The Troubadour's Song Read online

  When Richard arrived in Marseilles there was still no sign of the English fleet, which was still trying to extricate itself from Lisbon. But he set off anyway in his own galley, Piombone, along the Riviera coast, hoping that the rest would overtake him by sailing directly between Corsica and Sardinia. He went briefly ashore again at Genoa, past the famous lighthouse, with the towns­people hanging carpets out of their windows above the port to welcome him. He had meetings with the local lord Grimaldo Grimaldi, whose family still rules Monaco to this day.* Then a quick visit to the Bank of St George, which was handling hismoney, and it was back on the voyage down the Italian coast towards Sicily, putting in at Pisa, but refusing to see the Pope, whom Richard disliked, and in Salerno to see the famous doctors about his recurrent shaking.

  It was a triumphal progress by a supremely confident monarch revelling in his own status as the hero of Christendom and the romantic successor of King Arthur. Perhaps it was to celebrate this apotheosis of Christian chivalry, perhaps it was to assuage the deprivations of the Saladin Tithe, but it was at this moment that the news filtered out that the monks of Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset had discovered the grave of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere.

  The story went back to the months of Richard's final showdown with his father, when a new abbot arrived at Glastonbury, which was then struggling to recover from a disastrous fire that had burned down their buildings five years earlier. He suggested that they act on royal advice given some years before to find out if the stories of the Welsh bards were true and that Arthur was really buried there. So as Richard was sailing down the Italian coast, they dug at the legendary spot between two ancient stone pyramids, and behind screens to keep out the public. Some way down they found an unusual cross with the inscription 'Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur, with Guenevere his second wife, in the Isle of Avalon'. By the time they had got sixteen feet down, they found an enormous hollowed oak coffin. At one end were the bones of a woman with her golden hair still attached. A monk grabbed at the tresses and they fell to dust in his hand. At the other end of the coffin was the skeleton of a gigantic man. The skull was so big that the eye sockets were almost the size of a palm. There were the marks of wounds all over the bones.* The news spread across Europe that the bones of King Arthur had been discovered. It was a tremendous omen: the very epitome of chivalry seemed to have risen from the dead to bless his heroic successor.

  *

  Richard's preliminary objective was Sicily and here he ran into difficulty in a typical fashion. Having landed quietly by himself and set off with just one knight towards the town of Gioja, he heard the cry of a hawk. Following it to the house of its owner, he found — to his great irritation — that the man was unwilling to part with the beautiful bird, despite (as Richard saw it) not being of sufficient rank to deserve it. Matters quickly got out of hand. Richard lost his temper, grabbed the hawk and prepared to leave the house. Having no idea who he was, the family refused to let him go. In the melee, one of them drew a knife and attacked. Richard responded by hitting him with the flat of his sword, and at this crucial moment it became clear that there was a flaw in the steel and the blade broke in half. He escaped by the skin of his teeth.

  Safely back on board his own ship the next morning, he arrived in the Straits of Messina to find that they were filled as far as the eye could see with French and English ships. But when Richard reached them, he found that the inevitable underlying tensions between the two armies were being exacerbated by the new ruler of the island. Tancred of Lecce had allowed Philip to find com­fortable lodgings in the city, but — following trouble with the townspeople — was refusing to let the English soldiers land.

  Sicily was always going to be a problem. For one thing, Richard knew that his formidable mother was on her way to meet him there, having travelled — at the age of sixty-nine — all the way to Navarre, in the north of what is now Spain, to fetch his bride, Berengaria. It was a marriage alliance negotiated in the utmost secrecy, but before any arrangements had been made to extricate himself from his original engagement to Philip's sister Alys. For another, Richard's sister Joanna had married William II of Sicily when she was eleven, but he had died without leaving an heir the previous year.* The Pope had been horrified by the prospect of the next in line, Constance of Sicily — married to Barbarossa's eldest son, Henry — uniting Sicily with the Holy Roman Empireon either side of his lands. He had therefore intrigued to hand the throne instead to Tancred, an illegitimate cousin of William's and also widely considered by contemporaries to look like a monkey. Richard was determined to retrieve his sister, now under house arrest, as well as her dowry.

  Growing tensions with the locals, and Tancred's failure to com­ply with his immediate demands — plus the discovery of a secret passage into the city — led to Richard's snap decision to take Messina. It was accomplished 'in the time it takes to say Matins', watched uncomfortably by Philip from his lodgings inside the walls. Tancred duly responded with apologies for their treatment, and handed over 40,000 ounces of gold from Joanna's original dowry. She herself followed a little later. She had been away since she was a child and was now twenty-five, beautiful and brilliant. Philip met her as well and was clearly taken with her, especially as he was now searching for an eligible new bride.

  Richard and Philip's agreement was that they would split the proceeds of the crusade between them equally. An embarrassed Philip now demanded half the city which had been taken under his very nose, but Richard gave it to the Templars and Hospitallers, and instead organized the building of a massive fortified wooden tower overlooking the city walls, known as Mategriffbn ('curb the Greeks').

  It had always been their plan to spend the winter in Sicily, making final preparations for sailing to Palestine. It was not con­sidered safe to cross the Mediterranean after the end of September. But it was a long, irritable autumn, culminating in Christmas dinner in Mategriffbn, to which Richard invited Philip. It was almost their last friendly meeting. After Christmas, the matter of Alys and Richard's marriage would simply wait no longer. In the early spring, he asked Philip, Count of Flanders — well known as intelligent and articulate — if he would mediate with the king of France.

  In the end, Philip Augustus had no choice but to accept what he was told. He had no reason to suppose that Richard was lying when he said that Alys had been his father's mistress, and in thosecircumstances it was impossible to insist that the marriage go ahead. But stiff conditions were attached (10,000 pounds of silver) and, with great irritation, Philip gathered his ships and set off towards Acre, smarting at what had been a humiliating rebuff. Carefully timed to avoid him, Eleanor of Aquitaine's galley then slipped into Reggio harbour in Sicily. She carried with her Berengaria of Navarre — said to be 'sensible rather than attractive' — whom Richard had chosen after meeting her at a tournament in Pamp­lona, and wooing her exhaustingly according to the rules of courtly love, possibly since the age of twenty. As such, she was the chivalric choice; but she was also the choice of a southern prince — the alliance with Navarre would secure the southern borders of Aquitaine.

  It was Lent and weddings were banned under ecclesiastical law, so Eleanor left immediately on the long journey home overland via Rome. While they were dismantling Mategriffbn, packing it in sections into the ships, Tancred took Richard to see Mount Etna and on an impulse showed him letters from Philip promising help if he rejected Richard's demands. Moved by this unexpected display of friendship, Richard experienced one of his episodes of impulsive generosity. He sealed a comprehensive alliance with Tancred there and then and agreed to marry Tancred's baby daugh­ter to his own heir, Geoffrey of Brittany's son Arthur. To seal their understanding, Richard presented Tancred with a sword he said was Excalibur, with the strong implication that it had been found in King Arthur's tomb in Glastonbury.

  The medieval intrigues of European diplomats were always complex. Richard probably congratulated himself that he had negotiated the potential pitfalls very skilfully, and in s
ome ways he had. But in twenty short months or so, he would have cause to realize that the seeds of his disastrous arrest had been sown in Sicily. It was clear, for one thing, that his relationship with Philip, and therefore the French, was firmly on a downward spiral — as Tancred's letters would have reminded him —just four years since they had been sharing a bed in Paris. But he should also have been concerned that he had allied himself with the illegitimate usurperof the throne of Sicily, when the rightful heirs — Barbarossa's son Henry of Hohenstaufen and his wife, Constance — were even then marching south to take it back.

  But as the English fleet finally set sail, in Easter week 1191, these concerns were probably disappearing from Richard's mind on the sea breeze. His high admiral Robert de Turnham, whose brother Stephen was also commanding ships, eased the 203 ships into six lines of galleys, with the big transports known as busses at the rear, and sailed them out of the straits and into the Adriatic. As darkness fell, a light from the mast of the king's ship guided the others through the night. But the very day they sailed, the diplomatic situation was twisting further. Pope Clement III died in Rome — another short-lived papal reign — and four days later the cardinals elected in his place the 85-year-old diplomat Giacinto Bobo, who actually had to be ordained in order to take up the position. In his younger days, the new Pope, Celestine III, had been a brilliant thinker, a defender of the great Abelard himself and a vigorous negotiator on behalf of the papacy. But the thrusting Bobo was now the frail and timid Celestine, and the papacy — the only means of controlling recalcitrant kings and princelings — was suddenly in weak hands.

  His first act was to crown Barbarossa's heir, Henry of Hohen­staufen — who had arrived with his army in Rome on the way south to invade Sicily — as the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. In a final demonstration of his own superiority to temporal power, the Pope horrified onlookers at the coronation by kicking the crown off the new emperor's head: it was his last burst of resistance against Henry's domination. Making her way through Rome at the same time going north, Eleanor also met the new Pope -whom she had trusted as a go-between with her husband and Thomas Becket — but studiously avoided the imperial couple. She needed papal support if she was going to control the different factions back in England. She would not have guessed that, in two years' time, she was going to need Celestine very badly indeed.

  *Even the future king and saint Louis IX was caught in this way a generation later. He stormed upstairs, grabbed the student responsible and gave him a scholarship. That's the kind of behaviour that deserves canonization.

  *In the days before printing, it took one man a year to produce a complete copy of the Bible.

  * If he finished his seven-year course, Blondel would have finally achieved his master's degree, after which he gave his specimen lecture, took his oath of obedience to his school, had a ring put on his finger to symbolize learning and was solemnly kissed by his examiners, whom he had to invite to a banquet.

  * There had been omens as far away as London, where there was a total eclipse of the moon as Saladin massed his troops on the Golan Heights.

  † The Second Crusade had not been a success. Eleanor of Aquitaine had been sent home in disgrace after rumours of an affair with her crusader uncle Raymond of Antioch.

  * Richard's generation of crusaders took chess sets with them to Palestine, though actually chess had been learned from the Arabs; shah mat (checkmate) is Persian for 'the king is dead'.

  *Grimaldi's younger son, Frederick, joined the crusade as master of Richard's crossbowmen.

  * The bones have been missing since the Reformation and the lead cross since the seventeenth century.

  * William's main claim to fame was his salacious habits with slave girls from the Barbary coast.

  4. Acre

  'Blondel de Nesle!' he exclaimed joyfully — 'welcome from Cyprus, my king of minstrels! — welcome to the King of England, who rates not his own dignity more highly than he does thine. I have been sick, man, and, by my soul, I believe it was for lack of thee; for, were I half way to the gate of heaven, methinks thy strains could call me back.'

  Richard greeting Blondel in Sir Walter Scott's novel,

  The Talisman, 1825

  'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.'

  Psalm 13

  Richard's Mediterranean voyage with his enormous fleet did not go according to plan. The ships were hit by an exceptional storm on their way east which sank twenty-four of them and scattered the others. The drowned body of the bearer of the Great Seal of England, Roger Malcael, was washed ashore on the coast of Cyprus, with the seal still safely around his neck. When the remains of the fleet took shelter in Rhodes harbour, it became clear that the galley carrying Berengaria and Joanna was missing. It had taken twenty years for Richard to finally find himself a wife, and — as well as the concerns he would have had for them — he undoubtedly cursed the thought that he was going to have to start all over again. But their ship turned out to be sheltering outside Limassol harbour, on the coast of Cyprus, an island that had been for five years under the iron grip of a junior member of the Byzantine royal house, Isaac Comnenus, who had tricked his way into controlling it as an independent state. Worse, he had also negotiated an agreementwith Saladin which, it was widely believed, involved drinking each other's blood.*

  Isaac knew precisely who was on board the ship. He refused them fresh water and prevented them from landing in preparation for taking them hostage. But he had reckoned without Richard, who descended on the island with a fury, stormed up the beach at Limassol and — in a daring night attack — narrowly missed capturing him. Isaac rapidly came to terms and then, just as rapidly, tore up the agreement. Once ashore, Richard also discovered a high-ranking delegation waiting for him from Acre, including Guy of Lusignan — the hapless king of Jerusalem — as well as Guy's brother and the now divorced Humphrey of Toron. They told him that Philip had arrived there three weeks before and was plotting to replace Guy as king with Conrad of Montferrat. Richard unwisely gave them his support.

  Then, lending part of the army to Guy to track down and capture Isaac, he finally married Berengaria on 12 May 1191, in the Chapel of St George in Limassol. She was crowned queen of England there by the Bishop of Evreux. Richard had no plans to invade Cyprus, but now he had successfully done so, it seemed a strategic masterstroke for the embattled crusaders. From the eastern shores of the island, you could see the mountains of Lebanon. This was at last an effective island base from which to keep the Christian outpost supplied.†

  Binding him in silver chains — in order to keep a promise not to clap him in irons — Richard put Isaac and his family aboard the fleet and set sail on the fast galley Trenchmere for the Holy Land. It was 5 June. Nearly a year had gone by since the joint army had set off from Lyons. Conrad refused to let them drop anchor at Tyre — an ominous sign — and on 8 June they finally landed outside Acre. Having led the way to Tyre, Richard was almost the last to arrive. But the embarrassing moment of the arrival of his new queen was generously glossed over by Philip (still nursing a griev­ance on behalf of his rejected sister), who embraced her and lifted her down from the boat himself.

  As he arrived, Richard would have seen tens of thousands of people spread before him — the besieged city and 'the flower of the world camped around it' — from Saladin's command in the distance on the Hill of the Carob Trees to the hundreds of crusader tents and the 300 catapults and siege engines surrounding the city walls. These had challenging names like the Bad Neighbour and God's Own Sling, and were soon to be joined by Mategriffbn and the others. With the constant thudding as the engines dispatched their loads, and the screams of the wounded, it was hard to sleep at night.* There also were the miners tunnelling under the founda­tions of the city walls. In the coloured banners around him, Richard would have recognized representatives of almost every aristocratic family in Western Europe, as well as those of bishops from all over the known world, and Templars under their great black and white Beau-Seant flag.


  What he could not have seen was the intricate web of rivalries that were tearing the crusader camp apart. The Pisans had tried and failed in a bold assault on the Tower of Flies, the stone sentinel at the harbour mouth, and were bitter about it and declared themselves for Richard. The Genoese had already declared allegi­ance to Philip and the French, and therefore Conrad. When he heard rumours that Philip was offering three gold pieces for any non-aligned soldiers to join him, Richard could not resist offering four. Richard himself was a magnificent sight, appearing dressed as he had been at his wedding, on a Spanish charger with golden spurs, a silver scabbard and a scarlet bonnet with birds and animalssewn on to it. 'When Richard came, the king of the French was extinguished and made nameless, even as the moon loses its light at sunrise,' wrote one chronicler. Philip clearly felt the same.

  Either through courtesy or lack of military confidence, Philip had delayed the final assault on Acre until Richard's arrival. But having once arrived at the objective, both kings fell ill from some kind of scurvy that made their hair and nails fall out. This was a peculiar torture for a hypochondriac like Philip Augustus, who stayed suffering in his tent. Richard had his sickbed carried near the city walls and occupied his time picking off Saracens with a crossbow, offering four gold pieces for any piece of city wall that could be removed. The extraordinary courage of the Muslim garrison, manning the walls night and day without sleep, was increasingly impressing the crusaders, but it was clear that the city must now fall. Saladin's faithful eunuch Karakush, commanding the garrison, was able to negotiate a surrender that would mean safe conduct for the garrison for a ransom of 200,000 gold pieces, the release of 1,500 Christian prisoners and the restoration of the Holy Cross. When a Muslim swimmer managed to leave the harbour and get through the Christian lines to tell Saladin what had been agreed, he was horrified and sat in front of his tent composing a message that forbade the garrison to submit on those terms.* But as he did so, he could see the crusader banners being unfurled on the city walls. It was too late. The treaty had been made in his name and he was a man of honour, so he would honour it if he could.