July 12, 1191: The Siege of Acre ends.
The siege of the city of Acre by Crusader forces lasted two years and was one of the early major conflicts of the Third Crusade - whose goal was to reconquer the portions of the Levant from Saladin, the Ayyubid sultan and celebrated Muslim military leader who had captured Jerusalem in 1187. The Crusaders failed to retake Jerusalem, the lodestar of the entire operation, leading to the initiation of the Fourth Crusade, but Acre, along with Jaffa and other portions of the Levantine coast, were successfully conquered in a series of bloody confrontations. Initially, the Crusader army was composed of soldiers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem under Guy of Lusignan, the King of Jerusalem who launched the siege. Saladin’s army was an amalgam of troops from various territories under Ayyubid control.
In late 1189, reinforcements from Europe arrived to blockade the city by sea and land, and to augment the strength of the Crusader infantry. Over 15,000 men (some estimates have put the size of his army at 100,000) followed Frederick I Barbarossa into battle, though he himself drowned in a river under the weight of his own armor as his massive army approached Acre. Philip II Augustus of France arrived in the Holy Land in April of 1191, and Richard I “the Lionheart" of England soon after, although the latter alienated the other European noble and royal leaders, who just as quickly returned home as they had arrived once the city fell, leaving the Cœur de Lion to negotiate terms of surrender himself. After a long standstill between the attackers and defenders, repeated attempts to breach the city’s fortifications finally paid off when the Crusaders broke the siege on June 11 and entered the city on June 12. The bloodshed was not yet over, however; on August 20, the English king perpetrated the Massacre at Ayyadieh in response to Saladin’s delaying tactics during their surrender negotiations - over 3,000 people (men, women, and children) were slaughtered in a theatrical, threatening gesture of violence to the Muslim leaders.