Lionheart (24 page)

By now far too much power was concentrated in the Longchamp family, the third brother, Henry, having purchased the sheriffdom of Herefordshire. But Richard’s attention was firmly fixed on Aquitaine, where several vassals were defying his authority. He agreed with Philip Augustus’ kinsman Count Robert II of Dreux that the joint departure on crusade be postponed until July – which would mean a year’s delay in reaching the Holy Land – and then rode south with Henry of Saxony, son of his sister Matilda and Henry the Lion, to give the youth a blooding. And a blooding it was, with at least one castellan named William de Chisi hanged from his own battlements as a lesson to other Gascon dissidents.
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Still apparently trying to get Richard into bed with an appropriate spouse, Eleanor spent the spring and summer of 1190 in or near Chinon, to judge by the number of charters issued in that area stamped with her seal. He, meanwhile, was organising the crusading fleet in five squadrons commanded by two bishops and two laymen, only one of whom had experience of naval command. Also at Chinon in June, he published rules for shipboard conduct and laid down the punishments for various misdemeanours. From their harshness it is evident that he had no illusions about the men hired to crew the ships: for murder at sea, the penalty was to be bound to the corpse and thrown overboard with it; for murder on land, the penalty was to be buried alive with the victim; for non-lethal bloodshed, the perpetrator was to lose a hand; for an attack without bloodshed, he was to be keel-hauled three times; a fine was to be levied for foul language; and for theft the penalty was to be tarred and feathered and abandoned ashore at the next landfall.
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With both Richard and Eleanor in France, there was no one in England to hold Chancellor Longchamp in check. With no friends in England to favour, he taxed everyone so savagely that William of Newburgh said he had two right hands with which to grab money. The chronicler Gerald of Wales described him as:

short, crippled in both haunches, with a big head and hair on his forehead coming down almost to his eyes like an ape. His chin was receding and his lips were spread apart in an affected, false and almost constant grin. His neck was short, his back was humped and his belly stuck in front and his buttocks at the back.
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So large was the entourage with which he travelled, amounting sometimes to 1,000 riders, that accommodating it for one night could cost a monastery its revenue for the following three years.
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Longchamp was also a pederast, which made defaulting parents extremely reluctant to hand over their sons to him as hostages for payment of tax.
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On 1 July 1190, with Alais, a VIP prisoner in the fortress-city of Rouen, the kings of France and England rendezvoused at Vézelay in Burgundy, together with their armies. It must have been an impressive sight: thousands of barons and knights, each of whom required at least four horses; one or more
destriers
kept exclusively for combat; a palfrey to ride; another for his squire leading the
destrier
; and another to transport his armour and other belongings kept close to hand. In addition were the draught animals of the long wagon train of ox-carts bearing tents, cooking utensils and provisions.

To make the point that they were all pilgrims, albeit with murderous intent, the two kings were each presented with a symbolic staff and scrip, but Richard had put on so much weight that when he casually leaned on his staff, it snapped in two, which was taken as an evil omen. Although the two monarchs had sworn to be as brothers to each other and to share equally any loot taken on the expedition, stresses in the
entente
were already apparent. Richard controlled almost all the Saladin tithe collected in his possessions, but Philip had been able to collect the tithe only in his far smaller domains in the Ile de France, his vassals elsewhere tending to keep the tithe for their own crusading needs, which had enabled many of them to depart before their king, eager to carve out some glory in the Holy Land before Philip could claim the credit. There was no particular reason why they should not, since small parties of knights, and even individual knights, regularly travelled to Palestine in the years between the major crusades. William the Marshal, as one example, had spent nearly three years there in fulfilment of his deathbed promise to the Young King.

An armed mass of the size of the combined armies was rare. Its sheer size imposed severe strains on the countryside through which it passed like a plague of locusts, moving slowly at the pace of the wagon train. With no sanitation, the army left behind a trail of human and animal excrement several miles wide on the 200-mile journey from Vézelay to Lyons, where the Rhône was crossed. That problem was left behind them, but the impossibility of finding feed for so many horses and oxen along the way forced a decision to diverge after crossing the river. Philip’s contingent crossed first because it was fewer in number, but such was the press of the English following them that the bridge collapsed – a not uncommon event of the time. Many were drowned and the crossing of the rearguard was delayed while ferries were improvised.

Here the two armies separated, with the French heading for Nice and eastwards along the coast to Genoa to hire shipping that Richard had thought too expensive. He led his contingent south to Marseilles, where the combined Plantagenet fleet should have been awaiting him, had they not been delayed first by the events at Lisbon and by contrary winds at the straits of Gibraltar.
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Impatient as ever, on 7 or 16 August (accounts vary)
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Richard hired some Pisan merchant vessels to take his immediate entourage to Genoa while his rank-and-file swiftly ran out of money during the unexpected delay and caused problems in Marseilles.
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Meeting Philip in Genoa, he was asked for the loan of five galleys when the English fleet arrived, but haggled the number down to three, which Philip took as a personal insult as well as a blow to his royal purse.

The English fleet arrived eventually at Marseilles on 22 August 1190 to embark the main force of Richard’s army while he was making a Grand Tour of western Italy, riding from one port to another, where the hired Pisan ships were waiting to transport his party to the next stopping place. It was a curious and time-consuming diversion, attributed to his fear of the sea and susceptibility to sea-sickness: on 20 August he was in Pisa; then came a meeting with Bishop Octavian of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber and on to Naples, which he reached on 28 August and stayed for eleven days.
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The Plantagenet fleet was meanwhile coasting down to Messina on the eastern coast of Sicily, arriving there on 14 September, two days before Philip Augustus sailed in and was given Tancred’s palace in the city as accommodation for his household.

Archbishop Baldwin, Bishop Hubert Walter and Ranulf de Glanville set off from Marseille as soon as the Plantagenet fleet arrived there with an advance party to sail direct to the Holy Land and reached the siege camp outside Acre eight months earlier than Richard and the main force. With the harbour fiercely defended by the Saracens, autumn storms obliged the incoming ships to sail north to Tyre and take shelter there. On finally entering the siege camp, spread over half a mile east–west by three-quarters of a mile north–south, that had been set up by Guy de Lusignan on and around the low hill known as Tel al-Fukhar a mile to the east of the city of Acre – and therefore out of range of catapulted missiles from the ramparts – the new arrivals found there a horror even worse than the conditions of medieval sieges in Europe.
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The Christian besiegers had dug deep ditches to protect their camp from surprise sorties by the garrison in the city and, on the landward side, from Saladin’s forces who were besieging the Christian invaders. With blocking forces much closer to the city covering the area from the camp to the sea both north and south of Acre, at times de Lusignan’s forces controlled far more territory than this; at other times they were driven back inside the defensive perimeter of the ditches, where a festering mass of sewage and decaying animal and human corpses attracted millions of flies. Since nothing was known of contagion, these were tolerated – as they would be for centuries to come – as a simple nuisance by men unaware that these pests contaminating their food represented far more of a threat to health and life than the missiles aimed at them from the city walls or Saladin’s attacks on the camp.

Unfortunately for archaeology, the site of the camp lies beneath the modern city of Akko, but it is known from the
Estoire de la Guerre Sainte
, written by Ambroise from notes he made during the crusade, that the Saracen siege lines extended in a loose crescent a couple of miles to the east of the crusader camp, and moved backwards and forwards as the fortunes of war favoured first one side and then the other in the intermittent skirmishes, a few of which could have qualified as minor battles. Even Saladin’s personal pavilion had to be moved several times. South of the camp, the Muslim siege lines extended nearly to the beach but to the north a corridor was kept clear by the crusaders, to permit convoys to enter and leave, evacuating casualties to Tyre and returning with supplies and reinforcements.
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On arrival there, finding the Patriarch of Jerusalem ill, Archbishop Baldwin took his responsibilities as the senior churchman seriously until the atrocious conditions claimed him as yet another victim. He died in November, leaving a specific bequest to finance twenty knights and fifty sergeants-at-arms, the balance of his treasury to go to the over-stretched fund to provide for the increasing number of impoverished and sick crusaders. Hubert Walter rose to the occasion, negotiating with the leaders of the other contingents, providing for the sick and wounded, leading diplomatic missions to the Saracens and on occasion leading forays against them.
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He was to serve Richard and John, when he came to the throne, with loyalty and a perhaps excessive zeal.

The one city Richard had no desire to see on his tour of Italy was the dilapidated field of ruins that had formerly been the Eternal City, because Pope Clement III was no friend of his and Italy was riven by tensions between the Holy Roman Empire occupying the north of the peninsula and the Norman kingdom of Sicily embracing a large part of the southern Italian mainland. Its mixed-race inhabitants spoke Latin, Greek and Arabic and were of western Catholic, Greek Christian and Muslim faiths. Under King William II, known as ‘William the Good’ and whose consort was Richard’s now 25-year-old sister Joanna, it had enjoyed two decades of quiet prosperous co-existence, symbolised by a coinage with Greek Christian images on one side and Muslim symbols on the reverse. The Norman kingdom had also been a considerable support for the crusader states, but when William II died on 11 November 1189 Grand Admiral Margaritus led the fleet back to Sicily on orders from William’s successor, formerly Count Tancred of Lecce, who was faced with insurrection by his Muslim subjects and incursions into his territory on the Italian mainland by German forces under the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI Hohenstaufen.

The last leg of Richard’s long ride down the length of Italy was apparently accomplished with only one companion.
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One has to wonder why a king would put himself at risk in that way, which nearly proved fatal at the small Calabrian town of Mileto, just off the modern A3
autostrada
. The story is that he heard the cry of a hawk coming from inside a peasant’s hovel and assumed that common folk, as in his own possessions, had no right to own such a bird. Trying to steal it from them, he was badly beaten by the peasants before making his escape, which put him in a foul mood, no matter that his troubles were of his own making.

Mooring in the port of Messina on 23 September and riding into the city in grand pomp, Richard was insulted that his ‘crusading brother’ had been accommodated in the royal palace, which he thought should have been reserved for him instead of a smaller palace outside the walls that Tancred made available. With the French and Plantagenet fleets bringing thousands of hungry men clamouring for fresh food, the profiteering inhabitants of Messina had put up the price of bread and all other provisions, leading to disputes and injuries on both sides. Knowing of the events during the stop over in Lisbon, the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Messina, whom the crusaders nicknamed
Griffons
, had no desire to see their city taken over by all these armed men pumped-up with adrenalin and spoiling for action after the confinement on board ship, but on 3 October a quarrel outside the walls over the price of food took on the dimensions of a riot, causing the city gates to be closed against the foreigners and Richard’s ships to be refused moorings in the harbour.

The following day Philip tried to defuse the situation by arranging a meeting at Richard’s borrowed palace with Admiral Margaritus and a number of local notables. Whatever progress might have been achieved was undone when Richard heard himself being insulted, through the open windows, by a crowd of Messinans outside. Dismissing the negotiators in a fury, he decided to do what he always did when thwarted or insulted: use violence.