Lionheart
Page 16
Released by agreement with Robert of Turnham and Henry of Cornhill, the men were forced to swear that in future they would abide by the rules of conduct laid down by King Richard. On 24 July William de Fors arrived with thirty more big ships, divided into five squadrons commanded by Archbishop Gérard of Auch, Bishop Bernard of Bayonne, Richard de Camville, Guillaume d’Oléron and Robert de Sablé, who was in overall command. After mooring in the estuary of the Tagus, they were given two days to re-provision before sailing away on 26 July, to the evident relief of the Portuguese, and passed the point of no return at the straits of Gibraltar on 1 August. The land on both sides of the strait was occupied by the Moors, but with insufficient naval power to prevent so large a Christian fleet passing through. In any case there was, as Saladin discovered, little sense of solidarity among Muslims of the Maghreb with those fighting the crusaders in Outremer. However, southern Spain was all Moorish territory, so, after Gibraltar, they were unable to land and re-provision until reaching Christian territory at the mouth of the Ebro in north-east Spain. From there, the plan was to rendezvous with King Richard and the bulk of his army, travelling by land, at Marseille on the southern coast of France.
NOTES
1. N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea (London: Penguin/National Maritime Museum, 2004), pp. 6–7.
2. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, p. 5.
3. Also spelled snecca, enecca and énèque.
4. B.Z. Kedar, ‘Reflections on Maps, Crusading and Logistics’, in Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, ed. J.H. Pryor (Farnham: Aldershot Publishing, 2006), p. 288.
5. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, p. 45 quoting Pipe Roll 2 Richard I, pp. 7–8, 53, 104, 112–13.
6. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, p. 45.
7. Ibid, p. 47 and endnote.
8. Possibly from ‘Muslim’ or ‘Mosul’ as in the case of cloth muslin.
9. See www.royalnavalmuseum.org
10. Kedar, ‘Reflections on Maps’, p. 263.
11. R. Gertwagen, ‘Harbours and Facilities along the Eastern Mediterranean Sea Lanes to Outremer’, in Logistics of Warfare, p. 103, quoting from The Book of the Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri, trans. A. Stewart (London: PPTSL, 1893–96).
12. Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse, pp. 144–6.
13. C. Tyerman, Who’s Who in Early Medieval England (London: Shepeard-Walwyn, 1996), pp. 240–1.
14. The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, ed. and trans. J.T. Appleby, Nelson’s Medieval Texts (London: Nelson, 1963, p. 10.
15. Roger of Howden, Chronica, pars posterior, Vol 3, p. 46.
16. Kedar, ‘Reflections on Maps’, p. 263.
17. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, pp. 119–20.
13
Sea-Sickness and Siege
With 70 per cent of the money raised in England already spent on the fleet and other preparations, Richard made a compact of mistrust with Philip Augustus on 18 January 1190, under which they swore to depart together and return together, meanwhile behaving as brother crusaders, their territorial disputes put on hold for the duration of the crusade. Expanding the peace treaty of Villandry, they also imposed a truce on all their vassals remaining in France for as long as the crusade lasted.
Richard’s travels throughout his continental possessions, exacting more taxes and punishing vassals who failed to pay up, were interrupted by the arrival of Queen Eleanor, crossing the Channel and bringing with her Prince John, Geoffrey the Bastard and a posse of prelates that included both William Longchamp and Hugh of Durham. Also in the party was Princess Alais, a hostage of the Plantagenets for twenty-one of her thirty years. Eleanor was by this stage desperate that Richard should marry and father a legitimate child, so that if he died on crusade, John would not succeed to the throne. And if Richard’s heir were an infant, who better than his astute and experienced grandmother to act as regent until it came of age? Marrying Alais, who had been betrothed to Richard for more than two decades, would have solved this problem. She had borne at least one child to Henry and was therefore known to be fertile. Since the marriage would also cement a new alliance between the Capetian royal family and the Plantagenets, it would have been a political masterstroke. Refusing the match at this moment was one of the worst moves in Richard’s erratic reign.
To correct another ill-considered decision, he forced Prince John and Geoffrey the Bastard to swear that they would not return to England in the following three years – the likely duration of the crusade – without his express permission. Eleanor was rightly alarmed: with John itching to lord it over his possessions on English soil, it was extremely probable that, if forced by this oath to remain idle in France, he would collude in some way with Philip’s vassals, with incalculable results. She therefore persuaded Richard to release John from the oath, so that he could occupy himself with governing his English territory. Geoffrey the Bastard was obliged to remain in France – an archbishop of York forbidden to set foot in the country of his diocese! A factor in this decision was the considerable income of the see that was to go to the Exchequer during his absence.1
England was a ferment of crusading fever; knights who did not take the Cross were presented with a distaff, symbolising the women’s work of spinning. Some of the stay-at-homes were even derisively labelled ‘Holy Mary’s knights’.2 A few courageous individuals argued publicly that it was wrong to rejoice in the slaughter of thousands of Saracens, who were human beings, although unbelievers. The chronicler Radulphus Niger, a future dean of Lincoln Cathedral, went so far to declare that the obsession with terrestrial Jerusalem was a chimera that distracted men’s minds from the true goal of a spiritual Jerusalem or ‘heaven on earth’. But he was swimming against the tide. For many people, the idea of killing Saracen unbelievers in the Holy Land became confused with killing non-Christians closer at hand, as it had in the two previous crusades. England’s Jewish community was seen as an obvious target with the spurious justification that its property could afterwards be sold to raise funds for the crusade.
A series of pogroms climaxed in a mass suicide at York on 16 March 1190 – the feast of shabbat ha-gadol or the Great Sabbath at the end of Pesach or Passover. The former leader of the community, named Baruch – Latinised to Benedict – had already been killed during the pogrom in London at the time of Richard’s coronation. In the renewed violence his palatial home was set on fire, his family murdered and their possessions looted. This prompted the 150 surviving Jews in the city to take refuge in a wooden fortress standing on a motte and known as Clifford’s Tower.3 Fearing that the constable of the tower would betray them, the Jews refused to let him in, arguing that the tower was the property of the king, under whose direct protection they were. When the sheriff John Marshal was told that they had illicitly taken possession of the tower, the militia was ordered out. This in turn attracted a mob intent on ‘tasting Jewish blood’, in which a prime mover was one Richard Malebisse, a noble deeply indebted to Jewish creditors at a very high rate of interest in the region of 250 per cent per annum, comparable to the interest rates of the instant cash companies of today. So high was the risk of default on loans from Jews that interest rates like this were the norm.
A friar celebrated mass in front of the motte each day. After he was killed by a stone thrown from the tower, the terrified Jews suffered several days of anguish while small siege engines were dragged into position below the motte. After a fire broke out in the wooden building from causes unknown, in the smoke and confusion, a French rabbi from Joigny advised the men to kill their wives, rather than have them raped before death. This they did, after which the rabbi killed sixty of the men in a scene reminiscent of the Roman siege at Masada. Many bodies were thrown from the tower onto the mob outside.4 The remaining Jews, trusting to promises of safe conduct if they converted to Christianity, emerged to be massacred by the mob, whose ringleaders never had any intention of sparing them. Malebisse then led a group of other debtors to the
cathedral to destroy the copies of their loan agreements stored there, before making good his escape, reputedly to Scotland.
At Bury St Edmunds fifty-seven Jews were murdered on Palm Sunday, and many others died in similar pogroms at Kings Lynn, Stamford, Colchester, Thetford and Ospringe in Kent. Probably the richest man in the kingdom, Aaron of Lincoln had founded a nation-wide banking organisation, financing major works like the construction of cathedrals and monasteries. On his death in 1186, so great had been his fortune that a scaccarium judeorum, or Jews’ Exchequer, was established under the Exchequer of Westminster to administer the estates of deceased Jews. Although cloaked by the argument that the Jews ‘had killed Christ’, most pogroms were incited by Christians who owed them money and had good reason to kill their creditors, loot their property and destroy evidence of the debts. In a few places, wise administrators forestalled this. At the first sign of trouble in Lincoln, the sheriff Gérard de Camville allowed the community to take refuge in the castle with all their valuables while he and his officers restored order in the town.
Furious that so much taxable wealth had been destroyed or stolen elsewhere, Richard ordered that, in future, copies of Jewish loan documents be held by the Crown, so that, when the lenders were killed, debts due to them automatically became enforceable as property of the king, removing the prime motive for murder by their debtors, although, as a Christian, he could not demand interest on the outstanding loans.5 Hubert Walter later arranged the other details.
In the immediate future, Richard ordered William Longchamp back to England with his brother Osbert to arrest and punish the instigators of the pogroms and the office-holders who had failed to prevent them. Sixty pairs of iron fetters were purchased at a cost of 15 shillings for those arrested in Lincoln and the diocese was placed under interdict. Before Longchamp was finished, among his prisoners was Bishop Hugh of Durham, arrested ostensibly for his responsibility for what had happened at York on 16 March. Trusting to letters from Richard confirming him in office, he had returned to England, only to be shown later letters from the king justifying his Aye-and-Nay nickname by giving Longchamp jurisdiction. These were used to deprive him of his offices, most of his wealth and his liberty.6
By now far too much power was concentrated in the Longchamp family, the third brother, Henry, having purchased the sheriffdom of Herefordshire. But Richard’s attention was firmly fixed on Aquitaine, where several vassals were defying his authority. He agreed with Philip Augustus’ kinsman Count Robert II of Dreux that the joint departure on crusade be postponed until July – which would mean a year’s delay in reaching the Holy Land – and then rode south with Henry of Saxony, son of his sister Matilda and Henry the Lion, to give the youth a blooding. And a blooding it was, with at least one castellan named William de Chisi hanged from his own battlements as a lesson to other Gascon dissidents.7
Still apparently trying to get Richard into bed with an appropriate spouse, Eleanor spent the spring and summer of 1190 in or near Chinon, to judge by the number of charters issued in that area stamped with her seal. He, meanwhile, was organising the crusading fleet in five squadrons commanded by two bishops and two laymen, only one of whom had experience of naval command. Also at Chinon in June, he published rules for shipboard conduct and laid down the punishments for various misdemeanours. From their harshness it is evident that he had no illusions about the men hired to crew the ships: for murder at sea, the penalty was to be bound to the corpse and thrown overboard with it; for murder on land, the penalty was to be buried alive with the victim; for non-lethal bloodshed, the perpetrator was to lose a hand; for an attack without bloodshed, he was to be keel-hauled three times; a fine was to be levied for foul language; and for theft the penalty was to be tarred and feathered and abandoned ashore at the next landfall.8
With both Richard and Eleanor in France, there was no one in England to hold Chancellor Longchamp in check. With no friends in England to favour, he taxed everyone so savagely that William of Newburgh said he had two right hands with which to grab money. The chronicler Gerald of Wales described him as:
short, crippled in both haunches, with a big head and hair on his forehead coming down almost to his eyes like an ape. His chin was receding and his lips were spread apart in an affected, false and almost constant grin. His neck was short, his back was humped and his belly stuck in front and his buttocks at the back.9
So large was the entourage with which he travelled, amounting sometimes to 1,000 riders, that accommodating it for one night could cost a monastery its revenue for the following three years.10 Longchamp was also a pederast, which made defaulting parents extremely reluctant to hand over their sons to him as hostages for payment of tax.11
On 1 July 1190, with Alais, a VIP prisoner in the fortress-city of Rouen, the kings of France and England rendezvoused at Vézelay in Burgundy, together with their armies. It must have been an impressive sight: thousands of barons and knights, each of whom required at least four horses; one or more destriers kept exclusively for combat; a palfrey to ride; another for his squire leading the destrier; and another to transport his armour and other belongings kept close to hand. In addition were the draught animals of the long wagon train of ox-carts bearing tents, cooking utensils and provisions.
To make the point that they were all pilgrims, albeit with murderous intent, the two kings were each presented with a symbolic staff and scrip, but Richard had put on so much weight that when he casually leaned on his staff, it snapped in two, which was taken as an evil omen. Although the two monarchs had sworn to be as brothers to each other and to share equally any loot taken on the expedition, stresses in the entente were already apparent. Richard controlled almost all the Saladin tithe collected in his possessions, but Philip had been able to collect the tithe only in his far smaller domains in the Ile de France, his vassals elsewhere tending to keep the tithe for their own crusading needs, which had enabled many of them to depart before their king, eager to carve out some glory in the Holy Land before Philip could claim the credit. There was no particular reason why they should not, since small parties of knights, and even individual knights, regularly travelled to Palestine in the years between the major crusades. William the Marshal, as one example, had spent nearly three years there in fulfilment of his deathbed promise to the Young King.
An armed mass of the size of the combined armies was rare. Its sheer size imposed severe strains on the countryside through which it passed like a plague of locusts, moving slowly at the pace of the wagon train. With no sanitation, the army left behind a trail of human and animal excrement several miles wide on the 200-mile journey from Vézelay to Lyons, where the Rhône was crossed. That problem was left behind them, but the impossibility of finding feed for so many horses and oxen along the way forced a decision to diverge after crossing the river. Philip’s contingent crossed first because it was fewer in number, but such was the press of the English following them that the bridge collapsed – a not uncommon event of the time. Many were drowned and the crossing of the rearguard was delayed while ferries were improvised.
Here the two armies separated, with the French heading for Nice and eastwards along the coast to Genoa to hire shipping that Richard had thought too expensive. He led his contingent south to Marseilles, where the combined Plantagenet fleet should have been awaiting him, had they not been delayed first by the events at Lisbon and by contrary winds at the straits of Gibraltar.12 Impatient as ever, on 7 or 16 August (accounts vary)13 Richard hired some Pisan merchant vessels to take his immediate entourage to Genoa while his rank-and-file swiftly ran out of money during the unexpected delay and caused problems in Marseilles.14 Meeting Philip in Genoa, he was asked for the loan of five galleys when the English fleet arrived, but haggled the number down to three, which Philip took as a personal insult as well as a blow to his royal purse.
The English fleet arrived eventually at Marseilles on 22 August 1190 to embark the main force of Richard’s army while he was making a Grand Tour of western Italy
, riding from one port to another, where the hired Pisan ships were waiting to transport his party to the next stopping place. It was a curious and time-consuming diversion, attributed to his fear of the sea and susceptibility to sea-sickness: on 20 August he was in Pisa; then came a meeting with Bishop Octavian of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber and on to Naples, which he reached on 28 August and stayed for eleven days.15 The Plantagenet fleet was meanwhile coasting down to Messina on the eastern coast of Sicily, arriving there on 14 September, two days before Philip Augustus sailed in and was given Tancred’s palace in the city as accommodation for his household.
Archbishop Baldwin, Bishop Hubert Walter and Ranulf de Glanville set off from Marseille as soon as the Plantagenet fleet arrived there with an advance party to sail direct to the Holy Land and reached the siege camp outside Acre eight months earlier than Richard and the main force. With the harbour fiercely defended by the Saracens, autumn storms obliged the incoming ships to sail north to Tyre and take shelter there. On finally entering the siege camp, spread over half a mile east–west by three-quarters of a mile north–south, that had been set up by Guy de Lusignan on and around the low hill known as Tel al-Fukhar a mile to the east of the city of Acre – and therefore out of range of catapulted missiles from the ramparts – the new arrivals found there a horror even worse than the conditions of medieval sieges in Europe.16
The Christian besiegers had dug deep ditches to protect their camp from surprise sorties by the garrison in the city and, on the landward side, from Saladin’s forces who were besieging the Christian invaders. With blocking forces much closer to the city covering the area from the camp to the sea both north and south of Acre, at times de Lusignan’s forces controlled far more territory than this; at other times they were driven back inside the defensive perimeter of the ditches, where a festering mass of sewage and decaying animal and human corpses attracted millions of flies. Since nothing was known of contagion, these were tolerated – as they would be for centuries to come – as a simple nuisance by men unaware that these pests contaminating their food represented far more of a threat to health and life than the missiles aimed at them from the city walls or Saladin’s attacks on the camp.