Lionheart A Novel - By Sharon Kay Penman Page 0,262

his voice carried; the Grand Master of the Hospitallers was accustomed to dominating gatherings of other men. “The problems we faced in September are still unresolved. We still risk having our supply lines to the coast cut by Saladin, finding ourselves stranded in enemy territory, caught between Saladin’s army and the garrison in Jerusalem. Nothing has changed since we last discussed this, except to get worse. Now we have an army weakened by sickness and desertions and we are in the midst of one of the most severe winters in memory. There is a reason why fighting in the Holy Land is seasonal, and you need only stick your heads out of this tent to understand why that is so.”

Before he could be refuted, the Grand Master of the Templars added his voice in support of Garnier. Robert de Sablé argued that even if they somehow managed to capture Jerusalem, they could not hope to hold it, for all the men who’d taken the cross would then depart, their vows fulfilled. “We’d be gambling more than the lives of our men. We’d be risking the very survival of the kingdom, for if our army suffers another defeat like Ḥaṭṭīn, . Outremer is doomed. I say we withdraw to the coast and rebuild Ascalon, as the English king wanted us to do last September.”

The French were not convinced. They infuriated all the Templars by implying that Robert de Sablé was Richard’s puppet because he was a vassal of the English king. They dismissed the concerns of the Hospitallers and poulains by arguing that a holy war was not like ordinary warfare, insisting it was God’s Will that they besiege Jerusalem and He would reward them with victory. This was the reasoning that had carried the day at Jaffa. But on this cold January night at Bait Nūbā, it did not. Much to the dismay of the French, their fellow crusaders were no longer willing to disregard their military training and experience in favor of such a great leap of faith. It was agreed that the army would not attempt to capture Jerusalem now and instead would seize the ruins of Ascalon, rebuilding it to threaten Saladin’s power base in Egypt.

The French departed with dire predictions of disaster and veiled and notso-veiled threats to abandon the crusade. Hugh of Burgundy paused in the entrance of the tent to glare at Richard, whom he saw as the architect of this shameful surrender. “Our men will never forgive you for this,” he warned, “for they will never understand why we did not even try to seize the Holy City.”

Richard said nothing, for although he truly believed they’d just averted a calamity that would have reverberated throughout Christendom, he knew that Hugh was right. Their men would not understand and he would be the one they blamed.

CHAPTER 30

JANUARY 1192

Ascalon , Outremer

When they were told there would be no attack upon Jerusalem, the army’s morale plummeted. Men had been willing to endure severe hardships if their sacrifice would mean the recapture of the Holy City. Now they were shocked, bewildered, and angry to be told they were returning to the coast, for their suffering suddenly seemed pointless. Richard was no less troubled, feeling that he’d let them down even as he’d saved their lives. He did what he could for them, providing carts to transport all the sick and wounded back to Jaffa, and the eyewitness chroniclers took note of it. Ambroise reported that many of “the lesser folk” would have been left behind if not for the English king, and the author of the Itinerarium acknowledged that the ailing would otherwise have died since they were unable to care for themselves. But they also reported that each man “cursed the day he was born,” that the heartbroken soldiers could not be comforted.

When the dispirited, bedraggled army reached Ramla, it fell apart. Most of the French refused to serve under Richard’s command any longer and scattered, some heading to Jaffa, others to Acre, some even vowing to join Conrad at Tyre. Henri and his men remained loyal, though, and they accompanied Richard on a grim march to Ascalon along roads so mired in mud that they’d become death traps. Battered by the worst weather of the winter—snow, hail, and icy, torrential rains—they finally reached Ascalon on January 20. There the exhausted men sought shelter midst the wreckage of this once thriving city, the storms so intense that Richard’s galleys dared not enter the dangerous harbor for