April Queen (47 page)

Longchamp crossed to Dover and, from the safety of its castle, declared himself still bishop and chancellor. The magnates now sought to use John’s powers as ‘supreme governor’ to rid themselves of this persistent nuisance. For that, the sulking prince demanded a better price than the £700 in silver which, he said, Longchamp had offered to pay within the week for his support.
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In the Holy Land, the majority of the crusaders were dead from one cause or another, with the more prudent survivors heading homeward, their health broken and financially ruined. Enmeshment in the internecine politics of the Latin Kingdom weakened the military effect of those who remained. Both sides in the conflict had their fanatics. The
Sufi
believed that dying in battle with the Christians guaranteed them an immediate place in paradise; what has been called ‘the cult of martyrdom’ in the Christian military orders likewise encouraged heroic but useless self-sacrifice. By now even the Templars and Hospitallers, whose Orders existed for no other reason than to protect pilgrims and fight the Saracen, were divided on the course to be followed.

The many instances of Richard’s personal bravery had become legendary and would eventually win him the posthumous sobriquet ‘Lionheart’, yet he had failed totally to show the qualities of leadership, decisiveness or persistence in following up temporary gains as Henry would have done. Oblivious of the sufferings of the rank-and-file, he had enjoyed courteous relationships with Saladin and his other noble opponents, sending them jewels, arms, horses and finely bred greyhounds and lyamhounds, trackers kept on a leash and trained to hunt by scent. In return he had been sent fresh fruit and iced sherbets by his gallant enemy during his repeated bouts of malaria. And although he had gained some victories and twice come within sight of Jerusalem’s walls, the Third Crusade had failed to recapture the Holy City from the infidel.

The winter was spent uselessly rebuilding the defences of the southern port city of Ashkelon while families and loved ones back
home waited and wondered whether they would ever again see the husbands, fathers and brothers who had taken the cross. Raimbaut de Vaqueyras, one of the troubadours who sought refuge in Italy to escape the Albigensian crusade, expressed their anguish:

From England came a letter from Longchamp reporting Prince John’s conspiracy with Philip to usurp the crown. Yet Richard paid so little attention that Eleanor dispatched John of Alençon, who arrived in the Holy Land in April 1192 with letters from her which Richard could not ignore. In them, she detailed John’s plundering of the Exchequer, his exaction of oaths of loyalty to himself from the Anglo-Norman magnates and his plan with Philip’s backing to divorce the countess of Gloucester and marry Alais as a prelude to claiming the crown. Echoing Suger imploring Louis to return to his kingdom when his brother Robert of Dreux attempted to usurp him, Eleanor begged her son to abandon whatever project he had in mind and hurry home before it was too late.

But Richard was enjoying his status as the most powerful Christian lord in Outremer. When Guy de Lusignan’s many enemies forced him to resign the throne of the Latin Kingdom, he was compensated by Richard with the crown of Cyprus and peopled it as a colony for refugees unwilling to live any longer in the perpetual strife of the Holy Land. Eleanor’s grandson by her Capetian daughter Marie of Champagne was dispatched to Tyre to convey to Conrad of Montferrat the news that he was now king of Jerusalem. Before he could be crowned, Conrad was fatally stabbed in the street while returning from dinner with the bishop of Beauvais, leaving the young Count Henry of Champagne as the compromise candidate acceptable to both factions.
Married to Conrad’s widow Isabelle within the week – which allowed her scant mourning, even for a widow in the Holy Land – he was installed immediately as monarch of the Latin Kingdom.

Another marriage Richard tried to promote in his efforts to reach a political settlement with Saladin was greeted with less enthusiasm by the nobility of the Latin Kingdom. He offered Joanna as wife to Saladin’s brother Al-Adil, known also as Saphadin, the couple then to be installed as king and queen of Jerusalem, with the Latin Kingdom as their dower lands. Carried away by his own enthusiasm, Richard prepared Al-Adil by calling him ‘my brother’, dubbing him a knight and making arrangements for his baptism. Saladin raised no objection to the mad scheme if it was a way of ridding the country of the Europeans, but the intended bridegroom had no desire to change his faith. The whole plan fell to pieces when Joanna, in one of those outbursts of passionate indignation so rare among feudal noblewomen, refused to marry a Muslim, even should he convert,
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invoking all the prelates in the Holy Land in her support.
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To overcome her defiance, Richard tried to presume upon the pope’s authority in the remarriage of widows. When that failed, he promised Saladin that Al-Adil could have his niece Eleanor of Brittany as substitute bride. Geoffrey’s daughter was his chattel to dispose of as he wished, but not even Richard can really have believed this a solution; he was casting around in desperation for what looked like a political settlement only because his depleted treasury permitted no other course and he was reluctant to admit total failure.

He had said that victory would be his within twenty days of Christmas 1191. It was not until nine months later that a treaty was signed on 1 September 1192 by Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury. Having replaced the dead Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury as chief chaplain to the army, he had ably but hopelessly pressed the Christian claims in negotiation. The treaty declared Richard and Saladin allies, neither to raise the sword against the other for a period of three years, three months and three days. A condition was that Ashkelon’s brand-new walls, in building which Richard had himself worked as a labourer,
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be razed to the ground. However, the crusaders were permitted to keep the hard-won coastal strip and access to the holy places was guaranteed to pilgrims of all faiths.

Richard’s
jonglar
Ambrose went with one party and described to his master the tears with which the Christians gazed upon the alleged sites of the Holy Sepulchre, the hill of Calvary and the tomb of the Virgin, chosen by Constantine’s mother Helena when she visited Jerusalem in
search of relics during the fourth century. But despite Saladin’s gracious offer for Richard to visit Jerusalem as his personal guest, his crusader’s oath made it impossible for him to go there other than as liberator of the holy city – a prospect that was now beyond the realms of possibility.

In France, the unrest stirred up by John and Philip had spread as far as Toulouse and caused Bertin, as seneschal of Aquitaine, to invade the county with Eleanor’s grandson Otto of Brunswick and Prince Sancho of Navarre, brother of Berengaria. The combined forces captured castles and towns, camping briefly just out of bowshot from the walls of Toulouse before heading north and west to ‘pacify’ the Auvergne and Angoulême.
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Finally, even Richard could not pretend that he was accomplishing anything in Outremer. A week after dispatching Joanna and Berengaria to Sicily, he gave orders at nightfall on 9 October 1192 to weigh anchor in the port of Acre, having insulted so many of his allies that he had to beg an escort of knights from the Master of the Templars in return for the Saladin tithe his Order had received. To travel island-hopping across the pirate-ridden Aegean in a solitary galley was a sorry way to leave the Holy Land for the king who had arrived with 200 vessels under his command.

A
s the autumn of 1192 became winter, the trickle of crusaders returning to Normandy became a flood. From them, Eleanor heard tales of Richard's derring-do, his physical strength and peerless bravery in Outremer. But she was not fooled. Contradicting all the boasts of valour and victories was the undeniable failure of this crusade, so like what she had witnessed first-hand fifty years before. The alibis for this sounded to her ears remarkably like those used by the spin-doctors on the Ile de la Cité after Philip's return, except that now it was the underhand tricks of the Franks and Germans and the
poulains
that had prevented the lionhearted king of England and his brave vassals from triumphing over the Saracen.

But where was the King? she asked again and again. The replies were confusing. Richard was known to have left the Holy Land in a fast galley that would have made better time than the pilgrim round ships transporting lesser travellers. After making landfall at Corfu at the end of October, his galley had been seen nearing the friendly Norman harbour of Brindisi.
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From there, all was mystery.

On land, the homebound crusaders had travelled by whatever means of fortune they could find; commandeering or buying the best horses
available, Richard should have made far better time. Yet everywhere Eleanor saw crusaders picking up the pieces of their shattered lives while Joanna's and Berengaria's households waited for him to join them in Rome to share what should have been a triumphal return. Her constitutional status undefined, Eleanor returned to England to keep an eye on bishops Walter of Rouen and Hugh of Durham and the other justiciars. Her Christmas court of 1192 was not a happy one, for John's partisans were not alone in whispering that the king was dead.

There are several partial accounts of Richard's return journey. According to his chaplain Anselm, as reported by Ralph of Coggleshall, they set out for Marseilles with Baldwin of Béthune, his clerk Philip and the Templars. After stopping in Cyprus – a safe enough haven for a few days – Corfu was reached a month after leaving Acre.
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Across the straits lay Brindisi and the short route home, unfortunately barred by the armies of the German Emperor, alienated both by the Treaty of Messina and by the insult to his vassal Leopold of Austria at Acre.

Richard decided that the best course was to sail around the tip of Italy and land in southern France. Putting in to an Italian harbour that may have been Pisa,
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he learned that in avoiding one enemy, he was sailing into the trap set by another. Eager to avenge himself on Richard for the humiliation suffered at the hands of Otto of Brunswick, Count Raymond of Toulouse and his allies were defying the Peace of God by setting ambushes all along the French Mediterranean littoral. The alternative of landing on what is now the Costa Brava and heading west to Navarre meant crossing Aragonese territory – a risky business for the son-in-law of Sancho the Wise. Richard therefore back-tracked all the way down the coast of Italy to Corfu, where he hired two Romanian pirate galleys for 200 silver marks to escort him northwards up the Adriatic.
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All three vessels were stranded by a storm on the coast of Istria, near modern Trieste – a stretch of territory held by vassals of Leopold of Austria.
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Disguised as pilgrims, the small party asked the local overlord Count Mainerd for safe-conducts under the Peace of God.
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This granted, they pressed on with Richard disguised as a rich merchant despite the many Austrian crusaders able to identify him by his height, red hair, warrior's mien and natural arrogance that ill suited the role of a smooth-talking merchant. A Norman from Argentan living in those parts recognised him, but refused to betray the crusader duke of his homeland even for the high reward offered.
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Trusting in speed, Richard made a horse-killing ride of over 200 miles in three days, during which he escaped from two ambushes by
sacrificing eight Templar knights the first time and six more on the second occasion, before being immobilised by malaria in the village of Ganina near Vienna. Betrayed by the boastfulness of a German-speaking boy he had brought along with him
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and too weak to mount a horse, he was brought to bay in a sordid tavern, disguised as a scullion. Sick and with only a handful of companions, he still had the Plantagenet swagger and refused to surrender until Duke Leopold of Austria left his Christmas court in Vienna to accept Richard's sword
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and order him nursed back to health in conditions both fittingly luxurious and extremely well guarded.

Before Twelfth Night Eleanor learned from travellers from Paris of a letter received by King Philip, according to which her son was a prisoner of the very man he had insulted at Acre. Henry Hohenstaufen's letter to Philip ended, ‘inasmuch as he is now within our power, and has always done his utmost for your annoyance and disturbance … we have thought proper to notify your nobleness … knowing that the same is well pleasing to [you]'.
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