Richard & John: Kings at War (29 page)

The tireless Eleanor of Aquitaine spent just three days at Messina before starting back on the long journey to Normandy. She left Berengaria with Richard’s sister Joan, sailed to Salerno and thence went up to Rome to attend the new pope’s consecration.
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Richard was left to ponder his choice of wife. Politically, the match made sense, but was there any more to it than that, and should we discount the story that long ago, when count of Poitou, Richard had fallen in love with her and wanted her as his wife?
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It is a moral certainty that she was a virgin, so there would be no Alice-style distaste this time on the part of the groom. William of Newburgh said she was both prudent and beautiful, though Richard of Devizes (who never saw her) thought she was more prudent than beautiful. The best eyewitness report is from Ambroise who said: ‘She was a wise maiden, a fine lady, both noble and beautiful, with no falseness or treachery in her.’
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Richard was keen to celebrate the wedding at once, but Church protocol forbade this as it was still Lent; whether he and Berengaria ‘anticipated’ marriage must be left in the realm of speculation. But the arrival of Berengaria concomitant with that of spring meant there was no further reason to remain in Sicily. The fleet was drawn up and loaded with provisions. The castle of Mategrifon was dismantled and stowed away in sections, ready for reassembly in the Holy Land. More than 200 ships, groaning with men, horses, armour, siege engines, food and fodder, stood away for the east on 10 April.
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For once medieval and modern authorities are in rough agreement on numbers. Richard of Devizes’s meticulous head count gives us 24 busses, 39 galleys and 156 other ships (219 in all) which on the usual basis of ships’ capacity would provide a grand total of 17,000 soldiers and seamen, a massive force by the standards of the day and possibly the largest army any king of England had ever commanded to that date.
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Twelfth-century navigators were terrified of the open sea and liked to hug coastlines as far as possible. Dependent solely on the wind, they sailed the Mediterranean at a speed of little more than three knots - no more than walking pace - and even with the most favourable winds could not hope to complete the voyage from Marseilles to Acre in less than fifteen days.
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It is therefore not entirely surprising that Richard’s fleet took twelve days to reach Rhodes from Sicily. On the third day out, Good Friday 12 April, a gale hit the armada and scattered the ships, so that at the first staging point, Crete, on 17 April, no less than twenty-five ships were missing, including the one bearing Joan and Berengaria. The gales had not claimed them, merely pushed them ahead of the body of the fleet, so that by 24 April this detached flotilla was off the coast of southern Cyprus, near Limassol. Here the first casualties were sustained, for three ships were wrecked and their cargoes plundered. A number of soldiers and sailors drowned when the vessels ran aground, including Roger Macael, the king’s vice-chancellor, who was carrying the great seal; this was recovered when Macael’s body was washed ashore with the seal on a chain around his neck.
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When the half-drowned survivors scrambled ashore, they were at once arrested, fleeced of their money and thrown in prison. A landing party attacked the fort where the imprisoned crusaders were held, which enabled the prisoners to sortie and join their comrades; together they then retreated to the ships standing offshore, including the vessel with Joan and Berengaria aboard. It took Richard another five days to complete the voyage from Rhodes to Cyprus, but, once arrived, he quickly secured a beachhead and drove the Cypriot defenders back. Richard had been enraged by his reception in Cyprus, and now announced that he intended to punish the island’s ‘tyrant’ Isaac Comnenus, self-styled ‘emperor’.
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The politics of Cyprus at this juncture were just as complex as Sicily’s. Formerly the Byzantine governor of Cilicia, Isaac Ducas Comnenus had, by 1184, gained control of Cyprus in murky circumstances on which historians cannot agree. He immediately rebelled against the new emperor in Byzantium (Andronicus I), declared him a usurper and took the title of emperor on the grounds that he alone was the legitimate successor and all other claimants to the Byzantine throne merely usurpers.
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He survived an attempt by yet another new emperor (for Andronicus lasted just two years) to overthrow him in 1186 but by the time of Richard’s arrival was in a precarious position, since the death of his ally William II of Sicily in 1189 had left him friendless. Isaac’s aggressive posture towards a huge crusader army seems the height of folly, unless his spies had already warned him that Richard intended to conquer the island. The probability is that Richard had this in mind all along. There are many circumstantial pointers in this direction: the fact that Joan and Berengaria and the others remained cruising off Cyprus while Richard was in Rhodes; the fact that Guy of Lusignan, his brother Geoffrey, Bohemond of Antioch and Raymond of Tripoli all arrived at Limassol on 11 May and swore fealty to Richard; Ambroise’s cryptic statement, explaining Richard’s tardiness in proceeding to Acre, ‘He already had another plan in mind’; most of all, the obvious strategic imperative of securing the long supply lines from southern Italy to Outremer via Cyprus. Richard had a keen sense of logistics, and it seemed obvious to him that to have Cyprus in crusader hands simply reinforced the position of the struggling kingdom of Jerusalem.
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Isaac Comnenus’s seemingly mindless aggression may simply have been a reflex action to threat. From his point of view, the landing of crusaders without permission was an act of war, and their standing off the coast after an initial repulse spelled just one thing: they were awaiting the arrival of the main force.

When Richard arrived from Rhodes on 6 May, he was enraged to discover that Isaac had stripped Limassol bare of anything wooden and constructed beach defences that were partly improvised timber castles and partly great blocks of stone - he had to oppose the crusaders on the beach, since Limassol and all other Cypriot towns were unwalled. Richard went through the pacific motions, demanding restitution and compensation for the goods seized from the wrecked vessels, but these demands were predictably rejected.
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He then bruited through the army full details of Isaac’s treacherous behaviour, including an alleged attempt to lure Joan and Berengaria ashore to captivity by false, forked-tongue words and, far worse, his alliance with Saladin, allegedly sealed in a ceremony of blood-brotherhood when they had actually drunk each other’s gore. Ambroise stated that Isaac was more treacherous and evil than Judas, or Ganelon, who had betrayed Roland in the famous troubadour lay
Chanson de Roland
.
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Having attended to morale, Richard then implemented the more difficult task of an amphibious landing on a defended beach, but his soldierly touch was as sure as ever. Showers of arrows from crossbowmen in the advancing landing craft forced the Cypriot defenders back from the shore, enabling Richard’s commandos to wade through shallow water and then disperse the enemy by a well-timed charge up the beach. We even learn from Ambroise the names of some of the knights who distinguished themselves in this action, among them Roger of Harcourt from Brionne (Eure) and William of Bois-Normand, a Norman from Evreux.
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The Greek and Armenian defenders melted away into the hills, leaving the crusaders to pillage Limassol, now virtually a ghost town after the inhabitants had abandoned it. Richard followed up his victory on the beaches with another next day, allegedly at Kolossi.
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With local numerical superiority, Isaac was confident Richard would not immediately attack but he did so. The sources do not agree on the details, but it seems that the assault came as a surprise, that Isaac was nearly captured, and that the key to the second victory was the destriers. Isaac had known about the famed crusader warhorses but had either assumed it was too difficult to bring them from Sicily or, at worst, thought they needed to be fed and exercised before being used in battle. Ambroise’s explanation is that Richard spent the night after the beachhead battle exercising his horses so that he could use them next day as a shock weapon.
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Isaac was vanquished but still not ready to concede total defeat. There was a short lull in the fighting, and in this interlude Richard turned his attention to two pressing non-military matters. In the first place, he finally married Berengaria, in a ceremony in Limassol performed by Nicholas, bishop of Le Mans. Then, in a separate ceremony, Berengaria was crowned queen of England by John, bishop of Evreux; other ecclesiastical dignitaries attended both events. Richard assigned to his queen as dower full rights in all territory in Gascony south of the River Garonne.
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Some observers queried the oddity of a Norman bishop crowning a woman queen of England in Cyprus, but there was method in Richard’s eccentricity, since he wanted to arrive at Acre unencumbered by the possible embarrassment involved in an Outremer wedding with a peevish Philip of France hovering around like the proverbial spectre at the feast. Much more tricky was the issue involving Guy of Lusignan. It will be recalled that Saladin released Guy on condition he would no longer fight, but that Guy broke that pledge at the prompting of his clergy. Guy’s daring, and even reckless, attack on Acre, which by now had petered out into stalemate after eighteen months of siege, had been an attempt to regain credibility as king of Jerusalem but he was under heavy challenge from the new Christian ‘hero’ Conrad of Montferrat. Guy of Lusignan’s claim to be king had always been underpinned by his marriage to Sibylla, the acknowledged heiress of the kingdom, but in 1190 she and her two daughters died, victims of the plague that intermittently assailed Guy’s camp. Conrad seized his chance to usurp the title and forced a marriage on Sibylla’s younger sister Isabella. It was a classic case of duress: Conrad simply abducted the trembling woman and browbeat her to his will in a ‘wedding’ on 24 November 1190. But marriage by rapine was not even the worst of it, for Conrad was already married, bigamously, to Italian and Greek spouses, while Isabella was still married to Humphrey of Toron, who was still fuming impotently in the encampment at Acre. Moreover, it was later established by canon law that Conrad and Isabella constituted an incestuous coupling, because Isabella’s sister had once been married to Conrad’s brother, and no papal authority gave credence to the validity of Conrad’s forced marriage to Isabella. He had found a couple of venal and corrupt churchmen to perform the ceremony, but a papal commission concluded that her marriage to Humphrey was never dissolved.
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The situation was black farce of the worst sort, particularly serious among men who claimed to be fighting for God and spiritual values and particularly dangerous at this juncture, since the Franks could scarcely afford a civil war when they were supposed to be warring against Saladin. A ‘gentleman’s agreement’ was reached that the decision on who was truly king of Jerusalem should await the coming of the kings of England and France. But when Philip arrived at Acre on 20 April he immediately jumped the gun and recognised Conrad as king. In response Guy of Lusignan, his brother Geoffrey and the wronged husband Humphrey of Toron, together with Raymond of Tripoli and Bohemond of Antioch, set sail for Cyprus and arrived in Limassol the day before Richard’s marriage to Berengaria.
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Since the Lusignan sept were vassals of Richard as duke of Aquitaine, even though they (and especially Geoffrey) had caused him so much trouble in the past, he was bound to take their side in the dispute. Richard was also angered by Philip’s attempt to steal a march on him by his unilateral declaration at Acre. Philip’s action was controversial, provocative and divisive, but the runes on this could have been read by a perceptive observer, since it was his cousin the bishop of Beauvais who had been instrumental in arranging the phoney marriage between Conrad and Isabella. Philip proved himself a master of tact-lessness by following up this insulting behaviour with a request that Richard make all haste to Acre. The envoy he sent with this request was none other than the corrupt bishop of Beauvais, accompanied by Dreux of Mello, soon to be Philip’s choice as constable of France.
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Richard pointedly treated the ambassador and his message with contempt, there were angry words spoken and Richard declared himself insulted; but he announced that he would proceed to Acre only when he had finally settled accounts with Isaac, and when he had secured Cyprus as a reliable provisioner for the crusaders in the Holy Land.
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For by now warfare had flared up again. The duplicitous Isaac agreed to Richard’s peace terms and swore allegiance to him, thus gaining himself the time to gauge Richard’s strength; maybe he thought the crusaders would at once respond to Philip’s plea to proceed to Acre. But the terms he swore to were harsh: 20,000 marks compensation with an immediate down payment of 3,500 acres, his daughter to be at Richard’s disposition to marry off as he saw fit, the surrender of his castles, and five hundred mounted men to serve in Palestine.
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On second thoughts, he found them unacceptable and by now he had received envoys from Conrad of Montferrat asking him to delay Richard in Cyprus as long as possible. At any rate he suddenly stole away by night to Famagusta. This played into Richard’s hands, as he had been hoping for a pretext to conquer the entire island. He divided his army, sending half with Guy of Lusignan to pursue Isaac while the other half he sent on a circumnavigation of the island, capturing towns and fortresses as it went. Intending to link up with Guy at Nicosia, Richard marched from Famagusta, and easily brushed aside an ambush Isaac had prepared at Tremetousha. Angry that the craven Isaac had not stayed to try matters with him in single combat, as he had offered, Richard took his anger out on the burghers of Nicosia and had their beards shaved. In the Byzantine culture of the twelfth century, this assault on the ultimate symbol of masculinity and power was the final insult. Isaac retaliated by blinding or mutilating Frankish prisoners or any of his own side that had offended him.
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But the fall of Nicosia swung many Cypriots over to Richard’s side, and it soon became apparent that Isaac was deeply unpopular, that the people had been merely waiting their chance to display their disaffection.