Richard the Lionheart vs. Saladin- The Final Confrontation

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0:30There 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.

1:01And between them, the struggle for the fate of the city of Jerusalem and the balance of power in the Near 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.

1:34Now, 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 ask 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,

2:05and 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. I 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.

2:44So, 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, I'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,

3:14or 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. Acre 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.

3:48And 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. But 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,

4:20and 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. So, 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,

4:52after 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 surrendered 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

5:23in 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. But 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.

5:59The 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. Saladin 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.

6:30Richard 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. And 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.

7:03And so, they are very much embedded with the armies of the Third Crusade, and they took part in the fighting 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.

7:36Can you guys give me some kind of guarantee? And the Templars say to Saladin, We will not take an oath 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.

8:09On 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 and 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

8:41to 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 witnessed 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

9:12in 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 those conventions. And what they are is basically, sometimes you capture some of our guys, and sometimes we capture some of your guys,

9:42and 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 that they used as slave labor.

10:13So, 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.

10:45And 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 Battle of Hattin.

11:16So, 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

11:48sets a new precedent, and the immediate outcome is that Saladin changes his policy on captured Frankish 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

12:19in retributive killings of other Frankish prisoners in the immediate wake of Acre, because the rules have just changed. Within 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,

12:50and 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 he 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.

13:21But 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. And 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.

13:52So, 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. The 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,

14:23he 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 slow 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

14:54of 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. And their role is to get in, to attack some vulnerable part of the army, to kill some guys,

15:24and 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 point. Egypt and Sudan share a border and there were definitely black units in Egypt who were now serving

15:54under 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 like porcupines.

16:25So 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

16:55were being peppered with arrows. So 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

17:26but the unfortunate guy who 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

17:57that 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

18:28who will fire because these guys are also along the inland flank 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.

18:59The 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. There 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

19:29and 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. They'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

19:59matching 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. So 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

20:29protected 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. Now King Richard is aware that his main weapon is the heavy cavalry charge. This is the moment of medieval legend when you have

21:01these 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 and then counter-attacking. The problem is that Saladin's armies don't operate like that at all.

21:31They'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

22:02when and where 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

22:32until 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

23:03have been 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 directly behind

23:34so 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 from left to right or the other way around

24:05as 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 do the same thing so there are these multiple charges of these extremely accurate

24:37very 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

25:07would immediately rear and panic you'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

25:38a 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 Hospitaller 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

26:08stay 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 an 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

26:39be 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 a 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

27:09up 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 left 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

27:40were 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 he 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

28:12to 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

28:43these words from an eyewitness of the 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

29:14with his sickle unquote now these words come from Ambois who was a Norman poet 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

29:44so that's who Ambois is but he also gives us further lines about the same battle he says their 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