Clash of the Titans The Crusades

In July 1192, Richard the Lionheart...

King of England, valiant crusader knight...

stood with his holy warriors, preparing for a strike on Jerusalem.

Inside the Holy City, the mighty Saladin,

Jihadi warrior, unifier of Islam,

readied his troops for the infidels' inevitable attack.

These two legendary leaders had fought each other to a standstill

during a year-long campaign across Palestine.

Thousands had perished.

Appalling atrocities had been perpetrated by both sides.

Now they faced each other in a battle for their final objective,

the sacred city of Jerusalem.

This promised to be the ultimate clash between two of history's

greatest leaders,

men who, even today, are regarded as the figureheads of the Crusades.

We think we know these medieval titans. Saladin, the pious

and just champion of Islam, Richard,

the brutish hothead with a gift for battle.

But we shouldn't settle for legend...

because if we look at what Richard and Saladin actually did,

what they said about themselves, and how

they were described by the very people who lived alongside them,

then we can go further.

We can begin to glimpse them both as men each capable of dark deeds

and stunning acts of genius.

To understand these men and their epic struggle,

we need first to understand the world that became their battlefield.

At its heart was Jerusalem...

the holy city prized

by both Christianity and Islam.

In 1099, a crusading army had seized it from Muslim hands,

wresting it from Islam's control for the first time in four centuries.

This bloody conquest eventually ignited two hundred years

of violent Holy War between Christian West and the Muslim East.

But, surprisingly,

it did not provoke an immediate response from Islam.

The Muslim world was fractured, riven by an ancient

feud between Sunni and Shia Muslims, over the rightful line of succession

to Mohammed, and paralyzed by the power struggles of rival warlords.

Against this backdrop, the capture of Jerusalem barely registered.

Near and Middle Eastern Muslims seem to have had little idea

of who the Crusaders were and why they'd come to Syria and Palestine.

Most probably thought that they were Byzantine mercenaries,

engaged in a short-term military incursion,

not driven warriors bent upon the conquest

and settlement of the Holy Land.

This dire misconception helps to blunt Islam's response to

the First Crusade, a costly mistake.

Had the Muslims recognized the true nature and scale of the Crusades,

they might have put aside their differences to repel a common enemy.

Instead, Islam's uncoordinated response allowed

the Christians to strengthen their foothold here in the East.

With Islam divided, the Christian invaders, or Franks,

were left to expand and prosper in their new kingdom in the East.

This realm was known in the Middle Ages as Outremer,

the Land across the Sea.

It was divided into

four major territories

known collectively

as the Crusader States...

Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli

and the Kingdom

of Jerusalem.

As East collided with West,

cities like Jerusalem became cultural melting pots,

creating a medieval society unique to the crusader states.

One settler, writing in the 1120s, noted,

'We who were Occidentals have become Orientals.

'He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this place become

'a Palestinian or a Galilean.

'He who was a citizen of Rheims or Chartres is now

'a member of Antioch or Tyre.

'We have forgotten the very places of our birth.'

A minority Latin elite ruled over a mixture of Muslim, Jewish

and Eastern Christian subjects.

Growing familiarity forged a degree of mutual acceptance.

And, inevitably,

the Westerners developed a taste for local goods and delicacies.

Sugar cane, olive oil, citrus fruits, pomegranates,

rice and saffron...

all became popular with the Western Europeans.

Some began to frequent Turkish bath-houses, or hammams,

others started to adapt their dress to suit the climate,

especially the aristocracy, who could afford silks.

Some 30 years after the First Crusade, this cultural fusion

was epitomised by the marriage of Fulk V and Melisende,

his half-Latin, half-Armenian bride.

Melisende was heir to the throne of Jerusalem and Fulk,

a wealthy count of Anjou, had been brought East to marry her.

Together, they were to rule the kingdom.

An extraordinary memento of their world survives

today in the form of a small prayer book, thought to have been

made in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 1130s...

one of the greatest treasures held in the British Library.

It's a thing of the most remarkable beauty and craftsmanship.

And for someone who loves the Crusades, its every

bit as important as the Doomsday Book or the Bayeux Tapestry.

And that's because it speaks to us of the Medieval World,

it offers us a direct connection to the crusading era.

This Psalter is a beautifully ornate personal prayer book,

probably given as a peace offering from King Fulk to Melisende,

to repair the wounds of a bitter feud.

Inside are full page images from the life of Christ,

illustrated in a typically Byzantine,

or Greek Christian, style.

Magnificent as the book itself is, in many ways, the real treasures

are the pair of covers that originally enclosed the Psalter.

Two pieces of ivory, intricately and precisely carved,

and decorated with semi-precious stones and turquoise.

And what I love about these covers is that I think they show us

the message that Fulk wanted to send to his wife.

And that message was...

from this point forward, I will rule as a good king.

On the front cover are a series of images

drawn from the life of King David...

another ruler of Jerusalem, from the Old Testament.

Here he is shown fighting against Goliath.

And on the rear cover, we see a second king, this time, probably

Fulk, and he's shown carrying out acts of Christian virtue.

Here he is feeding the hungry, and here, clothing the naked.

The message here is,

from this point, I will rule as a monarch should.

But the Psalter is not just a reflection of Fulk's Christian faith,

it also allows us to glimpse the wider world that he

and Melisende inhabited.

Because it is a product of the mixture of cultures that

shaped the Crusader States.

We can see in the way in which it's constructed and designed evidence

of different cultures, different artistic styles coming together.

Within the book itself, we can see French, English

and even Armenian styling.

And these covers are very clearly Byzantine

or Greek in their overall style and design.

Here is Fulk dressed very much as a Byzantine emperor,

as a man of great power,

and if we look at the geometric patterning

surrounding the whole design,

this is very suggestive of Islamic influence.

What this book says to me is that

the Crusaders did not live in some hermetically sealed environment,

instead, even in the context of the Holy War,

these Christians were being influenced

by the Near Eastern world around them.

But even as Fulk was giving peace gifts to his queen,

outside the boundaries of their kingdom, a new force was gaining momentum...

prompting Islam to unite and fight back against the Christian invaders.

Jihad.

I've come to Cairo to meet

Taef Al Azhari,

Professor of Islamic Studies,

to find out how Islam's recorded history sheds light on Jihad

and the First Crusade, from the Muslim perspective.

In the Middle Ages, the idea of Jihad is to spread

the message of Islam into the non-Muslim territory -

in central Asia, in North Africa,

and most importantly,

into Christian territory,

Byzantine Empire.

But Jihad gained huge momentum when the Crusaders came to

the Middle East in the 11th and 12th century.

You are not into the others' territory,

you are defending your own territory against the others.

So Jihad was a prime responsibility and duty.

Jihad literally means struggle,

but in the Middle Ages, this could represent

a fight against internal impurity or a sacred physical struggle,

a Holy War. And its message could be spread by poetry.

The Arab poetry from pre-Islamic time through the Islamic history

was one of the tools to galvanise society and,

you have thousands of lines of poetry

urging Muslim communities to defend and recapture Jerusalem.

Let me read you just few lines.

HE SPEAKS ARABIC

Here, the poet is reminding the Muslim community about how important

Jerusalem is, and he's calling for its recapture, and he says

the only way to recapture it

is through blood which would purify Jerusalem.

In the 12th century, the torch of Jihad was taken up by a new,

powerful Turkish dynasty...

The Zangids.

In the name of Islam, they conquered great

swathes of territory in the East and brought the promise of a new era.

One in which the Christians might be driven from the Holy Land.

In 1146, the Sunni warlord Nur al Din Zangi came to power.

In the course of his career, he united Aleppo and Damascus,

consolidating the Zangid hold on Syria,

and pushed their rule further, into Egypt.

But rising up through the ranks of his armies was an ambitious

Kurdish soldier.

Born Yusuf son of Ayyub, he's known to history by the honorific title,

Salah al Din, Goodness of the Faith.

In the Western tongue, Saladin.

In 1169, Saladin took command of the Syrian forces

that had seized Shi'a-controlled Egypt.

Although, officially, the answer to the Shi'ite caliph,

or spiritual leader of Shi'a Islam,

he began to act with increasing autonomy.

But as a Sunni Muslim, Saladin was an isolated outsider,

and his prospects seemed bleak.

The qualities that would mark Saladin's career soon shone through.

When threatened with open rebellion by a powerful Sudanese

regiment based in Cairo, Saladin was ruthless, burning their garrison

to the ground with men, women and children still locked within.

But he also knew the value of caution,

waiting a full two years before abolishing the ruling Shi-ite

caliphate and uniting Egypt under his own rule.

And as Egypt's new lord, he now possessed a base with huge

economic reserves,

riches provided by the arable lands of the Nile Delta.

In 1174, Nur al Din died,

leaving his 11-year-old son to rule in his stead.

But Saladin seized this opportunity to expand into Syria.

To lend his rule the aura of legitimacy, he moved to Damascus,

Nur al Din's capital, and married his widow, Ismat.

Saladin was quickly becoming the premier Muslim leader in the East.

With the might of Egypt behind him, Saladin brought Arabia

and Syria under his control.

And before long, he united the disparate Muslim

factions into a cohesive army and began styling himself as Sultan.

The Sultan proclaimed his growing power and status

with massive public building works, like this citadel here in Cairo.

A towering fortification

that served as his royal residence and military barracks.

On the gate into the citadel is an ornate inscription,

commissioned by Saladin and deliberately placed here,

where ordinary residents of Cairo could see it.

So what does this inscription tell us?

Well, on the one hand,

it proclaims Saladin as the builder of this great citadel,

and it names him with honorific titles,

Al-malik Al-nasir, the victorious king,

Salah al-Dunya Wa al-Din, the goodness of the world

and of the faith.

But the inscription also sets out to demonstrate that Saladin's

achievements weren't all about serving his own agenda.

Because it states

that this citadel was built to protect his people.

And it affirms that he was the one who had restored orthodox

Sunni faith to Egypt.

This was the image that Saladin wanted to present to the world.

As a great Sultan, but also a man of the people and a servant of Islam.

As Saladin's status and kingdom grew, he presented his gains

as a necessary step on the road to Jerusalem.

By the mid 1180s,

the Sultan's empire stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates.

But his grip on this realm remained fragile and hung

on the question, would he make good on his promises to wage holy war?

As yet, he had not shown total dedication to all-out battle

with the Franks.

Did he really aim to annihilate them

and recapture Jerusalem for Islam, or were they merely a convenient

justification for his meteoric rise to power?

In December 1185, Saladin fell ill and retired from the battlefield.

The exact nature of his malady is unknown, but it involved

severe bouts of fever that left Saladin racked with pain.

And as the weeks turned to months, his condition became

increasingly grave.

Emaciated and drifting in and out of consciousness,

the Sultan was on the edge of death.

Physicians were called and announced there was no hope.

The Muslim world was gripped with confusion and fear.

But after three months, he pulled through.

Saladin's friends and closest advisers saw this illness,

this brush with mortality, as a moment of transformation...

sent by God to wake the Sultan from 'the sleep of forgetfulness'.

The experience does seem to have deepened Saladin's piety

and spiritual devotion.

Before his illness, Saladin had been a ruler who spoke about Jihad,

he had spent most of his time fighting fellow Muslims

and forging an empire.

He now emerged with new drive

and purpose as a man ready to wage the Holy War in earnest.

The Sultan mustered a huge force near Damascus,

and prepared for an invasion of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem.

His troops were drawn from across the Near Eastern world,

some 12,000 professional cavalrymen

and 30,000 volunteers,

described by a Muslim eyewitness

as a pack of 'old wolves and rending lions.'

Surveying his own troops, Saladin observed that a huge dust

cloud darkened the eye of the sun

once the swarming Muslim horde began to advance.

But victory here wouldn't depend simply upon military might.

The real key would be water.

To lure the Crusaders into his trap,

Saladin attacked

the Christian-held town of Tiberias.

Sure enough,

on 3rd July 1187,

a massive Latin army set out from Saffuriya, led by Guy de Lusignan,

the recently-anointed King of Jerusalem.

In these hot, dry conditions,

dehydration could be a deadly weapon,

something that Saladin understood only too well.

The Sultan had carefully scouted his chosen terrain.

He knew where water could be found

and went to great lengths to ensure that the Christians were denied it.

The Sultan immediately dispatched a number of men to guard

the nearest ample spring in the village of Hattin,

and then filled in all the remaining wells in the region.

His own soldiers and horses would be supplied with water

ferried in on camel-back from the Jordan valley below.

The Christian army, marching in the height of summer,

was being led into a waterless killing zone.

Around noon that day, parched and weakened, the Franks paused

briefly to quench their thirst, beside the settlement of Turan.

There was a small spring in the village,

a last precious lifeline of water,

but oblivious to their desperate situation,

the Christians left it behind,

pressing on with their march eastwards.

As soon as they had left, the Sultan sent flanking divisions

to capture the town.

There was no going back.

The Christian armies were forced to press on to the plateau

so carefully prepared by Saladin.

On 4th July, the Christian troops left their camp

and Saladin's cruel and brilliant strategy was revealed.

Instead of launching an immediate attack,

the Sultan allowed them to continue their pitifully slow progress

eastwards, and waited for the midday sun to take effect.

And then Saladin's archers began bombarding the Frankish troops.

In desperation,

they headed to higher ground on the Horns of Hattin,

to make their last stand.

I'm visiting the site with Rafael Lewis,

a specialist on the Battle of Hattin.

We know that, at a certain point,

the foot soldiers had left the main body of knights and escaped

and basically ran up towards the mountain.

Anyone who was seated on a horse was basically stuck

in the basin between the mountain

and between Salah al Din himself, who was probably positioned

about 800 metres from here, on the other side of this valley.

Twice, the Christians launched driving counter-attacks,

pushing the Muslims back, but it was no use.

They were annihilated by Saladin's forces.

Salah ad-Din chose to lead his army into battle,

he didn't stay aside and let his emirs plays the role.

At the final moments of the battle, he was the one there,

he was the one standing with his people,

close enough to see that everything turns out

the way that he wanted it to be.

From his vantage point, the Sultan saw the red tent

of Guy de Lusignan fall, and with it,

the last shreds of Christian resistance.

For Saladin, the battle of Hattin was a total victory.

It culminated in the capture of the Christian King of Jerusalem

and the sacred relic of the True Cross.

And it left virtually the entire army of the crusader states

either slain or in captivity.

By day's end, this landscape was littered with the bodies of the dead.

And a Muslim eyewitness reported that the perfume of victory

was thick with the stench of them.

As the sun set, Saladin was said to have looked over

the field of battle like a lion in the desert.

This was his moment of triumph, a proclamation to all Islam

that he was a true jihadi warrior.

With the Christian armies decimated at Hattin, Jerusalem,

Saladin's avowed objective,

stood virtually undefended.

And in September 1187,

he directed the full force of his army towards the Holy City.

Within ten days, he knocked through the outer walls.

Christian mothers shaved their children's heads in atonement

and the clergy led barefoot processions through the streets.

But in stark contrast to the Crusaders' sack of Jerusalem in 1099,

the Sultan took the city without a bloodbath.

And this episode has been instrumental in shaping

his reputation.

For centuries, it's been argued that Saladin,

the wise and just ruler,

willingly agreed terms of surrender with Jerusalem's Christian citizens.

This notion has become a cornerstone of his legend.

But I think it's just a pretty fiction,

because it ignores the evidence drawn from those closest to the events

and to Saladin himself.

Shockingly, this material suggests

that what Saladin wanted was not peaceful capitulation,

but a bloody massacre!

Saladin's secretary, Imad al Din al-Isfahani,

arrived in Jerusalem the day after its surrender.

An early copy of his written account is kept

in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

This text is not just important contemporary testimony,

it offers us the fall of Jerusalem

as Saladin wanted it to be remembered.

What's so remarkable is that Imad al-Din

makes no attempt to present Saladin as the man of peace.

Instead, what we get is Saladin the holy warrior.

He is described telling the Christians inside Jerusalem

in categorical terms,

"You will receive neither amnesty nor mercy!

"Our sole desire is to inflict perpetual subjugation upon you.

"And worse still, we will kill and capture you wholesale,

"spill men's blood and reduce the poor and the women to slavery."

Saladin only relented and offered more generous terms

when the Christians responded that they would fight to the very last man,

destroy Jerusalem's Islamic holy places

and execute thousands of Muslim prisoners still held in the city.

Imad al-Din's account is corroborated by

a series of official letters, written in the Sultan's own name.

Taken together,

this evidence offers us a startling insight

into Saladin's state of mind in the autumn of 1187.

He arrived at Jerusalem conscious of one overwhelming truth.

He had forged his empire

and bent Islam to his will on the promise of jihad, selling himself

as the man who would crush the Christians and re-conquer Jerusalem.

Under these conditions,

anything short of a brutal sack would be positively embarrassing!

This revelatory text shows us that the Sultan felt the need to

explain why he had failed to butcher the Christians inside Jerusalem.

Saladin's primary concern

was not to present himself as a magnanimous victor.

What he feared, above all, was an attack upon his image as a mujahid,

as Islam's perfect champion of Holy War.

Jerusalem was back in Muslim hands

and Saladin's string of achievements that year

turned him into an Islamic hero.

But they also sparked a new Crusade.

News of Saladin's attack on the Crusader States,

his conquest of Jerusalem and the catastrophe at Hattin,

sent a shockwave of horror and dismay coursing through the West.

When the first tidings reached the elderly Pope Urban III,

he promptly died of a heart attack on the spot.

He was replaced by Pope Gregory VIII, who immediately issued a new

papal proclamation, Audita Tremendi, declaring a new Crusade.

Audita Tremendi's call to crusade was lent particular force

by two compelling themes.

God's supposed decision to allow Islam victory in the East

was explained as a punishment for sin,

the guilt for which was shared by all Christians.

And for the very first time, the evil enemy was personified,

Saladin himself was named and likened to the Devil.

The messages contained within Audita Tremendi

were soon translated into popular songs and music,

composed and played by travelling court singers.

HE SINGS IN LATIN

These troubadours toured the courts of the European aristocracy

to sing about chivalry and love.

Now their words and music became infused with religious

passion, as they spread the word about the coming war.

As the crusading message swept across Europe,

it began to acquire a more distinct identity.

Previously, crusaders had been variously dubbed as travellers,

pilgrims, even soldiers of Christ.

Now, for the very first time,

documents began to speak of them as Crucesignatus,

one signed by the cross,

the very term that would lead to the words "crusader" and "crusade".

Tens of thousands of Latin Christians enlisted,

including whole tranches of the European aristocracy,

princes and monarchs,

among them the King of France.

But even before this crusading fever had spread,

one leader made an immediate commitment to the cause,

the man who would emerge as the driving force behind this crusade.

Richard I was crowned King of England,

here in Westminster Abbey on 3rd September 1189.

He was now ruler of the Angevin Empire,

a powerful realm that stretched from Ireland to the Pyrenees.

But by the time he took the throne,

Richard had already committed to joining the crusade.

The decision had shocked his family, a volatile dynasty.

Richard's youth was spent variously scheming against his brothers,

including Prince John,

and then uniting with them in opposition to their father,

Henry II.

The old King opposed Richard's decision to enlist in the crusade,

viewing it as an act of unsanctioned folly.

But for Richard,

the Holy War offered an opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow.

Henry died in July 1189,

and Richard was transformed from scheming prince to ruling monarch.

But this did nothing to stem his crusading enthusiasm.

This was his chance to prove his prowess, his valour and his

skills as a military commander, to make his mark on history.

But this was also the start of a troubling crisis of identity,

as the Lionheart struggled to reconcile his roles as a crusader and as a king.

Like all medieval monarchs,

Richard had a sacred obligation to protect his people.

But enthralled by the allure of Jerusalem,

he was about to turn his back on his realm, leaving his grasping brother,

John, behind, and his kingdom vulnerable.

For now, England would be entirely dedicated

to the preparations for Holy War

and to footing the bill for the King's colossal military campaign.

Henry II had already begun to raise the necessary funds

by imposing a special crusading tax,

the Saladin Tithe, throughout England.

Enforced by threat of excommunication,

it proved deeply unpopular.

But the Lionheart pushed these fundraising efforts even further,

he was said to have put up for sale...

lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, lands, castles, towns, everything.

And then the Lionheart began spending on an unprecedented scale.

Thanks to fastidious record-keeping in medieval England,

details of this immense outlay can now be recovered from the pipe

rolls of the Exchequer,

kept at the National Archives.

These documents,

the earliest surviving public records in England,

contain accounts of the royal income, arranged by county,

for each financial year.

This is the pipe roll for the year 1189-90,

effectively a full financial account of Richard's reign.

And what's fantastic about this piece of evidence

is that it shows us an incredibly precise and detailed record

of what was spent to prepare for the Third Crusade.

If we look at one example here... this is for Sudhantescr,

that's Hampshire,

and we can see incredibly precise details

of what was taken to the Holy Land and how much it cost.

Here's a listing for 800 baconibus,

that's sides of cured bacon, to be taken to Jerusalem with the King.

And the cost...

58 pounds 18 shillings and 11 pence.

And the record continues with 20 portions of beans,

an extraordinary 10,000 horse shoes with double nails,

and a hundred weight of cheese.

This pipe roll allows us to see what was spent in Hampshire,

just one area of England, in preparation for the Third Crusade.

It allows us to glimpse the furious activity that was going on

before Richard set out for the Holy Land.

In total, Richard spent around £14,000

preparing for his crusade.

This was more than half of England's entire annual crown revenue.

Not only would Richard be the best provisioned crusader king,

he also adopted an entirely new approach to

the problem of reaching the Holy Land.

His crusade would travel by sea.

This major logistical operation required detailed

and extensive planning, and it was not without its dangers

from the likes of shipwreck and disease.

But if Richard could pull it off, this new approach would be

quicker and safer than marching his troops through enemy territory

and would also allow him to transport the machinery of war to the East,

from weapons and armour to horses.

But success would depend upon a leader of exceptional strategic

and organisational ability.

Most of Richard's men would have

little or no previous experience of sea travel,

so the King paid special attention to discipline on board.

The King drew up a precise set of regulations,

outlining harsh penalties for disorder.

If a soldier committed murder while at sea, then

he would be tied to his victim's corpse and pushed overboard.

If guilty of the same crime on land, he'd be thrown into a grave

and buried alive alongside the body.

And thieves had their hair shaved

and boiling pitch poured over their heads to mark them as criminals.

Finally, his meticulous preparations complete,

Richard was ready to depart from the port of Marseille.

Although familiar to pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land,

this was the first time it would be used for such a major

crusading expedition.

What would the conditions have actually been like

for the crusaders on board a ship?

The conditions

would've been appalling.

They departed Marseille

on 7th August 1190,

so we can assume the temperatures hovered around 35 degrees Celsius.

You're talking about 150 men or more

crammed in with provisions and arms in a vessel

with a shallow keel,

meaning it was susceptible to anything above mild sea states.

Sea sickness, with certainly the knights and their attendants,

who weren't used to sea travel, would have been a real concern,

as would dehydration.

Dysentery and any of the maladies

that you would expect among men in close quarters

for a prolonged period of time.

The fleet would take the long way round,

avoiding the more treacherous route straight through the middle of the Mediterranean.

You needed to go as close as possible

to the shoreline in order to navigate,

and this meant that you had to travel during the day.

Also, water was a severe limitation, rowing was arduous work,

your oarsmen needed approximately eight litres a day,

it'd take a metric tonne of water to keep a whole crew compliment

going for the day.

The horses would have taken as many as 28 to 35 litres a day,

so you had to put in almost daily for water

and food replenishment reasons alone.

In June 1191, Richard the Lionheart sailed down the coast of Palestine,

at the head of his fearsome crusading army,

and caught his first glimpse of Acre.

One of the greatest ports of the Near East,

Acre stood at the gateway to Palestine.

For the Muslims, it was a bastion

against Christian attack from the north, whether by land or sea.

Its looming defensive walls rising from the Mediterranean

would have been visible to Richard as he approached with his fleet.

And what the Lionheart found was a city deeply entrenched

in a siege that had already lasted one and a half years.

The Muslim garrison within the city

was besieged by tens of thousands of Crusaders.

Beyond those, spread out across the plains,

were the tents and trenches of the Muslim armies,

with Saladin in their midst.

Why was Saladin unable to crush the Crusaders' siege of Acre

before Richard the Lionheart arrived?

The answer was the sea.

Because this was a coastal port,

the Mediterranean acted as a pulsing, unstemmable artery,

allowing troops to flow from the west to the Holy Land.

No matter whether the Sultan would kill 1,000

Christians on one day, 2,000 more would appear on the next.

For Saladin, Acre quickly became a military engagement

that was almost impossible to win.

Breaking this siege would take all of Richard's military genius.

To smash through Acre's mighty walls, the Christians deployed heavyweight

siege machines capable of unleashing a terrifying aerial barrage.

The Crusaders nicknamed their most powerful trebuchet "Bad Neighbour",

while at the foot of another machine christened "God's Own Catapult",

a priest stood,

preaching and collecting money to pay to repair damage

done by the incessant Muslim counterattacks.

But the Lionheart's machines continued to wreaked havoc.

And to make them even more destructive,

they were loaded with huge stones

that Richard had brought from Western Europe.

The Crusaders' most powerful trebuchets could propel

a missile into the very heart of the city.

And a single catapult stone

might kill 12 of Acre's Muslim garrison.

By late July, the Christians' tactics had worked

and the city's walls were on the verge of collapse.

The men inside were weak and exhausted by constant fighting.

One Crusader summarised the Muslims' predicament.

He wrote, "They were afraid of the miracle they now beheld,

"how the whole world had come to annihilate them.

"They saw their walls broken down, pierced and destroyed,

"they saw their people injured, killed and cut to pieces.

"Saladin's garrison could take no more."

The great victor at Hattin, conqueror of Jerusalem,

Saladin now had to watch in horror as Acre's shattered garrison

buckled and negotiated peace terms with King Richard.

According to the deal struck,

the Muslims captured would only be released

when specific terms were met by Saladin.

Including the payment of 200,000 gold dinars,

and the return of the True Cross.

The Third Crusade had achieved a categorical victory.

Richard wanted the terms of the surrender settled quickly

so that he could press on with his Palestinian campaign.

But Saladin played for time,

a dangerous strategy that prompted Richard to take shockingly

brutal action.

As Saladin's advance guard looked on, the bulk of Acre's Muslim garrison -

some 2,700 men - were led from the city, bound in ropes.

Herded onto the open plain,

they huddled together in fear and confusion.

Some perhaps imagining that they were about to be released.

A Muslim contemporary described what followed.

"As one man, the Crusaders charged them,

"and with stabbings and blows of swords, they slew them in cold blood."

This terrible massacre sent Saladin a stark message.

This would be the ruthless dedication that the Lionheart would bring to

the Holy War.

This atrocity,

one of the most controversial acts in Richard's career,

shocked Islam, fuelling the fires of Jihad,

and left an indelible mark on the Lionheart's historical reputation.

Richard's task now was to try and march his army

down the coast of Palestine.

Even for the Lionheart, actually persuading his troops

to leave Acre proved no simple matter.

The port had become a comfortable, even enticing,

refuge from the horrors of Holy War. A fleshpot,

offering all manner of illicit pleasures.

One Christian conceded that it was "delightful, with good wines

"and girls, some of them very beautiful,"

with whom the Crusaders were "taking their foolish pleasure."

Richard had to induce his men's obedience

through a mixture of flattery, prayer, bribery and force.

But his will would be done.

Four months after arriving in the Holy Land,

Richard the Lionheart's Christian army set off

on a long march down the coast.

His aim was to avoid a risky confrontation,

and reach the southern staging post of Jaffa with his armies intact.

His soldiers would be escorted by a fleet of ships,

sailing along the shoreline.

They would rendez-vous along the way...

at Haifa, Destroit, Caesarea and Jaffa.

This meant that the soldiers

could travel light,

while the bulk of the resources

could be carried by the fleet.

Richard's coastline hugging route offered his troops

protection from Muslim encirclement.

Wherever possible, the Crusaders advanced at a measured pace,

the right wing of their tightly packed ranks practically wading in the sea.

By these measures, the Lionheart skilfully minimised the impact

of marching through enemy territory.

At every stage, they were shadowed by Saladin.

He launched sporadic attacks and harassed them with skirmishers,

always looking to provoke an open battle

and stop Richard in his tracks.

Richard's constant visible presence in the midst of the Crusaders,

signalled by his massive dragon banner,

was critical to the morale and continued discipline of his troops.

And it was the Lionheart's charisma and sheer force of personality

that drove the crusade forward through the storm of war.

Richard took great care to conserve his army's energy,

resting them for two days after every marching interval.

But by September, with food shortages starting to bite,

arguments were breaking out.

Ordinary Crusaders apparently swarmed over the carcasses

of the fattest horses to fall during each day's march,

brawling over their flesh,

much to the disgust of the dead animals' knightly owners.

Richard stepped in, promising to replace any lost mounts

so long as the carrion was freely offered to "worthy men at arms."

His grateful troops were said to have eaten the horseflesh

"as if it were game.

"Flavoured by hunger rather than sauce,

"they thought it was delicious."

On 6th September, Richard set up camp,

pausing to rest his starving, exhausted army.

At that same moment, his enemy's patience was faltering.

Eyewitness testimony from within Saladin's camp tells us

that he was deeply frustrated by Richard's

inexorable advance,

and wrong-footed by the Lionheart's policy of resting his troops

every two to three days.

What the Sultan needed now was to engineer a confrontation,

a pitched battle.

In the morning, Richard and his men set out for Arsuf

and were almost immediately met with the full strength of Saladin's army.

The Sultan had decided that this was where the Franks would be stopped.

The Christians marched on, pummeled by Saladin's incessant onslaught.

The air thick with Muslim howls and thundering battle drums.

One eyewitness described how the Crusaders were "now surrounded,

"like a flock of sheep in the jaws of wolves, so that they could

"see nothing but the sky and their wicked enemies on every side.

"The tumult was almost unbearable."

King Richard's soldiers begged him to let them retaliate,

but he refused.

They would keep marching in formation.

Richard's hand was suddenly forced.

Two knights near the rearguard unexpectedly broke rank.

Fuelled by anger, humiliation and bloodlust,

they raced towards the Muslim lines, screaming the name of St George.

Within moments,

thousands of Crusaders joined the headlong charge.

With no hope of recalling his men, the Lionheart immediately

spurred his horse to gallop and led his remaining forces into battle.

The Muslim armies shattered under the charge.

Hotly pursued, they melted into the forests.

It was another damaging psychological blow for Saladin.

The Sultan had thrown the full force of his armies into the field,

hoping to stop the crusaders in their tracks, and yet he'd failed.

Despondent, the Sultan's heart was said to have been

full of feelings only God could know.

Richard, by contrast, could look back on Arsuf with some satisfaction.

He may not have set out to confront Saladin in open battle,

but when the moment of decision came,

he reacted with swift resolution, scoring a morale-boosting victory.

With the Crusaders' momentum building,

it now seemed that Richard was primed to march on to Jerusalem.

His strategy now combined

a forceful military advance inland

with a subtle diplomatic offensive.

This approach

involved a remarkable proposition.

The warrior-king offered his own sister in marriage to

the Sultan's brother,

Al Adil.

The details of this offer are recorded in the biography

of Saladin, written by his close adviser, Baha' al-Din.

A rarely seen,

800-year-old original manuscript of this account

is held in the library of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

It is an honour to be permitted

to view this crucial eyewitness testimony,

a piercing insight into the Muslim view of Richard the Lionheart.

So one of the most extraordinary moments in the Third Crusades

is when Richard is actually negotiating with Saladin's bother...

Al Adil, and he makes a remarkable offer.

Could you tell us what this text reveals?

This text,

actually, the folio 157, here,

and Al Adil sent a letter for his brother, Salah al Din,

and on the Monday 29th of Ramadan,

they are reaching this deal after a lot of negotiations have taken place,

a lot of letters between each other.

But in the end, they're reaching a point that Al Malik Al Adil,

the brother of Salah al Din, will marry the sister of Richard.

This wedding offer was a cunning move by the Lionheart,

designed to sow seeds of doubt about Al Adil.

After all, he was not just Saladin's trusted brother,

but also a potential threat to

his son and heir.

Someone who might just

be harbouring personal ambitions.

And Salah al Din agree about this agreement.

Why they agree? Because everybody want the coast,

and the, or the city or that city,

but Richard agree to give all the coast

to his sister after they married.

It seems to me the sister of the King did not accept that,

because she became angry. She makes an oath.

She does not accept this thing, to do it.

You see, it's not easy in the Middle Ages

for the Muslims to marry from the Christians,

or the Christians from the Muslims.

Absolutely.

Reading Baha' al-Din's text, we get a real sense that Richard was an agile

and cunning negotiator, and that Saladin was only too aware of this.

The two of them were engaged in a delicate game.

Saladin almost certainly only accepted

the idea of a marriage offer

because he thought it would later be withdrawn, and he was right.

Within a few days, Richard replied that his sister would be

unable to marry Al Adil because he was a Muslim.

By December, Richard was ready to march on his holy prize,

Jerusalem.

He moved his troops to within 12 miles of the city

and prepared for a strike.

That winter, conditions were appalling.

One eyewitness described how it was, "cold and overcast,

"rain and hail battered us, bringing down our tents.

"Food became water-logged, armour rusty,

"and even the Crusaders' clothes began to rot."

And yet in spite of all of this, morale was high.

The Christians were almost within reach of their goal

and were said to be filled with,

"an indescribable yearning" to see Jerusalem, to complete their pilgrimage.

This was why they had joined the crusade.

But did Richard share his men's single-minded devotion?

He was finally within reach of the Holy City.

Now he faced an agonizing decision,

between his crusader ambition

and the stark reality of war.

The Lionheart announced that the crusade

was to turn away from Jerusalem.

The fragile supply lines back to the coast were faltering amidst

the freezing winter rains.

And any attempt to actually besiege Jerusalem

would be unacceptably dangerous.

In strict military terms, Richard's decision made sense,

but his announcement had a catastrophic affect

upon the morale of his men.

One Crusader later recalled,

"Not since God created time was there ever seen an army so dejected,

"and so depressed, everyone cursed the day he was born."

The King dragged his devastated men away from their holy goal.

Disillusioned, great numbers left Palestine and returned home.

The Third Crusade was in disarray.

But Saladin's armies were also faltering.

And as the two forces circled each other at arm's length,

rumours of insurrection among Saladin's troops presented

Richard with an opportunity to make a second advance on Jerusalem.

But his plans were disrupted by troubling news from Europe.

During Richard's long absence from home, his brother, John,

had been plotting to take control of England.

This news deeply disturbed the Lionheart,

he was said to have become "saddened, downcast and melancholy...

"his thinking confused."

This was also a stark reminder of the fact

that he was not simply Commander in Chief of the Third Crusade,

he was also an Angevin king.

He now now had to decide,

should he stay and fight for the Holy Land, or return home

to try to secure his kingdom?

Richard was paralysed by indecision,

but his men were determined to strike out for Jerusalem.

The King eventually conceded.

Against his better judgment, the Lionheart began a second advance,

having effectively lost control of his crusade.

Richard's lack of resolve had given Saladin time to regroup.

He was already positioned inside Jerusalem with his troops,

readying himself for the moment of decisive confrontation.

But then, the Sultan wavered.

His financial resources were profoundly overstretched,

and, after four years of campaigning, men were in short supply,

and their loyalty was waning.

With an attack on Jerusalem imminent,

his remaining troops threatened mutiny.

Many were fearful of being trapped in another disastrous siege

like that at Acre.

With the pressure mounting,

long-submerged tensions between between Turks and Kurds in Saladin's forces began to

bubble to the surface, threatening to boil over into open conflict.

In this increasingly precarious position,

Saladin's closest advisers urged him to leave the Holy City

while he still could.

It was the Sultan's turn to agonise.

Should he stay to mount a hopeless defence of Jerusalem,

or do the unthinkable and turn his back on this most sacred city?

Baha' al-Din was beside Saladin through a long

and tortuous night and he's left us

an extraordinary record of the Sultan's state of mind.

He wrote that Saladin felt a concern for Jerusalem

that could "move mountains", and that it was

"a night entirely given over to the concerns of Holy War."

By morning, the Sultan had made a shocking decision.

He would abandon Jerusalem.

With his fateful choice made, Saladin took a final chance

to lead prayer in the heart of the Holy City.

Here, in the Aqsa mosque, on Friday 3rd July 1192, Baha' al-Din watched

the Sultan "prostrate himself and say some words,

"while his tears fell on his prayer rug."

On the verge of collapse, the Muslim Army prepared for exodus.

Richard was on the brink of victory.

Once Saladin marched from Jerusalem, the city would be open to attack.

It seemed that the Lionheart was hours away from achieving

a startling triumph.

But entirely unaware of Saladin's astonishing decision,

the King's own resolve was weakening.

Richard was said to have looked upon Jerusalem with its massive,

near impregnable defences and to have had a change of heart.

He called a meeting of leading Crusaders

to discuss what should be done.

But according to Christian eyewitnesses,

his mind was already made up.

Having once again led his men to within hours of the city,

the attack was called off.

For the Crusaders, this was an appalling reversal.

After the vast sums raised and spent,

the months campaigning away from his empire,

all the lives given up in the name of Jerusalem,

his retreat was utterly shocking.

Richard apparently said that he was unwilling to lead the crusade

on such a "rash venture" because it would end in "terrible disgrace"

for which he would be "forever blamed, shamed and less loved."

At this moment of crisis, as the fate of Jerusalem

hung in the balance,

Richard refused to risk everything on a direct assault,

at least in part out of fear for his reputation.

Had he held his nerve, the King could have defeated

Saladin's stricken armies and conquered Jerusalem.

Instead, his crusade was torn apart,

without either side scoring a victory.

Richard the Lionheart, the legendary crusader knight,

left the Holy Land without ever setting foot in Jerusalem.

When he returned to his Angevin realm,

the kingdom was still his to rule

and he spent the remainder of that decade

campaigning against his European enemies,

until he was shot and killed by a crossbow bolt.

King Richard was buried at his father's feet

here in Fontevraud Abbey in the heart of his realm.

He's remembered as a peerless warrior and a great crusader,

the man who brought Saladin to his knees.

But in reality, he never truly mastered the art of Holy War.

Torn between the need to defend his realm

and the desire to forge a legend in Palestine,

the Lionheart failed to lead the Third Crusade to victory.

Islam held onto its Holy City,

but despite his undoubted military genius,

Saladin had been wholly unable to prevent the Franks

from reconquering the coast.

Exhausted, after years of campaigning,

Saladin died just six months later, at the age of 55.

Born a Kurdish outsider, he had risen through the ranks

to become an Islamic icon,

one of the most extraordinary and fascinating leaders

of the Medieval age.

But one question remains.

Did he champion the cause of Jihad and wage the war

for the Holy Land in pursuit of his own gain

and glory, or in the interests of Islam?

In the end, I think perhaps even Saladin himself

remained unsure of the answer.

The story of these two men has so often been simplified

and manipulated, cast as emblematic of the great struggle

between East and West, Christians and Muslims.

Even today, their images are still appopriated and twisted.

Richard, the ultimate warrior, the cruel king, lionhearted,

and Saladin, the clement hero of Islam, avowed enemy of the West.

Their confrontation during the Third Crusade

also revealed the complexity of their characters.

Saladin was not simply the pious defender of Islam.

He could also be ruthless and self-serving.

And Richard was not just the masterful warrior-king,

but a wily and skillful negotiator.

Almost perfectly matched as adversaries,

these were the men who contested the Third Crusade

and who ultimately fought one another to a standstill.

The bloody war for possession of Jerusalem

had raged for 100 years.

In the century to come,

the final chapter of this epic struggle

would be played out in Egypt, as a saintly French King,

afire with crusading zeal,

and the most remarkable Muslim in the Middle Ages,

fought for ultimate victory in the East.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]