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goal, setting free ‘the mosque of al-Aqsa, to which Allah once led in the night his servant Muhammad’. Within a year the Christians had either lost or surrendered almost all their ports and castles in the kingdom of Jerusalem. As for the relic of the True Cross, tradition has it that Saladin ordered it to be buried under the entrance to the great mosque at Damascus, so that the feet of the faithful could tread on it as they went in to pray.

Richard The Lionheart Massacres The Hostages At Acre
    22 August, 1191

     
    News of the Battle of Hattin and the capitulation of the city of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 reached the Christian West within weeks. The shock of the dreadful news is said to have hastened the death of Pope Urban III. It galvanized the new popes, Gregory VIII (who lived only two months after his investiture) and Clement III into calling for the leaders of Western Christianity to set aside their differences and come together to save Christianity in the East from ‘the barbarians who thirst for Christian blood’.
    In the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa began gathering together an army for the relief of the Holy Land that eventually numbered over 200,000 men. Henry II of England, who was also overlord of half France, and Philip II Augustus of France both began levying taxes in their countries to finance this third crusade mounted by Catholic Christianity in the past century.
    Henry II died in October 1189, before his ‘Saladin tithe’, drawn from every subject, including the clergy, had been collected. It was left to his son, the tall, red-blonde, handsome and lionhearted Richard I, to collect the English contribution to the Third Crusade. Although Richard I was considered ‘a bad king, a bad son, a bad husband and a bad father’, he was a great soldier, and the main object of his life was a heartfelt desire to recover Jerusalem, the city of Christ’s Passion for Christendom. Among Europe’s Christian princes, Richard, while still Prince of Aquitaine, had been the first to fall to his knees and take the cross.
    Once he became king of England, at the time the wealthiest and strongest nation in Europe, Richard carried out his father’s crusading intentions with ruthless vigour, turning all his tax-raising efforts to financing the crusade. He sold high church offices, earldoms and lordships, castles and manors, even whole towns to finance his crusade. Richard’s remark that he would have sold London if he could have found a buyer was not a joke. As for the Saladin tithe, it was levied for three years, and any parish that did not collect its full due was excommunicated.
    Of the three most important rulers involved in the Third Crusade, Richard was the last to arrive in Palestine. Frederick Barbarossa, leading his huge army down through eastern Europe and into Turkey, died of a chill in Armenia in mid-1190 after bathing in the River Saleph. More than half his army turned back to Europe. Frederick of Swabia led a remnant of Barbarossa’s army down into Palestine, reaching there after Philip II Augustus of France, who had arrived in March 1191. After numerous adventures on land on the way, Richard went to the Middle East by sea, meeting up with Philip II Augustus at Messina in Sicily. There, the two kings completed the building up of the great fleet that would carry the crusaders to Palestine.
    Philip II Augustus set off first, leaving Richard to get the main body of the fleet to the eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately, a great storm scattered the mighty fleet and it took weeks to find all the ships and gather them together again. The three largest ships, carrying Richard’s betrothed, the Princess Berengeria, his sister Joanna and his English gold and treasure that were to finance the crusade, ended up on the island of Cyprus. When he caught up with them, Richard found that his gold and treasure had been snatched and his ships held in custody by the governor of the island, the son