Authors: Sharon Kay Penman
I’d initially intended to tell Richard’s story as one book, but I soon realized that I’d underestimated the extent of the research I’d need to do, though this is Richard’s fault more than mine. The man’s travel itinerary would put Marco Polo to shame—Italy and Sicily, Cyprus, the Holy Land, Austria, Germany, France; a pity he didn’t have frequent-flier miles. As the deadline loomed and Richard and I were still stuck in Outremer, I began to panic. Fortunately, my friend Valerie LaMont came up with a brilliant idea; why not write two books about Richard? It made perfect sense, for there is a natural breaking point—the conclusion of the Third Crusade. Much to my relief, my publisher was amenable to this approach, and so
A King’s Ransom
will pick up where
Lionheart
ended, as Richard sails from Acre for home. Of course he has no idea what lies ahead—an unlikely encounter with pirates, shipwreck, capture, imprisonment, ransom, betrayal, his deteriorating marriage, and an all-consuming war with the French king.
A King’s Ransom
will also be my final farewell to the Angevins, surely one of history’s most dysfunctional and fascinating families. I will miss them.
S.K.P.
February 2011
www.sharonkaypenman.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My acknowledgments pages must sometimes read like that classic line from
Casablanca
—“Round up the usual suspects.” But few writers have been as fortunate as I have been in the course of my writing career, for I have had the same editor and agents for nigh on thirty years, almost unheard of in the publishing industry. So once again I want to thank my editor extraordinaire, Marian Wood, and my wonderful agents, Molly Friedrich and Mic Cheetham. At the risk of embarrassing them, I feel truly blessed. I would also like to thank Kate Davis of G. P. Putnam’s, Paul Cirone and Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency, and Dorian Hastings for a superb copyediting job. The “usual suspects” list includes Valerie and Lowell LaMont; no writer could ask for a better book midwife than Valerie, and Lowell continues to exorcise my computer demons with his usual finesse. I want to thank my friend and fellow historical novelist Elizabeth Chadwick for pointing me in the right direction as I sought to envision Fauvel, Richard’s famed Cypriot stallion. The admiring chroniclers described him as a dun, but there are bay, red, and grey or grulla duns. Elizabeth reminded me that Fauvel was a popular medieval name for chestnut horses, thus giving me a eureka moment—Fauvel was a red dun! I am very grateful to Dr. Larry Davis, Dr. Diego Fiorentino, and Ellie Lewis for their efforts to diagnose Richard’s mystery ailment, the mystifying Arnaldia, which has been baffling historians and physicians for over eight hundred years. I allowed Morgan to borrow the evocative phrase “whispers of the blood” from Dana Stabenow, author of the brilliant Alaskan mystery series. And I want to say
Diolch yn fawr
to my friend Owen Mayo for his kindness in vetting Morgan’s Welsh, which is Morgan’s native tongue but not mine. Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge my Facebook friends and blog readers for their encouragement as I worked on
Lionheart
. Too often, it can seem as if writers operate in a vacuum, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology that is no longer true. Think what Shakespeare could have done with his own Facebook page.
More and more of my readers have been asking me to include a bibliography for my novels. I have begun listing some of my sources on my website and blog, but that doesn’t help those readers without Internet access. So I am going to cite here the cream of the crop, those books I found to be most helpful and most reliable. The gold standard for Ricardian biographies remains John Gillingham’s
Richard I
, published in 1999 by the Yale University Press; he has also written
Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century
. I am not sure I could have written
Lionheart
without
The Itinerary of King Richard I, with Studies on Certain Matters of Interest Connected with His Reign
, by Lionel Landon; unfortunately, this book is almost as hard to find as the Holy Grail.
The Reign of Richard Lionheart: Ruler of the Angevin Empire, 1189–1199
, by Ralph Turner and Richard R. Heiser, does not address the most consequential and fateful event of Richard’s life—the Third Crusade—but it does cover the remainder of his reign, and has an excellent concluding chapter called “Richard in Retrospect,” which analyzes the way his reputation has fluctuated over the centuries. Kate Norgate’s
Richard the Lion Heart
, published in 1924, has stood the test of time surprisingly well. In all honesty, I have not read the second half of Frank McLynn’s
Richard and John: Kings at War
, but the half of the book about Richard is accurate and insightful. I also recommend
Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth
, edited by Janet Nelson;
The Legends of King Richard I, Coeur de Lion: A Study of Sources and Variations to 1600
, by Bradford Broughton; and
The Plantagenet Empire, 1154–1224
, by Martin Aurell, translated by David Crouch. And since so many of my readers have seen the wonderful but historically inaccurate
The Lion in Winter
, here are two excellent books about medieval sexuality:
The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages
, by Pierre J. Payer, and
Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others
, by Ruth Mazo Karras; I hope to have a comprehensive bibliography about this subject on my website by the time
Lionheart
is published.
My favorite book about Richard’s mother is
Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady
, a notable collection of essays edited by Bonnie Wheeler. There are a number of biographies written about Eleanor, more than Henry, which would probably not please him much. Just to list a few of her biographers: Ralph Turner, Régine Pernoud, Jean Flori, D. D. R. Owen, Marion Meade, and Amy Kelly, though the last two authors’ conclusions about the so-called Courts of Love are no longer accepted. I also recommend
The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries
, edited by Marcus Bull and Catherine Leglu, and
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours
, by Ffiona Swabey.
I was blessed with a treasure-trove while researching and writing
Lionheart
—two chronicles written by men who’d accompanied Richard on crusade and two by members of Salah al-Dīn’s inner circle. I felt very fortunate to have access to Helen Nicholson’s translation of
The Chronicle of the Third Crusade: The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi
, and Marianne Ailes’s translation of
The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la Guerre Sainte.
These wonderful books make fascinating reading and provide invaluable footnotes about the persons and places mentioned in the texts. Another crusader chronicle is
The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation
, by Peter W. Edbury, and then there is
Chronicles of the Crusades
, edited by Elizabeth Hallam. Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād wrote a compelling account of his time with Salah al-Dīn; in
Lionheart
, I quoted from the nineteenth-century edition,
Saladin, or What Befell Sultan Yûsuf
, translated by the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, but there is a more modern translation by D. S. Richards, complete with valuable annotated notes, titled
The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin
, which I recommend highly. Other contemporary chronicles are
The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period, from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh,
Part 2, also translated by D. S. Richards, and a chronicle written by one of Salah al-Dīn’s scribes, Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, translated into French by Henri Masse as
Conquête de la Syrie et de la Palestine par Saladin.
There is also
Arab Historians of the Crusades
, translated by Francesco Gabrieli. Non-crusading chronicles include
The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes,
translated by J. A. Giles;
The History of William of Newburgh
, translated by Joseph Stevenson;
The Annals of Roger de Hoveden
, translated by Henry T. Riley; and
History of William Marshal
, translated by S. Gregory and annotated by D. Crouch. The quotation from the Comtessa de Dia’s song, “Cruel Are the Pains I’ve Suffered,” in Chapter Eleven, comes from
Lark in the Morning
, translated by Ezra Pound, William De Witt Snodgrass, and Robert Kehew.
Moving on to Sicily and Cyprus, there is
The Travels of Ibn Jubayr
, translated by Roland Broadhurst, a remarkable account of a pilgrimage to Mecca made by a Spanish Muslim in 1183–1184; his description of a deadly storm in the Straits of Messina was my inspiration for Alicia’s shipwreck in Chapter One of
Lionheart
.
The Kingdom in the Sun
, by John Julius Norwich, is a beautifully written book about Norman Sicily, although his “take” on Richard is outdated. Another outstanding book about Sicily is
Admiral Eugenius of Sicily, his Life and Work and the Authorship of the Epistola ad Petrum and the Historia Hugonis Falcandi Siculi
, by Evelyn Jamison. For the history of medieval Cyprus, readers need look no further than Peter Edbury’s
The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191
–
1374.
There is also George Hill’s four-volume
A History of Cyprus;
volume I concerns Richard’s conquest of the island.
The best book about the Crusades, IMHO, is Thomas Asbridge’s riveting
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land.
Other books on my Favorites List include
God’s War: A New History of the Crusades
, by Christopher Tyerman;
Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades
, by Jonathan Phillips;
Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land
, by Norman Housley; the six-volume
A History of the Crusades
, edited by Kenneth Setton; and
The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam
, by Bernard Lewis. The definitive study of Salah al-Dīn is still
Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War
, by Malcolm Cameron Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson. I also recommend
The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
, by Carole Hillenbrand. Some social histories are
The World of the Crusaders
, by Joshua Prawer;
The Crusaders in the Holy Land
, by Meron Benvenisti;
Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon
, by Piers D. Mitchell; and
Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World
, by James E. Lindsay. For books dealing with warfare during the Crusades, a classic study is
Crusading Warfare, 1097–1193,
by R. C. Smail; there is also David Nicolle’s two-volume
Crusader Warfare.
Lastly, for books that cover medieval warfare in general, I have several exceptional books to recommend:
By Fire and Sword: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare
, by Sean McGlynn;
Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages
, edited by Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi;
Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000–1300
, by John France;
Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades
, edited by Michael Gervers and James M. Powell; and
War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217
, by Matthew Strickland.
ALSO BY SHARON KAY PENMAN
THE HISTORICAL NOVELS
The Sunne in Splendour
Here Be Dragons
Falls the Shadow
The Reckoning
When Christ and His Saints Slept
Time and Chance
Devil’s Brood
THE MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES
The Queen’s Man
Cruel as the Grave
Dragon’s Lair
Prince of Darkness