1215 and All That

by Ed West

  Philip, however, was almost continually ill in the Holy Land since arriving, and he really didn’t like the ordeal at all. Richard seemed to love it: when he arrived in the Middle East, he just assumed command and no one questioned it, even when he got sick. Even then, ‘he pursued hostilities with far more vigor from his sick-bed than Philip Augustus had ever done in full health.’6

  Their comrade at arms, the German legend Frederick Barbarossa, had had an even worse war. Barbarossa was famed for having led his people on crusade against the pagans of northeast Europe with his Teutonic Knights. He was so good at siege terror tactics that his troops were known for playing football with their enemies’ severed heads ‘and [to] torture captured defenders by scalping them or cutting off their hands and feet, to provide amusement and relief from the boredom that naturally accompanied such an attritional method of warfare.’7

  However, the most famous warrior in Christendom had barely arrived in the Middle East before drowning in a mundane accident, leaving many of the Germans to give up.

  In October 1191, at Jaffa, Richard almost got caught when some Turks ambushed his party. One of his knights, William de Preaux, pretended to be the king, giving him time to escape as he fought off the infidels; the Turks greatly admired de Preaux for this and took him alive; Richard’s last act before returning home would be to pay his ransom.

  But though the fate of the holiest of cities was at stake, throughout these campaigns Richard and Philip were constantly bickering, even quarreling via messengers while both were seriously ill.

  Richard had by now also fallen out with Duke Leopold of Austria, over the issue of flags once again; the flags issue was important not just for the sake of ego but because raising the flag meant the troops from that country were free to loot. This time it happened after the fall of Acre, on July 12, 1191, when Leopold put his standard up to try to bask in the glory, and Richard’s soldiers tore it down. The Austrian swore his revenge.

  The following month came the most controversial episode of the Crusades when Richard broke a treaty and ordered the execution of 2,500 Muslim prisoners: ‘Some were hanged, others were killed by the sword, while the Muslim cavalry attacked in a frenzy of anger, trying to break through to the scene of the execution; but they failed.’8 The reason Richard did this was because his opponent Saladin would not return to him a bit of the ‘True Cross’ that Jesus died on, which in retrospect doesn’t seem like very good justification. Although there was a military reason for this massacre—Richard couldn’t bring with him all these prisoners as he marched on Jerusalem—we can’t be entirely certain that Jesus would approve.

  Philip had meanwhile left the Holy Land on July 22, saying he was too ill to continue; some of his men chose to stay with Richard, which was yet another humiliation. And when Philip returned home, he was soon ‘imprudently boasting that he was going to devastate the lands of the king of England.’

  And after Acre was conquered, the Pisans and Genoese, who hated each other more than they hated any Muslims, plunged the crusaders into an absurd civil war.

  ____________

  * Marshal didn’t take the cross because as his biography stated he ‘had already made the journey to the Holy Land to seek God’s mercy . . . whatever anyone else might tell you, that is how matters were arranged.’ So, that clears that up.

  * Before arriving in Sicily, Richard had also caused a brawl in Calabria, the ‘toe’ of Italy, when he saw a falcon in a village and insisted on taking it with him.

  † Hodierna’s son Alexander Neckam, born on the same night as the Lionheart, became the first European to study magnetism.

  * When Richard became ill, he began to believe the hermit was right, although the Lionheart swallowed any old rubbish that hermits told him. Joachim of Fiore, the wild hermit of Calabria, predicted that a third age was nigh, and the Muslim leader Saladin was the sixth of the seven great enemies of the Church, the last being the antichrist, who would get the job of Pope before revealing himself. Richard, who didn’t like Pope Clement III, thought it all made sense and waited in vain for the pontiff to eventually reveal his true identity.

  * To pass the time, Richard and one of his knights, William des Barres, had a joust. When Richard was unable to unhorse his opponent, he became so angry that he ‘uttered threats against him’ and banished des Barres, and the whole thing turned into an unseemly brawl.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A King’s Ransom

  Perhaps the worst thing about the king’s addiction to overseas adventures was that it meant his younger brother John was left in charge. Upon his father’s death, John had been made Count of Mortain in Normandy, and had been given numerous castles and estates in England and France, as well as all the revenues of Somerset, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire. He now personally owned Ireland, the southwest of England, Lancashire, and southwestern Normandy, but he also wanted to be king. When Richard departed for Palestine, he had made specific instructions that John was not to enter England for three years while he was away, but he was persuaded to let him stay by their mother. So from 1190, once Richard headed off, John was basically an irresponsible twenty-something in his own country-sized Playboy mansion. When warned that his brother would probably try to seize the throne while he was away on crusade, Richard replied: ‘my brother John is not the man to conquer a country if there is anyone to offer the feeblest resistance.’ Which turned out to be fairly accurate.

  It was not long before Lackland was conspiring against his brother, and against the chancellor Longchamp, spreading the idea that because he was foreign he didn’t really understand English ways and should be ignored.

  The Norman chancellor was not very popular, to put it mildly; he made enemies with many of the most powerful men, including William Marshal and Bishop Godfrey of Winchester—who, thanks to Longchamp, was forced to give up his lands and castles despite having paid the king £3,000 for them only a year before. Longchamp had numerous faults, among them ‘over-confidence, inordinate love of power, aggrandizement of his family, lack of tact, and a complete failure to understand the English whom he openly professed to despise.’ Both clergy and laity found him to be ‘an intolerable tyrant.’1 It didn’t help that Longchamp introduced the French style of being served food by a kneeling servant, and that he couldn’t even speak English, nor to mention that he traveled around with an entourage of one thousand men.2

  Longchanp was also physically unfortunate, a ‘short, ugly, deformed figure,’3 and Gerald of Wales likened him to an ape. As one historian put it: ‘If his enemies are to be believed, Bishop Longchamp looked like a cross between Shakespeare’s Richard III and Tolkien’s Gollum.’4

  Not that there were any goodies in this particular drama. John’s chief ally in his scheming was Bishop Hugh Nunant of Coventry, who was said to be so sinful that after his deathbed confession no one could be found who was willing to absolve him.

  Richard had sent the Archbishop of Canterbury, Baldwin, to the holy land ahead of him. Baldwin was a controversial figure who as one chronicler put it, ‘was more damaging to Christianity than Saladin.’ When the churchman arrived in 1190, he got bogged down in a succession dispute after the Queen of Jerusalem had died, and was in the process of excommunicating everyone when he succumbed himself soon after.

  In 1191, news reached England about Archbishop Baldwin’s demise and Longchamp, who was also the pope’s legate in England, was therefore effectively in charge of the Church. He soon imprisoned Geoffrey Plantagenet, the Archbishop of York, who was also the king’s half-brother, and ignored a royal command sent from the king in the Middle East.

  The various bishops and archbishops were constantly at one another’s throats. Geoffrey Plantagenet had been made archbishop under Richard even though there were complaints from the locals, namely that he wasn’t even a priest. Geoffrey swaggered around, and once drunkenly put a golden cup cover on his head and said ‘Would not a crown look well on this head?’ This during a period whe
n paranoid, dictatorial monarchs were in charge was tantamount to screaming ‘please behead me.’ Once installed, he claimed that any grants made by the king in his province would need his consent; Richard had brought him down to earth by stripping him of his land.

  John, for perhaps the only time in his life, was now the hero of the hour, ordering Longchamp to leave the kingdom, and after a brief struggle, the bishop fled the country in 1191 disguised as a prostitute, escaping despite a sex-starved fisherman trying to assault him en route.

  By the winter of 1191–92 John was in military control of London and began to conspire with King Philip, but any talk of open rebellion was halted in February when his mother heard about it, crossed over to England, and held meetings of the Great Council, making her son back down. Having put him in his place, she then went about sorting out the Church, forcing the warring northern bishops to make up (Archbishop Geoffrey of York had excommunicated the Bishop of Durham at the time). John’s unrest was triggered by the treaty between Richard and Tancred of Sicily, which named Richard’s nephew Arthur of Brittany as his heir; this was done so that Arthur could be more valuable when he was married off to Tancred’s daughter. Meanwhile, news of Richard’s marriage to Berengia in the spring now also threatened John further; if they produced an heir that is, which would entail touching each other.

  Having signed a treaty with Saladin in September 1192, Richard now had to return home, and to avoid France en route in case Philip’s men got him; however, he had also fallen out with the Austrian ruler, Leopold, so that whole swathe of central Europe was a no-no, too. But on the way, the king was shipwrecked. He landed, of all places, in Austrian territory. Despite disguising himself as a lumberjack, or possibly a monk, his expensive gloves gave him away, and Leopold’s men found him in a ‘house of ill repute’ (which could mean either a brothel or poor man’s home). Leopold sold him as a hostage to the German emperor, Heinrich VI, who in turn demanded a ransom from the English Crown.

  Medieval contracts could be as complex as any Hollywood deal. The agreement between Heinrich and the English included 100,000 marks as payment but also stipulated that Richard’s niece was to marry Leopold’s son; that Isaac of Cyprus was to be released by Richard’s men; that Richard would have to bring fifty galleys and two hundred knights to Heinrich’s invasion of Sicily; and that Heinrich would have to give Leopold two hundred hostages. Meanwhile, when Richard was captured, John announced that his brother was dead and began open rebellion against him, rushing to Paris in January 1193 to do homage to Philip.

  King Philip had planned to invade Normandy while Richard was still in Palestine, but none of his neighbors would go to war against a crusader, as the Pope had strictly forbidden such a thing. But he found a coconspirator in John, who betrayed both God and his own brother in one act. Even French chroniclers who disliked Richard, such as Philip’s biographer Rigord de Saint-Denis, were scandalized that the younger brother would do such a thing. But then it was a sort of family tradition that went right back to old Fulk the Black. Now Lackland gave up large parts of Normandy to the French as part of his deal, so much so that Philip ‘thought him a fool’ and was shocked by his lack of sense.

  It is not like Richard had not been warned about his brother. On April 5, 1192, he had received a letter from Longchamp about an attempted coup by John but he continued fighting, and in May he launched a new military offensive. At the end of the month, he got a second letter saying John was conspiring with Philip; instead Richard made another attempt at capturing Jerusalem.

  John and Philip struggled to find allies to help them. King William of Scotland refused to join in because Richard had freed him and to fight him would be dishonorable; likewise, Richard’s allies, including Dietrich, Count of Holland, Henry, Duke of Brabant and the unlikely named Archbishop Adolf of Cologne, all remained loyal. He had that effect on people, while Philip and John didn’t. It’s telling that despite the cost of the King’s ransom, there seems to have been little appetite for the alternative, John; people were prepared to pay four year’s annual revenue to keep him from power.

  Their other devious plan was to get the Danish king, Canute VI, to invade; after all, no one had really heard from the Vikings for a while, but they were always up for a fight. However, as it turned out, the days of the Danes being a threat to anyone were long gone, and they were already well on their way to becoming the tediously reasonable peace lovers of today. Canute’s invasion failed to materialize, and even if he’d succeeded he’d probably have just set up a center-Left coalition government anyway.

  Philip and John also attempted to pay the emperor to keep Richard in prison for an extra year. Meanwhile, Richard’s mum tried to intervene by writing to the Pope, signing her letter ‘Eleanor by the wrath of God,’ but it made no difference—the realm of England was forced to pay thirty-four tons of gold, four years’ worth of government expenditure.5

  The job of collecting this vast amount of cash fell on the chancellor and his sheriffs, and the king’s ransom was soon followed by ‘Saladin’s Tithe,’ a tax on all revenue in the kingdom to pay for the capture of Jerusalem. There was a certain amount of compulsion; while the negotiations were going on, Richard sent a letter to his mother asking that she note who contributed money so he might show his great thanks. In other words, anyone who didn’t contribute would be noted. However, despite the huge cost involved, the Germans accompanying Richard’s return were apparently so amazed by London’s opulence they thought they could have gotten more for him.

  This was onerous for the people back in England but for Richard, meanwhile, imprisonment was like jail for Mafia dons or Wall Street crooks in the 1970s. ‘He was allowed to hold his court at Spires or Worms or wherever he might be, and to transact the business of his kingdom; his friends, who visited him in great numbers, were permitted to come and go unmolested; and he had his hawks sent to him to provide him with amusement.’6

  During his confinement, Richard passed the time by playing practical jokes on his jailors, while a legend grew that the Lionheart’s minstrel, Blondel de Nesle, looked for him by going around Germany singing his favorite tune until, finally, he responded from his cell. He also apparently wrote the love song Ja nus hons pris ‘No man who is in prison,’ which can still be found on an album called Music of the Crusades. Most likely, none of these stories are true.

  Another legend put around to impress the gormless yokels at home has Richard’s jailors setting a hungry lion on him, only for the jailor’s daughter to fall in love with him and give him forty silk handkerchiefs with which to defend himself. Just what you need when fighting a lion, one would think, but at this point Richard calmly wraps the handkerchiefs around his hand, puts his arm down the animal’s throat, and rips the beast’s heart out and eats its still-beating organ—after first sprinkling salt on it—in front of the amazed Austrians. I think we can safely assume that story was unlikely to be true, as well, but the fact that these highly improbable tales attached themselves to the king suggests that some people were at least prepared to believe them. He was heroic. No one would believe such a story if it was John involved; women tended to go out of their way to avoid Richard’s brother and if a similar tale had been made about him it would probably involve him pushing the jailer’s daughter in front of the lion to save his own skin.

  Richard finally made it back home in March 1194, Philip having sent a message to John: ‘Look to yourself; the devil is loosed.’ Although Lackland had fled to Normandy, his brother caught up with him at Lisieux, where he was surprisingly forgiving, telling him: ‘Think no more of it, brother: you are but a child who has had evil counselors.’ John was twenty-seven at the time. He showed repentance by inviting members of a French garrison at Evereux (his own side) to dinner where he had them murdered and their heads stuck on poles. John’s lands were restored, and all was well that ended well (apart for the French soldiers, obviously). Richard stormed nearby Vernueuil, which had been besieged by King Philip, and there he supposedly kisse
d every member of the garrison defending it—but in a manly way, obviously.

  On his return, the Lionheart besieged Nottingham, one of the very few areas that had sided with John in his woefully incompetent rebellion. At first, its defenders refused to give in, then he ordered gibbets to be raised and hanged a few captives in full view of everyone, which got the message across. According to Marshal’s biography, the other soldiers were spared because of ‘compassionate’ king Richard who was ‘so gentle and full of mercy.’ Other sources say at least one of them was flayed alive and the others were starved to death in a dungeon—so compassionate perhaps for the standards of the twelfth century. However, such was the king’s reputation that he didn’t actually have to kill all his enemies; the governor of St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall died of fright on hearing of Richard landing in England.

  As it was, Duke Leopold never received the money from the emperor, and on New Year’s Eve 1194, he died of gangrene after crushing his foot in a riding accident. On his release, Isaac the Tyrant went back to his old ways and made an audacious bid to seize Constantinople and become emperor, but he was poisoned. The Templars found Cyprus too much effort and ended up selling it on, for 40,000 Byzantine bezants, less than half as much as they’d paid for it. And they defaulted on the rest of the payment to Richard. As with all Middle East adventures, nothing ever goes to plan.

  In the end, Richard’s escapades had achieved very little, with Jerusalem still in Muslim hands, the king having never gotten closer than twelve miles away from it, although for centuries mothers in Turkey would warn their children of Malik Rik, King Richard, a bogeyman figure. However, historians are grateful for the Lionheart’s adventures. Hubert Walter, who Richard made Chief Justiciar during his absence, thought it wise to record everything in case the king accused him of fiddling with the books, and government affairs have been written down ever since.