The Angevin king was like a force of nature when launching a direct attack, but he also possessed a remarkably acute appreciation of the precepts governing military manoeuvres and engagements. During the crusade he had sparred with Saladin’s forces on numerous occasions, through fighting marches, exploratory raids and, perhaps most importantly, in the course of the first, incremental advance inland towards Jerusalem conducted in the autumn of 1191. This hard-won familiarity with the subtleties of troop movements and armed incursions served the Lionheart well when Philip Augustus tried to launch a counter-offensive.
In the early summer of 1194, the French king marched his troops to the very edge of Angevin-held territory and took up a position just east of the town of Vendôme, from where he seems to have been planning a full-scale invasion of the Loire Valley. Richard responded quickly – moving his own host into the region and establishing a camp in front of Vendôme. Only a few miles now separated the two well-matched armies. At this stage, Philip must have imagined that he still had the initiative, but he badly misjudged the situation. The Lionheart understood, through his reading of both the surrounding landscape and the relative disposition of their respective forces, that his enemy had overreached himself. If the Capetian king tried to mount a direct advance on Vendôme, Richard could send a portion of his troops to perform a flanking manoeuvre and then crush the French on two fronts. But at the same time, any attempt to withdraw might leave Philip’s rearguard prone to attack. Unable to move forward or back, the Capetian king found himself in a trap.
As the reality of the situation began to dawn on him, Philip tried to save face – brazenly warning the Lionheart through a messenger on 3 July that the French were about to launch an attack. Richard is said to have calmly responded that he would happily await their arrival, while promising that if the Capetians failed to appear he would be sure ‘to pay them a visit’ of his own. King Philip’s nerve broke the next day. He ordered a hasty retreat along the road running north-east towards Paris, but his lines soon became disordered. As evening fell, the Lionheart pounced, ravaging the French rearguard and supply train. A large portion of the Capetian force was either killed or taken prisoner, and many of Philip’s own prized possessions – including the royal archive and seal – were seized as plunder. Philip himself only narrowly escaped capture by hiding in a small roadside church.10
By the end of 1194, King Richard had scored a clutch of notable successes, halting the Capetian advance and salvaging the heartlands of the Angevin realm. None the less, much of Upper Normandy and the Norman Vexin remained in Philip Augustus’s hands. The French monarch had been stung, but not conclusively defeated. It would take more than three years of further campaigning to recover the territory conceded by Count John. Not all of this grinding war of attrition went Richard’s way – there were setbacks and periods of truce when both sides sought to recover and regroup – but the balance gradually shifted back in the Angevins’ favour.
One critical step along the road to victory was born out of the Lionheart’s nuanced appreciation of the role and design of medieval castles. The lynchpin of Philip’s hold over the highly contested Vexin border region was his possession of Gisors. This imposing stone fortress boasted a doughty outer circuit of battlements and a looming inner keep. Even more importantly, it stood only fifteen miles from Beauvais and some forty miles from Paris. The proximity of Gisors to these major centres of Capetian power meant that the stronghold could be readily reinforced or relieved by a French army in just a matter of days – thus rendering any attempt at a siege exceptionally risky.
Drawing upon his wealth of military experience garnered in Europe and the Holy Land, King Richard conceived an audacious plan to overcome this difficulty. If Gisors could not be captured, the Lionheart would neutralize its significance as an outpost by constructing a new fortification of his own. Of course, this was no simple task. Between 1196 and 1198, the king built a huge military complex at Les Andelys, on the Vexin’s western edge, seventeen miles from Gisors. Positioned on a sharp bend in the River Seine so that it was accessible to ships shuttling to and from Richard’s recently established naval base at Portsmouth, the site boasted a fortified island to control waterborne traffic and a main stronghold perched some three hundred feet above on an overlooking cliff. This latter edifice, nicknamed ‘Château Gaillard’ or the ‘Castle of Impudence’, was a masterpiece of military design. Constructed with the finest limestone, it made use of the most advanced castle technology of the day, including concentric walls and machicolations that allowed defenders to drop the likes of rocks or burning pitch straight down on to attackers’ heads. Gaillard was nothing short of a cathedral to war and cost a staggering £12,000 – roughly the equivalent of £2 billion today.
The value of Richard’s lavish new complex was two-fold. On the one hand, it protected the approaches to the ducal capital of Rouen. More importantly, it enabled the Lionheart to billet with impunity large numbers of Angevin troops on the very fringe of the Vexin. The king then used these forces to patrol and police the border zone in strength. French soldiers garrisoning Gisors and other nearby fortresses soon discovered that they could hardly step out of their gates in safety. By September 1198, the Lionheart was confident enough of his position to mount a full-scale incursion into the Vexin. He seized a handful of minor strongholds and, when King Philip tried to respond by deploying his field army, Richard launched his own pre-emptive attack – pouncing, it was said, like ‘a ravening lion, starved of food’ – and promptly routed the French army. The Capetians were forced to flee to the only point of safety nearby: Gisors. With the Lionheart chasing at their heels, Philip and his men made a desperately chaotic and humiliating attempt to pile through the main castle gate. Such was the crush of troops that the bridge over the stronghold’s moat collapsed and the French king was dunked in the water below. Richard later proudly boasted in a widely circulated letter that he had personally unhorsed three prominent French knights with his lance during the engagement.11
Philip Augustus had barely evaded capture once again, but the tide of the war in northern France had turned against him. In January 1199, he agreed terms for a new five-year truce and appears to have confirmed the Lionheart’s rights to all the territory he had reconquered since returning from the crusade and his time in captivity. Richard had been forced to commit the full weight of the Angevin realm’s military might and economic resources to the effort, mustering all of his own strength, resilience and martial genius, but the damage done by Count John and King Philip had finally been repaired.
The Lionheart’s willingness to place himself in the frontline of conflict was arguably the critical factor behind many of his military successes, but in the end Richard’s penchant for close-quarter combat and siege warfare cost him his life. In the first months of 1199, the king moved south, using the lull in hostilities with Philip Augustus as an opportunity to deal with an outbreak of unrest in Aquitaine. In late March he laid siege to the small and relatively insignificant fortress of Châlus. The stronghold was defended only by a meagre garrison and, after just three days, stood on the brink of collapse. Then, on the evening of 26 March, with the light failing, Richard decided to survey the progress made in the investment. He strode forward, unarmoured save for an iron headpiece, but accompanied by one of his knights bearing a heavy shield. A lone crossbowman, perched on the battlements, spotted the figures and loosed a bolt in their direction. As luck would have it, the quarrel found its mark, striking the Lionheart in his left shoulder. The wound seems to have been mistreated by the attendant surgeon, who struggled to remove the bolt, and the injury soon turned gangrenous. From that point onwards there was no chance of recovery. Having named John as his successor, King Richard died on 6 April 1199, aged just forty-one. His body was buried, alongside that of his father, in the nearby abbey at Fontevraud, while his heart was interred in Rouen Cathedral. After all his many grand feats of arms and far-flung escapades, the Lionheart had been slain by a common soldie
r in the midst of an all but meaningless siege. This sudden, unexpected end shocked contemporaries. One chronicler recorded that his passing was ‘a source of grief to all’, while another wrote: ‘O death! Do you realise whom you snatched from us? … the lord of warriors, the glory of kings.’12
Were contemporaries right to mourn the passing of Richard I and to laud his supposed qualities and achievements? When seeking to make a sober estimation of the man and his reign, some of the gravest excesses can be discarded. Richard was no mindless thug. Nor was he a superhuman hero – the titan turning back a thousand enemies single-handedly that we see rendered in so many medieval accounts. But a strong case can be made to suggest that as a king the Lionheart possessed many different faces and an inimitable array of distinct qualities. He was at once a violent and ruthless warrior and a cultured man of learning; a guileful politician, calculating general and diligent logician, yet ever restless for action and neglectful of his own safety. At court he might remain proud and aloof – the distant sovereign – but in the field he was approachable and charismatic, attentive to the needs of his men.
Perhaps these various personas were simply a reflection of the diverse roles Richard was called upon to fulfil. He was never simply the King of England, or even the ruler of the greater Angevin realm. Yes, he wished to be remembered as the majestic monarch, but that was not enough. The Lionheart also aspired to achieve untrammelled success as a military commander, renown as a storied knight and victory as a holy crusader. In part it was the caprice of chance that placed these demands, and opportunities, before him. The early death of his elder brother opened Richard’s pathway to the crown. The outbreak of war in the Near East propelled him on to the international stage. And the perpetual rivalry with his increasingly powerful nemesis, Philip of France, forced him to prioritize war above statecraft. But there is also an unmistakable sense that the Lionheart embraced these trials, seeing them as steps along the path to greatness.
In one particular respect, Richard was most avowedly the child and mirror of his parents, for like Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, he was driven by an indomitable, insatiable sense of ambition. But the Lionheart was also a product of the new age of chivalry – not in the sense that he cherished the mannered niceties of courtly life or craved the artificial glory that might be earned on the tournament field; Richard’s chivalric endeavours were more worldly. He wished to garner honour through wise rule, force of arms and martial triumph, and lived in the full expectation that these achievements would be celebrated by his contemporaries and memorialized through the ages. In many respects the Lionheart was Western Europe’s first true roi-chevalier or king-knight. His thirst for power was subsumed by a deeper hunger for fame and renown, and he harboured an acute awareness of his own reputation, actively cultivating his image as something akin to a living legend: both Arthur the all-conquering king and Lancelot the unrivalled champion, made flesh in one man.
Perhaps Richard should not be judged too harshly for his pursuit of recognition, for this same near-obsessive narcissism pervaded much of late twelfth-century chivalric culture and its influence can be detected in the careers of a number of contemporary knights and aristocrats. But there were few, if any, kings or rulers in this day who allowed themselves to be so distracted from the business of governance and dynastic preservation. In comparison to Richard, the men who confronted him as rivals and enemies through the course of his life were a cut apart: in his prime, Henry II was the arch powerbroker and empire builder; Philip Augustus, the patient and dutiful spider, carefully spinning the web that would entrap his opponents; and Saladin, the holy warrior with a singular devotion to his sacred cause.
For all of Richard’s successes and accomplishments, strengths and abilities, in the end he could be accused of having worked, first and foremost, not for the betterment of his realm, protection of his kin or defence of Christendom, but for himself. His eyes seem to have been fixed on the creation of a legend, rather than the foundation of a legacy. Arguably, the quest for this hollow prize placed the Angevin realm on the path to destruction, for in neglecting the issue of succession, Richard I paved the way for his younger brother’s rise to power. And it would be King John who brought England to its knees and squandered all the Lionheart’s hard-won gains.
5
The Legendary King
Richard I’s short but remarkable reign came to an end in 1199, but he was not forgotten. Perhaps more than any other king of England from this era, the Lionheart achieved lasting fame and enduring prominence in popular imagination. His deeds, embroidered and interwoven with myth, have long been celebrated in literature and song, art and sculpture, and now in television and film. And, unlike most English monarchs, his renown extends beyond the British Isles to reach around the globe – whether he is remembered as a warrior without equal, a towering adversary or an icon of national identity. So why has Richard achieved this recognition, and where is the line between reality and invention?
It is no exaggeration to say that the Lionheart has always been the subject of fanciful tales and fantastical legends. Even within his own lifetime, Richard attained a kind of semi-mythical status. He seems to have actively cultivated his own reputation on the international stage, courting celebrity wherever he went. His famous nickname, Coeur de Lion, was already in use during his reign, and Richard evidently relished its potent associations with such martial qualities as ferocity and bravery. His father had been known as ‘Curtmantle’ (short robe), while his brother John would suffer under the withering moniker of ‘Softsword’. Richard – as one admiring contemporary proudly pointed out – was ‘the noble king, the Lion-Heart’.1 Many chroniclers and writers, including some who lived alongside Richard, played an active role in promoting the cult of personality that developed around their sovereign – weaving stories of his heroic feats into their accounts, sometimes even imbuing the Lionheart with near-superhuman abilities.
In Ambroise’s influential Old French verse account of the Third Crusade, Richard was presented as ‘the boldest king in the world’, a warrior who could ride into battle ‘faster than a crossbow bolt’, leaving a trail of vanquished foes in his wake. The poetic form of Ambroise’s eyewitness narrative – which drew heavily from the epic chansons de geste (songs of deeds) – helped him to mix realism with fantasy. Thus, the Lionheart was shown fighting outside Jaffa in August 1192 like a titan of old:
The powerful king was in the press, against the Turks and the Persians. Never did one man [make] such efforts. He threw himself against the Turks, splitting them to their teeth. He fought so often; he struck so many blows; he did himself such injury in striking that the skin of his hands cracked.2
Traditionally framed chronicles, written in prose Latin, might at first glance be expected to offer a more sober appraisal of events, but the author of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi – another important eyewitness narrative of the Third Crusade – actually drew heavily upon Ambroise’s text. He claimed that Richard had been endowed by God ‘with virtues which seemed rather to belong to an earlier age. In this present age, when the world is growing old, these virtues hardly appear in anyone, as if everyone were like empty husks.’ In comparison, the Lionheart supposedly possessed ‘the valour of Hector, the heroism of Achilles’ and ‘was not inferior to Alexander’.3
Of course, sycophantic courtiers and fawning acolytes have a well-known tendency to praise the leaders they serve. But Richard’s accomplishments brought him recognition outside his pool of immediate supporters and far beyond the term of his own life. Indeed, even some of the Lionheart’s most embittered enemies were moved to acknowledge his qualities. Muslim chroniclers in the Near and Middle East often praised Richard’s fearsome tenacity – one who lived through the ravages of the Third Crusade characterized the king as ‘a mighty warrior of great courage’ driven by ‘a burning passion for war’. The renowned Arab historian and scholar Ibn al-Athir, who wrote a grand history of the world in the early thirteenth centu
ry, went so far as to describe Richard as ‘the most remarkable man of his age’.4
Back in Europe, the fascination with the Lionheart only intensified in the aftermath of his death, not least because his character and achievements could be so readily compared to those of his infamous brother and successor, King John. This was also the precise period in which Western culture’s obsession with chivalric ideals intensified. Contemporary literature was awash with tales of honourable knights and daring exploits. Many of these stories were situated in the realms of pure myth-history, including that of the Arthurian court.
The Angevin dynasty had shown a marked interest in establishing a connection to – and even the co-opting of – the largely fabricated memory of King Arthur. Indeed, the monks of Glastonbury apparently initiated their search for the great king’s tomb at Henry II’s behest and went on to ‘discover’ the remains of both Arthur and his enchanting bride Guinevere in around 1191. By that stage, Richard I had already embarked on the crusade bearing a sword named Excalibur, though he does not seem to have been overly attached to the weapon, as he later gave it to the King of Sicily in return for a fleet of nineteen ships.
For the authors of chivalric literature, and even some of the more inventive historians writing in the thirteenth century, the Lionheart developed into an ideal protagonist – a heroic figure drawn from the near-past who could emulate the likes of Arthur and his knights. Three distinctive features of the late king’s career attracted particular attention, spawning an array of imaginative, larger-than-life legends. Some were fascinated by Richard’s evocative nickname and sought to explore its origin and meaning. A popular tale examining this theme seems to have been circulating by around 1230 and was later incorporated into the well-known fourteenth-century Middle English romance poem Richard Coeur de Lion. This story offered a garbled account of the Lionheart’s time in captivity – placing his imprisonment before, rather than after, his crusade and naming his captor as King Modred of Almayn. While in prison, Richard was said to have begun an illicit love affair with Modred’s beautiful daughter Margery, but when their tryst was discovered, Modred took his revenge by releasing a lion into the Angevin king’s cell. Being the magnificent hero that he was, Richard was unperturbed by this threat – he simply reached down the beast’s throat and ripped out its still-beating heart with his bare hands. To top it all, he then bore the blood-dripping organ into Modred’s great hall and, pausing only to sprinkle a little salt on the heart, he wolfed it down with gusto before the horrified king and his assembled court.5
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