AUTHOR’S NOTE

The story of Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, and the Third Crusade is one of the great adventure stories of history—but unlike the fictional stories which it otherwise so closely resembles, it dribbles away at the end. There is no satisfying conclusion, not even a grand defeat. Richard gave up his war in the very moment when he might have won it. Saladin lived to claim the victory, but he was exhausted, in many ways a broken man. He died not long after Richard sailed back into the west, leaving heirs who could not maintain the empire that he had built.

Richard for his part was shipwrecked on his way home and captured by the Grand Duke of Austria, whose enmity he had won during the Crusade, and held for ransom. His kingship, like his Crusade, frittered itself away into nothing, until he died as a result of a foolish attack on a minor castle.

Alternate history relies on turning points—on moments of multiple possibilities. There were many such in the Third Crusade, of which one of the most crucial was the battle of the Round Cistern, when Richard captured Saladin’s great Egyptian caravan. He could have forced matters then and taken Jerusalem—if he had not simply thrown it all away.

Certainly he had his reasons. His brother John was causing considerable difficulties in England and Normandy, and the King of France, who was no friend at all to Richard, was egging him on. Queen Eleanor in fact had left Richard in Cyprus before he set sail for Acre, and turned back toward home, in large part to keep John under control. Richard was in very real danger of losing his western possessions unless he hastened home to defend them.

Suppose that John had somehow been restrained, and Philip of France with him; suppose that Eleanor, with her powerful will and her relentless pursuit of her favorite son’s advantage, had gone with him on Crusade. Suppose further that the Old Man of the Mountain had succeeded in assassinating Saladin, who was his avowed enemy. The way would then have been clear for Richard to win his Crusade.

I am indebted to a large number of sources for the background of this book. Most important however are the following: on the side of Islam, Malcolm Cameron Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson, Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War (Cambridge, 1982), and on the side of the Crusade, Geoffrey Regan, Lionhearts: Saladin, Richard I, and the Era of the Third Crusade (New York, 1998).