Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Richard’s fleet then proceeded to Portofino (where the king rested for five days) and on to Portovenere, providing an opportunity to visit Pisa. The voyage continued past Cape Baratti to the castle of Piombino, thence via Portoferrajo on the island of Elba, the peninsula of Monte-Argentario, Porto Ercole and Civitavecchia to Ostia.4 Though at the mouth of the Tiber and just 16 miles from Rome, he did not visit the Eternal City and to Octavian, cardinal bishop of Ostia, who came to meet him he coldly explained why. Angry at the 1,500 marks he had to pay to have the pope appoint William Longchamp legate for the English Church, he told Octavian that the papacy was a mere snakepit of corruption, the keys of St Peter in effect sold off to the highest bidder and the so-called Vicar of Christ no better than the moneylenders Christ drove out of the temple. He made it clear that his snub to the Pope had nothing to do with his haste to be in the Holy Land by proceeding to Naples (via Nettuno and Ischia) and then ostentatiously staying there ten days.5 He then spent another five days at nearby Salerno, then considered the leading centre for European medicine. His leisurely progress had method in it, for he had left instructions for the main fleet to follow with all speed. This armada of cut-throats and reprobates actually arrived at Marseilles on 22 August and got under way again on the 30th. While Richard was at Salerno, he heard that it had leapfrogged him and was already off Messina.6 He decided to complete the rest of the journey to Sicily overland, and his chroniclers logged the succession of dreary towns in minute detail: Amalfi, Conza, Scalea, Amantea, Santa Eufemia, Mileto. On the road from Mileto (where his overnight stopover had been the abbey of the Holy Trinity), he made a typically bad, impulsive Ricardian mistake. Having sent his servants ahead, he was travelling with just one companion when he heard the sound of a hawk coming from a village hovel. Indignant that anyone but an aristocrat should own a hawk, he strode into the house and seized the bird. This high-handed action soon had the entire village down around his ears. Pelted by sticks and stones, Richard drew his sword to chastise the contumacious villagers, only to see the blade snap when he smacked the boldest villager with the flat of the weapon. The proud king of England and lord of Aquitaine experienced the humiliation of conducting a fighting retreat with nothing more than the selfsame tools the villagers were using. He could easily have been killed for a moment of impetuous folly.7

  That very evening he crossed the Straits of Messina, joined his fleet and, next day, made a triumphal entrance into Messina itself. The interview with Philip of France on 24 September was a sullen affair - Philip had been in Messina since the 16th, keeping a low profile and now he was outshone and piqued by the ‘magnificent reception’ given to his rival. The Sicilians seem to have been intrigued by the English fleet and its polyglot crews, as amazed by the olio of French, English and Flemish as by the bewildering variety of ships in Richard’s armada. There were snacks, oared transport ships of a Scandinavian type, longer and narrower than the galleys or dromonds, then there were the bulkier and slower dromonds - galleys with either a single or double bank of oars and one or more masts with lateen or triangular sails, equipped with a ramming beak for immobilising an enemy ship or holding it fast while grappling and boarding tactics were attempted. Particularly admired were the destriers, for the Normans had acquired ever since the Conquest of 1066 a particular expertise in transporting horses by sea.8 But the chronicler Ambroise said that the ‘Grifons and Lombards’ (Sicilians of, respectively, Greek or Latin descent) were angry at such pomp and circumstance, especially the caparisoned chargers and the flying pennants, which they considered a tactless slighting of their own king. Philip, angry that his arrival in a single ship had been so signally upstaged, announced that he was leaving his quarters in the royal palace and setting sail for Outremer at once. But Philip was as fearful a sailor as he was a warrior. Barely had he cleared Messina harbour when the sea began to make up and Philip, terrified by the waves, was forced to return to Messina and further ‘humiliating’ encounters with Richard.9

  On his way to rescue the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem from crisis, Richard had fortuitously walked into another political maelstrom when he arrived in Sicily. A prosperous and affluent kingdom, with abundant agricultural wealth - apart from oranges, lemons, sugar cane and cotton, the island was still the breadbasket of the Mediterranean it had been in Roman times - Sicily, at the crossroads between Western Europe, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, had always been a cockpit for conflict over trade routes and strategic nodal points. The eleventh century saw it as a battlefield between Byzantines, Normans and Saracens - a conflict the Normans had largely won by 1090. The result was a syncretism of cultures and languages, with Greek, Latin and Arabic the languages representing the respective three combatants. A political crisis had arisen on the death of the childless King William II in November 1189. By the laws of succession the kingdom passed to the late king’s aunt Constance, who was married to Frederick Barbarossa’s son Henry. Since Barbarossa’s career had largely been spent trying to assert German hegemony in Italy, it began to look as though the Holy Roman Empire might attain by dynastic marriage what it had failed to achieve by force of arms. The papacy, still scarred from the Guelph versus Ghibelline conflict, had no more desire to see Sicily fall into the German orbit than the Norman Sicilians had. Anti-German forces managed to instal Tancred of Lecce as the new king on the dubious grounds that he was an illegitimate cousin of the late king.10 This blatant attempt at a kind of Norman super-hegemony triggered both a Muslim revolt and an invasion from Germany. The dust of civil war had only just settled when the crusaders arrived. Tancred feared it might not be only Saladin who felt the military lash from doughty warriors like Richard.11

  For his part, Richard had a more immediate grievance. His sister Joan had been married to William II and, fearing trouble from her, Tancred had put her under house arrest and withheld the income from her dower, the county of Monte San Angelo. Moreover, William II had bequeathed his vast wealth in money, gold plate, grain, wine and warships to his father-in-law Henry II, but Tancred had used Henry’s death as an excuse to declare the will null and void.12 From Messina Richard dispatched envoys to Tancred in Palermo with a simple message: release my sister or face the consequences, and make good on William’s legacy. Tancred immediately set Joan free but stalled on the issue of the dower, ‘compensating’ her with a large money grant.13 Dissatisfied, Richard showed that he intended to pursue ‘linkage’ of both grievances by seizing the fortified monastery of Bagnara on the mainland side of the Straits of Messina and installing his sister Joan there. Irritated by the entire business over Alice, Richard thought he detected a flicker of interest in Joan from Philip and toyed with paying him back in the same coin by dangling the prospect of a dynastic marriage.14 But he soon had more serious concerns to attend to. Warfare was already probable when an insurrection in Messina made it certain. The crusader rank and file had not even managed to live on friendly terms with the people of Lisbon, so it was not likely they could adapt easily to the complex multicultural society of Sicily. Misunderstandings and failure to communicate soon hardened into deadly hostility between the indigenous population and the interlopers. The issue of the local women and the lustful attentions of the crusaders immediately became a running sore. Moreover, with demand for the essentials of life outstripping supply, the presence of such large numbers of troops soon resulted in skyrocketing food prices, especially of staples. Local traders and shopkeepers welcomed the chance for some quick profits and cited the law of supply and demand, but for the crusaders rising food prices simply meant greed, exploitation and profiteering by the Sicilians.15 Intemperate haggling led to crusaders refusing to pay prices asked, and the more ruffianly of them rode roughshod over the locals. The inevitable upshot was violence. Fearing rape, and, ultimately, enslavement, the Messinesi rose in revolt; Richard’s seizure of another stronghold, the Greek monastery of San Salvatore, on 2 October was apparently the last straw. The word spread that Richard and his men intended to spend the winter in
Sicily, so that there would be more rape, seduction, extortion, violence and bullying. Tancred’s agents, and even his governors, obligingly fanned the flames.16

  Even as Richard sat in conclave on 4 October with King Philip, Tancred’s local governors and the archbishops of Monreale, Reggio and Messina, he received word that his men were coming under heavy attack by the people of Messina and that the quarters of Hugh of Lusignan, one of the barons of Aquitaine, had been selected as the first target. Richard at once broke up the conference and assumed command of his army. The only way to deal with this uprising was a systematic conquest of Messina, so he made his dispositions.17 He began with a surprise uphill charge of the kind the locals had never seen before, which dislodged the defenders from their ‘impregnable’ position on high ground.18 Then he battered down the city gates and stormed in at the head of bloodthirsty, vengeful troops; in their fear, the Messinesi had achieved a self-fulfilling prophecy and now faced the very hordes of murderous rapists they so feared. In such circumstances, the fighting was bitter and hand-to-hand. Losses were high, including twenty-five of Richard’s household knights. To the fury of the English, Philip and the French remained neutral during the fighting, and Philip even seemed to favour the locals.19 But Richard and his men needed no assistance. They were in their element in this bloody streetfighting, they were veterans of many a siege, and they could sense the plunder and the rape that awaited them at the end of operations. All too soon local resistance collapsed: Ambroise said Richard completed the conquest of Messina in less time than it would take a priest to say matins. Then came the inevitable aftermath when Messina got a taste of what Lisbon had suffered. Palls of smoke rose over the harbour as the victorious troops stormed down to the merchants’ quarters to pillage and burn. Many a shopkeeper lived to regret the high prices he had charged, and many a shopkeeper’s wife and daughter paid for the patriarch’s profiteering by suffering the fate worse than death. As Ambroise put it in throwaway style: ‘They acquired women, fair, noble and wise women.’20

  Richard’s swift victory infuriated Philip, who claimed to be insulted when he saw the banners of England and Aquitaine streaming from the towers and walls of Messina. Since the flying of banners implied the absolute dominion of the lord whose colours were flown, he demanded, absurdly in the circumstances, that Richard take down his own insignia and replace them with those of France. Not wishing to abort the entire crusade on a matter of protocol, Richard compromised by taking down his own colours and replacing them with the ‘neutral’ pennants of the Templars and Hospitallers, who would thus remain as keepers of Messina until Tancred agreed terms.21 This was the second contretemps between Richard and Philip and some chroniclers said it was the crucial one, for Philip began to develop an obsession that Richard was flouting the terms of the ‘all for one’ agreement at Vézelay.22 Richard meanwhile took hostages from the wealthy burghers and, to rub salt in the wound, built a wooden castle on a hill overlooking the town; to this structure he gave the undiplomatic name Mategrifon, or Kill the Greeks.23 Faced with the possible permanent loss of Messina, Tancred agreed to pay Richard another enormous sum in gold, as full settlement of Joan’s dower and Richard’s other financial grievances. Tancred of Lecce may have been physically unprepossessing - ugly, simian and dwarfish - but he was a shrewd diplomat. In return for conceding Richard’s demands, he got a treaty of alliance against any invaders of the island - whether the Germans of emperor Henry VI or the Almohads of North Africa - and a diplomatic revolution whereby the king of England became the enemy of the German emperor.24 This was a rash step for Richard to take, and Philip Augustus, offered a similar deal earlier, had turned it down so as not to make an enemy of Germany. The value of Tancred’s diplomacy was seen the following year. When emperor Henry VI launched an attack on Sicily, Richard engineered a revolt in Germany, led by his ally Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa’s old adversary Henry the Lion. Richard on the other hand was no diplomat since by his agreement with Tancred he alienated both the German emperor and his brother John. To cement the alliance with Tancred, it was expressly stated that Arthur of Britanny was the heir presumptive to the throne of England and that, when adult, Arthur would marry one of Tancred’s daughters.25

  Two days after the agreement with Tancred, on 8 October, Richard settled his differences with Philip by drawing up guidelines for the crusaders’ stay in Sicily. He ‘squared’ the French king by giving him one-third of the monies received from Tancred, though the French later complained this should have been one-half, in accordance with the fifty-fifty rule.26 Then he imposed a code of conduct for his own men. First, he insisted that all goods looted in Messina should be returned. Then he ruled that the moratorium on debts, allowable as a crusader’s ‘perk’, applied only to debts contracted before the crusade. His target here was gambling debts, for the soldiers had taken to wagering huge amounts in the taverns of Messina and then, if they lost, repudiating the debts on the grounds that this was their privilege as crusaders. Additionally, a total ban on gambling, except in the presence and with the permission of officers, was imposed on the rank and file, with punishments for infraction severe: whipping through the army for a soldier (usually a fatal sanction) or triple keelhauling for sailors (even more decidedly so). These checks on high-handedness and indiscipline reconciled the people of Messina to occupation.27 Richard’s unsympathetic attitude to his private soldiers caused much muttering in the ranks, especially when he allowed knights and clerics to gamble up to twenty shillings a day. But bad feeling was to some extent assuaged by a price freeze: Richard and Philip fixed the price of bread at a penny a loaf, made it a criminal offence for merchants to raise the price of wine, and decreed that profits higher than 10 per cent on any transaction were illegal. Speculation and hoarding were punishable by death, no trading was allowed in dead meat, and in live meat only for slaughter by the army. A finance and discipline committee enforced these regulations and others, such as a tax of 50 per cent on the estates of crusaders who died, in order to further and finance the crusade, with the other 50 per cent being remitted to heirs and legatees in the home country.28 These regulations were tough and even draconian but they preserved the peace for the next six months while the crusaders remained on the island.

  It was probably at this stage that Richard had his first meeting with Tancred, for he spent a week away from Messina, in Palermo, during 9-16 October.29 Roger of Howden was more interested in the king’s encounter with the Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore, another of those mystics who claimed to be able to see hidden meanings in the Bible. Along with a lot of mumbo-jumbo about the Three Ages of History and the imminent coming of the Antichrist, Joachim was at least able to identify Saladin as the sixth of history’s seven great persecutors of the Church (the seventh was to be Antichrist himself), and to predict that Richard, as God’s chosen agent, would defeat Saladin and drive him from Jerusalem.30 At the temporal level, Richard learned of the death at Acre of Archbishop Baldwin and, on Christmas Day 1190, entertained Philip of France to a magnificent banquet at Mategrifon - a sumptuous occasion of meat and wine served on gold and silver plate.31 But his tarrying so long in Sicily puzzled many of his associates, particularly those who had been cooling their heels in Messina before he had even arrived. There were loud murmurings of discontent, with even oligarchic crusaders complaining of the damage to their purses caused by the long sojourn on the island. To quell the disaffection Richard was reduced to outright bribery: he distributed lavish cash gifts to his captains and there were even ‘trickle down’ payments made to the bored and fractious troops who were by now beginning to suffer from starvation and malnutrition. Many affected to query Richard’s ‘unconscionable’ delay in Sicily, but his motives were simple and twofold. In the first place, he feared the elements and the state of the Mediterranean in winter; what would be the point in arriving at Acre with a shattered fleet? Secondly, he was allowing time for Eleanor of Aquitaine to bring his bride Berengaria to him. The women and their escort crossed the
Alps in mid-winter and were at Lodi near Milan by 20 January 1191. There the 69-year-old Eleanor had a memorable meeting with Emperor Henry VI of Germany.32