Lionheart (99 page)

Guilhem’s grateful brothers began to acclaim Richard for his generosity, marveling that he’d have given up such a vast sum for a Norman knight, one who’d merely been doing his duty to protect his king. For Richard, this had been a debt of honor, one that had to be repaid, no matter the cost, and he brushed aside their emotional praise, explaining that he’d said nothing in case the negotiations failed at the eleventh hour. He’d also wanted to surprise them, looking forward to their joy when Guilhem was restored to them. Their reunion was all he could have hoped for; never had he seen three men as happy as the Préaux brothers were on this October afternoon in the royal palace at Acre. But as he looked at their tearstained, blissful faces, he was taken aback by what he felt—a sharp prick of envy.

After they eventually left, so euphoric they practically seemed to float down the stairs, Richard and Henri shared gratified smiles. Richard then surprised his nephew by asking him if he was close to his younger brother. “I’d say so,” Henri confirmed. “I am much older than Thibault, of course; he was born when I was thirteen. So that gave me the opportunity to play the wise elder brother, which I enjoyed enormously,” he said, with a reminiscent chuckle. “And when our father died two years later, I suppose I became even more protective of Thibault. He’s a good lad, wanted so badly to come with me to the Holy Land. . . .” A shadow crossed his face, but his homesickness was forgotten when Richard began to speak of his own brothers, for he’d never heard his uncle mention them before.

“Hal was no ‘wise elder brother,’ for certes. He could not find water if he fell into a river. Even worse, he was as malleable as wax, swayed by the slightest breeze. Had he ever become king, it would have been catastrophic for all but the French king. Now my brother, Geoffrey . . . he was too clever by half and, as far back as I can remember, we were at odds. Mayhap it was because we were so close in age—just a year between us—but we were always rivals, never friends.”

Richard moved to the trestle table, reached for a wine flagon, and then changed his mind. “With Johnny, it was different. He was nine years younger, and I did not see him much as we grew up, for he spent several years being schooled at Fontevrault Abbey. My parents may have been considering a career in the Church for him; if so, he’d have been spectacularly ill-suited for it. The one time our father entrusted him with any authority—sending him to govern Ireland when he was eighteen—he made an utter botch of it. And when he was seventeen, he joined Geoffrey in invading Aquitaine. I blamed our father for that, though. He’d told Johnny that Aquitaine was his if he could take it away from me. When Geoffrey and Johnny then tried, he hastily recalled them, insisting he’d never meant to be taken seriously. I’ve sometimes wondered if he said that, too, to the knights who murdered Thomas Becket after he’d raged about being shamefully mocked by‘a lowborn clerk.’”

Henri was fascinated, for his uncle’s turbulent family feuding had always been off-limits, and since he was kin to Richard on his mother’s side, he didn’t have personal knowledge of the Angevins’ internecine warfare. “But you were very generous to Johnny once you became king,” he interjected, unable to resist adding, “more than he deserved,” for he’d always viewed John with a jaundiced eye. “You gave him a great heiress and lands worth four thousand pounds a year!”

“And my mother had misgivings about that,” Richard admitted. “But our father had played the same damnable games with Johnny that he had with the rest of us, so I felt he deserved a chance to show he could be trusted.”

“And he showed you.” Henri was not usually so harshly judgmental, but he thought John’s sin—betraying the man who was his brother, his king, and a crusader in God’s Army—was beyond forgiving.

Richard nodded grimly. “Yes, that he did.”

ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, Richard was ready to go home. The vast army that he’d led to Sicily, Cyprus, and the Holy Land had been decimated by illness and war. Galleys would have been swamped in heavy winter seas, so he’d given the ones that were still seaworthy to Henri, and planned to sail in a large buss. It could hold hundreds of men, but as Henri looked at that lone ship, it seemed like a great comedown from Richard’s spectacular arrival at Acre sixteen months ago, and he thought his uncle would be dangerously vulnerable to the violent storms that roiled the Greek Sea at this time of year—and to a host of enemies, some earned, some not, all eager to see him brought low.

He sought to hide his concern, forcing himself to smile as Richard kissed Isabella and then gave him a quick, casual embrace, as if he were merely sailing down the coast to Jaffa. Henri’s studied nonchalance did not deceive his wife. Isabella had been dreading this day, knowing how hard it would be for him, knowing how deep-rooted was his ambivalence about his new life in Outremer. He gamely sought to make her believe that he was content, but the fact that in five months he’d done nothing to arrange a coronation spoke volumes to her. It had not escaped her, either, that Henri continued to call himself the Count of Champagne, and she spent a great amount of time trying to find ways to make him feel less of an exile in a foreign land. She’d blessed Richard for promising to return, and it had occurred to her that once Thibault came of age, there was no reason why Henri’s mother should not come to visit. She was known to be devout, and for Christians, a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was what the
hajj
to Mecca was to Muslims. Giving Henri a searching look as he watched Richard’s lighter row out toward the waiting ship, she vowed that she’d make him happy in this new life that had been forced upon him.

“Henri . . . I want us to be honest with each other, to share the deepest secrets of our hearts. You can tell me anything, can tell me when you yearn for home—”

He tightened his arm around her, stopping her words with a gentle finger against her lips. “I am home, my love.”

THEY’D CHOSEN to depart at dusk so they could sail by the stars. Earlier that day, it had been overcast, but brisk winds had scattered the clouds. As the buss raised anchor and headed out of the harbor, most of the men on deck were looking toward the horizon, where the sky was streaking with the dying rays of the setting sun. But Richard kept his eyes upon Acre, slowly disappearing into the distance. “Outremer,” he said softly, “I commend you to God. May He grant me the time I need to come back to your aid.” He stayed where he was, not moving until darkness swallowed up the shore and all he could see was the endless, rolling sea and the glittering stars, brilliant and cold and eternal.

Click here for more books by this author

AFTERWORD

I am not going to include the star players here; the fates of the Angevins are already well-known to us and will be covered in my usual obsessive-compulsive detail in
A King’s Ransom.
So I am focusing upon the historical figures who are not as familiar, some of whom might not even surface if Googled.

Philippe Capet will have a major role in
A King’s Ransom
. His sad sister, Alys, was finally returned to France in 1195, and Philippe immediately married her to the teenage Count of Ponthieu. Alys was then thirty-five, but she was able to conceive, giving birth to a daughter. Philippe’s youngest sister, Agnes, known as Anna after her marriage to the Byzantine Emperor’s son, lived for the rest of her life in Constantinople, taking Theodore Branas, a Byzantine general, as her lover and then her husband. She had a daughter, but after that, she disappears from the written record.

The Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich von Hohenstaufen, his consort, Constance de Hauteville, and Leopold von Babenberg, the Duke of Austria, will be appearing again in
A King’s Ransom.

Tancred reigned as King of Sicily for only four years. He struggled valiantly to stave off the threat posed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Heinrich, but his fledgling dynasty was doomed after the sudden death of his eldest son, Roger, in December of 1193. Tancred himself died in February of 1194, leaving as his heir a four-year-old son. His widow, Sybilla, was forced to yield to Heinrich, who was crowned as King of Sicily at Christmas. Soon thereafter, he conveniently claimed to have discovered a conspiracy and brutally executed a number of Sicilian lords. Sybilla and her children were sent to Germany, where she and her daughters were confined to a convent for years; they eventually managed to escape to France. Her little son was taken to a German monastery and was never seen alive again. There are several accounts of his tragic fate; the most credible says that Heinrich had him blinded and castrated, and he died in 1198.

Isaac Comnenus was held at the Hospitaller stronghold of Margat until 1194. Upon regaining his freedom, he began to intrigue against the Byzantine Emperor, Isaac II. He died circa 1196, said to have been poisoned. His second wife, Sophia, returned to Sicily in 1192, but nothing more is known of her after that. Anna, the Damsel of Cyprus, accompanied Joanna and Berengaria back to Richard’s domains; her subsequent history will be related in
A King’s Ransom
. Neither Sophia’s nor Anna’s names were recorded by the chroniclers. W. H. Rudt de Collenberg, the author of “L’empereur Isaac de Chypre et sa fille, 1155–1207,” an invaluable scholarly article about Isaac and Cyprus, speculated that his daughter may have been called Beatrice, for a Beatrice received a generous bequest in Joanna’s will, and several of the Damsel’s maternal ancestors bore this name. But two of Joanna’s ladies took the veil at Fontevrault Abbey after her death, and one of them was Beatrice, which refutes his theory. So I had to choose names of my own for Isaac’s wife and daughter.

Salah al-Dīn’s health continued to deteriorate and he died of a fever on March 3, 1193; Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād reported that he’d given so much to the poor that there was no money to pay for his funeral. His sons fought over the succession, and in January 1200 his able brother, Malik al-’Ādil, was proclaimed the Sultan of Egypt. He had a successful reign and was succeeded by his son in 1218.

Guy de Lusignan did not govern Cyprus for long, dying in 1194. His brother Amaury managed to get the Emperor Heinrich to recognize him as King of Cyprus, a title Guy had not claimed, and the de Lusignan dynasty ruled the island kingdom for over three hundred years. Humphrey de Toron did not remarry; he apparently died soon after following Guy to Cyprus. I hope to deal with Balian d’Ibelin’s story at a later date.

Henri and Isabella had five happy years together before he was killed in a bizarre fall from a palace window at Acre in September 1197. Isabella was then wed to Amaury de Lusignan, Guy’s brother, now King of Cyprus. Isabella died in April 1205 at the age of thirty-three, having been widowed three times and divorced once. She and Henri had three daughters; one of them, Alice, would later marry a son of Amaury by his first wife and become Queen of Cyprus. Isabella’s daughter by Conrad, Maria of Montferrat, ruled as Queen of Jerusalem until her death following childbirth at age twenty.

The Third Crusade was considered a failure in Richard’s time because they’d been unable to recapture Jerusalem; Richard himself saw it that way, too. Ironically, successive crusaders adopted the military strategy he had wanted to pursue—assaulting Egypt. Richard did succeed in gaining the kingdom another hundred years of existence, until the fall of Acre in 1291.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Richard I was never one of my favorite kings, although my knowledge of him was admittedly superficial. I saw him as one-dimensional, drunk on blood and glory, arrogant, ruthless, a brilliant battle commander but an ungrateful son and a careless king, and that is the Richard who made a brief appearance in
Here Be Dragons
. I saw no reason not to accept the infamous verdict of the nineteenth-century historian William Stubbs that he was “a bad son, a bad husband, a bad king.”

So I was not expecting the Richard that I found when I began to research
Devil’s Brood
. I would eventually do a blog called “The Surprising Lionheart,” for after years of writing about real historical figures I’d never before discovered such a disconnect between the man and the myth—at least not since I’d launched my writing career by telling the story of another king called Richard.

The more I learned about this Richard, the less I agreed with Dr. Stubbs. I think Richard can fairly be acquitted of two of those three damning charges. I loved writing about Henry II. He was a great king—but a flawed father, and bears much of the blame for his estrangement from his sons. Certainly both Richard and Geoffrey had legitimate grievances, and it can be argued that they were driven to rebellion by Henry’s monumental mistakes; see
Devil’s Brood
. I bled for Henry, dying betrayed and brokenhearted at Chinon, but he brought so much of that grief upon himself.

Nor was Richard a bad king. Historians today give him higher marks than the Victorians did. Yes, he spent little time in England, but it was not the center of the universe, was only part of the Angevin empire. After his return from his crusade and captivity in Germany, he found himself embroiled in a bitter war with the French king, and spent the last five years of his life defending his domains from Philippe Capet. The irony is that he has been criticized in our time for the very actions—his crusading and his military campaigns—that won him acclaim in his own world. By medieval standards, he was a successful king, and historians now take that into consideration in passing judgment upon him.

He was, however, a bad husband, his infidelities notorious enough to warrant a lecture from the Bishop of Lincoln. Note that I say he was taken to task for adultery, not sodomy. I discussed the question of Richard’s sexuality at some length in the Author’s Note for
Devil’s Brood
and will not repeat it here since this note is already going to rival a novella in length. Very briefly, the first suggestion that Richard preferred men to women as bedmates was not made until 1948, when it took root with surprising speed; I myself helped to perpetuate it in
Here Be Dragons
, for I’d seen no need to do in-depth research for what was basically a walk-on role. But the actual “evidence” for this claim is very slight, indeed. I’ll address this issue again in
A King’s Ransom
, for that is where Richard will have his famous encounter with the hermit. The research I did for
Devil’s Brood
inclined me to be skeptical, and I am even more so after finishing
Lionheart
, for I had not realized the intensity of the hatred between Richard and Philippe. The French chroniclers accused Richard of arranging the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, of poisoning the Duke of Burgundy, of plotting to kill Philippe by sending
Assassins
to Paris, of being bribed by the “godless infidels” and betraying Christendom by allying himself with Saladin. So why would they not have accused him of sodomy, a mortal sin in the Middle Ages, and a charge that would have stained his honor and imperiled his soul? If they’d had such a lethal weapon at hand, we can be sure they’d have made use of it.

Berengaria has remained in history’s shadows, a sad ghost, a neglected wife. She has not received the respect she deserves because her courage was the quiet kind; she was not a royal rebel like her formidable mother-in-law. She has been called a barren queen, unfairly blamed for the breakdown of her marriage. Since I knew of her unhappy marital history, I was somewhat surprised to discover that the marriage seems to have gotten off to a promising start. Because Richard shunned her company after he recovered his freedom, I’d assumed this was true in the Holy Land, too. But Richard actually went to some trouble to have her with him when he could. It would have been easier and certainly safer to have had her stay in Acre instead of bringing her to Jaffa and, then, Latrun. We cannot be sure what caused their later estrangement, but I have some ideas; as a novelist, I have to, don’t I? I think we can safely say, though, that the greater blame was Richard’s.

What surprised me the most about Richard the man as opposed to Richard the myth? I already knew he was almost insanely reckless with his own safety, so it came as something of a shock to learn that he was a cautious battle commander, that he took such care with the lives of his men. It is a fascinating paradox, and one which goes far toward explaining why he was loved by his soldiers, who seemed willing “to wade in blood to the Pillars of Hercules if he so desired,” in the words of the chronicler Richard of Devizes.

It also surprised me to learn that his health was not robust, that he was often ill, for that makes his battlefield exploits all the more remarkable. The Richard of legend smolders like a torch, glowering, dour, and dangerous. But the Richard who comes alive in the chronicles had a sardonic sense of humor, could be playful and unpredictable; Bahā’ al-Dīn reported that he habitually employed a bantering conversational style, so it wasn’t always easy to tell if he were serious or joking. And while I’d known he was well educated, able to jest in Latin and write poetry in two languages, I admit to being impressed when I discovered him quoting from Horace. Even his harshest critics acknowledge his military genius; he hasn’t always been given enough credit, though, for his intelligence. The mythical Richard is usually portrayed as a gung ho warrior who cared only for blood, battles, and what he could win at the point of a sword, but the real Richard was no stranger to diplomatic strategy; he was capable of subtlety, too, and could be just as devious as his wily sire.

But I was most amazed by his behavior in the Holy Land, by his willingness to deal with the Saracens as he would have dealt with Christian foes, via negotiations and even a marital alliance. As tragic as the massacre of the Acre garrison was, it was done for what he considered valid military reasons, not because of religious bias, as I’d once thought. However serious he was about offering Joanna to al-’Ādil, it was revealing that he’d entertained an idea that would have horrified his fellow crusaders, and it is impressive that he managed to keep it secret; we know of this only because the Saracen chroniclers reported it. He was not the religious zealot I’d expected. The man who was the first prince to take the cross refused to lay siege to Jerusalem, alarmed his own allies by his cordial relations with the Saracens, and although he believed they were infidels, denied God’s Grace, he respected their courage. According to Bahā’ al-Dīn, he formed friendships with some of Saladin’s elite Mamluks and emirs, even knighting several of them. That was the last thing I’d have imagined—knighting his infidel enemies in the midst of a holy war?

I don’t expect
Lionheart
to change the public perception of Richard I any more than
The Sunne in Splendour
could compete with the Richard III of Shakespeare. But I do hope that my readers will agree with me that this Richard is much more complex and, therefore, more interesting than the storied soldier-king. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised by what my research revealed. As an Australian friend Glenne Gilbert once observed astutely, “There had to be reasons why he was Eleanor’s favorite son.”

War was the vocation of kings in the Middle Ages, and, at that, Richard excelled; he was almost invincible in hand-to-hand combat, and military historians consider him one of the best medieval generals. It was in the Holy Land that the Lionheart legend took root, and his bravura exploits won him a permanent place in the pantheon of semimythic heroes, those men whose fame transcended their own times. Even people with little knowledge of history have heard of Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon—and Richard Lionheart. This would have pleased Richard greatly, for he was a shrewd manipulator of his public image.

But if Richard is the best-known medieval king, he is also the most controversial. His was an age that gloried in war and that jars modern sensibilities. The darkest stain upon Richard’s reputation is the killing of the Acre garrison. It certainly contributed greatly to my own negative feelings toward Richard, especially after I read in Stephen Runciman’s
A History of the Crusades
that the families of the garrison were slain, too. Human beings are conditioned to react to numbers; we find the deaths of two thousand six hundred men more shocking than the death of one man or a dozen. And the deaths of noncombatants is particularly reprehensible. So when I wrote
Here Be Dragons
, I was not at all sympathetic to Richard, repulsed by the blood of so many innocents on his hands.

More than twenty years later, when I began to do extensive research about the man, I was astonished to learn that the story of the killing of the women and children has no basis in fact. It first struck me that Runciman cited no source for his statement, and that really surprised me, for this is such a basic tenet of historical research. I then found that only older books like Runciman’s (which was written more than fifty years ago) made the claim that the families were killed, and not a single one offered any evidence to substantiate this accusation. This charge is not found in any of the more recent histories, including those written by historians specializing in the era of the Crusades.

This was of such importance that I put everything else aside and devoted my time to researching all the contemporary sources for the siege of Acre. I read every chronicle I could find that dealt with this tragic episode; I even sought out different translations of Ambroise and Bahā’ al-Dīn. In none of them did I find it said that the families of the garrison were put to death. To the contrary,
Arab Historians of the Crusades,
the translation of Bahā’ al-Dīn’s account of the massacre, refers to the martyrdom of three thousand
men
in chains. I also found a passage in al-Athir’s chronicle in which he said Saladin had sworn that all Franks taken prisoner would be killed in revenge for the
men
put to death at Acre; see
The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh
, Part 2, “Crusade Texts in Translation,” translated by D. S. Richards, page 390. So this turned out to be just another one of the myths that trailed in Richard’s wake—and a valid reason for not recommending the Runciman book. (Bahā’ al-Dīn said three thousand had been slain, Richard said two thousand six hundred, and I decided he was in the better position to know.)

The execution of the garrison remains troubling, though; these were men who’d fought bravely and surrendered in good faith, believing that they would be ransomed. But Richard was ruthless when he waged war, and the matter-of-fact tone of his letter to the abbot of Clairvaux shows that he felt himself justified in executing them after Saladin defaulted on the terms of the surrender. Bahā’ al-Dīn admitted that Saladin had been seeking to delay their departure from Acre, although I find it highly unlikely that he expected to have his bluff called in such a brutal fashion. But the Saracens must have seen Richard’s action as a military decision, for how else could Richard have formed friendships with so many of Saladin’s emirs and Mamluks?

I still found myself feeling enormous sympathy for the slain men and the loved ones they left behind. I felt sympathy for all those who died during the Third Crusade, soldiers and civilians alike. It is not always easy for an instinctive pacifist to wade through so much blood and gore while writing of medieval battles! As a writer and a reader, I am faced with one of the greatest challenges, which is not to judge people of another age by our standards of conduct. The truth is that virtually every medieval ruler committed acts that we would find abhorrent, and that includes Richard, his father, Henry, Saladin, and most of the men I’ve been writing about over the years, with the possible exception of poor, addled Henry VI. But I never feel too sanctimonious, not when I remember the death toll for civilians in the wars that have convulsed our world during my own lifetime. St Francis of Assissi has always been a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness.

Lionheart
was a unique writing experience. I’ve never had such a wealth of eyewitness accounts of events; the closest I’d come was Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral. This was beyond wonderful, spoiling me for other books. I had amazing resources to draw upon—two chronicles written by men who accompanied Richard on the Third Crusade, and three Saracen chronicles written by men who were there, two of them members of Saladin’s inner circle. There were other chronicles, too, which I list on my Acknowledgments page, but it was the ones written by the poet Ambroise, the clerk Richard of the Temple, and Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād that I found absolutely riveting.

Imagine being able to read accounts of battles by the men who actually fought in them. Bahā’ al-Dīn watched as Richard landed on the beach at Jaffa, vividly describing his red galley, red tunic, red hair, and red banner. Ambroise’s account of the crusaders’ march along the coast reads like a battlefield dispatch. The author of the
Itinerarium
compared the fleet Saracen horses to the flight of swallows, and explained how the stings of tarantulas were treated with theriaca, which only the wealthy could afford. Both the crusader and Saracen chroniclers reported Guilhem de Préaux’s heroic sacrifice. Occasionally, I had to reconcile differing accounts. Ambroise said the huge Saracen ship was rammed by Richard’s galleys when they could not capture it; Bahā’ al-Dīn said the captain gave the order to scuttle it. So I went with the most likely scenario that both chroniclers were correct.