Richard & John: Kings at War (27 page)

The next year, 1189, was even worse for Saladin. Eighteen months after Hattin he was on the defensive, having to concentrate his forces on the coast against the Frankish counter-attack that was bound to come once the crusaders from the West arrived. And every day his ally in Byzantium dinned into his ears the menacing stories about Frederick Barbarossa’s careful and determined preparations. Saladin’s failure to crush the Franks immediately after Hattin was now proving his biggest mistake, since his great victory there had done no more than rouse the sleeping tiger in Western Europe. He was now in a race against time, and he knew it. Ominously, at Tyre Conrad de Montferrat and Guy of Lusignan were reconciled, and Guy had been persuaded by his priests that the oath he had sworn not to fight against Saladin was not binding since ‘an oath should not be kept when Holy Mother Church is in danger’. Once more a credible general in his own and others’ eyes, Guy at once won a significant battle in July 1189 between Tyre and Sidon. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Reginald of Sidon asked for a nine-month extension on his promise to deliver up Beaufort, on the grounds that his family was still within the walls of Tyre.
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Then Guy of Lusignan made his great gamble. Helped by the fact that the first contingents of crusaders were starting to arrive from Denmark and Holland, he raised a new army of 700 knights, mainly Templars, and 9,000 foot and took it to Acre, where he commenced to besiege the city. Saladin in turn took the besieging army in the rear, so that Guy was hemmed in between a potentially sallying garrison and a relieving host, rather like Julius Caesar at Alesia in 52 BC during the Gallic War. Saladin tried to cut his way through Guy’s army in September only to be thrown back in a bruising encounter. There was another inconclusive battle in October, when Guy and Conrad de Montferrat collaborated well (and Gérard de Rideford died). Saladin claimed a victory but any marginal military benefit was soon offset by plummeting morale in the Muslim army and mass desertions of troops carrying off loot, so that he could not capitalise on battlefield advantage. The fortunes of war had definitely turned in favour of Guy of Lusignan. At the beginning of 1189 Saladin had his pick of targets - Tripoli, Tyre, Antioch; by the end of the year he was fighting for survival.
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Ill throughout January 1190, Saladin had to devolve operations to his commanders, who were so devoid of new ideas that they tried to start an epidemic of fever by throwing Christian corpses into the River Belus. With the caliph in Baghdad lukewarm in his support, sending derisory financial contributions to the fight against the infidel, Saladin had to derive comfort from small victories like the final surrender of Beaufort Castle in April 1190. But he knew this could be the year when he was overwhelmed. With an army of 25,000 men (but rumoured to be ten times that size), Frederick Barbarossa moved down through Hungary, forced the Byzantine emperor to give him passage into Asia Minor and crossed the Dardanelles at the end of March 1190. Saladin still hoped that Qilij-Arslan, conqueror of the Byzantines, would be able to stop the Germans in their tracks, but Frederick defeated the Turks outside Iconium after a 33-day running battle and took the city.
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The seemingly unstoppable German emperor was then destroyed by a freak accident when he drowned in the River Saleph on 10 June. Allah suddenly seemed to be smiling on Saladin and he accordingly won a victory on 25 July 1190. Once more he was unable to follow up, and the arrival of Henry of Champagne with crusader reinforcements three days later annulled any impact the battle had. Saladin’s best piece of luck was that the German host was no longer formidable. Imploding after the emperor’s death, it split into three divisions to make foraging easier but simply made itself easier prey for marauding Turks. Only about 5,000 under the command of Frederick’s son the duke of Swabia limped into Antioch. The Germans had achieved little on their disastrous march through Asia Minor but they had forced Saladin to remain on the defensive for an entire summer.
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Once he realised he had little to fear from them and tried to resume decisive operations against the besiegers of Acre, he found that the enemy had meanwhile grown stronger than ever with the arrival of fresh seaborne reinforcements. The most terrible threat, from Barbarossa, was no more, but, if the most powerful Christian monarch in Europe was dead, Saladin knew that close behind him trod the second-and third-ranking kings: Philip Augustus of France and the formidable warrior Richard I of England.

7

AFTER WAITING FOR A week for the fleet that was then still labouring through the Straits of Gibraltar following its disgraceful behaviour in Lisbon, Richard divided his overland forces in two and sent one half directly to the Holy Land (we are not told where he got the shipping); in this force were such notables as Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, Ranulph Glanville and his nephew Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury. This party arrived at Tyre on 30 September and at Acre on 12 October.
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The detachment Richard commanded embarked in ten large ships known as busses and twenty galleys on 7 August and began a leisurely cruise of the western coast of Italy, beginning in Genoa, where Philip of France had gone after the two monarchs parted company in Lyons. Philip’s administrative arrangements looked more impressive than Richard’s for he had already hired a Genoese fleet to take his army to Palestine, and the transaction was minutely and meticulously recorded: 650 knights with two squires per knight - some 2,000 men in all - were to be provided with transport to Outremer, food for themselves and fodder for their horses for eight months and even a four-month supply of wine for the total cost of 5,850 marks.
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Even though many French knights had proceeded overland or gone on ahead by other means, Philip’s total numbers were far less than Richard’s host of an estimated 10,000. At Genoa Richard found Philip himself lying ill in the Church of St Lawrence from a mysterious malady, which cynics said was no more than a bad case of seasickness. Whereas Richard and Philip, political differences notwithstanding, had hitherto always enjoyed good personal relations, to the point where incautious writers today can still refer to them as ‘lovers’, it seems that it was at this juncture that they had the first of the serious disagreements which would terminate in a legendary feud. Philip asked Richard for the loan of five galleys, Richard responded with an offer of three, and Philip, choosing to take this as a personal insult, angrily refused.
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Richard’s fleet then proceeded to Portofino (where the king rested for five days) and on to Portovenere, providing an opportunity to visit Pisa. The voyage continued past Cape Baratti to the castle of Piombino, thence via Portoferrajo on the island of Elba, the peninsula of Monte-Argentario, Porto Ercole and Civitavecchia to Ostia.
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Though at the mouth of the Tiber and just 16 miles from Rome, he did not visit the Eternal City and to Octavian, cardinal bishop of Ostia, who came to meet him he coldly explained why. Angry at the 1,500 marks he had to pay to have the pope appoint William Longchamp legate for the English Church, he told Octavian that the papacy was a mere snakepit of corruption, the keys of St Peter in effect sold off to the highest bidder and the so-called Vicar of Christ no better than the moneylenders Christ drove out of the temple. He made it clear that his snub to the Pope had nothing to do with his haste to be in the Holy Land by proceeding to Naples (via Nettuno and Ischia) and then ostentatiously staying there ten days.
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He then spent another five days at nearby Salerno, then considered the leading centre for European medicine. His leisurely progress had method in it, for he had left instructions for the main fleet to follow with all speed. This armada of cut-throats and reprobates actually arrived at Marseilles on 22 August and got under way again on the 30th. While Richard was at Salerno, he heard that it had leapfrogged him and was already off Messina.
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He decided to complete the rest of the journey to Sicily overland, and his chroniclers logged the succession of dreary towns in minute detail: Amalfi, Conza, Scalea, Amantea, Santa Eufemia, Mileto. On the road from Mileto (where his overnight stopover had been the abbey of the Holy Trinity), he made a typically bad, impulsive Ricardian mistake. Having sent his servants ahead, he was travelling with just one companion when he heard the sound of a hawk coming from a village hovel. Indignant that anyone but an aristocrat should own a hawk, he strode into the house and seized the bird. This high-handed action soon had the entire village down around his ears. Pelted by sticks and stones, Richard drew his sword to chastise the contumacious villagers, only to see the blade snap when he smacked the boldest villager with the flat of the weapon. The proud king of England and lord of Aquitaine experienced the humiliation of conducting a fighting retreat with nothing more than the selfsame tools the villagers were using. He could easily have been killed for a moment of impetuous folly.
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That very evening he crossed the Straits of Messina, joined his fleet and, next day, made a triumphal entrance into Messina itself. The interview with Philip of France on 24 September was a sullen affair - Philip had been in Messina since the 16th, keeping a low profile and now he was outshone and piqued by the ‘magnificent reception’ given to his rival. The Sicilians seem to have been intrigued by the English fleet and its polyglot crews, as amazed by the olio of French, English and Flemish as by the bewildering variety of ships in Richard’s armada. There were snacks, oared transport ships of a Scandinavian type, longer and narrower than the galleys or dromonds, then there were the bulkier and slower dromonds - galleys with either a single or double bank of oars and one or more masts with lateen or triangular sails, equipped with a ramming beak for immobilising an enemy ship or holding it fast while grappling and boarding tactics were attempted. Particularly admired were the destriers, for the Normans had acquired ever since the Conquest of 1066 a particular expertise in transporting horses by sea.
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But the chronicler Ambroise said that the ‘Grifons and Lombards’ (Sicilians of, respectively, Greek or Latin descent) were angry at such pomp and circumstance, especially the caparisoned chargers and the flying pennants, which they considered a tactless slighting of their own king. Philip, angry that his arrival in a single ship had been so signally upstaged, announced that he was leaving his quarters in the royal palace and setting sail for Outremer at once. But Philip was as fearful a sailor as he was a warrior. Barely had he cleared Messina harbour when the sea began to make up and Philip, terrified by the waves, was forced to return to Messina and further ‘humiliating’ encounters with Richard.
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On his way to rescue the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem from crisis, Richard had fortuitously walked into another political maelstrom when he arrived in Sicily. A prosperous and affluent kingdom, with abundant agricultural wealth - apart from oranges, lemons, sugar cane and cotton, the island was still the breadbasket of the Mediterranean it had been in Roman times - Sicily, at the crossroads between Western Europe, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, had always been a cockpit for conflict over trade routes and strategic nodal points. The eleventh century saw it as a battlefield between Byzantines, Normans and Saracens - a conflict the Normans had largely won by 1090. The result was a syncretism of cultures and languages, with Greek, Latin and Arabic the languages representing the respective three combatants. A political crisis had arisen on the death of the childless King William II in November 1189. By the laws of succession the kingdom passed to the late king’s aunt Constance, who was married to Frederick Barbarossa’s son Henry. Since Barbarossa’s career had largely been spent trying to assert German hegemony in Italy, it began to look as though the Holy Roman Empire might attain by dynastic marriage what it had failed to achieve by force of arms. The papacy, still scarred from the Guelph versus Ghibelline conflict, had no more desire to see Sicily fall into the German orbit than the Norman Sicilians had. Anti-German forces managed to instal Tancred of Lecce as the new king on the dubious grounds that he was an illegitimate cousin of the late king.
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This blatant attempt at a kind of Norman super-hegemony triggered both a Muslim revolt and an invasion from Germany. The dust of civil war had only just settled when the crusaders arrived. Tancred feared it might not be only Saladin who felt the military lash from doughty warriors like Richard.
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For his part, Richard had a more immediate grievance. His sister Joan had been married to William II and, fearing trouble from her, Tancred had put her under house arrest and withheld the income from her dower, the county of Monte San Angelo. Moreover, William II had bequeathed his vast wealth in money, gold plate, grain, wine and warships to his father-in-law Henry II, but Tancred had used Henry’s death as an excuse to declare the will null and void.
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From Messina Richard dispatched envoys to Tancred in Palermo with a simple message: release my sister or face the consequences, and make good on William’s legacy. Tancred immediately set Joan free but stalled on the issue of the dower, ‘compensating’ her with a large money grant.
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Dissatisfied, Richard showed that he intended to pursue ‘linkage’ of both grievances by seizing the fortified monastery of Bagnara on the mainland side of the Straits of Messina and installing his sister Joan there. Irritated by the entire business over Alice, Richard thought he detected a flicker of interest in Joan from Philip and toyed with paying him back in the same coin by dangling the prospect of a dynastic marriage.
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But he soon had more serious concerns to attend to. Warfare was already probable when an insurrection in Messina made it certain. The crusader rank and file had not even managed to live on friendly terms with the people of Lisbon, so it was not likely they could adapt easily to the complex multicultural society of Sicily. Misunderstandings and failure to communicate soon hardened into deadly hostility between the indigenous population and the interlopers. The issue of the local women and the lustful attentions of the crusaders immediately became a running sore. Moreover, with demand for the essentials of life outstripping supply, the presence of such large numbers of troops soon resulted in skyrocketing food prices, especially of staples. Local traders and shopkeepers welcomed the chance for some quick profits and cited the law of supply and demand, but for the crusaders rising food prices simply meant greed, exploitation and profiteering by the Sicilians.
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Intemperate haggling led to crusaders refusing to pay prices asked, and the more ruffianly of them rode roughshod over the locals. The inevitable upshot was violence. Fearing rape, and, ultimately, enslavement, the Messinesi rose in revolt; Richard’s seizure of another stronghold, the Greek monastery of San Salvatore, on 2 October was apparently the last straw. The word spread that Richard and his men intended to spend the winter in Sicily, so that there would be more rape, seduction, extortion, violence and bullying. Tancred’s agents, and even his governors, obligingly fanned the flames.
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