I won't do it she puts her foot down and says absolutely not now remember Joanna is Richard's sister and she's not a child at this point she's in her mid-twenties she's already been the queen of Sicily she was married to the king of Sicily who's recently died and Richard has picked her up on his way through southern Italy towards the near

47:16east so she's now traveling with Richard she's right there but this is a woman who's not a child she's already been a queen and she's Eleanor of Aquitaine's daughter so you know having certain ideas about how to run her own life and not just doing what men around her tell her to do kind of runs through her veins so Joanna makes it very clear to Richard that I don't care what conversations you're having with Al-Adil I'm not going along with this now on the Muslim side Richard's proposal seems to have been better received so Al-Adil

47:52takes this idea that Richard has tabled and he discusses it with Saladin himself and Saladin is reported to have said something like sure if Richard wants to do this I have no objections so think about this for a second Saladin has no objections to the idea of his brother marrying Richard's sister and the two of them residing in Jerusalem he's not sure if Richard is really serious about this but he's saying if he's being serious I would say yes but that is the whole question was Richard really serious about this or was he just playing

48:29for time which allowed him to organize his armies better and prepare to move them closer to Jerusalem some historians want to say that Richard certainly couldn't have been serious about this but others take exactly the opposite view and I'm more persuaded by the second for a number of reasons first of all Richard actually mentions this to his sister we know this because her response is on record if he himself had never seriously considered doing it why bother involving his sister in the conversation when he knew that she would be unlikely to agree if Richard wasn't

49:05serious he could have just continued these theoretical conversations with Aladol and then found a reason at the last minute to say oops it's not going to work and just pull out but the fact that Richard does talk to Joanna I think counts in favor of the fact that he thought this was truly possible and he goes back to Aladol after Joanna has thrown a fit and says yeah Joanna seems a little bit reluctant but if we can get a papal bull to support this plan that could change Joanna's mind so what's Richard talking about he's

49:42saying if I write to the Pope and say could you please give us special permission or your approval for the marriage of Joanna to Aladol if the Pope signs something that says he's willing to approve of this then this could change Joanna's mind and it could also assuage public opinion because Richard is now aware having mentioned this idea to a few other people that some of the others in the third crusade are also scandalized at the idea that Richard's sister would marry Saladin's brother so again why would you go around talking to people on your

50:20own side about a plan you weren't ever serious about and why would you be brainstorming ways to make it work and overcome objections if you weren't actually interested in doing that I would argue that the balance of evidence suggests that even if only briefly Richard thought that this was actually a possibility so as these negotiations are continuing Richard says to Aladol you know it's going to take a while to get the Pope's permission assuming he even

50:50gives it to us it's going to take at least three months for messengers to go to him and for him to write back and he might not end up approving it but one way this could work is if you Aladol my friend are willing to convert to Christianity then Joanna's objections would disappear and we could do this deal right away Aladol politely declines this particular version he says no I'll be happy to marry your sister and

51:21she can continue being a Christian but I'm going to continue being a Muslim I think so that's not going to happen and then Richard says well I know I could just give you my niece to marry instead I mean unlike my sister who's kind of headstrong and totally grown up my niece is very young and she's my ward so I get to dictate who she marries it's not up to her she has no voice in the

51:51matter so I can guarantee you that this bride will be available if you want to take her instead we can still do this deal now all of this raises one of those fascinating what if questions that history sometimes presents us with what if Richard's suggestion had gone ahead what if his sister Joanna had married Al-Adl Saladin's brother and the two of them had a part Norman part Kurdish dynasty that was founded in Jerusalem and represented peace

52:22in the Near East and access to Jerusalem for both Christians and Muslims what would that have looked like and how would that have changed subsequent history unfortunately it's a question that will remain unanswered but it was a possibility that existed in Richard's mind and on the table for a brief moment and it represents an alternative path that history might have taken but didn't because Saladin and Al-Adl said you know marrying the sister of the king of

52:52England is one thing we'll happily wed Al-Adl to Joanna but we're not interested in the substitution of some minor niece who's barely more than a child so in the end the deal fell through Richard and the leaders of the third crusade have an army council in January of 1192 many of the knights and the other men in the army are excited Jerusalem is so close surely they will be inside the city soon thus fulfilling their crusader

53:23vows and ending their armed pilgrimage so there's a lot of excitement there's a lot of forward momentum men are eager for Richard to draw up plans to attack and take Jerusalem itself unfortunately the knights who are local to the region the Templars and Hospitallers have a less enthusiastic view they point out that if Richard attacks Jerusalem not only will he be fighting the defending garrison but inevitably Saladin and his army will show up and surround Richard's

53:53forces from the outside so it's going to be a replication of the siege of Acre with the crusaders in the middle fighting the defenders of the city on one side and Saladin and his forces on the other Jerusalem is 50 kilometers inland unlike Acre which was on the coast at Acre Richard and his ships controlled the coast they controlled the water and that allowed them to resupply as well as control some degree of traffic on one side of the siege Jerusalem is a totally different situation here Richard and his men are going to be relying

54:31on an extended supply line from the coast one which Saladin and his army could easily cut and that would leave Richard and his army stranded in between the city and Saladin's army running out of food and potentially water as well which would be a far more severe deprivation all of these factors made it seem very unlikely that Richard and his army would be able to sustain a siege long enough to force Jerusalem to surrender so the idea of attacking it would be a maneuver that would put many lives at risk but for what gain the

55:08Templars and Hospitallers also pointed out to Richard that even if they got into Jerusalem most of the men in his army would then very happily return home they would have achieved their objective they'd gotten inside the city they'd fulfilled their vows and then they'd be taking the first ships back to Western Europe but the Templars and Hospitallers and the other knights who lived in the Crusader kingdoms of Outremer would then be tasked with trying to hold that city and they said it is highly unlikely that we have the manpower to do so so even best

55:45case scenario even assuming you don't run out of food and water you get into the city and you take it it's going to be this ephemeral moment where the armies of the third crusade will hold Jerusalem for a few days maybe a few weeks and then it'll once again be in Saladin's hands there can be no doubt that Richard was unhappy to receive this counsel from the Templars and Hospitallers but the logic of it was inescapable and so despite the fact that it was probably a blow to his ego and was not going to go

56:22down well with his men Richard made the decision not to advance toward Jerusalem apart from the decision of what to do next with his army Richard soon had other problems and those problems had to do with tension inside the crusader kingdoms themselves so the problem here was that there were two men who both wanted to be king of Jerusalem never mind the fact that Jerusalem was in Saladin's hands and so no crusader or crusader descendant was currently residing in that city but the title king of Jerusalem essentially meant leader of the crusader states of Outremer

57:00wherever the capital might end up being even if they didn't retake Jerusalem on this occasion so there are two guys who want to have this job the first of these two is a man called Guy de Luzignan and we met him in our last episode so he was the one wearing the crown when the city of Jerusalem was lost to Saladin and Guy himself became Saladin's prisoner in the interim another candidate Conrad of Montferrat emerged as the leader of the crusader states because he had led an incredible defense of the city of Tyre which was

57:37then under attack by Saladin and many of the families and the knights in the crusader kingdoms thought that Conrad would be a much better king than Guy ever so this rift had already emerged when King Richard the Lionheart of England and King Philip the France landed at the siege of Acre and involved themselves in that battle and before the King of France went home he and Richard tried to broker a deal King Guy Guy de Luzednan had been released by Saladin and was in the army camp at the siege of Acre fighting alongside the armies

58:15of his status as king because he knew that many of his followers and the knights and the fighters in the kingdoms no longer supported him many of them supported Conrad so Richard and King Philip of France have to broker some kind of a deal at Acre to say okay Guy gets to stay king until he dies and then Conrad will be king because he's just married into the royal family and so he's acquired this extra legitimacy

58:45so as soon as Guy dies Conrad and his children he has will inherit the throne the problem is that while this settlement seemed like a reasonable one to Richard and King Philip before Philip left back for France it wasn't acceptable to the people on the ground in the Crusader kingdoms many of them thought Guy is the wrong choice these kings have just arrived here from Western Europe what do they know about what's been going on and

59:16they may think that it pleases Guy and it pleases their politics to allow him to stay king but it didn't please very many other people and the result of this was beginning to catch up with Richard because he was discovering that Conrad that candidate for king that he had sort of sidelined wasn't cooperating with the Third Crusade he wasn't showing up with his forces he was staying holed up in other places and he was conducting his

59:47own separate negotiations with Saladin so you can imagine how difficult this is going to be for Richard if he's trying to come up with a peace settlement with Saladin but Conrad is separately negotiating his own peace deal that's going to undermine any gains that Richard is trying to lay his hands on and so he realizes that we desperately need to have everybody on the same page here the armies of the Third Crusade who've come in from

1:00:18Western Europe led by Richard as well as the resident families knights and nobles of the Crusader states who are going to have to live with whatever goes home recognizing the inevitable Richard holds a meeting of all the barons and the nobles of the Crusader states of Outremer the locals and he says okay how many of you support Conrad and how many of you support Guy not a single man stood and raised his voice in support of

1:00:48Guy Guy who was the current king under the settlement that Richard had brokered and this is because many of the knights in Outremer regarded Guy as a failed leader someone who had lost Jerusalem someone who was a very bad military commander you know personally tough but quite stupid this was actually words that people at the time used they said he was soft headed simple minded not a very smart guy and so someone who was going to

1:01:19continue to make very bad and very costly leadership decisions which nobody the response is overwhelming nobody is a fan of Guy so Richard accepts this verdict and he basically says all right Conrad is going to be the new king we'll have him crowned shortly but you have clearly spoken now this is a bit of a personal defeat for Richard because he had supported Guy for reasons that had to do with politics back home Guy 's family

1:01:50held land under Richard's authority they were his so he felt a sense of personal loyalty to his vassal and he had supported Guy for that reason but at this point the strategic realities on the ground dictate that he's just going to have to accept Conrad because that's who everyone else wants so Richard manages to give Guy the island of Cyprus as a consolation prize Richard had seized this island on his way over to the Near East

1:02:21and so in order to smooth things over and minimize any other infighting he says to Guy you're not king of Jerusalem anymore but you can go and rule over the island of Cyprus and so the matter is settled or is it Conrad was supposed to be crowned king of Jerusalem in just a few days but that ended up never happening Conrad has received the news that he's going to be crowned king he's walking home from a

1:02:52friend's house where he was planning to have dinner when he's suddenly stopped by two men dressed as monks and one of them hands him a letter which he opens and begins to read and the other one begins stabbing him so Conrad only has a couple of companions with him at this point he's unable to stop the attack these two men dressed as monks stab him to death so the men who killed Conrad were known as assassins

1:03:23in fact these are the guys who are responsible for the existence of that word the word assassins is derived from the term hashashin and that's because these men were supposedly fans of consuming hashish before they went out on missions that was the rumor how accurate it was is another question but it's a reputation that they had so who are these hashashin or assassins well they were a splinter sect of shia muslims and their leader was sometimes

1:03:55referred to as the old man of the mountain his followers were intensely devoted to him and so they would undertake these missions even at the cost of their own lives if their leader asked it of them so this was a reputation that they had of being intensely devoted and completely committed to their missions they also had a reputation for effective infiltration of the household or the people around their intended target so they were quite willing to

1:04:26play the long game of having guys maybe get hired as servants in a household disguise themselves as other people Christians or monks or whatever and then when the moment was right to strike suddenly and mercilessly as they had done with Conrad showing up looking completely innocuous dressed as monks as cover for their murderous mission and the assassins didn't just get rid of people that were enemies of their own group because they had this reputation for being

1:04:57so effective they were often hired by other powerful men in the region so if you wanted to get rid of somebody you could put out a hit on him by hiring the assassins and they could go and use their skills to take out that person you wanted to get rid of for a fee in fact the assassins had tried to kill Saladin himself twice already in the last couple of decades and the first time they were

1:05:28hired by one of Saladin's Seljuk enemies kind of a rival and the second time well why were these Muslim assassin guys trying to kill Saladin who was also a Muslim weren't they on the same side no the short answer is no they weren't for any number of reasons first of all the assassins could be hired and so when they were hired they were hired by another Seljuk Muslim leader someone whose territories were being threatened by Saladin

1:05:59as he was expanding and building his own power so reasons this Seljuk wanted Saladin taken out and he was quite happy to hire anyone who could do the job the assassins failed on that occasion the second time that the assassins came for Saladin it was a very near miss they did end up cutting him across the face he was defended by some of his immediate companions and the would-be assassins were killed it is possible on this

1:06:31occasion that they came for him for reasons of their own because Saladin had ambitions to control most of Syria and that would include territory that was controlled by the old man of the mountains the leader of this particular Shia splinter sect and so they might have regarded him as a threat to themselves on the second occasion and that was the reason they tried to kill Saladin but they failed on both occasions though they had demonstrated their

1:07:03signature ability for blending in they came disguised as soldiers in Saladin's own army and the second time these soldiers had infiltrated his tent and had been resident there serving in his retinue for some time before the actual assassination attempt so this killing of Conrad established the reputation of the assassins in the crusader imagination many men returned home from the third crusade with tales of these incredible killers who could blend in and suddenly emerge at a moment

1:07:34you least expected them to murder someone who was thought to be untouchable and these tales are so persistent that they actually go back to England and France and there are rumors that the king of France might be a target of these assassins who possibly could be hired by Richard to take him out in the same way that Conrad was killed now this might seem a little bit surprising really would anyone believe that a small Shia group

1:08:06from Syria would make the trip to France of course they didn't but it tells us something about what kind of reputation they had in the imagination of western crusaders as people who were so incredibly devoted to their leader that they would sacrifice themselves and undertake any mission no matter how long or how perilous even if that meant a very long hazardous journey to France itself it wasn't considered out of the realm of possibility when people started

1:08:37talking and gossiping about these mysterious assassins and their incredible abilities and this impression that the assassins made on western Europeans is actually captured in a lyric written by a troubadour someone who's like a court poet or writer of songs back in Europe and he writes the verse quote just as the assassins serve their master unfailingly so I have served love with an unswerving loyalty unquote so this poet is comparing this sort of selfless devotion of this

1:09:09group of people he's never met but they're a reference point to the kind of devotion that he wants to ascribe to himself in pursuit of his beloved so they had a very long shadow on the imagination of returning crusaders in order to show up in courtly love lyrics like this now the question of who killed Conrad was a pressing one I mean the short answer was obvious the assassins did but who hired them who wanted Conrad

1:09:41out of the picture one of the assassins was killed in the struggle around the murder of Conrad but the other one was taken alive and under torture he confessed that Richard the first Richard the lionheart had hired the assassins to kill Conrad now we can't take this story at face value first of all because it was obtained under torture and so someone being tortured is going to say whatever they think their interrogators want to hear to

1:10:12make it stop and so if this person was being fed questions that suggested they wanted Richard as the answer he would certainly have complied but the other reason is that it was also standard practice amongst the assassins to have a cover story for who they killed and why in case they were captured by the enemy and that cover story was designed to spread confusion amongst the enemy and so the story that Richard hired us could also

1:10:44have been an intentional assassin ploy as well now even without this confession there were a lot of people who began to look at Richard with suspicion after all Richard had never wanted Conrad to be king of Jerusalem he had supported Guy and had sort of acquiesced in agreeing to make Conrad king only under pressure and this suspicion was only intensified when Richard's nephew a guy called Henry of Champagne marries Conrad's widow seven days later now think

1:11:15about this for a second Conrad had been married to a woman called Isabella she was a member of the royal family that had ruled Jerusalem for some time and she was his claim to legitimacy so with Conrad dead Richard's nephew Henry rushes in and marries this same Isabella the Isabella whose husband has just been murdered seven days later I mean this is a classic case of the funeral baking being trotted out to be reused at the

1:11:46wedding feast literally you could have used some of the same food that's how closely it happened and for Henry to marry Isabella was a way of asserting his own legitimacy to be the next king of Jerusalem you can see how this would look to many observers Richard doesn't want Conrad to be king suddenly Conrad is dead and oh look Richard's nephew has just married Conrad's widow and is now in line to wear the crown convenient no?

1:12:17Muslim sources people who observed this from the enemy side at the time make a note of this rapid marriage this seven days for Isabella from being in bed with her husband to being in bed with a new guy while being pregnant by her husband as sort of a whiplash marriage something that was disgusting something that sort of demonstrated for them as solid proof the licentiousness or the immorality of these Frankish crusaders what kind of barbarian people

1:12:48would do such a thing this is what the Muslim observers said and frankly from Isabella's perspective I'm inclined to agree with them this was a very rapid grab for power one that put Richard's nephew Henry in line for the throne and certainly a maneuver that made Richard's life easier after all he now had his younger nephew in this position someone that he could more easily lead or influence rather than Conrad a seasoned fighter in his own

1:13:20right a man of ambition and a man with ties to Richard's nemesis the king of France it is of course possible that Richard was entirely innocent of this murder and that Conrad had brought it on himself by arousing the anger of the old man of the mountain the leader of the assassins through some act of piracy basically stealing property that belonged to them and so in this case it would just be a fortunate coincidence for Richard

1:13:51but one that put him in a position that made him look suspicious to a good number of people we can't know the truth for certain but what we can know is that now that Conrad was out of the picture and Henry was married to Isabella the crusader forces and the local forces of the crusader kingdoms were completely united there was briefly a moment of enthusiasm and some renewed talk of an attack on Jerusalem itself but this

1:14:22was quickly quashed by the news that Saladin had circled around and retaken the city of Jaffa now you remember Richard and his men spent a good amount of time at Jaffa just a few months ago and they had left some men behind to defend that city it was a critical port city a place that Richard used to transport supplies inland from his ships on the coast so he could ill afford to lose it this would be the most daring battle of all between Richard and Saladin so the news that Jaffa was under attack arrived with

1:14:58Richard on the very last day of July 1192 and he responds immediately he rapidly mobilizes his army and sends them marching overland toward Jaffa but it's going to take them longer to get there Richard himself decides to get there by the fastest means possible which is by ship and so he boards some boats accompanied by less than 100 knights and some 2,000 mercenaries that he's managed to quickly hire and take along with him so they're going to arrive first when Richard's ships arrive he sees Saladin's banners on the walls of the city of Jaffa and

1:15:34he despairs because when you have banners on the walls of a city it means that army has taken the city it's a sign of victory and so Richard believes that all is lost and he's arrived too late but there's a priest inside the city of Jaffa who risks his life by getting outside the walls of the city somehow evading Saladin's lines and swimming in the water towards Richard's ship so he's risking his life to do this but the priest arrives on board Richard's ship and hurriedly informs him that all is not lost the defenders inside

1:16:11Jaffa are holed up inside the citadel kind of the fortified tower at the center of the city and that they're currently in talks with Saladin for a negotiated surrender but they're still there and when Richard hears this he makes an immediate decision he decides he's going to beach his boats bring them in as shallow as he can disembark and without even taking the time to put his armored boots on Richard leads his own men off the boats through the water and up to the beach now of course the beach isn't empty there's a thin line

1:16:47of Saladin's archers who are outside the city on that beach and they are firing arrows at Richard and these men who are coming up through the water Richard has his own Italian archers these crossbow men that he's hired fire arrows at Saladin's men basically to cover him and his knights as they're charging through the surf to get onto the beach so you can imagine Richard and his men trying to charge through these waves and get to the beach keeping their heads down because their armor is quite effective against arrows that are being shot by Saladin's

1:17:24archers so as long as they can keep their eyes and their necks covered they're probably going to be okay and they have their own archers firing back to try and take out some of the enemy archers that are attacking them as they're coming up toward the beach the defenders of the garrison in Jaffa spot them because it's a high tower that they're up in and they say Richard's arrived there are his ships he's leading men onto the shore and so they actually begin to fight their way out of the citadel and they say you know

1:18:00deliverance is here we're not going to be surrendering after all and Saladin's men are deeply confused because the guys inside the city aren't aware of what's just happened on the beach they thought that the defenders in the garrison were negotiating with Saladin maybe but it's not clear if they've surrendered yet or not and suddenly Richard and his men are coming into the city the guys who are defending Jaffa are coming out of the citadel and it's just confusion so in these circumstances Saladin's men begin fleeing in all directions and Richard and his men succeed in

1:18:38retaking the city so this was a daring gambit on Richard's part and having managed to succeed in taking the city through this rapid unexpected assault Richard then does something we've seen him do before he takes a lot of the Muslim prisoners so soldiers who've been captured from Saladin's side and he basically has them slaughtered he even takes their bodies and he throws them into pits that have been made outside the city and these pits were made

1:19:09by Saladin's soldiers themselves because as they came into Jaffa they had apparently killed pigs in that city and just thrown the bodies of the pigs into these pits because for Muslims pigs are unclean animals you don't eat them they're just filthy they're kind of like rats you want to get rid of them cleanse the city of these animals so the pits were there the pig carcasses were in them and when Richard takes the city he doesn't

1:19:41just kill the Muslim soldiers he's captured but he throws their bodies into the pits with the pig remnants which is sort of a deliberate gesture of disrespect for the corpses and then the very next day Saladin's negotiators arrive to talk to Richard about ransoming the highest value prisoners because as usual Richard has killed rank and file guys but anyone who looked like an emir an officer an aristocrat didn't get killed they got kept in a more

1:20:13comfortable room and served tea while negotiations could commence for what money would be exchanged so that these guys would be ransomed so Saladin's negotiators have come to engage in those very talks and they find Richard having jovial exchanges with some of Saladin's officers that he's captured so this for me is a really strange moment because you've just seen Richard butcher a lot of prisoners and insult their corpses and that's something that you can explain if Richard

1:20:45really thought that this crusade was a holy war against enemies of God and all Muslims needed to die and you know if that was the mentality then you can explain that kind of a slaughter it's not justified but you understand the process behind it but the very same man is sitting here having tea and trading jokes and getting on very well with Muslim officers and Richard demonstrates this kind of duality on more than one occasion we

1:21:17saw him do it at Acre where he butchered 2700 guys and some of their women and children but he's happy to get very close with Saladin's brother Al-Adul even referring to him as my brother and at one point knighting Al-Adul's son those behaviors don't make a lot of sense if you're viewing everyone you encounter through the lens of religion and enemies of God nor would you offer your sister in marriage to one of these guys which

1:21:48Richard also does so the one thing that does explain these apparently contradictory behaviors is not religion at all it's class and we've seen Richard demonstrate this mentality already back at home forget about the crusade and the Muslims for a moment Richard spent much of his youth punishing rebellious vassals back in southern France in the lands that his father controlled and so you would punish vassals by laying siege to their castles burning their lands and there are

1:22:20even reports that Richard was raping the wives and daughters of rebellious families so these are people that are lower on the feudal hierarchy than he is and this kind of retribution involves enormous levels of brutality and we saw the same attitude from Richard in an earlier episode when he's in southern Italy sees that a peasant has a hawk and decides just to go into that guy's house and steal the bird for himself because in his mind

1:22:51hawks are for nobles and peasants have no right to such a bird and we saw Richard do this in southern Italy when he threatens his own men with amputation of a hand for anyone who fails to fight enthusiastically enough when he decides to invade the city of Messina so if Richard is willing to cut off the hands of his own men and rape wives and daughters of his own people that explains the Richard that we're seeing

1:23:21on the third crusade if you're a member of the noble class if you're someone that he regards as the same status as himself then you're entitled to humane treatment to civilized negotiations to jokes to marriage offers to gifts and all of the above but if you are rank and file if you are a common person then you can be treated with the most casual level of brutality or even murder and that is the consistent pattern of

1:23:51behavior that we see with Richard it's not the lens of holy war that's driving him here it's a class attitude that dictates who he treats well and who he doesn't so when Saladin's negotiators arrive the day after Richard captures Jaffa they're there to negotiate for the ransom of high value Muslim prisoners but again they're also trying to see if they can find a settlement maybe we don't have to fight anymore maybe we can draw a line

1:24:21in the sand and say you keep this part and we keep that part and have done with it no such agreement is reached so Saladin's negotiators go back to him empty handed but Richard's negotiating position has certainly been strengthened by recapturing Jaffa and it's going to be strengthened even more in a few days time because remember Richard's army is still on the march over land they're going to arrive in Jaffa in the next couple of days

1:24:51so Richard's there with this very small force that he landed by ship but many more men are arriving shortly Saladin knows this so because the negotiations have failed at this moment he decides that it would be a good idea to see if he can take Jaffa back from Richard again before the rest of the army arrives so it's the morning of August 5th the sun hasn't come up yet and Richard and his men are camped outside

1:25:21the walls of Jaffa why are they outside the walls of the city you might ask the answer is that the smell of corpses inside the city was appalling as it normally would be in the aftermath of a battle and the capture of a city so Richard and his men are outside and the walls themselves are quite damaged anyway because again in a siege you have holes punched in walls and crumbling fortifications and all of that so

1:25:51Richard and his guys are outside the city fairly exposed one of his men gets up quite early to urinate and because he's up before anyone else as the sun is beginning to come up he sees the early morning light glinting off of some metal in the distance the metal of helmets he realizes that Saladin and his army are on their way back and hurriedly he wakes the other men in the camp and he warns them of

1:26:21what is imminently going to be upon them so what ensues at this point is this frantic preparation many of the men don't even have time to get fully dressed Richard is out there giving orders to quickly arrange his men to prepare them for the attack that is on its way and he doesn't have that many of them he has about 2,000 mercenaries he has a handful of knights a mere 15 horses and presumably the remains of the garrison that emerged from Jaffa when he retook the city so it's not a lot of guys to work

1:26:58with and he has to make the best of whatever features of the landscape that are there or that he can create so Richard has his men set up the tent stakes so you have to think of long wooden posts not the 5 or 6 inch tent pegs we use now but much larger pieces of wood that were used to support very large tents and these are set up in the ground at an angle so one end of the stake is embedded in the sand or whatever kind of earth they've got and the other is coming

1:27:35up at an angle designed to impale horses so this is a barrier that they are constructing as fast as they possibly can to put something between themselves and charging enemy cavalry now behind these posts Richard arranges his men in pairs each with their shields up each with their spears jutting out at a similar angle to repel charging cavalry and between each of these pairs he stations a singular archer so you can think of these men in clusters of three two guys with spears and shields and one crossbowman who's going to be shooting directly into the

1:28:12oncoming enemy lines now Saladin's force was considerably larger the estimate is about 7,000 men although we have to take these estimates loosely because they're notoriously unreliable during this period what we can be certain of is that Saladin had a good number of men more than Richard did and Saladin sets up his attack so that there are waves of cavalry charges so you have to think of this as sort of waves and lulls it's not like somebody blows a horn and there's suddenly a continuous all-out assault or melee it's a lot more spaced out than that

1:28:49Saladin's army comes closer he sends out the first cavalry charge these guys come riding down the lines and basically turning at the last minute and then circling back to behind Saladin's lines so you'll get one of these charges that gallops out turns travels along the edge and returns from whence it came so there are these surges and then there are lulls Saladin's men are exhausted some of them don't even want to fight at all and refuse to so this sudden maneuver that Saladin's trying to do of trying to take Jaffa a second time in this

1:29:26window before Richard's army arrives isn't something that everyone is excited about a lot of these men have been fighting continuously for several days and they don't have a lot of stomach for yet another battle so you can think of these cavalry charges as happening but perhaps without as much enthusiasm as Saladin might hope Saladin's charges go on for several hours reportedly and they don't manage to break through or scatter Richard's lines and as Richard begins to see Saladin's forces tiring and begin to slow down then he instructs his crossbowmen to fire at them more aggressively

1:30:03and take some of them out and then at a critical moment Richard himself leads an infantry charge of spearmen directly into Saladin's lines so Richard is on a horse but remember there aren't very many probably about 15 in total so he's on horseback out in front and most of these spearmen who've been standing there with their shields up and their spears at the ready are now running after him towards Saladin's lines and Saladin who's watching this from a bit of a hill so that he can direct the movements of his army sees that Richard's horse

1:30:40gets shot out from under him so an arrow takes out Richard's steed presumably it's shrieking and rearing and writhing and collapsing and Richard is now on foot and now we come to one of the most surprising moments in this entire engagement reportedly Saladin sends a groom with two horses out during one of the lulls so there's a charge there's a lull there's a cavalry charge there's a lull it's not like a continuous all-out melee so during

1:31:12one of these lull periods Saladin sends a groom with two horses to Richard he gives Richard the horses with the message that says something like it is unseemly for kings to fight on foot now I have looked through many books trying to get a little more information about this moment because it puzzles me it is consistent with the type of behavior we've seen from Saladin on many occasions throughout the third crusade where he will provide armed

1:31:43escorts for noble women from crusader state families to get them to their own families or to safety where he's treated prisoners fairly well but why do you give horses to the leader of the enemy army in the middle of a battle it seems counterproductive wouldn't it be better if you could capture that king and certainly he'd be easier to capture if he were on foot so I was unable to find any explanation for why Saladin would

1:32:15do this apart from the words that he said that it was unseemly for a king to fight on foot but it was for actions like this that Saladin acquired the reputation that he did amongst the crusaders and the men of the crusader kingdoms and that reputation was that Saladin was a man of chivalry someone who was able to treat even his enemies graciously so I can't say for certain why Saladin makes this decision but only that

1:32:47it is consistent with many other things that we know he did and perhaps for Saladin as for Richard ideas of class and nobility were guiding principles and that for him Richard is a king and kings require a certain level of treatment even if kings are your enemies and that would be a principle that might explain why he chose to make this remarkable move as the battle drags on and as evening approaches Saladin realizes that his army

1:33:19has been unable to overpower Richard's men so they've not succeeded in overcoming their resistance or retaking the city and Saladin is well aware that the rest of Richard's army is going to arrive very soon so deciding that there's nothing further to be gained Saladin calls off his men and they retreat the battle is over and Jaffa remains in Richard's hands when Richard's army finally arrives they have word that Saladin and his forces have gone to Jerusalem

1:33:50itself and that that is where they are located so there's once again this push from the men why don't we go after them why don't we attack Jerusalem why don't we take the fight to Saladin and take that city because the call to retake Jerusalem had been the reason for the entire third crusade to start with and so for many of the men in Richard's army who have fought so hard who have endured heat and hunger

1:34:22and enemy attacks and have risked their lives and have made these vows to go and retake Jerusalem it is absolutely maddening to be a few days march from that city and not to actually go there but Richard knows that the arguments that the Templars and Hospitallers have already made remain true and he's unwilling to risk the lives of his men for a victory which even if they can get it will be very transient there's one story

1:34:54that says that Richard says to his men if you insist on going to Jerusalem I will come with you but as your fellow pilgrim and your friend not as your commander because I refuse to lead you into this battle Richard says this because he knows it's a battle that will cost them dearly and will leave them with little to show for it things are so bad that there are elements in his army the French in particular

1:35:26who are composing songs of mockery basically ridiculing Richard for failing to take his men into Jerusalem at this moment and so Richard has to ignore all of those things he has to ignore the way that people are going to talk about him the average rank-and-file soldier who doesn't understand the strategic realities that exist in the Crusader Kingdoms and don't bother to think about what's going to happen after Jerusalem and he has to hold back and say

1:35:59no it must have been a bitter thing to do Richard is now under intense pressure to return home for months he's been receiving bad and worse news from his kingdom back in England and the lands that he holds in southern France Philip the king of France is massing troops on the borders of lands that the kings of England and France have been fighting over for years now and even worse Richard's younger brother John who's still back

1:36:31at home is now leading a rebellion against Richard's designated chancellor or the guy he's left in charge of running things his mother Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine is maneuvering as cleverly as she can to keep the kingdom together but the word is urgent Richard needs to return home and as quickly as possible Saladin knew that Richard was eager to go home he had excellent intelligence about what was going on in the Frankish or Crusader camp and he

1:37:04knew that Richard was once again very ill in the wake of the Battle of Jaffa Richard had come down with a fever and so he was extremely sick and Saladin sends negotiators bearing fruit and baskets of snow to cool Richard's drinks and his brow and in classic fashion these negotiators are very amiable and they bring very valuable gifts but of course they also return to Saladin with reports of what they've seen from inside Richard's camp and

1:37:36what they say is there are almost no real war horses left amongst these Crusaders one of the most significant military assets the Crusader army had was the mounted cavalry charge and this took place on trained war horses very large animals who were conditioned to the kind of violence and shock that combat would entail and those animals were now gone they just had mules so the effectiveness of attempting to execute something like that was going to be

1:38:09significantly less finally at the end of August 1192 an emissary from Saladin brought his final offer which Richard accepted a truce of three years and eight months was agreed between Saladin's armies and the forces of the Crusader kingdoms and the Third Crusade Richard and Saladin were declared to be allies for this period of time and in terms of the division of land the coastal cities that Richard and the Third Crusade had already taken such as Acre

1:38:41and Jaffa would remain in Crusader kingdom hands Jerusalem would remain in Saladin's hands although he gave assurances that Christian pilgrims would continue to have access to the city they just couldn't come as an army so this peace was announced to the men on both sides and the Third Crusade was now officially over on October 9th 1192 Richard makes his way back to Acre that coastal city where he had landed with his army at the beginning of

1:39:14the Third Crusade and there's a story that as Richard was riding in the vicinity of Jerusalem some weeks before the sun had glinted off the walls and the towers of that city and Richard had raised his shield to hide the sight he could not bear to look upon the city that he was unable to take and this memory must have been a bitter thing for him to carry as he now got on board a ship to

1:39:46embark from the city where he had first landed at the start of the expedition neither Richard nor Saladin had managed to achieve a decisive victory Jerusalem remained in Saladin's hands and recapturing that city was supposedly the goal of the entire Third Crusade so if that was the mission it had failed what the Third Crusade did succeed in doing is propping up the Crusader kingdoms retaking some of the coastal cities so it provided some assistance but at

1:40:19what cost it was extraordinarily expensive from a financial point of view and had cost many lives during the siege of Acre and in the many other battles since the unknown number of infantrymen of ordinary people of knights whose bones would lie bleaching under the sun in the Near East testifies to a cost that was paid and the returns on that weren't much to show for it the Crusader kingdoms would continue to exist in the Near East

1:40:51for another century but Richard now had to turn his attention homeward what he could not know was that his journey home would take far longer than he could ever have imagined and that England would have to pay a fortune before they would ever see the return of King Richard the Lionheart I hope you've enjoyed this episode in our extended series on the Third Crusade the story isn't over yet though what happened to Richard as he exited the Third Crusade and before he made it home is an incredible story all on its own but for that you'll have to come back for another episode thank you so much for being here with me today and if you'd like access to even more history or live conversations about it head over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and become a supporter of Villains and Virgins podcast I'll see you in the next episode hey there it's Wayfair here where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone you're relaxing in an old hammock scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it a brand new patio set next thing you know Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up oh you need a new grill too all right Wayfair's got you covered with Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast experts set up on qualifying orders life gets a little easier visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app Wayfair every style every home that way