Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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The battle for the sea

When the Latin fleet appeared, driven down the coast by a north wind, around fifty of Saladin’s ships sailed out of Acre’s harbour in pairs to meet it, flying green and gold banners. The Franks possessed two main types of vessel: ‘long, slender and low’ galleys, fixed with battering rams and powered by two banks of oars (one below and one on deck); and ‘galliots’, shorter, more manoeuvrable warships with a single bank of oars. As the fleet approached, shield walls were erected on decks and the Christian ships formed into a V-shaped wedge, with the galleys at its point. With a cacophony of trumpets sounding on both sides, the two forces ploughed into one another and battle was joined.

Sea-borne combat was still a relatively rudimentary affair in 1190. Larger ships might try to ram and sink enemy craft, but on the whole fighting took place at close quarters and consisted of the exchange of short-range missiles and attempts to draw in opposing vessels with grappling hooks and board them. The greatest horror, as far as sailors were concerned, was Greek fire, because it could not be extinguished by water, and in this engagement both sides possessed supplies of this weapon. The Muslim fleet came close to gaining the upper hand on a number of occasions. One Frankish galley was bombarded with Greek fire and boarded, prompting its oarsmen to leap into the sea in terror. A small number of knights who were weighed down by their heavy armour, and who did not know how to swim anyway, chose to hold their ground ‘in sheer desperation’ and managed to win back control of the half-burnt vessel. In the end, neither side achieved an overwhelming victory, but the Muslim fleet came off the worst, being forced back behind Acre’s harbour chain. One of their galleys was driven ashore and ransacked, its crew dragged on to the beach and summarily butchered and beheaded by a merciless pack of knife-wielding Latin women. In a grim aside, a crusader later noted that ‘the women’s physical weakness prolonged the pain of death’ because it took them longer to decapitate their foes.

This battle cost Saladin control of the sea for the rest of 1190. The crusaders were able to police the waters around Acre, penning the sultan’s remaining ships within the harbour and disrupting any attempts to resupply the city’s garrison. For the next six months Acre’s inhabitants lived on the edge of starvation. By late spring their stores of supplies were exhausted and they were forced to eat ‘all their beasts, hooves and innards, necks and heads’ and expel any old or weak prisoners (the young were kept to load catapults). Saladin made repeated attempts to break the naval cordon, with varying degrees of success. In mid-June, part of a twenty-five-ship-strong fleet managed to fight its way through. Around late August, the sultan arranged for a round-bellied transport ship to be packed with 400 sacks of wheat, as well as cheese, corn, onions and sheep. To beat the blockade it sailed from Beirut under the cloak of disguise. Its crew ‘dressed up as Franks, even shaving their beards’, while pigs were placed on deck in plain view and crosses flown. The crusaders were fooled and the vessel successfully ran the gauntlet. But these were meagre victories for a city that needed near-constant supply. At the start of September, Qaragush managed to smuggle out a letter informing Saladin that in two weeks Acre would be entirely empty of food. The sultan was so alarmed that he kept the news secret for fear that it would break his army’s morale. Three more grain-laden supply ships were due from Egypt, but bad winds delayed their progress. Baha al-Din described how, on 17 September, Saladin stood on the shore ‘like a bereft mother…his heart troubled’, watching as they finally sailed up the coast towards Acre, knowing full well that the city would fall if they failed to get through. After fierce fighting ‘the ships came safely into harbour, to be met like rains after drought’.³³

One saving grace throughout all these struggles was that the crusaders never succeeded in taking control of Acre’s inner harbour. Had they done so, the garrison’s position would have quickly become untenable. Late in the summer of 1190 the Franks made a concerted effort to seize the Tower of Flies, the fort built on a rocky outcrop in the bay of Acre that controlled the chain guarding the port’s harbour. They fortified two or three ships, creating what amounted to elaborate floating siege towers, but their assault failed when these were burned down by Greek fire.

With the exception of this attack, the Franks never attempted a naval assault on Acre and, in reality, from their perspective the battle for the sea functioned as a platform and an addendum to their land-based siege. Access to naval support was utterly indispensable in that it continued to furnish the crusaders with reinforcements, provisions and military supplies, and the blockade of Acre certainly added an important element of attrition to their investment, but for most of 1190 their overall strategy was grounded in warfare on land.

The struggle on land

Here the fighting season began again in earnest in late April and early May 1190. With spring, Saladin recalled his troops from Syria and Mesopotamia. On 25 April he moved his camp back to the front line at Tell Kaisan with the support of his son al-Afdal. Over the next two months they were reinforced by detachments from the likes of Aleppo, Harran and Mosul. At the same time, of course, with the sea open the crusader camp was again flooded by fresh recruits, many of whom were early arrivals from the armies of the French and English kings. Chief among them was Henry II of Champagne, count of Troyes, nephew of both Richard I and Philip Augustus. Henry reached Acre in August in the company of his uncles, Count Theobald V of Blois and Stephen, count of Sancerre, along with some 10,000 fighting men, and immediately took over military command of the siege. A large contingent of English crusaders arrived in late September, headed by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, the formidable Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, and Hubert’s uncle, Ranulf of Glanville, once one of King Henry II of England’s closest advisers.³⁴

In spite of the renewed influx of western crusaders, Saladin should have possessed the manpower to balance, perhaps even overwhelm, the Christian besiegers during the long fighting season of 1190. But one factor stayed his hand–the coming of the Germans. As early as autumn 1189 Saladin had received reports that Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was marching to the Holy Land at the head of a quarter of a million crusaders–tidings that, not surprisingly, ‘greatly troubled the sultan and caused him anxiety’. The impending threat posed by the expected arrival of this horde meant that from April to September the sultan was never able to direct the full might of his military resources, nor focus his strategic thinking, upon the problem at Acre. Convinced that the emperor’s vast host would sweep south through Syria and Lebanon like an unstoppable tide, Saladin set about preparing for a bitterly fought war on two fronts. Almost as soon as the sultan’s troops arrived at Acre that spring he began sending them away to bolster the defences of the north. Inland cities were ordered to store their harvests in case of siege, while along the coast Saladin judged that the likes of Latakia and Beirut would have no chance of resisting Frederick, and thus ordered their walls to be razed to the ground to prevent them becoming Latin strongholds. These measures made complete strategic sense–indeed Saladin would have been mad to ignore Barbarossa’s approach–but they also served to cripple Muslim efforts at Acre by forcing a massive redirection of resources. In this way, even before they set foot in the Levant, the Germans made a significant contribution to the Third Crusade.³⁵

Weakened and distracted, Saladin had to adopt a largely reactive approach to the defence of Acre. He could hope to frustrate the Franks’ attempt to seize the city, but any plans actually to make a concerted attempt to annihilate the besiegers were again sidelined. By the first days of May the sultan had re-established a front-line position, penning in the crusaders between his armies and Acre’s walls. This allowed Saladin to mount almost instantaneous counter-attacks to any Latin assault on the city, forcing the crusaders to fight their own draining struggle on two fronts. Meanwhile, the sultan sought to maintain contact with Qaragush and his garrison, but with the city subject to a close land and sea blockade this was no simple matter. Carrier pigeons were one of the mainstays of the communication and intelligence system that spanned the far-flung Ayyubid Empire, but at Acre they seem to have played a limited role, perhaps being too easy a target for enemy archers. Here, Saladin relied instead upon a group of guileful and courageous messengers who would seek to swim into Acre’s inner harbour under cover of darkness, carrying letters, money and even flasks of Greek fire sealed in otter-skin bags. This was perilous work. On one mission an experienced swimmer named Isa, who ‘used to dive and emerge on the far side of the enemy’s ships’, disappeared, only to be washed up drowned in the harbour a few days later, his consignment of messages and gold still tied round his waist.³⁶

For the greater part of 1190, Saladin faced an enemy driven by one core objective–the breaching of Acre’s landward defences. Lacking a single universally acknowledged leader (with power passing between the likes of King Guy, James of Avesnes and Henry of Champagne), their attacks sometimes lacked resolve, but the threat they posed was severe nonetheless. The Franks adopted an assault-based siege strategy, looking to overcome the city’s walls through a combination of bombardment, scaling and sapping. Having constructed a number of catapults through the winter, they now initiated a near-daily barrage of stone missiles. These machines seem to have been of fairly limited strength, incapable of propelling truly massive boulders, so the attacks were probably designed to harass and injure the Muslim garrison as much as to weaken Acre’s walls. Of course, this was no one-sided affair. Within the city, Qaragush had his own array of heavy weapons with which he sought to destroy the crusaders’ siege engines, often with great success. One was said to be particularly massive, capable of loosing stones that on impact would bury themselves a foot into the ground.

Acre’s landward walls were encircled by a dry moat, designed to hamper any ground assault and prevent large-scale siege towers from being drawn up against its battlements. The crusaders made arduous attempts to fill sections of this ditch with rubble, often under the cover of aerial bombardment. The garrison did its best to hamper these efforts, showering the workers with arrows, but they were determined. One Frankish woman, mortally wounded as she carried forward stones, even requested that her body be thrown into the moat to act as infill. By early May 1190, to the Muslims’ horror, a path to the foot of the walls had been opened.

Panic now started to spread. For weeks Qaragush and Saladin had watched a frenzy of construction within the crusaders’ camp, as three massive siege engines gradually rose into the air. Built with wood specially brought from Europe to a height of some sixty-five feet, these wheeled three-storey behemoths were covered in vinegar-soaked hide, to dampen the effect of fire, and hung with rope netting to weaken the impact of catapult attack. One Muslim eyewitness wrote that, towering above the battlements of Acre, ‘[they] seemed like mountains’. Around 3 May, King Guy, James of Avesnes and Ludwig of Thuringia packed them with troops–crossbowmen and archers on the roof, spear and pikemen below–and began inching the machines towards the city. This dreadful spectacle appalled the Muslims. In Saladin’s camp ‘everyone totally despaired for the city and the spirits of the defend[ers] were broken’, while within Acre ‘Qaragush was out of his mind with fear’, preparing to negotiate a surrender. A swimmer was hurriedly dispatched to warn the sultan that collapse was imminent and Saladin quickly launched a counter-attack. Simultaneously, the garrison began pelting the towers with flasks of Greek fire once they came into range, but none of this halted their inexorable advance.

The day was saved by a young unnamed metalworker from Damascus. Fascinated by the properties of Greek fire, he had developed a variation on its formula which promised to burn with even greater intensity. Qaragush was sceptical, but eventually agreed to try this new invention, and the metalworker ‘concocted the ingredients he had gathered with some naphtha in copper vats, until the whole mixture was like a burning coal’. Earlier in the day, fruitless attempts to use standard Greek fire had prompted the Franks to dance about and make jokes atop their towers, but when a clay pot of this new formulation struck, their jeers were silenced. ‘Hardly had it hit the target before it burst into flames and the whole became like a mountain of fire’, observed one Muslim onlooker. The two remaining towers soon suffered a similar fate. Trapped crusaders on the upper levels died in the conflagration, while below those who could escaped to watch their great engines ‘burn to cinders’. For now, at least, Acre was safe.³⁷

In the months that followed, the Muslims’ superior mastery of combustible weapon technology proved a decisive element. In August, when the Franks sought to intensify their bombardment, operating in shifts through day and night, building ever more powerful catapults, Qaragush and Abu’l Haija launched a lightning sortie, sending ‘Greek fire specialists’ to burn the enemy’s machines, killing seventy Christian knights in the process. In September a massive stone-thrower, built under the orders of Henry of Champagne at the cost of 1,500 gold dinars, was similarly dispatched in a matter of minutes. Not surprisingly, the crusaders developed an intense hatred of Greek fire. One unfortunate Turkish emir thus paid a heavy price when wounded in a skirmish beside a Frankish siege tower. He had been carrying a container of Greek fire, hoping to destroy the engine, but now a Latin knight ‘stretched him out on the ground, emptying the contents of the phial on his private parts, so that his genitals were burned’.³⁸

Other, more insidious, battles raged that summer. The careful nurturing of morale within one’s own army and the struggle to break the will of the enemy had long been common features of medieval siege warfare. And, although events at Acre do not seem to have been marked by repeated acts of deliberately callous brutality or barbarism on either side, Qaragush’s garrison occasionally employed such tactics. Latin dead had already been hung from Acre’s battlements in November 1189 in an attempt to enrage the crusaders. Now, in 1190, Muslim troops occasionally dragged crosses and images of the Christian faith to the parapet to subject them to public defilement. This might involve beatings with sticks, spitting and even urination, although one soldier who attempted the latter was reportedly shot in the groin by a Frankish crossbowman.

The recurrent issues of any protracted investment–starvation and disease–also cast their shadows over Acre in 1190. Hunger and discontent seem to have prompted poorer sections of the crusader host to launch an ill-disciplined and ultimately fruitless attack on Saladin’s camp in search of food on 25 July, at the cost of at least 5,000 lives. With their corpses rotting in the summer heat and great swarms of flies descending, making life unbearable in both camps, disease inevitably spread across the plains of Acre.

Saladin once again sought to cleanse the battlefield by throwing the remains of the Christian dead into the river, sending a gruesome mixture of ‘blood, bodies and grease’ downstream towards the crusaders. The tactic worked. One Latin described how ‘no small number of [crusaders] died soon after [they arrived] from the foul air, polluted with the stink of corpses, worn out by anxious nights spent on guard, and shattered by other hardships and needs’. The lethal combination of malnutrition and atrocious sanitary conditions poisoned the camp for the rest of the season, and the mortality rate rocketed. Losses among the poor were severe, but even nobles were not immune: Theobald of Blois ‘did not survive more than three months’, while his compatriot Stephen of Sancerre ‘also came and died without protection’. Ranulf of Glanville lasted just three weeks. Acre was fast becoming the graveyard of Europe’s aristocracy.³⁹

The fate of the German crusade

Elsewhere in the Near East another death was to change the course of the crusade. In late March 1190 Emperor Frederick Barbarossa secured terms with the Byzantines and led the German crusade across the Hellespont to Asia Minor. The Germans forged a route south-east through Greek territory, crossing into Turkish Anatolia in late April. Internal power struggles within the Seljuq sultanate of Konya meant that Frederick’s earlier attempts to negotiate safe passage through to Syria had a limited impact on the ground, and the crusaders soon encountered concerted Muslim resistance. Despite supply shortages, Barbarossa managed to maintain discipline among his men–Muslim sources claimed that he threatened to cut the throat of any crusader deemed to have contravened orders–and the German marching column continued to make headway. On 14 May a major Turkish assault was beaten back and Frederick moved on to attack Konya itself, occupying the lower town of the Seljuq capital and forcing the Turks into temporary submission.

With the crossing of Asia Minor almost completed, Barbarossa pushed south towards the coast and the Christian territory of Cilician Armenia. The German crusade had suffered substantial losses in terms of men and horses, but all in all Frederick had achieved a striking success, prevailing where the crusades of 1101 and 1147 had failed. Then, just as the worst trials seemed to be over, disaster struck. Approaching Sifilke on 10 June 1190, the emperor impatiently decided to ford the River Saleph ahead of his troops. His horse lost its footing mid-stream, throwing Frederick into the river–on a scorching-hot day the water proved shockingly cold, and unable to swim, the German emperor drowned. His body was dragged ashore, but nothing could be done. Western Europe’s most powerful monarch, the mightiest ruler ever to take the cross, lay dead.

This sudden unheralded cataclysm stunned Latins and Muslims alike. One Frankish chronicler remarked that ‘Christendom suffered much harm by [Frederick’s] death’, while in Iraq another contemporary joyfully proclaimed that ‘God saved us from his evil’. The German crusaders were gripped by a crisis of leadership and morale. Barbarossa’s younger son Frederick of Swabia tried to salvage the expedition. Assuming command, he had the late emperor’s body wrapped and embalmed, and then he led the way into northern Syria. But en route ‘disease and death fell upon them [leaving them] looking as though they had been exhumed from their graves’. Thousands died, while others deserted. At Antioch, some of Barbarossa’s remains were buried in the Basilica of St Peter, beside the site of the Holy Lance’s discovery; his bones were then boiled and collected in a bag in the hope that they might be laid to rest in Jerusalem (as it was, they were eventually interred in the Church of St Mary in Tyre). Frederick of Swabia limped down the Syrian coast with what remained of the German army, facing attacks from Ayyubid troops stationed in the north.⁴⁰

It is not clear precisely when news of Barbarossa’s death reached Saladin–according to Baha al-Din, he was informed of the event by a letter from Basil of Ani, head of the Armenian Christian Church, but no date was provided. The tidings certainly caused celebration among the Muslims. A crusader wrote that ‘inside Acre…there was dancing and playing of drums’, and recalled that members of the Ayyubid garrison gleefully climbed the battlements to shout ‘many times, in a loud voice…: “Your emperor has drowned.”’ Nonetheless, the sultan was still dispatching troops to defend Syria as late as 14 July 1190 and the full strength of his armies did not reassemble at Acre until early autumn. Thus, even though Barbarossa’s demise crippled the German crusade, Saladin still lost vital military resources that summer. Frederick of Swabia eventually reached Acre in early October 1190 in the company of perhaps 5,000 troops. Saladin seems to have expected that, in spite of all their losses, the Germans’ arrival would reinvigorate the crusader siege, but in real terms it did little to advance the Frankish cause.⁴¹

STALEMATE

In one sense the fighting season of 1190 had been a success for Saladin. Acre had shrugged off every Latin assault, its garrison countering the artifice of the Franks’ experimental military technology. The sultan had managed, albeit with some difficulty, to maintain channels of communication and resupply with the city, while deploying his own troops to harass and distract the besieging crusaders. After twelve months’ investment, Acre still held.

Nevertheless, in the wider scheme of things, Saladin had failed. Forced to redeploy his martial resources to meet the perceived threat of the German crusade, he lacked the manpower with which to seize the initiative at Acre. With armies at full strength, that summer he might have risked a concerted frontal assault on the Frankish positions and driven the crusaders from Palestine. As it was, by the time his troops had regrouped at Acre in early October, Saladin seems to have decided that, for now at least, the opportunity for decisive intervention had passed. This, combined with the onset of a ‘bilious fever’, prompted him to move his army back to a distant winter encampment at Saffaram (about ten miles south-east of Acre) in mid-October, effectively bringing the fighting season to a close. With his confidence evidently shaken, Saladin ordered the demolition of Caesarea, Arsuf and Jaffa–the key ports south of Acre–and even mandated the dismantling of Tiberias’ walls. In the months that followed, Saladin faced a constant struggle to maintain his forces in the field. Some, like the lords of Jazirat and Sinjar, repeatedly petitioned to return to their lands; others, like Keukburi, were dispatched to oversee the governance of the sultan’s neglected Mesopotamian interests and were lost to the jihad.⁴²

In pulling back from the front line, just as he had a year earlier, Saladin was relying upon the ravages of nature to weaken his enemy, waiting to see if the crusaders could survive a second cruel winter huddled outside Acre. Before long the change of season began to bite. As in 1189, autumn’s end heralded the closing of long-distance sea routes and the effective isolation of the Frankish host. By November, the crusaders’ supplies were already running short, forcing them to attempt a foraging expedition south towards Haifa which was beaten back after just two days.

Ordeals

In late November Saladin at last disbanded his army for winter, once again remaining in person with only a small force to watch over Acre as the ‘sea became rough [and the rains] heavy and incessant’. From the Muslim perspective, the months that followed proved far harsher and more trying than the winter of 1189. The city’s garrison was faltering, while Saladin and his men were exhausted and ill-tempered. With supply lines stretched, there were widespread shortages of food and weapons, and too few doctors available to deal with the frequent outbreaks of illness. ‘Islam asks aid from you’, the sultan wrote in an imploring letter to the caliph, ‘as a drowning man cries for help.’ And yet, these problems were but a pale reflection of the torments faced by the crusaders. One Muslim eyewitness acknowledged this, writing that because ‘the plain [of Acre] became very unhealthy’ and ‘the sea was closed to them’, there ‘was great mortality amongst the enemy’ with 100 to 200 men perishing daily.

The Latins’ suffering may have been obvious to onlookers, but the view from inside the Christian camp was even more anguished. Cut off from the outside world, the crusaders’ stores of food simply ran out. By late December people had turned to skinning ‘fine horses’, eating their flesh and guts with gusto. As the famine intensified, one crusader wrote that there were ‘those who had lost their sense of shame through their hunger [who] fed in sight of everyone on abominable food which they happened to find, no matter how filthy, things which should not be spoken of. Their dire mouths devoured what humans are not permitted to eat as if it were delicious.’ This may be an indication that there were outbreaks of cannibalism.

Weakened by hunger, the Franks fell prey to illnesses such as scurvy and trench mouth:

A disease ran through the army…the result of rains that poured down such as have never been before, so that the whole army was half-drowned. Everyone coughed and sounded hoarse; their legs and faces swelled up. On one day there were 1,000 [men on] biers; they had such swelling in the faces that the teeth fell from their mouths.

The resultant mortality was on a scale not seen since the First Crusaders’ siege of Antioch. Thousands died, among them such potentates as Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, Theobald of Blois and even Frederick of Swabia. These dark days of winter witnessed a collapse in Christian morale. One crusader commented ‘there is no rage like that born of starvation’, observing that, in the midst of this horror, anger and despair caused a loss of faith and desertion. ‘Many of our people went to the Turks and turned renegade’, he wrote; ‘they denied [Christ], the Cross and baptism–everything.’ Receiving these apostates, Saladin must have hoped that the siege of Acre would soon falter.

But still the crusaders clung on. Some resorted to grazing on grass and herbs ‘like beasts’, others turned to eating unfamiliar ‘carob-beans’ indigenous to the area, which they found ‘sweet to eat’. Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, played a major role in restoring some semblance of order to the chaos-stricken camp, organising charitable collections from the rich so that food could be distributed to the poor. When scores of hungry crusaders sinned by eating what little meat they could find during Lent, Hubert enforced a penance upon them–three blows on their backs with a stick, administered by the bishop himself, ‘but not heavy blows’, as he ‘chastised like a father’. Finally, around late February or early March, the first small Christian supply ship bearing grain reached the camp to be greeted with great celebration, and with spring the crisis of supply ended. Having passed through a tempest of death and misery, the Franks were still thronged outside Acre.⁴³

For Islam, the crusaders’ tenacity spelled disaster. As he had a year earlier, Saladin sought to use the winter season to strengthen Acre, but this time his efforts met with less success. Al-Adil was sent to organise a supply depot at Haifa from which resources could be ferried from Egypt up the coast to the garrison. On 31 December 1190 seven fully laden transport ships reached Acre’s harbour only to be dashed against the rocks and sunk by the treacherous seas. Food, weapons and money that could have sustained the city for months were lost. Then on 5 January 1191 an intense rainstorm caused a section of Acre’s outer wall to collapse, suddenly exposing the city to attack. Racked by starvation and illness, the crusaders were in no position to capitalise on this opportunity and Saladin’s men hurriedly filled the breach, but the omens for Islam were bleak. With a growing sense of apprehension, the sultan sought to reorganise Acre’s defences. Abu’l Haija the Fat was relieved of his military command of the port on 13 February, to be substituted by al-Mashtub, although Qaragush was left in his post as governor. The exhausted troops of the garrison were also replaced, but Saladin’s secretary Imad al-Din later criticised this measure, noting that a force of 20,000 men and sixty emirs was exchanged for just twenty emirs and far fewer troops because Saladin struggled to find volunteers willing to man the city.

The sultan’s frustration is apparent in a letter sent to the caliph that same month, in which he warned that the pope might be coming to lead the crusaders and bemoaned the fact that, when Muslim troops arrived at Acre from the far corners of the Near East, their commanders’ first question was when they could leave. At the same time, the manifold pressures of maintaining his enormous realm while locked in the struggle at Acre were beginning to tell. In March, Saladin begrudgingly assented to Taqi al-Din’s repeated demands to be made ruler of the north-eastern cities of Harran and Edessa. While the sultan could ill afford to lose his nephew from the jihad, he needed to safeguard his control over the Upper Euphrates or risk the unravelling of his empire.⁴⁴

By April 1191 Saladin’s prospects, and those of Acre, seemed almost hopeless. For a year and a half the sultan had been immobilised by the crusaders’ siege of the city, unable to consolidate fully his victories of 1187, cowed into a strategy of reactive defence. He had sought to turn back the vengeful tide that had swept from western Europe onto the shores of Palestine, and he had failed. Frederick Barbarossa’s sudden death in June 1190 had been extraordinarily providential, but at Acre itself Saladin had been less fortunate, facing a seemingly indomitable Frankish enemy. Acre held, but so too did the Latin siege. Battered, but not broken, the crusaders had achieved a staggering feat of arms–the maintenance of a siege deep in enemy territory while beset by an opposing field army.