News of the fall of Jerusalem reached Europe in October 1187, brought by Genoese ships from Tyre and by overland messengers from the patriarchate. The reaction was immediate. Pope Urban III, on hearing the news, is said to have died of grief; his successor Gregory VIII issued the bull Audita tremendi on the 29th of October 1187, calling a new crusade. The three most powerful monarchs of western Europe took the cross: the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I "Barbarossa," King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I "the Lionheart" of England. The Third Crusade — the largest military operation of medieval Europe before the Hundred Years' War — was under way by the spring of 1189.
The siege of Acre
The kingdom's remnant at Tyre, under Conrad of Montferrat, was the rallying point until the new Crusader armies arrived. King Guy of Lusignan — released from Saladin's custody in mid-1188 in exchange for a renunciation of his throne (which he immediately reneged on) — joined Conrad at Tyre in 1189 but was rejected as king and took the surprising decision to march, with the small force he could assemble (perhaps four hundred knights and seven thousand infantry), to besiege Acre, the principal port of the kingdom and the symbolic centre of its commercial life. The siege began on the 28th of August 1189 and lasted two years. It is, by aggregate, the longest siege of the medieval Mediterranean.
The siege of Acre had a strange double character. The Crusaders besieged the Muslim garrison inside the city; Saladin's army, in the surrounding hills, besieged the Crusaders in turn; reinforcements and supplies for both sides came through the port (which the Crusaders could not blockade until they had naval superiority in the bay). The arrival of successive Crusader contingents — the German army of Barbarossa (which never reached Acre; Barbarossa drowned in the river Saleph in Anatolia on the 10th of June 1190, and his army largely dispersed); the French army of Philip II (April 1191); the English army of Richard I (June 1191, after a successful diversion to capture Cyprus from its Byzantine rebel ruler Isaac Komnenos) — progressively shifted the strategic balance. The city surrendered on the 12th of July 1191 after the new Crusader siege artillery had breached the walls and Saladin's relief efforts had failed. The terms of surrender required Saladin to pay 200,000 gold dinars, release 2,500 prisoners (including 100 named Frankish knights), and return the True Cross. The terms were not fulfilled on either side.
The most controversial single event of the siege was its aftermath. Richard I, considering that Saladin was deliberately delaying the payments and that his army's mobility was constrained by holding 2,700 Muslim prisoners, ordered the prisoners executed on the 20th of August 1191, in full view of Saladin's lines. The massacre — a calculated political act of intimidation, and a sharp departure from the codes of medieval siege warfare — was condemned by contemporary Muslim sources and has been debated by Western historians since. Saladin retaliated in subsequent operations by executing his own Frankish prisoners. The bitterness of the campaign that followed dates from August 1191.
The march to Jaffa and Arsuf
Philip II, never enthusiastic about the campaign, returned to France in late July 1191, citing ill health. Richard I and the residual Crusader leadership — Hugh III of Burgundy commanding the surviving French contingent, the new King Guy and the Hospitaller and Templar grand masters — marched south along the Palestinian coast toward Jaffa, the port nearest to Jerusalem. The march of August–September 1191, conducted under continuous attack by Saladin's mounted archers, is one of the most carefully studied military operations of the medieval period: Richard maintained close formation between his infantry (Italian crossbowmen on the inland flank), the Hospitallers and Templars in the centre, and a continuous defensive march discipline that allowed the column to absorb attacks without breaking. On the 7th of September 1191 Saladin attempted a major pitched battle at Arsuf, north of Jaffa; Richard's Hospitallers, on the rear flank, charged at the right moment, the column wheeled, and the Crusaders won a substantial tactical victory. Saladin's army withdrew. The coast was, for the moment, in Crusader hands.
The approach to Jerusalem
The strategic objective of the Crusade — the recapture of Jerusalem — was, however, not achieved. Richard advanced twice from Jaffa toward Jerusalem (late 1191, mid-1192), and twice withdrew within sight of the city. The arguments against the assault were, on close military analysis, decisive. Jerusalem could only be taken by a long siege; the Crusader army's lines of communication ran 50 km back to Jaffa over country dominated by Saladin's cavalry; even if the city were taken, holding it would require a permanent garrison the kingdom's reduced revenue base could not support. Richard's reasoning was that of a professional soldier rather than a religious crusader, and it bitterly disappointed his army. Several of Richard's commanders climbed a nearby hill from which Jerusalem could be seen, but Richard himself reportedly declined to look, on the explicit grounds that those who were not worthy to liberate the city were not worthy to behold it. The remark was preserved by his French chroniclers and has been told and retold for eight centuries.
The Treaty of Jaffa
The Third Crusade ended on the 2nd of September 1192 with the Treaty of Jaffa between Richard I and Saladin. The terms: a three-year, three-month, and three-day truce; Crusader retention of the coast from Tyre to Jaffa; Christian pilgrim access to Jerusalem (the city itself remained in Muslim hands); the dismantling of the fortifications at Ascalon (which Richard had rebuilt during the campaign and which the treaty required him to demolish at his own expense). The treaty was, from the Crusader perspective, considerably less than had been hoped, but considerably more than the position immediately after Hattin would have permitted. Richard left the East on the 9th of October 1192 (and was famously kidnapped in Austria on his way home, held for ransom by Henry VI of Germany, and not released until February 1194). Saladin died at Damascus on the 4th of March 1193 of fever, aged about fifty-five.
The kingdom that remained after the Third Crusade was a different state from the one that had been destroyed at Hattin. Its capital was now Acre, the principal Crusader port; the patriarchate, the High Court, the chancellery, and the major archives moved there in 1191. Its territory was a coastal strip about 200 km long by 20 to 50 km wide, with a population of perhaps a quarter of a million (most of them Muslim subjects under Frankish rule, with a Frankish urban population of perhaps thirty thousand in Acre, Tyre, and Beirut). Its monarchy was contested: Guy of Lusignan was deposed by the High Court in 1192 and given Cyprus as compensation (which his descendants would rule, as the Lusignan kings of Cyprus, until 1474); the kingdom went to Conrad of Montferrat, who was assassinated by Nizari Ismaili assassins on the 28th of April 1192, less than a fortnight after his election; and then to Henry II of Champagne (Conrad's wife Isabella's third husband, on a fast remarriage that troubled Western canonical opinion). The new kingdom would last for almost another century in this reduced form. The next chapter follows it.
End of Chapter VI