Siege of Acre (1189–1191)

Released by Saladin in 1188, Guy found the gates of Tyre closed to him by Conrad of Montferrat, who had saved the city and disputed his kingship. With a few hundred knights and several thousand foot soldiers, supported by Pisan and Sicilian ships, he marched south and on 28 August 1189 camped before Acre, the kingdom's chief port, held by a strong garrison. An attempt to storm the walls failed, but fleets of Danes and Frisians and French, Flemish, German and Italian crusaders soon arrived by sea, and when Saladin came up he could not drive them off. On 4 October 1189 a pitched battle before the city ended with neither side able to dislodge the other; Gerard of Ridefort, master of the Temple, was among the dead. Saladin then encamped around the crusader camp, so that the besiegers were themselves besieged, while Muslim and Christian fleets fought for access to the harbour.

The siege dragged on for almost two years. Famine and disease ravaged the crowded camp: Queen Sibylla and her daughters died in 1190, which undermined Guy's claim to the throne, and many lords died of fever. Frederick Barbarossa's German army melted away after the emperor drowned in Anatolia in June 1190, and only its remnants reached Acre under his son Frederick of Swabia, who died there in January 1191. Merchants from Bremen and Lübeck set up a field hospital for the German crusaders, the nucleus of the later Teutonic Order. The decisive change came with the kings: Philip II of France landed on 20 April 1191 and Richard I of England, who had conquered Cyprus on the way, on 8 June. Their siege engines battered the walls, and on 12 July, after a final appeal to Saladin brought no relief, the garrison surrendered.

The terms provided for a large ransom, the release of Christian captives and the return of the True Cross. When the exchange broke down, Richard had some 2,700 prisoners of the garrison — the figure given by the Itinerarium Peregrinorum — beheaded in sight of Saladin's army on 20 August 1191, and Saladin retaliated by killing his Christian prisoners. By then Philip had already sailed for home, and Leopold of Austria had left after his banner was torn down from the walls. Acre became the capital of the second Kingdom of Jerusalem, a coastal strip that lasted another century; but many historians judge the victory a Pyrrhic one, since the losses of the siege contributed to the crusaders' failure to recover Jerusalem itself.