A King's Ransom (133 page)

Another one of Richard’s legends—the man was a veritable magnet for myths—is that he was laying siege to Châlus to claim a treasure that had supposedly been found by the castellan. This story has been discredited in recent years, the most thorough exploration of the legend and its sources in “The Unromantic Death of Richard I,” by John Gillingham, in his
Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century
. Richard was conducting a punitive military campaign against an often disloyal vassal, the Viscount of Limoges, not a treasure hunt.

I had always assumed that Joanna had died in childbirth, unable to deliver her baby. It was a surprise, therefore, to find that this was not so. In trying to determine why she’d suffered such a dangerous pregnancy, my friend Dr. John Phillips was a great help. As soon as I told him that Joanna had given birth to three children in three years, he told me that she would have been very anemic, which medieval medicine could neither diagnose nor treat. We will never know for a certainty what caused her death, but I think hyperemesis gravidarum is a definite possibility. Women who are prone to motion sickness are more vulnerable to HG, and we do know that Joanna was so seasick on her way to Sicily in 1176 that they’d had to continue her journey on land. Most people are unfamiliar with HG, although it is probably better known today now that the Duchess of Cambridge was afflicted with it in the early months of her pregnancy. It is an awful illness and was often fatal until the advent of IVs and antinausea drugs. It has been suggested that Charlotte Brontë died of HG, possibly complicated by TB, in the fourth month of a problem pregnancy, for her symptoms matched perfectly with those of HG.

For those who would like to learn more about HG, I highly recommend
Beyond Morning Sickness: Battling Hyperemesis Gravidarum
,
by Ashli Foshee McCall, a collection of powerful, harrowing first-person stories by women who suffered from HG during their pregnancies. Some of them had been so ill that they’d been desperate enough to seek abortions, and then were guilt-stricken and remorseful that they’d done so. As for Joanna’s caesarean, it is one of the earliest reported cases of this procedure; in the Middle Ages, it was only done after the woman had died in an attempt to baptize the baby and save a soul.

It may be a cliché but it is also a truism that history is usually rewritten by the victor. One of the more blatant examples of this revisionism is surely the Tudor depiction of Richard III as a moral monster, done in order to validate Henry Tudor’s tenuous blood claim to the throne. Richard III was still more fortunate than Raimond de St Gilles, the sixth Count of Toulouse. Unlike Richard, Raimond has no society devoted to clearing his name and his foe cast a far greater shadow than those upstart Tudors—the medieval Church.

Raimond was one of the victims of the Albigensian Crusade, which began in 1209 and ravaged the lands today known as Languedoc. He made mistakes, ill served by an irreverent sense of humor and slow to see the danger until it was too late. In the end, he could save neither himself nor his people from the French invaders who claimed they were doing God’s will as they plundered the rich lands of the south. He died an excommunicate, falsely branded as a heretic, unable to keep the Inquisition from taking root and knowing that Toulouse was doomed.

Thousands of men, women, and children would die, the great majority of them Catholics, not Cathars. The most notorious of the massacres occurred at Béziers, whose citizens refused to surrender the two hundred Cathars living in their midst. When the town was captured, it was said that the papal legate, Arnaud Amaury, was asked how the soldiers were to distinguish Catholics from Cathars and he replied, “Kill them all. God will know His own.” Some historians have cast doubt upon this statement, for it was not reported until a few years later, but I have no trouble believing it, for I read the letter that Arnaud Amaury wrote to Pope Innocent, proudly declaring that neither age nor sex was spared and twenty thousand had been slain. There was not quite that much blood on his hands; the death toll was probably about nine thousand, including priests. When Raimond’s nephew, Raimond-Roger Trencavel, sought to surrender Carcassonne to spare it the fate of Béziers, his safe conduct was not honored and he was put in chains in his own castle dungeon, dying a few months later at age twenty-four. The townspeople of Carcassonne were turned out with just the clothes on their backs, “taking only their sins,” as a chronicler gleefully put it.

Men willing to shed blood so cavalierly would have no compunctions about vilifying those they destroyed, and so it happened to Raimond de St Gilles. Catholic chroniclers painted him in the most lurid of colors, maligning him as a godless Cathar, a man steeped in sin, an enemy of Holy Church, seeking to justify what was done in God’s name. As I said in the Afterword, his true sin was tolerance, incomprehensible to the medieval mind. By the time he died, his reputation was in tatters, and for centuries it was accepted that the Count of Toulouse had been a dissolute womanizer and a heretic.

Raimond’s character assassination at the hands of the Church spilled over into his marriage to Joanna, too. You will find it claimed by Wikipedia, and even some histories, that she was unhappy and was fleeing to Richard for refuge when she learned of her brother’s death. This is not true.
The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens
said of Joanna, “She was an able woman of great spirit, and after she had recovered from childbed, she was determined to counter the injuries being inflicted upon her husband at the hands of numerous magnates and knights. She therefore took arms against the lords of Saint-Felix, and laid siege to a castrum belonging to them known as Les Cassés. Her efforts were of little avail; some of those with her treacherously and secretly provided arms and supplies to the besieged enemy. Greatly aggrieved, she abandoned the siege, and was almost prevented from leaving her camp by a fire started by the traitors. Much affected by this injury, she hastened to see her brother King Richard to tell him about it but found that he had died. She herself died, whilst pregnant, overcome by this double grief.” This testimony is all the more convincing for being written by a man who was a devout Catholic and a supporter of the Albigensian Crusade, seeing it as necessary to combat heresy.

But Raimond continues to be portrayed as a neglectful or abusive husband, despite all evidence to the contrary, mainly because he remains a peripheral figure, a minor player in the histories of other men. The translators of William of Puylaurens’s chronicle, W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly, are renowned scholars, but even they get Raimond’s marital history wrong, reporting that he had five wives, which is indeed true; however, they, too, have confused the Damsel of Cyprus with the daughter of Amaury de Lusignan, listing the latter and eliminating the Damsel altogether. Raimond de St Gilles is a man desperately in need of his own biographer, and maybe a Raimond de St Gilles Society to repair some of the damage done to his memory.

Peire Basile’s crossbow bolt did more than change the history of England and France. It altered German history, too, for without his powerful uncle’s support, Otto’s hold on power was much more precarious. And that bolt would have a devastating impact upon Languedoc. Had Richard not died at Châlus, he would never have permitted a French army to invade lands he saw as within the Angevin orbit. I still think the conquest of Languedoc was inevitable; the Church saw it and its pleasure-loving people as a genuine threat, and the French barons saw it as a plum ripe for the picking. But it would not have happened while the Lionheart lived.

The circumstances of Constance of Brittany’s capture and imprisonment by her husband, the Earl of Chester, remain somewhat murky and confusing. The Bretons naturally blamed Richard, but that did not seem likely to me as he was still attempting at that time to coax her into allowing Arthur to be raised at his court; moreover, he would have known that the Bretons would never have agreed to trade Constance for Arthur, as indeed they did not. I chose to follow the chronology set forth in Dr. Judith Everard’s excellent history,
Brittany and the Angevins
, which remains the best source for Brittany in the twelfth century.

Ralph de Coggeshall reported that Robert de Nonant, the brother of the Bishop of Coventry, was starved to death in prison, and I see no reason to doubt him, for Richard would not have forgiven de Nonant’s defiance during their confrontation at Mainz. But he was imprisoned in 1194 and died at Dover Castle in 1195, so clearly he must have been given some sustenance for him to have survived that long; I concluded, therefore, that he was put on a bread-and-water diet. His brother, the bishop, who was hand in glove with John, was more fortunate, for he died in comfortable French exile in 1197.

Some readers may have felt a sense of déjà vu while reading several passages in
A King’s Ransom
—the garden scene between John and Joanna after he’d made his submission to Richard at Lisieux and the scene in Chapter 33 in which Eleanor accused John of conniving again with the French king. Your memories were not playing you false; variations of both scenes first appeared in
Here Be Dragons
.
And readers of my mysteries will have noted the occasional appearances of Justin de Quincy and his nemesis, Durand de Curzon, both serving Eleanor as they have done since the publication of
The Queen’s Man
.

A few readers may also have been struck by the ambiguous way I described an ugly episode in the war between Richard and Philippe in Chapter 33, where I related that both kings had blinded prisoners, each one accusing the other of committing the atrocity first. The French chronicler Guillaume Le Breton claimed that Richard, in a fury, had ordered French prisoners blinded after several thousand of his Welsh mercenary troops had been slain in an ambush. The English chronicler Roger de Hoveden also reported the blinding of prisoners, only he placed the blame on the French king as the instigator. Historians generally give greater credence to the English chroniclers, for they were more independent of the Angevin kings, not penning court histories as Guillaume Le Breton and Rigord were, and were therefore much more critical of Henry and his sons than the French chroniclers were of Philippe Capet. And Roger de Hoveden, in particular, is considered one of the most respected historians of the twelfth century. Nonetheless, I found it difficult to decide which of the conflicting accounts—Hoveden’s or Guillaume Le Breton’s—was likely to be the true one, probably because I could see both Richard and Philippe giving such a command in a royal rage; there is no doubt that their war had become very bitter and very personal by then. So I finally decided to include both accounts of the atrocity and then discuss my ambivalence in the Author’s Note, allowing readers to make up their own minds.

We do not know the fate of Richard’s Cypriot stallion, Fauvel. According to a later legend, Richard was riding Fauvel at the second battle of Jaffa and after Fauvel was slain, Saladin dispatched a stallion to the English king in tribute to his courage. Only that is not true. Richard did not take Fauvel with him as he sailed to Jaffa; he had only eleven horses at the time of Saladin’s surprise attack upon his camp, those they’d found in Jaffa or captured from Saracens. And of course, Saladin never sent him a horse during the battle. The gift of two Arab stallions was made by his brother, al-Malik al-Adil, and that was done afterward; not even the most chivalric of souls was going to provide his foe with another horse in the midst of a battle. Fauvel was safely stabled back at Acre while his master was burnishing the Lionheart legend. I am sure Richard would have arranged for the transport of Fauvel and his two Arab stallions; horses were highly valued in their world, especially horses of Fauvel’s caliber. So unless Fauvel was unlucky enough to encounter a fatal storm at sea, he and Richard would have been reunited after the latter regained his freedom. A chronicler mentioned Richard’s fiery Lombardy stallion; since he did not give us the Lombardy destrier’s name, I called him Argento.

Issoudun. That was the name of the castle and town that was unfortunate enough to be caught in the line of fire between the English and French kings. It was also the reason why I lost a lot of sleep. The chroniclers reported that Richard raced for Issoudun after learning that the French had seized the town and forced his way into the castle. The problem for me was that I knew the town was enclosed by walls, but I did not know if those walls had been erected by 1196. And this made a great difference in how I would write the scene. So I tried to find the answer to that question, with some invaluable help from my friend John Phillips. That turned out to be as challenging as the search for the Holy Grail. I finally struck gold with a French history of Issoudun; local historians are often the answer to a writer’s prayers. This book not only confirmed that the walls were indeed there in 1196, it also included a map of medieval Issoudun, which was like winning the lottery. Of course this did make life more difficult for Richard and me, since I now had to figure out a way to get him into a walled town. But it is such a gratifying feeling to be able to approach a scene like this with confidence, knowing it will have a sound factual foundation. And as an added bonus, another book I bought in my search for Issoudun’s elusive walls,
Le Berry du Xe siècle au milieu du XIIIe siècle
,
contained the story of André and Denise de Chauvigny’s troubles with the Archbishop of Bourges, which I’d found in no other history of the period; the author, by the way, shared my suspicions that the French king was behind this harassment of Richard’s cousin. The “Issoudun episode” is the perfect example of why I love historical research—and why it takes me so long to write each of my books.

My readers know by now of my m.o. when it comes to writing historical novels. I rarely use fictional characters, Morgan and his family being the exception to this rule. I am admittedly obsessive-compulsive about historical accuracy, and I think the Eleventh Commandment for historical novelists should be the one articulated so eloquently by my fellow writer Laurel Corona: Do not defame the dead. I do have to fill in the blanks more often than I’d like, for medieval chroniclers could be utterly indifferent to the needs of future novelists. We have to rely upon charters and chronicles to find out where someone was on a particular date. Naturally, kings are easiest to track. But women were well-nigh invisible, even queens.