Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Most general modern criticisms of Richard can be dismissed a priori as they depend for their supposed force on historical hindsight and anachronism. David Hume’s critique of the crusades shows the problem. His History of England, far more famous in the eighteenth century than his philosophical output, worked itself into a lather about the crusades, which he described as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’.3 Sub specie aeternitatis, the judgement is incontestable, and no one in the modern age would wish to defend the crusades, particularly in an era when ‘crusade’ has been annexed to describe both Franco’s excesses in the Spanish Civil War and the American assault on Iraq. Yet the point, surely, is that no one in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries regarded crusades as immoral, sinful or otherwise evil. On the contrary, successive Popes inculcated the notion that it was the sacred duty of rulers to go on crusade. In terms of medieval morality, Richard was a paladin who did his Christian duty; his father Henry and brother John, both of whom disingenuously took the Cross when they had not the slightest intention of campaigning in the Holy Land, evaded this clear imperative. Unless one derives satisfaction from gloating over both the real and imaginary superiority of twenty-first century modes of thought over those of previous centuries, no point whatever is served by fulminating about the medieval Christian campaigns to ‘liberate’ the land of Outremer. A recent book sums this up neatly: the authors remark that modern writers are no more capable of understanding the Crusades than medieval writers would understand landing a man on the Moon.4 Anachronistic too is the perception that Richard was a ‘bad king’ because he neglected England. From a contemporary standpoint (Richard’s own), England was only part of the Angevin empire, and there was no overarching reason why he should prioritise it above Normandy, Poitou, Anjou or Aquitaine. It was Aquitaine that he loved, Aquitaine where was born, educated and ‘formed’ and therefore Aquitaine that occupied the bulk of his attention. England in the late twelfth century was a fairly insignificant kingdom, not the great power it would later become. Modern critics of the Little England type seem to imagine that Richard should somehow have guessed at England’s future significance - doubtless by gazing in a crystal ball - and behaved accordingly. Moreover, if it can be alleged on a superficial reading that Richard neglected England, it can be stated with even greater authority that John neglected those parts of the Angevin empire that were not England - with disastrous results.

  By combining modern judgements - the condescension of posterity once again - with a selective reading of the disinformation churned out by Richard’s political enemies in France, Germany and Austria, it is possible to provide a devastating portrait of the Angevin king, but it is one that depends on tacking in and out of propaganda and anachronism. It cannot be denied that Richard had a difficult personality, that he suffered from pride, and could be insensitive, high-handed and arrogant; indeed it was said that the city of Tyre would not let Richard and his English crusaders land there at the start of Richard’s Palestine campaign because they feared his ‘arrogance’.5 But these are normal human faults and in no way mark him down as anything exceptional for his - or indeed any - era. To establish that Richard was wicked, evil or egregiously depraved, we would need far, far more than this. The final nail in the coffin for the idea that Richard can be judged as ‘racist’ or ‘imperialistic’ comes from the high regard entertained for him by his Muslim adversaries. There is no whiff of the ‘Great Satan’ or ‘Little Satan’ about Saladin’s opinions or those of his courtiers and advisers. Ibn al-Athir called him ‘the most remarkable man of the age’.6 Another Muslim historian managed to achieve the empathy that has so often eluded later western historians with fewer cultural barriers to cross: ‘With him to wage war in God’s name was a veritable passion; his whole heart was filled with it, and he gave body and soul to the cause.’7 The consensus of all who met Richard, from Saladin’s envoy al-Adil to St Hugh of Lincoln, was that the English king had many striking human virtues: he was magnanimous, openhanded, capricious, impulsive but not vengeful, cruel or treacherous; the canard that he attacked Saracens while they were under Philip Augustus’s flag of truce was simply black propaganda by the French.8 Although he is sometimes accused of lack of self-control, it is striking that he did not lose friends or make enemies purely through the gratification of his passions, as John habitually did. And the historical record does not even show him to be arrogant in any normal sense, unless arrogance is defined as a healthy realisation of one’s own abilities.

  The worst sins alleged against Richard were that he was an unfilial, ungrateful and treacherous son, that he was a man of blood who cared nothing for human life and that, by his massacre of the Muslim prisoners at Acre, he proved himself a war criminal even in contemporary medieval terms. The charge of treachery towards his father will not really hold, for Henry had no idea how to manage sons and at various times alienated all four of his male offspring.9 It was not really surprising that Richard had no real affection for his father, since Henry wronged him four times over: he mistreated his mother, seduced his fiancée, set his brothers against him and even threatened to disinherit him in favour of John. Much of the later bad blood between Richard and Philip Augustus can be traced to Henry, since his seduction of Alice placed Richard in an impossible position: he had either to insult Philip by setting her aside or take as wife a woman whom his detested father had ‘defiled’, as he saw it. Quite apart from the issue of Alice and the imprisonment of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry alienated Richard by his soft spot for John, which led him to try to give his lastborn son a bigger share in the Angevin inheritance than was justified by custom and precedent. Indeed, if Gerald of Wales can be believed, Henry wanted to restrict Richard’s inheritance to the Anglo-Norman realm and give John all the fiefs held of the French crown (except Normandy).10 In a larger sense the charge that Richard was heedless of human blood and suffering must be sustained, although he always took care to see that his troops were well equipped and fed - not something that can be said for every medieval ruler. Richard was one of those rare men who seemed to live only for combat and martial glory - this is a distinctive type that runs from Alexander the Great to moderns like General Phil Sheridan and General Patton, but excludes Caesar, Napoleon and Robert E. Lee who, despite their prowess on the battlefield, had other concerns and other interests. He was not a man of blood in the sense that he sanctioned murder for political ends: although he was accused of compassing the death of Conrad of Montferrat, the charge is totally false, and received the currency it did only because the canard was assiduously milked by Philip Augustus and his spin doctors. Conrad had made so many enemies in so many different spheres that it is surprising he lasted as long as he did; among his myriad treacheries was a secret channel of negotiation with Saladin, by which he hoped to double-cross the other crusaders.11

  A creature of impulse and therefore neither treacherous nor cruel, Richard erred rather on the side of naivety and over-trustingness, as he showed in his relations with his brother John. A more ruthless or cynical man would have insisted that John accompany him to the crusades, and probably his half-brother Geoffrey as well. Richard was forever forgiving the treachery of the Lusignans, taking them back as allies and then being disappointed once again when they reratted. The one clear moral blemish on Richard’s record and by any standards a war crime was his massacre of the Muslim prisoners at Acre on 20 August 1191. Richard’s defenders say that he was within the strict letter of the law in so doing, that Saladin could have ransomed the prisoners if he chose, and that the killing was justified by Saladin’s massacre of the Templars after the battle of Hattin. Richard’s further justification was that he could not afford to stay in Acre indefinitely while Saladin stalled, using the prisoners as a bargaining counter, that Saladin was deliberately trying to wear down the English king, confident that western notions of chivalry and honour would prevent Richard from taking the obvious way out of his dilemma.12 From Richard’s point
of view, he could not march away leaving the Acre garrison to play warder to 3,000 prisoners, and there was barely enough food to feed the garrison, never mind thousands of ‘useless’ mouths. Contemporary Christian opinion had no intellectual problem with the killings; after all, had not Bernard of Clairvaux declared that ‘The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified.’ Ambroise thought the killing entirely justified as a reprisal for the sufferings of the Christians at Acre; he does not even bring Hattin into the equation.13 The French chronicler Jacques de Vitry took the line that if the Muslims had not been butchered, they would have lived another day to kill and maim Christians, so that on a brutal utilitarian calculus Richard was vindicated.14 The Cistercian monk Ralph of Coggleshall thought that Saladin’s failure to help Acre effectively delivered the other coastal towns (Haifa, Caesarea, Arsuf, Ascalon and Jaffa) into Richard’s hands, since they came to realise they could look for nothing from Saladin.15 But modern historians tend to see Richard’s action as a clear-cut war crime, engendered by his rage and frustration. It certainly gave another twist to the cycle of atrocity, and for a time (until mid-September 1191), all Christians taken prisoner were summarily executed in reprisal. One hundred years later, when Acre fell to the Muslims, Richard’s actions were cited as the justification for Muslim massacre of the Christians. We should remember, however, that the entire cycle of butchery was begun by Saladin at Hattin.16 Nonetheless, when all allowances have been made, probably the most judicious comment is that passed by Napoleon’s chief of police Fouché, after Napoleon executed the duc d’Enghien: ‘It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.’

  If most historians have conceded that Richard was a great warrior, this is usually balanced by the judgement that he was a poor king of England, a hopeless politician and a weak administrator. If one’s merit as a king of England is to be judged merely by ‘presentism’, then clearly John wins hands down. But there must have been many, whether barons, merchants or clergy who suffered under John, who would have given much for the return of Richard’s absentee kingship; never has the phrase ‘less is more’ looked so appealing as when applied to England without Richard. John, the so-called ‘hands on’ king of England, managed to incite a civil war, whereas the arrangements Richard made before departing on crusade and while battling Philip Augustus in the years 1194-99 were remarkably successful; the Angevin empire as a whole did better under Richard’s cavalier kingship than under John’s centralist authoritarianism.17 Since Richard was not systematically manipulative, dishonest and duplicitous, there is a sense in which he must, by definition, have been a bad politician. But what will not work is the thesis that Richard was habitually governed by pride.18 Despite his superlative military talent, he would always adopt the best plan for the occasion, even if he had not thought of it, and regardless of who suggested it. He often deferred to decisions he did not support, such as the advance to Beit Nuba, and always believed in consulting the opinions of men who knew the local terrain or who knew how the Arab mind worked.19 Moreover, his choice of underlings, lieutenants and henchmen was shrewd. He chose the right men for the job, and did not value the company of flatterers, sycophants, toadies and hangers-on, as the Young King had done. 20 Recent research into how the Angevin empire was governed under Richard shows that he did a remarkably good job of holding together his polyglot dominions, evincing a remarkable sensitivity to local mores, customs, traditions and folkways, making no attempt to impose a common currency or to forge a coherent political identity on such disparate domains .21 The legend of Richard as a poor administrator dies hard, but is not borne out by the best scholarship.

  The ultimate assault on Richard’s reputation comes with the assertion that his military reputation has been absurdly exaggerated, that he was indeed no more than a journeyman warrior who made many bad, and sometimes egregious, mistakes. The reductio ad absurdum of this tendency comes in recent works purporting to cast doubt on the very idea of a ‘crusade’ or in the assertion that Richard’s fame was unjustified, since medieval battles were no more than a glamorised form of gangland warfare without strategy, with one pack of thugs attacking another.22 A more nuanced criticism accepts Richard’s talent, but then subjects his conduct of the crusades to a ferocious critique. Among the charges levelled at the Lionheart are that he unconscionably delayed the arrival of his forces in the Holy Land, that he directed campaigns for personal gain, alienated his allies by his arrogance, needlessly risked himself in personal combat, was an inadequate master of logistics and commissariat, and was conservative and circumspect in his strategy; the charge-sheet ends with the incontestable fact that he failed to take Jerusalem, the ostensible point of the crusade.23 The issue of arrogance has already been dealt with, and it might be added in passing that no ‘great man’ in any walk of life, whether soldier, statesman, banker, writer, actor, director could ever achieve anything without an above-average share of ego, which to their opponents is always construed as arrogance. As to Richard’s needlessly exposing himself to danger, the critics are on sounder ground. Certainly his captains thought the criticism valid and often reproached him with it - and Richard responded by boasting about how he had disregarded their advice .24 Whether his Saracen opponents, who came close to capturing him on several occasions because of his excessive daring, thought him rash and foolish in insisting on being in the thick of action, is far less certain.25 So, yes, Richard was reckless and heedless of his own safety but contingency pays no regard to actuarial probabilities; Frederick Barbarossa was not reckless, yet the German emperor perished before reaching the Holy Land and the English king did not.

  The long period that elapsed between Richard’s taking the Cross and his eventual arrival in Outremer does, however, merit further consideration. Richard took his vows as a crusader in 1187 but did not land near Acre until four years later. Why was this? We must remember first of all the money that had to be raised - the Saladin tithe - and the meticulous military preparations necessary before a credible force could sail from England. The death of Henry II in 1189 further complicated matters, for Richard had to attend to the succession, have himself crowned and settle England before he could depart. It is worth pointing out that the very same people who accuse Richard of being an absentee king of England also charge him with being dilatory in departing on crusade, yet in logic both charges cannot be sustained simultaneously. The transfer of power on Henry’s death effectively meant that Richard departed a full year after Frederick Barbarossa. Thereafter the gap between the two could only widen, as the Germans proceeded overland while Richard went by sea. And at sea he proceeded slowly, both because he suffered from seasickness and because he was travelling with large numbers of troops; above all he did not want his transports scattered by the winds because he was crowding on sail.26

  But here the critics have another string to their bow. Granted that Richard was making a difficult sea voyage, why did he have to pause so long in Sicily and Cyprus? Were not his conquests of those islands clearly self-serving actions?27 Here one is tempted to taunt the critics with the same kind of ignorance of the realities of sea power that bedevilled Napoleon. Both Philip and Richard made attempts to clear from Sicily after the conquest of that kingdom but were driven back by storms and high seas; in the days of primitive sailing ships, no rational commander would take a large fleet across the Mediterranean in midwinter.28 But what about Cyprus? Was this not a self-serving enterprise, as flagrant a diversion from the main purpose as Drake’s diversion from Howard of Effingham’s fleet during the battle with the Spanish Armada in order to loot the Rosario? The critics further allege that the conquest of Cyprus was contrary to the Pope’s directives, a bad precedent and act of grotesque irresponsibility because it delayed Christian reinforcements and thus jeopardised operations at Acre.29 Here the critics seem to forget that it was Isaac Comnenus who started the fighting. And so far from excessive delay, Richard wound up his business on the island in just six days after completing military
operations. Moreover, Richard’s conquest of Cyprus contained clear benefits for the Third Crusade. Richard sold the island shortly after his victory there, gained extra funds for the Crusade thereby, and later used Cyprus to placate and remove his troublesome ally King Guy of Jerusalem. Moreover, Cyprus turned out to be a vital forward supply post, a crucial logistical asset - as Saladin had already recognised by his negotiations with Byzantium, aimed at stopping the crusaders using it. Even some of Richard’s most vociferous critics concede his strategic insights in the matter of Cyprus.30

  It may seem almost preposterous, after the brilliant victories at Acre, Ascalon, Darum, Jaffa and, above all, Arsuf, that Richard’s calibre once landed in the Holy Land should be questioned, but the critics allege that Richard was over-cautious, to the point where he can be suspected of having a secret agenda, possibly a plot with the Templars to invade Egypt instead of taking Jerusalem. After all, it is said, it is a matter of record that Richard did not besiege Jerusalem even though the Pope’s instructions expressly directed him to that target.31 But Richard did not advance to Jerusalem, as a lesser captain would have done, because his acute military mind never lost sight of supply and logistics. Richard was a great leader precisely in his restraint and absence of mindless glory-seeking. He anticipated the very greatest leaders like Ernest Shackleton by turning back when almost within sight of his goal, because he realised that the so-called final goal was actually a bridge too far. Critics of Richard’s careful, systematic approach to the campaign in Palestine would presumably apply the same thinking to the cautious buildup for OVERLORD in 1944 and argue that the Second Front should have been opened in 1943. Richard may have been a Patton in temperament and sensibility but he was an Eisenhower when it came to down-to-earth concern for practicalities and the art of the possible. He knew that lack of careful preparations and poor supply lines had doomed the Second Crusade and severely impeded the First (they were also to cause the failure of the Fifth and Sixth), and he was determined not to fall into that obvious trap. As for Jerusalem, Richard made it quite plain that there was no point in expending blood and treasure on a target which would have to be abandoned soon after capture, simply because there were not enough permanent settlers from Christendom to make its permanent occupation feasible. The Third Crusade, conceived purely as an expedition to reclaim Jerusalem for Christianity, was doomed to failure before a single crusader left Europe, precisely because the Western nations were not exporting large enough populations to make permanent retention of Outremer practicable. For all that, Richard’s heroic endeavours in effect prolonged the life of Christian Palestine for another hundred years. He cannot be blamed for failing to solve a problem that was beyond any single person’s capacity.