Lionheart (30 page)
Authors: Douglas Boyd
Philip had been ill for three months longer than Richard, and was worn out physically and mentally. He begged Richard to release him, not from his crusader’s vow – only the pope could do that – but from the undertaking agreed in France that neither king should return to Europe before the other. On 22 July a number of Philip’s barons, including the duke of Burgundy, came to Richard and begged him with tears in their eyes to advise them whether it was lawful to return to France with Philip or not. Strangely, because he was himself adept at the same sort of display when it suited him, he was moved by their entreaties. According to the chronicler, he said to these hardened warriors, ‘
Nolite flere!
’ Don’t cry!
20
On 28 July the squabbling continued, not only over the division of the spoils of the siege, but also over the future of the Latin Kingdom. Richard sneeringly agreed that Philip could leave, but would get no share in the eagerly awaited ransom money, on the grounds that it was for the continuation of the war, not for Philip’s royal purse. The continuing bone of contention between the two kings was the question of who was now the rightful king of Jerusalem. Richard upheld Guy and Philip stood firm on Conrad. A Byzantine compromise was reached, under which Guy could keep the title ‘king of Jerusalem’ and have the ports of Jaffa and Caesarea, while Conrad could keep Beirut, Sidon and Tyre and inherit Jerusalem on Guy’s death – assuming that Jerusalem could be retaken from the Saracens. At that time and in that place there was a joke about a man called Ali who became rich overnight by telling the sultan he could teach his favourite camel to talk in only three years. His friends said he was mad because no one can teach a camel to talk and that the sultan would chop off his head when the time was up and he had not taught the beast to say a single word. Unworried, Ali replied, ‘In three years, the camel may be dead, the sultan may be dead or I may be dead.’ There was something of that logic in the compromise over the throne of Jerusalem, given that, even during periods of truce, men and women of all ranks and ages in the Holy Land died suddenly from disease even more frequently than back home in Europe.
Philip again demanded a half-share of Cyprus, in keeping with their agreement to share the spoils of the crusade equally, but Richard again refused. The personal antipathy between the kings had reached the point of no return. When Philip’s illness peaked with trench mouth causing his teeth to fall out of rotting gums, rumours circulated in the French camp that Richard had somehow poisoned him. To add to his troubles, Philip heard a malicious rumour started by Richard to the effect that his infant son and heir Prince Louis, known to have been ill, had died in Paris.
21
Sorting out the inheritance of Count Philip of Flanders, Theobald of Blois, Henry of Troyes, Stephen of Sancerre and the counts of Vendôme, Clermont and Perche, and many others of his magnates, was now a matter of priority for Philip Augustus. Duke Hugues III of Burgundy was shortly to be added to the list, so that it was afterwards said that the French king ‘had left the major barons of his father’s generation buried in the Syrian sands’.
22
Such a depletion of the old aristocracy, loyal to the House of Capet, inevitably meant instability in France, which its king could not ignore.
Another reason for Philip’s urgent desire to leave lay in rumours that Richard’s repeated contacts with the Saracens had included a deal for four of the Shi’ite extremists known as the Hashashin or Assassins to shadow his movements and murder him at some propitious moment. If the specific arguments between the two kings are relatively undocumented, Richard’s arrogant ability to insult most of the other leaders after Philip’s departure is a matter of record. In view of what later happened to Conrad of Montferrat, Philip’s fears of assassination were quite reasonable. Richard invoked the crusader’s oath not to return home before liberating Jerusalem in order to belittle Philip for breaking it, but that rings hollow today, since Richard himself later abandoned the crusade, leaving Jerusalem in Saracen hands.
His problem was now that if Philip returned to France before him, the continental Plantagenet territories would be vulnerable to his incursions, no matter how strongly the Church protected a crusader’s property in his absence. He therefore made Philip swear a new oath, witnessed by the duke of Burgundy and the count of Champagne, that the House of Capet and its vassals would not invade Plantagenet territory until forty days after Richard’s return!
Departing from Acre on 31 July, Philip left half his share of the spoils of the city to Conrad and gave to the ill-fated Hugues of Burgundy the command of his troops who elected to remain in the Holy Land, with some treasure and 5,000 marks for their upkeep. To Raymond of Antioch he sent 100 knights and 500 foot soldiers. Conrad departed with him, refusing to serve in an army now commanded solely by Richard and perhaps also because his own contacts with Saracens had given him reason to fear that a contract had been put out on his life. Three days after leaving Acre, Philip and his entourage set sail from Tyre for Europe in a fleet of fourteen Genoese galleys, using the anti-clockwise currents of the Mediterranean to port-hop from Tyre to Tripoli, Tripoli to Antioch, Antioch to Rhodes and Crete through the pirate-infested Aegean islands to Corfu, and across the Adriatic to Otranto or Brindisi on the south-eastern tip of Italy. There, safe conducts were obtained from Tancred of Lecce and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI for them, as returning crusaders, to ride the length of Italy in peace. Stopping in Rome with the traces of his illness evident on his face and body, Philip was released from his crusader’s vow to liberate Jerusalem by Pope Celestine III,
23
who also listened sympathetically to his complaints about Richard’s conduct.
Yet Philip’s request to be allowed a dispensation from the Peace in order to seize the moment to right the wrongs of the Alais/Vexin/Flanders complex met with no such success, possibly because Eleanor on her stopover in Rome had briefed the pope on the Plantagenet reaction to any such move.
24
Instead, Philip was warned that he would be excommunicated, should he ‘commit any evil’ to the lands and property of the king of England during the latter’s absence on crusade.
25
From there northwards, the homeward journey was the same as for Queen Eleanor and Louis VII on their return from the Second Crusade. At Milan, Philip met the German Emperor Henry Hohenstaufen, who was settling scores with Tancred of Sicily and more than ready to listen to all the Franks’ tales discrediting the Sicilians. He was also related to both the insulted duke of Austria and the imprisoned king of Cyprus and his daughter, who was still held prisoner in Joanna’s household. However, the claim that he swore there and then to take personal revenge on Richard should he pass through any part of the Empire on his way home
26
sounds like a later invention, for there was then no reason why Richard should set foot in Hohenstaufen’s domains.
N
OTES
1.
Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 168.
2.
Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 47.
3.
Maalouf, pp. 208–9
4.
Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, cxxxi.
5.
Bradbury,
Philip Augustus
, p. 89.
6.
See
http//fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_de_Chastenay
7.
Maalouf,
The Crusades
, p. 290.
8.
P.D. Mitchell, E. Stern, and Y. Tepper, ‘Dysentery in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem:
An ELISA Analysis of Two Medieval Latrines in the City of Acre (Israel)’,
Journal of Archeological Science
Vol 35, issue 7, July 2008, pp. 1849–53.
9.
Maalouf,
The Crusades
, p. 210, quoting Baha al-Din.
10.
Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, pp. 170–1; also Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 49.
11.
Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 172.
12.
Ambroise,
Estoire de la guerre sainte
, ed. G. Paris (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1897), p. 386.
13.
W. Stubbs, ed.,
Itinerarium Peregrinarum et Gesta Regis Ricardi
, Rolls Series (London: Longmans, 1864), p. 223; Ambroise,
Estoire de la guerre sainte
, p. 386.
14.
Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 174.
15.
Some sources say 5,000 squires.
16.
The numbers vary in different accounts.
17.
Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 179.
18.
Ibid, Vol 2, p. 181; Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 51.
19.
Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 51.
20.
Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 184.
21.
Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 52.
22.
J.W. Baldwin,
The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 80, quoted in Bradbury,
Philip Augustus
, p. 94. The Holy Land was also called Syria because it had formed part of the Roman province of Syria-Palestine.
23.
William of Newburgh,
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
, Vol 1, p. 358.
24.
Kelly,
Eleanor of Aquitaine
, p. 275.
25.
Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 229.
26.
Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 167.
16
R
ichard, meanwhile, was receiving disturbing news with every despatch from Europe. In England, William Longchamp had made enemies at every level by his exactions to finance the absent king’s distant enterprise. His fellow bishops had only one thought on hearing that Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury had died on the crusade. Fearful that Longchamp’s intimacy with King Richard would see him raised from the see of Ely to supreme status as the new primate of all England,
1
they found the moment to strike after Geoffrey the Bastard was consecrated at Tours and invested with the
pallium
of office.
