Richard and John

FULLY TO MAKE SENSE of the era 1187-93 in Richard’s life, and especially the years after 1189, we have to turn aside from the running conflict between France and the Angevin empire to examine the labyrinthine complexity of Middle Eastern politics in the same epoch. The most militarily successful of all the Crusades, the first, saw Christian and Norman princelings established in what later became known as Outremer - the Christian lands beyond the sea. The great Prince Bohemond established himself in Antioch, and Godfrey of Bouillon stormed Jerusalem in 1098 and massacred thousands of Muslim defenders. To achieve security, the new princelings had to conquer all the coastal cities of Palestine, to ensure seaborne communications with Europe, and then to conquer Galilee to safeguard the frontier with the Muslim state of Syria, based on Damascus.¹ From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the ‘Franks’, as the Christians were habitually termed by their Muslim enemies, also expanded into southern Palestine and established famous fortresses like Krak. The conquest of Tyre in 1124 was particularly important, as it deprived the Egyptian fleet (the Egyptians were the natural enemies of Outremer) of watering facilities north of Ascalon.² By 1131 the Crusader kingdom comprised most of Palestine and the coast of Syria, both the inland cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Antioch and Edessa and the coastal cities of Latakia, Tortisa, Tripoli, Beirut, Tyre, Acre, Caesarea, Haifa, Jaffa and Ascalon. The largest cities were Jerusalem and Acre, with a population of about 25,000 each out of a total for the entire kingdom of Jerusalem of some 250,000. Two points are salient. By and large the crusader kingdoms and provinces were ruled by the younger sons of minor European aristocratic households, for the motivation to go on crusade was remarkably similar to the motives for the conquistadores four hundred years later as described by Bernal Diaz: ‘to serve God and to become rich’. Yet the crusaders could never have enjoyed the success of the First Crusade or the halcyon period of colonisation thereafter but for the weakness of the Fatimid regime and the general paralysis in the Muslim world caused by the doctrinal and ideological warfare between Sunni and Shia factions.³

The crusader states benefited from two great advantages. In the first place were the famous crusader castles that so bewitched T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia).⁴ Including walled cities, there were more than fifty of these. Although their military role has been overplayed - they could not stop invaders, for example, and their purely strategic importance was largely over by 1140 - they were important both administratively and economically. Administratively they formed the heartland of Outremer and were often the focus for settlement and colonisation projects, while economically they provided the force that allowed castellans to extract a surplus from the working population locally. It is difficult to separate civic and military or public and private aspects of the castles, but in purely military terms it can be said they usually performed a negative rather than positive function: they allowed Christians to counter-attack Muslim forces sortieing on raids from their own strongholds and they afforded a base providing water, supplies and - in case of defeat - protection; it was always wise to encounter an enemy near a friendly fortress.⁵ Finally, the best of the castles had a symbolic importance in that they betokened the indestructibility of Outremer. The great showpiece castle, supposedly impregnable, was Krak des Chevaliers (Hisn al-Akrad) in Syria.⁶ Here successive obstacles of fosse, outer and inner walls and three great towers acting as redoubts, formed an overlapping system of defence. The inner defences were much higher than the outer yet were close to them so that an enemy could be simultaneously engaged from both positions, while round towers, closely spaced at intervals from both lines of the wall, provided security from the flank. So formidable was Krak des Chevaliers that Saladin himself took one look at it and decided not even to try to besiege it.⁷ The other ‘secret weapon’ of the kingdom of Jerusalem was the two knightly orders that protected it: the Templars and the Hospitallers. The Hospitallers had developed from the hospices attached to a Benedictine monastery in Jerusalem in 1071, while the Templars were founded around 1119 to defend pilgrims travelling to the Holy Sepulchre. Having received papal recognition, the two orders added military roles to their functions, so that by the time of the Third Crusade they were the local backbone of the Christian armies in Outremer.⁸

The two obvious weaknesses of the Latin states were factionalism between the lords of the various castle-cities (especially Jersusalem, Antioch, Tripoli and Krak) and the fact that they ruled largely Muslim populations whose loyalty was suspect, especially in wartime.⁹ These disadvantages were played up by the rising star in the politics of the Middle East, Al-Malik al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Yusuf, known in the West as Saladin. Yusuf was the son of Najm-ad-Din, a Kurdish nobleman from northern Armenia, near Georgia. Najm-ad-Din migrated early in his career to Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, and was made constable of Takreet Castle on the River Tigris. Tradition said that Saladin was born on the very day in 1137 that Najm and his brother Shirkuh were disgraced and forced to relocate north in Mosul.¹⁰ After many adventures, Saladin had his early formation in Damascus, where his father was in the service of Zangi, formerly ruler of Mosul but now the lord of Syria. When Zangi died, the new prince of Damascus was his son Nur al-Din, the major influence on Saladin’s life, a man who had inherited Zangi’s anti-Frank zealotry.¹¹ An ambitious Sunni, Nur al-Din set his sights on the detested Shiite caliphate of the Fatimids in Egypt and determined to destroy it; as commander of his armies he appointed Shirkuh, with his 26-year-old nephew Saladin as his aide. Nur al-Din’s decision to launch his troops against Egypt was a courageous one, for it meant crossing territory dominated by the crusader states, but his gamble paid off. Although Shirkuh had to fight no less than three major campaigns in six years, and could not finish off the enemy even by the great victories at Kawm-al-Rish in 1164 and Al-Babain in 1167, finally, in 1169, he was triumphant and Nur al-Din’s banner fluttered above the mosques in Cairo. The Egyptian campaign was the making of Saladin: a promising staff officer at the beginning of the war but a leader of men and Shirkuh’s heir apparent by the end, he had also whetted his appetite for anti-Crusader warfare. The Franks, knowing the threat that would come from a united Egypt and Syria, intervened on the side of the Egyptian Fatimids but lost the third and final round of the struggle against Shirkuh.¹²

Shirkuh’s triumph was actually too complete for Nur al-Din, for he had unwittingly raised up a rival in the new vizier of Egypt. Shortly afterwards he died, by poison it was rumoured, but maybe simply from obesity.¹³ The removal of Shirkuh anyway did Nur al-Din no good, for Saladin promptly replaced him as vizier, being both acclaimed by the Army and then rubber-stamped by the Fatimid caliph. Saladin was in a ticklish situation in Cairo for, as a Sunni, he recognised the supremacy of the Sunni caliphate of the Abbasids in Baghdad, but in Egypt he was working for the Fatimids, its enemy. Until 1172 he walked a tightrope, surviving Fatimid conspiracies by the old guard of defeated malcontents who were prepared to ally themselves with the Franks to bring Saladin down. Knowing Nur al-Din’s enthusiasm for jihad, he realised that to make Egypt subservient to Syria would simply give Nur the resources of Egypt for a Holy War against Jerusalem, so, while gradually suppressing the Fatimid caliphate, he did not immediately completely abolish it but used it as a pawn in his diplomatic struggle with the lord of Damascus.¹⁴ The game was supremely dangerous, and a serious Fatimid rebellion in Cairo had to be suppressed, but Saladin, convinced that the Egyptian economy was not strong enough to weather the demands of Nur’s anti-Crusader aims, continued to play both sides against the middle. When he at last formally reinstated the Abbasids in Egypt but would still not obey directives from Damascus, Nur al-Din lost patience and decided to attack. In vain did Saladin protest that to join Nur in jihad would simply expose Egypt to crusader counter-attacks. He added insult to injury by wasting Egypt’s substance, as Nur al-Din saw it, in campaigns in Nubia, Libya and Tunisia. War between Saladin and Nur was imminent when the lord of Damascus died suddenly in 1174.¹⁵

The death of Nur al-Din produced a political situation similar to that in Egypt on the eve of Shirkuh’s invasions, but with the roles of Egypt and Syria reversed. By 1175 Saladin was master of Damascus as well as Cairo. His political talents could scarcely be denied, for he had overcome the manifold problems that assailed Egypt in the late twelfth century: mob violence in Cairo and Alexandria, Norman naval attacks, revolts in Upper Egypt, famine and plague, even currency devaluations. He had risen to the top despite the underlying problems like the vicious Shia-Sunni conflict and the political fragmentation caused by the rise of the vizier class, independent of the caliphs to whom they paid nominal allegiance. The caliph-vizier divorce of ownership and control, as it were, also uncannily mirrored the situation in France, where more powerful Angevin rulers paid homage to less powerful feudal overlords. Now that he had established his power base in Egypt, harnessed its economic resources, its army and even its fleet, and integrated Egypt with Syria, Saladin had the scope to display his military talent. The situation faced by the Christian kingdom of Outremer was more serious than in its entire history, and the crisis was made worse by the absence of its normal allies. Ironically, in the very same year that the western emperor Frederick Barbarossa came to disaster at Legnano in Italy (1176), the eastern emperor Manuel sustained a stunning defeat at Iconium at the hands of the Saljuquids.¹⁶ The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem could no longer look to Byzantium for support. In contrast to the situation ten or fifteen years earlier, Syria and Egypt now had little to fear from Outremer, especially as Venice, Pisa and Genoa, putative crusader allies, were trading with Egypt after meeting commercial resistance in Byzantium. Additionally, king Almaric, erstwhile scourge of Egypt, died in 1174 and was succeeded by the 13-year-old Baldwin, Jerusalem’s leper king.¹⁷

Why, then, did it take a dozen years, between seizing power in Syria and 1187, before Saladin moved decisively against the Franks? In the first place, it took him that long to bring the whole of non-Christian Syria and Mesopotamia under his control. The long campaigns against the atabegs of Aleppo and Mosul occupied an unconscionable amount of his time and attention, even though Saladin made occasional forays against the Franks.¹⁸ It was estimated that after 1174 Saladin spent thirteen months fighting the Christian states but thirty-three in battles against his fellow-Muslims.¹⁹ All sections of his domains had specific grouses, with Egyptians in particular feeling that Saladin consistently neglected their interests in favour of Syria’s. Some of his own table-talk was scarcely helpful, as with the much-touted saying: ‘Egypt is a whore who has tried in vain to part me from my faithful wife, Syria.’²⁰ But even Syrians felt resentful. Cynics said of him: ‘Saladin spent the revenues of Egypt to gain Syria, and the revenues of Syria to gain Mesopotamia.’²¹ He was vehemently criticised within the Islamic world for wasting so much time in campaigns against Muslim states rather than against the infidel - exactly the criticism successive popes had made of Henry II and the French kings. Doubtless Saladin hoped for quick victories against Aleppo and Mosul, but these constantly eluded him. Additionally, the Aleppo ruler trumped his ace by calling in the radical sect of Islamic hitmen - the Assassins - to deal with him. There was a contract out on Saladin in 1176 until he bribed the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’ (the Assassins’ leader) to desist, after which there was no more trouble with them.²² Yet another problem was the rising power of Qilijarslan, the Saljuquid sultan who defeated the Byzantines at Iconium and was now looking covetously at the Euphrates. Saladin and Qilijarslan confronted each other once, in 1178, but the Saljuquids thought better of battle and withdrew.²³ Moreover, the Franks did not stand idly by while Saladin was thus preoccupied but raided into his territories. And Saladin was never entirely a free agent. He had to consult the interests of local warlords, who were apathetic about the idea of an anti-Christian jihad. Finally, there is the distinct possibility that Saladin himself was never that interested in Holy War, that his real preoccupation was a united Islam under a centralised Abbasid caliphate.²⁴

During the years 1175-86 Saladin had many brushes with the crusaders. There were major skirmishes in 1177 and in 1179, when Saladin turned the screw by sending his fleet of 60 galleys and 20 transports on a raid along the coasts of Syria and Asia Minor which netted over a thousand prisoners. In 1183 Guy of Lusignan confronted Saladin with a Christian army, but both sides declined battle.²⁵ In general in these years, Saladin was preoccupied with Mosul and Aleppo and responded only to direct provocation from the Franks. Everything changed in 1186 when Saladin broke the power of Mosul (Aleppo had fallen in 1183) and he was finally able to devote his full-time attention to the kingdom of Jerusalem. Saladin’s new bearing came at the worst possible moment for Outremer, deprived as it was of its traditional allies by the decline of Byzantine power and riven by factionalism.²⁶ By the early 1180s three major figures had emerged on the Christian side. Baldwin IV, affected by leprosy, was gradually turning the kingdom over to Guy of Lusignan but there was considerable resentment about this, since Guy was a ‘new man’, an interloper in the eyes of ‘old Outremer’, an adventurer who had made his mark by marrying Sybilla, the widowed sister of the king of Jerusalem, in 1180. Temporarily Regent in 1184 but meeting stiff opposition, Guy got his big chance when Baldwin died of leprosy in 1185 and his infant heir the next year. Despite intense unpopularity, Guy manoeuvred his way to the throne and was crowned in 1186 - a Poitevin king. Quite apart from religious considerations, Henry II and Richard now had a more immediate interest in Jerusalem, for Guy was nominally their vassal as a Poitevin subject of Richard, and Sybilla, as a member of the junior branch of the house of Anjou, was a cousin.²⁷

The two other figures were bitter enemies of Guy of Lusignan, though they could not have been more unlike. Raymond of Tripoli would have been a more popular choice as king of Jerusalem, and he and his many supporters continued to brood about this setback. One of the ‘old guard’ of the Latin kingdom, a wiry man of medium height with a hawk nose and dark complexion, Raymond was a great warrior but a wise, solomonic and magnanimous counsellor and a great ally and promoter of the Hospitallers. He had suffered imprisonment at the hands of the Muslims but had learned to admire them, spoke Arabic and advocated peaceful co-existence with the heathen. He married the widow of the lord of Tiberias, whose territory, on the shores of lake Galilee and containing the New Testament locations of Nazareth and Mount Tabor, was the most vulnerable fief in the whole of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the first target for any invasion from Arabic Syria.²⁸ Mindful of this and resentful of Guy of Lusignan, Raymond established good relations with Saladin and even entered into a treaty of friendship with him. Utterly unlike Raymond in every way was the chief ‘hawk’ of the kingdom, Reginald (Reynald) of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, a classical crusader-adventurer from a minor family in northern France, who had come east in 1147 in search of wealth. Captured by Muslims in 1160, Reginald had spent fourteen years in captivity until ransomed for the enormous sum of 120,000 gold dinars. His years as a prisoner had left him with a fanatical, undying hatred of the Islamic world and all its works. Notorious for his cruelty, Reginald had been an eager warrior in the many clashes with Saladin in the period 1175-87. In 1182-83 his anti-Saladin zealotry bore fruit in a quixotic raid on the Red Sea, part of a grand design apparently conceived to sack Mecca and Medina and carry off the sacred black stone or Ka’aba. His piratical fleet was defeated by Saladin’s navy off Medina, but Reginald escaped to fight another day. Saladin, who was heavily criticised for allowing the infidel to penetrate so close to the holy cities of Islam, swore a mighty oath that he would capture and behead the lord of Kerak. A wise man might have sought conciliation, as Raymond of Tripoli did, but in 1187 Reginald compounded his ‘blasphemy’ by attacking and slaughtering Arab pilgrims as they passed Kerak; among those taken for ransom from the caravan was Saladin’s sister. Reginald had now insulted Saladin’s family as well as the Prophet.²⁹

Saladin at once appealed to Guy of Lusignan, as king of Jerusalem, to restore his sister and offer an apology and compensation for the attack on the caravan. Guy agreed that some such action was due, but Reginald of Châtillon, backed by the diehard leader of the Templars, Gérard de Rideford (another anti-Islamic fanatic), brutally rebuffed him, telling him in effect that events in the environs of Kerak were none of his business. Saladin methodically collected the largest army he had ever put in the field (some 25,000 strong), and then asked Raymond of Tripoli, his nominal ally, for permission to cross his territory so as to be able to strike back at Reginald de Châtillon. Raymond was thus in a terrible dilemma, bound on the one hand to an ally but on the other forced to betray his co-religionists if he honoured the alliance. The hawks, led by Châtillon and de Rideford, poured out all their venom on Raymond, alleging that he had ‘gone native’ and was a traitor to the Christian religion. Threshing around desperately to find a way out of this conundrum, Raymond hit on the idea of suggesting that Saladin’s forces arrive in Tiberias by sunset but be gone by sunrise the next morning without any raiding en route.³⁰ He salved his conscience by warning Guy of Lusignan that an attack was coming. But nothing could stem the Christian fanatics. When Saladin’s forces crossed the River Jordan into Lower Galilee on 1 May 1187, a small force of Western knights, mainly Templars, engaged them at Cresson, two miles from Nazareth. Despite having merely hundreds to launch against thousands, Gérard de Rideford attacked. The Muslim army simply opened up like the biblical Red Sea, swallowed up the mailed knights, then closed up again, engulfing the Franks in frightful slaughter; miraculously de Rideford and four horsemen escaped, but they left behind over one hundred slain knights, the cream of the kingdom’s chivalry.³¹ The debacle meant the end for Raymond of Tripoli’s fence-sitting diplomacy. His ‘treachery’, not de Rideford’s folly, was blamed for the disaster, and he came under massive pressure, even from his own troops, to abandon his alliance with Saladin. Bowing to the inevitable, Raymond went to Jerusalem with his men and swore allegiance to Guy of Lusignan.

News of Cresson made even hesitant Arab warriors keen to join Saladin, who declared that this was a critical moment in the history of Islam, requiring a supreme effort. With an army of 25,000 men, Saladin at last had the manpower to offset the Franks’ advantage in technology and discipline. But the Franks too were now waging Holy War. The remainder of the kingdom’s 1,200 knights joined Guy’s 20,000 foot to make up the most formidable Christian host yet seen in the Latin kingdom. Saladin next began by tempting Guy’s army to move out of its secure rendezvous point at La Safouri. He laid waste the lands of Raymond, his erstwhile ally, even defiling the cone of Mount Tabor, the scene of the biblical Transfiguration. Since Raymond’s wife had remained at Tiberias, that walled city was Saladin’s next target, and soon the Arab army had breached the outer walls. At a council of war called by Guy of Lusignan, Reginald de Châtillon and Gérard de Rideford predictably urged immediate rescue but Raymond, the immediately injured party, advised waiting Saladin out and making a stand at Acre instead.³² In the contest between the cautious and intelligent Raymond, backed by the Hospitallers, and the firebrand de Châtillon, backed by de Rideford and the Templars, it was perhaps inevitable that the hawks would prevail. But legend has it that it was only when de Rideford stole into Guy of Lusignan’s tent after the council and accused him of arrant cowardice that Guy, seeing the issue as a point of personal honour, finally snapped and gave the order for an immediate attack.³³

The crusader army proceeded to make every mistake in the book. Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee lay fifteen miles east of La Safouri, at first over the arid plain of Lubiya and then up onto the ridge of Hattin, with the final stage of the march over a waterless wilderness. Since it was only possible for a large, heavily encumbered force to march 6-7 miles a day in such conditions, the Christian army did not reach the village of Turan, with the last waterhole before the lake of Galilee itself, until noon on 3 July. They then set out immediately to march the nine miles to the lake, having to face the prospect of a battle without water if Saladin opposed them. As soon as they left Turan, Saladin sent riders to cut off their retreat. By nightfall Guy and his men were encamped in the middle of the desert, waterless and with the horn of Hattin, scene of the Sermon on the Mount, ahead of them. During the night of 3-4 July the Arab army surrounded them. Saladin positioned his archers carefully, telling them to aim at the horses for, without mounts, the fearsome Frankish knights were powerless. By morning, having spent a parched, thirsty night in great agony, the Christian troops were beaten before battle was even joined. Saladin could have finished his enemy off at dawn but, prolonging the agony, waited until the sun was high in the sky before attacking and destroying the Christian host piecemeal.³⁴ Defeat for Guy of Lusignan was total and the massacre fearful. Somehow Raymond of Tripoli escaped from the bloody battlefield, but Guy, de Rideford and Reginald de Châtillon were captured and brought before Saladin. After giving Châtillon the chance to convert to Islam, which Reginald contemptuously rejected, Saladin cut him down where he stood, leaving his guards to administer the coup de grâce. Guy feared a similar fate but Saladin shrugged and said to him: ‘Real kings do not kill each other. But that man was no king and had overstepped the mark. So, what happened, happened.’³⁵

Saladin was not so merciful towards the captured Templars and Hospitallers, whom he ordered executed to the last man. The True Cross, which Guy had brought from the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem to the field of battle, was sent on to Damascus. Saladin’s armies then swept over the kingdom of Jerusalem. Acre, Beirut and Sidon surrendered without a fight. Only Tyre, whose defence was masterminded by Conrad of Montferrat, an adventurer who had made himself prince of the city, held out. Unable to make an impression on Tyre, Saladin moved on to take Caesarea, Arsuf and Jaffa. His next target was Ascalon, one of the five cities of the biblical Philistines. His idea was that he would barter Guy of Lusignan’s freedom for Ascalon’s surrender, but at first Guy returned empty-handed; fortunately for him, Ascalon soon afterwards had second thoughts and ran up the white flag. De Rideford gained his freedom in a similar way, after persuading the Templar castle of Gaza not to resist Saladin.³⁶ Instead of concentrating on strategic objectives, Saladin now decided that the propaganda coup of taking Jerusalem was irresistible. Jerusalem faced his coming with trepidation, for this was the scene of the massacre of some 40,000 Muslims by the Franks in the climax to the First Crusade in 1098. A vigorous defence of the Holy City by Balian of Ibelin convinced Saladin that a negotiated surrender was best; he knew reinforcements would reach the Franks from the West and he could not afford to lose manpower in a costly siege. Nonetheless, the terms of surrender were harsh. Those who could afford to pay steep ransoms were allowed to depart; those who could not were enslaved. Among the latter were many Christian women who suffered mass rape and enforced concubinage. ³⁷ But atrocities were largely forgotten in the more general shock sustained by Christendom when Saladin entered Jerusalem on 2 October 1187. The archbishop of Tyre toured Europe preaching the crusade, while Pope Gregory VIII issued the encyclical Audita Tremendi on 29 October, calling on the faithful to rally to the rescue of Jerusalem and granting a plenary indulgence and other benefits to all who took the Cross.³⁸

Dramatic and convulsive as these events were, they took time to make an impact on the feuding French and Angevins in Western Europe, where for a time it was still ‘business as usual’. Tired of the entire running farce over Alice and determined to solve the issue once and for all, Philip next threatened an immediate invasion of Normandy unless Henry either returned Gisors and the Vexin or compelled Richard to marry Alice forthwith. But, in a surprise twist of events, at the supposedly ‘final’ conference at Gisors in January 1188, impassioned rhetoric from the archbishop of Tyre persuaded both kings to take the Cross themselves. Neither Henry nor Philip wanted to go on crusade - they regarded it as a tiresome diversion from the real arena of their interests in France - but they were increasingly being swept along by a force of public opinion that was more typhoon than tide.³⁹ Passions were running high, with those reluctant to crusade being sent ‘womanly’ tokens of wool and distaff - the twelfth-century equivalent of white feathers. Crusaders were offered important concessions: the freezing of all debt until return from the Holy Land; the protection of the Church for their property while they were away; and a plenary indulgence which wiped out all sin and removed the fear of Hell and Purgatory. Henry and Philip were caught in the whirlwind of history - Henry particularly, who had pledged himself to crusade since 1172 but had done nothing about it.⁴⁰ The two kings now had to raise the money for the expedition, and a special Saladin Tithe was ordained in England - the first tax in English history levied on personal property other than real estate. But it was agreed that both monarchs would need at least a year to prepare a host sufficient to deal with Saladin, so that the proposed General Passage through Europe would have to be postponed into 1189. Nonetheless a major crusading conference was held at Le Mans in early 1188, where it was agreed that French troops would wear red crosses, the English white and the Flemish green. Philip sent advance envoys to the king of Hungary and the emperor at Constantinople to secure safe passage for the armies, while Richard, planning a seaborne approach across the Mediterranean, wrote letters to his brother-in-law King William of Sicily, requesting merchant shipping there. But the recruiting masterstroke among the many decrees at Le Mans was the exemption of all crusaders from paying the Saladin Tithe, which led many an ungodly knight to take the Cross.⁴¹

Even while these complex matters were being thrashed out at Le Mans, yet another rebellion broke out in Aquitaine, featuring Richard’s old adversaries Geoffrey de Lusignan, Ademer of Angoulême, Geoffrey de Rancon and the Taillefers, who followed the rebel banner even though Richard had given up his original demand that Angoulême should be inherited by Vulgrin’s daughter Matilda. The rising was something of a rerun of the events of 1179, with the castle of Taillebourg once more featuring as the centrepiece of the insurrection, but it was as futile as the one nine years earlier, for Richard simply hurried south and repeated his former exploits, taking all rebel castles and laying waste their territories with fire and sword. If the rebels had had any sense, they would have waited until Richard was safely on crusade in the Holy Land. But now, foreseeing that there would be another rising once he was out of the country, Richard pardoned the insurgents on the express understanding that they would all take the Cross.⁴² Yet no sooner had he put this revolt down than he became involved in fresh hostilities with count Raymond of Toulouse; being duke of Aquitaine seemed like an everlasting game of Chinese boxes. Raymond had visited some atrocities on a party of Aquitaine merchants - either he blinded them or castrated them - and Richard, in a revenge raid, captured Raymond’s right-hand man Peter Seillan. Raymond retaliated by taking prisoner two of Henry II’s knights, on their way back from pilgrimage at Compostela. The stand-off soon turned into outright war - Philip of France tried to arbitrate but was rebuffed by both sides. Richard’s Brabançon mercenaries assailed Toulouse while he himself took seventeen castles in a sweep to the north as far as Cahors. When Richard’s combined army approached the gates of Toulouse, the citizens made it clear they were willing to do an immediate deal with him.⁴³

Seeing disaster looming, Raymond appealed to the king of France. Philip did not want to fall out with his new friend Richard, and in any case that would leave Richard nowhere to go but back to Henry, which would defeat the point of Philip’s anti-Angevin campaign. So, instead of replying to Raymond, he duplicitously complained to Henry about his son’s behaviour at Toulouse. Henry replied that events in Aquitaine were nothing to do with him. In fact he was playing a double game, apparently with the intention of stopping Richard from going on crusade this year. He hated the idea of Richard’s having an independent command that was proceeding ahead of the overland armies by sea, partly because he feared his son would win the renown as a general he felt should be his alone. Not only did he disavow Richard’s actions, but Richard soon found evidence that his father had given moral and financial backing to both the Aquitaine rebels and Count Raymond. This was the end of the road for Richard as far as Henry was concerned.⁴⁴ Once Philip realised that Richard now harboured an implacable hatred for his father, he turned on his erstwhile friend and invaded Berry, in retaliation for the attack on Toulouse. Philip claimed, unconvincingly, that the attack on Toulouse was a breach of the January 1188 accord, but in fact Raymond had not agreed to take the Cross so was not covered by its provisions. Philip was being doubly disingenuous for Raymond, as a rebel against a declared crusader, should have been anathematised by the general decree of excommunication pronounced at Le Mans against all who hindered or delayed the General Passage. The real reason for Philip’s intervention was that he regarded Toulouse as an integral part of France and could now be reasonably confident that Richard and Henry would not combine in the field against him. His invasion of Berry was a fully-fledged affair, with a full complement of siege engines. On 16 June he easily took the fortress of Châteauroux - so easily that it was reliably reported that a fifth column had treacherously delivered it to him. Once Berry switched its allegiance to Philip, the lord of Vendôme followed suit.⁴⁵

Henry II was caught in the coils of his own double-dealing, for soon Loches and other key strongholds in the Angevin heartland were threatened as Philip’s success became breakaway. Alarmed by the turn of events, Henry sent a deputation to Philip to protest against his invasion of Aquitainian territory. When this made no impression, he assembled an army, made ready to cross the Channel himself, sent out raiding armies on French dominions and began helping Richard to recover Berry. After narrowly escaping destruction in a terrific Channel storm, he landed in Normandy on 11 July 1188.⁴⁶ Wrongfooted as a result of a bad miscalculation - that Henry and Richard would never again make common cause - Philip was forced to withdraw from Berry to protect his northern border with Normandy, leaving Richard free to recover most of his lost territories. Yet the fortress of Châteauroux stubbornly held out. While in a scrimmage outside the gates, Richard was thrown from his horse but quickly rescued when a giant of a man, a butcher by trade, plucked him from the ground.⁴⁷ Meanwhile the Philip-Henry confrontation was heading towards the inevitable stalemate. Henry simply camped on the Normandy borders and made no attempt to invade France, as he feared the prospect of a pitched battle. Philip struck south again but his campaign ran into the sands when Richard moved into the Loire valley to meet him. Philip retreated to Paris and Richard, seeing him gone, rejoined his father in Normandy. The king of France was running out of options, for his barons advised him he should not be making war on the Angevins or any other fellow Christians at this juncture when every last fighting man was needed for the crusade in the Holy Land.⁴⁸

Yet another peace conference was arranged at Gisors. On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August 1188, Philip, Henry and Richard convened under the eye of Holy Mother Church, with papal envoys frantically beseeching the great lords to compose their quarrel so that the crusade could begin. But this three-day conclave began badly and ended in farce or bathos. On the second day a French knight made fun of a Welsh archer in Henry’s service for his strange accent and weird attire. The Welshman fitted an arrow to his bow and shot the shaft into his taunter’s head. The wound was not fatal, but now, under the famous tree of Gisors which was supposed to guarantee safe conduct and no blow could be struck, the French knight showed King Philip the arrow sticking from his skull and asked for satisfaction. Philip angrily declared the conference at an end. William Marshal, who was with Henry, hardly improved matters by intervening to suggest that, although his liege lord accepted responsibility for this crime, both sides should make up by a general joust. When this was angrily spurned, he suggested a four-against-four duel of champions; as he was the greatest knight in Christendom, this was a contest he clearly expected to win.⁴⁹ Philip simply became more angry at this absurd offer of ‘compensation’ and stalked away angrily. Brooding in his tent, he finally found a way to avenge himself on Henry for the egregious breach of traditional ceasefire terms at the tree of Gisors. That night he sent out a party of axemen who cut down the famous elm tree and used it as firewood. News of this ‘sacrilegious’ act caused a sensation, but Philip was making it clear that he had had enough of the endless deadlock at these colloquys and of Henry II’s endless lies. He was in effect declaring that there could be no dealing with Henry and the only recourse was war to the death.⁵⁰

On 30 August the Angevin army crossed the border and marched towards Mantes, burning and looting as it went in a particularly devastating raid. Richard was involved in a successful skirmish with a French knight, William de Barres, which further increased the diapason of ill-feeling caused by the Gisors conference. De Barres surrendered to Richard and was released on parole - the standard practice in both war and tournaments - but escaped on horseback, to Richard’s great fury. The French then added chivalric insolence to injury by claiming that the real cheat was Richard because he had thrust his sword into William’s horse, although, as William Marshal’s career showed, this too was standard practice.⁵¹ Clearly nerves were on edge on both sides, with the monarchs especially fretting at the burdensome costs of maintaining knights and archers in a combination of idleness and constant readiness. Then there were the calls of both harvest and vintage in the autumn, and the constant undertow of criticism, especially from the clergy, that putative fellow-crusaders should not be trying to kill each other. So, despite Philip’s vow that there would be no more talk, circumstances forced him to agree to yet another conference on 7 October 1188, this time at Châtillon on the border of Touraine and Berry. Philip hoped to find a way to drive an entering wedge between Richard and Henry but began cautiously, offering to waive his conquests in Berry on condition that Richard handed back his gains in Toulouse to Count Raymond. Richard replied that he wanted the two matters kept separate, but offered to accept Philip as arbitrator between him and Raymond. Clearly he thought he could not trust Henry and suspected him of still wanting to cut him out of the succession in favour of John; an entente with Philip was therefore his insurance policy. This unilateral decision in turn enraged Henry, who felt he should have been consulted. When Philip escalated matters by asking for the surrender of a castle as an earnest of Henry’s good intentions while he (Philip) arbitrated between Richard and Raymond, the Old King stormed out in a rage.⁵²

Now that Richard was negotiating directly with him and was not part of an Angevin united front, Philip could deluge his ally with all the rumours, all the intelligence both hard and soft, that his spies brought him about Henry’s future intentions. One circumstantial detail that nobody could argue round was that John had not taken the Cross. Why not? Was Henry simply waiting until Richard had left for the Middle East before making his move and naming John as his successor? Philip kept such suspicions at white heat. His agents claimed to have uncovered a plot whereby every vassal in Anjou and Aquitaine would be forced to pay homage to John; when Richard returned from crusade, with his own loyal forces depleted by a hard campaign against Saladin, he would find John installed in Aquitaine with the citadels of every castle there barred against him. On Philip’s advice, Richard decided, despite his natural repugnance, that he would marry Alice as a point of policy, and in return Philip would press Henry to say before the whole world that he recognised Richard as his undoubted and indefeasible heir. Agreed on all points, Richard and Philip then demanded another colloquy with Henry, who could not refuse unless he was to stand forth as the man who prevented the Crusade from setting out; Henry had had enough trouble with the papacy over Becket to be unwilling to face a fresh threat of excommunication.⁵³ Accordingly, a fresh conference took place at Bonsmoulins on 18 November. Richard and Philip arrived together, rather ostentatiously making the point that they were now allies. They began with a kind of ‘dumb show’ where Philip suggested an exchange of conquests to Richard and he indignantly rejected it. Presumably this charade was meant to allay suspicions about their collusion, but it fooled no one. The atmosphere at the conference was notably tense. On the first day the parties managed to control themselves, but on the second day there were raised voices and angry exchanges, and by the third swords had been drawn. Richard made three demands that Henry found unacceptable: he must be proclaimed heir apparent to Henry in Normandy and England; he must immediately come into possession of all other Angevin fiefs; and he must marry Alice without delay. When Henry declared that these demands were simple blackmail, Richard replied: ‘Now at last I must believe what I previously thought was incredible.’⁵⁴

Without more ado Richard knelt and swore fealty to Philip. The breach between father and son was irreparable. That evening, when Richard rode off with Philip to Amboise, he began laying plans for calling out his vassals in Aquitaine for war against Henry. The Old King seemed bewildered and crushed by the turn of events. In his retinue he had Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury and Hugh, bishop of Lincoln and now he turned on them, claiming that God had deserted him and, as his servants, they should have interceded for him. When the divines cautioned him against blasphemy, Henry whipped himself into new heights of execration. ‘Why should I venerate and honour Christ,’ he asked, ‘who has allowed a mere stable-boy to insult and dishonour me?’ When the bishops protested, he made obscene and atheistic references to the Christian God, so startling that Gerald of Wales, who reports the conversation, could not bring himself to mention the exact words.⁵⁵ What seems to have infuriated Henry most of all was that his bluff had been called and he had been outwitted by a son whose intelligence he despised. For years he had kept Alice in play as a political pawn, knowing very well that Richard would not marry her because she was a royal mistress. Now, prompted by the cunning Philip, Richard had stated openly that he wished to marry Alice. It was quite clear to Henry that Richard could not have thought up such a devastating change of tactics for himself and that he was now firmly in Philip’s pocket. Gradually, though, his advisers talked him round. William Marshal said that the king owed it to himself and his realm to try to bring Richard back to his side. Henry tried the old ploy of bombarding his son with dozens of envoys, all pleading with him to return, but the Old King had cried wolf once too often and Richard was not impressed. William Marshal told Henry bluntly that the idea of ‘turning’ Richard was hopeless.⁵⁶ Hearing from his messengers that each new overture served only to make Richard indite another letter calling out further feudal levies, Henry bent his energies to securing his castles in Anjou. The agent for this mission was his faithful bastard son and now Chancellor, Geoffrey.

Henry was faced with a terrible crisis, worse than all he had endured with the Young King, as he no longer had the energy to deal tirelessly with it, as in earlier years. He was disconcerted to find that all the great knights of Aquitaine were declaring for Richard.⁵⁷ At root Henry was to blame: for his machiavellianism over the succession, his dishonesty over Alice, his partiality for John and his basic manipulative deviousness. It is possible, as some historians have maintained, that he was not planning to supplant Richard with John, that he believed too strongly in hereditary, indefeasible right for that, that he was simply the victim of his own deviousness. The historian W.L. Warren wrote. ‘Henry had adopted the tactic of trying to discipline Richard by keeping him in uncertainty and had then become caught in the coils of his own deviousness. ’⁵⁸ It is true that he made no overt steps in John’s favour, except to prevent him from taking the Cross. One view is that Henry knew in his heart that Richard would succeed but refused to acknowledge him publicly because of the harm that had been caused when he announced the succession of the Young King prematurely.⁵⁹ Yet there is much that points the other way, towards a genuine desire to displace Richard in favour of his beloved John, and the endless vacillations and policy shifts may instead indicate a man determined that John should be king but uncertain how exactly to achieve that aim.⁶⁰ Certainly the analogy with the Young King was disingenuous, as Henry must have known. The Young King was an idler and wastrel who had eschewed responsibility and proven himself incompetent in government. With Richard the reverse was the case. And it is unconvincing to think that Henry was still playing manipulative games with no ulterior purpose in the years 1187-89, unless we conclude that he was stupid rather than cunning. Whereas he could have got away with sheer deviousness for its own sake or to control Richard before the Crusade became a pressing issue, once that loomed across the face of Europe, only an idiotic ruler would have continued in the same vein. The obstinacy in the face of pressure from the pope and Christian Europe in general surely points towards a grim determination to make John king, whatever the political cost.⁶¹

That Henry’s star was fading was obvious at his last Christmas court, held at Saumur. Of his family only John was present; even more ominously most of his great barons stayed away, clearly awaiting the moment to transfer their allegiance to Richard or Philip. The truce agreed at Châtillon to last until the New Year 1189 was extended until Easter, but halfway through Lent Henry fell ill at Le Mans and took to his bed. The archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Tours and the archbishop of Rouen acted as a triumvirate of fathers-confessor and persuaded the Old King to confess his sins in a proper canonical form. Even close to death Henry remained devious and now he tried to con the Almighty, admitting to ‘sins’ that could be extenuated as raison d’état but denying graver ones of which he was obviously guilty. At first the bishops refused absolution on the grounds that Henry had not made a firm purpose of amendment; this was why they felt free to divulge his bogus confession. Yet in the end they were persuaded that Henry’s fear of Hell was enough to make his confession genuine - quite how is a mystery, as Henry continued his atheistic ravings - and granted him the sacrament. Informed of Henry’s illness, both Richard and Philip refused to believe that it was genuine and suspected some typically Henrician trick. Once the truce lapsed, they continued their raiding to the point where Britanny, seeing no counter-movement from the Old King, rose in revolt. The Angevin empire was starting to come apart at the seams.⁶² Desperately Henry sent envoy after envoy to Richard, but the time for that had long gone; although many in the Old King’s entourage were convinced that he was now genuinely sorry for the shabby way he had treated Richard, the harsh fact was that his eldest son no longer believed a word he said.⁶³

Finally in June a papal legate named John of Anagni, under orders from the Vatican to compose the quarrel so that the Crusade could proceed, assembled an arbitration panel of himself and four bishops, two nominated by each side (the bishops of Rheims, Bourges, Rouen and Canterbury). The arbitrators met at La Ferte-Bernard in Maine, twenty-five miles north-east of Le Mans, secure in the pledge by both kings that they would abide by the decision. Many other bishops and abbots attended the conference out of curiosity, to the point where one observer said the gathering looked more like a synod of the Gallican Church than a peace conference of warring factions. But both sides arrived with armed guards, suspecting treachery. Richard and Philip once more demanded that Henry guarantee Richard’s inheritance as heir apparent and immediately agree to his marriage with Alice. It may have been the irksome presence of John in his sick father’s retinue that made Richard add a further condition: John was to take the Cross and depart overland with Philip before he, Richard, would set out for the Mediterranean. Henry retorted that he would accept all conditions but the one relating to Alice for, he now announced, he wanted her to marry John. Richard and Philip were outraged by this latest twist in Henry’s serpentine schemings and rejected the idea angrily. But the papal legate and the panel now seemed to feel it was Richard who was being intransigent; the Old King’s political skill had still not deserted him. John of Anagni threatened to lay a papal interdict on France if Henry’s terms were not accepted; Philip, never one to take a direct threat lying down, replied haughtily that it was easy to see that the legate’s bags were full of English silver. Yet another conference broke up in acrimonious chaos.⁶⁴

Henry withdrew at once to Le Mans, but Richard and Philip attacked La Ferte-Bernard and quickly took it. A lightning campaign saw many more of Henry’s castles - Montfort, Maletable, Beaumont, Ballon - fall into their hands. Henry was now in a desperate situation, for Aquitaine was wholly with Richard, England was dragging its feet about sending troops to the continent (and they would not be available for two months anyway), and Normandy was poised to receive an invasion from Philip. At first he hoped to make a stand at Le Mans and burned all the bridges over the River Huisne, thinking this would flummox Richard. But on 10 June his son rode with his knights in full armour into the middle of the stream, sounded the bottom with their lances and found a fording place. Still reluctant to abandon the town of his birth, Henry ordered the suburbs of Le Mans burned down, to provide a fire break between Richard’s army and the defenders, but the blaze got out of control and began gutting the wooden houses around the citadel.⁶⁵ On the 11th Henry realised Le Mans was bound to fall and rode away northwards with his knights, towards Normandy; at the head of the column, surrounded by bodyguards so that he could come to no harm, was his beloved John. It is said that, two miles out of Le Mans, Henry mounted a hilltop to look back on his favourite city. When he saw it in flames he had another of his rants against providence. ‘God, you have foully taken from me the city I loved best in all the world, the city where I was born and raised, the city where my father is buried, the city which holds the tomb of St Julian. I shall be revenged on you as best I can. I shall deny you my soul’, were the words attributed to him. The vanguard rode without armour, but William Marshal and his followers provided a heavily-mailed rearguard. Richard meanwhile was pursuing his father on a fast horse so as to give him no respite, so rode armourless in his tunic. One of Henry’s knights, William des Roches, charged into Richard’s knights, despite curses and imprecations from both sides. Richard exhorted his men that the point of the pursuit was to harry Henry, not to get bogged down in a mini-tournament with William Marshal and his Poitevins. But he was too late. In the melee that followed, Richard suddenly realised to his horror that the greatest knight in the realm was bearing down on him with couched lance. As William Marshal’s destrier thundered towards him, Richard cried out: ‘By God’s legs, Marshal, do not kill me! That would be wrong. I am unarmed.’ Marshal replied: ‘No, let the Devil kill you, for I won’t,’ and plunged his lance into Richard’s horse instead.⁶⁶

Meanwhile Henry made good his escape but, having got as far as Alençon, he seemed to give up the ghost, switched direction and went south to Chinon in Anjou. Richard and Philip took the opportunity to overrun Maine and Touraine. When Tours, the hub of the Angevin empire, fell on 3 July, the sick old man, probably suffering from dysenteric fever, had no choice but to bow his head. Next day, in such pain that he could hardly sit on his horse, he attended the last conference of his life, at Ballon, south-west of Tours. Sitting bolt upright on his charger while peals of thunder rolled around him in appropriate symbolism, Henry tasted the cup of bitterness to the dregs. He agreed to place himself wholly at the will of the king of France, to do him homage and swear fealty; he was to recognise Richard as his heir and pay Philip an indemnity of 20,000 marks; Alice would marry Richard on his return from the crusade and meanwhile three castles in Anjou would be handed over as surety; all Henry’s subjects, in England and the continent were to transfer their allegiance to Richard and Philip; the crusade would commence at Lent 1190.⁶⁷ To seal the bargain Henry was forced to give Richard the kiss of peace. As he shammed the gesture, in a false embrace that somehow summed up his life, the Old King whispered balefully to his son: ‘May God let me live until I can have my revenge on you.’ Richard, full of contempt for his father, turned the empty threat into an after-dinner anecdote to enliven his followers, and soon the story was known throughout Christendom.⁶⁸

Henry dragged himself back to Chinon, the physical pain of the fever compounded by the humiliation he had just been forced to undergo. That evening he sat alone by a window, brooding on the forced surrender and repeating the words: ‘Shame on a conquered king.’ But if he thought he had supped from a cup thrice full and overflowing, there was one further agony to endure. On 5 July definite word reached him that his beloved John had gone over to the enemy. John the realist had decided he had no choice but to submit and pay homage to Philip. When he heard of this final betrayal, Henry lost the will to live.⁶⁹ He died on 6 July, almost certainly unshriven. His rage against God was such that he was no longer interested in the flummery of the last rites and Extreme Unction. A messenger from William Marshal sped to Richard with news of the king’s death. Richard arrived at the convent of Fontevrault next day as night was falling and entered the Church alone. He stood silently by his father’s bier, looked down once at his father’s face and fell to his knees to say a prayer. Then he stalked out.⁷⁰ There is no reason at all to believe Gerald of Wales’s fanciful story that when Richard entered the Church the corpse began to bleed from the nostrils; this is simply an imaginative gloss on the old superstition that a murdered man will bleed in the presence of his killer and was barefacedly lifted from Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romances.⁷¹ Richard had behaved nobly in the presence of his dead father, and he behaved even more royally once outside the chapel. He called William Marshal to him and reminded him pointedly that just the other day Marshal nearly killed him. ‘If I had wanted to kill you, I could easily have done so,’ Marshal replied, truthfully enough. Richard smiled grimly: ‘Marshal, you are pardoned, I bear you no malice,’ he said.⁷² He could afford to be magnanimous for all his dreams had come true. The duke of Aquitaine was now lord of Normandy and Anjou and king of England.