by David Boyle
'One of them is called Baldwin of Bethune,' said the messenger — presumably the name William de I'Etang would have been too recognizable. 'The other is called Hugo, a merchant, who also sent you this ring.'
But this reply did not satisfy the count. He stared thoughtfully at the ring in his hand, weighing up the extraordinary generosity of the gift against the rumours he had presumably heard from Corfu and Ragusa, as well as the instructions from the emperor to all his vassals along the coast. 'He is not called Hugo, but King Richard,' he said to the frightened messenger, adding, 'Although I have sworn that I would arrest all the pilgrims coming from those parts and would not accept any gift from them, nevertheless, because of the worth of the gift and of the lord who sent it who honoured me — an unknown man — I send back the gift he sent and I give him free licence to go away.'
Shocked and disturbed, the messenger made his way quickly through the town to the inn, where the others were by now bedded down for the night. He told Richard the story, and both were equally suspicious. There really was no alternative but to pack again, collect the horses from the stables and set off through the night before Count Engelbert could change his mind.
Richard's party set off at speed to leave the town as soon as they could. It was clear now that Hungary was out of reach and the direction would have to be Bohemia. Either in Corfu or Ragusa, Richard and his companions would have heard that Ottakar, the Duke of Bohemia — the hereditary cupbearer to the Holy Roman Emperor, or so he claimed — was in bitter dispute with the emperor and might therefore provide him with safe passage. That meant a journey north, across the mountains towards Vienna, where the Duke of Austria — who, Richard must now assume, was among his most determined enemies — would be preparing for Christmas. But once Vienna was passed and the Danube successfully crossed, it would be only a few days' travel to safety in Moravia, ruled by Ottakar's brother Ladislaw, and from Bohemia it was an easy journey to Saxony and home.
There has been some speculation among historians about which direction they took — whether towards the Pontebba Pass through the Alps or the Predil Pass further to the east, near what is now the border between Italy and Slovenia. But nobody who stands in the town square at Gorizia — and especially not on the walls of the castle, the very same walls Richard would have seen from the inn — can have much doubt which way they went. Gorizia is surrounded on three sides by mountains. To the north and east, the range looks like a great snow-capped wall, and it would have looked the same to Richard and his companions as they tried to puzzle out the best way to go. Without guides, even a hopeless optimist like Richard would almost certainly have shunned the freezing, mountainous northern route. The local Slavs were known to be particularly hospitable, but they could not risk any of them guessing their identity. They would have set off in the only direction that seemed possible, north-west towards Udine or Cividale.
The English chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, who had the story from Richard's chaplain, who was there at the time, reports another reason for believing this was the direction they went. Count Engelbert may have reassured them that they could go peacefully on their way — though they distrusted him — but he also sent a messenger to his brother-in-law to warn him that Richard and his group were heading in his direction and urging him to arrest them. In other words, Engelbert was able to predict exactly which direction they left in, and he was right. It was the obvious way.
Wherever Meinhard was, the message must have arrived at the next town at much the same time as Richard and his companions, early the next morning. Meinhard summoned one of his most faithful assistants and relatives, Roger of Argentan, the husband of his niece, and urged him to search some of the inns where pilgrims were staying in the town to see if he could recognize the king — promising him half the city if he could apprehend him. Which city this was is not clear. The counts had possessions in Cividale, but the most obvious place to head for — the nearest route to the main road north — was Udine, and this is probably where Richard's group and the forces searching for them converged, under the castle mound that still dominates the city.
The choice of Roger was not completely random. He had been in the service of Meinhard and his family for twenty years, but his homeland was Normandy — Argentan was the town where Richard's parents often spent Christmas. He may not have been able to recognize Richard because it was two decades since he last saw him as a teenager, if indeed he had ever seen him, but he might recognize something. Yet this was also the very reason why Roger of Argentan was the wrong choice for Meinhard. He searched assiduously through the lodgings of the town the next day and eventually came upon a tall, unkempt figure who did not look like the merchant he claimed to be. But as a Norman, Roger's loyalties were seriously divided. He confronted Richard and there followed a long discussion throughout which Richard initially stuck to the identity of Hugo. Roger became more animated and impassioned and, having assured Richard of his loyalty to the Angevins, very emotional. In the face of this blackmail, Richard could not sustain his story. As Ralph of Coggeshall put it, 'Eventually he was compelled by the tears of his pious inquisitor to confess who he was.'
Richard was in luck. Still in tears, Roger of Argentan urged him to leave town secretly and gave him his own horse to expedite matters. Returning to Meinhard, he then said that the reports about Richard had just been a rumour. He had found Baldwin of Bethune and his companions returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; there had been no Richard. Meinhard refused to believe him. In a fury, he ordered the arrest of the whole party, but it was too late. Without sleep now for some nights, the royal bird had once again flown.
Many of the towns in the region have half-forgotten legends about Richard's arrival and most of them involve some kind of bloody confrontation. Gorizia has a story about capturing him there and so does Trieste (although there is no evidence that he went to Trieste, a Roman arch is named in his honour there). But the story told later by the emperor suggests that in Udine at least the story was true. The Bavarian chronicler Magnus of Reich-ersberg claims that some of Richard's party were killed by local nobles in a melee. Either because Richard divided the company in two to confuse Meinhard's pursuers or because he was genuinely caught and had to fight his way out, eight of his attendant knights seem to have been captured there. Richard had slipped through the net again, but it was at a cost.
The mistake with Engelbert was to become a theme, because showing off was Richard's Achilles heel. By tradition, kings are not good at disguise. Traditional stories make it possible to recognize royalty in the most subtle ways — even princesses who are so sensitive that they can feel a pea through piles of mattresses — and Richard was no exception to this rule. He was tall and distinctive. Anyone who had been outside Acre or Jaffa with him would have known him immediately. But more fundamentally, he had no sense of what were appropriate levels of spending and giving in hisnew identity. His lavish behaviour seems to have given him away constantly, right up to his final arrest outside Vienna.
Richard seems to have reverted to his Templar disguise; it was too late for Hugo. His main strategy now and later appears to have been to stay with the dwindling numbers of travellers on the main roads, to go to the places where he was most likely to be able to disappear into the crowd. Maybe this was another reason why he took the road north from Udine rather than risking some of the tiny mountain passes to the north-east, and he joined the old Roman way from Aquileia to the Alps known as the Via Julia Augusta. There, on the twenty-two-foot-wide stone highway, he would have melted in with other travellers braving the road north in the wintry weather. From them, he and his companions would have learned of at least a possible way through the Alps, which were looming ahead of them out of the flat plain on the horizon, with snow-capped peaks which looked as forbidding as they looked frozen.
The twelfth century was warmer than subsequent centuries, so snow would not yet have been certain as the small group crept past the fortified town of Venzone and found them
selves turning eastwards into the extraordinary valley inside the eastern Alps known in Italian as the Val Canale, with the mountains sheer on either side and the vast river bed awaiting the great thaw in the spring stretching into the distance like the mouth of an ocean.
It was now two or three days since the shipwreck near Aquileia and Richard and his companions had been on the move without sleep almost the whole time. Richard's fever also seemed to be returning with the exhaustion and the stress; he had never fully recovered in Palestine. They must have searched desperately for somewhere to rest as night fell on the second day, and probably waited until they had entered the Val Canale, with a sense perhaps of security, before they slept. The evidence suggests that industries along the Roman road through the Val Canale had only recently been revived, and the road may have been in particularly poor shape — most passes through the Alps were gruelling journeys from boulder to boulder without the aid of roads at all. So when theysaw the monastery of Moggio towering above them on the rocks, the temptation to stop there must have been overwhelming. They may well have done so, taking the winding track up to the summit. The valley ahead of them looked a bleak prospect, and if they had taken turns to watch through the night, they would have had good warning of anyone following behind.
So far on their secretive journey north, Richard had twice attempted to stay in inns — each time forced back on to the road — and these would normally have provided rest for the night, if not a particularly comfortable one. Not even nobles got a room to themselves in those days, and sometimes not even a bed to themselves. In one inn in Arezzo two centuries later four beds were provided for fifteen travellers, and the innkeeper's family would probably have had to share them too. Often there was no heating or latrines; guests were usually expected to relieve themselves in the stables. There were also risks from the other guests. Or from the innkeepers: there were medieval stories about landlords who stole from the pockets of guests at night, and even murdered and ate them.
A monastery might not have been any more comfortable, but it would have provided them with some intelligent conversation and useful local knowledge, as well as hot meals, and monks might be more likely to keep to the Truce of God. It would have been worth the risk of sleeping at Moggio. Maybe this was where they added to their party the nameless boy who spoke German, who was soon to play such a crucial role. And as the dawn rose the next day — working backwards from the date of Richard's arrest, it was probably 13 December — they set off back down the hill, a little rested, for the cold and difficult journey through the Val Canale, past the great ravines carved out of the mountainsides by glaciers, the pine and fir forests stretching above them, and the old abandoned Roman resting stations that dotted the road.
The Val Canale is not strictly a pass across the Alps, it is a valley that runs along between the mountains from west to east, before finally emerging after forty miles on the Austrian side approaching the town of Villach (the Roman city of Santicum). The old roadwas used by the Romans, and again in Richard's time — and in our own — for transporting metals mined in the valley. For the Romans it was also a military road to the Alpine province of Noricum, but it was always border country, and one where the mountains and forests had been almost untouched by Roman civilization. The south-western villages owed their allegiance to the patriarch of Aquileia, the north-eastern ones to the bishop of Bamberg. It had been the route that Roman legions took to subdue the German tribes, just as it was the route that Italian and Austrian armies fought over in the First World War. As Richard and his companions passed the church of San Giovanni in Pontebba (Pontafel in German) deep in the valley, they may not have realized, but they were passing the ancient border between two cultures.
It would have been a nerve-racking journey, the snow poised to fall and halt their progress maybe for months, and the strange mountain people around them in the lonely corners of the pass. Perhaps they even saw evidence of the previous week's Krampus festival — a folk festival known only in the Val Canale — a celebration of St Nicholas involving horned masks and ringing cow bells. Perhaps they had been warned to watch out for the local demon, an ugly old woman known as the Mari de la Gnot (Mother of the Night). It was a relief to pass Tarvisio and see the way opening up beyond the Alps.
Even so, the mountainous region of Carinthia, where they were emerging, was itself a peculiar corner of Europe with little cultivation, cut off from the areas round about, where Slavs and Europeans intermarried and created a small, powerful culture and folklore of their own. Even in the nineteenth century, half the births there were illegitimate. The Roman writer Tacitus wrote that some parts of Germany were still primeval forests and bogs. There were fewer of these a millennium later, as Richard and his remaining companions headed for Villach after a day struggling between boulders and slipping on the ice in the pass, perhaps to spend the night. They must have shared a sense of relief having crossed the Alps, but it was still a murky journey through forestson roads that had been feared in Roman times, providing the very stuff of medieval nightmares. They galloped along the north side of the Ossiacher See, past the Benedictine abbey at Gerlitzen and into the valleys of Carinthia. As they passed the various town walls, they heard the watchmen at the gates ask them to identify themselves and their destinations at Feldkirchen, at St Veit past the palace of the Duke of Carinthia, and finally at Friesach.
Friesach was the objective, with its two competing markets, each one under a different bishop, its castle and, most important, its silver mine. This is the intelligence Richard extracted from the monks at Moggio or otherwise on the road, because Friesach was one of two towns in central Europe that had been contributing to the boom in silver coinage since the 1170s. The historian Peter Spufford describes the other silver-mining town of Freiberg in Germany as like the Californian gold rush towns in the 1850s — camps of hopeful prospectors from every nation in the world, and the hangers-on who are attracted anywhere to prey on those who are suddenly rich: the prostitutes, the gaming houses, the spivs and the petty crooks. There is no reason to believe that Friesach was any different. Even today, still squeezed inside its medieval walls, it has churches from denominations all over Europe, a legacy of the melting pot it once was. It was an anonymous place where a few Templars and pilgrims could easily disappear into the background.
Friesach belonged to the bishop of Salzburg rather than the surrounding region. It was a wealthy town with a mint large enough to use the local silver and more imported from Hungary to create the Friesacher pfennig, coins that turned up all over Europe. The walls and moat were built a few years after his visit, but Richard and his companions rode into the town square with the twin towers of the ancient fortress towering above them. Once again, nothing went according to plan.
Richard's group had moved quickly north, but the news of his shipwreck and disguise had moved faster. One of the 'ministers' or indentured barons of the duke of Austria, Friedrich III of Pettau, had dashed from Salzburg and was in Friesach waiting for them. As soon as they realized they were being sought, Richard's com- panions put into effect a plan they had clearly been practising. Baldwin of Bethune was to stay in Friesach and draw attention to himself by spending lavishly, while Richard took William de I'Etang — or in some accounts not even him — and the boy who spoke German, and set off as fast as he could in the evening towards Vienna. Freidrich, meanwhile, seized Baldwin and the rest of the party. Once again Richard had slipped through the fingers of his pursuers.
Now there were only three of them, and nearly 200 miles between them and the Danube, beyond which lay Bohemia — but to get there they would have to race ahead and skirt Vienna before the news of his escape in Friesach reached the ears of the duke of Austria. Richard's fever was also now much worse.
What followed was a desperate ride of three days and nights, without stopping for food or rest, which would have exhausted anybody, let alone somebody suffering from a potentially deadly bout of dysentery. They galloped past the Forchtenstein castle
near Neumarkt, then swung north-west along the road to cross the River Mur just after Teufenbach. They crossed to the south bank again near the Magdalenenkirche at Judenberg, then rode along the north bank past Knittelfeld, through Bruck an der Mur, all the time aware that the roads and inns were being watched. And as they headed north, Richard and his two companions must have considered the fate of one of their Irish predecessors on the road to Vienna. The pilgrim St Colman had been arrested outside the city on his way to the Holy Land and accused of spying, and was put to death on 13 October 1012. It was a worrying precedent.
Their exhausting ride took them past the first wintry vineyards along the old Roman road across the plain that is now the site of Wiener Neustadt until, over the hill, the city of Vienna was suddenly ahead of them, with the great archipelago of islands and channels nearly a mile across that then made up the River Danube beyond. Richard would not have been impressed with the city with its smoking chimneys and wooden one-storey hovels, without a proper city wall and with its thousand or so inhabitants setting uptheir huts outside the city as well as inside. The palace of the Babenberg dukes loomed in the distance, almost the only stone building in the whole city — the urban retreat of Leopold of Austria — and possibly Richard allowed himself a moment's regret for the way he had behaved over the Austrian banner on the walls of Acre.