The Troubadour's Song Read online

  It was no easy life, but we can imagine that Blondel excited interest on his rare visits home to Nesle, a young man of a noble family who gave it all up for the life of a scholar. Perhaps his father complained about the cost. Or perhaps, as in one contemporary story, he blinded his family with logic: a son, sent to university in Paris at great expense, persuades his father through logic that the six eggs on the table are in fact twelve; 'Well, you won't mind if I eat six,' says his father, gobbling them down and leaving the table bare.

  It was in Paris that Blondel achieved enough fame as a musician to have his music performed at the coronation of the new French king in 1179 — or at least to borrow the music for himself — andhere that it is most likely he and Richard met.* There are other times and places where this was possible. Richard and his brothers were in Reims Cathedral for the coronation, and they may have crossed each other's paths in Arras or at the great meeting of troubadours organized by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in Mainz. They may even have met in Poitiers. History does not tell us. We also know that troubadours and trouvères met and mixed at the courts of Richard's half-sister Marie of Champagne and his brother Geoffrey of Brittany. But if Blondel was still moving in court circles by 1187, when Richard came to Paris to seek Philip's support against his father, they may well have met to share their interest in music. Legend says that Richard asked Blondel to be his tutor. Everything we know about Richard suggests that, how­ever tense the political situation, he would have had moments of luxury, amusement and music.

  The French king was nearly eight years younger than Richard, but had inherited his throne nearly a decade before. Richard and Philip were also completely unalike. Where Richard was fearless, Philip was physically nervous, refusing to ride on all but the most placid of horses. Where Richard had genuinely poor health but good spirits, Philip was a hypochondriac with little or no sense of humour, and a puritanical streak. He once had some knights dunked in the river for swearing during a gambling game, while Richard liberally decorated his conversation with his favourite oath, 'By the legs of God!' Where Richard was resplendent, Philip was prematurely balding, his clothes were slightly out of shape and he never combed his hair. Where Richard was multilingual, Philip could not under­stand Latin — which made him almost illiterate, though he was him­self clearly highly intelligent and surrounded himself with educated advisers. On the other hand, where Richard was impetuous, Philip was patient and never lost sight of his basic goal.

  Philip would chew on hazel twigs at the Great Council of France, taking no part in the discussions, wondering whether it had been given to him to make France great again. During one of these reveries, he realized the solution: he had to destroy the Angevin empire. Through the early summer of 1187, there had been simmering tensions between the forces of Philip Augustus and Henry II, with Richard exhaustingly negotiating between them to avoid the dangers of a pitched battle. So when, shortly afterwards, the heir to that Angevin empire rode into Paris seeking his support, Philip must have regarded it as a heaven-sent oppor­tunity. They quickly became extremely close friends. 'Philip so honoured him that every day they ate at the same table, shared the same dish and at night the bed did not separate them,' wrote the chronicler Roger of Howden. 'And the King of France loved him as his own soul; and they loved each other so much that the King of England was absolutely astonished at the passionate love between them and marvelled at it.'

  So have people ever since. Many people shared beds in those days, so this kind of behaviour did not in itself carry any implica­tions of sexual intimacy, but it has fuelled the controversy over the past generation about whether Richard was bisexual, and — as we have seen — there is other evidence that he may have been, though there is no similar evidence about Philip. What is more interesting is the chronicler's use of the word vehementem in his account. It implied passion beyond mere friendship, and it is this that Henry was unnerved by. Perhaps it also explains why the relationship, physical or not, turned within the decade into the most intense dislike. Either way, we can be certain that the two became ex­tremely fond of each other during Richard's visit, though it is impossible to know how much this friendship was fuelled on Philip's side by its strategic advantages. We also know that, as Philip and Richard shared their bed in Paris, far-off events in Palestine were gathering force in a shape that would change all their lives.

  *

  Four months after Richard arrived in Paris, the news began filtering through of a catastrophic defeat for the Christian forces in Palestine. On 3 July 1187, at the Battle of the Horns of Hattin — the legendary site of the Sermon on the Mount — an army led by the brilliant Kurdish tactician Saladin completely routed the Christian army of King Guy of Jerusalem. The captured Knights Templar and Hospitaller (the soldier-monks who had taken oaths to protect the crusader states) were all beheaded, the surviving ordinary Christian soldiers sold into slavery and the city of Jerusalem fell once more into Muslim hands.*

  The crusades have become a byword for medieval brutality. But at the time, the tiny outpost in the Middle East was the jewel in the crown of Christendom, and the crusaders had ruled over Jerusalem and the Christian holy places for the past century. Their leading figures had also been aware for some years that a crisis was approaching. There was a constant struggle to attract the kind of Christian population there that could defend their outpost effec­tively, rather than relying on the brief periods of official crusades. While Christian soldiers of all classes and conditions flocked to the Holy Land for the First and Second Crusades, they tended not to stay. Once their crusader oaths had been fulfilled — usually by a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem — most of the foot soldiers trudged back to their families.† They took with them tales of untold luxuries, of exotic fruits and perhaps the first stories of chivalric love, borrowed from the Arabs and then distilled into the songs of the troubadours. But few stayed to defend the conquests afterwards.

  The land of Outremer, as they called it, was anyway an un­healthy place to live for Western Europeans. Few of the crusader kings of Jerusalem lived beyond the age of forty. King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem was no exception: he had leprosy and, by 1184, knewhe was dying. It was then that he sent a desperate appeal to Europe via Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and the grand masters of the Templars and Hospitallers. The Master of the Temple died on the journey, but the other two met the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in Verona. They finally caught up with Richard's father, Henry II, at Reading, and on their knees they begged him to return with them to be the next king of Jerusalem. It was a tempting offer for an ageing king, and though his favourite son, John, begged to be allowed to go instead, Henry refused. But he promised that if he could sort out his relationship with Philip Augustus he would lead a crusade. They just needed to give him a little time.

  But time was not on the side of the small crusader outpost. Baldwin died in 1186 at the age of only twenty-seven, and his young nephew, Baldwin V, died early the following year. At the same time, a brilliant Muslim leader was emerging who was, for the first time, able to unite the Arab world behind him against the crusaders. Al-Malik al-Nasir Saleh ed-Din Yusuf — known to history as Saladin — came from a family of Kurdish army officers in the household of Nur ed-Din, the dominant ruler in the Arab world. When he was still in his twenties, and because Nur ed-Din wanted a compliant vassal, Saladin succeeded his uncle as vizier of Egypt. When Nur ed-Din died in 1174, he married his widow and seized the empire. At the age of thirty-eight, he had power in both Damascus and Cairo, north and south of the crusader states. He was slight, modest and pious, holding on to his position by sheer strategic flair, generosity and honesty, believing that his great ambition — to drive the Christians from the East — demanded moral as well as military leadership.

  The other factor in the coining Christian defeat was the hope­lessly incompetent leadership of Baldwin's successor as king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan. Guy was charming and devastatingly handsome, but tended to agree with whoe
ver he had last listened to and, finally and fatally, agreed with the hawkish Templars and Hospitallers, who urged action at precisely the wrong moment. How did a man unrelated to the Jerusalem royal house — who hadbeen exiled from his native Poitou by Eleanor of Aquitaine after an abortive youthful attempt to take her hostage — end up as king? The answer was that heat and disease had done for all the likely male heirs to the throne, which meant that — in practice — the crown would go to the husband of the next woman in line. When Princess Sibylla, Baldwin IV's widowed sister, seemed determined to marry Guy, there was futile horror among the Christian aristocrats at their marriage and his subsequent coronation.

  So it was that, when it really mattered, the forces of Christian Outremer were led into a disastrous battle against the brilliant Saladin by a man who looked attractive but whom they dared not trust and could not like. The Battle of the Horns of Hattin destroyed the fighting strength of the crusader states and led directly to the surrender of most of Outremer, except Antioch, Tripoli and the coastal port of Tyre. This caused the most profound crisis for the beleaguered Christians, east and west, but especially in Christian Palestine. This was not simply because everything they had fought for was in jeopardy; it was also that thousands of fresh crusader zealots from Western Europe began arriving to help them. And while this was welcome to the desperate crusader leaders, they had developed a way of life very different from that of their relatives back home in France or England, learning to coexist with the Arabs, even breeding a new class of half-European descendants — the poulains or 'kids', as they called themselves. Often they saw themselves as Galilean or Palestinian, rather than European. They regarded the newcomers, with their beards and religious fervour — not to mention their Western smell — with some distaste. The new crusaders, on the other hand, took one look at the permanent inhabitants of the Outremer princedoms, with their turbans, long hair, clean-shaven chins, spiced baths, silks and soft slippers, and pronounced them corrupt.

  Until Hattin, Outremer had provided a reasonable life. The crusaders who stayed on had summer retreats in the hills for the hottest weather. In Antioch, they even had a sewerage system and running water to their houses. They had borrowed liberally from Arab culture, which was far more advanced at this stage than thatof Western Europe.* But it was a way of life that depended on living alongside the Muslim world, making basic agreements with them and keeping them, and this was a shocking idea for the fanatical newcomers. Both the disaster of the battle and the shock of disapproving new crusaders challenged the century-old Christian colonies.

  Immediately after Hattin, it was all the inhabitants of Outremer could do to survive. They remembered the 40,000 Muslims who had died when they stormed Jerusalem a century before. The city's Christian inhabitants now forced their daughters to shave their heads in penance. Some took cold baths on Calvary hill, but they could not stave off the inevitable. On 2 October, three months after the battle, Saladin marched into the city. However, to the intense relief of the Christian population, he refrained from mass­acring them. He took them into captivity instead and gave them the chance to buy their way out. The 30,000 bezants put into the treasuries of the Templars and Hospitallers by Henry II as part of his penance for the death of Thomas Becket were used to free 7,000 of them. Meanwhile, Josias, Archbishop of Tyre, set off in a black galley with black sails to carry the awful news to Rome, which he reached on 20 October. Urban III, Pope for under three years, died of grief when he heard. To him and those like him across Western Europe, the Christian hegemony over the Holy Land was a reward for righteousness, a blessing for which they seemed no longer to be worthy.

  His successor, Gregory VIII, proclaimed a new crusade, urging Christians to redouble their fervour — fasting completely on Fridays for five years, and abstaining from meat on Wednesdays and Satur­days too. But the enormous effort — either of making the procla­mations or of fasting — was too much for him as well and he died just fifty-seven days later. By then, Josias was crossing the Alps, on his way to see the kings of France and England.

  *

  The military disaster in Outremer would have been complete except for the efforts of a Western aristocrat on the run from his crimes. Conrad of Montferrat was accused of murder, carried out in Constantinople, as a result of which he had decided to disappear quietly on pilgrimage for a while. Completely unaware of the battle or its aftermath, this hard-bitten middle-aged warrior from northern Italy sailed innocently into the port at Acre a few days after its capture. He was familiar with its busy harbour, loaded with silks, dyes and spices bound for Europe, and was suspicious when the usual bell that heralded every ship's arrival failed to ring. When a Muslim official came alongside, he pretended to be a merchant and — horrified at the news — set sail at once for Tyre, a little up the coast. Saladin had been quietly negotiating the surren­der of Tyre, which is why he had failed to press his siege of the city to a military conclusion. But Conrad's arrival there changed the situation completely, and he was asked to take over the defence of the city.

  It happened that Saladin had Conrad's elderly father in custody — he had most of the leading aristocrats of Outremer under lock and key — and he now paraded him in front of the walls and threatened to kill him unless the city surrendered. The old Marquis shouted at his son to do no such thing and, just to make the point, Conrad fired at his father from the walls with a crossbow. Saladin withdrew in awe at such cold-heartedness, but — in a typical piece of humanity — he spared the father anyway.

  Much to the horror of his own hawks, Saladin also chose this moment to release King Guy, shrewdly realizing that his presence would cause more dissension among his opponents than his con­tinued detention. He was absolutely right. When Guy arrived at Tyre to take command, Conrad ushered him out, explaining, 'I am only the lieutenant of the kings beyond the seas, and they have not authorized me to give the city up to you.'

  What could he do, this landless king denied access to his only remaining city and left outside on the porch? He had of course sworn to Saladin not to attack him as a condition of his release, but since this oath had been made under duress it was easy to finda senior churchman to release him from it. There was little choice before him, but he chose to make one of the few dramatically courageous gestures of his life and it actually worked. With his few followers, he marched south to the port of Acre and laid siege to it. In military terms, taking his small force through enemy territory looked insane. His first attempt to scale the walls failed and it was clear that he could not seriously take the city by himself, but by occupying the narrow strip that connected Acre with the mainland — known as the hill of Toron, three-quarters of a mile to the east — he could divide the Muslim garrison from its sources of supply. He could then starve them into submission, supported by a sea blockade organized by the Pisan fleet, while he waited for the help from the West that he knew was bound to come if he could just hold on.

  It was a desperate gamble, but it paid off. Saladin's failure to capture Tyre — which seemed such a small mistake at the time -now proved crucial. And try as they might, the Muslim troops could not dislodge Guy's men. Slowly, small parties of reinforce­ments began arriving, among them groups of enthusiasts too impatient for the Western monarchs to organize a rescuing crusade. One of these was Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, leading a small contingent from England. He followed a group of French counts and other aristocrats who had arrived in the summer of 1190, under the leadership of one of Europe's most eligible bach­elors, Henry of Champagne, the son of Marie of Champagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine's daughter and co-conspirator in the Courts of Love.

  Even so, perched on his narrow promontory, all was not going well for Guy of Lusignan. For one thing, food was beginning to run short in his crusader encampment. Eggs now cost a silver penny each, and a sack of corn fetched 100 gold pieces. Each day there was the unedifying spectacle of his troops fighting over pieces of bread. There was a serious danger that the besiegers might starve before the besieged.
This was all the more likely since it was clear that Muslim ships were managing to run the crusader blockade, slipping through by shaving off their beards and wearing Westernclothes — some of them even putting pigs on deck to disguise themselves — and bringing the desperately needed supplies quietly into Acre harbour in the early hours of the morning.

  Worse, Guy's wife, Sibylla — whose claim to the throne under­pinned his own — died in the summer of 1190 in one of the endless epidemics that swept through his camp, together with their two daughters. There were already open discussions about whether he was fit to be king. Worse still, in the relative safety of Tyre, Conrad was buttressing his own claim. The next in line after Sibylla was the attractive eighteen-year-old Isabella, the younger daughter of Baldwin's predecessor, King Amalric I. There was a slight impedi­ment here in that Isabella was already married — to the scholastic, beautiful and clean-shaven Humphrey of Toron, one of the few leading Outremer aristocrats who could also speak fluent Arabic. Humphrey was regarded as slightly effeminate, but he was also one of the only people who had ever been kind to her and she loved him.

  But these were desperate times and many of the leading figures of the kingdom were determined to appoint a leader they had more faith in than Guy. It was also dawning on a horrified Humph­rey that there was a chance he was next in line to the throne, a post for which he felt himself ill-suited. To the rage of his wife, he escaped Tyre with her and made his way south to join Guy's party outside the gates of Acre. From there, Isabella was abducted from her tent by Conrad's supporters and dragged in front of her mother, who set about persuading her that her marriage was invalid.