The first phase of the contest between Richard and Philip comes as a welcome interlude in the tale of border disputes and family rivalries which make up the greater part of the tangled story of Philip’s dealings with the Norman empire. It takes us over the sea to the fair land of Sicily and on to the very gates of the Holy City. In 1187 the capture of Jerusalem had crowned the long efforts of the great Saladin, and where a century before Christian knights had ridden “up to their bridles” in the blood of the slaughtered Moslem, a procession of knights and priests and poorer folk passed out of the gate of David and left the Holy Sepulchre to the infidel. To the Saracens a certain sign that they were the only people “whose doctrine was agreeable to God,” the fall of Jerusalem killed the aged Pope, plunged Europe into prayer and fasting, and brought on the Third Crusade, under the leadership of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip of France, and Richard of England. Richard, then merely count of Poitou, was the first western prince to take the cross in this holy war; his father and Philip soon sealed their crusading vows with a public reconciliation under a great elm on the borders of Normandy and France, and the chroniclers tell us that every man made peace with his neighbor, thinking no more of tournaments and fine raiment, the lust of the flesh and the pride of the eye, but only of the recovery of the Holy City. Such great waves of renunciation and religious enthusiasm are peculiarly characteristic of the Middle Ages, but their force was soon spent. Then, as in other times, there were few who could live as on a mountain-top. In spite of all that the church could do, Henry and Philip soon came to open war, and the cause of Jerusalem was swallowed up in a struggle for the Loire and for Aquitanian fortresses. Richard, as we have seen, was a central point in these conflicts, and his accession to the throne simply continued the struggle in another form.
Nevertheless a peace was patched up, and the unwilling Philip was unable to hold aloof from the crusade which fired the military ardor of his chief vassal and rival. Large sums of money were raised by every means, and the two kings made an agreement to divide equally all the spoil of their expedition. They also arranged to go by sea to the East after they had assembled their ships and followers at Messina, thus avoiding the usual complications with the Eastern Empire and the fatal march through the barren and hostile interior of Asia Minor which now claimed another victim in the gallant German emperor. At the best, however, a crusade was not an organized campaign under efficient direction, but merely a number of independent expeditions which found it convenient to go at the same time and by the same route. There was no supreme command, and there was constant jealousy and friction between feudal lords who were ever impatient of restraint and careful of points of dignity and precedence. The presence of a king was of some help, the presence of two only made matters worse. If the causes of rivalry at home and the slighting of Philip’s sister could have been forgotten, there was still the fact that Richard was Philip’s vassal as well as his equal, and Richard was not of the type to spare Philip’s susceptibilities. Rich, open-handed, fond of display, Lion-Heart “loved the lime-light,” and his overbearing nature and lack of tact made it impossible for him to coöperate with others. He characteristically went his own way, paying scant attention to Philip and acting as if the leadership of the expedition belonged to himself as a matter of course. Relations became strained during the sojourn at Messina and grew worse in Palestine, where the affairs of the Latin kingdom and the rivalries of lesser princes added fuel to the flame. “The two kings and peoples,” says an English chronicler, “did less together than they would have done separately, and each set but light store by the other.” Sick of the whole enterprise, after four months in the East, Philip seized the first excuse to return home, departing in August, 1191.
Richard stayed a year longer in Palestine, yet he never entered Jerusalem and had finally to retire with a disappointing truce and to spend another year, and more, languishing in German prisons. The events of these months do not concern the history of Normandy, but if we would behold Richard in his fairest light we must see him as he rushed to the relief of Joppa on the first of August, 1192, wading ashore from his red galley with the cry, “Perish the man who would hang back,” covering the landing of his followers with his crossbow, making his way by a winding stair to the house of the Templars on the town wall, and then, sword in hand, clearing the town of three thousand Turks and pursuing them into the plain with but three horsemen; or, four days later, repelling a Mameluke attack in force by a most skilful tactical arrangement of his meagre army, directing the battle on the beach while he also kept the town clear, “slaying innumerable Turks with his gleaming sword, here cleaving a man from the crown of his head to his teeth,” there cutting off with one blow the head, shoulder, and right arm of a Saracen emir, his coat of mail and his horse bristling with javelins and arrows like a hedgehog, yet “remaining unconquerable and unwounded in accordance with the divine decree.”[43]
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What most concerned the Norman empire was the king’s absence since the summer of 1190, prolonged by his captivity in Germany until the spring of 1194. Although Philip had taken an oath before leaving Palestine to respect Richard’s men and possessions during his absence, and even to protect them like his own city of Paris, he sought release from this engagement as soon as he reached Rome on his homeward journey, and once back in France he soon began active preparations for an attack on the Plantagenet territories. With Richard safe in a German dungeon, he seized a large part of the Norman border and made a secret treaty with John which secured the surrender of all the lands east of the Seine and important fortresses in Anjou and Touraine. He offered huge sums of money to secure Richard’s custody or even his continued detention in Germany, and when early in 1194 he warned John that “the Devil was loose” at last, he was besieging the great fortress of Verneuil on the Norman frontier. When Richard landed at Barfleur in May, amid the ringing of bells and processions singing “God has come again in his strength,” it is small wonder that he came breathing vengeance and slaughter, and that the rest of his life is a record of scarcely interrupted war against the king of France. For many years he is said to have refused the sacrament lest he might have to forgive his enemy. Again and again he had Philip on the run. Once Philip lost all his baggage and saved himself by turning aside to hear mass while Richard rode by; on another occasion Richard drove the French into Gisors so that the bridge broke under them “and the king of France drank of the river, and twenty of his knights were drowned.”
Such scenes, however, are only the striking episodes in a series of campaigns which are confused and complicated and do not lend themselves to clear narration. Decisive engagements were rare, each side seeking rather to wear out the other. Money was spent freely for allies and mercenaries—a contemporary called the struggle one between the pound sterling and the pound of Tours, and the advantage was on the side of the pounds sterling by reason of their greater number. There was usually a campaign in the spring and summer, ending in a truce in the autumn which the church tried to prolong into a lasting peace but which soon broke down in a new war. The wars were for the most part border forays, in which the country was burned and wasted far and wide, to the injury chiefly of the peasants, upon whom the burden of mediæval warfare mainly fell. “First destroy the land, then the enemy,” was the watchword. Booty and ransom were the object as well as military advantages, so that even the contests between knights had their sordid side, so definitely were they directed toward taking profitable prisoners; while feudal notions of honor might cause Richard to put out the eyes of fifteen prisoners and send them to Philip under the guidance of one of their number who had been left one eye, whereupon Philip blinded an equal number of knights and sent them to Richard under the guidance of the wife of one of them, “in order,” says his eulogist,[44] “that no one should think he was afraid of Richard or inferior to him in force and courage.”
The brunt of the war fell on Normandy and ultimately on the castles which supplied the duchy’s lack of natural frontiers. To supplement the great interior fortresses of Caen, Falaise, Argentan, Montfort, and Rouen, Henry I began the organization of a series of fortifications on the southern and eastern borders. Henry II, we are told, improved or renewed nearly all these strongholds, and especially Gisors, the frontier gateway toward France, on which fortress the exchequer roll shows him expending 2650 pounds Angevin in a single year. These castles, remains of many of which are still standing, were typical of the best military architecture of their age, but they were inferior in strength and scientific construction to the great fortresses of Christian Syria, such as Krak or Margat, which seem to have gone back to Byzantine and even Persian models. A keen warrior like Richard had not spent his two years in Palestine without gaining an expert knowledge of eastern methods in the art of war, and we are not surprised to find that he had Saracen soldiers and Syrian artillerymen with him in his Norman campaigns, and that he made large use of oriental experience in strengthening his defences. His masterpiece, of course, was Château Gaillard, the saucy castle on the Seine controlling the passage of the river and its tributaries in that region of the Norman Vexin which was the great bone of contention between the Plantagenets and the French kings. Having first expropriated at great expense the lord of the region, the archbishop of Rouen, he fortified the adjacent island of Andeli and laid out a new town on the bank. This he surrounded with water and reënforced with towers and battlements, protecting the whole with a stockade across the river and outlying works farther up. Then on the great rock above he built the fortress, with its triangular advance work, its elliptical citadel, and its circular keep surrounded by a “fossé cut almost vertically out of the rock.” There was no dead angle, such as permitted sappers to reach the base of rectilinear walls, but instead a sloping base down which projectiles might ricochet; nor was there, as at the corners of square towers, any part of the surrounding area which could not be reached by direct fire from within. “The approaches and the fossé,” says Dieulafoy,[45] “were covered by the fire of the garrison right up to the foot of the scarp, and no sapper could touch any point in towers or walls, provided that the fortress was under the direction of an experienced commander.” This qualification is important, for the new type of fortification was designed for an active defence, one might almost say an offensive defence, and not for the mere passive resistance with which the older strategy had been content. The works at Andeli, carried on largely under Richard’s personal direction, occupied more than a year of labor and cost nearly 50,000 pounds Angevin, which we find distributed in the royal accounts over lumber and stone and hardware, and among masons and carpenters and stone-cutters and lesser laborers.
By the year 1199 Richard had recovered his Norman possessions save Gisors and certain castles on the border, where Philip never lost his foothold, and he had raised an effective barrier to French advance in the valley of the Seine. Strong allies were on his side, and the diplomatic situation was decidedly in his favor. Never had Philip been so hard pressed, and even the friendly legate of the Pope could secure for him nothing better than the retention of Gisors in the truce which was then drawn up. And then a second stroke of fortune, greater even than the captivity of 1192, came to Philip’s aid. Richard, impetuous and headstrong as ever, spoiled all by a raid on an Aquitanian rebel in which he lost his life. His energy, his military skill, and his vivid personality had concealed the fundamental weakness of his position against France; his removal meant the swift fall of the Norman empire.
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At Richard’s death there were two possible successors, his younger brother John, whom he had designated heir, and his nephew Arthur, son of his elder brother Geoffrey and duke of Brittany. There was enough uncertainty in feudal law to admit of a plausible case for either one, but Arthur was only twelve and John quickly took possession, being crowned at Rouen in April and at Westminster in May. Arthur, however, had the following of his Bretons and, what was more important, the support of Philip Augustus, who used Arthur against John as he had used John against Richard and Richard against his father. Philip confirmed Arthur as count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, and soon brought him to Paris, where he was betrothed to Philip’s daughter. Nevertheless the course of events at first favored John. Philip was in the midst of the great struggle with Pope Innocent III over the divorce of his queen Ingeborg, and a treaty was signed in 1200, by which, on giving up territory in the Norman border and in central France and paying a large relief of 20,000 marks for his lands, John was confirmed in his control of Anjou and Brittany, while a visit to Paris, where he was splendidly received, seemed to crown the reconciliation. In a position, however, where all possible strength and resourcefulness were required, John’s defects of character proved fatal. No one could depend upon him for loyalty, judgment, or even persistence, and he quickly earned his name of “Soft-Sword.”