nine
Richard the Lionheart
The news of the disasters that had befallen the Holy Land was brought to the Pope, Urban III, who was then in Verona, by knights of the military orders – the Templars carrying a letter from Brother Terence, the Templar Commander in the Holy Land who had been one of the few to escape after Hattin. Urban and the entire Papal Curia were staggered by the news: no one in Europe had imagined that such a setback was possible and they at once assumed that if God had forsaken his people it was because of their sins. The monk, Peter of Blois, who was visiting the Curia at the time, wrote to the English King, Henry II, describing how ‘the cardinals, with the assent of the Lord Pope, have firmly promised among themselves that, having renounced all wealth and luxuries, they will preach the Cross of Christ not only by word, but also by deed and example’.208 Urban III, broken by his sorrow, died shortly after.
When Josias, the Archbishop of Tyre, arrived in Palermo from Tyre in the summer of 1187, sent by the barons of Outremer to solicit help from the West, and told King William II of Sicily of the full extent of the catastrophe, the King threw off his fine silk robes, dressed in sackcloth and went into a penitential retreat for four days. Pope Urban’s successor, an elderly Italian, Alberto de Morra, who took the name Gregory VIII, only reigned for the last two months of the year 1187, but in that time he wrote an eloquent appeal for a seven-year truce between the warring European kings to free them for a new crusade. This encyclical, Audita tremendi, was ‘a moving document and a masterpiece of papal rhetoric’,209 and an immediate response came from King William of Sicily, who dispatched the fleet of fifty galleys that brought relief to the principality of Antioch.
Such penitential reactions, which were consistent with the crusading theology of Bernard of Clairvaux, were now complemented by a more chivalrous idea behind taking the Cross. It is at this time that the word crucesignata came into common use, and this not among churchmen but among lay knights and princes. Heraldic devices which had been unknown at the time of the First Crusade were emblazoned on banners and shields; and there was a sense in which the crusade had become in the minds of the European nobility the greatest proof of courage and virtue – the ultimate joust with the forces of evil, the final chivalrous endeavour. Thus Peter of Blois, who had witnessed the penitence of the prelates at the court of Pope Urban III, and wholeheartedly agreed with the penitential sentiments in Pope Gregory VIII’s Audita tremendi, also wrote in his Passio Reginaldi an account of the life and death of the buccaneering Reginald of Châtillon that presents him as not just a martyr but also a saint.210
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One of the first of the European princes to respond to the Pope’s appeal was Richard, Count of Poitou, the son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eleanor’s marriage to King Louis VII of France had been annulled in 1152, three years after their return from the disastrous Second Crusade. Eight weeks later, Eleanor, then aged thirty, had married the nineteen-year-old Count of Anjou who in 1154, on the death of King Stephen, mounted the throne of England as Henry II. This rapid remarriage has been criticised by Eleanor’s subsequent biographers: to one, Alfred Richard, she had simply grown tired of Louis’s ‘almost effeminate grace’ and ‘wished to be dominated, and as the vulgar crudely put it, she was among those women who enjoy being beaten’.211 Two chroniclers report that Eleanor had already been seduced, or possibly raped, by Henry’s father, Count Geoffrey of Anjou. However, her marriage to Henry was initially a success if measured by the number of their children: having had only two daughters by Louis VII (her failure to produce a male heir inclined the Capetian counsellors to agree to the annulment of the marriage), she bore five sons and three daughters to Henry between 1152 and 1167.
The third of these sons was Richard who, at the age of eleven, was invested with his mother’s Duchy of Aquitaine. Immersed from his youth in constant wars with rebellious vassals, Richard established a reputation as a ferocious warrior, a ruthless ruler and, after taking the supposedly impregnable fortress of Taillebourg at the age of twenty-one, a brilliant strategist and general.
In time, the marriage of his mother Eleanor to Henry suffered from Henry’s infidelities, particularly with his English mistress, Rosamund Clifford. In 1173, Eleanor joined her sons in a revolt against Henry II. The rebellion failed: the sons made abject submissions to their father while Eleanor, captured on her way to seek refuge with her first husband, Louis VII, was taken back to England and imprisoned for the next fifteen years.
The death of Richard’s elder brother, Henry, in 1183 made him heir to the throne of England as well as the Duchy of Normandy and the County of Anjou. His father, Henry II, at this juncture, had asked Richard to transfer the Duchy of Aquitaine to his youngest son, John. Richard had refused and appealed to his notional suzerain, the successor to Louis VII, King Philip Augustus of France. At one time friends, later rivals and finally implacable enemies, the political and military machinations of both princes were arrested by the news of the defeat of the Latin army at Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem to the forces of Islam.
Impetuously, without his father’s consent, Richard took the Cross in the new cathedral of Tours on the same spot from which his great-grandfather, Fulk of Anjou, had set out to marry the Princess Melisende and with her rule the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Philip Augustus protested; Richard was supposed to be marrying his sister Alice: but after hearing an eloquent sermon from the Archbishop of Tyre, he too took the Cross. Henry II, who had long planned to go on crusade and had sent substantial sums of money to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, was forced by the two young princes to join them. They were to set off from Vézelay after Easter in 1190 but Henry II died before he could fulfil his vow, on 6 July 1189.
Now King of England as well as Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Richard had enormous resources at his disposal and made meticulous plans for his crusade. There was great popular enthusiasm for the crusade and Cistercians like Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury, promoted the Holy War in the style of Bernard of Clairvaux; but no longer do we find, as at the time of the First Crusade, ‘silent and mysterious hermits advising the leaders on military tactics’: even the churchmen ‘who invoked God’s help … relied on their own resources’.212 The Pope imposed a ten-per-cent tax on all income and moveable property that came to be known as the ‘Saladin tithe’. Although, in the final analysis, the crusade still depended on the individual’s willingness to risk his life and property to regain the Holy Places, ‘the stirring of the Holy Spirit now moved most obviously in official channels’.213
A stream of lesser princes followed the example of King Richard of England and King Philip Augustus of France and, in advance of the two monarchs, joined the Christian army besieging Acre. Many of them were the descendants of earlier crusaders, or the relatives of the nobility of Outremer: Henry, Count of Champagne, a grandson of Eleanor of Aquitaine and so a nephew of the kings of both England and France; Theobald, Count of Blois and Ralph, Count of Clermont; the counts of Bar, Brienne, Fontigny and Dreux; Stephen of Sancerre and Alan of Saint-Valéry. There were also Germans such as Louis, Margrave of Thuringia; powerful fleets from Genoa and Pisa; Italians from Ravenna under their archbishop Gérard; other archbishops from Messina and Pisa, and Baldwin of Canterbury with 3,000 Welshmen; bishops from Besançon, Blois and Toul; the Archdeacon of Colchester, later killed during a sortie against Saladin’s camp; knights from Flanders, Hungary, Denmark; and a contingent from London which, like its predecessor during the Second Crusade, stopped off en route to help the Portuguese King Sancho take the fortress of Silves from the Moors.
In Germany, in April 1189, the Holy Roman Emperor himself took the Cross. This was Frederick I of Hohenstaufen, knowing as Barbarossa (Redbeard), who had been elected German king in 1152 and crowned emperor by Pope Adrian IV in 1155. His father had been Duke of Swabia and his mother the daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, and as a young man he had accompanied his uncle Conrad on the disastrous Second Crusade. His reign had been marked by an interminable struggle for advantage between Emperor, Pope, King of Sicily, Byzantine Emperor and, a new factor in the equation, the powerful Lombard cities led by Milan.
Now aged around sixty-six, Frederick was a heroic figure with great charm. The plight of the Holy Land not only inspired a private determination to take up his sword once again to fight the infidel, but demanded of him as the lay leader of Christendom a vigorous response. Until now, the Germans had played a secondary role in the crusades: few of them had settled in Outremer. However, Conrad of Montferrat was a kinsman of Barbarossa’s, and his valiant defence of Tyre had impressed the Emperor. Now Frederick sent an envoy to Saladin demanding the return of Palestine to Christian rule. Saladin, in response, would go no further than to offer to release all Christian prisoners and return Christian abbeys to their monks.
To Barbarossa, this was not enough. In May 1189, he set out from Regensburg with ‘the largest single force ever to leave on a crusade’.214 Frederick had made arrangements in advance for the passage of this host with the sovereigns over whose territory it would march. It passed through Hungary without incident but ran into trouble when it crossed into the Byzantine Empire.
Relations between the Greek Christians and their Latin co-religionists had been soured by events that had taken place in Constantinople five years before when the people’s hatred of the Latin Empress, Maria of Antioch, regent for her son, the young Emperor Alexius, had led to a pogrom of its Latin residents by the Greek population. As many as eighty thousand had been living in the city:215 men, women and children, the old and the young, the hale and the sick, were all attacked and many slaughtered, their houses and churches burned. Such was the Greek hatred of the Latins that when Saladin captured Jerusalem, the Byzantine Emperor, Isaac Angelus, sent a message to congratulate him.
However, Frederick Barbarossa’s army was too strong to be resisted and in the spring he led it across the Bosphorus unmolested and moved into territory controlled by the Seljuk Turks. As with the armies of the Emperor Conrad and the French King Louis VII forty years before, Greek non-co-operation, the harshness of the climate and the aridity of the land through which they progressed led to serious losses in Frederick’s forces from thirst and hunger. On 18 May 1190, the German crusaders came upon the army of Saladin’s son-in-law, Malik Shah. Battle was joined. The Turks were decisively defeated and swept from the crusader’s path. Proceeding unhampered, they now descended through the Taurus Mountains into the plain of Seleucia. While crossing the River Calycadnus, the Emperor Frederick fell into the water and, weighed down by his armour, drowned.
Without his dominating personality, the army he had assembled fell apart. His son, Duke Frederick of Swabia, continued to Antioch with his father’s body but many others made for the ports in Cilicia and Syria and returned home. Barbarossa’s decomposing corpse was buried in Antioch’s cathedral of Saint Peter: some of his bones accompanied the German crusaders in a sarcophagus in the hope that they might reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem but were eventually interred in the cathedral of Tyre.
In Palestine, what remained of Barbarossa’s army was joined by contingents that had come by sea under Louis of Thuringia and Leopold of Austria. To cater for their sick and wounded, a group of crusaders from Lübeck and Bremen founded a hospital under the patronage of Saint Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem which, like the Hospital of Saint John, formed an order of knights that adopted the Templar Rule, took the same white habit as the Templars but marked it with a cross that was black rather than red. In 1196 this foundation was approved by Pope Celestine III as the Order of Teutonic Knights.
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Just as the Western crusaders converged on the Holy Land in 1190, Guy of Lusignan was ousted as the titular King of Jerusalem by Conrad of Montferrat. Despite his audacious siege of Acre which had become the focal point of the new crusade, he had never been forgiven by the major barons of Outremer for being the consort of Queen Sybilla, heading the party of parvenus and leading them to defeat at Hattin. His two principal champions, Reginald of Châtillon and Gérard of Ridefort, were both dead; and in 1190 his position was further weakened by the death of his wife and their two young daughters from disease.
Since Guy’s title to the crown came from Sibylla, it now passed to her niece Isabella, the daughter of King Amalric I. Isabella, as we have seen, was married to the personable young Humphrey of Toron while being besieged by Saladin in the fortress of Kerak, but Humphrey too had alienated the barons by surrendering to Sibylla and Guy. Their solution was to annul her marriage to Humphrey on the grounds that she had been married when below the age of consent and marry Isabella to Conrad of Montferrat. The Princess was perfectly happy with her effete husband but her mother, the dowager Queen Maria Comnena, the great-niece of a Byzantine emperor, grasped the political imperatives behind the barons’ demand and persuaded her daughter to go along with their plan. The marriage was annulled by the Papal Legate at Acre, the Archbishop of Pisa, and Isabella was married to Conrad by the Bishop of Beauvais.
This dethronement of King Guy was vigorously opposed not just by the Lusignan family but also by the liege lord of the Lusignans in Poitou, Count Richard, now King of England. Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury, present in the camp before Acre, had denounced the arrangement but he had died on 19 November 1190, a few days before the wedding. When Richard eventually reached Acre on 20 April 1191, the deed was done.
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King Philip II Augustus of France had arrived seven weeks before. The routes taken by the two kings had started in Vézelay in July 1190: Philip and his army had then sailed from Genoa while Richard had met up with his English fleet at Marseilles. Both had stopped off in Italy, then sailed to Messina to stay with King Tancred of Sicily: a dispute between Richard and Tancred led the two guest kings to seize the city of Messina, after which they fell out over the distribution of the booty. Philip was also incensed that Richard now refused to marry Philip’s sister Alice, to whom he had been betrothed many years before, on the grounds that she had been seduced by his father, King Henry II, and had borne him a child.
In the spring, Philip Augustus left Messina and after an uneventful voyage reached Tyre. Richard’s journey was less straightforward: his fleet was forced to put in at Crete, then was blown north to Rhodes. While one of his ships was wrecked on the coast of Cyprus, another, carrying his betrothed, Berengaria of Navarre, who had been brought to Sicily by Richard’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and was now chaperoned by his sister, the dowager Queen of Sicily, Joan, was forced into the port of Limassol.
The self-appointed ruler of Cyprus, a renegade Byzantine prince, Isaac Ducas Comnenus, had formed an alliance with Saladin and so imprisoned the shipwrecked crusaders. Prudently, Joan and Berengaria declined his offer to land. Richard, when he caught up with them a week later, demanded the release of the captives and, when Isaac Ducas refused, prepared for war. Reinforced by a fleet from Acre carrying Guy of Lusignan, Prince Leo of Cilician Armenia, Bohemond of Antioch and Humphrey of Toron and the senior Templars in Outremer (the Templars, despite the death of Gérard de Ridefort, still backed King Guy), Richard embarked upon a lightning conquest of the island. Unloved by his Greek subjects, Isaac Ducas could put up but a feeble resistance and soon surrendered to the English King on condition that he would not be put in irons: Richard agreed and shackled him with silver fetters instead.
Enormously enriched by this conquest, Richard left a Latin garrison in its fortresses and two English justiciaries in charge of its administration, and sailed for Palestine. He landed near Tyre but by order of King Philip Augustus and Conrad of Montferrat was not allowed in. He therefore sailed south to Acre which he reached on 8 June. There his arrival boosted the morale of the crusaders. Philip Augustus, though intelligent and fascinated by siege-engines, was also sardonic and hypochondriacal, not qualities likely to inspire fighting men. He was also poorer than Richard who, even before the pillage of Cyprus, had emptied the treasuries of England and his French possessions to finance his crusade. With these ample resources and his martial reputation, it was agreed that Richard should take command of the crusade. The Templars admitted his friend and vassal, Robert of Sablé, as a brother and elected him their Grand Master.
One of the first actions of the new Grand Master was to buy Cyprus from Richard for 100,000 besants. News had reached Richard that his judiciaries on the island had been unable to control the Greek population: he wanted to be rid of the problem and must have known that the Templars, for all the recent depredations, had considerable treasure at their disposal. The agreement made, Robert of Sablé dispatched twenty knights with supporting squires and sergeants to take control of the island.
The main Templar force remained with the crusading army besieging Acre. On 12 July 1191, the Muslim garrison surrendered: Saladin had been unable to raise the siege. The price to be paid for the life of its inhabitants was 200,000 besants, the release of 1,500 Christian prisoners and the return of the relic of the True Cross. Conrad of Montferrat led the victorious crusaders into the city. King Richard moved into the royal palace; King Philip into the fortress previously held by the Templars. The Duke of Austria placed his banner on the ramparts next to those of the kings of England and France, thereby staking a claim to a share of the booty: the English, on Richard’s orders, tore it down and threw it over the ramparts into the moat. A compromise was reached between King Guy and Conrad of Montferrat: the former would reign until his death; the latter would be his successor. In the meantime the royal revenues would be shared.
With Acre now in Christian hands, a number of crusaders decided that their vows had been fulfilled and returned home. Leopold of Austria departed only days after his humiliation at the hands of King Richard. King Philip Augustus retired to Tyre with Conrad of Montferrat, then took ship for Brindisi: he had suffered from constant sickness and disliked the English King. Though he left most of his army under the command of the Duke of Burgundy, the barons of Outremer who backed Conrad were sad to see him go.
Richard the Lionheart was left as the undisputed commander of the crusading army. He became impatient when there was a hitch in the exchange of prisoners and the payment of the indemnity. According to one source, Saladin asked the Templars to guarantee the terms of an interim arrangement with Richard because, much as he hated them, he knew they would keep their word.216 The Templars were less sure of Richard and declined to give Saladin the assurance he required. Richard became exasperated at Saladin’s procrastination and personally supervised the execution of the Muslim captives: 2,700, among them women and children, were slaughtered by his English soldiers.
To the Muslims, this was a clear breach of Richard’s treaty with Saladin; to the Frankish chroniclers, it was a necessary and even praiseworthy action within the accepted conventions of war. Saladin, after all, had massacred the knights of the military orders after his victory at Hattin. Richard would certainly have secured the agreement of the other Christian princes before taking this drastic action: guarding the prisoners would have tied up a large part of the Latin force – something that no doubt entered into Saladin’s calculation – and so prevented the further progress of the crusade.
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Having disposed of their prisoners and strengthened the fortifications, the crusading army left Acre and marched south on the coast road towards Haifa and Caesarea. Constantly harassed by Saladin’s forces, the cavalry rode in tight formation with the Templars in the van and the Hospitallers in the rear. On the landward side they were protected by the Christian infantry, in particular Richard’s English archers, and they in turn protected the baggage train which was supplied by the Christian fleet that kept pace with the army. As it emerged from the Forest of Arsuf south of Caesarea, Saladin mounted an all-out assault. It was thrown back and despite light losses on both sides the outcome was a defeat for Saladin, the first in an outright battle since his victory at Hattin.
However, Saladin’s army – though weakened and suffering from defections – was not destroyed. Richard proceeded with his forces to Jaffa where he rebuilt the fortifications. It was clear that neither army was strong enough to destroy the other and so the conflict could only be resolved through negotiation. Frequent parleys were held with Saladin’s brother, al-Adil. Despite the massacre of the garrison of Acre, Saladin retained his profound regard for the English King. Initial courtesy led on to fraternisation: Richard proposed that al-Adil should marry his sister Joanna and that together they should jointly rule Palestine with the Holy City shared by their two religions, a suggestion that outraged Joanna and was not taken seriously by Saladin.
After spending Christmas at the monastery of Latrun in the Judaean hills, Richard led his army to within twelve miles of Jerusalem. The crusaders who had come from Europe wanted to besiege the Holy City but the barons of Outremer and the Grand Masters of the military orders counselled caution: even if Jerusalem was taken, how could it be held once Richard and the crusaders had departed? Without forward defences between Palestine and Sinai, it would remain permanently vulnerable to attack from Egypt.
Richard therefore returned to the coast and spent the first four months of 1192 fortifying Ascalon prior to a move on Gaza. Time was running out for the English monarch: disquieting news reached him from England about the activities of Philip Augustus and his brother John. Amicable negotiations with Saladin made it seem that a settlement was within his reach. He was also determined to leave the Kingdom of Jerusalem with a clear chain of command. Although his favoured candidate for the crown was Guy of Lusignan, he accepted the unanimous decision of the local barons that it should be Conrad of Montferrat; but even as preparations were made for his coronation, Conrad was murdered in the streets of Acre.
The killers were Assassins, sent by Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain. His purpose was unclear. Conrad had antagonised the Assassins by seizing a cargo ship that belonged to them and had refused any restitution; however, suspicion also fell on King Richard. Conrad’s close friend, the Bishop of Beauvais, whom he had visited just prior to his death, was convinced that the killers had been commissioned by the English King. Others argued that it was not his style to dispose of an enemy in such an underhand way; but the outcome was certainly to his advantage: within two days of Conrad’s assassination, his widow, the 21-year-old Queen Isabella, was betrothed to Richard’s nephew, Count Henry of Champagne.
For a final settlement of the affairs of Outremer, it only remained to dispose of Guy of Lusignan. With the concurrence of Robert of Sablé it was decided that, to make up for the loss of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, he should have Cyprus. The Templars had been no more successful than Richard’s judiciaries in controlling the island. The knights had proved rapacious and unpopular and, on 4 April 1192, the Latin garrison in Nicosia had been besieged by the Greeks. A sortie had dealt with the insurgents, but the incident had made clear that a small garrison could not control the population; ‘what was needed, if Cyprus was to be held permanently, was a large number of men with a vested interest in preserving the new regime’.217 The island was therefore returned to King Richard who promptly resold it to Guy of Lusignan for the balance owed by the Templars of 60,000 besants.
Impatient to return to Europe, Richard put further pressure on Saladin to come to terms. His army took the castle of Daron, south of Ascalon; but then, while Richard was in Acre, Saladin himself attacked Jaffa and after three days took the town. The garrison withdrew to the citadel and were on the point of surrender when fifty Pisan and Genoese galleys reached the city with King Richard on board. Jumping into the water and followed by only eighty knights, four hundred archers and around two thousand Italian marines, Richard fought his way through the streets of the city and put Saladin’s forces to flight. Before this small force could be relieved by Richard’s main army that was marching up the coast, Saladin counter-attacked. With brilliant improvisation, Richard directed his men to withstand wave after wave of the Muslim assault. ‘Saladin was lost in angry admiration at the sight.’218 When Richard’s horse was killed under him, this paragon of Islamic chivalry sent two fresh steeds as a gift for the English King.
By his personal courage and inspired tactics, Richard won the day; but it was now clear to both leaders that they faced stalemate: neither could destroy the other and both had pressing reasons to bring the conflict to an end. It was imperative that Richard should return home to secure his possessions in Europe while Saladin faced the perennial difficulty of maintaining a large army in the field. Although he had established a certain moral ascendancy in his role as the champion of Islam, his troops were often motivated by hope of booty in this world rather than reward in the next. Only this compensated for the dangers and privations of the campaign; and when it was not forthcoming, they found it difficult to resist the pull of home.
The obstacle to agreement in earlier negotiations had always been Ascalon: now Richard backed down. He agreed that Ascalon should be demolished: in return, Saladin guaranteed the Christians’ possession of the coastal cities from Antioch to Jaffa. Muslims and Christians were to be free to traverse each other’s territory. Christian pilgrims were to be free to visit Jerusalem and the other sites sacred to the Christian religion. Balian of Ibelin, Henry of Champagne and the Masters of the Temple and the Hospital swore on behalf of Richard to keep the peace for the next five years.
Many of Richard’s followers now went as unarmed pilgrims to the Holy City. Richard did not. He returned to Acre, settled his affairs and saw his wife and sister off on a ship to France. He himself set sail on 9 October: he had been in the Holy Land for sixteen months. His boat was blown off-course and was forced to put into port on the Byzantine island of Corfu. Fearing to be taken hostage by the Byzantine Emperor, Richard sailed with some pirates heading for Venice: he was disguised as a Templar and travelled with an escort that included four Templar knights.
His choice of route was forced upon him by political developments in his absence, in particular a war between his father-in-law, King Sancho of Navarre, and Raymond, Count of Toulouse. This made it impossible to land in any of the ports of southern France. With winter approaching, the long voyage through the Straits of Gibraltar and around the Iberian Peninsula was too hazardous; to travel through Italy and up the Rhine valley would make him vulnerable to capture by his enemy, the Hohenstaufen Emperor, Henry VI.
Making for Venice, the pirate boat went aground near Aquileia at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea. From here, Richard and his companions made their way north over the Alps disguised as pilgrims, but at an inn in Vienna Richard was recognised, supposedly because of the fabulously valuable ring that he still wore on his finger, and was handed over to his arch-enemy from the siege of Acre, Leopold, Duke of Austria. The man who had bought and sold the island of Cyprus now himself became a commodity: Leopold first imprisoned him in his castle of Dürrenstein, then passed him to his overlord, the Emperor Henry VI, whose terms for Richard’s release were that Richard should swear allegiance as the Emperor’s vassal and pay a ransom of 150,000 marks.
While Richard was in captivity, his admiring antagonist, Saladin, died. So too did his friend and former vassal, the Templar Grand Master, Robert of Sablé. King Philip Augustus and Richard’s brother John lobbied the Emperor to hold on to Richard but Richard – courteous, cheerful, almost nonchalant in his humiliating position – won support among the princes at the court of the German Emperor. In February 1194, he was released: he had made the required vows and, such was the prosperity of England at the time, most of his ransom had been paid. On hearing the news, King Philip Augustus wrote to John: ‘Beware, the devil is out.’
After spending only a month in England, Richard returned to Normandy and spent the next five years in intermittent warfare with rebellious vassals and King Philip Augustus of France. In 1199, while besieging the castle of Châlus belonging to one of his vassals, the Viscount of Limoges, he was hit in the shoulder by the bolt from a crossbow and fatally wounded. His mother, Eleanor, was summoned to his side and, after confessing his sins and receiving the last sacraments of the Church, Richard died on 6 April. He was forty-two years old.
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In the centuries that followed, Richard the Lionheart was remembered as a paragon of chivalry, the subject of a number of exotic and improbable legends. Each reflects the prejudices of its time. ‘If heroism be confined to brutal and ferocious valour,’ wrote Gibbon, ‘Richard Plantagenet will stand high among the heroes of his age.’ The most recent myth, that Richard was homosexual, has been accepted by many historians even though it can be traced back no further than 1948 and is now thought to be false. Contemporary chroniclers rather criticise him for an insatiable appetite for women so ‘that even on his deathbed he had them brought to him in defiance of his doctor’s advice’.219
A more persistent criticism of Richard was that his foreign adventures had an adverse effect on the governance of England. ‘No doubt he thought it was a great and good thing to fight for Jerusalem,’ wrote H. E. Marshall in his compendium for English schoolchildren, Our Island Story, ‘but how much better it would have been if he had tried to rule his own land peacefully, and bring happiness to his people.’220 Again, more recent assessments exonerate Richard: his responsibilities extended far beyond England, the least problematic of his domains. Despite his enthusiasm for fighting, which he shared with other knights of his time, he ‘was not a crudely bellicose king, a king bent on war for its own sake and on aggression, but a ruler intelligently concerned to employ his military talents in the widely extended interests of the house of Anjou of which he was the head’.221 Though, in retrospect, his struggle to preserve his inheritance within the Kingdom of France from the encroachments of the Capetians may appear to have been a lost cause, it did not seem so at the time.
The most telling criticism made of Richard by his contemporaries was that he recklessly endangered his own person by throwing himself into the fray. Even his enemies, the Saracens, thought it folly for a such an inspired commander to risk his life in combat; for alongside his daring and impetuosity, there was a genius for planning and logistics. It was this daring that brought his life to a premature end. But this does not detract from his overall achievements. The conclusion of the contemporary historian, John Gillingham, that ‘as a politician, administrator and warlord – in short, as a king – he was one of the most outstanding rulers of European history’, echoes the verdict of the Muslim chronicler, Ibn Athir, that Richard’s ‘courage, shrewdness, energy and patience made him the most remarkable ruler of his times’.222