Bible and Sword (10 page)

The immediate cause of the Third Crusade was Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem from the Franks in 1187. A shudder ran through Europe, it is said, when the news was heard that the Holy City had again fallen to the infidel. Pope Urban II, who died shortly after, was popularly supposed to have died of grief. Even Henry felt the event keenly and this time began active preparations to go on the Crusade that the new Pope, Gregory VIII, was preaching. So great was the response that kings, nobles, and knights were taking the vow right and left until, says de Vinsauf, “it was no longer a question of who would take the Cross but who had not yet taken it.” He reports, too, that it became the custom to send a distaff and wool, token of a woman’s role, to prod reluctant warriors. (De Vinsauf was the supposed author of
Itinerarium Regis Ricardi
, an eyewitness account and, along with Bohadin’s history, the most valuable and readable of all the records of the Third Crusade. Since modern scholars have discovered that there was no such person as de Vinsauf, or if there was that he did not write the chronicle, it will be referred to hereafter for the sake of brevity as IRR.)

One outcome of the fate of far-off Jerusalem was England’s
first income tax, devised by Henry II to meet the cost of the expedition. Crusaders were exempt, but everyone else had to pay a tenth of all rents and movables. Each man was to assess himself, but if he were suspected of under-estimating his income, a jury of his parish was to decide his true worth. The Saladin Tithe, as it was called, despite its high purpose was regarded, says Roger of Wendover, as “a violent extortion which veiled the vice of rapacity under the name of charity and alarmed the priesthood as well as the people.” Taxes are never popular.

Despite the urgency, the Crusade was held up by the unending family feuds between Henry, his rebellious sons, and the French king, Philip Augustus, who were forever making and breaking combinations with and against one another. In the midst of these feuds, harried and worn out at fifty-six, unhorsed on the field of battle by his own son, Henry died in July 1189. The rampaging Richard was king. He had taken the Cross two years earlier, within a fortnight of the news of Jerusalem’s fall, and now he could be held back no longer. Unlike his father, he was unconcerned with the responsibilities of kingship or with England as a kingdom, except as it gave him the opportunity to indulge in grand style his ruling passion for battle, adventure, and glory. The Crusade offered all these with chivalry’s greatest gage, a renowned and valiant enemy, and salvation for his soul. He sped to England to be crowned and to organize some sort of regency for the period of his absence, and above all to fill his treasury. In an unexampled orgy of taxation and extortion he set about extracting money by every known method plus some original devices of his own. He dismissed his father’s ministers and put the high offices of church and state up for public sale. He sold every title that needed confirming, every castle in dispute, every fief of the crown that could find a rich enough claimant. “All things were for sale with him—powers, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, towns, manors, and suchlike.” From those who did not want favors or property badly enough to buy
them he collected fines with or without reason, jailed others and forced them to buy their liberty, required payment for security of estates or cash for remission of vows. While Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury and his invaluable archdeacon, Giraldus Cambrensis, went up and down England preaching the Crusade and gathering recruits Richard’s ministers were even busier raking in fines, bribes, and “presents.” When it was put to the King that his methods were questionable he only laughed abruptly and roared: “I would sell London if I could find a buyer.”

Within four months, having scraped in every penny that was loose or could be pried loose, he was gone, taking with him the most able and loyal ministers, including Archbishop Baldwin, and his father’s prime minister, Ranulf Glanville, both of whom were to die in Palestine, as well as the new justiciar, Hubert Walter. His father, shrewder by far, would have left men he could trust behind to hold things together until his return, but Richard never thought of that. It was a fatal mistake, for if his last year in Palestine had not been punctuated by reports of John’s usurpation and his purpose had not been weakened by an agony of indecision whether to go or to stay, he might have taken Jerusalem after all.

Theoretically each knight who joined the ranks was responsible for equipping himself and whatever number of squires and foot soldiers went in his personal train. But Richard, though he may have had no head for governing, was not an irresponsible soldier, and his enormous appetite for money was for the sole purpose of ensuring that he could equip, supply, and maintain an efficient force far from home over the period of a year or more that would win him the victory over Saladin he dreamed of. That he may also have had it in mind to make a greater show of pomp and power than the haughty Philip and Duke Leopold of Austria is not unlikely. But above all he was determined not to repeat the disastrous experience of the earlier overland expeditions, which, by attempting to live off the
land, had antagonized the populace along their way and had to fight their way through, losing thousands by battle and starvation before they ever reached Palestine. Richard wanted no taste of the scorched-earth policy of the Turks; but it required vast funds to transport an army by sea, feeding it the while. The Pipe Rolls of the time reveal the methodical planning that went into assembling the fleet. The Sheriff of London, Henry of Cornhill, for example, renders an account of how some five thousand pounds received from the king’s constable was spent:

This of course represented only a small part of the whole. Richard also requisitioned “from every city in England two palfreys and two additional sumpter horses [pack animals] and from every manor of the King’s own one palfrey and one sumpter horse.”

More than a year was spent in France and Sicily recruiting more men and ships and reaching a settlement with Philip out of the two kings’ mutual mistrust. It continued to gall the French King that wherever they went Richard dazzled all eyes. Who could but admire the tall figure whom IRR describes, clad in a rose-colored surplice embroidered in solid silver crescents, on his auburn hair a hat of scarlet embroidered with many-colored birds and beasts, at his side a gold-handled sword in a scabbard of woven gold? Indeed, he seemed the very mirror of chivalry as he vaulted astride a faultless Spanish charger wearing a gold bridle, trappings of gold and scarlet spangles, and a saddle chased with two golden lions.

In the spring of 1191 the entire army and fleet was assembled. After requisitioning additional galleys plus two years’ supply of wheat, barley, and wine and his sister Queen Joanna’s gold plate, Richard was ready for departure in April, Philip having gone on ahead in March. It was an imposing array of two hundred and nineteen ships, the greatest naval force men of that day had ever witnessed, that set sail with banners flying and trumpets sounding across the Mediterranean for Palestine. In the fleet were thirty-nine war galleys, long and slender fighting vessels powered by two tiers of oars; twenty-four huge “busses” or
naves maximae
with three tiers of oars, which carried forty knights, forty foot soldiers, and forty horses with all their equipment and a year’s provisions for men and beasts; and one hundred fifty-six smaller vessels carrying half the complement of the busses. They sailed in a wedge formation of eight squadrons with three ships in the front row and sixty in the last, so arranged that a man’s shout could be heard from ship to ship and a trumpet’s call from squadron
to squadron. In the lead sailed Joanna and Berengaria, whom the Queen Mother had brought to Messina for Richard to marry, although he did not get around to celebrating the wedding till they stopped off in Cyprus. The King in his “Esnecche” guarded the rear.

How many sailed with Richard on that grand and tragic venture? Medieval chroniclers have an exasperating disregard for figures and are forever speaking in terms of “multitudes” and “countless” numbers, or asking rhetorically “Who can count them?” or giving up utterly with the all-embracing generalization that there was not a man of influence and renown who was not there. IRR puts ten thousand in Richard’s force at the capture of Messina, a figure that fits the known complements of two hundred odd vessels. In addition Archbishop Baldwin sailed independently with a small force of two hundred knights and three hundred foot soldiers, and an unknown number of English mariners joined the fleet of Norsemen and Flemings, totaling twelve thousand according to contemporary records, that had gone to the relief of the Latin kingdom early in 1189, before Richard was king.

No figures exist at all for the population of England at this time. But demographic experts have figured the population at about two million in the decade of Richard’s crusade. This would mean, if one assumes that between ten and twenty thousand English took part at some time in the Third Crusade, that approximately one out of a hundred men at the highest or one out of two hundred at the lowest went to Palestine. According to “an owlde Roule … of noblemens armes and knights as weare with K. R. I. at ye siege of Acor (Acre)” every county of England supplied men for Richard’s ranks, and many came from Wales. A very large proportion never returned. IRR mentions among the casualties of the combined armies during the first two winters in Palestine six archbishops and patriarchs, twelve bishops, forty counts, five hundred noblemen, a “vast” number of clergy, and his usual “innumerable multitude”
of others. Most died of illness in the festering camp before Acre. In the fierce battles that followed after Richard took the city and went on to challenge Saladin’s might, many were captured and killed by the enemy. A true figure for the combined army is impossible to arrive at, because groups of Crusaders from every part of Europe had been coming ever since the fall of Jerusalem. Some stayed, some died, some went home; and the number mustered from the local Christian forces of Antioch, Tyre, and the other principalities shifted with the intrigues of their leaders.

Perhaps the estimate of Bohadin, Saladin’s chronicler, which put the Christian army before Acre at five thousand knights and one hundred thousand foot soldiers is as near the truth as any. Its proportion of one horseman to twenty foot is reasonable, although the higher losses among the foot reduced the proportion at the end more nearly to one in ten or even one in five. Certainly over half the Christian force was lost by the time the Third Crusade was over. At the very last battle before Richard’s departure, when he ordered every man who could fight to follow him, he could muster, according to IRR, only five hundred knights and two thousand shieldbearers whose lords had perished. When at last he sailed for home it was in a single galley that could not have carried more than fifty souls, though admittedly others had gone on ahead.

To attempt a guess at what proportion of England’s population saw service in Palestine, given the general lack of reliable figures, is foolhardy. All one can say is that fewer than one per cent went, of whom only a fraction ever came home.

When Richard arrived in Palestine in June the Third Crusade was bogged down outside the walls of Acre in a futile siege that had already lasted a year. If the besieged were badly off, so were the besiegers, cut off from the rest of the country, sunk in the squalor and disease of the overcrowded camp, reduced to eating their own horses that had died of starvation or paying fortunes in gold for the carcass
of a stray cat. Unable to storm the city or to give up the siege, dulled by debauchery with the hordes of camp followers, the Crusaders had lapsed into a rank and static misery that still seems to smell in the pages of the chroniclers.

Even the arrival in March 1191 of the French under Philip with fresh supplies did not succeed in stimulating the camp to more than half-hearted activity that quickly subsided. Not until the arrival of Richard, who had stopped to conquer and tax Cyprus on the way, was the camp finally galvanized into full-scale action. Richard reached Acre in June, and within four weeks the city, which had withstood nine battles and a hundred skirmishes in nearly three years’ siege, capitulated. This is not to say that the victory was Richard’s alone, but without his fierce spirit beating them on to the last ounce of effort the Crusaders would never have breached the walls. Though bedridden and shaking from the quartan ague (malaria) almost from the moment of his arrival, Richard directed the battle from his litter, and when the Christians fell back again and again under the hail of darts and arrows from the Turks he had himself carried to the front on a mattress, from which his great voice thundered and goaded the soldiers to a last and successful attempt.

A truce and exchange of prisoners was arranged with Saladin, of which the conditions were to be fulfilled at stated intervals over a three months’ period. But when Saladin kept delaying the fulfillment of his part Richard without compunction slaughtered more than two thousand Moslem prisoners. This ruthless act, which appalled even his own army, has provoked shudders of horror and righteous indignation among latter-day historians. Ever since they have discovered that Richard was not entirely the
preux chevalier
of romance and chivalry that his reputation supposed, the pseudo-Strachey school has been at him with open claws, tearing apart what is left of his reputation. The author of IRR, who worshipped the King, said he had the valor of Hector, the magnanimity of Achilles,
the liberality of Titus, the eloquence of Nestor, and the prudence of Ulysses; that he was the equal of Alexander and not inferior to Roland. But later historians tend to picture him rather as a remorseless, kindless villain. He was probably not a pleasant or a lovable character; none of the Plantagenets were. But a great soldier and a great commander he certainly was. He possessed that one quality without which nothing else in a commander counts: the determination to win. To this everything else—mercy, moderation, tact—was sacrificed. The avarice that so horrifies his critics was not simple greed: it was a quartermaster’s greed for his army. His massacre of the prisoners was not simple cruelty, but a deliberate reminder to Saladin to keep faith with the terms agreed to, which that great opponent understood and respected. The English King was in fact the only Frank Saladin had any respect for, and he once said: “If I should be fated to lose the Holy Land, I had rather lose it to Melec Ric than to any other.”