by David Boyle
One reason was undoubtedly a backlash against some of the effects of the new coins circulating down through society and the slow break-up of Europe's feudal ties — the luxuries from all over the known world, the fine clothes worn by urban dwellers of all classes, the widespread irritation at the greed of the monasteries as well as the moneylenders.* It was almost as if money could buy and value anything. The queen of Georgia even tried to bypass the whole business of crusading by offering Saladin 200,000 dinars for the Holy Cross. It was regarded as most unseemly. A century later, Dante would link usury with sodomy in the same circle of hell, both of them associated with unregulated greed. The fastest-growing cities, London, Paris and Vienna, were soon to be condemned by preachers for their association with greed and homosexuality. The emergence of silver coins and moneylending on such a wide scale — spread across Europe by Richard's enormous ransom — was one of the main agents of social change, and there were those among the aristocracy, whose peasants had fled beyond their reach to the freedom of the cities, who bitterly resisted it.
Even more important was the way this newly plentiful supply of silver — some of it from Richard's ransom — fed into a new determination by princes to centralize and regulate their own coinage. Philip Augustus was among the first to close his local mints to promote his own silver coinage from Paris. Richard's silver was soon turning into coins in Austria via the new mint in Vienna. Although the non-silver local tokens and méreaux continued to fuel local exchange, minted sometimes by cathedrals or charitable enterprises, the new centralization of power across Europe meant that administrators were intolerant of any kind of money but their own. Over the following century, there was aslow withdrawal of local currencies, until some centuries later economists began to share the suspicion of the princes and talk of 'bad money' driving out 'good'. Yet the trouble with silver coins was that they did not tend to circulate to peasants. It was the beginning of the end of the great twelfth-century prosperity.
All this fed into the sense at the beginning of the new century that the Christian world was in decay. The humiliating loss of Jerusalem, the failure of the Third Crusade to win it back and the arrest and accusations against its leader — all seemed to imply that God had turned against Christendom. If God had not seen fit to reward the crusaders with success on his behalf, then maybe there was something deeper wrong with their way of life. Some German contemporaries blamed the failure to recapture Jerusalem on the original sin of Richard's arrest, though it was a sin rather after the fact. It was a further symptom of'Islam within', and brought with it a growing sense of their own internal imperfections and those of their society. There is no doubt that the shock of Richard's failure to take Jerusalem, and the fragmentation of Christian Europe that resulted from his imprisonment — as well as the pressure that his ransom caused the Jews of England and Normandy — were at least part of the process that was sweeping away the old twelfth-century European culture of tolerance and learning.
As fear and despair spread around Europe in the early years of the thirteenth century, in the face of war, inflation and starvation — when the next generation increasingly seemed to be symbols of innocence and hope — then the determination to protect them from what were perceived as predatory Jews, heretics and lepers became all the more pressing. It was a small step from there to the spiritual hysteria behind the Children's Crusade in 1212.*
If Richard had lived, probably the Angevin empire would have survived intact, perhaps linked by a sturdy alliance of princes andprelates across northern Europe. Richard's alliance was smashed at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, where his old enemy the Bishop of Beauvais was back in action with his mace. If Richard had been there, the chances are that the battle would never have taken place, but if it had, it might have gone the other way.
Would he have seen the Albigensian Crusade for what it was? Probably not, but he might have perceived the strategic threat it posed, and it is unlikely to have succeeded without at least his tacit support. But would the new age of intolerance have been a little muted as a result? Richard was guilty of his own brand of brutality — the murder of the Saracen prisoners outside Acre in 1191 — and it is hard to imagine that he would have stayed so aloof from his own age. On the other hand, it is difficult to see Richard embracing the relative puritanism of his French counterpart. There is evidence that he was planning to settle down closer to Berengaria — the two of them bought a house together on the Continent — but Richard would probably have clung to the world of songs, music and courtly culture that the new age was beginning to frown on, and if he had done so then others would have too. He was planning to go back to Palestine. If he had done so, and captured Jerusalem, perhaps the corrosive sense of collective unworthiness that afflicted Western Europe might have been dispersed.
Meanwhile, a new generation of musicians was emerging, determined to take the music of people like Bernart de Ventadorn and Blondel and make it respectable. Within decades, preachers were beginning to put aside their disapproval of minstrels and use songs in their sermons. Music was beginning to lose its dangerous, romantic edge. A manuscript of ttrouvère music in the British Library, dating from the middle of the thirteenth century, includes the songs of Blondel and his contemporaries, but some of the words have been scrubbed out and replaced with religious ones. Even the troubadours were beginning to find themselves edged out. Walther von der Vogelweide, the pioneering minnesinger, did not find favour with Leopold VI of Austria. Under Richard's nemesis Leopold V, Walther had described Vienna as a joyous court of the muse'; now he was forced to leave.
Blondel's contemporaries also became increasingly respectable. The Chastelain de Coucy, Guy de Ponceaux, joined the Fourth Crusade and died in 1203 o n his way — as he believed — to Palestine. Gace Brulé was given a pension by the famously puritanical Philip Augustus, and lived out his old age in exile in Brittany, collaborating with Richard's great-nephew the young Thibaut of Champagne, the leading troubadour of the next generation. Conon de Bethune also joined the Fourth Crusade, negotiating on behalf of the crusaders and deputizing for the new Byzantine emperor, Baldwin of Hainault, in his absence. He died in 1219 or 1220 as the lord of a small region of Turkey. Jehan II, Lord of Nesle, almost certainly not in fact Blondel — though he may have written songs — even joined the Albigensian Crusade.
Andreas Capellanus and Richard's aunt Marie de France — the great romantic writers of the age — both confessed their mistakes at the end of their lives: courtly love had been ungodly and they no longer believed in its tenets. The literature of the Holy Grail disappeared in a generation. There are some suggestions that it had been forbidden. And at the same time, the new intolerance was closing the door to the inspirations behind it — the great resource of learning in the Arab world, and the great Arab and Jewish translations of the classics. The Albigensian Crusade also dispersed some of the troubadours of Languedoc, partly because their aristocratic patrons were Cathar heretics or because they were heretics themselves. 'It is no wonder to me, Rome, if people fall into error,' wrote the Toulouse troubadour Guilhem Figueira, 'for you have plunged the whole world into trouble and war.' The Provencal troubadours who survived adapted to the new spirit, but though their culture continued in new forms in northern France, Germany, Spain and Italy, they were always hankering after their forefathers, who, they believed, still had something new to say. The thirteenth-century Bertran Carbonel from Marseilles was so much part of the new commercial world that he could compare his love for his lady to investment in the hope of profit.
As for Blondel, the facts about the end of his life are even more sparse than those about its beginning. In the song collectionswritten out half a century later in the great libraries of the world, the initial verse of Blondel's Chanson VIII ('De la pluz douce amour') appears in other songs, which is evidence that it had become very famous and familiar. There is a William Blondel recorded as having been given land in England by Richard after his return, but there is nothing else t
o connect the two names. Blondel de Nesle's great friend Gace Brulé died in Brittany and it may be that he did too, though the references to him in the oldest documents as a 'gentleman of Arras' might imply a retirement there instead. He is generally believed to have lived until 1220, but it is really only tradition that says so. Apart from his songs, and the occasional reference to him in the songs of the next generation, and of course the strange legend that has kept his name alive, Blondel fades out of history.
William the Marshal lay dying throughout April and early May 1219. He was one of the great self-made figures of the age, and regent of England in the name of John's child, Henry III. When he knew he was facing death, he had himself rowed up the Thames to his favourite manor of Caversham next to the river, and lay there for some weeks giving away his goods, slowly divesting himself of his powers, and arranging for his funeral in Westminster Abbey and his burial in the Temple Church in London, where his effigy can still be seen. As he lay in his room just before death, wearing the white cloak of the Templars, he found his mind wandering back to the tournament fields in France in his youth. It was there that he and Henry the Young King had won their reputations and where he would sing carols as he waited to be called into the lists.
'Shall I tell you something extraordinary?' he said to his friend John of Earley, next to his bed. 'I have a great desire to sing.'
'Sire, sing,' said John, 'and throw your heart and mind into it. If it comforts you then it will be well done.'
'Quiet, John, such singing would not be good for me. The people here would think me mad.'
Very reluctantly, beside the bed, where the silk pall from Walesthat would cover his coffin lay beside him, his daughter Joan was persuaded to sing instead and, with tears in her eyes, she sang about love. It was a fitting end for one of the most colourful characters of the age of light and fin' amor. It was also a final glimpse of his world of culture and openness, where music had the power to find missing kings, and where it could speed regents into the next world.
* There is some evidence that he was. In 1791 a group of antiquarians opened his tomb and found Longspee dressed in furs and robes that had bleached white with age. Curled up inside his empty skull was a dead rat. The rat was finally given a post-mortem in the twentieth century and was found to have died of arsenic poisoning, possibly an unexpected second victim of Hubert de Burgh.
* Twelfth-century jokes imply that homosexual activity was widespread but tolerated. When St Bernard of Clairvaux threw himself on the body of a dead boy but failed to revive him, the satirist Walter Map — who particularly disliked the Cistercians — joked that this was extremely unlucky: monks often threw themselves on boys, he said, but when they got up again, the boys got up too.
* It seems to have been the destiny of the English to chafe against instructions from Rome then, just as they do against those from Brussels now. In fact, the two cities play parallel roles in English history.
* The Church was also worried about how easy it was to use zero in fraud. The simple business of adding zero to a figure multiplied it by ten. But the suspicion of'infidel knowledge' also counted and continued. Even in 1648 the tomb of the great mathematician Pope Sylvester II — the man who had introduced Arabic numerals to Western Europe — was being opened by orders of the Vatican to cleanse it of devils.
* The monks of St Swithun's in Winchester grovelled in the mud before the elderly Henry II to complain that their bishop had forbidden three of their customary thirteen dishes a day.
* The Children's Crusade was the tragic and bizarre departure of thousands of children from all over northern France and western Germany, aged six upwards, who believed that they could succeed in the liberation ofjerusalem when their parents had failed. Many were turned back on the roads to the south, but many also managed to reach Marseilles and were never seen again.
Epilogue: The Legend of Blondel, Reprise
'O Richard! Oh, my king! The universe abandons you.'
Michel-Jean Sedaine, Richard Coeur de Lion, 1784
It is 21 October 1784 and there is a thrilling atmosphere as the waving feathers and rustling skirts, the velvet coats and powdered wigs make their way through the great six pillars at the front of the Comedie-Italienne, one of the most fashionable theatres in Paris. There is nothing quite like the first night of a comic opera by Gretry and Sedaine, and this brand-new theatre — just near the modern Opera — has the exclusive right to perform comic operas in the heart of the city. Inside the Comedie-Italienne, the chandeliers of candles are reflecting on the mirrors and gilt that cover the green walls of the auditorium. The thirty-two musicians are tuning up and crowding in is a mixture of the gentry and street brawlers of the boulevard des Italiens and rue du Favart, many of them paid by the authors to cheer or by their rivals to hiss.
Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, has seven weeks to live. But Mozart is working on the first glimmerings of what will eventually become The Marriage of Figaro, the only rival of that whole decade to the operatic extravaganza the audience will witness tonight at the Comedie-Italienne. Schiller is hard at work on some of the most romantic works of German poetry; Goya is experimenting with his first successful paintings. A new romantic age is in the air and will shortly turn the world upside down.
But this opera straddled past and future. Gretry and Sedaine were masters of the comic form, and their masterpiece, Richard Coeur de Lion - their most successful collaboration — was both medieval and romantic at the same time. As the curtain rose on theopening night, the fascinated audience could see the stage dominated by Gothic castle walls. They thrilled to the full-scale assault of these in Act 3, but what they brought away with them more than anything else — even more, perhaps, than the romantic story of Richard's imprisonment and rescue by Blondel — were the costumes. The production had dressed the actors not so much in authentic medieval garb, but in what medieval troubadours ought to have worn if they had been practising their art in the eighteenth century. Their plumes and lace were soon afterwards popularized by Queen Marie Antoinette, Gretry's greatest fan, as 'le style troubadour.
Sedaine's libretto took the old story to some wild and eccentric places: the opera included a romance between Richard and a foreign princess and another between Blondel and the prison governor's daughter, neither of which has any basis, even in legend. But none of that mattered to the audiences that flocked to see the performances night after night, as they rediscovered the power of the story of Blondel's song for the first time in centuries. What they saw was the same story of love, friendship, loyalty and determination that has haunted people ever since, but they also had a particular interpretation that would guarantee trouble for the opera in Paris in the years ahead.
The audiences cheered the new smokeless lamps used to imitate the rising moon, and the critics adored what they saw. 'The romance song sung by Blondel and King Richard,' said one, 'reminds us of those so sweet and touching melodies that one still finds in our southern provinces like monuments which testify that they were the cradle of our minstrels and troubadours.' They longed for it to be true, retelling it for children, dramatizing it and versifying it constantly over the next decade on both sides of the Channel and in Germany too. But the medium-term outlook for Gretry and Sedaine's masterpiece was not so good. Its gentle royalist sentiment — loyalty to kings — was about to become extremely unfashionable. Nearly three months after the storming of the Bastille, in October 1789, the French royal family joined a celebration which included songs from Richard Coeur de Lion — including a performance of Blondel's song from the opera 'O, mon Roi! L'univers t'abandonne.' When the news of this cosy royal occasion filtered out, and its royal song, rumours began to circulate in Paris that it had constituted a demonstration against the new revolutionary regime — even that the new tricolore had been trampled in the orgy of royalist sentiment that Blondel's song had unleashed.
It proved to be a turning point in the relationship between the royal family and the new rulers
of France. The new regime banned the opera in 1791 — in fact, it was banned again by the brief revolutionary regimes of 1830 and 1848 — and just three months before the last performance of Richard's first run, King Louis XVI and his family were captured as they tried to escape from the country. Soon those who saw the first night, and who wept over Blondel's efforts on behalf of his king, would reflect that their own king was in prison himself, and had no minstrel to rescue him. Blondel's song had contributed to the series of events that led to the execution of the royal family.
But although the opera itself was banned, the legend did not disappear so easily. Until Gretry and Sedaine, the tale had been the province only of serious historians. Antiquarians like Jean de Notre Dame, the brother of Nostradamus, and those who followed him, treated Blondel's song as historical fact. The French librarian Claude Fauchet, first president of France's mint, published his collection of ancient songs and chronicles in 1581 and explained that the story of Blondel by the Minstrel of Reims was a real, forgotten event. 'When all those who played a role in the [lives of] kings Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion were gone, nothing was heard any more of Blondel,' he wrote, adding sadly, 'He had been forgotten.'