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The Troubadour's Song

Page 19

by David Boyle


  The city had to be avoided and, since Richard was now at the very limits of endurance, sweating with fever, he simply had to rest. The Roman road points directly towards that spot on the river, east of Vienna, where there was almost certainly a ferry in the twelfth century, and a key crossing place in medieval times. So they carried on towards the ferry, and then turned off to the left and headed to the tiny village of Erdberg, barely a village at all. There was no mention now of William de I'Etang, and it is possible he was sent on ahead to negotiate with the ferryman or to ask for an escort sent ahead by Henry the Lion. Richard found an inn on the road that approached Vienna from the east, sent the boy to buy some food and collapsed into bed.

  Erdberg was later to be a whole village of inns, and may have been the name — in the twelfth century spelt 'Ertpurch' or 'Erdpurc' — for a fortified ring or rampart beside the Danube owned by the wives of the dukes. Even then it seems to have been an area where traders from Russia, Byzantium and Hungary would keep their wagons and horses. Leopold enforced strict rules about trading in Vienna — only Austrians had the right to sell there — which meant that a vigorous trade between visiting merchants and locals had grown up between Erdberg and the city, with whole sprawling encampments of Germans and Hungarians, together with their market stalls, gathered around the new cathedral of St Stephen outside the eastern gates.

  Over the years, a tradition has grown up in Vienna that Richard made an unlucky error in his choice of inn. Next door happened to be the Jagerhaus (hunting lodge) or Riidenhaus, where Leopold kept his hounds. Since this coincidence was not instrumental in Richard's arrest, perhaps he might be excused; but it has allowed generations of Viennese historians to argue about where the inn was. The Riidenhaus was finally demolished in 1880, but it doesmean that we may know something about where Richard finally collapsed. A plaque commemorating the event remains to this day: it is at what is now 41 Erdbergstrasse, but the evidence is now that the Riidenhaus was actually further towards the river, surrounded then by fields, woods, kitchen gardens and hovels. Even so, if you visit there today, you can see how the main road snaked from this vicinity downhill via the ancient Rochus Market — perhaps where the boy found the food he had been sent to buy — overlooking the edge of the city.

  The presence of the boy in the market attracted attention, speaking German with a strange accent and evidently having access to considerable sums of money. He needed to change money because the silver coins he carried were minted in Syria and would have caused a stir in any small suburban market, let alone this one. But, according to Ralph of Coggeshall, he was also noticeably puffed up by his sudden importance — holding himself 'too courtly and too proudly' — standing between life and death for a secret king. He was asked who he was, and he replied that he was the servant of a very rich merchant who was coming to the city in three days — Richard had clearly reverted to the identity of Hugo. This seemed to satisfy his questioners, and the boy dashed back to the tiny inn and urged Richard to leave immediately, but he was just too ill.

  For three days, the boy made daily visits to the market, each time attracting more attention, and on the last of these he made the fatal error that led to Richard's arrest. This time, so the chron­iclers say, he took with him Richard's ornate gloves with a royal insignia — it was freezing, and it seems likely that Richard lent them to him — and stuck them in his belt as he wandered around the stalls. It was too much for Leopold's men, watching in the market, as others like them were watching all over southern Europe for the king of England. The boy was seized and taken into the city. It was 21 December, the feast day of St Thomas the Apostle.

  The chroniclers gloss over exactly how the boy was persuaded to tell the soldiers where Richard was staying, but the methods used were clearly brutal: Ralph of Coggeshall suggests theyincluded torture and threats to cut out his tongue. Whatever, they were sufficient. He then disappears from the pages of history, another crucial player too ordinary for chronicles — except for this chance conjunction — whose name and fate we will never know.*

  What happened next, like most of this story, is disputed by the chroniclers. Was Richard arrested as he slept, as some say? Was there a fight, as others insist? Was he arrested, as the French chroniclers say, while he was cooking at the spit? Ralph of Cogge-shall's main source, the chaplain Anselm, was presumably now in the clutches either of Friedrich of Pettau and on his way in chains to Vienna or of Meinhard of Gorz and on his way back to Gorizia, so he would not have been there himself. But still it makes sense to trust Ralph's narrative, and he describes Leopold sending a force of armed men quickly to Erdberg and surrounding the inn. Soon, Richard could hear the clamour of voices outside, and the combi­nation of bravado and panic that infects armed men as they arrive to arrest someone of known ferocity. As a final attempt to rescue the situation, Richard dashed into the kitchen and put on a skivvy's smock and set to work at the spit. There seems to have been no attempt to actually seize him: perhaps it was his fearsome repu­tation; perhaps it was in the forefront of the minds of Leopold's soldiers that they risked infringing the sacred Truce of God.

  According to the French chroniclers, the first search of the inn by Leopold's soldiers found nobody answering Richard's description. Then they questioned the landlord. 'There is no one here like him whom you seek,' he told them, 'unless he is the Templar in the kitchen, now turning the fowls which are roasting for dinner.' Where the English chroniclers emphasized the betrayal of Richard under torture by the boy, the French were more concerned to show the indignity to which Richard had been sunk — captured as a kitchen lad turning the spit, and recognized only because he had forgotten to take off his ring.

  Even before one of the soldiers recognized him from Acre, itwas clear to Richard that there was no possibility of escape now. Somehow he seems to have persuaded his pursuers that he would surrender, but only to the Duke himself. It would have taken an hour or two for a messenger to reach the Babenberg palace, on the other side of Vienna, and for Leopold to arrive in person. Perhaps it was in this period that Richard cooked the famous meal. But when it was clear that Leopold was nearly there, Richard left the inn — on foot presumably and surrounded by soldiers — and walked down what is now Erdbergstrasse in the direction of the city to meet him. For the first time since their dispute in Acre, Richard and Leopold were brought face to face — and in very different circumstances. Richard, the former hero of Christendom, handed over his sword and submitted to imprisonment. He was less than fifty miles from the border with Moravia and safety.

  Like Richard himself, Duke Leopold V was a complex character. He was half Greek and married to a Byzantine princess, part of the same Comnenus family as the Cypriot tyrant Isaac. Like most medieval aristocrats, he was obsessed by power and was the first of his dynasty to unite both Austria and Styria in the same duchy. But there was actually more in common between Leopold and Richard than one might suppose. They were both thirty-five, both obsessed with Jerusalem — Leopold went to Palestine twice — and both combined a shrewd political ability with a love of poetry and singing. Leopold was a patron of one of the first German minnesingers, Reinmar of Hagenau, who had accompanied him on crusade, just as Blondel had accompanied Richard. He was patron also of the greatest German poet of the age, Walther von Vogelweide, who scribbled away about the simple faith of the God of Love — the antidote to the imminent collapse of Christendom — in the wooden streets of Vienna and described Leopold's court as 'a joyous palace of music'. He was also known as Leopold the Virtuous, which could betray a hint of priggishness, but this may just refer to the virtuous impact that the events of 21 December 1192 were going to have on his own city of Vienna as a result of the enormous ransom that was to come.

  There was no reason, beyond Richard's outrageous snobbery and greed at Acre, why they should not have enjoyed each other's company. There is even a hint from Ralph of Coggeshall that they did: he explained that the Duke was 'very pleased and treated the king with honour'. This was no ordinar
y prisoner for Leopold, and he must have been alive to both the possibilities and the risks to his own position. Normal behaviour with a noble prisoner of this kind would be to accept his oath not to escape and to treat him like a guest. With one eye on his own reputation, Leopold informed Richard that relations of Conrad of Montferrat were plotting against his life and that this therefore was protective cus­tody. But there was still an almost supernatural fear of Richard's powers, and Leopold ordered soldiers with drawn swords to be at his prisoner's side day and night.

  Richard must have been taken on horseback down what is now Erdbergstrasse, through the Rochus Market, which had so fatefully provided his meals for the past three days, and through the camp of traders outside the city. He crossed the ditch known as Mohrung (dirt), which marked the entrance to Vienna, and entered the Hoher Market, wondering probably how such backward-looking hovels could support a market of what looked like enormous wealth, with its stalls laden with fabrics from Flanders, glass and spice from Venice, amber from Russia, salt from the Alps, as well as the wine that made the city so rich. And from there he was taken to Leopold's palace, next to the tournament area known as Amhofi As Richard would have seen for himself on that short journey, and his companions also when they arrived under guard from Friesach, Vienna was an extraordinary city, perched between east and west — the meeting point of crusaders from the west and Russian merchants from the east. It was the place where the Holy Roman Empire in the north met the world of Italian rivalry and naval power in the south. It was a cosmopolitan place of the kind he loved.

  It is hard to know whether he spent the night with Leopold, but later that same day or early the next, still suffering from the after-effects of fever, he set off with an armed escort past the Irishand Scottish monks at Schottenkloster to the west of the city, and along the north bank of the Danube towards the wealthy city of Krems. It was another two more days of riding before they reached the Wachau valley, and lonely Diirnstein Castle, perched high on the rocks above the river. The Danube raged past at this point in the distant valley, and as Richard rode silently by, he may well have wondered at the extraordinary twists of fate that had taken him from the height of fame and adulation to the depths of degra­dation in a space of just two and a half years. His imprisonment could mean the end of everything: his throne, his dynasty, his wealth and quite possibly his life. There might be no recovery. It must have been a Christmas of despair, made all the more poignant by the awareness that nobody had the slightest idea where he was.

  Far away in Rome some weeks later, or so the tradition goes, Queen Berengaria was in the market and was shocked to see a familiar belt of jewels on sale that she knew had belonged to her husband in Acre.* It was her first hint that something had gone terribly wrong with Richard's journey home.

  * Galleys required considerable stocks of salt and water (one writer estimates seventy-six gallons a day) just for the crew. With the oarsmen stuck behind their oars and no latrines on board, you could probably smell the approach of a medieval galley before it came into view.

  *The monastery on Lokrum survived until Napoleonic times.

  † When Henry the Lion and his wife were in exile, and spending Christmas at Henry II's court in Argentan in 1182, they encountered the troubadour Bertran de Born, who fell for Matilda: 'A court where no one laughs or jokes is never complete; a court without gifts is just a paddock full of barons,' he sang. 'And the boredom and vulgarity of Argentan nearly killed me, but the lovable, noble person, the sweet, kind face, the good companionship and conversation of the Saxon lady protected me.'

  *Most of the Alpine passes were opened in the following century. The St Gotthard Pass, for example, was open from the 1220s.

  * One story says that the boy was called loldan de la Pumerai, and that he was later taken to England, put on trial and convicted at Winchester.

  * There are documents in existence that record the money that Berengaria borrowed in Rome, which she agreed to repay at the annual fair at Troyes in Champagne.

  7. Blondel's Song

  The love that's captured me,

  Insists that I now sing.

  Blondel de Nesle, 'L'amours

  dont sui espris', Chanson XI

  'The story has always sounded too good to be true, but on the spot it's impossible to doubt it.'

  Patrick Leigh Fermor on the legend of Blondel at Diirnstein, A Time of Gifts, 1977

  Those English and Norman crusaders who left Palestine in the autumn of 1192 had now been home for many weeks — the ones who made it home — spreading the news that Richard planned to celebrate Christmas back at his own court. There was an expect­ancy in the great cities of Western Europe. London was particularly worried since the latest peculiar atmospheric conditions had made the Northern Lights visible again: those who were rich enough to have glass windows saw the red reflection and dashed outside thinking there was a fire. It seemed an eerie omen of disaster. Paris was also nervous, as Philip's propagandists prepared to counter what­ever stories the king of England brought home with his companions. When the news arrived in early December that Richard's ship had been sighted heading for Brindisi, special watches were organized in the Channel ports. In Dover, Folkestone and Deal, people gazed into the mist, awaiting his arrival.

  Eleanor made sure she was in England for Christmas. These final weeks of her son's absence would be the most dangerous, inmany ways, as the various power-brokers jockeyed for position, ready for his return. But as Advent turned into Christmas and there was still no sign of his ship — or any news that he had even succeeded in reaching his wife and sister in Rome — the nerves of the governors across Richard's empire became seriously strained. There were disturbing reports of storms and shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. If one of the storms turned out to have claimed Richard's life, then there would be a new monarch and hopefully an orderly handover of power, but the uncertainty — the carefully balanced decision about when to shift allegiance to John — made anyone in a position of responsibility feel acutely insecure.

  We can only guess what was passing through Richard's mind as, still struggling with the effects of fever, he trudged on horseback with a large contingent of soldiers along the bank of the fast-flowing Danube. Exhaustion and despair must have been close to the surface, but he could imagine only too clearly the feelings of those he trusted most back home. Reports of Richard a few months later describe his extraordinary sense of balance and per­spective, and the humour and energy with which he tackled his predicament, but in those first few days of humiliation — when the full extent of his failure and its possible consequences must have come home to him — imprisonment would have been hard to bear.

  Diirnstein was Leopold's choice, and not just because it was relatively inaccessible and extremely imposing.* It was too danger­ous to keep Richard in Vienna — who knew what focus for revolt he might represent — and the wooden Babenberg palace was not appropriate for holding him. It was not Leopold's main home, which was outside the city, and it was anyway only two storeys high, and far too small. Leopold was preparing to celebrate Christ­mas there and had already had to rent local houses for his guests. There was no space for a prisoner, however important. But the lords of the newly built Diirnstein were also his most powerful andtrusted barons, the Kuenrings — the word means 'minister'. The Kuenring family was from Saxony and was not therefore bound to any of the other local aristocracy. They could provide the perfect place in which to hide an eminent prisoner until his fate could be negotiated.

  The journey to the Wachau valley, with its steep hills of brown vines — now probably under snow — was slow and difficult. Richard had been parted from the boy he had travelled with, and William de I'Etang was either under arrest himself or in Bohemia on his way to the court of Henry the Lion in Saxony. What money Richard possessed had been stolen by the soldiers who arrested him, along with the Great Seal of England, which he was carrying with him. They in turn had handed him over to a detachment of soldiers described as 'foreign'
who knew nothing about him, except that he was extremely dangerous. The chronicles describe his guards as keeping up the precaution of drawn swords around him day and night.

  It is possible that he was ignorant of his eventual destination, as he watched the horses dragging the barrels of wine and the other goods from the east on barges up and down the river as they passed. So he rode, half frozen, into the small town of Diirnstein with relief tempered by the imposing sight of the castle high on the rocks north of the road — stronger and more impressive than anything else he had seen so far in Austria. There was probably a glimmer of guilt already apparent among Richard's captors. One of the conditions of the eventual agreement between Leopold and the emperor was that Richard should be forced, as a condition of his release, to persuade the Pope to absolve them for the sin of capturing a returning crusader. For this reason at least, he was probably welcomed with some civility by Hadmar II von Kuen­ring, the lord of Dürnstein.

  The Kuenrings later became one of the most powerful families in Austria, but Hadmar was only the third generation of the family to attach itself to the dukes, and he was extremely ambitious. He was bolstering his reputation and power base by founding monasteries and towns, and Diirnstein itself— planned by his father, Albero III — dominated the Danube, giving him strategic views for miles up and down the river. He was exactly the same age as Richard and Leopold, and his wife, Euphemia, rejoiced in the nickname of Hunde. The only surviving picture of him dates from five centuries after his death, but it portrays him with a jutting, determined-looking beard and brutish features.

 

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