Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Such are a few of the many flattering descriptions the obvious sincerity of which paints the English king as he seemed to the men who fought beside him.

A clever strategist, a born leader in battle, fearless himself, and with a restless energy that inspired him when sick to be carried on cushions in order to direct the fire of his stone-slingers, Richard turned his golden qualities of generalship to dust by his utter lack of diplomacy and tact. Of gifts such as these, that are one-half of kingship, he was not so much ignorant as heedless. He ‘willed’ to do things like his great ancestor, the Conqueror, but his sole weapon was his right hand, not the subtlety of his brain.

‘The King of England had gallows erected outside his camp to hang thieves and robbers on ... deeming it no matter of what country the criminals were, he considered every man as his own and left no wrong unavenged.’

This typical high-handed action, no doubt splendid in theory as a method of discouraging the crimes that had helped to ruin previous campaigns, was, when put into practice, sufficient alone to account for the hatred Richard inspired amongst rulers whose subjects he thus chose to judge and execute at will. The King of France, we are told, ‘winked at the wrongs his men inflicted and received,’ but he gained friends, while Richard’s progress was a series of embittered feuds, accepted light-heartedly without any thought of his own future interests or of those of the crusade.

Open rupture with Philip II of France was brought about almost before they had left the French coasts through Richard’s repudiation of his ally’s sister, to whom he had been bethrothed, since the English king was now determined on a match with Berengaria, the daughter of the King of Navarre.

In South Italy he acquired his next enemies in both claimants then disputing the crown of Sicily, but before he sailed away he had battered one of the rivals, the Norman, Tancred, into an outwardly submissive ally after a battle in the streets of Messina. The other rival, Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, and afterwards the Emperor Henry VI, remained his enemy, storing up a grudge against him in the hopes of a suitable opportunity for displaying it.

From Cyprus Richard, pursuing military glory, drove its Greek ruler because he had dared to imprison some shipwrecked Englishmen; and thus, adding an island to his dominions and the Eastern Emperor to his list of foes, arrived at last in Palestine, in the summer of 1191, just in time to join Philip II in the siege of Acre.

‘The two kings and peoples did less together than they would have done separately, and each set but light store by the other.’ So the tale runs in the contemporary chronicle; and when Acre at last surrendered the feuds between the English and French had grown so irreconcilable that Philip II, who had fallen sick, sulkily declared that he had fulfilled his crusading vow and departed homewards. Not long afterwards went Leopold, Archduke of Austria, nursing cold rage against Richard in his heart because of an insult to his banner, that, planted on an earthwork beside the arms of England, had been contemptuously flung into the ditch below.

The Lion-Heart was now master of the enterprise in Palestine, a terror to the Turks, who would use his name to frighten their unruly children into submission; but though he remained fourteen months, the jealousies and rivalries of his camp, with which he was not the man to contend, kept him dallying on the coast route to Jerusalem, unable to proceed by open warfare or to get the better of the wily Saladin in diplomacy.

News came that Philip II and the Emperor Henry VI were plotting with his brother John for his ruin at home, and Richard, weary at heart and sick in health, agreed to a three years and eight months’ truce that left the Christians in the possession of the seaports of Jaffa and Tyre, with the coastal territory between them, and gave pilgrims leave to visit Jerusalem untaxed. He himself refused with tears in his eyes even to gaze from a distant height on the city he could not conquer; but, vowing he would return, he set sail for the West in the autumn of 1192, and with his departure the Third Crusade ended.