When the King of France was known to be entering the port of Messina, the natives of every age and sex rushed forth to see so celebrated a king; but he, content with a single ship, entered the port of the citadel privately, so that those who awaited him along the shore saw this as a proof of his weakness; such a man, they said, was not likely to be the performer of any great matter, shrinking in such fashion from the eye of his fellows …
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Itinerary of Richard I and Others to the Holy Land
AT THE AGE of thirteen, while hunting in the forest of Compiègne, Louis VII’s son Philip became separated from the rest of the party and was soon hopelessly lost. Exhausted by cold and hunger, he was eventually discovered by a local charcoal-burner, but not before he had contracted an alarmingly high fever. King Louis went on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to pray – successfully – for his son’s recovery, but suffered a paralytic stroke on his way back to Paris. On 1 November 1179, according to the old Capetian tradition, he had Philip crowned in Reims Cathedral by its cardinal archbishop, the delightfully named Guillaume aux Blanches Mains, but was, alas, too ill to attend the ceremony himself. He died less than a year later.
He had been a good king on the whole, although never a happy one. The Second Crusade had been a humiliation from which he never fully recovered; but it was not the last. On 18 May 1152, barely eight weeks after her divorce, Eleanor married – this time for love – the future King Henry II of England. For poor Louis, here was yet another blow. Henry was technically his vassal and should have asked his permission before marrying – even though in the circumstances such a formality would have been embarrassing for all concerned. Worse still was the fact that the bride delivered all Aquitaine to her new husband. Henry had already inherited the Duchy of Normandy from his mother, Matilda, and Maine and Anjou from his father Count Geoffrey; with the addition of Aquitaine, he now ruled from Scotland to the Pyrenees and was far more powerful in France than Louis himself. But Louis was young – he was still only thirty-two – and there was plenty of spirit left in him. He was deeply conscious, too, that he still lacked an heir. Eleanor had borne him two daughters; his second wife, Constance of Castile, was to provide him with two more before dying in childbirth; only his third, Adela of Champagne, finally produced a boy, who was baptised Philip.
Louis left two magnificent monuments behind him, although to what extent he was personally responsible for them it is not easy to say. The first was the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, begun in 1163; its foundation stone is said to have been laid by Pope Alexander III, to whom he gave refuge during the Pope’s long struggle with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The second was the University of Paris, which originated with the cathedral school and has a good claim, after Bologna,* to be the oldest university in the world. For the rest, his reign was principally marked by recurrent but ultimately profitless warfare with Henry, and his consequent support of Archbishop Thomas Becket – whom, like almost everyone else who knew the man, he found insufferable. He reigned for forty-three years, on the whole wisely and well, concentrating – as his father had before him – on consolidating the royal authority across that part of the country where his writ still ran. He died on 18 September 1180 and was buried in the Cistercian Abbey of Barbeau; only in 1817 were his remains taken to Saint-Denis.
Philip Augustus – the imperial title was bestowed on him by his chronicler Rigord, but it stuck – proved to be one of the greatest kings of France. It could even be argued that he was the first of them; all his predecessors had been content to call themselves Kings of the Franks.* He found France in a parlous situation. To the west, Henry II of England was ruling over nearly half the territory that was rightfully Philip’s; to the east, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was at the height of his power, which extended not only throughout what is now Germany and Austria but also across the Alps into Italy. Between these two giants, France cut a fairly abject figure. During the next forty years, however, Philip conquered both his enemies. The greater of the two was of course Henry, an occupying power whom he hated in much the same way as, nearly eight centuries later, the French were to hate the Nazis in the Second World War. Here he had the Church, which had never forgotten Becket’s murder, actively on his side; he was also helped by the constant quarrels between Henry and his four appalling sons. Together they could easily have destroyed him; but for the Plantagenets to act in concert was unthinkable.
The serious trouble began with the death in 1183 of Henry’s second son (but the first to survive infancy), also named Henry.† In a vain attempt to heal the breach with France, he had been betrothed as a child and later married to Philip’s sister Margaret, who had brought as her dowry the small but important county of Vexin north-west of Paris. Philip now demanded that this should be returned; Henry refused. The two held several meetings beneath an elm tree near Gisors, which stood on the border of their respective domains, but it was only when King Bela III of Hungary demanded the widow’s hand in marriage that Henry reluctantly agreed. Then in 1186 came another death – that of Henry’s fourth son, Geoffrey Duke of Brittany, who left a pregnant wife behind him. Henry maintained that he should retain the guardianship of the duchy on behalf of the unborn child; Philip, as liege lord, objected. There followed two years of inconclusive fighting, during which Henry’s surviving sons, Richard and John, rebelled against their father. Philip joined them, and at last he and Richard forced Henry into submission. On 4 July 1189, at Azay-le-Rideau, Henry renewed his homage to Philip and renounced his claim to Auvergne. It was his last political action. Within two days he was dead.
But, suddenly, the temper of the world had changed. Exactly two years before, on 4 July 1187, the entire army of the Christian East had been destroyed by the forces of Islam. As usual, the West had had plenty of warning, but had reacted far too late. To most Europeans, the Crusader states were remote to the point of unreality – exotic, egregious outposts of Christendom in which austerity alternated with sybaritic luxury, where douceur and danger walked hand in hand; magnificent in their way, but somehow more suited to the lays of troubadour romance than to the damp and unheroic struggle that was the common lot at home. Even to the well-informed, Levantine politics were hard to follow, the names largely unpronounceable, the news when it did arrive hopelessly distorted and out of date. Only when disaster had actually struck did the knights of western Christendom spring, with exclamations of mingled rage and horror, to their swords.
So it had been forty years before, when the news of the fall of Edessa and the fire of St Bernard’s oratory had quickened the pulse of the continent and launched the grotesque disaster that was the Second Crusade. And so it was now. To any dispassionate observer, European or Levantine, who had followed the march of events for the past fifteen years, the capture of Jerusalem must have seemed inevitable. On the Muslim side there had been the steady rise of Saladin, a leader of genius who had vowed to recover the Holy City for his faith; on the Christian, nothing but the sad spectacle of the three remaining Frankish states – Jerusalem, Tripoli and Antioch – all governed by mediocrities and torn apart by internal struggles for power. Jerusalem itself was further burdened, throughout the crucial period of Saladin’s ascendancy, by the decline of its leper King Baldwin IV. When he came to the throne in 1174 at the age of thirteen, the disease was already upon him; eleven years later he died. Not surprisingly, he left no issue. At the one moment when wise and resolute leadership was essential if the kingdom were to be saved, the crown of Jerusalem devolved upon Baldwin’s nephew, a child of eight.
The death of this new infant king, Baldwin V, in the following year might have been considered a blessing in disguise; but the opportunity of finding a true leader was thrown away and the throne passed to his stepfather, Guy of Lusignan, a weak, querulous figure with a record of incapacity which fully merited the scorn in which he was held by most of his compatriots. Jerusalem was thus in a state bordering on civil war when, in May 1187, Saladin declared his long-awaited jihad and crossed the Jordan into Frankish territory. Under the miserable Guy, the Christian defeat was assured. On 3 July he led the largest army his kingdom had ever assembled across the Galilean mountains towards Tiberias, where Saladin was laying siege to the castle. After a long day’s march in the most torrid season of the year, the Christians were forced to camp on a waterless plateau; and the next day, exhausted by the heat and half-mad with thirst, beneath the little double-summited hill known as the Horns of Hattin, they were surrounded by the Muslim army and cut to pieces.
It remained for the Saracens only to mop up the isolated Christian fortresses one by one. Tiberias fell on the day after Hattin; Acre followed; Nablus, Jaffa, Sidon and Beirut capitulated in quick succession. Wheeling south, Saladin took Ascalon by storm and received the surrender of Gaza without a struggle. Now he was ready for Jerusalem. The city’s defenders resisted heroically for twelve days; but on 2 October, with the walls already breached by Muslim sappers, they knew that the end was near. Their leader, Balian of Ibelin – King Guy having been taken prisoner after Hattin – went personally to Saladin to discuss terms for surrender.
Saladin was neither bloodthirsty nor vindictive. After some negotiation he agreed that every Christian in Jerusalem be allowed to redeem himself by payment of the appropriate ransom. Of the twenty thousand poor who had no means of raising the money, seven thousand would be freed on payment of a lump sum by the various Christian authorities. That same day the conqueror led his army into the city; and for the first time in eighty-eight years, on the anniversary of the day on which the Prophet was carried in his sleep from Jerusalem to Paradise, his green banners fluttered over the Temple Mount from which he had been gathered up, and the sacred imprint of his foot was once again exposed to the adoration of the faithful.
Everywhere, order was preserved. In contrast to the events following the Crusaders’ capture of the city, there was no murder, no bloodshed, no looting. The thirteen thousand people for whom the ransom money could not be raised remained in the city; but Saladin’s brother and lieutenant al-Adil asked for a thousand of them as a reward for his services and immediately set them free. Another seven hundred were given to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and five hundred to Balian; then Saladin himself spontaneously liberated all the old, all the husbands whose wives had been ransomed and finally all the widows and children. Few Christians ultimately found their way to captivity. This was not the first time that Saladin had shown that magnanimity for which he would soon be famous through East and West alike;* but never before had he done so on such a scale. Here was an example of chivalry which was to have an effect on the forthcoming Crusade.
The recently elected Pope, Gregory VIII, lost no time in calling upon Christendom to take the Cross; and in the high summer of 1190 Philip Augustus and Henry II’s son and successor Richard Coeur-de-Lion, with their armies behind them, met together at Vézelay – perhaps in the circumstances an unfortunate choice of rendezvous. The two kings agreed to set off on their journey together less for reasons of companionship than because neither trusted the other an inch; and indeed no two men could have been more dissimilar. The King of France was still only twenty-five; but he was already a widower† and apart from a shock of wild, uncontrollable hair there was nothing youthful about him. Never handsome, he had now lost the sight of one eye, giving his face an asymmetrical look. His ten years on the throne of France had brought him unusual wisdom and experience for one so young, but had made him permanently suspicious and had taught him to conceal his thoughts and emotions behind a veil of taciturn moroseness. Though brave enough on the battlefield, he is thought to have lacked outstanding courage; in society he was strangely wanting in charm. But beneath his drab exterior there lay a searching intelligence, coupled with a strong sense of both the moral and the political responsibilities of kingship. It was easy to underestimate him. It was also unwise.
He cannot have looked upon his fellow-ruler without envy. Richard had succeeded his father, Henry, just a year before. At thirty-three, he was now in his prime. Though his health was often poor, his magnificent physique and volcanic energy gave the impression of a man to whom illness was unknown. His good looks were famous, his powers of leadership no less so, his courage already a legend across two continents. From his mother, Eleanor, he had inherited the Poitevin love of literature and poetry, and to many people he must have seemed like some glittering figure from the troubadour epics he loved so much. One element only was lacking to complete the picture: however sweetly Richard might sing of the joys and pains of love, he had left no trail of betrayed or brokenhearted damsels behind him. But if his tastes ran in other directions they never appreciably affected the shining reputation, burnished as his breastplate, which remained with him till the day of his death.
Those who knew Richard better, on the other hand, soon became aware of his other, less admirable qualities. Even more impetuous and hot-tempered than the father he had so hated, he altogether lacked that capacity for sustained administrative effort that had enabled Henry II, for all his faults, to weld England almost single-handedly into a nation. His ambition was boundless, and nearly always destructive. Himself incapable of love, he could be faithless, disloyal, even treacherous, in the pursuit of his ends. No English king had fought harder or more unscrupulously for the throne; none was readier to ignore the responsibilities of kingship for the sake of personal glory. In the nine years of life left to him, the total time he was to spend in England was just two months.
The hills round Vézelay, wrote an eyewitness, were so spread with tents and pavilions that the fields looked like a great multicoloured city. The two kings solemnly reaffirmed their crusading vows and sealed a further treaty of alliance; then, followed by their respective armies and a huge multitude of pilgrims, they moved off together to the south. It was only at Lyon, where the collapse of the bridge across the Rhône under the weight of the crowds was interpreted as a bad augury for the future, that the French and English parted company. Philip turned south-east towards Genoa, where a chartered fleet was awaiting him; it must have been considerable, since the army to be transported amounted to 650 knights, each with two squires, and 1,300 horses. Richard continued down the Rhône valley to join his fleet at Marseille. The two kings, it was agreed, would meet again at Messina, whence their combined army would sail for the Holy Land.
Philip arrived at Messina first, on 14 September, Richard nine days later. Nothing was more typical of the two than the manner of their disembarkation. A description of Philip’s arrival will be found at the head of this chapter; Richard’s made an interesting contrast:
When Richard was about to land, the people rushed down in crowds towards the beach; and behold, from a distance the sea seemed cleft with innumerable oars, and the loud voices of the trumpets and the horns sounded clear and shrill over the water. Approaching nearer, the galleys could be seen rowing in order, emblazoned with divers coats of arms, and with pennons and banners innumerable floating from the points of the spears … The sea was boiling with the multitude of oars, the air trembling with the blasts of the trumpets and the tumultuous shouts of the delighted crowds. The magnificent King, loftier and more splendid than all his train, stood erect on the prow, as one expecting alike to see and be seen … And as the trumpets rang out with discordant yet harmonious sounds, the people whispered together: ‘He is indeed worthy of empire; he is rightly made King over peoples and kingdoms; what we heard of him at a distance falls far short of what we now see.’*
Not all the king’s admirers on that memorable day may have been aware that that superb figure had preferred, through fear of seasickness, to take the land route down the peninsula; and that this mighty landfall was in fact the culmination of a sea journey that had brought him only the few miles from Calabria. Fewer still could have guessed that, for all the golden splendour of his arrival, Richard was in a black and dangerous mood. A few days before, passing through Mileto, he had been caught in the act of stealing a hawk from a peasant’s cottage and had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the owner and his friends; worse still, on landing at Messina, was his discovery that the royal palace in the centre of the city had already been put at the disposal of the King of France, and that he had been allotted rather more modest quarters outside the walls.
Why, we may ask, was the royal palace not occupied by the King of Sicily himself? Because Sicily was in turmoil. Its last legitimate king, William II, had died childless the previous year, leaving as his widow Joanna, daughter of Henry II and consequently Richard’s sister. The throne was now occupied by Tancred of Lecce, William’s bastard cousin, who – Richard had good reason to believe – was treating the young queen disgracefully, keeping her under distraint and withholding from her certain revenues that were properly part of her marriage settlement. How far these suspicions were justified it was not easy to say, but Richard’s subsequent behaviour suggests that he saw Sicily as a potential new jewel in his own crown, and that he was already on the lookout for any excuse to make trouble. Settling Joanna in the Abbey of Bagnara on the Calabrian coast, he returned to Messina, where he fell on the city’s own most venerable religious foundation, the Basilian monastery of the Saviour. The monks were forcibly and unceremoniously evicted and Richard’s army moved into its new barracks.
And what, it may be asked, was the reaction of Philip Augustus to such shenanigans? He had seen Sicily simply as a staging post, from which he was anxious to move on as quickly as possible to the Holy Land. Shocked and shamed by the conduct of his fellow-monarch, he had offered to mediate, but his proposals had been coldly rejected. Meanwhile, day by day, the situation in Messina was growing more threatening. It was many years since any Sicilian city had been called upon to accommodate a foreign army, and the predominantly Greek population had already been scandalised by the barbarous behaviour of the English. Their free and easy ways with the local women, in particular, were not what might have been expected of men who bore the Cross of Christ on their shoulders. The occupation of the monastery came as the final outrage, and on 3 October serious rioting broke out. Fearing – with good reason – that the King of England might take possession of their city and even of the whole island, the Messinans rushed to the gates and bolted them; others barred the harbour entrance. Preliminary attempts by the English to force an entry failed; but no one believed that they could be held in check for long. The sun set that evening on an anxious city.
Early the following day Philip Augustus appeared at Richard’s headquarters outside the walls. He was accompanied by his cousin Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, the Count of Poitiers and the other leaders of the French army, together with a similarly high-ranking Sicilian delegation, including the archbishops of Monreale, Reggio and Messina itself. The ensuing discussions went surprisingly well. The parties seemed on the point of agreement when suddenly the noise of further tumult was heard. A crowd of Messinans, gathered outside the building, were shouting imprecations against the English and their king. Richard seized his sword and ran from the hall; summoning his troops, he gave the order for immediate attack. This time it was the Messinans who were taken by surprise. The English soldiers burst into the city, ravaging and plundering it as they went. Within hours – ‘less time than it took to say matins’, wrote a contemporary chronicler – Messina was in flames.
All the gold and silver, and whatsoever precious thing was found, became the property of the victors. They set fire to the enemy’s galleys and burnt them to ashes, lest any citizen should escape and recover strength to resist. The victors also carried off their noblest women. And lo! When it was done, the French suddenly beheld the ensigns and standards of King Richard floating above the walls of the city; at which the King of France was so mortified that he conceived that hatred against King Richard that lasted all his life.
Geoffrey de Vinsauf goes on to describe how Philip insisted, and Richard finally agreed, that the French banners should be flown alongside the English; he does not mention how the citizens of Messina felt about this new insult to their pride. Just whom, they must have asked themselves, was the King of England supposed to be fighting? Did he intend to remain permanently in Sicily? It seemed a curious way to conduct a Crusade.
To Philip Augustus, the incident over the flags seemed to confirm his worst suspicions. Within a fortnight of his arrival as an honoured guest, Richard was in undisputed control of the second city of the island; and King Tancred, though not far away at Catania, had made not the slightest effort to oppose him. To Catania therefore Philip now despatched the Duke of Burgundy, charging him to warn Tancred of the gravity of the situation and to offer the support of the French army if Richard were to press his claims any further. Tancred, however, needed no warning. He was well aware of the danger of leaving Messina in Richard’s hands. But a new idea was taking shape in his brain. The legitimate heir to the throne of Sicily was Constance, the posthumous daughter of King Roger II; and she – unaccountably and unforgivably – had been married off by William to Henry of Hohenstaufen, the son of Frederick Barbarossa. Frederick was now dead – he had been drowned in a river in Asia Minor on his way to the Crusade – and Henry, now the Emperor Henry VI – would shortly be making his way to Sicily to claim the crown on behalf of his wife. If Tancred were to resist – which he had every intention of doing – he would need allies; and as allies the English would be vastly preferable to the French. Crude and uncivilised they might be – and their king, for all his glamorous reputation, was as bad as any of them – but at least he had no love for the Hohenstaufens. Philip Augustus, on the other hand, had been on excellent terms with Barbarossa; if the Germans were to invade now, while the Crusaders were still in Sicily, French sympathies would be to say the least uncertain. Tancred therefore returned the Duke of Burgundy to Philip with suitably lavish presents but not much else, and sent an envoy of his own to negotiate directly with Richard at Messina.
This time the financial inducements were more than the king could resist. Tancred offered Richard and Joanna 20,000 ounces of gold each, and agreed that Richard’s heir, his nephew Duke Arthur of Brittany, should be betrothed to one of his own daughters. In return Richard promised to give the King of Sicily full military assistance for as long as he and his men should remain in the kingdom, and undertook to restore to its rightful owners all the plunder he had taken during the disturbances of the previous month. On 11 November, with due ceremony, the resulting treaty was signed at Messina.
The reaction of Philip Augustus to this sudden rapprochement between the two monarchs can well be imagined. As usual, however, he concealed his resentment. Outwardly his relations with Richard remained cordial. The two of them had plenty to discuss before they set off again. Rules of conduct must be drawn up, for soldiers and pilgrims alike; there were endless logistical problems still to be solved; it was vital, too, that they should reach agreement in advance about the distribution of conquests and the division of spoils. On all these matters Richard proved surprisingly amenable; on one point only, unconnected with the Crusade, did he refuse to be moved. It concerned Philip’s sister Alys, who had been sent to England more than twenty years before as a bride for one of Henry II’s sons. She had been offered to Richard who, predictably, would have nothing to do with her; but instead of returning her to France Henry had kept her at his court together with her substantial dowry, later making her his own mistress and, almost certainly, the mother of his child. Now Henry was dead and Alys, at thirty, was still in England and as far away from marriage as ever.
Philip was in no way concerned for her happiness; he had never lifted a finger to help his other even more pathetic sister Agnes-Anna of Byzantium, twice widowed in hideous circumstances before she was sixteen. But this treatment of a princess of France was an insult that he could not allow to pass. He found Richard just as adamant as Henry had been. Not only did he refuse once again, point-blank, to consider marrying Alys himself, he had the effrontery to try to justify his attitude on the grounds of her besmirched reputation. Here indeed was a test of Philip’s sangfroid; and when Richard went on to inform him that his mother Eleanor was at that very moment on her way to Sicily with another bride intended for him in the shape of Berengaria, Princess of Navarre, relations between the two monarchs came near breaking point.
On 3 March 1191 the King of England rode down in state to Catania to call on the King of Sicily. The two reaffirmed their friendship and exchanged presents – five galleys and four horse transports for Richard who, according to at least two authorities, gave Tancred in return a still more precious token of his affection – King Arthur’s own sword, Excalibur itself, which had been supposedly found, only a short time before, lying beside the old king’s body at Glastonbury. The meeting over, the two returned together as far as Taormina, where a deeply disgruntled Philip was waiting. A new crisis seemed inescapable when Tancred, for reasons which can only be guessed, showed Richard the letters he had received from Philip the previous October, warning him of English machinations. Yet by the end of the month the allies were again reconciled, and relations seem to have been comparatively cordial all round when, on 30 March, Philip sailed with his army to Palestine.
He had timed his departure well; or, perhaps more likely, it was Eleanor and Berengaria who had timed their arrival. Scarcely had the French fleet disappeared over the horizon when their convoy dropped anchor in the harbour of Messina. It was forty-four years since the old queen had last seen Sicily, when she and her detested husband had called on Roger II on their way back from the Holy Land. On this second visit she had hoped to witness the marriage of her favourite son to the wife she had chosen for him; but Lent had begun, and a Lenten marriage was out of the question. Despite a recent prohibition of women from going on the Crusade, it was therefore decided that Berengaria should accompany her future husband to the East; young Queen Joanna, who could obviously not be left on the island, would make a perfect chaperone for her. Once everything was settled, Eleanor saw no reason to delay any longer. After only three days in Messina, with that energy for which she was famous throughout Europe – she was now sixty-nine and had been travelling uninterruptedly for over three months – she left again for England. The day after bidding her mother goodbye for the last time, Joanna herself set off with Berengaria for the Holy Land. Richard remained for one more week, organising the embarkation of his army. Finally, on 10 April, he too sailed away. The people of Messina cannot have been sorry to see him go.
Philip arrived in Palestine on 20 May 1191; he was not to stay there long. He marched straight to Acre, which was already under siege. Richard arrived on 8 June, having captured Cyprus – and incidentally married the unfortunate Berengaria – on the way. Acre held out until 12 July, but by that time the French camp had suffered a serious outbreak of dysentery. Philip had succumbed, and was lying miserably on his sickbed when he received a report of the death – due to the same epidemic – of Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders. This was grave news indeed, since it threw into doubt the whole question of the Flemish succession, essential if Philip was to keep his north-eastern border under control. One suspects that the king felt nothing but relief to have such a cast-iron excuse to return to France; in any case the moment he was well enough to travel, return he did. He left Palestine on 31 July with his cousin Peter of Courtenay, having been there a little over ten weeks – a period which had seen several more bitter quarrels with Richard, with whom he was now once again barely on speaking terms. His army meanwhile remained in the Holy Land, under the command of the Duke of Burgundy.
Richard, as might be expected, made several snide remarks about Philip’s premature departure before returning to the campaign. On 20 August he destroyed his chivalric reputation for ever by ordering the massacre of all his Muslim prisoners of war, some three thousand of them, together with a number of women and children; but he failed altogether to destroy Saladin. It was not until the summer of 1192 that it dawned on him that Philip and his brother John might well be taking advantage of his absence. At last he realised that he must return to England and finally reached a settlement with a thoroughly disgusted Saladin on a three-year truce, during which Christian pilgrims and merchants would have free access to Jerusalem and the Holy Places. A few days later he took ship from Acre. His journey home was delayed, first by bad weather, then by shipwreck and finally by imprisonment at the hands of Duke Leopold of Austria, from which he was released only on the payment of 100,000 pounds of silver – between two and three times the annual income of the English crown. In February 1194, on hearing that, thanks largely to Queen Eleanor, the money had at last been raised, Philip – who had tried unsuccessfully to bribe the Emperor Henry VI to keep his prisoner a few months longer – sent Richard’s brother, Prince John, a message: ‘Look to yourself – the devil is loose!’ A little over a month later Richard was back on English soil.
Until now, Philip Augustus has come out of our story a good deal better than Richard the Lionheart; but as soon as he returned to France he began to level the score. He knew that he would never be happy until he had driven the English out of France. Before leaving on the Crusade, he and Richard had each taken an oath not to attack each other’s lands during their absence; but he now began a campaign to blacken Richard’s name, accusing him of having been involved in treacherous communications with Saladin; of having conspired with him to cause the fall of several Crusader cities; and, finally, for having been responsible for the assassination in April 1192 of Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, husband of Queen Isabella of Jerusalem.* But none of this really mattered: nine months later, Richard himself was back – and on the warpath. Soon all Normandy was aflame – at one moment Philip narrowly escaped drowning, when a bridge collapsed just as he and his army were crossing it – and the fighting continued for the next five years. The two kings met for the last time in January 1199, with Philip standing on the bank of the Seine, Richard on a boat a little way offshore. Somehow the pair of them managed to agree on further talks between their respective ambassadors, and these were eventually to result in a five-year truce, which mercifully held. Three months later, during a minor campaign in the Limousin to suppress a mutinous vassal, Richard was struck by a bolt from a crossbow. The wound quickly became gangrenous, and on 6 April 1199 he died at the age of forty-one.
Philip Augustus, however, still had work to do. His chief enemy now was his former ally John of England. One or two modern historians have tried to defend John, blaming much of his deplorable reputation on two chroniclers, Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, both of whom were writing after his death. He may not, as Paris suggests, have offered to convert to Islam in exchange for military aid from the Almohad rulers in southern Spain; but he was very probably responsible for the murder of his nephew Prince Arthur of Brittany – providing Shakespeare with one of his most poignant scenes – and there is no doubt whatever that he was lecherous, duplicitous, faithless and cruel – worse even than his brother, the worst king England ever had. After a short-lived treaty of peace, fighting between Philip and John began in earnest in 1202. Thanks largely to John’s treatment of his allies, over the next two years more and more of them deserted him, and by August 1204 Philip had recovered all Normandy, Anjou and Poitou. John’s only remaining dominion on the continent was Aquitaine; but Queen Eleanor had died in April at the age of eighty-two, and once deprived of his mother’s support he managed to hold it for only two more years.
In 1209 John acquired a powerful new ally: his nephew Otto,* now the Emperor Otto IV. Otto had promised to help his uncle to regain his lost territories, but had never found the opportunity to do so. The two remained, as may be imagined, a permanent anxiety for Philip – who, seeing them both enmeshed in power struggles with the Pope, decided to strike. On 27 July 1214, he met the combined forces of John, Otto and Count Ferdinand of Flanders near the village of Bouvines in Picardy. Their army numbered some 25,000 men, compared with Philip’s 15,000. In the middle of the battle Philip was unhorsed by Flemish pikemen and saved only by his armour; but soon afterwards, when Otto was carried off the field by his wounded and terrified horse and Count Ferdinand, also seriously wounded, was taken prisoner, the imperial troops saw that the battle was lost, turned tail and fled. The French began to pursue them, but night was falling and Philip called them back. He returned triumphantly to Paris, followed by a seemingly interminable line of prisoners, and on his arrival the whole city erupted in celebration. There was dancing in the flower-strewn streets, and the students of the embryonic university caroused for a week. His fellow-monarchs, by contrast, had little to celebrate except their survival. Otto returned to Germany, where he was soon obliged to abdicate. John returned disgraced and discredited to England, where in the following year he signed Magna Carta and in 1216 he died – though not before seeing his country once again invaded by the French. As for Ferdinand of Flanders, he was to remain in prison for the next twelve years.
The reign of Philip Augustus also witnessed one of the blackest episodes in French history: what is ridiculously known as the Albigensian Crusade. It was launched in 1209, and was directed against as pure and harmless a group of innocents as ever existed. The Cathars – who became known as the Albigensians simply because they were vaguely centred on the city of Albi – had first appeared in the Languedoc around the beginning of the eleventh century. Essentially, they maintained the Manichaean doctrine that good and evil constituted two distinct spheres – that of the good, spiritual God and that of the Devil, creator of the material world – and that the Earth was a constant battleground between them. The leaders, known as the perfecti, abstained from meat and from sex; they also rejected saints, holy images and relics, together with all the sacraments of the Church, particularly baptism and marriage. To Pope Innocent III, such departures from orthodoxy could not be tolerated. At first he hoped for peaceable conversion, sending a Cistercian mission headed by a legate, Peter of Castelnau, and subsequently joined by the Spaniard Domingo de Guzmán, better known as St Dominic; but in 1208 Peter was murdered by a henchman of Count Raymond of Toulouse, and Innocent proclaimed a Crusade.
That Crusade was to continue for the next twenty years, pitting the northern barons, led by Simon de Montfort, against those of the south. It led to several hideous massacres – the worst of them in the town of Monségur – and it utterly destroyed the dazzling Provençal civilisation of the early Middle Ages. Even when the war ended in 1229 with the Treaty of Paris, the heresy refused to die. It was another hundred years before the Inquisition, unleashed on the region with all its terrifying efficiency, succeeded in crushing it.
Philip himself took little interest in the Crusade, preferring to remain in Paris to oversee his favourite projects: the paving of the principal streets; the provision of a central market, Les Halles;* the building of a great fortress on the Seine, later to become the Louvre; and the continuation of his father’s work on the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. He established the Royal Archives, together with the city’s first police force, consisting of twenty men mounted and forty on foot. He lived on until 1223, when he died at the age of fifty-four. The one stain on his record was his periodic persecution of the Jews, whom he bled white; but he left a France no longer threatened by the Germans, and no longer half-occupied by the English: a France happier, almost certainly, than it had ever been.
* It owes its name, the Sorbonne, to Robert de Sorbon, who founded its associated theological college in c.1257.
* He remains, too, the only French monarch to have a station named after him on the Paris Metro.
† He was known as ‘the Young King’, since he had been crowned in 1170, while his father was still very much alive.
* In 1183, when he laid siege to the castle of Kerak during the wedding celebrations of its heir, Humphrey of Toron, to Princess Isabella of Jerusalem, he had carefully enquired which tower contained the bridal chamber and had given orders that it was to be left undisturbed.
† His first wife, Isabelle of Hainaut, had died in childbirth a few months before.
* Geoffrey de Vinsauf, Itinerary of Richard I and Others to the Holy Land.
* It was in fact an empty title, since Jerusalem was no longer in Christian hands.
* He was the son of John’s sister Matilda, who married Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony.
* It lasted for seven and a half centuries, until its demolition in 1971.