Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Perhaps it was his illness that led a drained Richard to make this crucial concession which has been so much criticised, then and now. Certainly he was still very ill at the end of August and seemed uncertain from day to day whether he had given up Ascalon without compensation or whether peace depended on the generosity of Saladin’s offer; there is circumstantial evidence that he was hallucinating and may not have been entirely clear about the day-to-day drift of events. At any rate Saladin pounced and after conferring with his emirs, declared that the following would produce an immediate peace: Ascalon would be demolished and not rebuilt until three years from the following Easter, 28 March 1193 (i.e. in 1196); the crusaders would be allowed to hold Jaffa and the coastal strip up to Acre without let or hindrance; there would be no fighting and both sides would be allowed to travel freely; and Christian pilgrims would be allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and trade in the Muslim territories.105 These terms were simply a recognition of necessity: long-term the crusader army would shrink while Saladin’s would augment; the French refused to lift a finger to help Richard while pharisaically condemning him for betrayal of the crusade; most of all, events in England called the Lionheart home; for all he knew, his brother John might already have usurped the kingdom. To save face, Richard sent a message to Saladin that this was merely a three-year truce, not a permanent peace, that when he had settled matters in the Angevin empire he could come again with a new army to try conclusions with the Sultan. Saladin accepted this gracefully in the idiom of a sporting wager and wrote back: ‘He entertained such an exalted opinion of King Richard’s honour, magnanimity and general excellence, that he would rather lose his dominions to him than to any king he had ever seen - always supposing that he was obliged to lose his dominions at all.’106

  The peace was ratified and the rival rulers departed, Richard to Acre, Saladin to Jerusalem. Needless to say, Richard’s enemies converted a piece of realpolitik into a black legend of treachery and venality. French writers and chroniclers roundly asserted that Richard had been bribed to give up Ascalon, though more perceptive European observers saw clearly that there were no other realistic options in Palestine, that Ascalon would have been lost anyway sooner or later.107 A middle-of-the road faction pinned the blame for the ‘disaster’ on Richard’s illness, asserting that he was not compos mentis when he agreed to Saladin’s terms, that whereas Turks, Arabs and Mamluks could not defeat the Lionheart, the diseases of the Middle East had, thus depriving the crusaders by ill-luck of the prize they had secured by their martial prowess. There is some truth in this, for Richard was extremely ill, even close to death at times, and was too weak to do much more than be carried up to Acre.108 Some stated, more pragmatically, that Richard was running out of money and that his treasury was exhausted, not least through having to subvent the ungrateful and uncooperative French. Richard did not himself journey to Jerusalem, although many crusaders did take advantage of the pilgrimage offer made in the treaty. It was speculated that Richard wanted to lead by example, that if he went to the Holy City every last soldier would follow him, so how then could he ever raise ‘pilgrims’ for the intended Fourth Crusade?109 For precisely the same reasons, Saladin rejected Richard’s request that he apply a quota system on Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem and only allow in those he (Richard) approved. Saladin knew that a peaceful pilgrimage was in itself a disincentive for a Christian to serve in a crusading army again.110 But if Richard was machiavellian in this matter, he was an upright paladin elsewhere. Not only did he pay all his debts but he took the trouble to ransom William de Preaux, who had been captured in the ambush a year before, releasing ten Muslim lords in exchange.111

  The peace formalities took a month to be tied up completely, since Henry of Champagne and the French lords, who took a pacific oath independently of Richard, demanded in turn that all the leading emirs, not just Saladin, should do the same. Then envoys were sent to Bohemond of Antioch and Muslim lords in far-flung locations. But finally there was nothing to stop Richard departing. The two queens Joan and Berengaria had sailed from Acre on 29 September and Richard followed in their wake two weeks later on 9 October.112 He had time to reflect ruefully that neither side in the Third Crusade had won and that each had fought the other to a standstill, with the crucial factors perhaps being Muslim numbers on one side and Frankish command of the sea on the other. Given the divided command, the intransigence of the French and the massive logistical problems Richard faced, the amazing thing was that he achieved as much as he did. Yet it is certain that the Lionheart’s exploits prolonged the life of the crusader states for another century.113 Lovers of drama will always regret that Richard and Saladin never met, but then neither did Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots or General Gordon and the Mahdi. Certainly no two captains of such prestige ever clashed again in the Middle East until Tamerlane’s fateful encounter with Bayazid on the field of Angora in 1402. Ironically, having repelled the Frankish invader, Saladin died very soon afterwards, on 4 March 1193, almost as though with the departure of Richard his life’s work was over. Alternatively one can speculate that it was the very stress of having to deal with the most brilliant Western commander in the entire period 1000-1300 that brought on his sudden death. Richard and Saladin had both on occasions acted with ruthless brutality, but their chivalric effusions and mutual admiration won the pagan many friends in Christendom, to the point where Dante included him in the pantheon of virtuous unbelievers in the Inferno, alongside Hector, Aeneas and Julius Caesar. It was Saladin’s fate to depart the vale of fears almost the moment Richard had departed. But Richard, having endured his lliad, was now to face his Odyssey.

  10

  ALTHOUGH BERENGARIA AND JOAN had an uneventful passage to Brindisi and then proceeded to Rome, Richard’s voyage had all the travails of Odysseus’s homeward journey. One of the great mysteries in Richard’s life, about which professional historians have been unaccountably silent, is exactly what happened to his crusading army at the end of the campaign in Outremer. The host that had terrorised Lisbon, laid waste Sicily and convulsed Cyprus, seems to have been no more, or else Richard could surely have cut a swathe with fire and sword through Europe just as he had on the outward journey. The inference is that losses in the Holy Land, more from disease than battle, must have been catastrophic; one estimate is that only one in twelve of those who had left England remained.1 But the mystery does not end there. What happened to Richard’s battle fleet? Ships cannot travel overland, as Richard now proposed to do, and in any case his manpower losses would not have enabled him to man them all. The only warranted conclusion is that Richard’s army by and large made its way back to England on a sauve qui peut basis, and that the warships, once beached in European ports, were simply abandoned. The central fact Richard had to contend with was that neither he nor his fleet could return via the Straits of Gibraltar. The great Arab geographer Edrisi had already cautioned the unwary about what awaited anyone foolhardy enough to venture into the Atlantic in winter, but the plain fact was that even if Richard had been prepared to take the risk of facing 60-foot waves in galleys that would be overwhelmed by waves one-quarter that height, medieval technology ruled out that possibility. East-flowing currents through the Straits were faster than the speed of any twelfth-century vessel plying in the opposite direction.2 For Richard’s troops, the outgoing voyage through the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ had been a one-way ticket in more senses than one.

  What, then, were Richard’s options? The leisurely outward procession through France was not a feasible scenario, given King Philip’s hostility, but at first Richard thought he could land somewhere on the southern coast of France, probably Marseilles, and make his way to England overland. An overland route via Spain was also apparently suggested, but making for Spain on too southerly a track would mean risking interception by Barbary corsairs and, if they headed too far north, they risked running into naval forces commanded by Raymond of Toulouse. In any case Spain was now in turmoil. One of the many envoys wh
o arrived in the Holy Land in 1191-92 informed him that his old enemy Raymond of Toulouse had fomented another rebellion in Aquitaine. Sancho of Navarre had immediately helped the seneschal of Gascony to suppress this uprising. Infuriated, Raymond intrigued with the king of Aragon and Catalonia to make common cause against Navarre. With Aragon in the enemy camp, most of the coast of Provence and northern Spain, including Barcelona, was closed to Richard. An educated man, Richard might have pondered the words of Virgil describing the Underworld: ‘The way down is easy . . . but to come back and regain the outer air, that is the task, that is the problem.’ Nevertheless, he was initially determined to land in Provence and fight his way through if necessary. At midnight on 9 October he sailed from Acre on a large buss capable of housing 1,000 men.3 Even a Mediterranean voyage in winter at this date was a terrifying ordeal for sailors. Navigators had not mastered the currents and were largely baffled by the unpredictable winds: sirocco, ghibli, mistral, bora. In Roman times sailors had been advised never to put to sea after 14 September, and even the daring Pisans in the Middle Ages thought 30 November the absolute limit for safe seafaring. The result was that in the winter the Mediterranean was more a dead sea than the Roman ‘lake’ of old. Richard’s buss, a two-masted ship with a 75-stong crew, was going in harm’s way, not really equipped for the Mediterranean winter at any level. Navigation was crude - latitude determined by an astrolabe but no means of fixing longitude - pilots steered mainly by the stars, and conditions on board were noisome: water brackish, latrines non-existent, food poor and hygiene woeful.4

  Whether because the master of the buss was fearful of heading into the open sea or because Richard wanted to give a boost to Guy of Lusignan, the ship anchored in Limassol harbour three days after leaving Acre. Then, after another midnight start, it headed for Rhodes where, after a brief landfall, the voyagers threaded their way out through the Dodecanese islands, with Karpathos on the starboard, heading south-west for Crete. Once at Crete they hugged the southern coast before striking north along the west coast of Greece. Taking a risky track through the Zakynthos Channel between the mainland and Corfu, Richard landed on the island for the first time on an unknown date. Corfu was one of the great trading crossroads, a meeting point of merchants from Italy, the West, Byzantium and the Arab world. It was a hive of spies and secret agents, and it was here that Richard first heard of the meeting between Philip Augustus and Henry VI, and Henry’s threats to seize the English king. Both Philip and Leopold of Austria had returned from Palestine angry, vengeful and malicious towards Richard for the reasons already mentioned (see pp.176-77). Leopold added ‘spin’ to his grievances by alleging that Richard was anti-German and had insulted German soldiers by doubting their courage.5 The ostensible pretexts for hostility seem relatively trivial, except to men with a prickly sense of honour, but there was something else. Richard was exceptionally decisive and quick-thinking, and this quality comes across as arrogance to the ditherer and waverer, of whom Philip Augustus was a prime example. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, Leopold and Philip had defamed and traduced Richard all over Europe, and a new twist to the catalogue of calumniation was provided by the bishop of Beauvais, who returned from the crusade roundly asserting that the king of England had betrayed Philip to Saladin, had had Conrad of Montferrat murdered, and then capped his exploits by poisoning the duke of Burgundy.6

  Richard’s options were narrowing. We cannot follow all the agonising and prevarication and the stressful conferences with his followers that must have taken place, but the king evidently decided to throw his enemies off the scent. He initially sailed north and came close enough to Brindisi to be spotted by watchers on the shore, as was his intention.7 He then changed direction, went round Cape St Maria di Leuca and crossed the Gulf of Taranto to Sicily, intending to pick up currents off the North African coast that would waft him north to Marseilles without the necessity of hugging either the Spanish or Italian coasts. The probability is that he put in to a port in southern Sicily to obtain further intelligence about political events in Europe. What he learned confirmed his worst fears. Philip and Raymond of Toulouse had barred the entire southern coast of France against him, and Emperor Henry had done the same in Italy. Genoa was firmly in the Franco-Imperial camp and the territory of Piedmont was controlled by the relatives of Conrad of Montferrat, who remained convinced that Richard had had Conrad murdered; to cap all, Richard’s erstwhile allies in Pisa had signed a treaty with Heny VI, pending his invasion of Sicily. Richard’s homeward journey looked more and more impossible. The only good news was that the Angevin empire itself was holding firm. His marriage to Berengaria had paid off, and Sancho of Navarre was at the very gates of Toulouse.8 Nevertheless, literally at sea and on a stormy winter Mediterranean, it was clear that Richard had to think quickly. He ordered the buss put about for Corfu, intending to make landfall in the Adriatic. After a dangerous voyage in and among the shifting currents of Sicily and southern Italy, the buss struggled to the top of the Ionian Sea and the most northerly of the Ionian islands. Fortune had been with them so far, and they had avoided storms. It is not clear whether 11 November, the date mentioned by the chroniclers, was the date of the first or second landing in Corfu (probably the latter).9

  The second approach to Corfu involved yet another mysterious episode about which professional historians hesitate to express a definite opinion. According to some versions, Richard’s ship had an encounter with the notorious pirates in the Ionian Sea, who had already intercepted his mother during the Second Crusade, but Richard unfurled his colours and browbeat the sea rovers. Much more plausible is the more prosaic version that Richard, concerned about the weatherliness of his sea-battered buss, decided to switch ships and therefore chartered two privateer galleys and their crews for a fee of 200 marks.10 Perhaps the idea of the Lionheart hiring corsairs did not appeal to the romancers, so they had to turn it into a rewrite of Julius Caesar’s famous browbeating of the pirates. Richard’s chartering of the two galleys from irregulars was sensible, for it turned away a plethora of awkward questions and gave little away to Corfu’s espionage community. Most of Richard’s men were paid off or otherwise discharged at this point, and he went on with just twenty companions, divided into two groups on the two galleys, so that potential marauders would not know which vessel to target. Coggleshall gives the names of some of the happy few: William de l’Etang, Baldwin of Bethune, Philip of Poitou, Robert de Turnham (his admiral) and his chaplain Anselm. They were engaged in a desperate endeavour at two levels. In the first place, galleys could not survive in gales higher than Force Five, and they were already in the storm season.11 In the second, their objective seemed chimerical to all but the most optimistic. Richard had decided to head north to Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) but his ultimate destination was either the north-east of Germany (the lands of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion), or Saxony, where the duke was his nephew, or even Bohemia, whose ruler Ottokar had recently had a major falling-out with German emperor Henry VI - historians still dispute his real intention. The safest way to accomplish this was a roundabout route through the territories of Bela III of Hungary, a man whose feud with Leopold of Austria was legendary.12

  So far Richard’s luck had held, for all the evidence suggests his enemies still thought he was heading for the southern coast of France.13 But the passage up the Adriatic proved stormy; under heavy battering from the feared Adriatic wind, the bora, the galleys could not even run into the safe anchorage of Ragusa harbour but were forced to put ashore at the island of Lokrum, about half a mile out to sea at the entrance to the harbour. Salvation from the storm had been a close-run thing, and there is a powerful tradition that Richard, momentarily despairing, promised to spend 100,000 ducats building a church if he was saved; and so, according to the story, he became the founder of the cathedral of Ragusa.14 Proceeding up the coast past Pola and Zara early in December, he ran into another storm, which drove the galleys ashore somewhere between Aquileia and Venice. The sources speak of a lan
ding in a deserted area of swamps and forests, maybe somewhere in the estuary of the Tagliamento.15 Longhaired, bearded, in need of clothes that would make them inconspicuous, the crusaders halted to take stock. Richard decided to press on incognito, having no confidence that anyone in these parts would give him a safe-conduct, taking with him only a handful of handpicked comrades: Baldwin of Bethune, William de l’Etang, Philip of Poitou and the chaplain Anselm being the most notable. It was bad luck that he had landed where he did, for this area was the domain of Meinhard II of Gorz (Gorizia), who represented double jeopardy - as a close ally and loyal subject of the German emperor and also the nephew of Conrad of Montferrat. Richard decided that his original idea of travelling disguised as a Templar was not such a good one. The story now would be that he and his party were pilgrims returning from Palestine and that Richard was a wealthy merchant named Hugo.16 There had to be some covering fiction, for this was not an era in which a traveller could proceed in privacy; at every town and castle you were expected to reveal your identity, your destination and the purpose of your travels.

  The wayfarers headed north-east towards Gorizia and Hungary. The first day on the road gave them a taste of the travails to come, for medieval travel was no affair of the faint-hearted, being more the stuff of Grimm’s fairy stories than feudal reality; voyagers could expect to run risks from brigands and wild animals, quite apart from the obstacles of nature (winds, mountains and flood) and the hardships of a bitter winter. Few roads or bridges had been constructed since Roman times and, by common consent, those undertaking unnecessary journeys in the Middle Ages were on a fool’s errand.17 At the end of the first day on the road the ‘pilgrims’ came to Gorizia, a crossroads for the cultures of Italy, Germany and Slovenia. Richard asked the town authorities for safe passage, a guide and the Truce of God for crusaders, but he was no actor and foolishly sent a messenger ahead with a rich ruby ring as token of his good faith - an appropriate gesture for a great king but scarcely for a money-grubbing Hugo. Engelbert III, lord of Gorizia, immediately became suspicious at such munificence and questioned the envoy closely. At the end of the interview he told him he knew full well, from all kinds of circumstantial evidence, that ‘Hugo’ was Richard the Lionheart. In awe of the great king or secretly sympathetic to his plight, he returned the ring and sent a warning to the Lionheart to be on his way with all speed. When this was reported to him Richard grew alarmed, concluded Hungary was beyond his reach and set his course instead for Bohemia, where he knew Duke Ottakar was locked in a bitter dispute with the emperor.18 The new itinerary would involve crossing the mountains to Vienna and thence traversing the Danube to Moravia (ruled by Ottakar’s brother Ladislaw), then Bohemia itself, Saxony and home to England.