Lionheart (14 page)

He departed within the week, before Henry could change his mind. It seems that Richard had at last realised that his previous manner of ruling his vassals was making him nothing but enemies, and that it was time to enlist some supporters. There were already a number of free towns, where feudal laws did not apply. La Rochelle was one, recently enriched by an influx of Jews, who had their own quarter in the city, after Philip Auguste expelled them from the royal domains in 1182. Richard now created others, called
villes neuves
or
villes franches
because their inhabitants were enfranchised, owing no duty except forty days’ military service each year, when called upon
.
One such town was Saint-Rémy on the banks of the River Creuse at the borders of Poitou and Touraine, where the only tax to be paid was a registration fee of 5
sous
per inhabitant. He was also more generous when travelling, renewing ancient privileges that had fallen into disuse, allowing monasteries and convents to gather firewood in the forests, or pasture pigs on the fallen nuts. Whether his chaplain Milo was influential in this, we do not know, but his name appears on many of the charters.

Henry played a new card, summoning Eleanor from England and ordering Richard at the Easter court of 1185 in Rouen to return all his titles to his mother, failing which Henry would ride with her at the head of a large army to retake possession of Poitou and Aquitaine by force. Richard’s inclination was to refuse, but his vassals talked him out of this, which placed him, as was Henry’s intention, in the position formerly occupied by Young Henry – a prince without lands, dependent on his father’s largesse. To deflect what Bishop Stubbs called Richard’s ‘restlessness’, Henry gave him a large sum of money to hire an army of Brabanter foot- and horse-soldiers with which to punish the county of Toulouse for Young Raymond’s support of the recent revolt. Attacked on two fronts when his other neighbour, Count Guillaume of Montpellier, took advantage of the moment, Raymond’s family was forced to flee from city to city, his pleas to Philip Augustus falling on deaf ears as his cities were devastated and seventeen castles captured by the coalition.

Richard had no idea what this humiliation of the future count of Toulouse was to cost him on his return from the Third Crusade in 1192. On the contrary, flushed with satisfaction at what seemed the successful conclusion on the invasion, he spent the winter of 1185/86 in Bordeaux, making many gifts and signing his charters as duke of Aquitaine, no matter that he had formally renounced the title.

Prince Geoffrey had unsuccessfully sought the county of Anjou as compensation for being deprived of Brittany. Despairing of ever coming into what he regarded as his birthright, he departed for Paris, to lay his complaints before Philip Augustus, who, as always, listened sympathetically to one of Henry’s discontented sons and honoured him with a great show of feasts and tournaments. In one of these, Geoffrey was unhorsed and trampled, not quite to death but so badly that he died from his injuries on 19 August 1186. He was buried in Notre Dame Cathedral. With only two sons left to inherit the vast Plantagenet Empire and John having shown in Ireland that he could not hold two pennies together, let alone the vast spread of territory amassed by his parents on both sides of the Channel, Henry made a sort of peace with Richard, congratulating him for the successful campaign against Toulouse.

Whether Henry showed any grief at the loss of a son he had never much cared for or about is unknown. What did exercise him after the death was Philip’s demand that Geoffrey’s daughter, called Constance after her mother, be given into his keeping until she could be married – as was normal under feudal custom. Henry had no intention of allowing Brittany to pass into the hands of a husband for the girl found by Philip, but agreed to meet when he came to France after his Christmas court at Bedford. The meeting failing to find any common ground, a truce was agreed upon, to last until midsummer – the purpose of which on both sides was to prepare for an all-out war. In this, Richard came into his own.

Given a generous budget and another army or mercenaries, he was sent to push deep into French territory in central France, supported by another army nominally under John’s command and two more armies under Geoffrey the Bastard and the count of Aumale. The outcome was still in doubt when papal legates arrived to stop the widespread devastation such a war would have caused if allowed to continue. With threats of excommunication on all sides, a truce of two years was forced upon the two monarchs and Richard was ordered by his father to go to Paris and do homage to Philip for the county of Poitou. It was as if the transfer of power to Eleanor had never taken place.

Richard was delighted and in no hurry to return. Indeed, 23-year-old Philip spared no expense to entertain his now famous 31-year-old warrior vassal. Preferring to use cunning rather than force of arms, he updated Richard on Henry’s offers at their last meeting. With gossip being the favourite pastime of courtiers, it is unlikely that Richard learned anything new, but Philip assured him Henry intended to give the continental possessions to John, with the exception of Normandy, which would go to the eventual inheritor of the throne of England. As to Philip’s demands regarding Princess Alais, Henry had admitted that his young mistress had given birth to a son by him.

Court gossip in Paris was that Richard spent both day and night with his host, eating together, drinking from the same cup and sleeping in the same bed.
⁴
When this news reached Henry, he ordered Richard to return – with the usual promises offered as bribes. Richard took no notice, but eventually left Philip, riding to Chinon and forcing Étienne de Marçay, the seneschal of Anjou, to remove from Henry’s treasury in the castle funds sufficient for Richard to re-fortify or build several fortresses, including a castle by the new town of St Rémy. Once again, Bertran de Born was stirring up trouble, in this case referring to Richard as ‘the duke who will be king’. This bout of independence did not last. Losing his nerve, Richard met Henry at Angers, publicly repented his recent conduct and swore that he was Henry’s liege man.
⁵
His next act was hardly in keeping.

After news reached Europe of the capture of Jerusalem by the Saracens, Richard took the Cross without consulting his father, which infuriated Henry II. At last, Richard could see a great martial enterprise ahead of him, in which, it seemed, his father could do nothing to frustrate him without incurring the wrath of the Church. But first he had to restore order in Poitou, where Count Vulgrin of Angoulême, Geoffroy de Rancon and the de Lusignan family had captured several of his castles. In one combat, Geoffroy de Lusignan had even killed one of Richard’s household knights. With Richard at the head of a band of mercenaries, the result was yet again a winter of devastation and death in the south-west of France.
⁶

N
OTES

1.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 225.

2.
  Ibid.

3.
  Installed as count in 1195, he became Raymond VI, although some say two previous Raymonds had been missed out of the line of succession, making him properly Raymond VIII.

4.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 239.

5.
  
Recueil
, Vol 17, p. 23.

6.
  Ibid, Vol 17, p. 478.

8

The Hell of Hattin

F
or a man whose entire adolescent and adult life was devoted to warfare, it is ironic that the battle which was to launch Richard into history was one at which he was not even present – at a place in the middle of nowhere, known as Hattin.

In common with most other Western intrusions into the Middle East, historical and modern, the crusades achieved the opposite of their professed aim. It was one thing to capture Jerusalem by force of arms, but governing it and the hinterland long term proved beyond the succession of Latin kings because more and more of the early crusaders left Jerusalem to live in the temperate climate and relative safety of the coastal cities, or even to return to Europe if they had the means. According to Archbishop William of Tyre’s thirteenth-century
Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum
–
The History of Things Done Overseas
– the city ‘liberated’ by the First Crusade became so depopulated that there was scarcely a place where one could safely spend the night.

So many houses were abandoned that the owner of any dwelling unoccupied for a year and a day forfeited title to it, but that was not sufficient to keep enough able-bodied men in Jerusalem to man the walls and guard the gates, even counting the Knights Templar and Hospitallers.
¹
In desperation, King Baldwin I, who reigned 1100–18, invited the eastern-rite Christians living east of the River Jordan to settle in what became known as the Syrian Quarter of Jerusalem. A gradual repopulation from this and other sources created the problem of finding enough food, the importation of which was heavily taxed until Baldwin II rescinded the customs duty in 1120, allowing local Christians and Muslims to sell affordable food to the population. Two generations after the capture of Jerusalem John of Würzburg wrote a description of the Holy Land in the years 1160–70, noting with surprise that the Holy City was then populated by ‘Greeks, Bulgarians, Franks, Hungarians, Germans, Scots, Navarrese, Georgians, Armenians, Jacobites, Syrians, Nestorians, Indians, Egyptians, Copts, Capheturici, Maronites and very many others’.
²
This heterogeneous population spoke, in addition to their native languages used in their own quarters of the city, the common tongue of
lingua franca
– a bastard French with many admixtures – for their daily dealings.

Although the immigrants brought the city back to life, there was no sense of the unity essential for a city largely surrounded by hostile peoples because each nationality in the city ruled itself according to its own traditions. Compounding the problem, the ruling knightly caste and nobility wasted much of its energy in incessant internecine struggles. It was this dissension that triggered the Second Crusade. The Latin states – referred to in Europe collectively as
Outremer
, or ‘Overseas’ – corresponded roughly to modern Israel plus parts of southern and coastal Lebanon and parts of Jordan. It comprised four baronies – the lordship of Krak or Montréal in the south, the county of Jaffa and Ashkelon on the coast, and the principalities of Galilee and Sidon in the north – and a royal domain of Jerusalem and Judea plus the cities of Tyre and Acre.

To the north lay the crusader buffer states of Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa, whose strategic function was to keep at bay the Muslim Seljuk Turks led by their
atabeg
Zengi. At Christmas 1144 Zengi’s forces took advantage of the festivities in the Christian city of Edessa, known as Rohais in the West, to breach the walls of the city, massacre 16,000 of its inhabitants and drive the rest off to the slave market at Aleppo.

Count Joscelin of Edessa was living in sybaritic luxury at his estate of Turbessel on the upper reaches of the Euphrates, and had been buying off the Muslim Turks for years. Zengi, a good strategist, had simply waited for the right moment to besiege Edessa, inhabited by peaceful Armenian and Syrian traders, at a time when it was defended only by a small corps of discontented mercenaries who had not been paid for a year. The Syrian bishop Abu al-Farraj declared that the walls of Edessa were mainly manned by ‘shoemakers, weavers, silk merchants, tailors and priests’.
³

The nearest city from which help could have been dispatched to Edessa was Antioch, the coastal city less than 200 miles away whose Count Raymond was a great uncle of Richard. For personal reasons, he refused to get involved, although the fall of Edessa put his county next in line for Turkish attack. After that, the ‘domino theory’ so often cited in the Cold War postulated that the various cities and fortresses of the Latin Kingdom would fall one by one.

The fall of Edessa provoked crusading fever in Europe. Pope Eugenius III declared it the duty of every Christian man to fight for the continued existence of the crusader kingdom and Eleanor’s first husband, the devout Louis VII, answered the call. Many of his vassals were less than enthusiastic until Eugenius made them an offer they could not refuse by announcing that departing on the crusade conferred on each participant a total remission of sins. Since virtually every knight and noble had blood on his conscience, for which he ought to burn in hell, the fever peaked on Easter Day of 1146 at Vézelay in Burgundy.

Avid for adventure, Eleanor donated her considerable riches to the cause and named her price, which was to come along for the greatest journey of a lifetime in defiance of the papal ban on women accompanying the crusaders, who were sworn to celibacy. But the reality of life in the Holy Land appalled most of the newcomers from Europe, who found Italian merchants making their fortunes there and a life of luxury and indulgence being lived in the Latin cities by the inhabitants they nicknamed
les poulains.
Meaning literally ‘the foals’ protected by their mares, it reflected their inability, after two generations of easy living in Outremer, to fight their own battles without help from Europe.