As soon as the King turned back to face his quarry and fixed him with an awesome stare, Bernard of Bigorre threw down his sword and fell to his knees. He grovelled at the Lionheart’s feet, attempting to kiss his boots. The King had nothing but contempt for him. He leaned down to pick up the man’s sword, which he used to poke him under the chin, making him get to his feet.
The Gascon continued to plead for mercy. Like all tyrants, once stripped of the means to intimidate, he was a quivering wreck. He wept and wailed, but the King said nothing, his jaw set resolutely. He gestured to a sergeant, who brought a rope. With the help of two men-at-arms, the sergeant tied a noose and secured it to a nearby tree.
Bernard of Bigorre was hanged for his crimes moments later. The King turned away from the scene before the executed man had stopped writhing in his death throes, and gave Godric an order.
‘Strip him of his armour and weapons and have them sent to his family in Bayonne. Give the girl some silver and an escort to Bagnères. Send my proclamation with her that this corpse is to rot where it hangs; anyone who cuts it down will suffer a similar fate.’
The Lionheart had a clearly defined threshold in his mind regarding behaviour he would not tolerate. The Lord of Bigorre had crossed that line and paid the price.
We then crossed the mountains to meet with King Alfonso II, the Lionheart’s old ally. Alfonso had formed a new alliance with Sancho VI, King of Navarre, which further extended Plantagenet influence into Iberia. More significantly, for all of us and for England, Sancho had a daughter who would make the alliance between England and the kingdoms of Iberia much more agreeable and permanent.
The King met her for the first time in Pamplona, at the banquet given in his honour by Sancho at the Palace Real de Olite. When she walked into the hall for the feast, the Lionheart was transfixed, as were we all. She was twenty years old and stunningly beautiful. She looked like a pure Basque of her homeland; in fact, she bore a striking resemblance to the lovely Negu I had met in Gascony. She had the same dusky complexion, strong features and flowing black locks formed into a fashionable chignon held with a clasp of gold. Tied with a dark-blue tasselled silk cord, she wore a stunning ice-blue kirtle, which hugged her voluptuous figure to intoxicating effect.
She was called Bérengère, a charming name that suited her perfectly. King Richard’s fascination for the princess seemed to be reciprocated by her, and her father’s beaming smile also seemed to lend approval; the King of the mighty Plantagenet Empire was a fine catch for his little kingdom.
However, I was immediately concerned because of the solemn undertaking that the King had given to Philip Augustus that he would marry his sister Alyse. But Abbot Alun was able to put my mind at rest with some dramatic news, which had been revealed to him by Queen Eleanor when she was released. Not only had King Henry seduced Alyse as a girl, but she had borne him a child, a boy now approaching adulthood, who had been brought up in Blois by her sister Alix, Countess of Blois. The Lionheart had not yet told Philip Augustus, but he would do so when challenged about the promise to marry his sister.
The King was in a hurry to return across the Pyrenees to make the Crusade rendezvous at Vézelay. And so, once again, Abbot Alun’s diplomacy and legal skills were put to good use and a marriage settlement was quickly agreed for the two to marry. It had been a whirlwind betrothal, and Abbot Alun was convinced that the King had already bedded the princess by the time we left, but nothing was ever said.
Richard was irrepressible. He had inherited the most powerful Empire in Europe, had found a wife with whom he could extend his influence into Iberia and with whom he could produce an heir who would add Latin blood to England’s pedigree, and he was about to embark on an expedition to save the heart and soul of Christianity.
Just as the King was invigorated, so I was content. I had shared so much already with the Lionheart and I knew there were great adventures to come, but I was still curious about the things I did not know.
As we rode up the Valley of the Rhône, I asked Alun once again about the background to the mission we were undertaking at Earl Harold’s behest.
‘Alun, is the time now right for me to know of the things that lie behind our journey?’
Alun adjusted his position in the saddle and took a couple of deep breaths.
‘Ranulf, let me tell you what you need to know. First, you must know about my personal commitment to Richard’s cause and that of England.’
Alun then turned to look me directly in the face. I sensed that what he was about to tell me was something deeply cherished, about which he rarely spoke.
‘My father was called Bryn, a sergeant in the service of the Bishop of Durham. He was born in the early 1130s, in Hexham, high in the Pennines. He married a local Durham girl of Anglo-Norse origins called Alditha, and I was born in 1155. I was blessed with a gift for learning and by the age of seven I was being taught by the monks of the cathedral. My father died when I was a boy, but his ancestry was very unusual. Before he died he told me about our heritage.’
I discerned the faintest of smiles begin to soften his face before he took another deep breath and continued.
‘Bryn’s father, Afan, and mother, Carys, both had ancient Celtic names. They were among the last survivors of an old tribe of Celts called the Gul, a final remnant of the peoples who lived in the north from before the time of the Romans. Carys was born sometime before 1120, the daughter of Awel, a princess of the Gul, whose father was Owain Rheged, the last Druid King of the Gul. Her name means “Gentle Breeze”, and she was apparently very beautiful.’
‘So, you are of royal Celtic blood?’
‘Yes, but that’s only half the story. Although Awel was never married to him, Carys’ father was a man of great importance in our history…’
He paused, and I sensed that he was reaching the crux of the story. I readied myself for what he was about to reveal.
‘So, to my great-grandfather; he had sought the remote realm of the Gul on a small estate called Ashgyll, near Alston, high in Northumbria. It was said he chose it because it was the remotest place in England. He lived to a great age after a life full of intrigue, heroism and sadness. Awel comforted him in his last years, and Owain Rheged and the Gul protected him when his few retainers died. Carys, my grandmother, was his only child.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Edgar the Atheling, prince of Old England.’
It took a moment for the significance of Alun’s words to sink in. But then I realized how profound they were.
‘But that means you are the true English heir to the throne?’
‘Well, yes. But that’s now unimportant, because the Lionheart carries enough Cerdician blood to suit us all. That’s why I’m here – to protect the heritage that I carry in my veins. Earl Harold carries the same heritage, and so do you.’
I wanted to ask countless questions, but Alun was in full flow with information I had yearned to hear for so long.
‘In the late 1120s, the great scribe William of Malmesbury travelled to Ashgyll with an apprentice, Roger of Caen. When they returned to Malmesbury, the young monk committed the Atheling’s story to vellum and stored it in their famous library. A few years later, when our mentor, Earl Harold, was in the service of the Empress Matilda, he met Roger of Caen, then Prior of Salisbury. The Prior had guarded the precious story of the Atheling’s life, a document he entrusted to Harold’s safekeeping.’
‘It must tell a story that no one has ever heard. It is something I would give a fortune to read.’
‘You should; and perhaps one day you will. But all that is for another day.’
I smiled to myself, content for now. My decision to accept Earl Harold’s commission had been a good one, and it was now entering a new phase with our journey to the Holy Land. I had learned to be patient – I had been so for a dozen years – and had now been rewarded with the amazing revelation of Alun’s personal commitment to the mission.
I knew there were more revelations t
o come, but I had learned to trust Alun’s judgement about when it was wise for me to know what I needed to know; so far, it had been infallible.
15. Excalibur
Before the rendezvous at Vézelay, we travelled to La Rochelle to meet the armada of crusaders that had left England. When we arrived, almost a hundred ships were at anchor in the port. There had been mayhem in the town, as the English and Norman sailors and artisans had overwhelmed the taverns and whorehouses. Their disappointment in not finding enough mead, beer or women turned to anger, which soon boiled over into rioting and looting. Women were raped, including the daughter of the Castellan.
The King’s fury knew no bounds. He ordered that twenty men be executed on the harbour wall and 200 flogged. When it was pointed out that it was difficult to know who the guilty ones were, his answer was blunt.
‘Like the Romans, decimate them. One man in ten is to be flogged; after the flogging, one in ten of those is to be hanged.’
He knew how many men were in his fleet and had already done the arithmetic. After the punishments, he stood on the battlements of the keep that towered over the harbour and spoke to the assembled fleet.
‘Listen carefully to my words, for woe betide anyone who does not. Any man who kills another will be bound to his body. If at sea, he will be thrown overboard with the body, and if on land, into a pit. Any man who rapes a woman shall suffer emasculation by her hand. Any man who uses blasphemous or abusive language will be fined one ounce of silver for each offence and any act of theft will be punished by tarring and feathering and being put ashore at the next landfall.’
The King stared out over his huge flotilla; there was silence from the men, punctuated only by the cries of seagulls and the lapping of waves. The men knew he meant what he said. When he turned away, the silence continued for several moments before the men returned to their duties.
To my astonishment and the King’s, despite his threats, the same chaos happened when the fleet anchored on the Tagus in Lisbon, and again in Marseilles. The same punishments were meted out on both occasions and the decimation was doubled, then trebled. But the effects were only temporary.
As the Lionheart said later, in a moment of reflection, ‘They are the scum of the earth; let’s pray that they treat Saladin with the same contempt as they treat me.’
After our rendezvous at Vézelay, the main army and that of Philip Augustus marched south to Marseilles. The Grand Quintet had joined us, making a combined force of 1,500 knights and 10,000 men. Armies of that size were rarely seen. Only when we reached the open plain of the Lower Rhône valley could the end of the column be seen from the front, and only then if viewed from high ground.
In our vanguard was Walter of Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, who carried aloft the Holy Host in a golden pyx. Behind him came small contingents of new recruits to the ranks of the ‘Soldiers of Christ’ in their distinctive cappa robes: there were the Knights Templar with their crimson crosses, the Teutonic Knights with their black crosses, and the Knights Hospitaller with their white, eight-pointed Amalfi crosses.
Each contingent had its own colours on their shields, but it had been decided that all the gonfalons and pennons would bear the crimson cross of the Crusade. As a consequence, we painted the broad valley with a long snaking ribbon of white, splashed with blood red. Previous Crusades had cost many lives. As I watched the vivid column pass, I wondered how much of the symbolic blood on display would be real by the time we returned.
At Marseilles, a Genoese fleet carried us to Sicily in several convoys, but instead of the island being merely a staging post on our journey to the Holy Land, it became much more. We made landfall at Messina at the end of September and entered the city with all the panoply befitting the arrival of kings.
The Sicilian King, Tancred of Lecce, was hardly a foreigner to the Normans among us. A descendant of the Normans who had ruled southern Italy for 120 years after its foundation under Roger the Great, he governed a land noted for its diverse population of Greeks, Muslims, Jews and Christians, who had all lived side by side without malice for years. But Tancred was a new King, said by most to be a usurper and not all that popular. A small hedgehog of a man, with no obvious redeeming features, he was no more than the illegitimate cousin of the previous King.
Infuriatingly, on only our second night there, we were awoken in the early hours by trouble on the streets of Messina. There were just too many crusaders, too taken by drink and too amorous for their own good. Fights had broken out with King Tancred’s militia and had spread to the local population. Some of the army had begun to intimidate the local Jews and Muslims, who had retaliated, causing more bloodshed.
Tancred was furious and summoned Richard and Philip to demand an end to the fighting and recompense for the damage. It was a difficult meeting. With the sounds of looting and burning only yards away, I stood at the Lionheart’s shoulder as Philip and Tancred bickered about who was to blame and how the fighting should be stopped.
After half an hour, King Richard’s patience was exhausted. He had taken a dislike to Tancred, who he thought was an uncouth bully. He got up from his chair and marched towards the door. As he did so, he calmly issued his orders to me.
‘Tell Godric to send your men to Mercadier and the others with instructions to wake their men. Muster my personal conrois. We will take control of the city and occupy Tancred’s citadel.’
All those years of training to build a new army, which had begun when his Brabançon mercenaries went on the rampage in the Limousin, in 1177, then paid off. The King’s conrois were in their billets and sober when I roused them. When the Grand Quintet and their men arrived, we swept through Messina. We arrested those who surrendered, but cut down any who did not, regardless of whether they were Sicilians or members of our own army.
By dawn, the city was calm. We disarmed King Tancred’s personal garrison and locked them in their barracks.
Then the Lionheart marched back into Tancred’s hall, where he still sat with Philip. They were calmly eating a breakfast of fresh bread, cold cuts and beer.
‘Join us, Richard. I see you have been busy.’
The Lionheart did not respond, nor did he sit; he just took some bread from the table and quaffed a pot of beer.
Tancred continued in a supercilious tone.
‘As my guest, it’s not very polite to maraud through the streets of my city, arresting my men and assaulting my garrison.’
Philip then intervened.
‘Our view was that we should let them fight it out; it gets rid of troublemakers.’
The two men had obviously struck some sort of deal, but Richard was not in the slightest concerned. He took another swig of beer and a piece of bread, then left with only a brief comment.
‘At the moment, the objective of every Christian ought to be to fight Saladin, not one another. When you two realize that, I’ll release the arrested men and unlock the barracks.’
The impasse lasted for several weeks. Richard spent the time constructing a wooden palisade close to Tancred’s main palace, in Palermo, as his quarters. He thought Tancred a fool, but was furious that Philip had not helped him bring the city to order. He took the view that this kind of issue of command needed to be resolved in Sicily rather than in Palestine. When he discovered that Philip had been promised ships by Tancred and was planning to take his smaller army of 2,000 men to the Holy Land on his own, he was even more annoyed.
The stalemate became even more intractable. Tancred’s mood of apparent indifference changed. His considerable pride had been wounded and he became more and more angry that King Richard maintained an iron grip on his city and his garrison and refused to relinquish his hold.
Then news arrived that changed the situation significantly. It was carried by the personal herald of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and what he had to say mortified us all.
The army of the Emperor, a mighty host over 70,000 strong, passed into the Byzantine Empire at the end of 1189. They were w
arned in advance by Queen Sybilla of Jerusalem that the Byzantine Emperor, Isaac Angelus, had entered into a secret pact with the Sultan Saladin. They therefore avoided Constantinople and the Golden Horn, but the Byzantine Emperor did all he could to impede the crusaders’ progress by laying waste all around them. Even so, despite his seventy years, Barbarossa’s inspirational leadership and the army’s discipline got them across the rugged terrain of Anatolia in the depths of winter. They withstood constant harassment by the Seljuk Turks, including a major pitched battle at Iconium against Qilich Arslan’s army. They finally arrived in Armenia in the spring of 1190, from where, as a chivalrous gesture, Barbarossa wrote a formal letter of warning to his adversary.
Now that you have profaned the Holy Land, over which we, by the authority of the Eternal King, bear rule, we will proceed to restore the land you have seized! You shall learn the might of our victorious eagles and shall experience the anger of Germany: the youth of the Danube, who know not how to flee, the towering Bavarian, the cunning Swabian, the fiery Burgundian, the nimble mountaineers of the Alps. My own right hand, which you think enfeebled by old age, can still wield the sword that will bring the triumph of God’s cause.
Also an honourable knight, the Sultan Saladin sent Barbarossa a reply.
If you count Christians, my Arabs are many times more numerous. Between us and those who aid us, there is no impediment. With us are the Bedouin, the Artuqid Turcomans, even our peasants, who will fight bravely against those who invade our country and exterminate them. We will meet you with the power of God. And when we have victory over you, we shall take your lands with God’s good pleasure.
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