by Douglas Boyd
Historians disagree over how prevalent was the jus primae noctis or droit de seigneur – the law of the first night. It was in any event not a law, but a custom; troubadour poetry has many instances of a travelling knight coming across a lone shepherdess and raping her as by right, in contrast with the anguished yearning for a lady of his own class. Spreading his semen far and wide in this way was regarded as an enrichment of the common people’s bloodstock and there are many people in Aquitaine whose surnames are masculine first names, such as Pierre, which would originally have been ‘de Pierre’ because an ancestor had been a bastard offspring of a noble of that name.
After Eleanor dangled in front of Sancho the Wise the idea of becoming father-in-law to the king of England, he consented to the match and Berengaria was hustled away on a 1,300-mile journey to meet her unwilling bridegroom. Richard’s mother had been an extraordinary beauty in her youth and was still an impressive lady of great presence, but the bride she had chosen for her son was described as prudent, gentle, virtuous and docile – in short, a submissive wife with whom Richard might be able to perform his marital duty to provide an heir. Eleanor could feel satisfied with her mission: the second reason to marry Richard into the family of the king of Navarre was that it afforded an excellent way of safeguarding the common frontier of Aquitaine and Navarre. The deal she had made with Sancho did not include the marriage portion to which Berengaria should have been entitled as queen of England because Eleanor intended keeping that for herself. In compensation, she offered Berengaria the county of Gascony, the Ile d’Oléron and several towns on both sides of the Channel. The old queen and the queen-to-be hastened towards Sicily, so that Richard could be married – and the union hopefully consummated to get her with child – before he proceeded to the Holy Land.
With Joanna safely out of the way on the mainland, Richard spent much of Tancred’s money in a series of magnificent Christmas banquets designed to flaunt his wealth and show Philip Augustus up as the poor relative. The ‘entertainment’ was usually a mêlée, or mock free-for-all battle in which tempers could run dangerously high. In one of these Philip Augustus’ cavalry commander Guillaume des Barres, who had broken his parole when taken prisoner by Richard after the Battle of Châteauroux in August 1188, was unwise enough to wound the vanity of his erstwhile captor by unhorsing him. Some of Philip’s vassals had grown bored with the long stay on Sicily and departed with their own retinues in the hope of reaching the Holy Land before the spring gales, taking with them some of Richard’s vassals too. Tales soon filtered back of shipwrecks, disease and deaths in combat in the Holy Land.
Meanwhile Eleanor was chaperoning Berengaria, using a series of safe conducts to travel across Toulousain territory and down the length of Italy through the rigours of a hard winter. Coming after her journey into Navarre, all this travelling made considerable demands on a woman of 68, but she was taking no chances that Richard would wriggle out of the arrangement with Sancho the Wise if Berengaria arrived alone on Sicily. It would have been all too easy for him to invoke his crusader’s oath of chastity or the papal prohibition on women accompanying the crusade in order to continue celibate to the Holy Land.
Keeping up to date on the journey south was hardly as easy as picking up e-mails on one’s laptop in the overnight motel, but Eleanor did have a continuing feed of news from both the continental possessions and England: from time to time her cortège crossed paths with nuncii carrying letters from Sicily to the crusaders’ homelands and back. One significant meeting on her journey south came at Lodi, between Milan and Piacenza. Whether by accident or design, her visit coincided with that of Henry VI Hohenstaufen, eldest son of Barbarossa, who was on his way to Rome to receive the papal blessing on his succession to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. He was deeply displeased with Richard’s endorsement of Tancred’s claims to Sicily and southern Italy but the meeting passed with the usual courtesies, Eleanor being invited to witness a charter before leaving his court.
With repairs proceeding apace, Richard’s combined fleet had some 200 vessels lying idle at Messina, yet he did not send one to facilitate the journey of his mother and bride, letting them travel by land. This may well have been so that Philip was not presented with yet another insult in meeting Eleanor’s replacement for his half-sister, still locked up in Rouen, when Berengaria arrived on Sicily. On 30 March 1191, one day after Philip’s diminished fleet set sail, the old queen arrived at Messina with Richard’s bride-to-be. However, this was in the forty-day period of Lent, during which not even the archbishop of Canterbury could celebrate a marriage. There was also the crusader’s vow of celibacy to get around, if the marriage were to be consummated.
It was for Eleanor a brief reunion with her favourite son and Joanna, a daughter whom she hardly knew, having sent her to Sicily as a 12-year-old bride for William II fourteen years earlier. Affairs of state caused Eleanor to set aside any tiredness from the long journey and commence the return journey four days after arriving on Sicily.9 She had learned that Prince John was using the time to acquire political leverage, taking advantage of the universal loathing for William Longchamp to bring over to his camp many of the nobility of England who outwardly professed loyalty to Richard but were all too aware that he showed no interest in his Anglo-Norman vassals, except to tax them. Statistically, there was one chance in four of a knight returning alive from crusade and the odds were even higher against Richard’s return, since he prided himself on always being in the forefront of any combat. So, to the dissident nobility of England it seemed very likely that John would wear the crown of England before long.
Armed with letters from Richard appointing Archbishop Walter of Rouen, who had been born in Cornwall, to replace Longchamp, Eleanor headed north after leaving Berengaria at Bagnara with Joanna acting as her chaperone until they could be safely embarked for the next stage of their journey to the east. The two royal pawns were said to be as happy in each other’s company as ‘two doves in a cage’10 – a gruesome simile for the lives of noblewomen even of the highest rank. Because of the papal prohibition on women accompanying the crusade, they did not travel with Richard’s main fleet, but departed on 7 April in a fast Byzantine armed vessel of the type loosely referred to as dromon, having fifty oars a side, each rowed by one man, and a lateen sail. A word of caution is needed here. To landsmen, many ships look the same. As Professor John Pryor says, today people talk and write of yachts, but what exactly is a yacht? He makes the point that although the chroniclers of the Third Crusade called various Mediterranean vessels dromons, the true dromon had been replaced in the Mediterranean by swifter galleys before this time.
The royal vessel had both fore- and after-castles designed for defence against boarding by pirates on the high seas, and would have provided ample accommodation for the two royal ladies with their entourages and baggage, the decks being sheltered by awnings during fair weather. It sailed in convoy with two galleys, whose job was to see off any importunate pirates seeking to take hostage these important passengers. The arrangements should have ensured a safe and reasonably comfortable voyage to the Holy Land, but sea travel was never certain. Even the formidable Queen Eleanor had disappeared in these waters for six undocumented weeks on her return voyage from the Second Crusade after an encounter with Byzantine pirate galleys whose captains were intent on holding her to ransom.
On 10 April the rest of Richard’s fleet upped anchor or cast off mooring ropes and set sail, to the great relief of Tancred and most of his subjects who had at least avoided the fate that was about to befall their neighbours on Cyprus. Various contemporary estimates of the size of the fleet exist. Richard of Devizes gave the number as ‘156 naves under sail (some of which were taridae or huissiers, each carrying twenty horses), twenty-four buscae (or northern round ships) and thirty-nine galleys’. Roger of Wendover gave the numbers as ‘thirteen three-masted buscae, 100 naves under sail and fifty galleys’.11 Whatever the exact numbers, the fleet at this point was a mixture of ships that ha
d sailed from England or Richard’s continental ports and hired Mediterranean vessels, together carrying some 8,000 men and the knights’ horses. Richard of Devizes recorded that this mass of shipping was divided into eight squadrons, so formed that a bugle call from one squadron could be heard by the next squadron and a man’s shout could be heard from one ship to the next in the same squadron; the king’s esnecca and the more manoeuvrable galleys brought up the rear, rounding up stragglers and towing them where necessary during calms.12 As maritime historian Dr Ruthy Gertwagen comments, such station-keeping could only work with this number of vessels of dissimilar speeds during good visibility and calm sea conditions.
In case the idea of a sea voyage in those days seems like a chance to relax, on the Seventh Crusade half a century later, Jean de Joinville spoke for many when he wrote:
You may appreciate the temerity of the man who dares, with other people’s property in his possession, or in a state of mortal sin, to place himself in such a precarious position. For how can a voyager tell, when he goes to sleep at night, whether he may be lying at the bottom of the sea next morning?13
At night, Richard ordered lanterns to be hoisted to the mastheads to aid station-keeping, but this was of no effect on the night of 13 April when a terrifying north-easterly storm, locally called la tormenta, sundered the fleet and forced those vessels that managed to keep station with Richard’s flagship to take shelter in the lee of the island of Crete, probably at the Gulf of Chandax, where the crews went ashore to replenish water barrels from streams that flowed down to the beach.14
By this time, Mediterranean navigation was not totally devoid of scientific aids. Foremost of these was the compass, described by Richard’s milk-brother Alexander Neckham as a magnetised needle on a pivot in his book De Utensilibus and listed as an essential piece of on-board equipment in his De Naturis Rerum, published in the 1180s, together with its modus operandi:
When in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of the sun, or when the world is wrapped up in the darkness of the shades of night … [the sailors] touch the magnet with a needle. This then whirls round in a circle until, when its motion ceases, its point looks directly to the north.15
Richard, with his fascination for all technology with military application, would certainly have known of this and required at least some of the ships to be equipped with compasses.
On 22 April they reached the island of Rhodes, which had been recaptured from the Muslims during the First Crusade,16 but a third of the journey still lay ahead. On that day Philip was already being welcomed to the siege of Acre by his cousin Conrad of Montferrat after an uninterrupted voyage of twenty-two days from Messina, which indicates that he had enjoyed moderate favourable winds all the way. As Dr Gertwagen remarks:
Galleys of all kinds were poor sailers because they were designed to be rowed and could use their sails only with moderate breezes astern. Nor was the upwind performance of naves much better than that of galleys. Because of their rounded hull configuration and lack of deep keel, they made much leeway and with winds abeam it was difficult to hold a … course.17
In fact, it was probably impossible to do so. The great advantage of galleys, of course, lay in calms when they could not only keep going on the right heading, but also tow becalmed vessels powered only by sail.
Richard’s crossing was very different from Philip’s. From Crete onwards, the seas were rough. Having suffered greatly from sea-sickness, he prolonged the stopover on Rhodes for ten days to take on provisions and especially fresh water, which was important for the horses, to exercise them a little and also to allow straggling ships to catch up. Fed on dry grain, with only stale water to drink while on board and their digestive systems upset by the motion of the ships, horses emerged from their stalls with problems that required several days of convalescence on land before the voyage could continue. Even more recuperative time would be needed on arrival in the Holy Land before the destriers would be fit for combat.18
Richard’s routes on the Third Crusade
The third landfall may not have been intended, since the island of Cyprus lies less than 200 miles from Acre. In taking the Cross a crusader swore not to be deflected from the journey to Jerusalem for any reason. Yet the relief of Acre was unilaterally put on hold by Richard after another storm drove Joanna’s small convoy onto the coast of Cyprus. The dromon carrying her and Berengaria reached Limassol on the southern coast of the island, but the two escorting galleys were wrecked on shoals before reaching this haven and their cargoes impounded. The survivors of the wrecks were imprisoned on the orders of the tyrant Isaac Comnenus, who had seized power in 1184 and declared himself emperor of Cyprus. He instituted a reign of terror on the island after securing a niche within the balance of power of the eastern Mediterranean by signing treaties with William II on Sicily to the west and Saladin to the east.
Isaac refused permission for the dromon with its two royal passengers to moor in the calmer waters of Limassol harbour, hoping to oblige them to accept his offer that they should step ashore.19 Refusing to be taken hostage so easily, Joanna replied to Isaac’s invitation with a polite apology, saying that she first needed her brother’s permission. In spite, Isaac refused supplies and even fresh water to her ship, but the number of armed men on board discouraged any further action.
On 6 May, five days after Joanna’s arrival, Richard’s fleet staggered into Limassol after another tempestuous crossing from Rhodes in which several vessels had been sunk and Richard’s esnecca narrowly missed the same fate. Foul-tempered from prolonged seasickness, he swore vengeance for the insults to his sister and Berengaria, and gave orders to trans-ship a landing force from the larger vessels into shallow-draught galleys and small boats to make for the shore, which had been fortified by Isaac and was defended by his troops. With Richard commanding a force of archers in the first landing craft, a hail of arrows fell on the defenders, giving the advantage to the invasion force. A great slaughter ensued, forcing the surviving defenders to flee inland and save their lives by taking paths through the mountains unknown to the crusaders.20
Never one to let an enemy escape easily, Richard ordered horses to be disembarked and took advantage of the unpopularity of Isaac among the non-Greek merchant families of the port to hire guides, with which he pursued the Cypriot army, surprising its camp before dawn with such violence and bloodshed that Isaac fled in his night-clothes, leaving behind his treasury, tent, horses and even the royal seal. Next day, many of the Cypriot nobility came to the crusader camp and swore to support the king of England in his war against Isaac, giving hostages as witness of their good faith. Seeing himself thus abandoned, Isaac asked for and obtained a safe conduct to meet Richard, where he agreed to terms: a payment of 20,000 gold marks; the prisoners to be freed; and himself to join the crusade with 100 knights, 400 Turcopole mercenaries and 500 infantry. In addition, he ordained that supplies bought by the crews and passengers of the fleet would be duty free at fair prices. He also did homage to Richard, acknowledging him as overlord of Cyprus. Yet another example of the fate of women in those times was his gift of his daughter, for Richard to marry to whomever he chose.
It was a very satisfactory outcome for two days of combat – until Isaac took advantage of the camp being asleep and slipped away to what he thought was the safety of Famagusta on the eastern coast, despatching his wife and daughter to the fortress-port of Kyrenia (modern Girne in north Cyprus) and ordered the crusaders to leave his territory. On the same day a ship berthed in Limassol bringing Guy de Lusignan and a coterie of supporters including Humphrey of Toron to lobby Richard’s support in the political struggle with Conrad. Richard’s impulsive endorsement of Guy – who was generally considered dim-witted and lacking in princely authority – as the rightful king of Jerusalem was a knee-jerk reflex on hearing that Philip Augustus had given his support to Conrad.
Richard broke promises all the time, but decided to punish Isaac’s effrontery by conquering Cyprus after the new arr
ivals pointed out to him the strategic significance of the island. If it became a haven for crusading ships, so much the better; but if Isaac were allowed to make a firm alliance with Saladin, it could be used as a base for Saracen ships to intercept and capture Christian convoys bearing men, money and supplies to and from the Holy Land – which would spell the end of the Latin states.
Richard therefore divided his army into three regiments: one was to pursue Isaac overland and the balance boarded the galleys, whose number was swollen by five of Isaac’s galleys that had been taken as prize. These were divided into two flotillas, one under himself and the other under Robert of Turnham, to circumnavigate the island in both directions, in his words so that ‘this perjurer may not slip through my hands’.21 In a time of no charts, the circumnavigation of an island beset by rocks and shoals was a hazardous undertaking that must have required pressing into service local seafarers as pilots and the use of the tallowed lead to ascertain the depth of water beneath the ships and the composition of the bottom when nearing shore. The mini-campaign was successful: every one of Isaac’s galleys and other ships encountered was taken as prize, and, seeing the crusader flotillas approaching, the castellans of Isaac’s littoral castles abandoned them and took refuge in the mountains.22
Already feeling confident that he was the de facto ruler of Cyprus, Richard took a day off. On Sunday 12 May, Lent being ended, the 33-year-old king of England married Berengaria in the garrison church of St George at Limassol and then watched the bishop of Évreux crown her as queen of England. There was no shortage of bishops to perform the ceremony. No detail of Berengaria’s appearance was recorded by the celibate chroniclers, although the bridegroom is known to have been wearing a gorgeous rose-coloured cotte of samite, embroidered with glittering silver crescents, a scarlet bonnet worked with figures of birds and animals in gold thread, a cape decorated with shining half-moons in gold and silver thread and slippers of cloth of gold. His spurs and the hilt of his sword were of gold, and the mounts of his scabbard were silver. What his bride made of this display, which defied the austerity decreed for crusaders – or, indeed, of his penance in Sicily, where he had been flagellated publicly in his underwear before being given absolution for sodomy in order to take the sacrament at the wedding mass – is not recorded. Whether he ever shared her bed is unknown. There was in any case no issue.
