Richard I

by Thomas Asbridge

  This legend touched upon the second intriguing aspect of Richard I’s life – the fact that he had been held captive in Austria and Germany. Medieval storytellers had long been fascinated by the notion of great men suddenly finding themselves held in confinement, and the Lionheart’s own time as a prisoner certainly offered fertile ground.fn1 One refrain on this theme, first emerging in a work composed near Rheims around 1260, gave rise to a particularly enduring myth: the story of Blondel – the king’s faithful minstrel. Once Richard was captured, Blondel was supposed to have mounted a determined search for his ‘missing’ master. This saw him criss-crossing Germany and Austria, pausing at the foot of countless castles to sing a song that he and Richard had written together, until finally at Dürnstein he heard the tune repeated and realized the Lionheart lay within. While the Angevin king did indeed compose at least two doleful laments while in captivity, both of which survive to this day, the tale of Blondel is pure fiction.6

  Above and beyond all else, however, it was Richard I’s participation in the Third Crusade and his titanic struggle with Saladin for control of the Holy Land that inspired generations of writers, artists and myth-makers. Played out in the remote Levant, the crusade possessed an intoxicating exoticism. It also matched the Lionheart against the perfect opponent – the great Muslim sultan of the East, the victor at Hattin and conqueror of Jerusalem. In fact, the confrontation between Richard and Saladin catapulted them both into the forefront of the medieval European imagination. Some chose to present the sultan in a romanticized light, emphasizing his cultured demeanour. It was even suggested that he had been dubbed a knight in the course of his career and adhered to the precepts of chivalry. In these tales, Saladin’s encounters with Richard were almost always well-mannered exemplars of courtly behaviour. Others painted the Muslim leader with a more demonic face – the scourge of Christendom, crushed by the triumphant Lionheart.

  It might be thought that two awkward truths would have intruded into the legends spun around the holy war: the fact that Richard and Saladin never met, or even fought one another directly; and the small matter of the Lionheart’s failure to actually achieve outright victory on crusade. But in the course of the thirteenth century these details were readily overwritten, not least because most subsequent crusades to the East enjoyed even less success. Popular tales of a direct military confrontation between the two protagonists, often akin to single combat, seem to have been circulating widely by the middle part of the century. In one version of events that seems to echo the fighting outside Jaffa in 1192, Richard was said to have confronted the sultan in a mountain pass, accompanied by just a handful of knights. In another, the Lionheart faced Saladin in a mighty duel, with both men – mounted on magnificent warhorses – exchanging blows. Here, fiction was providing what reality had failed to furnish: a decisive clash between the two champions; and one from which Richard always emerged triumphant, usually by driving a humiliated Saladin from the field.

  The image of the Lionheart defeating Saladin in single combat also found expression in contemporary art. A series of glazed floor tiles dating from the 1250s, discovered in Chertsey Abbey, Surrey, and now on display in London’s British Museum, depicts a tableau of this mythical encounter. Here, Richard is the archetypal man of action. Clad in full armour, his shield emblazoned with the royal coat of arms, the Lionheart’s body seems coiled with energy – braced for the impact of the lance couched beneath his arm, as his horse leaps forward to attack. Saladin, by contrast, is the enemy vanquished: his unarmoured body arched backwards, pierced through by the sharp point of Richard’s weapon; his horse folding beneath him in defeat. The Chertsey Tiles convey a clear impression of absolute victory – one in which the Muslim sultan is no longer merely being forced to retreat, but actually slain.

  The power of such images, alongside the blossoming cult of mythology surrounding the Lionheart, bear testament to the intensive memorialization of his achievements, both real and imagined, in this period. The legends of Richard’s deeds permeated aristocratic culture and certainly found purchase in royal circles. In 1251, the king’s nephew and successor, Henry III of England, commissioned a dramatic wall painting of the Lionheart’s duel with Saladin for the so-called ‘Antioch Chamber’ of Clarendon Palace in Wiltshire (though sadly the site has long been in ruins), and it has been argued that Henry wished to present himself as the ‘new Lionheart’. It is certainly the case that, when Henry’s remarkable son Edward I came to power, a song of celebration declared: ‘Behold. He shines like a new Richard!’ Later sovereigns were equally enthralled. In the fourteenth century, Edward III of England and his son Edward, the Black Prince, owned tapestries portraying the duel between Richard and Saladin, while an unusual round helmet, supposedly once worn by the sultan, was listed in the royal inventory.7

  Perhaps the ultimate example of the Lionheart’s power to arouse adulation among later generations came not from England, but France. In the wake of Richard I’s death, King Philip Augustus restored the ascendancy of the Capetian dynasty. By exploiting the weak and ineffectual nature of King John’s rule, Philip managed to seize control over almost all of the Angevins’ continental lands. The territories that the Lionheart had fought so hard to recover in the closing years of his reign were squandered within just a few years, including the whole of the duchy of Normandy. Even Richard’s grand fortress, Chateau Gaillard, fell after a grim, seven-month siege, its garrison starved into submission. Over the course of his forty-three years in power, Philip II transformed the fortunes of his realm, and when he died in 1223, he could rightly claim to have been one of France’s greatest monarchs.

  By the mid thirteenth century, Philip’s grandson, Louis IX, was in power. He too went on to enjoy a long and notable career, later being canonized by the papacy. But in one particular regard, it was not to Louis’s grandfather that contemporaries urged him to look for inspiration. Instead, rather shockingly, they pointed to the example set by Philip’s arch enemy, Richard the Lionheart. King Louis’s companion and biographer, John of Joinville, wrote that while Philip Augustus had been ‘much blamed’ for his early departure from the Third Crusade, Richard I ‘stayed in the Holy Land, and did many great deeds, so that the Saracens feared him mightily’. The Lionheart was held in such dread, Joinville claimed, that when ‘Saracen children cried, the women would scold them, saying: “Hush! King Richard is coming!” to quiet them’. Hoping to emulate the Lionheart’s stirring deeds, Louis IX launched two crusades to the Near East and ultimately lost his life in north Africa.8

  By the later Middle Ages, Richard I’s status as one of England’s most revered sovereigns seemed assured. Some even likened his achievements to those of Alexander the Great, the Roman emperor Augustus and mighty Charlemagne. In popular imagination, the Lionheart was a totemic figure – an idealized exemplar of English monarchy. His influence remained clear for all to see, with the English royal coats of arms preserving the device Richard adopted towards the end of his reign: three gold lions arrayed against a red background.fn2 But the first signs that the wheel might turn against Richard in scholarly circles were already apparent in the early seventeenth century and, by the time the historian Edward Gibbon was writing a hundred years later – in the full throes of the Enlightenment – it had become common for historians to censure the Lionheart’s penchant for violence and brutality, while also decrying his neglect of England. In 1864, the leading medievalist William Stubbs reflected the academic consensus when declaring that Richard had been ‘a selfish ruler and a vicious man’.9

  At this stage, however, the traumatic upheavals of widespread industrialization had driven European culture towards a romanticized re-engagement with its medieval past. In art and literature, the Lionheart came back in vogue – his story told and retold through a mixture of history, myth and pure fantasy. As Victorian England fumbled around in its own half-remembered history, desperately searching for a sense of national identity, some latched on to Richard – the peerless warrior and all-con
quering crusader – as an icon. The Great Exhibition, mounted in London in 1851, featured a monumental equestrian statue of the Lionheart, sculpted by the Italian baron Carlo Marochetti. Such was its popularity that it was soon decided the piece should be recast in bronze and placed on permanent display – the costs of this work being paid for by public subscription, to which both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert contributed. Since 1860, this larger-than-life image of Richard I has stood in the heart of England’s capital, beside the Thames, in Westminster Old Palace Yard. There the Lionheart – sword held aloft, astride a huge rearing warhorse, his heavily muscled frame outlined in skintight mail armour – looks down upon visitors to Parliament and the House of Lords: a medieval king who has found a place in the modern world.

  Illustrations

  1. King Richard I, shown here in an illustration from a mid-thirteenth-century chronicle by Matthew Paris, succeeded to the English throne in 1189.

  2. The reverse of Richard’s royal seal from 1198, depicting ‘the Lionheart’, as he was already known in his lifetime, as a mounted knight, his shield bearing the three-lions device that would be adopted as the royal coat of arms in England.

  3. Richard enlisted in the Third Crusade in 1187, even before he became king, after the Muslim sultan Saladin (depicted above) reconquered the city of Jerusalem for Islam. Richard and Saladin became arch rivals in the war for the Holy Land.

  4. Fighting alongside Philip II of France, Richard swiftly concluded the great siege of Acre. The two monarchs (Philip in blue) are shown receiving Acre’s surrender on 12 July 1191.

  5. When negotiations for the release of the city’s Muslim garrison broke down, Richard had some 2,700 captives executed.

  6. On 7 September 1191, Richard was confronted by the full might of Saladin’s forces in the Battle of Arsuf and, as this nineteenth-century engraving suggests, the Lionheart fought in the thick of the fray.

  7. Richard made two advances on Jerusalem, but retreated on both occasions without ever laying siege to the city. As a result, the Third Crusade ended with Christendom’s most sacred site – the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (above) – still in Muslim hands.

  8. These mid-thirteenth-century tiles, discovered in Chertsey Abbey, Surrey, depict Richard triumphing over Saladin in single combat, reflecting how the Lionheart’s achievements were widely mythologized in the later Middle Ages.

  9. Between 1196 and 1198, Richard spent a fortune constructing this mighty castle – Château Gaillard – perched above the River Seine, but it enabled him to neutralize the threat posed by Philip II and thus reclaim the duchy of Normandy.

  10. Mortally wounded by a crossbow bolt during a minor siege, Richard died on 6 April 1199 and was laid to rest beside his father, Henry II, in Fontevraud Abbey, where the Lionheart’s tomb effigy can still be seen today.

  11. This grand equestrian statue, erected outside the Palace of Westminster in London in 1860, bears testament to the resurgence of popular interest in the Lionheart during the modern era.

  Notes

  1. IN SEARCH OF THE LIONHEART

  1. Ambroise, The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la Guerre Sainte, ed. and trans. M. Ailes and M. Barber, 2 vols (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), ll. 11314–620; Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1864–5), vol. 1, pp. 413–24.

  2. Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, trans. D. S. Richards (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 225–6; Ibn al-Athir, The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamilfi’l-Ta’rikh, trans. D. S. Richards, vol. 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 401.

  3. J. A. Brundage, Richard Lion Heart (New York: Scribner, 1974), p. 250.

  4. Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and trans. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 478.

  5. Itinerarium Peregrinorum, p. 144.

  6. History of William Marshal, ed. and trans. A. J. Holden, S. Gregory and D. Crouch, 3 vols (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002–6), ll. 9291–303.

  7. Roger of Howden: Gesta Regis Henrici II et Ricardi I, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1867), vol. 2, pp. 78–83; and Chronica, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols (London: Longman, 1868–71), vol. 3, pp. 9–12. The details of King Richard I’s coronation were preserved in these two accounts authored by Roger of Howden, a parson from Yorkshire who also served both Henry II and Richard as a royal clerk. Howden was a remarkably well-informed contemporary witness to the Lionheart’s reign and a participant in the first phase of the Third Crusade.

  2. THE ABSENT KING

  1. Itinerarium Peregrinorum, p. xvii; A. L. Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta (1087–1216), 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 350; Brundage, Richard Lion Heart, p. 258.

  2. W. C. Sellars and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen, 1930), p. 23.

  3. ‘Historia de expeditione Friderici imperatoris’, in Quellen zur Geschichte der Kreuzzuges Kaiser Friedrichs I, ed. A. Chroust (Berlin: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1928), pp. 6–10; Itinerarium Peregrinorum, p. 140.

  4. J. S. C. Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 81–105; J. P. Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 99–103.

  5. Roger of Howden, Chronica, vol. 3, pp. 74–9.

  6. M. Routledge, ‘Songs’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. J. S. C. Riley-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 99.

  7. Bertrand of Born, The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, ed. W. D. Paden, T. Sankovitch and P. H. Stäblein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 384, 415.

  8. Ambroise, l. 5246.

  9. Roger of Howden, Gesta Regis, vol. 2, p. 90; William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols (London: Longman, 1884–9), vol. 1, pp. 303–7.

  10. R. A. Turner and R. Heiser, The Reign of Richard the Lionheart: Ruler of the Angevin Empire (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 100–101.

  11. Roger of Howden, Gesta Regis, vol. 2, pp. 219–20.

  12. Richard of Devizes, Chronicon, ed. and trans. J. T. Appleby (London: T. Nelson, 1963), pp. 44–6.

  13. Roger of Howden, Gesta Regis, vol. 2, p. 7; J. Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 265.

  14. Roger of Howden, Gesta Regis, vol. 1, p. 292; Gillingham, Richard I, p. 263; Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (London: Longman, 1875), p. 96.

  3. THE CRUSADER KING

  1. Epistolae Cantuarienses, in Chronicles and Memorials, ed. W. Stubbs, vol. 2, p. 347.

  2. Roger of Howden, Gesta Regis, vol. 2, pp. 110–11.

  3. Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, p. 146.

  4. Ambroise, l. 4602; Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, p. 157.

  5. Ambroise, ll. 6296–622; J. F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), pp. 232–9; Roger of Howden, Chronica, vol. 3, pp. 130–33; Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, pp. 174–6.

  6. Itinerarium Peregrinorum, p. 270.

  7. Gillingham, Richard I, pp. 173–8.

  8. Ambroise, ll. 11192–3.

  9. Ibid., ll. 111314–15; Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, pp. 225–6.

  10. Ambroise, ll. 7068–164.

  11. ‘Historia de expeditione Friderici Imperatoris’, pp. 6–10.

  12. Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, p. 153.

  13. Ibid., pp. 155–6.

  14. Ibid., pp. 173–4.

  15. Ibid., pp. 187–8; Ibn al-Athir, p. 392.

  16. Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, p. 161; Ambroise, ll. 5192–213; Itinerarium Peregrinorum, p. 233.

  17. Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, pp. 164–5.

  18. Roger of Howden, Chronica, vol. 3
, p. 131.

  19. Itinerarium Peregrinorum, p. 304; Ambroise, ll. 7672–5.

  20. Ambroise, ll. 7772–4.

  21. H. E. Mayer, The Crusades, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 148; Gillingham, Richard I, p. 191; T. Asbridge, The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), pp. 490–91.

  22. Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, pp. 209–12.

  23. Ambroise, ll. 12259–63.