It took some hours to craft the letter as the Duke wanted it, but eventually it was composed.
Dearest Father,
I understand your desire to give our beloved brother a great and powerful domain to mark his passage into manhood. Aquitaine is such a realm. However, for the past eight years I have fought countless battles, extinguished the reserves of so many treasuries, and received too many wounds in keeping Aquitaine within your Empire to relinquish it now.
Even if I were already King and too occupied elsewhere to oversee the Duchy myself, I would not entrust it to a young man like John – untried in battle, unproven in governance.
He should be happy with the lordship of Ireland. The Celts are not as intransigent as the lords of Aquitaine.
So, at the cost of incurring your wrath, I must tell you that I reject your proposition. I will return to Poitiers to await your response.
Your Devoted Son,
Richard
The Duke did not wait to witness the inevitable anger of his father; we left for Poitiers early the next morning. No doubt the King’s reaction was apoplectic, but we did not hear from him for several months.
Nor did we hear anything from either of Duke Richard’s younger brothers.
We spent most of 1184 training the army, relaxing on hunting expeditions or enjoying life at court in Poitiers. The Duke and Father Alun spent many hours discussing the diverse subjects raised by Abbess Hildegard, and the respect they held for one another grew.
The Grand Quintet made an appearance in June, which became a time of great revelry. They also brought some news.
Apparently, the King had been trying to negotiate a marriage for Richard – either by cementing an alliance with a daughter of the Emperor Barbarossa, or by confirming his long-standing betrothal to Alyse, the sister of Philip Augustus, King of France. Both notions had little chance of success. The Emperor’s daughter was a sickly child with no chance of producing children, while it was well known that when Alyse was under the King’s guardianship at Caen, as a girl, he had been unable to resist seducing her. As far as the Lionheart was concerned, diplomatic marriages were one thing, but marrying one of his own father’s conquests was completely out of the question.
The King then turned to what he thought would be a gambit that Richard would be unable to defend. Although it had much potential risk, and he did it reluctantly, he decided to release his wife from her confinement in England.
For the first time in eleven years, Eleanor of Aquitaine – the most powerful woman in Europe, and its most beautiful – was on the loose.
12. Return of the Duchess
The King’s gambit was the work of a master of chess. In May 1185, Queen Eleanor arrived in Normandy and the King immediately sent a message to Richard at Poitiers, asking him to travel to Caen once again to greet his mother and escort her back to Aquitaine. Once there, she would be reinvested as Duchess of Aquitaine.
It was a brilliant move.
Such was the esteem the Lionheart had for his mother, he ordered that we leave for Normandy the next day. In addition, he readily agreed to step aside and acknowledge Eleanor as Duchess of her domain. Richard’s agreement initially appeared to be a capitulation but was, in fact, far from it. He was his mother’s heir in Aquitaine, which significantly strengthened his claim. And he was also his father’s heir to the Empire. Even more importantly, his prodigiously capable mother was now free to become his most important ally.
Neither John nor Geoffrey was happy with their father’s elegant solution to the Aquitaine game. But there was little they could do to challenge the outcome. Among those who were inclined to manoeuvre against the Plantagenets and support rebellious offspring, Geoffrey did not command the respect that Young Henry had mustered and John was too young. With the King and his formidable wife allied in a pragmatic truce focused on Richard, a triumvirate had been created that was far too powerful to be challenged, even by Philip of France.
Richard’s position was strengthened even further during the following year. In August 1186, as was his wont, Geoffrey was competing in a chivalrous tournament in Paris. In a vicious encounter with a very tenacious and skilful knight from Saxony, he was thrown from his horse. Ominously, his right ankle remained caught in its stirrup. The horse was badly injured and, enraged by its pain, charged around the tiltyard, rearing and kicking, until it trampled Geoffrey to death beneath its hooves. The physicians did all they could to save him, but his injuries were too severe; his chest was crushed and he had deep wounds to his head.
The King was heartbroken. He had lost three sons – one in infancy, and now two more in their prime. Many said that the family was being punished for its sins and that the Devil’s Brood was now receiving the retribution that it deserved.
Life in Poitiers was very different after the arrival of Eleanor. The ‘Court of Love’ that she had created before her incarceration by the King returned. The routine we had enjoyed under the Lionheart – one of severe military training, frequent hunting and various forms of debauchery – was replaced by music and poetry, debate and learning, chivalry and manners. When Duke Richard needed to escape from the high morality of his mother’s court, he had to go in search of one or all of the Grand Quintet for baser amusements.
Although the Duchess – a title she held in her own right and much preferred to the title of Queen, which came courtesy of her husband – was closer to seventy years of age than sixty, there was no doubting her radiant beauty, nor her intellect and cunning. She was slim and shapely and walked like a woman half her age. She still had all her own teeth, all of which were unblemished and neatly aligned, giving her smile a wonderful symmetry; her face had few wrinkles and although her chestnut hair had become pure white, it shone with a healthy glow.
For a woman to be called both the most beautiful in Europe and its most powerful was a remarkable dual accolade. She was a patron of troubadours, poets and artists and a strong advocate of chivalry. She surrounded herself with handsome men and nubile women and encouraged them to let nature take its course, indulging their instincts. Rumours about her morality abounded and there were many tales of her numerous infidelities and sexual peccadilloes – most, no doubt, apocryphal.
Her exploits during the Second Great Crusade had added an almost supernatural allure to her reputation. She had taken the cross after hearing Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous clarion call, and insisted on taking personal command of her own domain as Duchess of Aquitaine. She recruited large numbers of ladies-in-waiting, who became known as her ‘Amazons’. She was fêted in Constantinople as ‘Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons’, and she enthralled the Byzantines with her beauty and courage. Although the Crusade was largely a failure, her heroic journey to Jerusalem and back, usually dressed in armour, and her survival through mountains, deserts, shipwrecks and battles became fabled.
Like the Empress Matilda and her confidant, Earl Harold, the one overriding passion of Eleanor’s life was the preservation of the Plantagenet dynasty through her sons.
And her favourite son by some distance was Richard.
The early days of 1187 were a period of relative calm in the Empire, but as spring blossomed a thorny issue that had been pricking the King for many years became a much bigger issue.
Despite being under his care for twenty-five years, and at one time his concubine, Henry had still not found a husband for Alyse, the sister of Philip, King of France. The King had promised several times that she would be married to Duke Richard, but it had never happened. Philip wanted her back, or he wanted her wed; at the very least, he wanted her estates and castles in the borders between France and Normandy returned to him. Henry refused to return Alyse, fearing that Philip would use her to forge an alliance with someone else.
The powers of King Philip Augustus were waxing, while King Henry’s were waning, and both were aware of the changes in the other’s prowess. The French King calculated that the time was right to challenge the Plantagenets head on. And so, in the summer of 1
187, two huge armies gathered near Châteauroux.
Towards the end of June, on a vast expanse of the flat, featureless farmland of Berry, all the lords and knights who could be mustered from the realms of Henry and Philip faced one another. At their sides were their allies from lands far and wide and thousands of bowmen, infantry and sappers, both regular soldiers and mercenaries, who made up the bulk of the two armies.
Most of the knights assembled had fought one another in tournaments many times, where the spilling of blood was commonplace, serious injuries were frequent and death part of the price they were prepared to pay for their sport. But what was in prospect on that inauspicious day was the mass slaughter of a major battle.
All was prepared. The din of men, armour and horses subsided and a menacing calm descended on the chosen field of battle. Pennons and gonfalons fluttered in the breeze, horses snorted, some peed or defecated on the ground. A few men did the same, or vomited where they stood.
I had been in many fights, some particularly vicious, but these were two mighty armies of huge proportions. I shifted uneasily in my saddle and took deep breaths to try to calm my racing heart.
Richard commanded the left flank, his brother John took the right and their father the middle. The Grand Quintet’s men supported Richard’s force, and I took command of Richard’s personal conrois. By the morning of 23 June 1187, all was ready for the mighty encounter to commence.
It was hard to count how many men faced one another that day. My estimate was at least 10,000 on each side. I had never seen so many men, let alone fought a battle amidst such numbers.
We were perhaps within an hour of the battle commencing when Father Alun rode up to our lines escorted by two men-at-arms. He carried a vellum scroll in his hand that would not only change the course of the day, but would also change our lives for ever.
Aware that a major battle between the two most powerful men in Europe was looming, he had travelled to Clairvaux in Champagne, the home of the Cistercian monk St Bernard of Clairvaux, whose passion for war had been focused on a world many miles from Europe, on a war driven not by the wants of men, but by the wishes of Christ himself.
St Bernard had been the main instigator of the Second Crusade of 1147 and one of the earliest supporters of the Knights Templar. Although he had been dead for over thirty years, his influence was still pervasive, and the great abbey of Clairvaux was still the spiritual focus of the crusader spirit in the Outremer.
It was well known that Christian control of the Holy Places was under threat and that Jerusalem itself was in danger, but the news that Father Alun carried was much more alarming. The Muslim leader, Salah al-Din Yusuf, known to the Christians as the Sultan Saladin, had issued a Jihad – a call to Holy War – in the spring and had been amassing a huge army ever since. The words of the Jihad had reached Rome and had sent a shiver down the spine of all who heard them, in every monastery and church in Christendom where they had been read:
Fight and slay the infidels wherever you find them.
Seize them, beleaguer them and lie in wait for them with every weapon of war.
Saladin’s reputation had spread far and wide in Europe. He was a man who had risen to rule the entire Levant by dint of his generalship and his code of chivalry, based on the Muslim knightly tradition of Futuwwa. He was much admired and widely imitated.
Although the Christian principalities in the Holy Land were powerful, and they had built imposing fortifications during the three generations they had been there, they lived a long way from western Christendom and were surrounded by millions of devoted Muslims. The Christians sometimes had the support of the Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire to their north, but that was not always guaranteed. Their main bulwark was provided by the military orders of fighting monks, the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller. They were redoubtable warriors, well funded and resourced from their properties and patrons in Europe, but they were jealous of one another and prone to competing rather than uniting in a common cause.
The figurehead for the Christian Outremer was the King of Jerusalem. In the past, these leaders had been warriors of great renown, but ten years earlier, the widowed Sybilla, Princess of Jerusalem, whose son had died, needed to produce a new heir to the kingdom. After much intrigue and haggling, a young French nobleman, Guy of Lusignan, was chosen and summoned from France. Sadly, he was not of the same calibre as the indomitable crusaders of the past. Since his arrival as King of Jerusalem, he had made several catastrophic mistakes in trying to meet Saladin’s growing threat.
When the Lionheart heard the detail of the situation in the Holy Land and read the contents of Father Alun’s scroll, he immediately sent a messenger to his father and brother. Within a few minutes, King Henry had called a council of war of his senior commanders and invited his opponent on the other side of the field of battle, Philip of France, to join him and the Plantagenets and to bring his senior nobles with him.
Campaign chairs were brought on to the killing ground between the two armies. With the massed ranks looking on, the most powerful men in Europe gathered to hear the contents of Father Alun’s missive.
At King Henry’s invitation, and without any sense of trepidation, Father Alun rose to describe the current situation in the Holy Land. There was not a murmur from his immediate audience, nor from the two armies on the periphery. When he gave the details of Saladin’s army and its gains, there were looks of horror all round. For almost a hundred years, the Holy Places had been under Christian hegemony, which now seemed to be under severe threat.
Then Father Alun unfurled his scroll. In a clear voice that echoed out to both armies he prefaced the statement with his own introduction.
‘Pope Alexander has decreed that plenary indulgences for all sins of this earth will be granted to all who rise to the challenge in Palestine and take the cross in defence of Christianity. All debts will be suspended, and all who answer the call will be exempt from taxes levied to pay for the expedition.’
A gasp of astonishment spread through the ranks as Father Alun spoke. Then he raised his hand to demand silence and, like an archbishop in his pulpit, held out the vellum epistle. He had the entire audience in his thrall: kings and dukes, lords and knights, soldiers and camp followers.
‘The Pope has decreed that the revered words of St Bernard of Clairvaux of many years ago be read again in every place of Christian worship in the world. With all humility, I read it to you all now and pray that you…’ He paused and stared pointedly at both King Henry and his opponent, King Philip, ‘… heed its impassioned message.’
He then read St Bernard’s letter.
Oh mighty soldier, oh man of war, at last you have a cause for which you can fight without endangering your soul; a cause in which to win is glorious and for which to die is but to gain. Are you a shrewd merchant, quick to see the profits of this world? If you are, I can offer you a bargain which you cannot afford to miss. Take the sign of the cross. At once, you will have indulgence for all the sins which you confess with a contrite heart. The cross is cheap and if you wear it with humility you will find that you have obtained the Kingdom of Heaven.
As Father Alun finished, there was a stunned silence for several moments. He then rolled up the vellum and walked over to Henry, his King. He fell to his knees, bowed his head and handed the scroll to his liege. Henry took the vellum and looked over to King Philip.
The French King was already on his feet; he walked over to Henry and offered to embrace him. The gesture was immediately reciprocated, and the two men hugged each other warmly. A powerful wave of cheers rolled across the open ground as both armies greeted with elation the rapprochement between the two monarchs. The embrace between the two kings spread among the opposing commanders like a contagion, and there were hugs of goodwill en masse.
The Duke called me over.
‘It looks like today’s fight is over. But I fear there are bigger battles to come – battles that will be fought a long way from these shores.�
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In the most remarkable of circumstances, by the middle of the next day the two armies were preparing to leave.
There had been celebratory feasting overnight and, at a brief but effective negotiation over breakfast, the Plantagenets and the French had agreed a truce. It would last until, at the very least, the threat to the Holy Places had been overcome.
Later that day, the Lionheart summoned Father Alun and myself to his tent. We were to join him and his Grand Quintet to hear his plans for the future.
‘I am clear about what I should now do. I intend to take the cross, and I would like all of you to join me. But I am also clear that if the Christian armies are to be successful against this Sultan, we need to unite all the armies of Europe. My father is now too old to go to Palestine, so it will be my responsibility. A deal needs to be struck with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. But first, it is vital that I build on this truce with Philip Augustus and win his confidence so that we can act in unison.’
I was in awe as I listened to the Lionheart.
He had matured considerably; he was now the heir apparent to a vast empire and had taken on the mantle appropriately.
Father Alun nodded sagely as the Duke spoke. He knew that the Lionheart’s destiny would not only be determined by his lordship of the Plantagenet Empire, but also by his leadership of the mission to save the Holy Land from the Sultan Saladin and his Muslim hordes.
13. Taking the Cross
Following the remarkable events on the plains of Châteauroux, where a battleground became a scene of harmony and goodwill, we travelled to the court of Philip Augustus in Paris to begin the planning of the next Great Crusade.
Philip and the Lionheart warmed to one another, to the point of genuine friendship. Although he was ten years younger than Duke Richard, Philip was an instinctive soldier, strong-willed and clever. Not as tall, nor as imposing as the Duke, he was powerfully built and athletic, with strong features and long wavy black tresses that framed his face like a wimple.
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