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The Siege of Acre was the first major engagement of the Third Crusade—one that would span almost the entirety of the war. With the assistance of the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitalier, the Kingdom of Jerusalem first launched an assault of Acre in 1189 before the arrival of the formal Crusader forces from Europe. Alerted by the siege, Sultan Saladin of Egypt and Syria hastily rallied his forces to relieve the coastal city only to mire himself in a prolonged stalemate against the besiegers.

The Saracens, faced with their inability to lift the siege, had little recourse but to settle into their own blockade around the Crusaders. As this double siege dragged on into the next year, the impatient Templars began to devise a plot to murder the entire population by poisoning their water supply, hoping that this would force a capitulation. Before the order could be carried out, however, it was sabotaged by the Assassin Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, who infiltrated their camp and assassinated the commander responsible for the operation.

Nevertheless, neither this setback nor the demise of many of the Christian leaders proved capable of breaking the siege. In 1191, the arrival of long anticipated reinforcements led by King Richard the Lionheart and King Philip II of France turned the tide in the Crusaders favor. Armed with greater siege weapons, the Crusaders breached Acre and effected its surrender, scoring a critical victory that would allow them to recover ground lost to the Saracens the previous years.

Prelude

The Crusader states established after the First Crusade had been vying to wrest control of the Levant from the Saracens for the past century. Even during the intervals between the crusades, war between the two factions raged on, punctuated by periods of uneasy peace.

In 1187, after Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, had unified the squabbling Muslim states of the Levant, warfare erupted once more between the Saracens and Crusaders. On 3 July, he baited a massive Christian army led by all its major leaders into the Battle of Hattin, where he dealt a major victory that severely crippled the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem. Among his prisoners were the King of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, and the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Gerard de Ridefort. Though both were released by Saladin the next year, the defeat was catastrophic for the Crusaders, allowing Saladin to swiftly conquer almost all of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, including Jerusalem itself.

The fall of Jerusalem ignited calls for a Third Crusade in Europe to recapture it. In the meantime, Guy of Lusignan traveled to Tyre, the last stronghold of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, having managed to ward off a major Saracen invasion through the leadership of Conrad of Montferrat. Conrad, recognizing that Guy's hold on the kingship was tenuous as it derived only from his marriage to Queen Sibylla, expected that with his newfound prestige, he could seize the throne himself. As a result, he steadfastly refused Guy's entry into the city until the formal Crusader armies led by King Richard I of England and King Philip II of France arrived to resolve their dispute.

Left without a home or a base to defend himself, Guy resolved to capture Acre with his forces, thereby initiating the the first major battle of the Third Crusade on 28 August 1189.

Siege

Battle for Acre

Acre did not prove easy to conquer, and Guy's assault quickly evolved into a protracted siege. Hearing news of this attack, Saladin promptly gathered a relief force for the rescue of Acre. Meanwhile, newly arriving Crusaders from across the seas rallied to Guy's initiative, even convincing Conrad to do the same with his army of Tyre.

On 4 October, Saladin's army clashed with the besiegers who were trapped between the Saracens of the city and the relief force. In spite of this, the Saracens failed to dislodge the invaders from their position. They did, however, manage to capture Gerard de Ridefort once again. Refusing to repeat his previous act of mercy, Saladin executed the Templar Grand Master by decapitation.

Double siege

After this intense battle, both sides settled into their respective blockades. While the Crusaders resumed their investment of Acre, the relief force kept the Crusaders surrounded with no hope of escape. Throughout the next year, reinforcements continued to arrive from various states in Europe to assist the siege, such as the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire army led by Frederick VI whose father, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, had drowned en route to the Levant.

In response, the Saracens continued to call in reinforcements of their own, and the number of soldiers involved in the siege massively swelled. Eventually, both the city and the Christian camp were entirely contained by Saladin's forces, a state of affairs that severely impacted the living conditions for the Crusaders. Epidemics broke out and even the Crusader leaders began to succumb to disease, including Duke Frederick VI of Swabia.

Flow of poison

Sometime in that same year, 1190, the Templars, frustrated with the stalemate, hatched a secret scheme to poison the entire water supply of Acre. Such was the extent of the operation that they expected the entire population of the city to die by the next morning, leaving the city empty for the Crusaders' taking.

When the de facto successor to Gerard, Basilisk, was defeated by the Assassin Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad in Tyre, however, the Templar leaked the plot to the Assassin in exchange for mercy. As both were in a competition for the Chalice, which they now knew to be a woman hiding in Jerusalem, Basilisk hoped that by playing on Altaïr's conscience to save Acre, he would delay the Assassin long enough for him to reach Jerusalem first.

Assassin intervention

Sure enough, Altaïr detoured to Acre, desperate to rescue its people from the massacre that could be carried out at anytime. The night of his arrival in the city, the Crusaders' latest assault had finally breached sections of the city wall, allowing some of their forces to surge through.

When three Hosptalier soldiers spotted Altaïr, he evaded them by throwing a smoke bomb and fleeing to the rooftops, from where he then sniped a few Templars with a crossbow. His indiscretion alerted the invaders of his presence, and Crusaders entering into the city were on the look out for him. As soon as he returned to the streets, he was confronted by a group of Crusaders who were immediately killed by a collapsing building. Rather than offering a reprieve, the commotion attracted the attention of more soldiers who Altaïr swiftly dispatched.

Altaïr intended to travel to the other side of the city to reach the Templar camp and assassinate the general in charge of the poison plot. After killing more Crusaders along the way, he found his route down a street blocked by a Templar commander and three of his knights. While his knights barricaded the way with their shields, the commander eagerly drew his sword at the Assassin, only to be slain in the ensuing duel. His knights nevertheless maintained their shield barricade, only to have Altaïr forcibly break through it and escape.

Moving on, the Assassin found himself before a city gate just as it was blasted open by the Crusaders, killing the Saracens that were desperately holding it back. Altaïr alone held back the force of Crusaders pouring in through the gate, but after a while, he came to realize the futility of this. Thinking quickly, he launched a catapult to destroy the lintel of the gate: the collapsing debris sealed the breach, forcing the Crusaders outside to scale the wall with ladders.

To this, Altaïr responded by firing ballistae from the walls at Crusaders on observation towers as well as pushing down any ladders raised. His actions successfully stalled the assault on that section, and he proceeded onward to a square nearby where Templars were assembling civilians for execution. From his vantage point on the roofs, the Assassin sniped the executioner with his crossbow before killing the rest of his compatriots.

As he battled the invaders through the streets and rooftops, he rescued another woman who was taken prisoner by Hospitalier soldiers. At last he reached the gate closest to the Templar camp, one that had also been breached but with Saracens still defending it. While Altaïr repeated his solution before: using a catapult to destroy the lintel to seal the breach, the Saracens mistook him for an enemy, recognizing him to be an Assassin.

Knowing that he could not exit the city through the gate itself without attracting enemies, Altaïr escaped the Saracens and fled onto the wall, from where he was able to then stealthily lower himself to the other side via a ladder while the combatants were preoccupied in the battle.