Lionheart (35 page)
Authors: Douglas Boyd
12.
Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, Vol 4, p. 61.
13.
For these dates, see Stubbs’ footnote to p. 230 of Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2.
14.
Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 1, p.70.
15.
Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, Vol 4, p. 63 avers that this was Stephen of Turnham, but he is not known to have spoken Arabic.
16.
Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, Vol 4, p. 68.
17.
Ambroise,
Estoire de la guerre sainte
, pp. 228, 413–14.
18.
Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, Vol 4, p. 71.
19.
See De la Ville,
La Sauve Majeure
.
Part 4:
18
S
hortly after the battle, Richard fell ill with fever yet again. After an embassy from Saladin repeated the former offer of terms, he countered with a letter to the man he called ‘my brother’ – al-‘Adil – pleading for his intercession so that Ashkelon might remain in crusader hands. Nothing came of this, partly because al-‘Adil was also ill with fever somewhere outside Jerusalem. With his customary gallantry, Saladin sent fresh fruit and baskets containing snow from Mount Hermon to cool Richard’s drinks, but would not yield over Ashkelon. Behind the pleasant gesture of respect for a worthy enemy was, as so often in warfare, the quest for intelligence. On this occasion, Saladin’s gift-bearer returned to Jerusalem with the news that Jaffa was garrisoned by only 300 knights who were, it was subsequently learned, mostly mounted on mules, their highly trained
destriers
having long since succumbed to the climate, tick bites and disease.
1
To Richard, the loss of Ashkelon seemed intolerable, for had he not personally laboured on the reconstruction of the walls there? Yet, among the
poulains
even the most fanatical Templars and Hospitallers had come to accept that his political and military problems at home demanded an early return. And what use was it, they asked, to have Ashkelon after Richard’s army departed? There would simply not be sufficient Christian knights in Outremer to hold one more fortress.
Richard had boasted that victory would be his within twenty days of Christmas 1191. It was not until 28 August 1192 that an emissary brought Saladin’s final offer, which was enshrined in a treaty signed on 2 September 1192. The treaty declared Richard and Saladin to be allies, neither to raise the sword against the other for a period of three years, three months and three days.
2
As a monarch, Richard refused to swear to uphold the treaty, but ordered Henry of Champagne, Balian of Ibelin and the Templar and Hospitaller masters to swear on his behalf. After Saladin put his name to the treaty the following day, the Third Crusade was formally ended – with victory, in the shape of the Holy City, firmly in Saracen hands.
The terms allowed the Christians to keep the coastal strip, leaving Saladin to control the hinterland, with permission for unarmed travellers to pass through both Christian and Muslim territory and for pilgrims of any confession to travel to and from the holy places. A condition was that Ashkelon’s newly rebuilt walls be razed to the ground, as well as the castle at Daron, so large that it was described as having seventeen towers, which threatened the main land routes between Egypt and Syria, essential to Saladin’s dual realm both for political reasons and trade.
3
Richard’s prestige was at low ebb. He was widely suspected by the nobility of Outremer of Conrad’s murder and despised by the more bellicose knights and barons for not making one last attempt to take Jerusalem. Perhaps, as so often in similar circumstances, some of them dreamed of ‘a glorious death’. The works of the Roman poet Horace were well known in twelfth-century Europe, so many would have been able to quote his
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
and, if it were sweet and proper to die for one’s country, how much more so for a Christian knight to ‘die for Jesus’?
Despite Saladin’s gracious invitation for Richard to visit Jerusalem as his personal guest, the king of England considered that his crusading oath made it impossible for him to go there other than as liberator of the Holy City – a prospect that was now beyond the realms of possibility. The more important pilgrims who had no such inhibition were greeted personally by Saladin and invited to be his guests at table, the traditional sign of a Muslim lord’s protection. Bishop Hubert Walter of Salisbury, who had replaced the dead Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury as chief chaplain to the army and the principal negotiator with Saladin, and who had ably but hopelessly pressed the Christian claims in negotiation, went with Ambroise in one party of pilgrims. Received by Saladin, they discussed the absent king of England, dutifully praised by Hubert Walter but considered by Saladin to be lacking wisdom and moderation.
4
On their return to Richard, the bishop and the poet described to their master how they had gazed with tears upon the hill of Calvary, the tomb of the Virgin and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, restored by Saladin to the Syrian priests. These sites, some of them disputed, had been approved by the Emperor Constantine’s mother St Helena when she visited Jerusalem in search of relics to bring back to Constantinople during the fourth century.
With the arrival of the prior of Hereford, new intelligence reached Richard of Prince John’s plundering of the treasury and plotting with Philip Augustus’ support to gain the throne of England. In France, the unrest stirred up by John and Philip had spread as far as Toulouse and caused Seneschal Bertin of Aquitaine to invade Toulousain territory with Richard’s nephew Otto of Brunswick and Prince Sancho of Navarre, brother of Queen Berengaria. Their combined forces captured castles and towns, camping briefly just out of bowshot from the walls of Toulouse before heading north and west to ‘pacify’ the Auvergne and Angoulême.
5
Finally, Richard could not pretend that he was accomplishing anything in Outremer. Ten days after despatching Joanna and Berengaria to reach Sicily before the winter storms, at nightfall on 9 October the king who had arrived with a fleet of 200 ships boarded a lone galley, having insulted so many of his allies that he had to beg a bodyguard of Templars to accompany him in return for the Saladin tithe that Henry had paid to the order. There are several partial accounts by the chroniclers of the mysterious return journey that was to cost Richard’s subjects so dearly. In some it was alleged that Richard disguised himself as a Templar knight. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Richard’s chaplain Anselm said later that they set out for Marseilles with Baldwin of Béthune and the Templars. After stopping in Cyprus for a few days, Corfu was reached three weeks after leaving Acre.
6
Across the strait lay the friendly Norman port of Brindisi and the shortest overland route home, but this lay across territories of the German Emperor Henry Hohenstaufen, from whom no safe conduct was forthcoming for the king who had alienated him both by the treaty he had signed with Tancred in Messina and by the insult to his vassal Leopold of Austria at Acre.
As the autumn of 1192 became winter, the trickle of crusaders returning to Europe became a flood. From them, Eleanor heard tales of Richard’s great valour in Outremer, mixed with accusatory alibis that only the machinations of the Franks and Germans and in-country factions had prevented the lionhearted king of England from triumphing over Saladin. But she was not fooled, having heard similar alibis after the undeniable failure of the Second Crusade that she had personally witnessed fifty years before. But where, she asked, was her son? No one had an answer. He was known to have left the Holy Land in a fast galley that should have overtaken the round ships transporting lesser travellers. After last being sighted making for Brindisi, all was mystery.
7
On land, other crusaders had travelled by whatever means of fortune they could find. Able to purchase the best horses available, Richard should have made far better time. Yet Joanna and Berengaria’s households waited in vain for him to join them in Rome and share what could have been spun into a triumphal return for the heroic king of England. The legal nicety that her constitutional status was undefined did not prevent Eleanor doing her best for him in the hope that he was still alive, so she returned to England to keep a beady eye on bishops Walter of Rouen and Hugh of Durham and the other justiciars, all the while aware that Prince John’s partisans were not alone in spreading rumours of their king’s death.
At Brindisi Richard had decided to avoid travelling the length of Italy, which entailed many miles across Hohenstaufen territory, by sailing on to make landfall in southern France. Putting in to an Italian harbour that may have been Pisa,
8
he learned that in avoiding one enemy, he was sailing into the trap set by another because his arrogance had made him the most hated man in Europe. To avenge himself on Richard for the invasion of 1187 and the more recent humiliation suffered at the hands of Richard’s nephew Otto, Count Raymond of Toulouse, in concert with Philip Augustus, was defying the Peace of God by setting ambushes all along the French Mediterranean littoral. The alternative of landing on what is now the Costa Brava and gaining Aquitaine via Navarre meant first crossing the kingdom of Aragon – forbidden territory to the son-in-law of Sancho the Wise of Navarre. Richard therefore back-tracked all the way down the coast of Italy to Corfu, where he hired two Romanian pirate galleys for 200 silver marks to escort him northwards up the Adriatic.
9
All three vessels were stranded by a storm on the coast of Istria, near modern Trieste, in territory held by vassals of Leopold of Austria. As returning crusaders, the small party – Richard, now posing as a merchant, with his chaplain Anselm, his clerk Philip, Baldwin of Béthune and the Templars – asked the local overlord Count Meinhard II of Görz for safe conducts under the Peace of God.
10
Most unwisely, Richard gave to the messenger a valuable ruby ring he had purchased in Outremer to use as a bribe. Meinhard was suspicious that a returning merchant should have so valuable a jewel but issued the safe conduct, at the same time advising his brother Frederik of Betestowe, through whose lands the travellers would have to pass next, to gather a sufficient force to arrest the group while on his territory.
Having in his employ a Norman named Roger who came originally from Argentan, Frederik chose him to scout round all the likely hostels and hospices in the area, promising a very rich reward if he should track down Richard’s party. Roger duly did so. At first, Richard denied being the king, but then admitted his true identity, begging Roger, whose Norman French betrayed his origins, to be merciful. To the surprise of the king’s party, this émigré Norman refused to betray the son of Henry II, his erstwhile liege as duke of Normandy. Instead, he procured fresh horses for the party to hasten on their way, and went back to tell Frederik of Betestowe that the leader of the travellers was Baldwin of Béthune. Frederik, however, had kept Roger under surveillance, and set an ambush, which seized Baldwin and some of the others, mistaking him for the king.
11
In later ambushes Richard abandoned eight, and then six more, of his Templar bodyguard. Still posing as a rich merchant, he continued with the reduced entourage, riding their horses into the ground before replacing them en route until they took refuge in a squalid tavern in the village of Ganina on the Danube, not far from Vienna and roughly 200 miles from where they had been shipwrecked.
It was a mammoth ride, worthy of Henry II at his best, but Richard was ill with malaria and unable to ride on. Somewhere along the way, he had picked up a German-speaking youth who was sent into the market place to buy provisions, and there tried to change a handful of gold
bezants
for the local currency and succeeded only in unleashing a torrent of questions about the mysterious group of foreign knights. Hastening back to the tavern, the understandably alarmed youth tried to rouse Richard and make him depart immediately, but found him too weak to rise from his bed. Each day, the youth went back into the market for more luxury provisions, arousing increasing curiosity about his employer. There are several versions claiming to be the true account of Richard’s undoing, but it seems that disaster struck on 21 December, when the lad carelessly went out with a pair of the king’s monogrammed gloves stuck into his belt. Arrested, he was tortured by men who threatened to cut out his tongue if he did not tell the truth.
