King Richard was only in his early thirties, but even so he knew full well that a sudden and untimely death remained a possibility. In 1183, a bout of dysentery had taken his eldest brother, Henry, from good health to his deathbed in mere weeks, while his brother Geoffrey of Brittany was killed three years later when he fell from his horse during a knightly tournament in France. The Third Crusade also proved to be an extraordinarily lethal campaign, from which Richard was lucky to emerge alive.
Why then did this monarch – otherwise so assiduous in matters of war and governance – lack a clear heir? In the mid twentieth century, some scholars popularized the notion that Richard’s failure to produce a successor was a consequence of his homosexuality. This idea was based in large part on a single medieval chronicler’s report that the Lionheart had shared a bed with Philip Augustus in the summer of 1187, while they were plotting Henry II’s downfall. But as one prominent academic historian has since pointed out, this encounter cannot be judged by modern standards and should rather be interpreted as a ‘political gesture of peace or alliance, not erotic passion’.13
In fact, Richard actually acquired a somewhat unsavoury reputation among contemporaries as a predatory womanizer. In the early 1180s, he was said to have abused his position as Duke of Aquitaine by abducting ‘his subjects’ wives, daughters and kinswomen’, forcing them to serve as his concubines. Towards the end of his reign, Richard was also rumoured to have become infatuated with a nun at Fontevraud Abbey. Much of the tale of this prospective liaison, as it was later told, seems barely credible – on learning that the Lionheart was particularly taken with her captivating eyes, the nun was supposed to have plucked them out and sent them to the king in defiance – but the story was obviously grounded in the belief that Richard had heterosexual, not homosexual, appetites. This same belief was reflected in one early thirteenth-century chronicler’s assertion that the Lionheart probably would have survived the wound that killed him in 1199 if only he had followed his surgeon’s orders and abstained from bedding whores.14
It remains possible that Richard was bisexual, of course, but the question of his precise sexual orientation hardly matters – the point is that his tastes did not prevent him from siring an heir. The notion that the Lionheart might have been infertile can also be discarded, given that he is known to have fathered at least one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. The real issue seems to have been neither desire, nor capacity, but the securing of a suitable wife. Richard originally was betrothed to King Louis VII’s daughter, Alice of France, in 1169 as part of a plan to secure peace between the Angevin and Capetian dynasties. Thereafter, Alice resided within the Angevin court, but her union with the Lionheart was never concluded, and Richard showed little interest in her, perhaps in part because she was widely rumoured to have become Henry II’s mistress.
In the end, Richard settled on a bride just as he was embarking on the Third Crusade: the Iberian princess Berengaria of Navarre. This was a politically expedient match, orchestrated in the main by Queen Eleanor, that secured the duchy of Aquitaine’s southern border during Richard’s absence. The Queen Mother chaperoned Berengaria on her journey to meet her new husband at Messina, on the island of Sicily, in early 1191, though their marriage was not formally enacted until they reached Cyprus. Berengaria then accompanied Richard on his journey to the Holy Land, but from this point onwards the couple had little contact. Though their union remained intact – probably in large part because the Lionheart could ill afford to alienate his Navarrese allies – it produced no children and it may be that Berengaria was barren.
Though Richard’s hands may have been partially tied, his failure to adequately address the issue of succession must be recognized as a significant blemish on his record. Of course, he could not have foreseen the exact circumstances of his sudden demise in 1199, but even so, his attitude towards the urgent matter of furnishing his realm with a legitimate heir seems unusually relaxed. For most medieval kings this was a primary obsession – an issue pursued almost regardless of the cost. In Richard’s case, however, the choice between John and Arthur remained largely unresolved until the Lionheart lay on his deathbed. Only then was Richard said to have finally confirmed his younger brother as his heir: a decision that would have catastrophic consequences for England and the entire Angevin realm.
3
The Crusader King
Richard I’s participation in the Third Crusade propelled him on to the world stage. The campaign proved to be the most ambitious and far-flung military expedition ever prosecuted by an English monarch. Above and beyond all the other events of his life, it would be this hotly contested holy war that shaped Richard’s reign and his reputation. He emerged as the crusade’s overall commander-in-chief, though more through a mixture of accident and intrigue than by design. First, in May 1190, the precipitous death en route to the Holy Land of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany stripped the Latin armies of their presumptive leader. Then, the unexpected departure from Palestine of the Lionheart’s co-commander, King Philip of France, in early August 1191, left Richard as the sole leader of the Third Crusade.
In all, King Richard’s eastern Mediterranean campaign lasted one and a half years. He began with a series of notable successes: capturing the strategically significant island of Cyprus while travelling to Palestine; breaking the long-standing deadlock at the crusader siege of Acre by pummelling the port’s Muslim garrison into submission in just one month; and then masterminding an audacious fighting march south along the coast to Jaffa in the late summer of 1191, even as Saladin strove to stop him in his tracks. From this point onwards, however, progress faltered. In the months that followed, the Lionheart made not just one, but two failed attempts to march inland towards Jerusalem, yet on both occasions he elected to retreat without ever launching a direct assault or initiating a siege. In September 1192, the crusade ended in stalemate. Richard had conquered a valuable strip of coastal territory, breathing new life into the crusader states, but fell short of achieving the expedition’s primary objective – the Holy City’s reconquest. Given the campaign’s indecisive outcome, it is reasonable to ask whether the Lionheart deserves his well-established reputation as one of Western Europe’s greatest crusade leaders. Was Richard in fact to blame for the Third Crusade’s limited achievements? And could he actually have led the Latin armies to outright victory?
In assessing Richard I’s crusading career, the extent of his ambitions for the expedition must first be acknowledged. Rather than simply focusing upon the Holy Land, the Lionheart seems to have envisioned his campaign to the Near East as one component of a broader strategy to deal with dynastic affairs and assert Angevin influence in the Mediterranean. Having decided to journey to the Levant via ship rather than overland, Richard plotted a course that conveniently brought him from Marseilles south along the Italian coast to the island kingdom of Sicily in late September 1190. Thirteen years earlier, King Henry II’s interest in international affairs had prompted him to marry off his young daughter Joanne to Sicily’s ruling sovereign, William II. But William had died in November 1189, prompting a succession crisis that saw the late king’s illegitimate cousin, Tancred of Lecce – an ambitious schemer of dwarf-like stature – seize power and take Joanne prisoner. Upon his arrival, Richard used a mixture of direct military aggression and insistent negotiation to secure not only Joanne’s release, but also a payment of 40,000 ounces of gold (partly in recompense for his sister Joanne’s previously withheld dower). Before departing, the Lionheart also secured a prospective marriage alliance between his three-year-old nephew Arthur of Brittany and one of Tancred’s daughters.
With the coming of spring, the sea lanes reopened, and Richard set sail on 10 April 1191, apparently with the intent of travelling on to Palestine as quickly as possible. In the event, he seized control of the Byzantine-held island of Cyprus before he ever set foot in the Holy Land. The supposed course of events that culminated in this providential conquest seems a little too propitious t
o be entirely accidental: the onset of a sudden storm dividing the Lionheart’s fleet, leaving three of his ships wrecked off the Cypriot coast; the ill-treatment meted out to their crews by the local populace offering Richard a ready cause to launch an armed intervention. Perhaps there was an element of premeditation behind the Lionheart’s actions – indeed, it may even be that he had always intended to make landfall on Cyprus, storm or no. As it was, Richard was able to brand the island’s Greek Christian ruler, Isaac Comnenus, a ‘tyrant’ and effect a swift military coup.1 The initial intention seems to have been to establish an Angevin outpost on Cyprus, and two English knights were installed as governors. Once the Lionheart and his great crusading army departed, however, insurrection soon broke out on the island. With his mind now more firmly focused on events in Palestine, Richard elected to sell Cyprus to the Templars for the price of 100,000 gold bezants, although admittedly he only ever received the initial down-payment of 40,000. The island would remain in Latin hands for almost four hundred years and served as an important staging post in the war for the Holy Land.
From an Angevin perspective, then, Richard’s Mediterranean adventure proved to be an enormous success even before his battle against Saladin began in earnest. There also can be no doubt that Richard’s military contribution transformed the fortunes of the Third Crusade once he reached the mainland. In part this was because the Lionheart brought his own, not inconsiderable, martial expertise to bear. His knowledge of war – and, in particular, the harsh realities of medieval siege-craft – had been cultivated through long years of governing the unruly duchy of Aquitaine and contesting the course of the Angevin succession. An aura of mystique had already begun to settle around Richard, linked to his vaunted prowess in combat and impetuous bravery.
Richard also arrived in the Levant at the head of a sizeable, well-resourced and disciplined army. As ever when dealing with medieval warfare, precise figures are virtually impossible to recover, but one contemporary estimate suggests that the Lionheart left Sicily with 17,000 troops and, by the standards of the day, the Angevin fleet of some 200 vessels was enormous. In contrast, Philip Augustus’s force seems to have contained just 650 knights and 1,300 squires, and the French king arrived in Palestine with a mere six ships.
The strict rules governing conduct within the Angevin fleet give some indication of King Richard’s authoritarian approach to command. Among a long list of harsh penalties for disorder was the provision that ‘Whoever shall slay a man while on a ship shall be bound to the corpse and thrown into the sea. If he shall slay him on land, he shall be bound to the corpse and buried [alive] in the earth.’2 Richard’s assiduous preparations for the crusade meant that his men would be equipped with all the necessary materials of war, from arms and armour to crossbow bolts and horseshoes. Furthermore, the king used his time in Sicily to amass a supply of hefty catapult stones and to construct a sophisticated wooden siege tower, known as Mategriffon, that could be broken down into sections, transported by ship and then reassembled in the Holy Land.
Richard also had the deep financial resources required to fund a victorious campaign. The successful implementation of the Saladin Tithe, alongside the Lionheart’s own extensive money-raising efforts, had filled the Angevin war chest, while the recent success in Cyprus only added more money to the coffers. Indeed, in almost every respect, Richard I’s qualities and resources outshone those of Philip Augustus, a man eight years his junior and his main rival for command of the crusade. Even their enemies were aware of the differences. Once the two kings arrived in the Levant, a Muslim contemporary observed that the French monarch was ‘a great man and respected leader, one of their great kings’, but added that the Lionheart ‘had much experience of fighting and was intrepid in battle’ and in comparison to ‘the king of France [was] richer and more renowned for martial skill and courage’.3
Richard may have been well placed to emerge as the guiding force behind the Third Crusade, but he would require all of his skill and strength to overcome the challenge now set before him: defeating the fearsome Muslim sultan Saladin and reasserting Latin dominion over the Holy Land. Saladin had come to power some twenty years earlier. The son of a Kurdish warlord named Ayyub, he began by establishing a powerbase in Egypt and then, drawing upon the fabled wealth of the Nile, set about extending his influence and authority into Syria and Mesopotamia. By 1186, Saladin controlled the great cities of Damascus and Aleppo, and had even subdued Mosul on the far-flung banks of the River Tigris, ushering in an unprecedented era of Muslim unity and establishing the foundations of an enduring Ayyubid empire.
These successes were fuelled by Saladin’s oft-repeated assurances that he would wage a determined jihad against the crusader states, reclaiming Palestine and the sacred city of Jerusalem for Islam. In 1187, he finally made good on his word, leading some 40,000 troops to war against the massed might of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. On 4 July at Hattin, in Galilee, Saladin scored a stunning victory, crushing the Christian army and capturing their king, Guy of Lusignan. In the months that followed, Muslim forces swept through Palestine, seizing key sites, including the coastal settlements of Acre and Ascalon, before finally toppling Jerusalem itself on 2 October. It was these grand triumphs that had sparked the Third Crusade and brought Richard I to the Holy Land. They also transformed Saladin into a living legend.
By the time the Lionheart reached Palestine in June 1191, Saladin was in his early fifties, his finest hour behind him. Age had begun to weaken the sultan’s constitution and he suffered from frequent, debilitating bouts of ill-health. None the less, he remained a redoubtable figure: admired by his followers as a champion of the holy war; shrewd in the arenas of politics and diplomacy; cautious yet competent in the field of battle. Richard I was thirty-three when he arrived in the Near East. Though hardly a neophyte, he was relatively new to the crown and largely untested on the international stage. In Saladin he found a well-matched opponent – a foil against whom his mettle would be tested to breaking point.
The first martial challenge to confront King Richard upon his arrival in the Levant was breaking the grim deadlock at the great siege of Acre. This extraordinary investment had begun almost two years earlier. The port city of Acre, in the northern reaches of the kingdom of Jerusalem, fell to Saladin in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Hattin. By the summer of 1189, however, King Guy had been released from Muslim captivity and decided to make a seemingly suicidal attempt to reconquer the fortified settlement. Guy marched south along the Mediterranean coast at the head of perhaps 2,000 troops and laid siege to Acre on 28 August.
At first, this offensive seemed like utter madness. It ran counter to every custom of medieval warfare, because under normal circumstances any attempt to assault a stronghold deep in enemy territory would end in catastrophe. In theory, all the opposition had to do was bring up a field army, encircle the besiegers and either starve them into submission or crush them to a pulp. But in 1189 Guy’s determined Latin army dug in, creating a network of well-defended trenches around Acre. Their position on the coast also meant that the sea could act as a vital conduit of supply and reinforcement. When Saladin deployed his army in support of the Muslim garrison inside Acre, he proved unable to overrun the Frankish positions. Any damage he could do was swiftly repaired, any troops killed or captured soon replaced by new arrivals. The siege of Acre evolved into the first military engagement of the Third Crusade, and, as the months passed, both sides found themselves caught in a dreadful stalemate. In the face of appalling privation and near-incessant military pressure, the Latin crusaders remained resolute, simply refusing to give up their cause, but they lacked the resources to breach Acre’s looming circuit of walls and overcome its garrison. For his part, Saladin maintained his counter-siege – with a field army encamped on the plains surrounding the Frankish trenches – but failed to break the investment.
The siege dragged on through two horrendous winters, with disease and hunger wreaking havoc in the Christian and Muslim
camps alike, and no end in sight. Philip of France was able to restore some momentum within the crusader camp once he arrived at the head of a small fleet on 20 April 1191. Work began on the construction of seven large stone-throwing machines, and the makeshift palisade surrounding the crusaders’ trenches was strengthened. In preparation for a proposed frontal assault on Acre’s walls, Philip also ordered that sections of the deep dry-moat surrounding the port should be filled. This led to a rather desperate and macabre struggle, as Franks began throwing animal carcasses and even human corpses into the ditch, while parties of Muslims set about the grisly task of undoing their efforts by dismembering and removing the remains.
Progress was being made by the Christians, but the tempo of operations only really changed once the Lionheart reached Acre on 8 June. With Richard’s forces in play, the crusaders could encircle the port’s landward walls with some 25,000 troops and, in spite of the simmering antagonism that persisted with Philip, there was a fair measure of positive coordination and collaboration between the Angevin and Capetian contingents. The Lionheart put two exceptionally powerful stone-throwing machines into the field – engines that may well have made use of advanced counterweight technology to propel heavier missiles further and with greater accuracy. Richard’s siege machines, when added to Philip’s arsenal, enabled the crusaders to subject Acre to a withering, near-constant aerial barrage, supplemented by arrow and crossbow volleys. Through the month of June, these attacks weakened the port’s fortifications and eroded the Muslim garrison’s morale, while also providing valuable covering fire under which teams of Latin sappers could begin tunnelling beneath Acre’s walls.
Richard I Page 4