The Second Crusade from 1147 to 1149 wasn’t just a disaster for the Outremer, it was also a catastrophe for the Seljuk Turkish Zengid Sultanate, the Abbasid Sultanate of Baghdad, and the Fatimid Sultanate of Egypt. Out of the Islamic victory a young and hungry Sunni Kurdish general, An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, better known to history as Saladin, first became vizier to the Fatimid Sultan, then quickly Sultan himself. In the 20 years after the Second Crusade, Saladin united Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia under the new Ayyubid Sultanate. With no Sunni Muslim lands left to conquer, he turned on the remaining three states of the Christian Outremer: the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Despite some setbacks from the leprous King of Jerusalem, Baldwin III, he destroyed the main Crusader army at Hattin in 1187, and promptly seized Jerusalem. Saladin then went on to reduce the three Outremer states to ports and small slivers of land along the Mediterranean coast.

In 1189, Saladin paroled Guy de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, and commander of the Crusader army at Hattin. Guy, still king by marriage to Sybella went to Tyre, the new capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but Conrad of Montserrat felt that someone so incompetent and arrogant didn’t have the divine right to anything, and told him to move on. Fortunately for Guy, the loss of Jerusalem shocked Europe and launched the Third Crusade, with Tyre being one of the only ports of arrival left for the crusaders. While Conrad was busy with affairs of state and holding back Saladin, Guy was down at the docks politicking and formed his own army from newly arrived French, Sicilian, and Italian crusaders.

To Guy’s credit (but probably because Sybella convinced him not to), he didn’t turn on Conrad but marched his small army to Acre to acquire his own power base, and recapture his own kingdom. The Muslim defenders of Acre outnumbered Guy 2 to 1 but the same reason Acre was so hard to capture, the narrow approaches to the city, also meant that defenders couldn’t sortie in force, and were bottled up by the much smaller crusader army. Guy, reinforced by a Sicilian fleet, settled in for a siege. Eventually Saladin moved to besiege the besiegers. For the next 18 months, a bloody stalemate ensued between Saladin and the besiegers whom were reinforced by a steady trickle of newly arrived crusaders from Europe.

The loss of Jerusalem shocked Europe, and united Europe in a way that really hasn’t been seen since. Anybody who was anybody packed up their stuff and went to the Holy Land, where Guy at Acre was seen as the only one doing anything (even though Sybella died of dysentery during the siege, which revoked his claim to the throne). In 1191, the crusading armies of the Big Four of Europe: Duke Leopold of Austria, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, King Phillip II of France, and King Richard the Lionheart of England, all descended on Acre (though the elderly Barbarossa died crossing a river on the way, but part of his army arrived).

After eighteen brutal, bloody months of horrible disease and privation in unheard of conditions, the city of Acre was finally on the brink of capitulation. In early July 1191, Saladin received news from the starving garrison that if he didn’t relieve the city, it would surrender. On 11 July 1191, Saladin attacked the combined crusader armies. The Battle of Acre was a grinding, attritional affair that belied the Muslim stereotype of the lightly armed warrior unwilling to come to close combat. Furthermore, both sides knew the final outcome of the siege would be decided at the end of the day. Saladin came close, but failed to relieve the city. Acre surrendered the next day, and Saladin “grieved like a mother who had lost her child”.

Richard and Philip accepted the surrender of the city, and Saladin offered to pay the ransom for the defenders. Richard demanded a hefty sum, plus 2000 Christian nobles, and the True Cross, which Saladin captured in Jerusalem four years before. Saladin agreed to pay in three installments.

The first installment arrived on 12 August, 1191. However, by this time, the crusader army was breaking down. Barbarossa was dead, Phillip had to leave to deal with a succession issue in Flanders, and Richard was a right bastard with Leopold and Conrad, both of whom he felt were his inferiors, so they took their footballs and went home. The ever impatient Richard also felt that Saladin was using the time to reinforce his army (he was, but why wouldn’t he?), and Richard didn’t want to be besieged himself at Acre.

When the second payment arrived on 20 August, it was short many of the promised nobles and the True Cross. The infuriated Richard rejected the payment and was unwilling to wait any longer. That night Richard had the 2700 prisoners taken to a small hill at Ayyadieh, where he had them all beheaded. The decapitated bodies were in full view of Saladin’s army when the sun rose the next morning.

The eighteen month Siege of Acre was Satan’s Vortex that sucked both Muslim and Christian alike into a hellish battle of attrition in which there was no winner. It cost nearly 100,000 dead on both sides, which as a percentage of the population of Europe and the Near East, was worse than the Battle of Verdun nearly 700 years later. The profits of the Medieval Warm Period were spent at Acre. The Siege of Acre and the Massacre at Ayyadieh gutted the Third Crusade, both physically and spiritually. Richard would go on defeat Saladin at the Battle of Jaffa, but due to the losses during the Siege, would not have the strength to seize Jerusalem. A generation of the finest fighting men that Christian Europe could produce were buried around the city. Never again would the crusaders have the strength to retake the Holy Land.

The Siege also eviscerated the Ayyubid Sultanate and fatally weakened it. All of Saladin’s hard work would be undone in a few decades as small minded men took advantage of the weakness. On the surface, the glittering jewel of the Sultanate was as bright as ever, but the warriors needed to defend it lay dead on the hills of the Levant.

The devastation could not have come at a worse time: A new and terrible threat was emerging from the Steppe; one that would prove the greatest challenge to both Christian and Muslim alike.

The Mongols.