One of the most savage encounters between Christians and Muslims took place on September 7, 1191. The sheer ferocity and valor displayed at the battle of Arsuf makes most otherwise “breathtaking” battle scenes emanating from Hollywood seem bland and trite.
Context: in late August 1191, Richard the Lionhearted, king of England, led a large force of Crusaders from Acre to Jaffa. Along with the fierce Syrian sun, the Christians were harried by a nonstop deluge of arrows from the hordes of Saladin, who a few years earlier had taken Jerusalem—the Crusaders’ ultimate objective.
Despite the casualties from arrows, sunstroke, snake bites, starvation, and disease, the Christian warriors kept moving forward. Saladin’s own biographer, Baha’ al-Din, expressed dismay:
I saw various individuals amongst the Franks with ten arrows fixed in their backs, pressing on in this fashion quite unconcerned…. Consider the endurance of these people, bearing exhausting tasks without any pay or material gain.
Finally, on September 6, as the Crusaders emerged from a dense wood, there on the vast plains of Arsuf they saw “all the forces” of Islam marshalled before them, “from Damascus and Persia, from the Mediterranean Sea to the East,” writes a chronicler. There was not a single warlike Muslim people “whom Saladin had not summoned to aid him in crushing the Christian people,” for he “hoped to wipe the Christians completely off the face of the earth.”
Battle commenced on the morning of September 7. A wild din erupted from the Muslim camp. Drums, horns, and cymbals banged and brayed to reverberant cries of “Allahu Akbar” and other “horrible yells.”
As the Crusaders knelt in prayer and assumed battle formation, the “land all around resounded with the echo of [Muslims’] harsh cries and roaring noise.”
Suddenly, in the midst of this “terrifying racket,” thousands of Turks “rushed down” on horses “driven like lightning.” The dust storm caused by this stampede “filled the sky like a dark cloud.”
Behind the galloping Turks “ran a devilish race, very black in color.”
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