The Plantagenets (18 page)

The most difficult problem Richard faced in leaving his kingdom was what to do with his 22-year-old brother John, who had not taken the Cross. Known as Jean sans Terre, or ‘John Lackland’ during their father’s reign, John was now lord of Ireland and had been promised £4,000 of land in England. Richard fulfilled the promise. John was given a Norman title – count of Mortain – and awarded the earldoms of Derby, Nottingham, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, numerous castles in the Midlands, and marriage to Isabel of Gloucester, heiress to Bristol, Glamorgan and Newport. This was a massive power bloc with which John could easily threaten to destabilize government. Richard had never trusted his younger brother, and when making peace with his father in their final war, had always tried to insist that John would accompany him on crusade. Now he vacillated: first banning John from England outright and then relenting, probably on the advice of their mother Eleanor. There was no easy way to solve a problem like John – leaving him with much land but no official power was the only solution it was possible to muster.

Richard appointed a team of loyalists to govern in his absence in the hope they would be able to deal with John. Eleanor of Aquitaine, now once more a political figure after her long years of imprisonment, and at the age of sixty-six no candidate for joining the second crusade of her lifetime, was tasked with keeping a maternal eye on her youngest son. Administration in England was split between Hugh de Puisat, bishop of Durham, and William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, whose jurisdictions were divided along the line of the river Humber. They were given clear instructions as to the government of the country, but it would have been surprising if they had not felt apprehensive. Henry II might have shown that a Plantagenet king could successfully spend more time out of England than inside it, but he had never been further away than the southern coast of France.

Finally, with his armies mustered and provided, and a huge fleet set to meet him in Marseille at the end of July 1190, Richard met Philip II in Burgundy. They swore an oath to share whatever plunder and gain they made equally. On 4 July the two kings set off south, accompanied by their gigantic armies. At Lyon, they split paths: the French
king’s contingent headed for Genoa, where a fleet was to be hired; Richard’s men headed for Marseille. Richard, ever mindful of his own romantic myth, carried a sword which was purported to be Excalibur, King Arthur’s legendary sword. Crusading fever swept before him.

Hero of the East

In the midwinter of early 1191, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the young girl moved slowly through the freezing Alpine passes. They were heading over the mountains, down towards the plains of Lombardy and on towards Pisa. They had been on the road for weeks. In the nights they slept in monasteries, and during the days they picked their way slowly through the steep countryside. They were carried in litters, and travelled with a train of servants. But luxury on so difficult a journey was by its nature hard to come by. These were royal travellers, but the road was a hard place.

Eleanor of Aquitaine had collected the girl – eighteen-year-old Berengaria of Navarre – from her family in the newly constructed castle-palace of Otile, near Pamplona, which towered over the baking Navarrese plains, as late summer was turning to autumn. She was taking Berengaria to meet her son Richard in order that they might be married. She found a girl recorded by most of the chroniclers as more wise than beautiful, but with an honest nature.

The girl’s epic journey had been planned for several years, and it must have required much persuasion from Richard and his diplomats to encourage Sancho VI to entrust his young daughter to a long and dangerous journey, through many rival kingdoms and difficult terrain, in pursuit of a king heading for the world’s most dangerous war zone. That she was in the hands of Eleanor, the most famous and notorious woman in Europe would have been as much a concern as a comfort.

Berengaria knew her marriage to Richard would be highly controversial. The English king was still engaged to marry Philip II’s sister
Alice, to whom he had been betrothed since they were children. Despite the widespread rumours that his father had seduced Alice, Richard was formally committed to marrying her.

If Berengaria was nervous, then she had at least the comfort of a travelling companion who had seen far worse. Eleanor was undimmed by the years. She transacted diplomatic business as they travelled, including a meeting at Lodi, near Milan, with Frederick Barbarossa’s son and successor Henry VI. The young Berengaria would have been aware of the enhanced prestige that her marriage was bringing her: in entering the Plantagenet family she was joining the highest reaches of a dynasty whose contacts and influence stretched from the German empire to Jerusalem.

After missing the king at Pisa, Eleanor and Berengaria finally caught up with Richard on Sicily on 30 March 1191. He had been there for six months, and already had an eventful journey. The massive Plantagenet army had put ashore at Lisbon, where they had shown their zeal for holy war by raping women and plundering the land, before meeting Richard at Marseille and sailing on to Sicily. Richard had met with personal adventure on his way down the Italian coastline, at one point being nearly stoned to death by a group of Neapolitan peasants whom he had berated for usurping the trappings of aristocracy by flying a hawk. When he reached Sicily, he had taken the liberty of conquering Messina and flying the English flag above the city ramparts, thus ignoring his deal with Philip to split the spoils of war. The Messina strait now bristled with his massive, heavy warships, much to the chagrin of the French king, who found the pomp in which his comrade travelled somewhat tiresome.

But if Philip was annoyed by Richard’s high-handed military style, he had been truly apoplectic when he learned that Berengaria of Navarre was arriving. In a humiliating exchange just days before his new bride arrived, Richard had finally told Philip there would be no wedding to Alice. He cited his father’s seduction of the girl, claiming that she had borne him a bastard child. Philip had no choice but to accept that he had been strung along, probably for years. He accepted 10,000 marks in compensation for swallowing the shameful news that
the marriage was off, but left Sicily several days before Berengaria’s arrival, in a state of shock and rage.

Eleanor stayed on Sicily for three days: just long enough to greet her favourite son and her daughter Joan, queen of Sicily, whom Richard had freed from imprisonment during his conquest of Messina. Eleanor had not seen Joan since she had been sent away for marriage as a girl of eleven in 1177. But the reconciliation was brief. Business in England and Normandy, where John remained a worry to his elder brother, called Eleanor home. Joan took over the position as chaperone to Berengaria as the crusading party prepared to leave the island for the Holy Land.

The next staging post was supposed to be Crete, but when a gale blew up at sea, Richard’s party was split, and around twenty-five ships were blown off course towards Cyprus. The island was an independent Greek territory ruled by the Byzantine ‘tyrant of Cyprus’ Isaac Comnenus. It was a vital staging point for the coastal cities of Outremer, but Comnenus was a wholly unreliable ruler. When several of the crusader ships were wrecked on the island’s coast, the passengers were sorely mistreated by Comnenus’s subjects. Most offensive of all, there was an attempt made to capture the ship carrying Joan and Berengaria, as it waited at anchor off Limassol.

Richard’s ship was not blown to Cyprus, but when he landed at Rhodes on 22 April he received news of his sister and fiancée’s predicament. He determined that the Cypriots, like the Messinans, should be punished by conquest, regardless of the fact that Cyprus was a Christian state and he a crusader. On 5 May Richard and his men stormed on shore at Limassol and fought a bloody street battle to capture the town. The Cypriots were beaten back to Famagusta on the east coast. To celebrate his victory Richard married Berengaria of Navarre on 12 May, in a ceremony in Limassol’s Byzantine Chapel of St George. The young queen was crowned by the Norman bishop of Evreux. The guests must have included Guy of Lusignan, erstwhile king of Jerusalem and Richard’s retainer in his capacity as count of Poitou. It was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary royal marriages and coronations in the history of the English Crown: a
Navarrese teenager crowned queen of England by a Norman bishop in a Cypriot chapel, attended by émigré Aquitanian-Jerusalemites. If ever there was an indication of the vast reach of the English Crown under the Plantagenets, this was it.

With the royal wedding concluded, Richard’s army spent the next three weeks completing its conquest of Cyprus. Richard split his fleet in two, and had it sail in opposite directions around the island. Everywhere they stopped the air would have filled with shrieks of terror, as men bearing the white cross of England’s holy war stormed ashore to raid towns, capture castles and board enemy ships. The main prize and enemy was Isaac Comnenus himself. The tyrant held out briefly, but when his beloved daughter was captured in the fortress of Kyrenia, his will to resist collapsed. He submitted to Richard with the sole request that his status should be respected, and he would not be bound in irons. Richard, ever chivalrous, obliged. Comnenus was bound in specially struck silver manacles.

The Plantagenet empire thus now extended, in a very real sense, to the fringes of the Middle East. Richard wrote home to his English chancellor, William Longchamp: ‘We have subjected to ourselves the whole island of Cyprus with all its strongpoints.’ He forced every Cypriot man to shave his beard and confirmed local laws and customs under his own officials’ administration. But Richard, unlike his father, was more concerned with hard cash than enduring overlordship. With his conquest completed, he promptly sold the island to the Templars for 100,000 Saracen bezants.

From certain high vantage points on Cyprus, the coast of Lebanon was visible. The Holy Land now lay tantalizingly close. Richard wasted no time setting sail. He arrived in Acre on 8 June 1191, to find that a siege had been going strong for more than a year. Philip II had been at Acre for several months after leaving Messina. His armies were camped to the east of the city, having recently joined the ranks of the eastern Christian host, the Germans, Pisans and the rest. They pitted his great catapult Malvoisine (‘Bad neighbour’) against its equivalent on the Muslim side, Malcousine (‘Bad cousin’). Malvoisine was continuously damaged by enemy fire, but Philip simply had it rebuilt.
The rumbling and crashing sounds as huge stones smashed into the city and buried themselves deep into the ground outside would have terrified everyone within earshot.

As Richard approached by sea he looked upon a city clouded in the dust of attritional warfare. It was as depraved and miserable a scene of human suffering as the mind can imagine. Stinking with disease from the rotting corpses of men, this was a place where dead horses and dead soldiers were used as ballast by the Christians as they attempted to fill in the city moat for their siege engines; a place where the midday sky would darken with the shadows of giant rocks and hailstorms of vicious arrows.

There was no salvation here. Atrocity was rife. Christian women captured an Egyptian galley crew and tortured them to death. Muslim leaders planned terror attacks on the Christian army, aiming to let loose hundreds of poisonous snakes among their camp. The French built giant siege machines, and the Muslim defenders duly burned the machine operators alive with Greek fire. Starving German troops ate mule flesh. Trench diggers worked themselves to exhaustion, gagging as they dug on the hot pestilential air of the battlefield, thick with death. Talented prostitutes worked both sides in the red light district that sprang up in the Christian camp. The nearby sea bobbed with bloated human remains.

As soon as Richard arrived in Outremer, problems surfaced between the Plantagenets and the Capetians. Far from presenting a unified Christian front against the infidel, all the rivalries of Europe were imported to the Holy Land. Richard was vastly wealthier than Philip, and his arrival packed the ranks of the Christians with well-paid soldiers hungry for success and plunder. He swelled the English host and stoked the furnace of Philip’s ire by offering higher pay than the French king to uncontracted men.

Even without the siege warfare and infighting, Acre was a dangerous place to invaders. Within a week of setting up camp, Richard had fallen grievously ill with a scurvy-like disease known as ‘Arnaldia’ or ‘Leonardie’. His teeth and fingernails began to loosen and his hair fell out in clumps. Yet Richard was a king in command of his own
propaganda. Illness was personally debilitating but it could not be allowed to stall the pace of his campaign. To maintain the momentum of the crusade, he sent messages to Saladin, requesting secret negotiations – and asking for peaches and ice to cool his raging fever. Saladin sent the fruit, rejected the requests to meet, but maintained a correspondence and learned to respect this new leader of the Franks.

Illness kept Richard debilitated for much of his crusading career. But he refused to be cowed. Early in July, as the Christians intensified their assault on Acre and the city’s defences neared collapse, he was carried onto the battlefield on a litter, covered in a gloriously regal silken quilt and carrying a crossbow, which he fired at Muslim defenders from behind a screen, killing several and giving cheer to his own men as he led a typically daring operation from the front.

Acre’s defences were finally breached on 5 July. Its fall owed equal parts to Philip’s tenacious assault from the east and Richard’s further battery from the north. The walls had been sapped and mined, smashed with heavy stones, scaled with ladders and fired at with arrows for nearly two years, by thousands of forces including almost every notable Christian aristocrat in the East, and the combined military might of the Plantagenet and Capetian empires, Pisans, Genoese, Danes, Germans and assorted other pilgrim soldiers. That it held out so long was testament to the extreme valour of the Muslim defenders.