The Third Crusade
Battle for the Holy Land

Battle for the Holy Land

The Third Crusade, 1189 to 1192, was the attempt by three Western rulers, Philip II of France, Richard I of England and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to retake the Holy Land after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187. Because of who led it, it is also known as the Kings’ Crusade.

It was partly successful. The crusaders took back Acre and Jaffa and much of the coast, but did not retake Jerusalem. This page follows what happened, using Saladin’s biographer Baha ad-Din, who served in Saladin’s army as its judge and saw the siege of Acre and the battle of Arsuf, and the standard modern accounts. Where the sources give different numbers, it gives the range.

I. Prelude to the Third Crusade

A. The Fall of Jerusalem

On 3–4 July 1187, Saladin destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee. Jerusalem was besieged from 20 September, and on 2 October 1187 Balian of Ibelin surrendered the city to him.

B. The Call to Crusade

News of the defeat reached the West in the early autumn of 1187, and the new pope, Gregory VIII, was soon proclaiming a new crusade. Henry II of England and Philip II of France stopped fighting each other to take part, and both raised the Saladin tithe, a ten per cent tax on income and movable goods, to pay for it. Henry died on 6 July 1189, so the English army went east under his son, Richard I.

II. The Leading Figures

A. Richard the Lionheart

Richard I of England was regarded, for about four centuries after his death, as a model king and a paragon of chivalry. His own time was more mixed: clergy chroniclers criticised him for taxing the Church for both the crusade and his ransom.

B. Philip II of France — who left early

Philip reached Acre on 20 April 1191, while it was already under siege, and began building siege equipment before Richard arrived on 8 June. By the time the city surrendered on 12 July 1191, he was seriously ill with dysentery. His relations with Richard had worsened, and the death at Acre of Philip, Count of Flanders, opened a question of succession back home. He left the Holy Land in August 1191, leaving 7,000 French crusaders and 5,000 silver marks to pay them.

C. Emperor Frederick I — who never arrived

Frederick I, Barbarossa, set out overland in May 1189. The size of his army is uncertain: a source written in the 1220s gives 100,000 men, which modern scholars think inaccurate; their estimates run from 12,000 to about 26,000 men. He won battles in Anatolia at Philomelium and Iconium.

He never reached the Holy Land. On 10 June 1190 he drowned in the Saleph river, in Cilician Armenia. The accounts of how differ. One says he chose to swim across and was swept away; the chronicler Ibn al-Athir says he went down to the river to wash and drowned where the water was not even up to his waist; and a churchman with the army wrote that he went to bathe to cool down after weeks of hard marching.

Most of his army then turned back. His son, Frederick of Swabia, led the rest on, and about 5,000 men reached Acre. An attempt to preserve the emperor’s body in vinegar failed, and his remains were buried in three places: his flesh at Antioch, his bones at Tyre and his heart and inner organs at Tarsus. From then on the crusade was, in practice, the story of two kings.

III. The Battles

A. Siege of Acre

The siege of Acre ran from late August 1189 to 12 July 1191, almost two years. The crusaders took the city after Philip and then Richard arrived with their armies.

B. Battle of Arsuf

After Acre, Richard marched south along the coast towards Jaffa, which he needed before any attack on Jerusalem. On 7 September 1191 Saladin attacked his army at Arsuf, trying to make it break formation. Richard kept his army together until the Hospitallers broke ranks and charged; he then ordered a general counter-attack, which won the battle. Baha ad-Din, on Saladin’s side, called it “a blow to all Moslem hearts”.

Arsuf let Richard take and hold Jaffa. It did not destroy Saladin’s army, and it did not decide the war: Jerusalem stayed in Saladin’s hands.

C. Battle of Jaffa

In late July 1192 Saladin’s army besieged Jaffa and stormed its walls; only the citadel held out. Richard, who had been about to leave for England, came back by sea with a small force of little more than 2,000 men, drove Saladin’s troops out of the town and then beat off their counter-attack. The battle ended in failure for Saladin, and the treaty that ended the crusade followed within weeks.

IV. The Role of Saladin

A. Saladin’s Leadership

Saladin had brought the forces of Egypt and Syria under his own control before 1187. His hold on his army had limits: in December 1191 pressure from his emirs forced him to disband most of it, and at Jaffa in 1192, by Baha ad-Din’s account, he told the defenders’ envoys that he could not stop his men from fighting on.

B. Negotiations

Richard and Saladin never met. Saladin refused, saying it was customary for kings to meet only after a peace treaty had been agreed. They exchanged gifts, and Richard had a number of meetings with Saladin’s brother, al-Adil. One proposal discussed was a marriage between Richard’s sister Joan, or his niece Eleanor, and al-Adil; it came to nothing.

V. Acre, Jerusalem and the road home

Richard is remembered as chivalrous; this is the rest of the record.

The prisoners at Acre

After Acre surrendered, Saladin agreed to pay the ransom for its garrison in three instalments, a month apart. Baha ad-Din says the first instalment (the relic of the True Cross, 100,000 dinars and 1,600 prisoners) was ready when it fell due on 11 August, but the crusaders’ commissioners said not all the prisoners they had named had been brought together, and neither side would hand over first. On 20 August 1191 Richard had the Muslim prisoners killed in full view of Saladin’s army.

The numbers differ. The Itinerarium Peregrinorum, a Latin chronicle of the early 1220s, gives 2,700; Wikipedia’s article on the massacre, citing Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades, gives about 2,700 to 3,000. Baha ad-Din says the prisoners numbered “more than three thousand, all tied together with ropes”, and that only those of note and those strong enough to work were spared. Saladin responded by killing the Christian prisoners he had captured.

Richard did not besiege Jerusalem

He came close twice. In the winter of 1191 to 1192 his army reached Beit Nuba, about 12 miles from Jerusalem, then turned back in cold, heavy rain, for fear that an army besieging the city could be trapped by a relieving force. In June 1192 it came within sight of the city and retreated again, this time because its leaders could not agree: Richard and most of the army council wanted to attack Egypt, while the Duke of Burgundy insisted on a direct attack on Jerusalem.

He was captured on the way home

Richard left for home on 9 October 1192. After his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, he travelled overland and was captured near Vienna shortly before Christmas 1192 by Duke Leopold V of Austria, who accused him of arranging the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, and whom he had also offended at Acre by throwing down his banner. In March 1193 he was handed over to the Emperor Henry VI, who demanded 150,000 marks for his release. Over his whole reign Richard spent very little time in England, perhaps as little as six months.

VI. The Legacy of the Third Crusade

A. The Truce

The crusade ended with the Treaty of Jaffa, signed on 1 or 2 September 1192. It set a three-year truce. Jerusalem stayed under Muslim rule and was open to Christian pilgrims; the crusaders held the coast from Tyre to Jaffa; and Ascalon’s fortifications were to be demolished. Balian of Ibelin sat on the crusader council that heard and accepted its terms. Saladin died in Damascus on 4 March 1193, six months later.

B. What changed

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had lost almost all its territory after Hattin, was restored as a coastal strip between Tyre and Jaffa, with its capital at Acre. Its crown had also changed hands during the crusade: in April 1192 the nobles elected Conrad of Montferrat king, and he was murdered before he could be crowned; Richard’s nephew Henry of Champagne then married Queen Isabella.

VII. The Journey to the Holy Land

The three armies took different routes. Frederick went overland through Hungary and Byzantine territory, crossing into Anatolia in the spring of 1190. Philip and Richard left together from Vézelay on 4 July 1190 and split at Lyon: Philip crossed the Alps to Genoa, and Richard went by sea from Marseille. The French and English armies spent the winter together at Messina, in Sicily, and Philip sailed for the Holy Land on 30 March 1191.

VIII. The Impact Beyond the Battlefield

The crusade’s financing reached far beyond the battlefield. The Saladin tithe taxed income and movable goods in England and France, and Richard’s ransom of 150,000 marks was, according to the crusades historian Thomas F. Madden, the same amount the Saladin tithe had raised a few years earlier, and two to three times the English crown’s annual income under Richard.

IX. Lessons and Reflections

• Winning battles is not the same as winning the war. Richard won at Arsuf and Jaffa, and Jerusalem still stayed with Saladin.
• Check who actually took part. Frederick never arrived and Philip left in August 1191; for most of the fighting, this was Richard’s crusade.
• Treat medieval numbers as ranges. Frederick’s army is 100,000 in one later source and 12,000 to about 26,000 in modern estimates; the prisoners at Acre are 2,700 in one count and more than 3,000 in another.
• A reputation is not the whole record. Richard’s chivalry and the killings at Acre belong to the same man and the same summer.

Sources

• Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, The Life of Saladin, translated by C. W. Wilson (Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1897), Internet Archive (Jerusalem in 1187, the siege of Acre, the ransom talks, Arsuf, the killing of the prisoners at Acre, Jaffa in 1192, the peace of 1192, Saladin’s death).
• Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, as cited in Wikipedia’s “Massacre at Ayyadieh” (Helen J. Nicholson’s translation, 1997, p. 231) (the 2,700 figure).
• Wikipedia, “Third Crusade”, “Frederick Barbarossa”, “Siege of Acre (1189–1191)”, “Massacre at Ayyadieh”, “Treaty of Jaffa (1192)”, “Battle of Jaffa (1192)”, “Richard I of England”, “Philip II of France”, “Battle of Hattin” and “Siege of Jerusalem (1187)”, and the works they cite for the facts used here: John Gillingham, Richard the Lionheart (1979) and Richard I (1999); Christopher Tyerman, God’s War (2006); John Freed, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth (2016); G. A. Loud, The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa (2010); Jim Bradbury, Philip Augustus (1997); John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus (1991); Hans Eberhard Mayer and Jonathan Riley-Smith in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. IV (2008); Anne-Marie Eddé, Saladin (2011); Frank McLynn, Richard and John (2007); Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages; Thomas F. Madden, Crusades: The Illustrated History (2005); Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. III.

Checked September 2026. Dates and events follow Baha ad-Din’s account and the Wikipedia articles listed, used only where they give a citation for the sentence (the works cited are named above); where they give different figures (the size of Frederick’s army, the number of prisoners killed at Acre, the date of the treaty), the page gives the range.

Related: Salahuddin Ayyubi · Leper King Baldwin IV · Battle of Kerak