Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Accordingly Richard and his companions set off north-west towards Udine. Engelbert, meanwhile, playing a double game, sent a messenger to his brother-in-law Meinhard, the emperor’s ally and bearing the title of hereditary ‘Advocate’ of Aquileia, to tell him that Richard was at large in his domains. Meinhard sent his aide Roger of Argentan to search the inns and taverns of Udine for pilgrims. It was a simple matter for Roger to run such conspicuous travellers to earth, but Meinhard had made a bad mistake in his choice of henchman. Roger was a Norman with divided loyalties. He confronted Richard and forced him to admit who he was, but then let him go, informing Meinhard that he could find no one answering the description of the wanted pilgrims. Meinhard found this the tallest of tall stories and in a fury sent out a fresh search party, but by the time they reached Udine the birds had flown.19 It must be admitted that no historian has ever been able to pin down the precise sequence of events in Udine. It seems that, even with Roger of Argentan’s blessing, the travellers had a hard time of it and were set upon twice by predatory locals, who noticed the contradiction between the apparel of the ‘pilgrims’ (they were travelling in disguise) and their lavish and conspicuous expenditure; it is not an easy thing for a prince to play the pauper. It is not clear whether the ‘killed and wounded’ referred to in some of the sources refers to the assaults here or the later one at Friesach.20

  Heading north from Udine, the travellers joined the Via Julia Augusta, the main road from Aquileia to the Alps. Realising that he was too tall, distinguished and well known to pass muster convincingly as a merchant, Richard reverted to the original Templar disguise, trying to avoid attention by travelling with caravans and merging with crowds in the towns. The 22-foot wide stone highway ran past the fortified town of Venzone and then turned east into the valley of the eastern Alps known as the Val Canale. Although twelfth-century winters in central Europe were warmer than our own, Richard’s spirits must have drooped as he saw the higher peaks of the Alps looming ahead, for by this time he was exhausted and suffering from fever - perhaps a recrudescence of the malady that had laid him low in Palestine. The probability is that the travellers stopped at the monastery of Moggio to allow the king to rest, and maybe it was here that they picked up the boy who spoke German and who features so prominently in the annals. On 13 December the pilgrims recommenced the journey through the Val Canale and soon passed Pontebba (Pontafel), usually regarded as the frontier between Italian and German-speaking peoples. Once past Tarvisio they were in the dangerous country of Carinthia. Everything now seemed to conspire against them, and they spent an entire day slipping and sliding in the snow before limping into Villach. Next day they galloped along the northern shore of the Ossiacher See, past the Benedictine monastery at Gerlitzen and then into the deep valleys of Carinthia, following a track through Feldkirchen and St Veit to Friesach.21

  News of their coming had preceded them. Friesach, a silver-mining boom town and fief of the bishop of Salzburg, turned out to be honeycombed by the troops of Friedrich III of Pettau, one of Leopold’s leading barons. Matters were desperate, so Richard agreed with Baldwin of Bethune that his faithful knight would have to be the sacrificial scapegoat. Baldwin and the main party would stay in Friesach, spend lavishly and generally draw attention to themselves, while Richard with just William de l’Etang and the German-speaking boy, would make a dash for Vienna.22 Friedrich duly took the bait and arrested Baldwin and the rest of the party; the confused sources hint that they may have resisted arrest and sustained casualties as a result. The larger diversionary plan worked only up to a point. Richard and William got as far as Erdburg (now a suburb of Vienna) after a three-day, 145-mile ride (past Forchenstein castle near Neumarkt, north-west to cross the River Mur just after Teufensbach, crossing back to the south bank near the Magdalenkirche at Judenberg, and then at full tilt across the plains of what is now the Viener Neustadt before dropping down to Vienna), and rented a room. There Richard collapsed with fever. Unfortunately, while the king slept off the fatigue of his recent exertions, the boy went out for food and was recognised by the emperor’s secret police; his arrogant manner in the Rochus market to say nothing of an expensive silver cross he wore almost invited attention. The story is that the boy went to the market on three successive days and on the third took with him Richard’s ornate gloves as the day was so cold. The police either seized him on the spot and put him to torture or followed him back to the house (once again the sources are unclear) and arrested Richard; the date was either 20 or 21 December.23 Some say the king was asleep when taken, others that he put up a fight, but the persistent legend that he was caught in the kitchen while masquerading as a chef and cooking meat over a spit may well be the truth. In the end Richard agreed to be apprehended but insisted he would surrender only to Leopold in person. International law was then in its infancy and the grounds for arresting a king who was travelling incognito seemed shaky, but the Austrians claimed that the selfsame ius gentium that established the reality of piracy was the basis for a charge against Richard of what we would nowadays call ‘crimes against humanity’. More specifically the following counts in the indictment were mentioned: the unlawful abduction of Isaac of Cyprus and his wife; insults offered to Duke Leopold at Acre; and the murder of Conrad of Montferrat. However, in general, educated and informed opinion in Europe, and even in France, where people had reason enough to hate Richard, concurred in finding the Austrian action an outrageous injustice, a crime made more outrageous by its humbug, for the jailers had kidnapped a king on the pretence that he himself was an abductor; rarely was the principle of tu quoque more appropriate.24

  Delighted to have his old enemy in his power, Leopold sent Richard to the castle of Durnstein, perched high up the Danube forty-five miles above Vienna, where the castellan was Hadmar of Kuenrig, one of his most reliable vassals. The Lionheart arrived there either on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.25 Richard’s sojourn in this fortress was the basis for one of the most enduring but, alas, apocryphal legends about the Lionheart. The story goes that Blondel was a wandering minstrel and troubadour, who had collaborated with Richard in Aquitaine on some aubades. Richard on his return from the crusades vanished into thin air, and it was feared he was being held for ransom by some desperate kidnappers, probably aided and abetted by some powerful continental magnate. When he learned of Richard’s arrest, Blondel at once wandered the length and breadth of Germany, searching for his lord. Outside all known prisons, dungeons and fortresses he would sing the first verse of the joint composition, hoping one day to hear his adored co-author respond with the second verse. Finally, as in all good stories, the inevitable happened, and Blondel heard Richard’s powerful voice wafting from the castle of Durnstein. He was thus able to return to England with news of the king’s whereabouts.26 One hardly needs to dwell on the manifold absurdities of the legend. Richard was held in Durnstein for just two weeks before being taken to the German emperor at Ratisbon. Even if the Austrians had been trying to conceal his whereabouts, and even if this was discovered immediately, it would have taken two weeks for the news to reach England. By the time Blondel was setting out on his quest, Richard would no longer be in Durnstein anyway, so would not have been there for him to discover. Besides, the motivation ascribed to the abductors is that valid only in the normal criminal case, where the kidnappers have to keep the hiding place of their prize secret, so that the celebrity’s family will pay the ransom money before the police can discover the hideout. But the whole point about the imperial seizure of Richard was that everything was out in the open. This was the coup of the century, and Henry VI of Germany wanted it known that he had Richard as a prisoner, so that he could extract the literal king’s ransom. It is a matter of historical fact that the emperor wrote to Philip of France on 28 December, virtually trumpeting the news that he had the Lionheart in his power, and soon all the civilised world knew it.27

  Yet since human beings are swayed more by myth than historical fact, it is worth probing a little more deeply into
this extraordinary legend. Its first appearance is in a Reims prose chronicle written about 1260, yet it really started to take off in the eighteenth century, especially after the 1785 comic opera Richard Coeur de Lion; this work, with words by M.J. Sedaine and music by Gretry, premiered in Paris, and features a rescue of Richard from Durnstein by Blondel in league with Margherite, countess of Flanders. In the nineteenth century Blondel appeared in Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman and he attracted the interest of the composers Robert Schumann and Joaquim Raff. In the twentieth century, following the fad for turning as many historical figures as possible into bisexual or homosexual personalities, Blondel tends to appear, inevitably, as Richard’s male lover.28 Although the story of Blondel at Durnstein is as clearly apocryphal as any story could be, the astonishing thing is that a troubadour named Blondel de Nesle did exist and was a contemporary of Richard’s. A native of Picardy, he was a mediocre composer of melodies and words which showed the influence of Gregorian chant, and twenty-three of his songs (seven of them with their music) have come down to us. He is sometimes tentatively identified with the minor nobleman Jean de Nesle of Picardy (though even here the attributors cannot agree whether it is Jean I or Jean II), but this is unlikely; more plausible is the notion that he was a member of the minor gentry or even a commoner. This Blondel de Nesle probably died around the age of 50 at the end of the twelfth century, and it is highly unlikely that he would ever even have met Richard. It is tempting to think the legend has been so enduring in part because an entirely fictional minstrel called Blondel was conflated with an actual troubadour of Picardy.29 Yet the myth of Blondel is extraordinarily tenacious, to the point where many writers seem reluctant to consign it to a fictional limbo. One recent valiant attempt to keep the flame alive ingeniously suggests the story may have been a transmogrified version of a real event, possibly involving troubadours as secret agents; the Blondel legend would thus be an elaborate smokescreen to hide the real story of England’s super-efficient espionage system.30

  The capture of Richard I of England was like manna to the troubled Henry VI, beset as he was by grave problems in every part of his realm. The German emperor faced the kinds of problems that would later bedevil Richard’s brother John: rebellious barons, breakaway provinces, local nationalism challenging imperial centralism, even Church-state collisions. Late twelfth-century Germany was a natural federation and should have been ruled as such, but Henry VI had autocratic tendencies and blundered into esoteric disputes between his vassals where he had no business.31 When Liège had to choose a new bishop in 1191, and two rival factions appeared, headed by the duke of Brabant and the count of Hainault, Henry chose to stick his imperial oar in and support a third, so-called tertius gaudens candidate. On 24 November, just a month before Richard’s capture, the Brabant candidate, Albert, was murdered and Henry was accused of having hired the hit-men. The Church in the Rhineland responded by raising the princes of the Rhineland in revolt against the emperor, and the Church leaders, the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, proposed the assassinated man’s brother Henry, duke of Brabant, as the next emperor.32 With revolts brewing in the north and east of his domains as well, Henry faced the possible break-up of the Holy Roman Empire. This was the context in which Providence delivered Richard into his lap. It was the classic instance of the external dimension serving as a diversion from internal problems - a transparent but perennially effective ploy that has served rulers well down the ages. Besides, a gigantic ransom obtained from the Angevin empire for the Lionheart would so swell the imperial coffers that Henry would literally be able to buy off his rebels by one means or another.

  Richard was now in effect a trophy to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The despicable Henry VI had already shown how much store he set by the Church - and indeed to some extent he was following in Frederick Barbarossa’s Guelph v. Ghibelline footsteps. It did not bother him that he was in flat defiance of canon law and papal bulls by detaining a crusading king who was supposed to be under the protection of Holy Mother Church. Leopold of Austria, however, was more cautious and genuinely feared excommunication. This was not the only point of difference between the two men, for both were pursuing very different agendas. Not surprisingly, the first bargaining round in the cattle auction did not produce results. Leopold took Richard under heavy armed guard to Ratisbon to exhibit the prize to the emperor, and king and emperor had a brief and, one imagines, intemperate meeting.33 Unable to strike a deal, Leopold began to fear that Henry would simply seize his human cash-cow, so suddenly returned to Austria to an unknown destination - it was most unlikely to have been Durnstein, for the emperor’s spies had already scouted the location against a possible order to snatch the English king. While Henry and Leopold contemplated their next step, Philip of France entered the fray, writing in early January 1193 to Leopold to enjoin him on no account to release Richard until all three men - Philip, Henry and Leopold - had held a summit conference to decide the next step.34 Despicably, he sent a message to the helpless Richard that all bonds between them were severed and that he should regard this communication as a declaration of war. Even more despicably, he contacted the emperor and offered to match and then outmatch any sum paid for Richard’s release, stating clearly that he wanted the Lionheart kept in Germany as a prisoner for life. This was too much even for Henry’s venal advisers, who advised the emperor that to accept the offer would make him the pariah of Christendom. The peevish Philip contented himself by invading Normandy instead.35

  It took six more weeks of haggling before Leopold and Henry finally hammered out an agreement. The contract was signed in Würzburg on 14 February; Richard was not present and was rumoured to be held a close prisoner at Oschenfurt. The ransom for Richard was set at 100,000 marks, to be split by the emperor and Leopold on a fifty-fifty basis. Half the sum was to be handed over at Michaelmas to Henry and Leopold on the occasion of the marriage of Richard’s niece Eleanor of Britanny (daughter of Richard’s late brother Geoffrey), and the other half at the beginning of the following Lent (23 February 1194). Additionally, Henry would provide Leopold with 20 hostages as surety that, should the emperor die while Richard was in his hands, he would be given back to Leopold; if Leopold died in the same period, the contract would be fulfilled by whichever son was chosen to marry Eleanor. Personal spite and vindictiveness are apparent in the clause requiring Richard to provide fifty galleys fully equipped for war plus one hundred knights as an outright gift to Henry before his departure on a campaign against Sicily, and the further provision that Richard in person had to accompany the emperor on the campaign, bringing another hundred knights at his own expense; truly Richard’s alliance with Tancred of Sicily was bearing bitter fruit. Further, as surety for his performance, Richard would provide twenty hostages of the highest calibre, who would also be detained until Richard obtained the Pope’s absolution of Leopold for breaking his crusader’s vow. The king of Cyprus and his daughter had to be freed before Richard himself could be released. If all these conditions were not fulfilled by Lent 1194, Leopold had the right to demand the return of the king to his custody. If Richard died while in the emperor’s power, Leopold would hang on to the 200 imperial hostages until he received full payment of the agreed ransom.36 Even by the standards of the Middle Ages, this was one of the most scandalous documents ever committed to paper. It was victor’s justice with a vengeance, and a coward’s charter to boot.

  The gleeful Philip of France passed on news of the treaty to his new-found ally Prince John. As soon as Philip returned from the Crusade he began intriguing with Richard’s disaffected younger brother, promising him Normandy in exchange for marriage with Alice. The dauntless Eleanor of Aquitaine nipped this in the bud by threatening John with confiscation of all his estates if he took ship for France.37 But John continued to tour England, telling anyone who would listen that Richard was dead. Matters seemed to swing decisively in his favour with the stunning news from Philip that Richard was a prisoner in Germany. This time nothing could stop
John, and he sped to France. In Paris he did homage to Philip for the entire Angevin empire - an express act of treason. He promised to marry Alice and to hand over Gisors and the Vexin to France. He then put a toe into Normandy but was quickly rebuffed when the Norman barons, meeting at Alençon, told him bluntly they would never accept him as their lord.38 When Philip’s forces arrived, they swept through the Vexin, took Gisors and moved on Rouen, but there they were vigorously repelled by the returning hero of the crusade, the earl of Leicester. Even so, Philip felt he held all the cards in his struggle with the Angevin empire. Delighted with the turn of events, he even contemplated an invasion of England and sent John back there to foment rebellion. He asked William king of Scotland for an alliance but William, remembering the generosity of Richard in the 1189 Quitclaim of Canterbury, turned him down contemptuously. Eleanor of Aquitaine and the justiciars raised an army to defend the south-east coast, so John withdrew into the castles of Windsor and Wallingford which he had managed to capture with Flemish mercenaries. He then proclaimed himself king as the legitimate and indefeasible heir of the dead king Richard. But John’s claim that Richard was dead was refuted in spectacular fashion when a letter arrived in England from Emperor Henry VI, asking for the 100,000 mark ransom. Accordingly, Walter of Coutances summoned a great council of the realm to a meeting in Oxford on 28 February 1193.39