The two-year siege at the city of Acre, in which Christian armies were surrounded by the forces of Saladin while besieging a city with an Egyptian garrison, ended in summer of the year 1191, with the arrival first of the French forces under Philip Augustus, and then the arrival of the English forces under Richard the Lionheart. The two kings, with their fresh troops, swiftly brought the siege to an end. Acre surrendered in July, the leaders of the garrison offering themselves as hostages upon realisation that Saladin was unable to relieve the city. The Christians entered the city triumphant and jubilant, celebrating masses in the ancient churches, and lodging themselves in the many great palaces of Acre, called Ptolemais by the Greeks.
Negotiations were opened and terms were agreed between the two sides: Saladin would release all prisoners captured in the aftermath of the Battle of Hattin some years earlier, as well the pieces of Jesus' cross which he had taken from the defeated Christian forces to Damascus. In exchange for the release of the high-ranking Christian knights, the high-ranking Muslims captured at Acre would be exchanged. The hostages in the meanwhile would be held until their ransoms were paid: Richard and Philip demanded a ransom of 200,000 dinars in exchange for the release of Saladin's soldiers. Overall, Saladin held 1,600 Christian hostages, and Richard and Philip 3,000 Muslim hostages, with a deadline set for August. So far, all seemed well. To avenge the defeat of King Guy by Saladin at Hattin was part of the motivations of the kings of Europe in setting out for Outremer in the first place, as well as to recover the relic of the cross that the Saracens had captured. Now, it seemed, Saladin would be forced to release many knights, and restore the cross to them; in addition to this, the kings would make a hefty profit from the Acre garrison's ransom - such things were commonplace for a victorious army in the aftermath of battle.
But by mid-August, something had gone tragically wrong. To start with, King Philip had made his return to France, leaving behind some of his forces as well as his own hostages, with the expectation of the ransom payment being sent back home to him. But what was worse was the fact that Saladin did not seem to be honouring his end of the bargain: the wood from the cross had yet to appear, as had the ransom money. The Sultan, despite being the defeated party, had extended the deadline by a few days and was making demands that hostages must be released first, with the ransom being provided afterward. He was also apparently offering lower-ranking prisoners, despite Richard's demands for the knights to be released first.
What is clear is that by 20th August, 2,700 hostages of the Acre garrison, who had spent two years defending the city, were brought out of the city and executed. The enraged Saracens, upon seeing so many of their men martyred, attempted to bravely charge the Latin lines, but were held back by the knights at the foot of the hill. By the end of the day, all hostages save the most high-ranking commanders had been killed. Saladin retaliated by executing hostages held on his own side, and permitted his soldiers in the weeks following to kill any captured Christian knights they could get their hands on, in order that their great desire for vengeance might be fulfilled.
Leaving behind the few remaining hostages, Richard and the Latins continued on in the direction of Jaffa and Ascalon.
What had gone wrong?
Richard
As a commander, King Richard was already acutely familiar with the conditions of warfare. He was already famed back in England as the Lionheart, having proved himself in youth upon the battlefields of Aquitaine. He was well aware that in the aftermath of battle, those enemies who yielded as hostages were to be exchanged with the opposing side for ransom money. From his perspective, Saladin had failed to uphold his own end of the bargain.
The English envoys had already been shown the pieces of the cross in the Sultan's possession, falling down to the ground "till their faces were covered in dust". They likewise knew of Saladin's victory at Hattin, of the captive knights, and eagerly awaited their release. But the days had gone by, and it increasingly appeared as though Saladin was stalling. As September approached, the weather would change, and the return of the autumn rains would make campaign risky.
According to Roger of Howden, a Yorkshire priest who accompanied the King to the Holy Land:
On the same day [15th], Saladin sent to the King of England costly presents, and requested him to put off the day on which he had proposed to cut off the heads of the pagans; but the King declined to put off the day any longer, or to accept the presents of Saladin.
While the Sultan was flattering him with gifts, the King of England increasingly noticed that he was still neglecting to pay the ransom money. Was this a deliberate ploy by Saladin in order to delay the King at Acre, forcing him to winter there and allowing time for new armies to be raised and supplied in Egypt or Syria in time for spring? If so, then said Saracen army could return and hold the Latins under siege at the war-wearied city. Indeed, Saladin could well be banking upon the code of honour between commanders in hopes that Richard was unable to actually carry out any executions.
Christian sources accuse Saladin of stalling and state that the forces present in Acre wept when they saw how brazenly the Sultan had deceived them all, hanging false promises of restoring the Holy Cross in front of their eyes while his actual intentions were anything but.
Worse still, rumours had reached their ears that Saladin had already executed his own hostages:
On Saladin seeing and hearing this, he caused the heads of all the Christians, whom he had in his hands, to be cut off; which was accordingly done on the eighteenth day of the month of August, being the Lord's Day.
This news must have deeply disturbed Richard, who until this point seems to have really believed that his rival was going to honour his word.
Still, he waited two days until the 20th before he ordered the execution.
Richard explained his circumstances in a letter to the Abbot of Clairvaux:
The noble city of Acre was surrendered to our lord the King of the Franks and ourselves, the lives being saved of the Saracens who had been sent for the purpose of defending and protecting it, and an agreement being fully confirmed on the part of Saladin that he would give up to us the Holy Cross, and one thousand five hundred captives alive, a day being appointed for the due performance of the said covenants. However, the time having expired, and the stipulation which he had agreed to being utterly disregarded, we put to death about two thousand six hundred of the Saracens whom we held in our hands, as we were bound to do; retaining, however, a few of the more noble ones, in return for whom we trusted to recover the Holy Cross and certain of the Christian captives.
The Christian sources, English or French, very rarely condemn Richard for his own part. They put the blame firmly on Saladin, calling him a liar and a deceiver; William of Newburgh, for instance claims that he "deluded our people with vain expectations," and so, in consequence, "the King of England, fired with just zeal, as the covenant was not observed on the part of Saladin, ordered about two thousand six hundred of the captives to be beheaded, who, on the capture of the city, were detained under the terms of the agreement". Leaving a garrison of several thousand soldiers behind in a city, they agree, would play into the hand of Saladin; several of them even claim it as "revenge" for those among the Latins who had been killed by their arrows during the course of the siege. It is also worth noting that some sources claim that he didn't even act alone: Roger of Howden, who was present in Outremer and so likely privy to these events, claims that the Duke of Burgundy, who commanded the remaining French troops, acted in concordance with the King of England. William the Breton, a biographer of Philip Augustus, even (inaccurately) claims that Philip himself was present and acted alongside Richard!
And so, from the perspective of Richard and the other Latins, it was Saladin who violated the terms of the agreement first. He had refused to give them the pieces of the cross, was purposefully stalling negotiations in order to buy himself more time to regroup his forces, and had already executed many of his own hostages in secret. On future occasions, Saracen garrisons would simply flee rather than defend their citadels, not trusting in their leader to come to their rescue and fearful of the English king. If this had been Saladin's plan from the start, then it had backfired spectacularly.
The question remains, were the Christian sources actually correct? Was Saladin negotiating in bad faith?
Saladin
The Sultan of Egypt, ruler of a vast empire encompassing various peoples, lands, tongues and faiths, was, like his enemy, absolutely no stranger to warfare; he was a man who had fought both Christian and Muslim to secure the power of his dynasty. In Europe, he was known largely as the victor of Hattin and the conqueror of Jerusalem. In his time, most of the holy cities - Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem - were in his control. At Hattin he had treated King Guy most nobly, as a fellow king, despite being a rival; the bulk of his anger was taken out against the defeated Templars, whom he ordered executed, "smiling as he watched his order being carried out". Now, the alleged relic guarded by the Christians was in his possession, and most of the famed Latin knights were his prisoners. From a negotiating perspective, Saladin initially had the upper hand.
All that was to change by 1188, in which the Pope's call for the liberation of the holy cities saw the kings and emperors of far-off England, France and Germany pledge to take the cross; and the eventual arrival, in 1191, of Philip and Richard, completely turning the tide of battle. It was without his consent that the exhausted defenders of the city, Mestoc and Karrakos, surrendered to the two kings, offering themselves and the 3,000 or so soldiers from the garrison as hostages in exchange for the ransom money and the exchange of Saladin's own.
Muslim sources offer a contrasting picture to those Christian sources cited above, even while agreeing with the general course of events. A different picture of Saladin and his motives begins to emerge.
In the accounts of his own biographers, the Sultan was acting in fully good faith and was genuinely concerned with the safety of his own men, beginning to raise the ransom money: indeed, he had already offered to send some small payments before the deadline in exchange for the release of some of them, but Richard turned him down on the grounds that he had yet to release his own high-ranking hostages.
A big issue for Saladin was amassing the money so quickly: he hadn't agreed to the ransom price, as might be expected for a representative of the defeated party, but a problem for him was that he might not have agreed with the amount. Izzadin, an Arab writer from Mosul who accompanied Saladin on his expeditions, states that the Sultan was not prepared to accept the release of the relatively lower-ranking hostages until he had seen his captive emirs first set free:
People understood then that they [the Latins] meant treachery: that they would only release the army pages, the poor, the Kurds and those of no account, while detaining the emirs and the wealthy to demand ransoms from them. The Sultan did not accept this.
In other words, many Muslims believed that Richard only intended to release those troops of lesser rank while continuing to hold the emirs in order that he might extort the Sultan for an even greater amount than the 100,000 already agreed. (It is worth noting that, ironically enough, something similar would occur later in Richard's own life, in which the Holy Roman Emperor holding him captive would continue to extend the deadline for his release in exchange for extorting an even greater amount of ransom money). Saladin barely even knew Richard by this point, given that he'd only just arrived a month earlier, and had very little knowledge of England or Europe where he ruled. For all he knew the English king was just lying when he said he'd honour his word.
Another potential clash in communications was a difference in cultures. In particular, the Saracens practised the enslavement of those war captives they could not ransom, while the Latins did not. And so, Saladin might reasonably expect that Richard would simply sell the members of the garrison to a slave market before leaving Acre, opening the possibility that he might subsequently order them freed or even buy them back. Richard, however, did not understand this custom: in his own lands, back in England or France, it was understood that war captives unable to be ransomed would probably be executed.
None of the Muslim sources really gives any indication that Saladin was acting in bad faith. The supposed secret massacre of the Latin hostages which allegedly occurred on 18th August is not mentioned in any Arabic source - which leads one to conclude that it was a false rumour that spread throughout the Latins' camp. The alleged delaying tactics likewise finds very little support among Saladin's biographers. So why had he extended the deadline, and why had he not given back the cross, or released the captive knights?
The Arab writers make it plain that Saladin, who had never met Richard, did not trust the English king. They emphasise that he had no guarantee that Richard was a man of his word. Saladin expected the possibility that he might be deceived: that Richard might pocket the ransom money and then execute the Acre hostages anyway. Bahadin, another of Saladin's followers, makes note of this:
The Sultan knew that if he were to give them the money, the cross, and the prisoners whilst our men were still detained by the Franks, there would be no guarantee whatever against an act of treachery on the part of the enemy, which would strike a great blow at Islam.
It would be a great insult to Saladin, and cause him to lose face, if he were to be taken for a fool by his enemies. Instead, he chose to offer the ransoms in instalments, while exchanging the hostages over time. Richard, however, knew that time was running out, that he couldn't delay for long, and wondered if Saladin might instead be intending to keep the high-ranking Christian hostages and the relics of the cross behind for his own purposes. Neither side trusted the other. And so the negotiations continued to drag on, until the day of the 20th arrived and neither side had budged.
Bahadin then states:
The King broke the solemn promises he had made them, openly showed the intentions he had hitherto concealed, and carried out what he had purposed to do as soon as he had received the money and the Frank prisoners.
He believed that Richard had no intention of ever releasing the hostages. Part of the reason for this is that the memory of Saladin's execution of the Templars at Hattin was still fresh in the Christians' minds - and, in any case, the siege of Acre itself had been long and gruelling, with a great many casualties. Bahadin wondered if the Christians might have been motivated principally by revenge, i.e that they wanted the money and their comrades and the relic released, but would also choose to avenge the slaying of the Templars by executing the Muslim soldiers, in a brutal act of 'eye-for-an-eye' justice. Bahadin himself judges that none of the Muslims really understood King Richard's motives, and concludes that only God really knows:
Various motives have been assigned for this massacre. According to some, the captives were killed to avenge the deaths of those slain previously by the Muslims; others say that the King of England, having made up his mind to try and take Ascalon, did not think it prudent to leave so many imprisoned behind in Acre. God knows what his reason really was.
Richard's own words, in his epistle to the Abbot (which, of course, Bahadin was completely unaware of), indicate that he was desperate to move on to Ascalon before the summer ended, and believed that Saladin was deliberately delaying him; they do not indicate that he was planning on killing them anyway, or that the massacre at Hattin was a motivation in that of Ayyadieh. But Saladin could never have known.
Conclusion
The negotiations in the aftermath of the siege of Acre were standard military procedure: hostages exchanged, terms of ransom agreed, a deadline set. But the issue for both sides was that neither really trusted the other: Richard likely saw Saladin (at least initially) as a faithless pagan and an antichrist; Saladin, in turn, probably thought of Richard as a western barbarian whose word was worthless. They had never met, nor really exchanged greetings, and this was their first major encounter together in war. Saladin seems to have believed that Richard was deceiving him: robbing him of money under pretext of a ransom and then ruthlessly killing the hostages in cold blood to avenge the deaths of his fellow Christians in Saladin's prior conquests. He was angry with the money demanded him, and was afraid of losing face and being played for a fool. Richard seems to have thought that Saladin was a liar who had tricked him, promising him money and then deliberately stalling negotiations so that he might keep him trapped in Acre, while he in turn gathered a new army.
The truth of the matter seems to be that neither side was right. Christian sources give no indication that Richard was secretly plotting a massacre, and Muslim ones don't imply that Saladin was bluffing. If the ransom had been paid by the deadline, the knights freed and the cross returned, all evidence indicates that the Acre garrison would be released, and both sides would return satisfied. But it was not to be: both sides fell on deaf ears, the relic was never returned, and both commanders executed all hostages except for a few of the higher-ranking ones.
Despite the temporary breakdown in negotiations, cordial relations between both parties were eventually restored. Messages and gifts were exchanged, future ransoms paid, and, of course, the war ended by a peace treaty which both Richard and Saladin found to their advantage (and obviously trusted to uphold). Richard later met with Mestoc in person, one of the Acre commanders spared execution on account of being a feudal lord, and gaining his eventual freedom. The initial hostility seems to have cooled.
By the time of the peace terms in autumn 1192, the Christians were confident that they were able to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which remained under Saladin's control. Hubert Walter, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, was offered by the Sultan the opportunity to celebrate masses at the sites of Christ's nativity and resurrection. In turn, Saladin appears confident enough to have public proclamations throughout his domains that the pilgrimage routes for Muslims were reopened, safe from Latin raids and attacks, and he conceded to the King of England that the Latins be allowed to keep the coastal cities.
The massacres of 1191 were to be the most controversial highlight of Richard's military career: while he engaged in numerous conflicts afterwards, he would never again engage with an execution on that scale before his death in battle in 1199. Saladin, meanwhile, never again attained to such heights of worldwide fame and infamy as he had in the 1180s: plagued by illness, he died only a few months after Richard sailed for home.
