The History of the Renaissance World (30 page)

Richard claimed the English throne. He was now thirty-one, an experienced soldier and politician, dazzling in person: nicknamed “Lionheart” by his soldiers, tall, golden-haired, “of a shapely build” with “straight and flexible limbs,” possessing the valor of Hector, the greatness of Alexander, and the manhood of Roland (at least according to the anonymous starstruck author of the
Itinerarium Regis Ricardi
). He released his mother Eleanor from her long house arrest and then, immediately after, announced that he would fulfill his father’s undone vows by going on crusade.
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Crusades were expensive. Richard ransacked the treasury, sold state offices to the highest bidder, and collected 10 percent of the kingdom’s goods and cash as a “tithe Saladin” (a “violent extortion,” says Roger of Wendover, “which veiled the vice of rapacity under the name of charity”). On August 16, 1190, Richard and Philip—having sworn an oath to divide all proceeds from their conquests equally between them—departed from Marseille, bound for Jerusalem.
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B
Y THEN
, Frederick Barbarossa was dead.

He had left Germany in April 1189, sailing along the Danube to Vienna, and then traveling along the long difficult land route through the kingdom of Hungary (where he was joined by the king of Hungary’s brother with some two thousand troops) and then over the rough terrain of Serbia and Bosnia.
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When he reached the border of the Byzantine empire, he found himself facing an unexpected enemy. Isaac Angelus, who had now been on the throne of Constantinople for four years, had originally guaranteed the Crusaders safe passage through his lands, but the approach of a huge German force supplemented with Hungarian, Bosnian, and Serbian soldiers was giving him pause. Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire had been jostling each other for decades; he might well be giving a conquering army an open door into his empire.

24.1 The World of the Third Crusade

So he sent guerrilla bands to harass the Crusaders. “As soon as we reached the borders of our imperial brother, the emperor of Constantinople,” Frederick himself wrote, “we suffered no small loss by robbery of goods and killing of our men; and this is known without doubt to have been instigated by the emperor himself.” Vexed, he sent envoys to Constantinople to object; Angelus threw them in jail. Tensions escalated until Frederick sent a message back to his son and regent in Germany, Henry VI, asking him to get from the pope permission to declare a crusade against Byzantium so that he could attack Constantinople.
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At this threat, Isaac Angelus offered to let the crusading army pass, as long as it stayed south, far away from Constantinople. In the spring of 1190, Frederick Barbarossa’s army finally crossed over into Asia Minor, at the far end of the Sea of Marmara, and began a wearying march through Turkish-held lands towards the Christian kingdom of Armenia, where the men could gather themselves for the assault on Saladin.

They arrived at the Armenian border in June of 1190. Hearing that the king of Armenia himself had come to greet him and was waiting on the other side of the shallow Saleph river, Frederick Barbarossa began to ford the river on horseback. Somehow, he fell; and in waist-deep water, surrounded by his own men, the emperor drowned.
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Without their leader, the German army divided. Some of the men headed back home to swear loyalty to the new emperor, Henry VI. Others pushed on, but plague and heat began to diminish their number. “Disease and death fell upon them,” writes the Arab chronicler Ibn al-Athir, “and they reached Antioch, looking as though they had been exhumed from their graves.” The king of Antioch, Bohemund III, was not particularly pleased to see them: “He encouraged them to join the Franks at Acre,” Ibn al-Athir says, “. . . but mortality was high among them, and only about a thousand of them were left.”
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The few who straggled on found the former King Guy of Jerusalem camped outside Acre’s walls. Guy had been freed by Saladin the previous winter after taking an oath not to fight against the Muslims, which he promptly broke by laying siege to Saladin’s stronghold at Acre. The siege had begun in August of 1189, and the pathetic German reinforcements did nothing to tip the balance towards the besiegers; Acre was
still
under siege when Philip II of France finally arrived, in April of 1191. “Considering how many noblemen have been at this siege,” Philip is said to have remarked, “it is extraordinary how slow they have been to take it.” But the Frankish reinforcements—six ships, rather than the huge numbers of men Guy had hoped for—also proved inadequate to bring Acre down.
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24.2 The Kingdom of Jerusalem

Meanwhile Richard, who (like Philip) had traveled by sea, had been shipwrecked on Cyprus. He had paused to capture the island from its Greek governor and did not arrive at Acre until early June.

His fleet—twenty-five ships, laden with men and provisions—heaved to on the horizon like the Second Coming, and the Crusaders welcomed him as the savior of the Crusade. “All the people were in transports,” the
Itinerarium Regis Ricardi
tells us, “shouting out congratulations and blowing trumpets . . . and there was great joy because the desire of all nations had come. . . . Nor was it easy to find any one who did not share in the general joy and welcome.”
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Philip was one. The hero’s welcome put him into an extremely poor temper, not sweetened by Richard’s refusal to hand over half of Cyprus. (The Crusade, in Richard’s eyes, hadn’t started until he got to the Holy Land, so Cyprus was his personal conquest.)
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Philip had also been suffering from various fevers, rashes, and stomach ailments ever since his arrival. He was sick of crusade, sick of Richard, sick of Acre. Communication between the two kings broke down so thoroughly that, at one point, Philip was negotiating Acre’s surrender on one side of the city while Richard was attacking it on the other.
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Finally, the garrison at Acre—with Saladin’s approval—agreed to a truce. The soldiers would surrender the city, their lives would be spared, and in return Saladin would release all of the prisoners he still held, pay a substantial sum over to the Crusader war effort, and also return the fragment of the True Cross that had been taken from Jerusalem during the conquest.

The city duly surrendered. But on either Saladin’s side or Richard’s (depending on whose chronicles you read), the deal broke down. On August 20, Richard marched out nearly three thousand prisoners and slaughtered them within sight of Saladin’s headquarters.
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This ended the possibility of any more negotiations, and Saladin prepared his army for an all-out war. Richard took command of the Crusader army; Philip had decided to go home.

Roger of Hoveden, who traveled back with the French king (and recorded his every move in excruciating geographical detail), writes that Philip stopped in Rome, on the way, and “said many evil things of the king of England” to Pope Celestine III. He wanted the pope to release him from his treaty of friendship with Richard, so that he could attack Richard’s lands in the English king’s absence. Celestine refused. Still bound by the oath, Philip made a deal with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI instead: “to lay hands upon the king of England, in case he should pass through his territory.”
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Unaware of the Christian hostiles arraying against him, Richard was marching south towards the port city of Jaffa, which he hoped to capture in order to assure a steady stream of supplies for his army. Saladin attempted to block him, and the two generals met north of Arsuf, on September 7, 1191.

Possibly Saladin had underestimated his enemy; Richard planned the battle carefully, breaking the opposing line in three places with his cavalry so that his foot soldiers could rush through into the body of the Muslim army. Ibn Shaddad, who himself fought in the battle, says that the Muslim front was “broken utterly . . . the Muslims were, in fact, in a complete rout.” It was a devastating defeat for Saladin, and a turning point in the war; Saladin would never face Richard in pitched battle again.
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Over the next year, the two men sparred, raided, and negotiated, always through intermediaries; when Richard suggested a face-to-face meeting, Saladin refused, explaining that kings could not fight properly against each other once they had met. It was becoming clear to both that victory would go to neither. Richard was too strong to be driven away; Saladin was too powerful to relinquish Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Richard was hearing alarming reports from home: Philip II was trying to persuade Richard’s younger brother John to seize Richard’s English territories and was planning on taking the lands in Western Francia for himself.
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After lengthy negotiations, representatives from both sides agreed to a treaty at the city of Ramla. The terms, finalized and sworn to on September 3, 1192, imposed a three-year peace. Richard would hand over captured territories to Saladin; Christian-held land on the coast would be left alone; Christian pilgrims would be allowed to visit Jerusalem and other holy sites unmolested. Richard arranged for Guy, the ousted king of Jerusalem, to rule in Cyprus instead; Acre was declared the new capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which survived as a tiny Crusader territory on the coast that no longer included the city of Jerusalem itself.
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Richard, heading home, found himself in greater danger from his fellow Christians than he had been from the Muslim army. He was captured on his way back through the Holy Roman Emperor’s territory, and imprisoned (as per Henry VI’s agreement with Philip) until February 1194. Instead of handing him over to Philip, Henry VI used the opportunity to raise cash: he ordered that Richard buy his freedom, a ransom demand recorded (delicately) in Richard’s own letter to his mother and the English barons who owed him allegiance:

We are prolonging our stay with the emperor, until his business and our own shall be brought to an end, and until we shall have paid him seventy thousand marks of silver.
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Wherefore we do beg of you . . . that you will use all earnestness in raising the said sum of money.

The royal treasury was empty; Eleanor and the English barons (who hoped for royal favor in return for their efforts) raised the money by collecting gold and silver from the churches, confiscating the year’s crop of wool, and charging a 25 percent tax on the income of all Englishmen.
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While they were engaged in this effort, Saladin himself died in Damascus of a fever; his sons fought between themselves for his kingdom. Richard, finally ransomed and set free in early February of 1194, returned to mount his own war against Philip and his brother John, who had fled England and taken refuge at the French court. (“Take heed to yourself,” Philip had famously written to John, as soon as he heard of Richard’s release, “for the devil is let loose.”)
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The Third Crusade, beginning with yet another burst of religious fervor, had ended with political compromise between the Crusaders and their enemies, and with bloodshed between men of the same faith. Crusade had become simply another name for war; and its participants were more likely than not to die at the hands of their fellow believers.

Richard himself died in 1199, right after he and Philip agreed to a five-year truce in their ongoing war. One of the noblemen in Aquitaine, the Viscount of Limoges, had discovered a buried stash of gold and silver on his estate, put there for safekeeping by some earlier tenant and never retrieved. He sent Richard, as his liege lord, a portion of it, but Richard demanded the whole thing. The viscount refused to hand it over. Richard reacted with the same savagery he had displayed at Acre; he laid siege to the viscount’s castle, and when the knights defending it offered to surrender it in exchange for safety, Richard announced that he would storm the castle and hang them all.

He was riding around the castle on a reconnoiter when an archer on the walls loosed an arrow at him. It struck him in the arm; a wound, says Roger of Wendover, of which “he thought nothing.” But the doctor who extracted the arrowhead made a mess of the job, and the wound turned gangrenous. Twelve days later, the forty-two-year-old king died in his campaign quarters.