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Indulgences are something that forgives your sins on earth. and so for many, this became an important piece of why they went on crusades. it was like, let's go take back the holy land, the land that jesus walked on. and secondarily, i can get all of my sins forgiven. >> richard descends on acre with 8,000 soldiers. he seizes control of king guy's army and launches the third crusade. >> richard the lionheart is an impatient man. he is not just going to hold the city under siege and wait for the people to starve out. so what he does is he swings around the backside of the city and busts in. and ...

And so, his family descends in to internal warfare. when saladin dies, muslim unity dies with him. >> i don't think the struggle between saladin and richard was ever a personal struggle. it was always a struggle for what jerusalem represents and what also the role as would-be liberators of jerusalem entailed. >> his want to liberate jerusalem came from the idea of controlling the holy sight, or control of the rock, would move islam forward. >> the legacy of the crusades and jerusalem among the arabs in general is a horrible, horrible legacy.

>> one of the challenges that richard and his army faced was the fact that jerusalem had these big defensive walls, and the only way to get through it was to attack it with their siege engines. it worked at acre, but if they destroy the walls of jerusalem, who's going to defend it? richard recognizes that it may not be in the best interest to simply bust through the gates and tear down the city walls. >> so richard surprises saladin by wielding a new weapon, diplomacy. >> richard sent the message to saladin, asking him to surrender jerusalem. and saladin obviously refused. >> and in their corr...

Anniversary of the prophet muhammad's night journey into jerusalem. >> but at the moment that saladin emerges victorious at the battle at the horns of ha teen, anyone living in the city of jerusalem must have feared for their lives because throughout the period of the crusades, there had been a number of sieges, battles, and even mass slaughters. so there was definitely fear of retribution and that any transfer of the city from one power to the other would be accompanied by mass bloodshed. >> the classic story is the first crusader of 1099 burst into the city, and they did an astoundingly terr...

Desperate efforts to break into acre to relieve the siege. he's leading from the front, but he is unable to break through into acre. >> the result of the battle of acre is that rich the lionheart does something that no one else has been able to do. he hands saladin his first loss at the hands of crusaders. saladin is forced to retreat, and now the crusaders, after almost being wiped out of the holy land, are now reconstituted, re-energized, reinvigorated, and now they're ready to recapture jerusalem.