Richard & John: Kings at War (41 page)

What, then, were Richard’s options? The leisurely outward procession through France was not a feasible scenario, given King Philip’s hostility, but at first Richard thought he could land somewhere on the southern coast of France, probably Marseilles, and make his way to England overland. An overland route via Spain was also apparently suggested, but making for Spain on too southerly a track would mean risking interception by Barbary corsairs and, if they headed too far north, they risked running into naval forces commanded by Raymond of Toulouse. In any case Spain was now in turmoil. One of the many envoys who arrived in the Holy Land in 1191-92 informed him that his old enemy Raymond of Toulouse had fomented another rebellion in Aquitaine. Sancho of Navarre had immediately helped the seneschal of Gascony to suppress this uprising. Infuriated, Raymond intrigued with the king of Aragon and Catalonia to make common cause against Navarre. With Aragon in the enemy camp, most of the coast of Provence and northern Spain, including Barcelona, was closed to Richard. An educated man, Richard might have pondered the words of Virgil describing the Underworld: ‘The way down is easy . . . but to come back and regain the outer air, that is the task, that is the problem.’ Nevertheless, he was initially determined to land in Provence and fight his way through if necessary. At midnight on 9 October he sailed from Acre on a large buss capable of housing 1,000 men.
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Even a Mediterranean voyage in winter at this date was a terrifying ordeal for sailors. Navigators had not mastered the currents and were largely baffled by the unpredictable winds: sirocco, ghibli, mistral, bora. In Roman times sailors had been advised never to put to sea after 14 September, and even the daring Pisans in the Middle Ages thought 30 November the absolute limit for safe seafaring. The result was that in the winter the Mediterranean was more a dead sea than the Roman ‘lake’ of old. Richard’s buss, a two-masted ship with a 75-stong crew, was going in harm’s way, not really equipped for the Mediterranean winter at any level. Navigation was crude - latitude determined by an astrolabe but no means of fixing longitude - pilots steered mainly by the stars, and conditions on board were noisome: water brackish, latrines non-existent, food poor and hygiene woeful.
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Whether because the master of the buss was fearful of heading into the open sea or because Richard wanted to give a boost to Guy of Lusignan, the ship anchored in Limassol harbour three days after leaving Acre. Then, after another midnight start, it headed for Rhodes where, after a brief landfall, the voyagers threaded their way out through the Dodecanese islands, with Karpathos on the starboard, heading south-west for Crete. Once at Crete they hugged the southern coast before striking north along the west coast of Greece. Taking a risky track through the Zakynthos Channel between the mainland and Corfu, Richard landed on the island for the first time on an unknown date. Corfu was one of the great trading crossroads, a meeting point of merchants from Italy, the West, Byzantium and the Arab world. It was a hive of spies and secret agents, and it was here that Richard first heard of the meeting between Philip Augustus and Henry VI, and Henry’s threats to seize the English king. Both Philip and Leopold of Austria had returned from Palestine angry, vengeful and malicious towards Richard for the reasons already mentioned (see pp.176-77). Leopold added ‘spin’ to his grievances by alleging that Richard was anti-German and had insulted German soldiers by doubting their courage.
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The ostensible pretexts for hostility seem relatively trivial, except to men with a prickly sense of honour, but there was something else. Richard was exceptionally decisive and quick-thinking, and this quality comes across as arrogance to the ditherer and waverer, of whom Philip Augustus was a prime example. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, Leopold and Philip had defamed and traduced Richard all over Europe, and a new twist to the catalogue of calumniation was provided by the bishop of Beauvais, who returned from the crusade roundly asserting that the king of England had betrayed Philip to Saladin, had had Conrad of Montferrat murdered, and then capped his exploits by poisoning the duke of Burgundy.
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Richard’s options were narrowing. We cannot follow all the agonising and prevarication and the stressful conferences with his followers that must have taken place, but the king evidently decided to throw his enemies off the scent. He initially sailed north and came close enough to Brindisi to be spotted by watchers on the shore, as was his intention.
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He then changed direction, went round Cape St Maria di Leuca and crossed the Gulf of Taranto to Sicily, intending to pick up currents off the North African coast that would waft him north to Marseilles without the necessity of hugging either the Spanish or Italian coasts. The probability is that he put in to a port in southern Sicily to obtain further intelligence about political events in Europe. What he learned confirmed his worst fears. Philip and Raymond of Toulouse had barred the entire southern coast of France against him, and Emperor Henry had done the same in Italy. Genoa was firmly in the Franco-Imperial camp and the territory of Piedmont was controlled by the relatives of Conrad of Montferrat, who remained convinced that Richard had had Conrad murdered; to cap all, Richard’s erstwhile allies in Pisa had signed a treaty with Heny VI, pending his invasion of Sicily. Richard’s homeward journey looked more and more impossible. The only good news was that the Angevin empire itself was holding firm. His marriage to Berengaria had paid off, and Sancho of Navarre was at the very gates of Toulouse.
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Nevertheless, literally at sea and on a stormy winter Mediterranean, it was clear that Richard had to think quickly. He ordered the buss put about for Corfu, intending to make landfall in the Adriatic. After a dangerous voyage in and among the shifting currents of Sicily and southern Italy, the buss struggled to the top of the Ionian Sea and the most northerly of the Ionian islands. Fortune had been with them so far, and they had avoided storms. It is not clear whether 11 November, the date mentioned by the chroniclers, was the date of the first or second landing in Corfu (probably the latter).
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The second approach to Corfu involved yet another mysterious episode about which professional historians hesitate to express a definite opinion. According to some versions, Richard’s ship had an encounter with the notorious pirates in the Ionian Sea, who had already intercepted his mother during the Second Crusade, but Richard unfurled his colours and browbeat the sea rovers. Much more plausible is the more prosaic version that Richard, concerned about the weatherliness of his sea-battered buss, decided to switch ships and therefore chartered two privateer galleys and their crews for a fee of 200 marks.
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Perhaps the idea of the Lionheart hiring corsairs did not appeal to the romancers, so they had to turn it into a rewrite of Julius Caesar’s famous browbeating of the pirates. Richard’s chartering of the two galleys from irregulars was sensible, for it turned away a plethora of awkward questions and gave little away to Corfu’s espionage community. Most of Richard’s men were paid off or otherwise discharged at this point, and he went on with just twenty companions, divided into two groups on the two galleys, so that potential marauders would not know which vessel to target. Coggleshall gives the names of some of the happy few: William de l’Etang, Baldwin of Bethune, Philip of Poitou, Robert de Turnham (his admiral) and his chaplain Anselm. They were engaged in a desperate endeavour at two levels. In the first place, galleys could not survive in gales higher than Force Five, and they were already in the storm season.
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In the second, their objective seemed chimerical to all but the most optimistic. Richard had decided to head north to Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) but his ultimate destination was either the north-east of Germany (the lands of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion), or Saxony, where the duke was his nephew, or even Bohemia, whose ruler Ottokar had recently had a major falling-out with German emperor Henry VI - historians still dispute his real intention. The safest way to accomplish this was a roundabout route through the territories of Bela III of Hungary, a man whose feud with Leopold of Austria was legendary.
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So far Richard’s luck had held, for all the evidence suggests his enemies still thought he was heading for the southern coast of France.
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But the passage up the Adriatic proved stormy; under heavy battering from the feared Adriatic wind, the bora, the galleys could not even run into the safe anchorage of Ragusa harbour but were forced to put ashore at the island of Lokrum, about half a mile out to sea at the entrance to the harbour. Salvation from the storm had been a close-run thing, and there is a powerful tradition that Richard, momentarily despairing, promised to spend 100,000 ducats building a church if he was saved; and so, according to the story, he became the founder of the cathedral of Ragusa.
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Proceeding up the coast past Pola and Zara early in December, he ran into another storm, which drove the galleys ashore somewhere between Aquileia and Venice. The sources speak of a landing in a deserted area of swamps and forests, maybe somewhere in the estuary of the Tagliamento.
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Longhaired, bearded, in need of clothes that would make them inconspicuous, the crusaders halted to take stock. Richard decided to press on incognito, having no confidence that anyone in these parts would give him a safe-conduct, taking with him only a handful of handpicked comrades: Baldwin of Bethune, William de l’Etang, Philip of Poitou and the chaplain Anselm being the most notable. It was bad luck that he had landed where he did, for this area was the domain of Meinhard II of Gorz (Gorizia), who represented double jeopardy - as a close ally and loyal subject of the German emperor and also the nephew of Conrad of Montferrat. Richard decided that his original idea of travelling disguised as a Templar was not such a good one. The story now would be that he and his party were pilgrims returning from Palestine and that Richard was a wealthy merchant named Hugo.
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There had to be some covering fiction, for this was not an era in which a traveller could proceed in privacy; at every town and castle you were expected to reveal your identity, your destination and the purpose of your travels.

The wayfarers headed north-east towards Gorizia and Hungary. The first day on the road gave them a taste of the travails to come, for medieval travel was no affair of the faint-hearted, being more the stuff of Grimm’s fairy stories than feudal reality; voyagers could expect to run risks from brigands and wild animals, quite apart from the obstacles of nature (winds, mountains and flood) and the hardships of a bitter winter. Few roads or bridges had been constructed since Roman times and, by common consent, those undertaking unnecessary journeys in the Middle Ages were on a fool’s errand.
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At the end of the first day on the road the ‘pilgrims’ came to Gorizia, a crossroads for the cultures of Italy, Germany and Slovenia. Richard asked the town authorities for safe passage, a guide and the Truce of God for crusaders, but he was no actor and foolishly sent a messenger ahead with a rich ruby ring as token of his good faith - an appropriate gesture for a great king but scarcely for a money-grubbing Hugo. Engelbert III, lord of Gorizia, immediately became suspicious at such munificence and questioned the envoy closely. At the end of the interview he told him he knew full well, from all kinds of circumstantial evidence, that ‘Hugo’ was Richard the Lionheart. In awe of the great king or secretly sympathetic to his plight, he returned the ring and sent a warning to the Lionheart to be on his way with all speed. When this was reported to him Richard grew alarmed, concluded Hungary was beyond his reach and set his course instead for Bohemia, where he knew Duke Ottakar was locked in a bitter dispute with the emperor.
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The new itinerary would involve crossing the mountains to Vienna and thence traversing the Danube to Moravia (ruled by Ottakar’s brother Ladislaw), then Bohemia itself, Saxony and home to England.

Accordingly Richard and his companions set off north-west towards Udine. Engelbert, meanwhile, playing a double game, sent a messenger to his brother-in-law Meinhard, the emperor’s ally and bearing the title of hereditary ‘Advocate’ of Aquileia, to tell him that Richard was at large in his domains. Meinhard sent his aide Roger of Argentan to search the inns and taverns of Udine for pilgrims. It was a simple matter for Roger to run such conspicuous travellers to earth, but Meinhard had made a bad mistake in his choice of henchman. Roger was a Norman with divided loyalties. He confronted Richard and forced him to admit who he was, but then let him go, informing Meinhard that he could find no one answering the description of the wanted pilgrims. Meinhard found this the tallest of tall stories and in a fury sent out a fresh search party, but by the time they reached Udine the birds had flown.
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It must be admitted that no historian has ever been able to pin down the precise sequence of events in Udine. It seems that, even with Roger of Argentan’s blessing, the travellers had a hard time of it and were set upon twice by predatory locals, who noticed the contradiction between the apparel of the ‘pilgrims’ (they were travelling in disguise) and their lavish and conspicuous expenditure; it is not an easy thing for a prince to play the pauper. It is not clear whether the ‘killed and wounded’ referred to in some of the sources refers to the assaults here or the later one at Friesach.
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