Third Crusade

Also known as The Kings' Crusade

The great expedition of Frederick Barbarossa, Philip II of France, and Richard the Lionheart that recovered Acre and most of the coast but not Jerusalem.

The shock of Hattin and the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 produced the largest crusading mobilisation since 1095. Three of the great kings of Latin Christendom took the cross. Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa marched overland with a vast German army but drowned crossing the Saleph river in southern Anatolia in June 1190; his army largely dispersed, and only a remnant reached the Holy Land.

Philip II of France and Richard I of England arrived by sea in 1191. Together with the surviving Franks they completed the long siege of Acre, which surrendered in July 1191, and Richard then marched the army south down the coast, defeated Saladin in the disciplined battle of Arsuf (September 1191), and recovered most of the coastal cities. Two attempts to march on Jerusalem were called off when supply and the political risk of being trapped inland looked too great.

The crusade ended in the Treaty of Jaffa (September 1192), a three-year truce that left Saladin in possession of the interior and Jerusalem but restored to the Franks the coast from Tyre to Jaffa and the right of unarmed pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. The kingdom that emerged was a strip-state along the Mediterranean shore, governed from Acre, that would be the realm's principal form for the next century.

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