by David Boyle
This was the kind of spending that required a loan. Richard had not set sail equipped to build cathedrals. Luckily, as a port that was soon to rival Venice, Ragusa was well endowed with banks prepared to lend him the ducats he needed. Perhaps this is also where he met a man simply described as Pisan who sold him three extremely expensive jewelled rings that he took a liking to, but it could perfectly well have been in one of the other ports on the return journey — Rhodes or Corfu or even back in Cyprus. But it was in Ragusa that Richard once again had access to money, and he may have felt he would need jewellery somewhere on the way home. Like many kings at the time, he believed that almost every local princeling could be seduced by jewels.
When the medieval cathedral of Dubrovnik was excavated recently, its foundations predated Richard's arrival by decades, which casts some doubt on the story. It is anyway far more likely that he was asked to contribute towards it, and he did so as much to help recover his lost reputation as to fulfil his vow. Richard may by now have been so obsessed with defending himself, or so excited about having ready money again, that he did not stop to consider that endowing cathedrals did not sit easily with slipping secretly across Europe. Ragusa's Romanesque cathedral church — supposedly built with the help of Richard's money — survived for nearly five centuries, until a disastrous earthquake hit Dubrovnik in 1667. The present Baroque cathedral is built on the same foundations.*
Even if there was a secondary and mysterious purpose behind Richard's enforced voyage up the Adriatic in winter, the objective seems clear. He was making for Saxony and the safety of his brother-in-law. Henry the Lion was one of the great figures of shifting German power at the end of the twelfth century. In 1192 he was sixty-three and past the peak of his influence but he had been a focus of resistance against the imperial rule of Frederick Barbarossa. A formidable duke, he had successfully cleared the Baltic of pirates and extended his lands towards the pagan east, even finding time to found the city of Munich in his Bavarian lands. But in 1182 he had been defeated and exiled for a period of three years that he spent in England, where he had built up even closer relations with the Plantagenets — he had in fact married Richard's older sister, Matilda, in 1169 and his son Otto was ruling Aquitaine in Richard's absence.† Once Frederick had left on the Third Crusade, on the way to his fatal encounter with the river crossing, Henry had returned to Saxony, gathered his old vassals around him and once more become a thorn in the side of the emperor — by now Frederick's son Henry VI, who took his own claims for overlordship over the whole world extremely seriously. Henry the Lion's alliance with England was of increasing concern to the Emperor. He was an absolutely reliable haven for Richard and, even more importantly, he controlled the Baltic ports of Hamburg and Llibeck, from where it would be a relatively short sea voyage to England.
Even so, it was no simple matter to cross Europe from the Adriatic to the Baltic without falling into the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor or his vassals. Richard was probably heading for what is now Pula or Zadar — now Croatian ports, and formerly the Italian naval strongholds of Pola and Zara, but in 1192 in Hungarian hands. Hungary meant the cosmopolitan rule of King Bela III, one of the wealthiest sovereigns in Europe because of the mineral riches of upper Hungary and the salt mines of Transylvania, with lands that stretched down to the Adriatic in the south. Bela was married to Margaret of France, the widow of Richard's older brother, Henry the Young King, and former mistress of William the Marshal, so he would have been among old friends. Perched between the rule of Western Christianity under the Pope and Eastern Christianity under the Byzantine patriarchs, the Arpad dynasty of Hungary had asserted its right to be Catholics but without the inconvenience of papal authority. They resisted demands to suppress the Bogomil heresy, with its emphasis on purity and poverty, versions of which were now powerful in the south of France. They only very reluctantly allowed Western crusaders free passage on their way to Palestine. And it was this truculence in the face of Western authority that paradoxically gave Richard a hunch that he might be safe there.
Bela was on friendly terms with the French — he was, after all, married to Philip's half-sister — which must have added an extra unpredictability about travelling through Hungary. But only six years before there had been considerable discussion about the possibility of a marriage between Bela and Richard's niece, and that must have reassured him that he would be welcomed. He was also known to be involved in a long-running dispute with Duke Leopold of Austria.
But again, it was not to be. Richard had only rested in Ragusa for a day or so. Given that it was now December, the Adriatic would have been almost completely clear of shipping, but his boat — no doubt hired from the grateful city fathers — was soon off, hugging the shore past the island of Hvar and Diocletian's old palace at Split. Yet once more he found himself in the grip of the notorious bora. For a second time, Richard and his exhausted companions despaired of ever reaching home as the wind plunged them out to sea into an unfamiliar part of the ocean, and drove them helplessly past the longed-for coast of Hungary, before depositing them and all that remained of their belongings somewhere not far off the coast of Istria, when the boat finally began to sink. They struggled ashore somewhere in the Gulf of Trieste, a little to the west of the Roman city of Aquileia — not in Hungary, but in territory under the indirect control of the Holy Roman Empire.
They probably had little or no idea exactly where they were, but suspected they had overshot their objective and may have strayed — as they had in fact — into territory disputed then and almost ever since between the power of Venice in the south and Salzburg and Austria in the north. There is a tradition in the area that says that Richard was arrested here rather than in Austria, which means it may not be very reliable. But it also suggests that he landed in an almost deserted area of swamps and forests, and had to be led with his friends to safety by hermits through the mists and sodden undergrowth. If this part of the legend is based on fact, he may have landed somewhere in the estuary of the Tagliamento, with its swampy beaches.
By the time he emerged from the forest and on to the road to Aquileia, the Templar identity was not sufficient. Richard's hair and beard were long, as were those of his companions. The implication in the chronicles is that long hair and beards were the local style and this was appropriate, though it was not the Templar clean-shaven style. But once they had recovered from the ordeal of picking their way through the marshes and their exhausting second struggle ashore — the crash of surf on rocks still echoing in their ears — they set about finding clothes that made them look a little more like the locals, and reconsidering the story they would tell about themselves. This was an age when you were expected to reveal your name and destination outside the gates of everytown. The decision was taken that they would be pilgrims returning from Palestine in the company not of a Templar knight or our errant king, but of a wealthy merchant called Hugo.
Aquileia had once been one of the largest cities in the world, before it was sacked by Attila the Hun. A monastery survived, and the palace of the powerful patriarch, but that was almost all when Richard surveyed the ruins of six centuries. It was 10 December 1192, or thereabouts. It was decided between them, once they had bought horses for the journey, that the right direction was north-east, towards where they imagined Hungary to be. This was also the direction of the castle of the local count, and the plan was to ask him for directions and safe conduct. It is not clear from the conflicting accounts where this castle was, whether it was simply a large house in Aquileia or the castle that still dominates the town now known as Gorizia further to the north-east. The most reliable source, the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall — who had the story from Richard's chaplain, Anselm — says that they landed 'in Slavonia' and headed to a town he calls Gazara. The evidence is that this is Gorizia, and that Richard and his companions were still determinedly heading towards the safety of King Bela's court.
It is unlikely, in that atmosphere of quiet watching and whispering in p
orts around the Mediterranean, that donating Venetian gold to endow a cathedral only 300 miles away in Ragusa would have gone unnoticed. Richard's presence would have been bound to be reported further north, as he must have realized as he prepared his disguise outside Aquileia. As his advisers would no doubt have told each other wryly, you can't both cross the Continent in disguise and repair your reputation at the same time.
His gesture may not have done much to repair his good name in Western Europe, but it was remembered for centuries in the Balkans — a region where memories are particularly lengthy. More than seven centuries later in January 1916, at the height of the First World War, the Serbian ambassador to Paris reminded his audience of Richard's munificence, claiming, 'It is not Great Britain who will fail in keeping her promises.' 'Great Britain has known us ever since Richard received our hospitality,' he said, 'and built for us amost beautiful church on the spot where our ancestors had saved him from a shipwreck on his way back from the crusade.'
The story of Richard's arrest has been passed over by historians through the years. It is the stuff of children's stories, and that is often the only place you will find much account of it. And the journey he made across central Europe is normally portrayed — if at all — as a brief and rather vague meander, during which he happened to stumble upon the Duke of Austria. The truth is that Richard's journey home, or as far as he reached, was an achievement of courage and determination in the face of serious obstacles. It was difficult, gruelling, dangerous and confusing, and he and his companions knew it would be the moment he turned the ship around off the North African coast.
It was not so much that the endeavour itself was extraordinary. Richard's generation, and his parents and grandparents, were those who rediscovered travel. For the first time since the Dark Ages, Europe was awakening to itself, driven to travel by conviction or education — and enabled to spend time away from home by the sudden abundance of silver coinage, which meant that wealth was no longer bound up in land and produce and could take to the roads. What had begun so tentatively in Abelard's lifetime with the first wandering scholars and monks had become a flood: crusaders on their way to Palestine, pilgrims heading towards the tombs of saints, masons in search of the next great Gothic construction, lawyers heading for the cities, the first students heading for the first universities, the merchants on their way to market. These people sharing Europe's dilapidated roads had a common European culture, presided over by the Church, and often a common language too — educated Latin — and between them they were building a new Gothic Europe. There they were, those early travellers, moving slowly in small groups for safety, from court to court, from inn to monastery to hostel. They travelled by barge, by horse or on foot if they were poor, at the speed of the slowest oxen.
As the ruler of an empire that stretched from Hadrian's Wall to the Pyrenees, Richard was used to travel. But he was not used totravel like this — setting aside his identity as king and hero of Christendom, and becoming just an ordinary merchant, on roads he did not know, through towns and villages he had never heard of, past people who spoke a language that he could not understand. It was simply too risky to seek out the local clerks and aristocracy and converse in Latin. And even in those days, journeys across Europe were so dangerous that the Church included travellers in prayers along with prisoners and the sick. Crosses were erected on lonely roads, lanterns kept burning in churches at night, and pilgrims would gather together — along with minstrels, bears, jugglers and herbalists — to venture along the old Roman roads. Conventional advice to travellers at the time was to give alms, make a will, put someone in charge of your house, settle all your differences with people, ask for people's prayers for you, your home and your family, and then put yourself in God's hands. Travelling was so insecure that it required the services of no fewer than three patron saints.
Richard's journey was also in mid-December: the snow lay ahead of them and the vast majority of travellers — except for those with urgent or nefarious reasons for being out — were home for Christmas, or resting until the spring. He was also still suffering from the effects of the fever that had made him so ill in Jaffa. Nor was it possible to derive much in the way of help and advice from the few fellow travellers who remained. When they greeted him on the road in the traditional way, asking who he was and where he was going, neither Richard nor his companions could answer truthfully. Worse, the last five centuries or so had seen almost no road and bridge building; instead, people relied the infrastructure that the Romans had left behind until it collapsed or wore out. Villages or local lords were occasionally given specific responsibilities for keeping some bridges repaired, but this period marked -as the historian Peter Spuffbrd puts it — the 'nadir of the European road system', when the Roman legacy of 3,000 miles of military roads had been fixed temporarily for centuries with little more than earth to fill the potholes caused by a thousand years of frost. The twelfth century had woken up to the importance of bridges — for example, there was the new bridge at Avignon, and the Steinerne Briicke was built across the Danube at Regensburg, which Richard was shortly to see for himself — and those who built them were honoured as saints.
Richard and his companions would have to expect broken roads covered in mud or ice, avalanches and wild animals — wolves or mountain lions — along the way. Europe might have awoken to the possibilities of travel, but nature was still a hostile force, able to sling at travellers deadly heat, cold or floods, as well as mists and snow, drought and disease and the most terrifying storms. Darkness and lightning were believed to send people mad. Even wading across a river included all the necessary ingredients for a fatal chill. Travelling by road was the stuff of the darkest European fairy stories, and ahead of them lay forests and craggy ranges of unknown extent. There would come a moment in winter when any road in this region became impassably frozen, and they would have to struggle to stay ahead of the weather.
But even worse than the prospect of negotiating a crumbling road system as the temperature dropped was the prospect of crossing the Alps. This normally required some local knowledge of the passes, but crossing them in winter must have seemed foolhardy in the extreme.* If they had been travelling openly — without fear that their guides might guess Hugo's real identity — they might have made it to Verona and gone from there across the Brenner Pass and home along the Rhine, but the central Alps were completely impassable in December. They would not have known what to expect in the eastern Alps, but would have known the terrifying medieval tales of Alpine crossings in winter, with desperate monks or saints crawling on their knees across sheets of ice, suffering terribly from frostbite and exposure. The century before, the Emperor Henry IV had tried to cross the Alps in winter, attempting to take the horses and ladies of the court on ox skins, crawling on hands and knees over the ice, and was lucky to escape with his life.
So if Richard and his companions, heading off towards thenorth-east and the nearest town, made a mistake in making contact with the local count at this point, you can see why. They needed support and protection on the road, but above all they needed guidance. Sometimes in these border areas, where unpredictable bands of returning crusaders made use of their positive balance in the spiritual bank to steal from anyone they met, an armed escort was compulsory for travellers — and had to be paid for too. The region of Aquileia was known to be infested with robbers. But there were also vital questions to ask. Which way was it safe to cross the mountains? Were there any roads that were passable at Christmas? They must have calculated that if they could convince the local lord of their identities, then no rumours about the presence of a king in disguise creeping through the countryside would make any difference.
So the argument for going to the local castle was a good one, except they almost certainly did not know they were in Gorizia — and even if they did, they would have had no idea of its significance. Because Richard had actually landed in potentially one of the most dangerous regions for him, the territory of the cou
nts of Gorz (the German name for Gorizia). The counts were unusual in that they ruled no specific territory but had a hereditary position as Advocates of Aquileia, and at this time the role was shared between Engelbert III and his brother-in-law Meinhard II — later described by the emperor as a 'loyal subject of ours'. Meinhard was also a nephew of Conrad of Montferrat. Again, it is impossible to know for sure whether the castle they approached was in Aquileia or the much more substantial castle in Gorizia itself. Either is possible, because both are on the road to the north-east, towards northern Hungary, where Richard had been planning to go before the storm. But a strong local tradition in Gorizia suggests that he was there, and no equivalent stories exist about Aquileia, so it seems likely — even though it was almost a day's journey further on — that it was Gorizia castle they headed for.
Gorizia is in that unusual region of central Europe, now the far eastern corner of Italy, where Italian, German and Slovenian cultures have interacted for a thousand years or more. The threelanguages are so enmeshed that every place name has its equivalent in the other two. It is a confusing area even today, but then it was the border lands between Venice to the west, Austria and the Holy Roman Empire to the north and Hungary to the east, and on the other side of the mountain ranges that mark the border between Italy and Austria to this day.
Having arrived in the town at the end of their first day on the road, barely recovered from wading ashore with what remained of their belongings, they would have found an inn in Gorizia and, exhausted from their ordeal, settled down for the evening. Richard sent a messenger to the castle that — even to this day — dominates the town, asking for safe passage and a guide, and evoking the truce of God — the universal protection that was supposed to be given to crusaders. And here he made his great mistake. As a token of peace, he sent the messenger with one of the ruby rings he had bought from the Pisan — worth, says the chronicler, at least 900 bezants or Byzantine gold pieces. In the castle above the town as darkness gathered and torches were lit in the great hall, Engelbert received the messenger and took the ring. Who is it that wants safe conduct, he asked, and was told they were pilgrims on their way home from Jerusalem. What are their names?