Richard & John: Kings at War (28 page)

Even as Richard sat in conclave on 4 October with King Philip, Tancred’s local governors and the archbishops of Monreale, Reggio and Messina, he received word that his men were coming under heavy attack by the people of Messina and that the quarters of Hugh of Lusignan, one of the barons of Aquitaine, had been selected as the first target. Richard at once broke up the conference and assumed command of his army. The only way to deal with this uprising was a systematic conquest of Messina, so he made his dispositions.
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He began with a surprise uphill charge of the kind the locals had never seen before, which dislodged the defenders from their ‘impregnable’ position on high ground.
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Then he battered down the city gates and stormed in at the head of bloodthirsty, vengeful troops; in their fear, the Messinesi had achieved a self-fulfilling prophecy and now faced the very hordes of murderous rapists they so feared. In such circumstances, the fighting was bitter and hand-to-hand. Losses were high, including twenty-five of Richard’s household knights. To the fury of the English, Philip and the French remained neutral during the fighting, and Philip even seemed to favour the locals.
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But Richard and his men needed no assistance. They were in their element in this bloody streetfighting, they were veterans of many a siege, and they could sense the plunder and the rape that awaited them at the end of operations. All too soon local resistance collapsed: Ambroise said Richard completed the conquest of Messina in less time than it would take a priest to say matins. Then came the inevitable aftermath when Messina got a taste of what Lisbon had suffered. Palls of smoke rose over the harbour as the victorious troops stormed down to the merchants’ quarters to pillage and burn. Many a shopkeeper lived to regret the high prices he had charged, and many a shopkeeper’s wife and daughter paid for the patriarch’s profiteering by suffering the fate worse than death. As Ambroise put it in throwaway style: ‘They acquired women, fair, noble and wise women.’
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Richard’s swift victory infuriated Philip, who claimed to be insulted when he saw the banners of England and Aquitaine streaming from the towers and walls of Messina. Since the flying of banners implied the absolute dominion of the lord whose colours were flown, he demanded, absurdly in the circumstances, that Richard take down his own insignia and replace them with those of France. Not wishing to abort the entire crusade on a matter of protocol, Richard compromised by taking down his own colours and replacing them with the ‘neutral’ pennants of the Templars and Hospitallers, who would thus remain as keepers of Messina until Tancred agreed terms.
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This was the second contretemps between Richard and Philip and some chroniclers said it was the crucial one, for Philip began to develop an obsession that Richard was flouting the terms of the ‘all for one’ agreement at Vézelay.
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Richard meanwhile took hostages from the wealthy burghers and, to rub salt in the wound, built a wooden castle on a hill overlooking the town; to this structure he gave the undiplomatic name Mategrifon, or Kill the Greeks.
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Faced with the possible permanent loss of Messina, Tancred agreed to pay Richard another enormous sum in gold, as full settlement of Joan’s dower and Richard’s other financial grievances. Tancred of Lecce may have been physically unprepossessing - ugly, simian and dwarfish - but he was a shrewd diplomat. In return for conceding Richard’s demands, he got a treaty of alliance against any invaders of the island - whether the Germans of emperor Henry VI or the Almohads of North Africa - and a diplomatic revolution whereby the king of England became the enemy of the German emperor.
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This was a rash step for Richard to take, and Philip Augustus, offered a similar deal earlier, had turned it down so as not to make an enemy of Germany. The value of Tancred’s diplomacy was seen the following year. When emperor Henry VI launched an attack on Sicily, Richard engineered a revolt in Germany, led by his ally Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa’s old adversary Henry the Lion. Richard on the other hand was no diplomat since by his agreement with Tancred he alienated both the German emperor and his brother John. To cement the alliance with Tancred, it was expressly stated that Arthur of Britanny was the heir presumptive to the throne of England and that, when adult, Arthur would marry one of Tancred’s daughters.
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Two days after the agreement with Tancred, on 8 October, Richard settled his differences with Philip by drawing up guidelines for the crusaders’ stay in Sicily. He ‘squared’ the French king by giving him one-third of the monies received from Tancred, though the French later complained this should have been one-half, in accordance with the fifty-fifty rule.
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Then he imposed a code of conduct for his own men. First, he insisted that all goods looted in Messina should be returned. Then he ruled that the moratorium on debts, allowable as a crusader’s ‘perk’, applied only to debts contracted before the crusade. His target here was gambling debts, for the soldiers had taken to wagering huge amounts in the taverns of Messina and then, if they lost, repudiating the debts on the grounds that this was their privilege as crusaders. Additionally, a
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ban on gambling, except in the presence and with the permission of officers, was imposed on the rank and file, with punishments for infraction severe: whipping through the army for a soldier (usually a fatal sanction) or triple keelhauling for sailors (even more decidedly so). These checks on high-handedness and indiscipline reconciled the people of Messina to occupation.
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Richard’s unsympathetic attitude to his private soldiers caused much muttering in the ranks, especially when he allowed knights and clerics to gamble up to twenty shillings a day. But bad feeling was to some extent assuaged by a price freeze: Richard and Philip fixed the price of bread at a penny a loaf, made it a criminal offence for merchants to raise the price of wine, and decreed that profits higher than 10 per cent on any transaction were illegal. Speculation and hoarding were punishable by death, no trading was allowed in dead meat, and in live meat only for slaughter by the army. A finance and discipline committee enforced these regulations and others, such as a tax of 50 per cent on the estates of crusaders who died, in order to further and finance the crusade, with the other 50 per cent being remitted to heirs and legatees in the home country.
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These regulations were tough and even draconian but they preserved the peace for the next six months while the crusaders remained on the island.

It was probably at this stage that Richard had his first meeting with Tancred, for he spent a week away from Messina, in Palermo, during 9-16 October.
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Roger of Howden was more interested in the king’s encounter with the Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore, another of those mystics who claimed to be able to see hidden meanings in the Bible. Along with a lot of mumbo-jumbo about the Three Ages of History and the imminent coming of the Antichrist, Joachim was at least able to identify Saladin as the sixth of history’s seven great persecutors of the Church (the seventh was to be Antichrist himself), and to predict that Richard, as God’s chosen agent, would defeat Saladin and drive him from Jerusalem.
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At the temporal level, Richard learned of the death at Acre of Archbishop Baldwin and, on Christmas Day 1190, entertained Philip of France to a magnificent banquet at Mategrifon - a sumptuous occasion of meat and wine served on gold and silver plate.
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But his tarrying so long in Sicily puzzled many of his associates, particularly those who had been cooling their heels in Messina before he had even arrived. There were loud murmurings of discontent, with even oligarchic crusaders complaining of the damage to their purses caused by the long sojourn on the island. To quell the disaffection Richard was reduced to outright bribery: he distributed lavish cash gifts to his captains and there were even ‘trickle down’ payments made to the bored and fractious troops who were by now beginning to suffer from starvation and malnutrition. Many affected to query Richard’s ‘unconscionable’ delay in Sicily, but his motives were simple and twofold. In the first place, he feared the elements and the state of the Mediterranean in winter; what would be the point in arriving at Acre with a shattered fleet? Secondly, he was allowing time for Eleanor of Aquitaine to bring his bride Berengaria to him. The women and their escort crossed the Alps in mid-winter and were at Lodi near Milan by 20 January 1191. There the 69-year-old Eleanor had a memorable meeting with Emperor Henry VI of Germany.
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By February 1191 it was clear that Richard and his men were at the extremities of boredom. They had drilled, they had manoeuvred, they had built siege engines and practised siege techniques, but now they really needed to sail to Acre and see action. Boredom and frustration must have been behind a notorious incident some time between 2-5 February when Richard took part in a tournament, not normally his favourite pastime. According to Roger of Howden, it was not even a properly organised tournament, just an improvised joust thought up on the spur of the moment when Richard, Philip and their retinues were out riding together. Finding peasants with a supply of long spear-like canes, the knights set about each other and, as bad luck would have it, Richard’s sparring partner turned out to be his old antagonist William of Barres, France’s equivalent of William Marshal. The details are confused and confusing, but it seems that Richard, having initially got the better of de Barres, tried to unhorse him only to find the French knight unwilling to admit defeat and clinging gamely to his horse’s mane. Infuriated by this ‘gamesmanship’, and mindful of his previous encounters with de Barres, Richard lost his temper and ordered the Frenchman never again to come into his sight on pain of death. To make his rage even more potent, Richard insisted that Philip dismiss him from his service so that he would miss the crusade. Alarmed by Richard’s volcanic outburst, Philip agreed, assuming that his fellow-monarch would eventually calm down. But when’s Richard’s wrath against de Barres continued at white heat, Philip had to play Agamemnon to his Achilles and play the suppliant. On his bended knees he and his knights begged Richard to grant at least provisional forgiveness to de Barres, so that he could continue on crusade. With great reluctance Richard agreed to allow de Barres to proceed to Acre, but made it clear that there would be no personal reconciliation between them.
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Maybe one factor disposing Richard to be ‘lenient’ to de Barres was the idea of an implicit deal with Philip over his sister Alice, the so-called fiancée of twenty years standing. By late February Eleanor of Aquitaine and Berengaria, accompanied by Count Philip of Flanders, had reached Naples, but there the problems started. Richard sent galleys to convey them the relatively short distance to Messina, but Tancred’s agents forbade the women to embark on the ludicrous excuse that their entourage was too large; it was suggested that they travel overland to Brindisi first. With yet another reason for anger, Richard stormed down to Catania to demand an interview with Tancred. During a five-day conclave Tancred gradually revealed the reason for the insult he had offered to Richard’s mother and bride. Philip of France had been playing Tancred like a violin, working on his fears that Richard intended to dispossess him and set up a permanent Angevin kingdom in Sicily. His motive was to save his sister Alice’s honour from the shame of Richard’s proposed marriage to Berengaria, but his methods were the old familiar Philippian ones of innuendo, rumour and dropping poison in the ear - the same ones he had used to such devastating effect when driving a wedge between Richard and his father Henry. Philip made particularly skilful use of the circumstantial features of Eleanor’s meeting with Henry VI at Lodi: did this not hint at collusion between Richard and the Germans and was it not obvious that Richard intended to tear up the treaty of last October as soon as the emperor attacked Sicily? By patience and plain talking Richard convinced Tancred that he had been duped by Philip; he swore renewed friendship with Tancred and, to seal the entente, gave him what purported to be Excalibur, King Arthur’s famous sword. Now convinced that he had been gulled by Philip, Tancred reciprocated by providing Richard with fifteen new galleys and four large transport ships. When Philip’s agents protested that Richard was just trying to find a way not to marry Alice, as he was pledged to, and that he, not Philip, was the arch-manipulator, Richard was able to produce as a kind of surprise witness Count Philip of Flanders, who had come on ahead by ship from Naples. The fact that Count Philip backed Richard’s version of events clinched matters for Tancred.
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So disgusted was Richard by Philip’s duplicity that when the French king came to meet him and Tancred at Taormina, Richard refused to see him and returned to Messina. Grudgingly, the next day he allowed the count of Flanders to act as mediator between them, and some sort of amity was patched up. Richard told Philip bluntly that marriage with Alice was out of the question as she had been his own father’s mistress and even borne him a son. He also offered to produce dozens of unimpeachable witnesses who could vouch for the truth of the accusation. That Richard was very angry about the entire Alice charade was clear from his explicit indictment of his father; as commentators have pointed out, to get out of the marriage all he had to show was the much easier-to-prove proposition that Alice had given birth to a child of which he was not the father.
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Evidently Philip already knew something of his sister’s liaison with Henry, or else he was simply not prepared for the shame and humiliation that would descend on Alice if a formal tribunal was called to establish the facts, for he quickly agreed to absolve Richard from his oath, salving his wounded pride by pocketing 10,000 marks in compensation. While they were in conference Richard and Philip also agreed to resolve all their outstanding territorial disputes over Gisors and the Norman Vexin (Richard to have it if he produced a male heir, otherwise it would revert to Philip). On the other boundary issues, a quid pro quo was hammered out: Richard was to have Cahors and the Quercy, while Philip got Issoudun, Gracy and Auvergne.
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But defeat over Alice was a bitter pill for Philip to swallow even with the cash payment. He made his feelings clear by sailing from Messina for Acre on 30 March, a matter of hours before Eleanor and Berengaria arrived from Reggio in Richard’s triumphant company.
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For Philip this was the last straw: he had been humiliated over galleys, banners, William de Barres and now Alice. He sailed to Outremer with a heavy, angry, brooding heart. In his mind his bitter enemy was no longer Saladin but Richard.
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