A King's Ransom (131 page)

Raimond was a man with his share of flaws, but what caused his downfall was a sin that we would consider a virtue—he was genuinely tolerant and was unwilling to persecute his subjects for their religious beliefs. He would pay a high price for that tolerance, would be publicly whipped, betrayed by men willing to violate canon law to entrap him, and then excommunicated. He died on August 2, 1222, at age sixty-six. He’d spent the morning on the threshold of a church as the sympathetic priests within raised their voices so he could hear the celebration of the Mass. He passed out from the heat and apparently then suffered a stroke. He had sought absolution repeatedly in the years since his excommunication, but it was always denied him, as it was now by the prior of St Severin’s. The Hospitallers showed more mercy and accepted the dying man into their Order. The Church’s enmity did not soften, though, and he was denied the last Sacraments, denied a Christian burial in consecrated ground. This would be a source of deep grief to his son, who tried desperately to get the Church to relent. The promise of mercy to his father was used as bait to force him into making greater concessions, but the promises were never honored, and Raimond’s unburied coffin rested for years in the commandery of the Hospitallers in Toulouse, where it was eventually discovered that his body had been devoured by rats.

His son, the seventh Count of Toulouse, knew nothing but war from his twelfth year. He could not have remembered the mother who’d died when he was only two, but Raimond seems to have kept her memory alive for him, as he showed himself to be devoted to that memory, often mentioning her in his charters, naming his daughter Joanna, and asking to be buried beside her at Fontevrault Abbey when he died in 1249, at age fifty-two. His daughter had been compelled to wed the brother of the French king, and when their marriage was childless, Toulouse was swallowed up by the French Crown.

Very little is known of Raimond and Joanna’s daughter, born in 1198. Most historians only mention the son born in 1197 and the son who did not survive. Others know there was a daughter, but claim her name was Mary or even Wilhelmina. That it was Joanna is proven by the necrology of Vaissy Abbey in Auvergne, which records that on May 28, 1255, died
“Johana, filia Raymundi comitis et Reginae Johannae.”
She was the second wife of Bernard III, Seigneur de la Tour, and had two daughters and three sons.

André de Chauvigny made another trip to Rome in April 1202, and Pope Innocent was more sympathetic than Celestine, ruling that André and Denise had been married for more than a dozen years, had five children by then, and there was no valid reason for challenging their marriage. Sadly, André was one of the men seized by John in his one great military triumph, when he captured Arthur and the leading Breton lords at the siege of Mirebeau in August 1202. John refused to ransom André and he was dead before the year was out. Some of the prisoners were said to have been starved to death and it has been suggested that he was one of them; he’d have been about fifty-two. Denise was then pregnant with their sixth child. She married again in 1205 to the Count of Sancerre, but died herself in 1207, when she was only thirty-five.

Constance, Duchess of Brittany, seems to have had a happy marriage with her third husband, Guy de Thouars. But her happiness was short-lived, as she died in early September 1201. It has occasionally been claimed that she died of leprosy, but that has been discredited and it is most likely that she died of the complications of childbirth; she was forty at the time of her death and the birthing chamber would have posed greater dangers for her. There is some confusion about her children with Guy. We know she gave birth to two daughters, Alix and Katherine, but I’ve seen it reported that Alix was born in 1200 and that Constance died after giving birth to twin daughters in 1201. Other histories say that Alix was born in 1201, and if so, she and Katherine would have been the twins. At least Constance was spared knowing the tragic fate of her children by Geoffrey. Arthur is believed to have been murdered at John’s command in April of 1203, and his sister, Eleanor (Aenor), was held prisoner in England for thirty-nine years, first by John and then by his son, Henry III, finally dying in August 1241. Once Arthur was believed dead, the Breton barons crowned his half sister Alix and Guy de Thouars served as regent until the French king assumed control of the little heiress, whom he would marry to his cousin when she was twelve. She died in childbirth like her mother, only twenty-two at the time. Guy wed again and his second wife gave him a son.

Baldwin de Bethune died in 1212 and his wife, Hawisa, Countess of Aumale, paid John the vast sum of five thousand marks so she’d not have to marry again; she died two years later. A few historians have suggested she may have been John’s mistress, but I’ve never been convinced of that.

William Marshal was a prominent figure during John’s reign, serving as regent to the latter’s underaged son, dying full of years and honors in 1219. The Earl of Chester wed another Breton heiress, Clemence de Fougères, but this marriage was childless, too; he died in 1232, having become a valuable ally of our favorite Welsh prince, Llywelyn Fawr. The Earl of Leicester was not blessed with a long life, dying in 1205. He and his wife, Loretta, had no children, and the earldom of Leicester was inherited by his sisters. The elder sister, Amicia, was wed to the French baron, Simon de Montfort, and eventually the earldom of Leicester would pass to Amicia’s grandson, another Simon de Montfort, featured in my novel
Falls the Shadow
. Mercadier survived Richard by just a year. He was murdered in the streets of Bordeaux in April 1200 by one of the men of a rival mercenary, who was now seneschal of Gascony.

Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, had an even more turbulent relationship with John than he had with Richard, and he fled to France in 1207. He died in exile in December 1212. I changed the name of Richard’s loyal clerk and subsequent Bishop of Durham, Master Fulk of Poitiers, as it was really Philip and I had a surfeit of Philips. He died in April 1208. Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, died in November 1200; he would soon be canonized by the Catholic Church and is the patron saint of sick children, the sick, and swans.

Philippe Capet lived long enough to overcome the stain upon his reputation caused by his abandonment of the Third Crusade and his humiliating defeats at Richard’s hands. He was much more successful against John and French historians consider him one of their great medieval kings. He seemed to be happy with Agnes of Meran, but he finally yielded to papal pressure and put her aside in 1200, making peace with the Church by effecting a sham reconciliation with Ingeborg. He continued to treat Ingeborg very badly, but Agnes spared him the awkwardness of having two crowned queens by dying in July 1201. Philippe died in 1223, at age fifty-eight, and was succeeded by his son, Louis VIII, who’d wed Eleanor’s granddaughter Blanche. Philippe’s abused queen Ingeborg outlived him by fourteen years, and was treated much more kindly by Philippe’s son and his grandson, Louis IX.

It seems likely that in marrying Alys to the young Count of Ponthieu, Philippe hoped that the marriage would be childless and Ponthieu would then revert to the French Crown. I am happy to report that Alys gave birth to an heir, though, a daughter, Marie. Alys is one of history’s sadder figures, but in a nice turn of irony, her great-granddaughter would become Queen of England, Eleanora of Castile, who wed Edward I.

Philip de Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais, took part in the Albigensian Crusade; naturally, he would. When he was freed from captivity in 1199, he was forced to swear that he’d not fight again against his fellow Christians. Not surprisingly, he did not honor this promise, and played a prominent role at the Battle of Bouvines, mentioned below, where he captured John’s half brother William de Longespée. He died in 1217, at age fifty-nine.

Berengaria’s younger brother Fernando died at the age of thirty in 1207 when he was killed in a tournament. Her youngest sister, Blanca, had a brief but happy marriage to Thibault, the Count of Champagne, brother of Henri of Champagne; she was a great comfort to Berengaria during the latter’s widowhood. Berengaria’s brother Sancho’s story is another sad one. His health deteriorated and he grew so heavy that he could no longer mount a horse and became a recluse. His marriage to Raimond of Toulouse’s daughter Constance failed, and although he had four illegitimate sons, he died without an heir in 1234, Navarre’s crown passing to his nephew, his sister Blanca’s son.

Leopold of Austria’s eldest son, Friedrich, assumed the papal penance imposed upon his father and took the cross. Like so many crusaders, he was stricken by a fatal illness, dying in April 1198 at the age of twenty-two. His brother Leopold inherited the duchy. He would have a long and very successful reign, earning himself the epithet “Leopold the Glorious” before his death in 1230. Friedrich, the son of Heinrich von Hohenstaufen and Constance de Hauteville, would become Holy Roman Emperor and even King of Jerusalem; he was one of the most intriguing, colorful, and controversial figures of the Middle Ages, called
Stupor Mundi
, the Wonder of the World.

As I explained in
Lionheart
, I chose to retain Richenza’s German name although she’d changed it to Matilda during her family’s exile in England. Her husband Jaufre, Count of Perche, died suddenly in April of 1202, leaving her a widow at age thirty. Jaufre entrusted her with the minority of their son, Thomas. She wed again between April of 1203 and April of 1204 to Enguerrand de Courcy, the French king’s cousin, and Kathleen Thompson, in her excellent history
Power and Border Lordship in Medieval France
, argues convincingly that what slight evidence there is indicates this second marriage was not of Richenza’s choosing. She died in January 1210, only thirty-eight, and her son, Thomas, was slain at the Battle of Lincoln in 1217.

Richenza’s brother Otto was crowned King of Germany in 1198, but he continued to be challenged by Heinrich’s brother, Philip of Swabia. Richard’s death was a great blow to him, and his hold on power became more precarious after John’s loss of Normandy, the tide shifting in Philip’s favor. But then Philip was tragically murdered in 1208 by a deranged vassal with a personal grudge, and the German barons turned again to Otto, as did Pope Innocent III. He was crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor in October 1209. He soon fell out with the Pope, though, who threw his support to Friedrich von Hohenstaufen, who was then seventeen. Since Philippe Capet was backing Friedrich, John resumed aid to Otto. The result was the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, which ended in a defeat for Otto and John, although the English king had not taken part in the battle. Otto was forced to abdicate the imperial throne in 1215 and died in May 1218, at age forty-one. His elder brother Henrik died in 1227 and his younger brother Wilhelm married the daughter of the King of Denmark, but he died young in 1213.

Anna is my own name for the Damsel of Cyprus. As I explained in
Lionheart
, the best source for the history of Isaac Comnenus and his daughter remains the article by W. H. Rudt de Collenberg,
“L’Empereur Isaac de Chypre et sa fille, 1155–1207.”
He speculated that her name may have been Beatrice, for a Beatrice received a generous bequest in Joanna’s will. But that Beatrice seems to have been one of Joanna’s two ladies-in-waiting who took the veil at Fontevrault after her death. The Damsel of Cyprus had an interesting marital history. Her marriage to the Count of Toulouse did not last long, and was over by the time Raimond went to the Holy Land in October 1202. In 1203, “Anna” wed Thierry, the illegitimate son of Philip d’Alsace, the Count of Flanders. They sailed with the army during the debacle that was the Fourth Crusade, and upon their arrival in Cyprus, Anna’s new husband claimed the island in her name. The then–King of Cyprus, Amaury de Lusignan, was having none of that and declared them persona non grata. They then went to Anna’s homeland, Armenia. In 1207, Thierry turned up in Constantinople, now ruled by his cousin, but we do not know if Anna accompanied him or remained in Armenia. After that mention in 1207, Thierry and Anna disappear from history; I am sentimental enough to hope that the remainder of her life was a happy one.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I
HAVE ALWAYS LOOKED
upon an Author’s Note as a necessary evil, for I find them very difficult to do. I do think they are essential, though, serving several purposes. They enable me to clear my conscience if I have had to take any liberties with historical fact and they lift the curtain to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a novel. They are also important to my readers, who have often told me they enjoy them almost as much as the books themselves. I can understand that, for I feel cheated when I read a historical novel and then discover that the author has not included an Author’s Note. So I have no intention of abandoning them; I even included one for my contribution to George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois’s anthology,
Dangerous Women
,
surely the first short story to have its own Author’s Note! Yet I will always approach them warily, my view of the Author’s Note being perfectly expressed by Dorothy Parker, who said that she hated writing but loved having written.

I’ll begin with Richard’s dangerous and dramatic adventures upon his departure from the Holy Land; it is remarkable how reality so often transcended fiction whenever the Angevins were involved. I’ve seen it suggested that Richard’s crusade was his
Iliad
and his homeward journey his
Odyssey
.
I am inclined to see
Lionheart
as the story of Richard the legend and
A King’s Ransom
as the story of Richard the man. I realize that
Ransom
’s
early chapters may read as if they were written by a Hollywood scriptwriter, but what I describe really happened—the two shipwrecks, the encounter with pirates, Richard’s temporary reprieves in Görz and Udine.

The site of his first shipwreck—La Croma—is today known as Lokrum Island (and the shore where Richard and his men landed has become a famous nudist beach). The Republic of Ragusa is now Dubrovnik, Croatia. Sadly, the cathedral that Richard’s money helped to rebuild was destroyed in an earthquake in 1667, but his memory lived on in local folklore, and, during World War I, a Serbian diplomat seeking British aid reminded that government of the warm welcome their king had received in Ragusa more than seven hundred years before.