A march of eight days brought the Crusaders to Lyons on July 10 or 13.[473] Here they were to cross the Rhône and then proceed down its left bank to the coast. The two kings with their personal followers crossed at once and encamped on the further side of the river (seemingly on a height whence their tents were visible from the hither side) to wait till the stragglers and late comers should overtake the main body of pilgrims, who lodged as they could in and around the city.[474] When the muster seemed to be complete, the kings gave the signal for departure by causing their tents to be struck.[475] The main body of the host on the other bank[476] thronged to the narrow wooden bridge; when a small number had crossed one of the arches broke down.[477] Only two persons were drowned, but the multitude left behind were sorely puzzled how to get across the “crested waters” of the Rhône in flood.[478] According to one account they in three days achieved the passage “as best they could, in little boats, with great difficulty.”[479] Another version, however, tells us that it was only Philip who had actually set out before the bridge gave 1190 way,[480] and Richard, having merely escorted him out of the camp, was still at hand when the catastrophe occurred; whereupon he, “whose constancy never failed in action,” quickly caused a bridge to be made of boats lashed together, and waited three days while by this means the whole host made its passage in safety.[481] Then, while the French king’s subjects followed their sovereign to Genoa or went by whatever route they chose to meet him at Messina,[482] the English king at the head of his own contingent set out[483] for Marseille, July 31 where he arrived on the last day of July.[484]
“From Marseille to Acre,” says a contemporary writer, “is a sail of only fifteen days. But,” he adds, “then you go through the Great Sea, so that after the mountains round about Marseille cease to be visible you will, if you keep the direct course, see no land either to right or left till you see the land of Syria.”[485] Some of the Crusaders who accompanied Richard—among them Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and Ranulf de Glanville—faced the mysterious terrors of the “Great Sea” and took this route[486] to Tyre, which they reached on September 16.[487] The two kings had chosen Messina as the final starting-point of their voyage at a time 1190 when they deemed themselves sure of finding there every possible facility for refitting and revictualling their ships, and substantial help of every kind for their enterprise; King William of Sicily being married to a sister of Richard, and having long ago promised every assistance in his power to the Crusade.[488] In March, however, they had learned that William had died in the preceding November.[489] The original scheme nevertheless had obvious advantages both for Richard, who knew that William had made some testamentary dispositions for his benefit, and for Philip, who “dreaded the sea.”[490] As the difficulties and dangers of the real overland route from northern France to Apulia and Sicily through the Alpine passes and Italy were apparently still considered even more formidable than those of the Mediterranean sea, Philip had arranged to be conveyed by the practised mariners of Genoa from their city to Messina, not exactly as an English chronicler says “by land,” but by the shortest and easiest coasting route. Richard on the contrary was minded to go by water as much as he could, and had ordered his fleet to meet him at the nearest Mediterranean port—Marseille.[491] When a week had passed and no fleet appeared, he grew weary of waiting; so he hired “two large busses and twenty well armed galleys,” in which he set sail with his household troops on August 7.[492] He was “grieved and confounded at the delay of his navy,”[493] and seems to have coasted along very slowly in the hope of its overtaking him, for it was not Aug. 13 till the 13th that he reached Genoa, where he went ashore to visit Philip, who was lying there sick. Next day, at Portofino, Aug. 14 he received a message from Philip asking for the loan of five galleys; Richard offered three, but this Philip declined. On the 23rd Richard relieved the tediousness of the slow Aug. 23 1190 coasting voyage by landing with a small escort at Baratto and hiring horses on which the party rode to Piombino; Aug. 24 there they rejoined their ships. “Then the king went on board the galley of Fulco Rustac” (or “Rustancri”) instead of the one in which he had been sailing (the “Pumbone”), and they proceeded to Porto Ercole, which was reckoned to be half way between Marseille and Messina. “But that day the sail of the galley in which the king was got torn; so he went back to the Pumbone.” On the same day, August 25, he landed at Ostia,[494] where he was met by the cardinal bishop and some other persons sent by the Pope to receive him and invite him to visit Rome; this he declined to do,[495] preferring, it seems, to spend a day in what a modern traveller might call seeing the sights of the neighbourhood. Aug. 28
to Sept. 8 He spent nearly a fortnight in the same way at Naples, making excursions round about (August 28-September 8); thence he went on horseback to Salerno,[496] and stayed there till on September 13 he heard that his fleet had arrived at Messina, and at once set out to rejoin it.[497] The report was Sept. 14 premature; but the fleet did in fact reach Messina next day. The story of its voyage illustrates the spirit of adventure in which the men of the more remote western lands set out upon their Crusade. The “justiciars of the navy” appointed in the spring had apparently taken each the command of a little squadron, and these squadrons had sailed in April, according to the king’s order, from various ports of England, Normandy, Britanny, and Poitou. Ten ships of the English division set out from Dartmouth; some of them touched at Silvia in Portugal, others at Lisbon, and all stopped to help the Christian Portuguese in their war against the Moors. Other ships of Richard’s—perhaps from more distant ports—came into Lisbon harbour at the close of the war; the whole fleet sailed thence on July 26, passed the Straits of Gibraltar on August 1, and sailing along the coasts of Spain and Provence reached Marseille on August 22. Finding that the king was gone, they stayed a week for necessary refitting, set out again on the 30th, and came to Messina on Holy 1190 Cross day.[498] According to English accounts Philip of France Sept. 14 arrived there two days later;[499] his own biographer, however, says he came in August.[500] As he had no ships of his own, the greater part of his host had either gone before him to Messina or proceeded towards Syria by other routes; and to the disappointment of the townsfolk and the pilgrims assembled at Messina, who all hoped to see a king arrive with great pomp and majesty, only the ship which bore Philip himself came into the harbour, and landing at the steps of the royal palace[501] he slipped out of sight as quickly and quietly as possible.[502]
The disappointed spectators of Philip’s landing were to be more than compensated ere long by the arrival of another royal guest. By September 21 Richard, travelling leisurely along the coast from Salerno, had reached Mileto in Calabria. Here a characteristic adventure nearly brought to an untimely end both his enterprise and his life. He was riding forth next day, accompanied only by one knight, “and as they passed through a little township the king turned aside towards a house where he heard the voice of a falcon, and he went into the house and took the bird; and when he would not let it go, a number of villagers came running up and attacked him with stones and sticks. One of them drew his knife upon the king, and the king beat the man with the flat of his sword till the sword broke. The other assailants he overcame with stones, and narrowly escaping from their hands made his way to the Priory of La Bagnara.” There, finding himself close to what an English chronicler describes as “the great river which is called the Far of Messina,” he took boat and crossed it immediately, and “lay that night in a tent hard by the great stone tower which stands by the entrance to the Far on the Sicilian side”—that is, the pharos, lighthouse, or beacon-tower which gave the strait its medieval name.[503] He probably crossed in a vessel of his own fleet, the whole of which seems to have been assembled at 1190 the northern end of the strait in readiness to meet him. Sept. 23 Next day (September 23) he sailed at its head into the harbour of Messina. “The galleys filled the Strait; they were crowded with hardy looking warriors, and decked with pennons and banners. So came the king to the shore,”[504] amid such blowing of horns and trumpets that “all the city was alarmed at the sound.” Philip and the governors and people of Messina went down to the beach and stood there “marvelling at that which they saw and heard of the king of England and of his power.”[505] Richard “leaped ashore,” and went immediately to speak with Philip.[506] Meanwhile those of his barons who had reached Messina before him brought “the fine destriers which had come over in the transport ships; and he and his people all mounted on horseback,”[507] and rode to their lodging, which—the royal palace being, by permission of the new sovereign of Sicily, occupied by Philip—was being prepared for them in the house of one of the Sicilian king’s officers, “in the suburb outside the city wall, among the vineyards.”[508]
The next of kin to the late king of Sicily and the person whom he had designated as his successor was his father’s sister Constance; but she was far away in Germany—being married to the Emperor’s son—and a cousin, Tancred, had without much difficulty become master of the kingdom, or at least of its insular half. Tancred had, as has been seen, provided lodgings for his two royal guests at Messina; he himself was at Palermo, and so was the widowed Queen Joan, Richard’s sister. Richard knew that a very liberal dowry in land had been settled upon Joan by King William at their marriage,[509] and also that William had made a will containing a bequest to his father-in-law, Henry II, of “a golden table twelve feet long and a foot and a half wide, three golden tripods for sitting at the table, a silken tent large enough for two hundred knights to eat in it together, a 1190 hundred first-rate galleys with all necessary gear and food for the crews, sixty thousand seams of wheat, the same number of barley and of wine, and twenty-four cups and twenty-four dishes” of either silver or gold.[510] This bequest was evidently intended by William, who seems to have been long in ill-health and expecting an early death, as his contribution to the Crusade. Richard, as Henry’s heir, now claimed it from Tancred, and he also demanded that Joan should be sent to him immediately with her dowry and a golden chair[511] for her use “according to the custom of the queens of that land.”[512] Tancred sent Joan off at once by sea “with just her bedroom furniture” and a million terrini for her expenses.[513] Sept. 28 She reached Messina on Michaelmas Eve, and was conducted by her brother to a lodging prepared for her in the Hospital;[514] but he speedily took steps for removing her to a safer place; for trouble, possibly with Philip, certainly with the townsfolk of Messina and with their king, was now evidently close at hand.
The English king’s subjects who had reached Messina before him on the fleet had been refused admittance into the city; they were obliged to encamp on the shore, and suffered much annoyance and persecution from a section of the townsfolk whom one of them describes as “a parcel of Griffons and low fellows of Saracen extraction.” These people not only insulted the Crusaders in the vilest ways, but even killed some of them and outraged the corpses.[515] All “Ultramontanes,” or men from beyond the Alps, were hated by the two races with which Sicily was mainly peopled—the “Griffons” or Greek-speaking folk, and the Italian-speaking whom the western writers call Lombards. In the minds of the last-named especially the memory of the Norman conquest of Sicily and Apulia still rankled; “they always had a grudge against us,” says the Norman poet-historian of 1190 Richard’s Crusade, “because their fathers had told them that our ancestors had conquered them; so they could not love us.”[516] It seems not unlikely that Tancred had gained the support of both Griffons and Lombards by posing as the champion of a sort of national government in opposition to the representatives of the foreign royal line, and that they looked with suspicion upon the crusading host as possibly designed to be the instrument of a new Norman conquest; more especially when they discovered, as they very soon did, that although it had nominally two crowned leaders, its real and sole commander-in-chief was the Anglo-Norman king. On the morrow of his arrival Richard set up outside the camp a gallows for thieves and robbers. “His judges delegate spared neither sex nor age; and there was one punishment for a stranger and for one born in the land.” The French king took no notice of any ill-doing on the part of his own men, nor of any evil done to them; but Richard cared not whose subject the criminal might be; “considering every man as his own,” he left no wrong unpunished; “wherefore the Griffons called him the Lion and Philip the Lamb.”[517]
Both Griffons and Lombards did their utmost to make the position of the “tailed Englishmen”—as they called Richard and all his followers indiscriminately—absolutely intolerable. They tried to starve them by refusing to let them buy food in the city; they fell upon and slew any whom they caught in small parties and unarmed; they even began to raise the town walls, as if challenging the strangers to besiege them.[518] By the time of Joan’s arrival matters had come to such a pass that two days later (September 30) Richard with a small armed force re-crossed the strait into Calabria, turned the Griffons out of a fortress called La Bagnara, Oct. 1 and next day established his sister in it with a guard of his own men.[519] He next seized a very strong fort or tower, which went by the name of “the Griffons’ Minster,” on an 1190 island in the Far, midway between La Bagnara and Messina,[520] put its garrison to death, and made it a storehouse for the provisions which had been brought by his fleet from England and his other dominions.[521] Scarcely was this done when on October 3 a dispute between a pilgrim and a townswoman about the price of some bread which the woman brought into the camp for sale led to an outbreak of hostilities. Richard, hearing the noise, sprang on horseback and strove to recall his men, riding in and out among them and striking with his staff all whom he could reach, to check the attack which they were threatening on the city gate. His efforts and those of the “elders” of the city at length quieted the tumult.[522] Both parties, however, felt that the matter was not ended. Before nightfall Richard went by boat to the palace Oct. 4 and held a consultation with Philip.[523] Next morning the archbishops of Messina, Monreale, and Reggio, with the “justices of Sicily”—that is, the governors whom Tancred had put in charge of Messina, Margarit and Jordan du Pin[524]—and some others of Tancred’s chief counsellors came to Richard’s lodging, bringing with them the French king and some of his nobles, and also some of the chief nobles of Richard’s dominions, to discuss terms of peace.[525] Three times the colloquy was interrupted by tidings, first that the English were being attacked, next that they were getting worsted, and finally that they were being killed “both within and without the city.” The Sicilian members of the conference hurried away, ostensibly for the purpose of checking their own people, “but they lied,” says Richard’s Norman chronicler.[526] Richard 1190 hastened forth to control his troops, learned that the quarters of one of his Aquitanian followers, Hugh the Brown of Lusignan, had been attacked by a party of the townsfolk, and that another party was lying in wait for himself, the city wall bristling with armed men, and another strong body of citizens posted on the hills at the back of the town.[527] He hurried back for his armour and instantly gave orders to “assault the city all round by land and by sea.”[528] He himself began by driving out the assailants from the camp. With scarce twenty men at his back, he made for the quarters of Hugh the Brown; the Lombards turned and fled from him “like sheep from a wolf,” says one who saw the scene, and he drove them “as oxen are driven under the yoke” all the way to “the postern gate which is towards Palermo,” the west gate of the city.[529] Meanwhile the whole English host was in motion. The fleet could do nothing, because Philip, who had returned to the palace under a promise from the governor that he should not be molested, intercepted the galleys as they approached and forbade them to proceed.[530] The land attack met with a fierce resistance; part of the host endeavoured to storm the walls and the gates; Richard himself led a small party up a hill “so high and steep that no one would have thought they could by any means climb it,” drove down in headlong flight the Sicilians who occupied its summit,[531] and rejoined his main force in time to be one of the first to enter the city. “A good ten thousand went in after him,” says one of the number.[532]
The suddenness and rapidity with which the city was captured, and the contemporary French form of its name, “Messines,” or in the Norman dialect “Meschines,” appear to have suggested to some Norman or Angevin rimester in the host a jingle which from the camp has found its way into history:
“Our king and his men have taken Messines
More quickly than priest can say his matines.”[533]