1215 and All That

by Ed West

  Richard Coeur de Lion, as he became known, was a ferocious warrior, and it’s not clear whether the nickname ‘Lionheart’ was as complimentary as it sounds or a reference to his inhumanity, which was widely recognized, or a mixture of the two. Richard spent all of six months in England during a ten-year reign, the rest of which he was causing mayhem in the Middle East as head of the Crusades, or in France fighting his fellow crusaders in various off-season warm-up wars. By all accounts, he absolutely loved every minute of it, laughing his way through the slaughter right up to the point when a crossbow bolt fatally hit him. Richard was a fantastically good military leader and he also looked the part of a king, with dazzling blue eyes, long legs, a big chest, and golden-reddish hair. He was the greatest warrior of his age, partly because of his genius for the logistics of war, but mostly because he just loved violence; a monastic chronicler accused him of ‘immoderate use of arms from his earliest youth,’ and this continued for the rest of his days.

  Although Henry II spent only a third of his reign in England, most of it in Normandy, while he preferred the Loire Valley most of all, Richard tried to avoid the place altogether if he could help it, complaining that ‘England is cold and always raining.’ At one point, he even tried to sell the entire country to the Holy Roman Emperor. Richard also managed to make enemies with almost everyone he met en route to the Holy Land, and this would cost England a king’s ransom. Literally. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the holy war, they were very expensive, and the monarch’s escapades bankrupted the country and in particular cost the barons dearly. These were among the causes of the rebellion of 1215.

  Yet despite squandering all of England’s money on a futile war in the Middle East, Richard’s PR team still managed to leave him remembered as some great national hero. Bizarrely, Richard I is the only monarch with a statue next to Parliament, when he is just about the least deserving of all, with the possible exception of Hardicnut, the eleventh-century Viking who drank himself to death after only two years on the throne. They say that death and taxes are the only two inevitabilities in life, but under the Lionheart they both came sooner rather than later.

  Richard’s popularity had much to do with his straight dealing and lack of malice; although violent and brutal, he was not sly. One of his first acts was to forgive William Marshal, allowing him to marry Strongbow’s daughter, Isabel de Clare, something Henry II had promised him—a lottery win if ever there was one, as she came with most of south Wales and eastern Ireland.

  After he had arrived by the old king’s corpse, Richard asked Marshal to come with him to the countryside. After a pause the new king said, ‘Marshal, the other day you intended to kill me, and you would have, without a doubt, if I hadn’t deflected your lance with my arm.’ The knight replied that it was not his intention to kill him, and he could have if he wanted to. He might well have expected the king to have him executed or exiled, but instead Richard ‘in effect, made William a millionaire overnight.’1

  Richard sent Marshal to England to ‘take charge of my land and all my other interests,’ with a secret message for his mother in jail, although frustratingly his biography doesn’t say what it was. The new king forgave all those who had stayed loyal to his father, and made peace with Philip of France, paying him off with 40,000 silver marks for the return of Angevin land.

  Finally after fifteen years of being a prisoner of her husband, Eleanor was freed and became de facto ruler of England. In another act of largesse, the new monarch released most of the people languishing in Henry’s jails, because Eleanor ‘had learned by experience that confinement is distasteful to mankind, and that it is a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be set free therefrom.’ Rather predictably, there followed an explosion in crime, but it also made Richard popular because many were in prison for having broken the detested forest laws. Introduced by William the Conqueror to protect the vast royal hunting grounds—one-third of the entire country—these included such punishments as blinding for anyone who captured a hare, which even by the low standards of the twelfth century was considered draconian.

  Richard then turned up in England with Stephen of Tours—the old king’s least popular minister—in chains. All of this sort of stuff was tremendously popular with the gormless peasants who constituted most of the population.2

  For his coronation in September 1189, and to show that he was God’s chosen one, Richard made the Archbishop of Canterbury anoint him with holy oil on the chest, hands, and head—a tradition that pretty much survives today, although Queen Victoria removed the chest part, as by that stage English people had grown a bit uncomfortable with that sort of thing. Richard’s coronation was absurdly elaborate, attended by churchmen in purple silk, with candles and incense, the king being escorted along streets covered in cloth, with singers behind him, followed by the great and good of the realm. After this, Archbishop Baldwin anointed him with a tiny silver spoon, and he was then crowned and given a scepter and golden rod.

  Following his coronation, Richard held an enormous party, with 1,770 pitchers of ale, 900 cups, and 5,050 dishes, a scene that one imagines must have involved lots of Robin Hood–style japes and general medieval cheer; unless you were Jewish of course. Richard, not really getting into the whole interfaith spirit of things, commanded that the ‘enemies of Christ’ weren’t to be allowed in. When some rabbis tried to bring gifts for the king, a riot ensued, the start of a sinister new trend across Europe; however, Richard punished the rioters with extreme violence, out of ‘greed rather than compassion—he wanted to fleece the entire [Jewish] community to pay for his crusade.’3

  Richard’s long-held ambition was to follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Fulk by leading a holy war, and the whole king of England thing was something of a distraction. So the following Tuesday after his coronation, Richard, in effect, sold the entire country, with royal estates and offices going in a sale, the king flogging every job that could be flogged. The chancellorship, a position that entailed running the country while the king was away, went to a Norman, William Longchamp, who paid £3,000 for the honor. Even people who already held positions had to stump up more or the king would sell them to someone else. Richard joked: ‘I would have sold London could I have found a buyer.’ He also sold his rights to Scotland for 10,000 marks, its king William of Scotland having previously been forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty with Henry II after his last invasion that had seen him dragged around England and France in chains for months.

  The Crusades were a sort of gap year of the time, except instead of building a well or teaching school kids in Africa, you got to kill some Arabs; that’s if you didn’t die in agony from dysentery or get beheaded by some bearded maniac.

  The Third Crusade came about after the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem had been reconquered by the Muslims in 1187, news of which had caused Pope Urban III to die of shock. The rulers of England, France, and Germany pledged their support, and to encourage recruits, emperors and kings promised rich rewards on Earth; while the Pope said anyone who died on Crusade would enter Heaven in a state of grace, with a soul unstained by any previous wrongdoing. There were other pressures, of course—men who didn’t take up the cross were given distaff and wool in the street, the equivalent of handing them a white feather in the First World War or perhaps shouting ‘paedo’ at them today.*

  Henry II had promised to take up the cross but had never really had any intention of doing so, even though he was related to Baldwin IV, the unfortunate leper king of Jerusalem. There had also been talk of John going on crusade or even becoming ruler of the Holy Land, an offer informally made to him in 1185 but which his father had wisely vetoed.

  Many crusaders were extremely heroic. James of Avesnes fell at Arsuf after being isolated from his comrades and killing fifteen Muslims before his death, and his corpse was later found surrounded by dead infidels. But much of the time, they were fanatical and moronic in the extreme, and often—out of sheer dimness or otherwise—they attacked
other Christians, who they were supposed to be helping. The enterprise would reach its nadir in 1204 when the crusaders sacked Constantinople, the leading Christian city in the world, a blow from which it never recovered.

  The logistics involved were immense. Richard I had sixty thousand horseshoes made before setting off, as well as turning fourteen thousand pigs into cured ham. Soon, an appropriate omen went his way when reconstruction work at Glastonbury Abbey led to the discovery of two bodies, which just happened to be those of Arthur and Guinevere, the sixth-century, nonexistent king and queen of Britain—which was incredibly good luck. Glastonbury Abbey had burned down in 1184 and the monks there were in desperate need of money to finance a new building, so they might not have been entirely honest when they made this miraculous discovery, as there were clear financial incentives toward being associated with the mythical King Arthur. As anyone who has been to Glastonbury today, with its plethora of ‘magik’ shops, can attest to, this is still a big selling point.

  Alongside Arthur and Guinevere was a sword, which Richard assumed to be Excalibur and took with him; he then swapped it with the dim-witted king of Sicily for four ships and fifteen galleys. Such deals were quite common. Hoping to conquer Hungary, one German emperor exchanged a chunk of Switzerland for a piece of the ‘True Cross,’ of which there was said to be enough bits going around to construct a medium-sized boat. Still, when the war came about, his successor did beat Hungary, so who are we to say it wasn’t a wise transaction.

  Long before he even reached the Levant, Richard managed to get into trouble. His army first landed in Sicily, which was ruled by King Tancred, a dwarfish man, rather cruelly said to resemble a monkey with a crown placed on its head. Although Tancred was from Sicily’s Norman ruling class, the people of the island were largely Greek Orthodox, who lived alongside Jews and Muslim Arabs in relative harmony by the standards of the day. The Normans had first arrived on the island in the eleventh century as tourists on their way back from Palestine but ended up conquering it, as they tended to do; but they were fairly tolerant as rulers.

  Then several thousand highly armed, drunk crusaders rowed into view. There were already tensions: Tancred was the bastard cousin of the previous king, William II, who had been married to Richard’s sister Joan, and the new ruler had refused to allow her back or to return her dowry, so he had already gotten off to a bad start with the Lionheart.

  Alongside Richard for the jaunt was Philip II of France, his ally, rival, and enemy, who had grown from being a weedy adolescent into a devious adult. Under the previous reign, Richard and Philip became close: ‘Between the two of them, there grew up so great an affection that King Henry was much alarmed.’4 However, it did not last long. Philip was described by one contemporary as ‘one-eyed, red-faced, unkempt, charmless, a timid young man fearful of assassins and hard-mouthed horses.’ It was Philip who built medieval Paris, and he planned to expand the size of his kingdom, at the expense of the Angevins. When he was born, citizens of the French capital had rung bells and lit bonfires, declaring ‘by the grace of God there is born to us this night a king who shall be a hammer to the king of the English.’ Despite Philip’s cunning schemes however, in a predictable, cartoonish way the Lionheart always beat him in battle.

  Richard and Philip had to arrange to leave at the same time, as neither trusted the other not to attack while he was away, even though the Pope had ruled against it.

  In Sicily, Richard and Philip got into an argument with Tancred, who was alarmed at the sight of this traveling army turning up on his island, and a fight soon broke out between the locals and tourists. With two groups of men sharing the same space, and with alcohol involved, the argument could have started over anything, although the chronicler Ambroise said at the time that the crusaders were ‘anxious to make friends with the women of Sicily,’ which is never going to go down too well.

  The situation got out of control and Richard ended up sacking the city of Messina—and this was supposed to just be an overnight stay as guests.*

  It illustrated his incredible fighting skills: he took Messina quicker than it would take for a priest to say Mass, so Ambroise said. But his diplomatic talents weren’t quite of the same quality. After Richard conquered the town he began building a castle, which he sensitively called ‘Castle Kill the Greeks.’ To everyone’s horror, Richard then decided they would winter in Sicily, and to make matters worse for the poor Sicilians, it was reported that the German Emperor and his army were now on their way.

  Richard then fell out with Philip, and the cause was a woman, or Richard’s lack of interest in one. In recent years, there has been a fashion for suggesting that Richard was gay, a case first made in 1947, but there’s no real evidence, and certainly no one mentioned it at the time. The main argument seems to be that he was very close to his mother, as well as his wet nurse, Hodierna, who is (as far as anyone knows) the only wet nurse to have a parish named after her, Knoyle Hodierne in Wiltshire.† Another supposed pointer is that Philip and Richard regularly shared a bed when they were allies against Henry, although medieval historians say there is no sexual significance to this and that men would regularly bunk together. And on another occasion a hermit rebuked Richard for his sins, shouting ‘Remember the destruction of Sodom.’ At the time, though, that would have referred to any extramarital sex.* However the best evidence that Richard wasn’t gay was that he is known to have committed multiple rapes as ruler of Aquitaine; so desperately insecure men who want him as a role model can rest assured. He also sired at least one bastard, which is admittedly tame by his father’s standards. More likely, he was just more interested in fighting than anything else, and as one modern historian suggests, Richard’s ‘tastes did not lie in the direction of marriage.’

  In Sicily, he argued with Philip over the latter’s sister, Alice, who Richard had been engaged to for twenty years. Alice had, at the age of eight, been sent to England to marry but had been kept waiting by Henry II for political reasons, effectively a prisoner her whole life. To make matters worse, Henry had supposedly had sexual relations with her. Richard rather offended the French king by saying that Alice’s morals were too questionable for marriage, which could have been more tactfully put, but she was rumored to have had a child by Richard’s father, so we can see his reluctance; it would have been slightly on the weird side.

  Philip and Richard also fell out over flags, a subject that seems somewhat childish eight centuries later but was hugely important. Philip was furious that Richard had flown his flag over Messina and demanded that his also be erected.

  As if things weren’t bad enough, Eleanor of Aquitaine then arrived in town with Berengaria, a Spanish princess she intended her son to marry; despite being seventy, Richard’s mother had ridden all the way to Madrid to find a wife for her boy. Either she was a calculating politician or one of those mothers totally deluded about her son’s sexual orientation. Though they did eventually marry, Berengaria became the only English queen to never visit England, and she and Richard never had sex.5 Apart from that, the marriage went splendidly.

  Luckily, Richard escaped the island just as his mother arrived, long after Philip, outraged, had sailed ahead to Palestine.

  At this point, the Templars, the famous medieval religious-military-banking group founded in 1119 to defend pilgrims in the Holy Land, turn up in the story. Having fled Sicily, Philip had been captured by Isaac, the tyrant of Cyprus, and Richard, in what he later described as a ‘fit of pique,’ invaded it (again, a Christian country), freed the king of France, and conquered the island; he then sold it to the Templars. Despite their monastic origins, the Templars had grown incredibly rich through patronage and support across western Christendom and sort of ended up inventing banking, as they were able to transfer large amounts of money across Europe and the Middle East. In fact, this wealth would be their undoing when the Crusades all started going wrong, and they were destroyed by Philip IV of France in 1312, although they continue to exist in the minds of conspi
racy-theory-loving imbeciles.

  The tyrant of Cyprus was a strange one; he had bluffed his way into the job, having arrived on the island with forged documents supposedly from the ruler of Constantinople stating that he was the new governor, and by the time anyone found out about the forgery, he had installed himself as dictator. He had incurred Richard’s ire by taking the remains of a crusader shipwreck, which under convention he was entitled to, but was not the sort of thing you did with Richard.

  Isaac surrendered to the English king on the condition that he was not ‘clapped in iron,’ and the Lionheart agreed—and had special silver chains made for him. Richard then, in an act of petty spite, made the Greeks shave off their beards to conform with western ways.*

  It was already turning out to be some trip. But what with the battles, the risk of some disgusting disease, and the dangers of long-distance travel, the Crusades were hugely risky adventures. In 1191, at Acre, Richard and Philip both got trench mouth, an infection every bit as horrible as it sounds, which caused their nails and hair to fall out. The holy war was relentlessly grim most of the time, and in the winter of 1190 some two hundred crusaders a day were dying of illness and starvation.

  But there were plus points for the lads on tour if you were interested in violence and the ladies. At Acre, the local women cosied up to the Crusader men; that is, people think that’s what the Arab Imad ad-Din was getting at when he said ‘They made themselves targets for men’s darts, offered themselves to the lance’s blows, made javelins rise towards shields. . . . They interwove leg with leg, caught lizard after lizard in their holes, guided pens to inkwells, torrents to the valley bottom, swords to scabbards, firewood to stoves.’ Had Imad been born in a different time and place, he could have made quite a living writing erotic fiction.

  They also got to play around with some fairly awesome weaponry, with European military technology starting to advance at the time, in particular big siege weapons; Philip had enormous trebuchets built, two with the excessively macho names God’s Own Sling and The Wicked Neighbor, capable of firing 350 pounds of material at the enemy.