by Dan Jones
Berengaria knew her marriage to Richard would be highly controversial. The English king was still engaged to marry Philip II’s sister Alice, to whom he had been betrothed since they were children. Despite the widespread rumours that his father had seduced Alice, Richard was formally committed to marrying her.
If Berengaria was nervous, then she had at least the comfort of a travelling companion who had seen far worse. Eleanor was undimmed by the years. She transacted diplomatic business as they travelled, including a meeting at Lodi, near Milan, with Frederick Barbarossa’s son and successor Henry VI. The young Berengaria would have been aware of the enhanced prestige that her marriage was bringing her: in entering the Plantagenet family she was joining the highest reaches of a dynasty whose contacts and influence stretched from the German empire to Jerusalem.
After missing the king at Pisa, Eleanor and Berengaria finally caught up with Richard on Sicily on 30 March 1191. He had been there for six months, and already had an eventful journey. The massive Plantagenet army had put ashore at Lisbon, where they had shown their zeal for holy war by raping women and plundering the land, before meeting Richard at Marseille and sailing on to Sicily. Richard had met with personal adventure on his way down the Italian coastline, at one point being nearly stoned to death by a group of Neapolitan peasants whom he had berated for usurping the trappings of aristocracy by flying a hawk. When he reached Sicily, he had taken the liberty of conquering Messina and flying the English flag above the city ramparts, thus ignoring his deal with Philip to split the spoils of war. The Messina strait now bristled with his massive, heavy warships, much to the chagrin of the French king, who found the pomp in which his comrade travelled somewhat tiresome.
But if Philip was annoyed by Richard’s high-handed military style, he had been truly apoplectic when he learned that Berengaria of Navarre was arriving. In a humiliating exchange just days before his new bride arrived, Richard had finally told Philip there would be no wedding to Alice. He cited his father’s seduction of the girl, claiming that she had borne him a bastard child. Philip had no choice but to accept that he had been strung along, probably for years. He accepted 10,000 marks in compensation for swallowing the shameful news that the marriage was off, but left Sicily several days before Berengaria’s arrival, in a state of shock and rage.
Eleanor stayed on Sicily for three days: just long enough to greet her favourite son and her daughter Joan, queen of Sicily, whom Richard had freed from imprisonment during his conquest of Messina. Eleanor had not seen Joan since she had been sent away for marriage as a girl of eleven in 1177. But the reconciliation was brief. Business in England and Normandy, where John remained a worry to his elder brother, called Eleanor home. Joan took over the position as chaperone to Berengaria as the crusading party prepared to leave the island for the Holy Land.
The next staging post was supposed to be Crete, but when a gale blew up at sea, Richard’s party was split, and around twenty-five ships were blown off course towards Cyprus. The island was an independent Greek territory ruled by the Byzantine ‘tyrant of Cyprus’ Isaac Comnenus. It was a vital staging point for the coastal cities of Outremer, but Comnenus was a wholly unreliable ruler. When several of the crusader ships were wrecked on the island’s coast, the passengers were sorely mistreated by Comnenus’s subjects. Most offensive of all, there was an attempt made to capture the ship carrying Joan and Berengaria, as it waited at anchor off Limassol.
Richard’s ship was not blown to Cyprus, but when he landed at Rhodes on 22 April he received news of his sister and fiancée’s predicament. He determined that the Cypriots, like the Messinans, should be punished by conquest, regardless of the fact that Cyprus was a Christian state and he a crusader. On 5 May Richard and his men stormed on shore at Limassol and fought a bloody street battle to capture the town. The Cypriots were beaten back to Famagusta on the east coast. To celebrate his victory Richard married Berengaria of Navarre on 12 May, in a ceremony in Limassol’s Byzantine Chapel of St George. The young queen was crowned by the Norman bishop of Evreux. The guests must have included Guy of Lusignan, erstwhile king of Jerusalem and Richard’s retainer in his capacity as count of Poitou. It was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary royal marriages and coronations in the history of the English Crown: a Navarrese teenager crowned queen of England by a Norman bishop in a Cypriot chapel, attended by émigré Aquitanian-Jerusalemites. If ever there was an indication of the vast reach of the English Crown under the Plantagenets, this was it.
With the royal wedding concluded, Richard’s army spent the next three weeks completing its conquest of Cyprus. Richard split his fleet in two, and had it sail in opposite directions around the island. Everywhere they stopped the air would have filled with shrieks of terror, as men bearing the white cross of England’s holy war stormed ashore to raid towns, capture castles and board enemy ships. The main prize and enemy was Isaac Comnenus himself. The tyrant held out briefly, but when his beloved daughter was captured in the fortress of Kyrenia, his will to resist collapsed. He submitted to Richard with the sole request that his status should be respected, and he would not be bound in irons. Richard, ever chivalrous, obliged. Comnenus was bound in specially struck silver manacles.
The Plantagenet empire thus now extended, in a very real sense, to the fringes of the Middle East. Richard wrote home to his English chancellor, William Longchamp: ‘We have subjected to ourselves the whole island of Cyprus with all its strongpoints.’ He forced every Cypriot man to shave his beard and confirmed local laws and customs under his own officials’ administration. But Richard, unlike his father, was more concerned with hard cash than enduring overlordship. With his conquest completed, he promptly sold the island to the Templars for 100,000 Saracen bezants.
From certain high vantage points on Cyprus, the coast of Lebanon was visible. The Holy Land now lay tantalizingly close. Richard wasted no time setting sail. He arrived in Acre on 8 June 1191, to find that a siege had been going strong for more than a year. Philip II had been at Acre for several months after leaving Messina. His armies were camped to the east of the city, having recently joined the ranks of the eastern Christian host, the Germans, Pisans and the rest. They pitted his great catapult Malvoisine (‘Bad neighbour’) against its equivalent on the Muslim side, Malcousine (‘Bad cousin’). Malvoisine was continuously damaged by enemy fire, but Philip simply had it rebuilt. The rumbling and crashing sounds as huge stones smashed into the city and buried themselves deep into the ground outside would have terrified everyone within earshot.
As Richard approached by sea he looked upon a city clouded in the dust of attritional warfare. It was as depraved and miserable a scene of human suffering as the mind can imagine. Stinking with disease from the rotting corpses of men, this was a place where dead horses and dead soldiers were used as ballast by the Christians as they attempted to fill in the city moat for their siege engines; a place where the midday sky would darken with the shadows of giant rocks and hailstorms of vicious arrows.
There was no salvation here. Atrocity was rife. Christian women captured an Egyptian galley crew and tortured them to death. Muslim leaders planned terror attacks on the Christian army, aiming to let loose hundreds of poisonous snakes among their camp. The French built giant siege machines, and the Muslim defenders duly burned the machine operators alive with Greek fire. Starving German troops ate mule flesh. Trench diggers worked themselves to exhaustion, gagging as they dug on the hot pestilential air of the battlefield, thick with death. Talented prostitutes worked both sides in the red light district that sprang up in the Christian camp. The nearby sea bobbed with bloated human remains.
As soon as Richard arrived in Outremer, problems surfaced between the Plantagenets and the Capetians. Far from presenting a unified Christian front against the infidel, all the rivalries of Europe were imported to the Holy Land. Richard was vastly wealthier than Philip, and his arrival packed the ranks of the Christians with well-paid soldiers hungry for success and plunder. He swelled the En
glish host and stoked the furnace of Philip’s ire by offering higher pay than the French king to uncontracted men.
Even without the siege warfare and infighting, Acre was a dangerous place to invaders. Within a week of setting up camp, Richard had fallen grievously ill with a scurvy-like disease known as ‘Arnaldia’ or ‘Leonardie’. His teeth and fingernails began to loosen and his hair fell out in clumps. Yet Richard was a king in command of his own propaganda. Illness was personally debilitating but it could not be allowed to stall the pace of his campaign. To maintain the momentum of the crusade, he sent messages to Saladin, requesting secret negotiations – and asking for peaches and ice to cool his raging fever. Saladin sent the fruit, rejected the requests to meet, but maintained a correspondence and learned to respect this new leader of the Franks.
Illness kept Richard debilitated for much of his crusading career. But he refused to be cowed. Early in July, as the Christians intensified their assault on Acre and the city’s defences neared collapse, he was carried onto the battlefield on a litter, covered in a gloriously regal silken quilt and carrying a crossbow, which he fired at Muslim defenders from behind a screen, killing several and giving cheer to his own men as he led a typically daring operation from the front.
Acre’s defences were finally breached on 5 July. Its fall owed equal parts to Philip’s tenacious assault from the east and Richard’s further battery from the north. The walls had been sapped and mined, smashed with heavy stones, scaled with ladders and fired at with arrows for nearly two years, by thousands of forces including almost every notable Christian aristocrat in the East, and the combined military might of the Plantagenet and Capetian empires, Pisans, Genoese, Danes, Germans and assorted other pilgrim soldiers. That it held out so long was testament to the extreme valour of the Muslim defenders.
Before Acre fell, a deal was hammered out between Saladin and the Christian kings which averted a bloody sack. The crusaders allowed Acre’s garrison to make an honourable submission and they raised the flags of Richard and Philip over the city with minimal further bloodshed. In return for this, Saladin agreed to pay a ransom of 200,000 dinars, to release nearly 2,000 prisoners and to restore the True Cross. The bulk of the Egyptian galley fleet that was moored in the city harbour was captured, extending Christian hegemony along the coasts of the Levant and virtually ending Muslim ambitions to spread their influence further west in the Mediterranean. Outside the royal palace, Christians flocked into Acre, singing and dancing with joy after their long, nerve-shredding ordeal, and indulged themselves in the drinking dens and whorehouses of the city’s grubbier quarters. But in victory lay the seeds of a disaster that would have serious implications for the Plantagenet empire back in Europe. Although Acre fell to a joint attack, Richard, Berengaria and Joan moved into the royal palace, where Richard tore down the livery of his ally Duke Leopold of Austria, who had been in the Holy Land since April and was instrumental in the siege. The perceived arrogance of the Plantagenet crusading faction infuriated both Duke Leopold and Philip, whose numerous slights at Richard’s hands had made his entire crusade a catalogue of humiliation.
In the days after Acre, the crusading movement received both a fillip and a blow. Philip II, driven by a cocktail of emotions that included jealousy, homesickness and exasperation, announced that he considered his crusading oath to have been served by the conquest of Acre. He was going home.
This was generally seen to be an act of cowardice that undermined the dignity of the French Crown. In truth Philip was sick of being humiliated by Richard – over his marriage, his conquest of Messina, and latterly over a power struggle in which the two kings had backed opposite candidates for the kingdom of Jerusalem: Richard’s retainer Guy de Lusignan and Philip’s candidate, Conrad of Montferrat.
Furthermore, one of the French king’s most important retainers, Philip count of Flanders, had died at Acre. This was a major loss to the European aristocracy in the East, but it was far more important in Europe. Flanders was the wool and cloth capital of Europe, a vastly wealthy corner of the world, which would transform the French finances if it could be brought within the royal demesne. Serving the glory of God in the East was one thing, but Philip was a Capetian at heart. His claim to the rich territory that the count of Flanders had left behind was more pressing. Pushing the claims of the French Crown in north-west Europe appealed far more to the French king than did playing second fiddle to his own vassal in the baking cesspit of the East. Philip left Outremer from Tyre on 3 August and sailed for France.
Richard was now the indisputable commander of the Third Crusade. He had men, money, a vast fleet and burgeoning prestige. He now also had almost full direction over military operations. According to the chronicler Richard of Devizes, Richard declared that having Philip around in the East was like being a cat with a hammer tied to its tail. With the hammer cut loose, the cat was free to run. Richard’s stay in the region would earn him plenty of further glory, which he now had no obligation to share with Philip. Yet for every month he spent on his crusade, problems loomed larger and larger for the Plantagenet empire back at home.
Treachery
Geoffrey, archbishop of York, stared up, like every other visitor to Dover, at the great castle being built above the harbour. By September 1191 work had progressed somewhat since the late King Louis VII had toured the building site. Now Geoffrey could look up at its imposing square keep and think of his father, who had spent a royal fortune building it into a statement of royal magnificence: a shrine to the secular power of the Plantagenet dynasty.
Geoffrey was a magnificent man himself. He was a military talent, a learned clerk, and half a Plantagenet prince. The illegitimate child of Henry II and a woman named Ykenai, he had built a career in the royal service and the Church. He had served as his father’s chancellor and risked his life fighting a brilliant campaign in the north during the Great War of 1173/4. Now he was his brother Richard’s second-highest ecclesiastic. But if he had been a Plantagenet loyalist in the past, a rich, powerful and ambitious Geoffrey was a dangerous man to have around the country with the king away and no direct heir yet produced. When Richard left for the Holy Land, he had made Geoffrey, like John, swear an oath to remain out of England for three years. Government had been left in the hands of William Longchamp, who combined the roles of bishop of Ely, papal legate, justiciar and chancellor – no king, but as close to a figure of universal authority over government and Church administration as it was possible to create.
Now Geoffrey, allied with his half-brother John, was breaking his oath. While Richard was in Sicily, he had given an indication that his nephew Arthur of Brittany should be heir to England in the event of the king dying on crusade. Arthur of Brittany was Richard’s elder brother’s son – the offspring of the Geoffrey Plantagenet who had been killed in a Paris tournament in 1186. When Richard left for Outremer he was around four years old. John, meanwhile, was twenty-four and had reacted violently towards his brother’s choice of heir. Forcing support from Eleanor of Aquitaine, he had returned to England, seized the great castles of Nottingham and Tickhill and raised men against the chancellor. In doing so, John relied on Longchamp’s meagre popularity in England. A Norman by birth and background, the chancellor’s grand style set him at odds with many of the men whom he was attempting to govern. In talks aimed at resolving the dispute John had bullied Longchamp into abandoning young Arthur of Brittany’s cause and recognizing him as England’s heir presumptive. Geoffrey’s arrival in the country was another step in John’s campaign to turn his potential power into reality.
When Geoffrey landed beneath the glowering castle, he received a message from John warning him of impending danger. Word had leaked of his arrival and Longchamp’s agents were on their way to Dover intending to arrest him. He would be charged with entering the realm illegally and might well find himself imprisoned at the hands of the chancellor. In haste, the archbishop fled through the town to take refuge at St Martin’s Priory, Longchamp’s men hot on his h
eels.
Geoffrey reached St Martin’s shortly before his pursuers and took sanctuary with the holy community there. Longchamp’s agents laid a siege outside the grounds of the priory, but after four days they lost patience and battered their way in to fetch their quarry. They found the archbishop by the altar. It was a safe place – a holy place. It was also, in the context of recent events, a highly symbolic place. In scenes disturbingly reminiscent of the Becket murder two decades previously, the chancellor’s men laid hands on Archbishop Geoffrey, and bundled him out of the priory. He was dragged by his arms and legs through the streets of Dover, his head banging on the ground as he went.
This was no doubt an uncomfortable experience for Geoffrey, but it was a political disaster for William Longchamp. Having held England’s government together for eighteen months of the king’s absence, and despite his loyalist motivations, he was now turned upon by virtually every churchman in England.
John leapt at the opportunity presented by the fracas. His propagandists went into overdrive. Writers like Hugh of Nonant, who were loyal to John, derided Longchamp as an ape, a midget, a pervert and a paedophile. He was accused of every vice and abomination that the medieval imagination could conjure. Meanwhile, the count prepared to take control of London. When Longchamp attempted to prevent him from entering the city, the citizens barred the gates and denounced the chancellor as a traitor.
A triumphant John hauled Longchamp before the regency council, where Geoffrey of York made a series of accusations concerning the chancellor’s involvement in his arrest and financial impropriety. His authority was all but destroyed. Longchamp was stripped of his office by the council, forced to hand over hostages for his castles, and thrown into Dover prison for a week. When he was released, he was ruined, and made his way as quickly as he could to Flanders. The council named John supreme governor of the realm. It was precisely the sort of situation that Richard had hoped to avoid.
