Richard the Lion Heart

by Kate Norgate

The whole fight had lasted less than five hours.[534] The town was plundered, “and there would have been more people slain, but that the king took pity” and restrained his men. The Sicilian galleys in the harbour were set on fire and destroyed.[535] Philip and his followers meanwhile had sat at their ease within the palace and the city, doing nothing to help their fellow-Crusaders, and totally unmolested by the Sicilians, among whom they seemed quite at home. But when Philip learned that the victorious host had set up their royal leader’s banners on the walls, he angrily declared that this act was an insult to himself as Richard’s feudal superior, and demanded that the banners should be taken down and replaced by his own. Richard at first ignored the demand; but some of the prelates and nobles brought about a compromise; the banners of both kings were placed on the towers together, and the custody of the fortifications was given to the Templars and Hospitaliers till it should be seen how matters would go between Richard and Tancred.[536] The compromise was a fair one on Richard’s part; as his poet-chronicler 1190 says, “Sirs, I ask your judgement—which of the two had the best right to set his banners over the city, the one who would take no part in its assault, or the one who dared the enterprize?”[537] “But,” he remarks no less truly, “the king of France’s envy on that subject was like to be lifelong; that was the origin of the war whereby Normandy was ruined.”[538] According to one account, Philip next, on the strength of the agreement made at Vézelay, demanded his share of the spoils of the city, and grew so insolent and quarrelsome that Richard prepared to load up his ships and depart on his pilgrimage alone with his own people rather than be tied any longer to so disagreeable a comrade. Hereupon, however, Philip made overtures for reconciliation, and Oct. 8 they renewed their alliance,[539] swearing and making their respective barons swear to keep good faith with each other Oct. 6 throughout the expedition.[540] Two days earlier, on October 6, the governors of Messina had given hostages to Richard, pledging themselves to keep peace towards him and his men and to let him have free possession of the city unless Tancred speedily satisfied all his demands.[541]

Those demands, for the whole of Joan’s dowry and William’s legacy to Henry, were now again transmitted to Palermo, by envoys who represented both the Crusader kings, for one of them was no less a personage than the duke of Burgundy.[542] In the Anglo-Norman camp it seems to have been reported that the French envoys returned loaded with gifts because they had carried a private message from Philip to Tancred encouraging him to resist Richard’s demands and promising that in any strife which might ensue the French would remain neutral.[543] However this may have been, the envoys of the English king brought back a very unsatisfactory reply to their master. “I gave to your sister Joan,” said Tancred, “a million terrins for quit-claim of her dower before she went away from me. Concerning your other demands I shall do whatever I ought to do according 1190 to the custom of this realm.”[544] During the absence of the envoys a very suspicious event took place at Messina. One night the two governors of the city, Jordan du Pin and Margarit, stole away with their respective households, taking with them all the gold and silver they possessed. Richard at once seized their houses, their galleys, and whatever other property they had left behind them. His own treasure was already stored in the “Griffons’ Minster,” which he further strengthened by digging a deep and wide ditch across the island on which the fort stood.[545] When his envoys returned from Palermo they found him busy with another piece of work “which gave him pleasure,”[546] the erection, on the top of a hill overlooking the city, of a strong wooden fortress to which he gave the name of Mategriffon, “Check” or “Kill-Greek.”[547] All these precautions did in fact check the Griffons effectually; but when Richard on hearing Tancred’s reply straightway retorted that he would enter upon no pleadings at law and would get what he wanted in his own way,[548] the Lombards again began to give trouble. They refused to sell even necessary food to the host, “and but for God and the navy, many would have led a poor life”; the ships, however, had ample stores. Philip was accused of being secretly in league with the Lombards. The city and the camp were guarded day and night. Mediators went to and fro between the palace and Mategriffon, but could not bring the two kings back to friendship.[549]

At last Tancred intervened. “He was,” says Ambrose the poet-Crusader, “very wise; he had heard tell of many happenings; he was a good scholar; he knew his business.”[550] Through all these months he had played a waiting game till he could feel sure which of the two kings would be most useful to him as an ally. At first he had inclined to Philip, and “would have given him untold gold” for the marriage 1190 of one of his daughters to either the French king himself or to his infant son Louis; but Philip declined this proposal because he did not wish to quarrel with Tancred’s rival, Constance’s husband, who was now king of the Germans and Emperor elect,[551] and whose friendship he doubtless foresaw might be useful to him in future struggles with Richard. By the end of October, however, Tancred not only knew that the townsfolk of Messina had gone too far; he also perceived that he had himself gone too far in his haughtiness towards the English Lion. He therefore despatched two messengers to Richard with an offer of alliance. He proposed to give twenty thousand ounces of gold to Joan instead of her dower-lands, and to Richard, in place of King William’s legacy, the same amount as the dowry of one of his (Tancred’s) daughters on condition of her marriage with Richard’s nephew, Arthur of Britanny.[552] Richard saw at once that this offer must be accepted. The necessity of coming to a settlement of some kind with Tancred, and the outrageous conduct of Tancred’s subjects, had already detained him in Sicily much longer than he had originally contemplated. Now it was quite clear that he would be obliged to remain there for several more months, as the season of the year had begun when the “inclemency of winds and waves and weather”[553] made navigation so difficult and dangerous that no fleet could attempt a voyage to Palestine till the return of spring. The same cause must of course detain Philip also; and to reject Tancred’s offer would have been to throw Tancred and Philip into each other’s arms. Nor was the offer itself a bad one. Whatever might be the intrinsic value of Joan’s dower-lands and of William’s legacy, there was obviously very little chance of ever gaining either the one or the other; while forty thousand ounces of gold would be a very convenient addition to the treasury of the Crusade. A treaty on these terms was therefore drawn up and executed forthwith. Richard promised that 1190 all questions about his sister’s dowry and his own claims should be henceforth at rest; that he and his men would faithfully keep peace by sea and by land with Tancred and all his subjects, and if the Sicilian realm should be invaded or attacked while they were in it, they would help the king against his assailants; that Arthur—“our dear nephew, and our heir if we should die without issue”—should be contracted to Tancred’s daughter; and that the bride should have a dower of lands within her husband’s duchy “befitting a lady so illustrious and the daughter of so magnificent a king.” If Arthur succeeded to the Crown, his wife was to have the customary dower of a queen of England. If, on the other hand, from any cause dependent on Richard or Arthur, the marriage should not take place “in due time” (that is, when the children should be old enough; Arthur was in his fourth year), the dowry given by the bride’s father was to be returned.[554] Tancred on his part promised that he and his subjects would keep peace with Richard and his men,[555] and he paid over the covenanted sum without delay.[556] Richard was in a pacific mood; although none of the gold which he had just received could fairly come under his agreement with Philip as to the division of conquests, he at once made Philip a peace-offering of part of it.[557] He next insisted on his men restoring to the townsfolk the plunder which they had taken from them, and Archbishop Walter of Rouen enforced this order by threatening to excommunicate those who failed to obey it. Finally, a set of ordinances for the regulation of intercourse and trade between the pilgrims and the townsfolk was issued in the joint names of all the three kings.[558] Thenceforth town and camp were on 1190 friendly terms, and so were—for a while—the two pilgrim kings. There was, however, some grumbling in the host, especially among the knights who had reached Messina before Richard, at their long detention there and the expense which it entailed on them, and at being forced to give back the plunder with which they had recouped themselves. Richard “was not avaricious or stingy”; he silenced the grumblers by a distribution of costly gifts, of which all ranks, down to the lowest foot-soldiers, received such a share that every Feb. 1191 man was fully satisfied.[559] Early in the next year he made a present to the French king of several of the ships which had come from England, and to his own troops, of all ranks, a further distribution of “more treasures than any of his predecessors had ever given away in a whole year.”[560]

1190

Before Christmas Richard’s growing sense of the weightiness of his enterprise showed itself in another step in his preparations. One day he called together in the chapel of the house where he was lodging all the bishops in his host, came before them as a penitent, with three scourges in his hands, fell at their feet and openly confessed to them a vice in which he had lived and which he now solemnly abjured; he received his penance at their hands, “and thenceforth returned to his iniquity no more.”[561] At Christmas he entertained Philip and the French nobles at a great feast in Mategriffon.[562] The festivities were disturbed by a quarrel between the Genoese and Pisan sailors and some of the men belonging to Richard’s galleys, and not till some lives were lost did the two kings in person succeed in quelling 1191
Feb. 2 the strife.[563] An incident on Candlemas Day (1191) throws a 1191 curious side-light on one phase of Richard’s character of which there is little trace elsewhere, and also on his relations with the other crusading chiefs during this dreary time of waiting. He and some English and French knights, on their way back from a ride, met a countryman with a load of reeds or bulrushes and bought some for a game such as boys played, tilting with the rushes for spears. The king challenged William des Barres, with whom he had had at least two encounters in real warfare, and who (according to one account) on the second of these occasions,[564] being made prisoner, had committed a breach of the rules of chivalry which Richard was not a man to condone easily: he had regained his liberty by breaking his parole. When William’s first thrust broke the head of Richard’s bulrush, Richard was seized with one of those fits of unaccountable, irrational fury before which all persons accustomed to associate with the Angevin counts quailed as before a direct manifestation of the powers of darkness whence the house of Anjou was said to have sprung. He set his horse furiously at his opponent; the shock of the encounter failed to unseat William, but caused Richard’s own saddle to slip; he leapt from it, mounted another horse, and renewed the attack, but with no better success; nor did his angry threats disturb the coolness of the Frenchman. The Earl of Leicester, trying to intervene, was roughly bidden by his sovereign, “Leave me to deal with him alone!” and finally, after a long struggle and much bandying of words, the king burst out to William, “Get thee hence, and take heed that I see thee no more, for henceforth I will be an enemy to thee and thine for ever.” William, now thoroughly alarmed, went and besought counsel and help of his own sovereign. Philip in person interceded for his unlucky vassal; some of the highest nobles of France actually went down on their knees to Richard for the same purpose; but Richard would hear none of them; and on the third day William des Barres had to leave Messina “because the king of France would not keep him against the will of the king of England.”[565]

The time was now approaching when the seas would 1191 again be navigable, and Philip presently asked Richard to get ready to accompany him on what was called “the March passage” to Holy Land. Richard is said by a French chronicler to have answered that he could not go before August.[566] It seems that either August here must be a mistake for April, or Richard cannot have been serious in answering thus, unless indeed he entertained some vague project of going back for a short visit to his island realm before proceeding further eastward. Such a project is not impossible; for the reports which had been coming to him through the winter about the state of affairs in England were at once so disquieting and so contradictory that he may well have longed to see for himself how matters really stood and settle by his personal authority the quarrels which had arisen between his justiciars and his brother. In the end he committed the solution of these very puzzling difficulties to Archbishop Walter of Rouen. He had, however, another reason for delaying at least for a few weeks his own departure for Acre. Early in the year King Sancho of Navarre had placed his daughter Berengaria in Queen Eleanor’s charge to take her to Richard to become his wife.[567] Before the end of February the two ladies reached Naples, and Richard sent some galleys to meet them there; but “on account of the multitude of men who accompanied them” Tancred’s people refused them leave to go to Messina—which indeed must have been already overwhelmed with foreign visitors—and they had to spend a month in his continental dominions.[568] Their coming was a clear intimation that Richard was now fully determined to shake off the bonds of his engagement to Aloysia. Philip peremptorily bade him, as his vassal, choose between two alternatives: either to go with his overlord across the sea, in which case he should be at liberty to marry Berengaria, or, if he would not go, to keep his promise of marriage with Aloysia. Richard bluntly 1191 refused both.[569] Meanwhile Tancred had invited him[570] to a March 3 meeting at Catania. A splendid welcome was given him there on March 3, and for three days he was Tancred’s guest in the palace. Tancred offered him “gifts many and great” in gold and silver, cloth of silk, and horses, but Richard, “needing none of such things,” would accept only one small ring as a token of friendship; in return for this he presented Tancred with a sword which he seems to have asserted to be the famous Excalibur of King Arthur. Finally Tancred offered a substantial gift which Richard did not decline: a contribution of four large ships “which they call ussers” and fifteen galleys to the crusading fleet.[571] The Sicilian king escorted his guest on the way back as far as Taormina, where Philip was to meet them on March 8. There Tancred is said to have put into Richard’s hands a letter which he declared had been brought to him by the duke of Burgundy from the French king, containing an assertion that Richard had no intention of keeping faith with Tancred, and a promise that if Tancred were disposed to attack Richard, the French troops and their sovereign would give their help in effecting Richard’s destruction. Richard on this left Taormina before Philip reached it and returned to Messina by another way so as to avoid meeting him. When he did meet him again, he at first studiously avoided him or ignored his presence; when asked the reason, he showed the letter. Philip accused him of having invented the whole affair as an excuse for “casting off” the daughter of France whom he had promised to wed. Thus driven to extremity, Richard said plainly that a marriage between him and Aloysia was impossible, and gave a reason which, as he produced several witnesses who declared themselves ready to swear to its truth, fully justified his refusal.[572] The result was that Philip formally released him from his engagement and declared him free to marry whomsoever he would. On the basis of this and certain other conditions which were to take effect 1191 only at a later time, a “firm peace” was once again made between the king of France and his “friend and faithful liegeman, the illustrious king of England.”

The treaty was made before March 25;[573] shortly afterwards Philip and his “company” sailed, in the galleys which Richard had given him, for Acre.[574] Before starting he again besought Richard to pardon William des Barres, and Richard after some demur promised to keep the peace towards William so long as they were both engaged in the cause of the Cross.[575] He convoyed Philip through the Far, and then himself went to Reggio, having just heard that Eleanor and Berengaria had arrived there. He took them on board and brought his mother back with him to Messina, after, it seems, placing Berengaria at La Bagnara with Joan; the men of the queen’s suite seem to have been left at Reggio, and possibly even Eleanor and her ladies may not have landed at Messina at all, for she stayed with her son only four days and then departed for England.[576] He had nothing more to wait for. With all speed the fleet was made ready, and on April 10, the Wednesday before Easter, it put to sea.[577]

The ships which Richard had found awaiting him in the harbour of Messina when he arrived there are said to have numbered one hundred and fourteen.[578] Stragglers that had 1191 come in later, Tancred’s gift, and other vessels bought or hired by Richard had now raised the total to about two hundred.[579] Of these, some forty or fifty were galleys or battleships, built after the pattern of the old Roman liburnae or the “long keels” of Richard’s Norse forefathers, long, slender, with armed prows, and propelled by two tiers of oarsmen.[580] The rest were transport vessels; those of the largest size, of which there seem to have been now twenty-four, were called “busses” by the northerners and “dromonds” in the Mediterranean and the Levant. Of these vessels, fourteen which had formed part of the original English fleet had each of them three spare rudders, thirteen anchors, thirty oars, two sails, triple ropes of every kind, and a double set of everything else that a ship could need, except the mast and the boat; the lading of each consisted of forty war-horses, forty knights with all their arms and accoutrements, forty foot-soldiers, and fifteen sailors, with food enough for all these men and horses for a whole year. The other ships of burden, called “huissiers,” “ushers,” “enekes” or “smacks” (esneccae) were round-shaped vessels, seemingly dependent on sails alone; their carrying capacity was half that of the busses. The king had taken the precaution to distribute his treasure among all the transport ships, “so that if part were lost, another part should be saved.”[581]

April 10

If the fleet’s arrival had been a great sight for the people of Messina, its departure must have been a much more imposing spectacle. Three dromonds, one of which carried Queen Joan and the Damsel of Navarre, went in advance of all the rest. Thirteen ships formed the second line or squadron; in the third were fourteen, in the fourth twenty, 1191 in the fifth thirty, in the sixth forty, in the seventh sixty; the last consisted of the galleys, on one of which was the king himself. Throughout the fleet the order of its going was so carefully arranged that a trumpet’s sound could be heard from squadron to squadron, and a man’s voice from ship to ship.[582] When all had passed, with a fair wind, through the Far into the open sea, the galleys sped forward to overtake the slower vessels[583] and took their place as the advanced guard of the whole fleet, Richard’s own ship leading.[584] “The king had arranged, as far as possible, that the ships should never be separated unless indeed a storm should disperse them. So the galleys moderated their speed and endeavoured to keep pace with the transports, for the protection of the multitude and the comfort of the weak.”[585] Suddenly the wind dropped, and the whole fleet had to anchor for the night. Next morning, Maunday Thursday, April 11 “He Who took the wind from us,” as one of the pilgrims says, “gave it us back again”; but the breeze was so faint that they made very little progress, and at night they were again becalmed. On the following morning (Good Friday, April 12) they were met by “a contrary wind on the left,”[586] and all that day they had to struggle with a heavy gale and storm. As good pilgrims they endured their sufferings “right willingly, as a fitting discipline for the holy day.”[587] On their leader wind and weather had no effect; he was “just as healthy and hearty, brave and strong, on sea as on land”;[588] throughout this first experience of Mediterranean storms and all those that followed, he “remained perfectly calm, and ceased not to comfort the others and encourage them to endure with confidence, hoping for better things.”[589] Every evening he had “a large candle in the lantern” lighted on his galley, to show the way to the other ships; they all followed the light, and if one got out of the course he waited for it to get back. “Thus as a hen leads her 1191 chickens out to feed he led his mighty fleet,” sailing day and night till late on the Wednesday in Easter Week (April 17) they anchored off Crete.[590] Next morning, it seems, Richard counted up the ships, and found to his “great wrath” that despite all his precautions no less than twenty-five were missing.[591] He then directed his course to Rhodes, reached its capital city on the following Monday (April 22), and stayed there three days, partly because he was unwell, partly in the hope of hearing some tidings of the missing vessels, and also to make inquiries about Cyprus and its “tyrant.”[592]