Crowner's Crusade

by Bernard Knight

  Within an hour, the mate’s forecast proved correct, as when the galley turned east to enter the bay, the full force of the gale struck them, coming straight off the snow-covered mountains of the Balkans.

  All the passengers, now wet through with spray, either clung on to the top of the bulwarks or lay in the shelter, hanging on to the ribs at the sides to avoid being rolled across the deck. De Wolfe and Gwyn stood hunched, clinging to the rail, looking ahead into the gloom, the wind tearing at their hair and clothing. It came in gusts, sometimes dying down for a few moments, allowing the oarsmen to recover some semblance of rhythm. But a moment later, a gust like a hammer blow would come again and, several times, John feared that the vessel would capsize.

  King Richard, standing a few yards away, was obviously of the same opinion. ‘If God wills us to survive,’ he cried, ‘I solemnly promise to pay for a church on the spot where we land, in grateful thanks for His compassion!’ Turning to his chaplain, who stood alongside him with his clerk Philip, he made sure that the Almighty heard his promise. ‘Mark my words well, Anselm, and ensure that my soul be damned if I do not fulfil this heartfelt vow!’

  He crossed himself as he spoke and the priest followed suit. The other knights heard him swear his oath, but were more concerned with muttering their own prayers for survival as they anxiously scanned the coast for any sign of the harbour.

  ‘There’s an island coming up, with a light on it,’ yelled Baldwin, who as a self-confessed landlubber, had suffered badly from seasickness throughout the voyage. However, when the violence of a gale was this bad, mal de mer was banished by the prospect of impending doom.

  ‘That’s the Isle of Lokrum, just outside Ragusa,’ replied Robert de Turnham, who had been here before on a voyage from Venice.

  ‘I can see faint lights beyond it, in the distance,’ shouted Gwyn. ‘That must be the port. Another mile or two and we’ll be safe!’

  They passed the wooded island, now just visible in the gloom and headed for the flares of the distant harbour in what was momentarily, a lull in the gale. But just as everyone was thanking Jesus Christ, the Virgin and every saint in the calendar for their deliverance, a violent squall roared across the water and hit them on the port side. There were yells and screams from below as the inboard ends of the long oars swept men from their benches, then the galley heeled over, water pouring over the lee bulwarks of the lower deck. For a moment, the vessel was poised on the very brink of capsizing, but at the last second, the force of the wind on the hull slewed it around and drove it careering back towards Lokrum, now only a few hundred yards distant. Either their combined prayers – or the Lionheart’s vow to endow a new church – must have persuaded the Almighty to preserve them, for the galley was driven straight on to the only safe patch of beach which lay between large boulders at the foot of a wooded hill. Though it was not soft sand, it was at least pebble and shingle, free of any large rocks. The shallow draught of the hull slid up with a grinding noise that could be heard even above the howling of the gale.

  ‘Get yourselves off as fast as you can!’ yelled Gwyn, whose stentorian voice was a match for even the worst weather. ‘Get ashore in case she’s sucked back by the undertow.’

  There was a scramble for the ladders down to the rowing deck, with the king’s inner circle and the Templars making sure that Richard was safe – though his own bull-like roar made it equally sure that his small treasure chest was carried along with them. Thankfully, the almost flat keel of the vessel kept her upright and though a wind-lashed surf was rolling up the beach, the castaways found that by moving almost to the bows before jumping over the low sides, the water was then only waist-deep. There was still a glimmer of twilight in the far western sky, enough to let them stumble from the waves that sucked at their legs and to crunch their way up the beach. The shipmaster and the Sicilian were yelling at their crew to take ropes from the bows and trail them up the beach to secure the galley to the nearest trees.

  The pines grew almost down to the pebbles and once free of the water, John de Wolfe looked up in the dim light at the steep hill that was Lokrum. ‘There’s a light up there at the top,’ he growled at Gwyn, as they stood shivering and shaking water from themselves like dogs.

  ‘Let’s hope there’s also a good fire up there as well. I’m as cold as a whore’s heart,’ replied his companion, squeezing water from his wild hair and long moustaches.

  ‘Over here, all my good men!’ shouted the king, rallying his exhausted entourage around him under the trees. ‘Are we all here, safe and sound?’

  The energetic Baldwin checked their party and found every soul present, albeit drenched and bedraggled. Philip of Poitou also confirmed that the small treasure chest was safe, inside which was another box which carried Richard’s narrow battle crown and his Great Seal.

  ‘That poor thing has been shipwrecked twice now,’ bellowed the king. ‘It must have the nine lives of a cat!’

  His official seal, which was impressed on to the wax of all documents to confirm that they bore his royal will, had been lost on the outward journey to the Holy Land. His seal-bearer, Roger Malcael, was drowned when his ship, part of the flotilla that also carried Berengaria and the king’s sister Joanne, was wrecked off Cyprus. Miraculously, his dead body was washed ashore with the seal still hanging from a chain around his neck.

  ‘We’ve already lost our horses, now we’ve no chance of saving our armour either,’ lamented William de L’Etang, peering back at where the galley was bucking and rolling in the surf at the end of rope tethers. Several score of drenched shipmen and rowers were milling about the beach, being harangued by the captain and his mate.

  ‘We’ve got our lives and our swords, rusty though they’ll be after this soaking,’ cried Richard heartily. ‘Now we need fire, food and shelter, for which I will more than amply repay with the church I vowed to build on this blessed isle!’

  FIVE

  The promised church was never built on Lokrum, but the generous – many would say profligate – Richard Coeur de Lion gave a large donation towards the rebuilding of the cathedral in Ragusa itself. He had been persuaded by the city fathers that the money would be better spent that way and his only condition was that as long as the sanction of the Pope was obtained to this amendment of his vow, a small part of it must be used to renovate the dilapidated priory on the island. The four hermetic monks there had given them food and shelter in the hours after the shipwreck.

  The king’s generosity was not universally welcomed.

  ‘Though I love him dearly,’ grumbled John de Wolfe, ‘I must acknowledge that he can be overly free with other people’s money.’

  He was standing with Baldwin, William and Brother Anselm some three days after their shipwreck. They were once again at the rail of yet another vessel, staring out at bleak mountains a few miles away, the further peaks now dusted with the first snows of winter. The knight from Bethune looked quizzically at de Wolfe, as even the mildest of criticism of their sovereign was a novelty coming from the doggedly faithful man from Devonshire.

  ‘What do you mean, John – “other people’s money”? Legally, he owns everything in his kingdom.’

  De Wolfe shrugged. ‘I know that, but the chancellor and the Curia Regis seized every spare penny to fund the Crusade. Not only in England, but Normandy and Aquitaine as well. They squeezed the merchants and taxed the common people until they howled and then bled the Church as dry as a bone, taking their gold plates and chalices and their wool and corn.’

  ‘And all in God’s great cause!’ retorted Anselm, defensively. ‘To recover Jerusalem from the grip of the infidel Saracens.’

  John sighed and wished he had kept his mouth shut. ‘Well, we failed in that didn’t we? But what I mean is that all that money was scraped together to equip and feed a great army and pay for a fleet of ships to transport them to Palestine. It was not for lavishing on a new cathedral in some obscure foreign city.’

  William de L’Etang slapped his friend on the
back. ‘But, John, it’s typical of our lord and master! Fierce and even cruel at one moment, then hearty and boisterous at the next, throwing gold around as if it grew on trees. It’s what makes him what he is and we all love him for it.’

  Anselm nodded his agreement, but partly sided with de Wolfe. ‘Yet I admit he is sometimes too impulsive and often fails to think of the consequences. Look at how yesterday he went with the Templars to the Treasury in Ragusa and borrowed thousands of Venetian ducats against a Templar promissory note. Chancellor Longchamp will have a stroke when all these bills come home to roost.’

  John held his tongue, but William threw in a half-jocular comment. ‘And what did he do with some of that new money? Spent it on three expensive jewelled rings for himself!’

  Baldwin came to Richard’s defence over this apparent extravagance. ‘Our lord is a great king, ruling lands that stretch from the Pyrenees almost to Scotland. He needs the appurtenances of a king, such as these ostentatious jewels, to display his power and influence in the world!’

  ‘Well, I wish he had used his power and influence to get us a better vessel than this,’ grumbled de Wolfe, looking down the deck to where Gwyn was contentedly fishing over the side, his ever-unruly hair blowing in the wind.

  ‘There’s little wrong with the Medusa, John,’ remarked Robert de Turnham, who had joined the group from his place up on the aftercastle. ‘She’s getting along quite well with this new southerly wind behind her.’

  The Medusa was an ordinary merchant ship called a ‘cog’, which was much smaller than the more bulky Franche Nef . With a single mast and square sail, she was a maid-of-all-work similar to hundreds of others in the Mediterranean – though virtually all of those were now laid up for the winter. Only the generosity of the Lionheart to the bishop and city council of Ragusa had persuaded this shipmaster to venture up the coast of Dalmatia in December.

  The violent bora had subsided as quickly as it had arisen and after two nights in Ragusa, with blissful sleep in the guest house of the monastery, the travellers were sent on their way towards Zara, about a hundred and sixty miles up the coast, well into Hungarian territory.

  ‘With this wind, we should reach Zara the day after tomorrow,’ prophesied the High Admiral. ‘The route lies behind the many islands that line this coast, so we should be protected from any westerly storms. Pray God we don’t suffer another bora.’ He crossed himself virtuously as he spoke.

  At the king’s council held earlier that day, it was agreed that they would buy horses in Zara and make the long ride to the court of King Bela, who had a grand palace in Estergom on the Danube. There Richard would trade on his kinship with Bela’s queen, to seek hospitality and advice on how best to return to Normandy and England. Though most of the knights had only a hazy idea of the geography of Central Europe, both Richard and Baldwin knew enough to debate possible routes.

  ‘Either we aim for Saxony and the undoubted welcome of Henry the Lion,’ declared the king. ‘Or perhaps we could ride north to reach the Baltic and take ship to the German Ocean.’

  Baldwin was dubious about the latter plan. ‘It would mean riding many hundreds of miles across turbulent territory. The Polish lands are in turmoil and we would not be welcome amongst them, even as returning Crusaders.’

  Robert de Turnham had been equally pessimistic about the idea. ‘Sire, as you have discovered from our recent experiences of sea voyaging, we would be much too late in the season for safety. To attempt such a long journey across the northern waters in the depth of winter would be foolhardy in the extreme.’

  The meeting broke up with a decision to wait until they reached the Hungarian capital, to hear what their opinion would be.

  The king had a cubbyhole to himself on this vessel, too small to be called a cabin, just a large box built under the poop. The rest of them squeezed into other spaces under the aftercastle and the forecastle, sharing the deck boards with the dozen crew. None of these spoke a single word of any language they could recognize, other than the shipmaster who could manage a little Latin. The mattresses from the galley had been lost, along with their armour and most of their possessions, so new palliasses were provided in Ragusa, along with a change of clothing.

  ‘We’ll arrive home like beggars,’ muttered Gwyn, as they huddled under cloaks on the slowly rolling deck. ‘No spoils of war on this trip, that’s for sure.’

  John de Wolfe told him what had been said at the council as they lay on the thin straw bags that were their beds, and Gwyn wanted to know more. ‘Who’s this King Bela, then?’

  ‘A powerful ruler and one of the richest in Europe, thanks to the minerals and salt in his country. Thankfully, he’s no friend of Henry, the Holy Roman Emperor, whom we’re trying to avoid.’

  The Cornishman digested this and probed again. ‘But I heard that he’s related to our king. Is that true?’

  John turned over with a grunt to relieve the pressure of his hip on the deck boards. ‘By marriages, at least. Bela’s wife is Margaret of France, who was the widow of Richard’s older brother, Henry the Young King who died years ago.’

  Gwyn chuckled into his cloak. ‘I know of her all right! It was common knowledge that she was William Marshal’s mistress.’

  He was talking about the Marshal of England, a great warrior and tourney champion.

  ‘Better not voice that about too loudly when we get to Hungary,’ advised de Wolfe. ‘She is also sister-in-law of Philip of France, which is a point not in our favour!’

  Gwyn clucked his disgust with all these imperial entanglements. ‘These royal folk are like rabbits in a box, mating with someone different every five minutes! I’m not sure I want to go to Hungary!’

  Perhaps God was listening once again.

  Though the Lionheart had bribed the shipmaster to carry on sailing through the first night, the second was spent on shore, as they needed food and water. In addition, the helpful southerly wind had freshened markedly during the day and the motion of the Medusa became far too lively for much sleep to be had on deck.

  They stopped in a bay on the mainland side of the island of Zirje, though the captain informed de Turnham in his halting Latin, that he had wanted to land on the opposite mainland.

  ‘It seems that the wind and the currents made it too difficult to cross the strait,’ Robert explained to the other knights. ‘He is also worried that tomorrow might bring a worsening of the wind, though, thank St Christopher, there seems no sign of that damned bora, which could take us back to Ragusa or even beyond.’

  The cold, grey dawn showed them that the shipmaster was right. Once they left the shelter of Zirje, they were hit by a blustery half-gale, which took them towards the north-west, in spite of the crew’s efforts to get them back into the narrow channels between the mainland and the offshore islands of Kornat and Pasman.

  The cog was far more seaworthy than the galley, but it was hopeless at sailing more than a few points off the wind. By mid-afternoon, the shipmaster admitted that they had no chance now of getting back into the archipelago that lay outside Zara.

  As they raced on out into the open sea before the relentless south wind, Richard’s admiral, who was best at understanding the captain’s garbled speech, relayed the bad news. ‘He says there is no hope of getting to Zara, unless you wish to wait for days to get back to it after this gale stops.’

  The Lionheart rapidly lost his recent good mood in his frustration at being repeatedly thwarted from getting back to his Norman dominions. After a string of choice oaths, he demanded to know where they were going now.

  ‘The shipmaster says that there is another port called Pola further up the Adriatic, on the peninsula of Istria opposite Venice. It is still within the Kingdom of Hungary and in fact, would be nearer King Bela’s capital than Zara.’

  Slightly appeased, the king grunted a demand to know how long it would take to get there.

  ‘If this wind holds, we should be there this time tomorrow,’ replied de Turnham. He decided it would be wiser
not to repeat that the captain had added ‘If the vessel doesn’t founder on the way!’

  The rest of that day and the night were yet another miserable time for the weary travellers. The wind grew progressively stronger and as it was dead astern, the Medusa pitched rather than rolled, its blunt bow dipping into the waves, then hauling itself up to point at the sky. Big rollers coming up behind them in the narrowing funnel of the Adriatic constantly threatened to ‘poop’ the vessel. Poor Baldwin of Bethune had a return of his sickness and spent all his time hunched over the scuppers, retching until nothing came up except a trace of bile. At dawn, the cog still raced on, the gale not abating in the slightest, though its direction backed slightly so that it came from the south-east, which was even worse for them.

  ‘If this keeps up, we’ll land in Venice, not Hungary,’ said de Turnham, as he squatted in the shelter of the aftercastle with the others. ‘Though the master has just admitted to me that he has no idea where we are at the moment, only that we are being driven northwards – which any ten-year-old deck boy could have told me!’

  ‘So how are we going to find this Pola place?’ demanded de Wolfe.

  The admiral shrugged. ‘It’s in the hands of God and his angels – the shipmaster doesn’t know! He’s used to hugging the coastline and going ashore every night, so the open sea is a mystery to him.’

  Even though the crew had lashed up the sail closely to its yard, the Medusa was careering along under a bare pole from the pressure of the wind on its blunt stern and the relentless progress of the rollers that endlessly see-sawed the hull.

  Once again, few slept for more than a hour or two that night and Gwyn, with his fisherman’s senses, sat up in the early hours and listened for a moment. He knew from de Wolfe’s breathing that he too was awake and touched him on his shoulder. ‘The wind has dropped a little, but I can smell land!’