Richard the Lionheart: the crusader king

Richard the Lionheart was a king who barely lived in his kingdom. He spent only a few months of a ten-year reign in England, and he sold offices and lands to pay for a war two thousand miles away. Yet his knightly courage made him the hero of his own age and of countless romances after it. Britannica sums up the man in a sentence: irresponsible and hot-tempered, capable of great cruelty, but a soldier of consummate ability, a skillful politician and a lyric poet of considerable power.²

Early life

Richard was born at Oxford on 8 September 1157, probably in the royal palace later called Beaumont, the third son of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. As a younger son he was given his mother's inheritance. At eleven he received the duchy of Aquitaine, and in 1172 he was enthroned as duke at Poitiers.³

Duke of Aquitaine

Aquitaine made him a soldier. He showed precocious political and military ability, won fame for his prowess as a knight and quickly learned how to master the turbulent barons of Poitou and Gascony. He also learned rebellion early: in 1173 and 1174 he joined his brothers in the great revolt against their father, who twice invaded Aquitaine before Richard submitted and was pardoned. For years afterward he was busy crushing revolts in his own duchy, and his harshness drove the Gascons to rise in 1183 with the help of his brothers Henry, the "Young King," and Geoffrey of Brittany.⁴

Rebel son, crowned king

The sudden death of the Young King on 11 June 1183 made Richard heir to England, Normandy and Anjou. Henry II wanted him to hand Aquitaine to his youngest brother, John; Richard, a true southerner, refused. In November 1188 he did homage to the young king of France, Philip II, for all the English lands in France, and in 1189 the two of them drove the old king from Le Mans to Saumur, forced him to recognize Richard as his heir, and harried him to his death on 6 July 1189. Richard received Normandy on 20 July and the English throne that autumn.⁵

He had one ambition: to lead the crusade called after Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187. To pay for it he dipped deep into his father's treasure and sold sheriffdoms and other offices, and with the money he raised a formidable fleet and army. In 1190 he set out for the Holy Land by way of Sicily, leaving the government of England to others.⁶

Messina and Cyprus

The crusade began with war against Christians. At Messina the townspeople were hostile to the crusaders, and in the autumn of 1190 Richard forced the gates with a battering ram and took the city in a single day, as the chronicler Richard of Devizes tells it. The new king of Sicily, Tancred of Lecce, was holding Richard's widowed sister Joan and her dower. By the settlement that followed, the Treaty of Messina, Joan was handed over to her brother, Tancred paid 20,000 ounces of gold for her dower and another 20,000 toward a marriage between his daughter and Richard's nephew Arthur of Brittany, and peace was sworn.⁷

Sailing on in the spring of 1191, Richard conquered Cyprus on the way. At Limassol on 12 May he married Berengaria of Navarre. On 8 June he joined the crusader army besieging Acre.⁸

Acre

The crusaders had been besieging Acre before Richard arrived; in July 1191, a month after he landed, the city surrendered. Richard quarreled with his allies: he insulted Duke Leopold V of Austria by tearing down his banner, and Philip II, who had quarreled with him too, went home to France after the city fell.⁹ › Saladin vs Richard the Lionheart

The surrender terms required Saladin to free Christian prisoners and return the relic of the True Cross. When neither happened, Richard ordered the Muslim prisoners killed. Both sides recorded it: the crusader chronicle known as the Itinerarium, in James Brundage's translation, says 2,700 hostages were led out and beheaded on 20 August, and Saladin's secretary Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad wrote that more than three thousand, tied together with ropes, were slaughtered in cold blood in sight of the Muslim army.¹⁰

Arsuf

Richard then marched south along the coast toward Jaffa, the port for Jerusalem. Saladin's army harassed the column all the way from Caesarea, which the crusaders left on 1 September. On 7 September, as they came out of the forest of Arsuf, the attacks intensified against the Hospitallers in the rearguard. Richard held his men back, hoping to draw in Saladin's main army, until the Hospitallers, losing their horses, broke ranks and charged. Richard turned the charge into a general attack that overwhelmed Saladin's army; Britannica puts the dead at 700 crusaders and several thousand Muslims.¹¹ › Battle of Arsuf, 1191

It was a famous victory, not a crushing one. Afraid of ambushes, the crusaders did not pursue, and Saladin regrouped. From 9 September his horsemen were harassing them again. But Arsuf opened the road to Jaffa, which the crusaders occupied, and it damaged Saladin's reputation as a commander.¹²

Jerusalem out of reach, Jaffa and the truce

Twice Richard led his army to within a few miles of Jerusalem, and twice he turned back. The city was the whole point of the crusade, but holding it after the European armies went home looked impossible, and the French, German and English contingents quarreled bitterly. Richard backed his vassal Guy of Lusignan for the crown of Jerusalem against Conrad of Montferrat, and when Conrad was murdered, rumor, unjustly according to Britannica, accused Richard.¹³

In 1192 Saladin attacked Jaffa and stormed the town while the garrison held out in the citadel. Ibn Shaddad, who was there, describes how the news made the king of England give up his plan to move on Beirut and come to the rescue, and how at daybreak the Muslims heard the Frankish trumpets as the relief arrived by sea. The citadel stayed in crusader hands. The Royal Household counts Jaffa among his victories over Saladin.¹⁴

Both sides were exhausted. In September 1192 Richard made a truce with Saladin for three years: the crusaders kept Acre and a thin strip of coast, and Christian pilgrims were given free access to the holy places in Jerusalem.¹⁵

Captivity and ransom

The way home was blocked by enemies. Avoiding France, Richard sailed up the Adriatic, and a storm drove his ship ashore near Venice. He traveled in disguise because of the hatred of Duke Leopold, but in December 1192 he was recognized near Vienna and imprisoned in the duke's castle of Dürnstein on the Danube. Early in 1193 he was handed over to Emperor Henry VI, who moved him between imperial castles. The romance of the minstrel Blondel searching for his master grew out of this captivity in the 13th century.¹⁶

Under the threat of being handed to Philip II, Richard accepted the emperor's terms: a ransom of 150,000 marks and the surrender of his kingdom to the emperor, to receive it back as a fief. Meanwhile his brother John occupied Windsor Castle and plotted with Philip, and their mother, Queen Eleanor, held England for Richard. Raising the ransom, Britannica writes, was one of the most remarkable fiscal feats of the century. Richard was freed in February 1194 and had himself crowned again, at Winchester, on 17 April, fearing his kingship had been compromised.¹⁷

How he made war

Richard was above all a master of the war of sieges and marches. He took Messina by storm, shared in the siege of Acre, marched an army along a hostile coast, and kept it in hand under constant attack at Arsuf until the moment came to charge. Behind the romantic image was an organizer who raised money, a fleet and an army on a scale few kings of his time could match.¹⁸

He was also brave to the point of rashness, and it was this impetuosity, Britannica says, that killed him. He could inspire loyal service and was a skillful politician, but he was also ruthless: the massacre at Acre was his decision. His enemies took him seriously: in Ibn Shaddad's account of Jaffa, the news that the king was coming made Saladin resolve to finish the siege at once.¹⁹

The last war and death

Within a month of his second coronation Richard crossed to Normandy and never returned to England. His last five years were spent at war with Philip II, broken by truces, while the justiciar and archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, governed England. To guard the Seine approach to Normandy he built Château Gaillard on the cliff at Les Andelys, the strongest castle of its age, and by the time of his death he had recovered all his lands.²⁰

The end was almost casual. The viscount of Limoges refused to hand over a hoard of gold found by a peasant, and Richard laid siege to his castle at Châlus. There, in an unlucky moment, he was wounded, and he died on 6 April 1199, aged 41. He was buried in the abbey church of Fontevraud beside his father, Henry II, where his mother would also be laid and where his effigy survives. He left no children by Berengaria, and his brother John succeeded him, losing Normandy and Anjou within six years.²¹

Legacy and memory

Richard was a popular king in his own time and became the hero of countless romantic legends: the minstrel Blondel, the duel with Saladin that never happened, the Lionheart returning to set right his brother's misrule. Recent historians, Britannica notes, have judged him less kindly, as a king who neglected England for his wars and drained it for his ransom. Both pictures hold part of the truth.²²

He remains the archetype of the crusader king, and his rivalry with Saladin is one of the great stories of the Middle Ages. Read more about his opponent, Saladin, the Battle of Hattin that started the crusade, the siege of Jerusalem in 1187, the greatest British commanders, or what happened on 7 September, the day of Arsuf.²³