Lionheart (100 page)

Even the random details come straight from the pages of these chronicles: Philippe’s lost falcon at Acre. The Saracen slave girl who charmed Richard with her singing during his visit with al-’Ādil. Complaints about the tiny flies called cincelles. The postern gate at Messina and the Templars’ stairway at Jaffa. The pears, plums, and snow sent by Saladin to Richard when he was ailing. Richard’s one glimpse of the Holy City. The sudden mist that swept in from the sea and cut off Richard’s rear guard on the march to Jaffa. The logistics of a medieval army on the move, which I’d never encountered anywhere else. Richard’s unfair banishment of Guillaume des Barres in Sicily and their reconciliation after al-’Ādil’s attack upon the rear guard. Philippe’s unexpected interest in Joanna. Richard’s despair as he struggled to reconcile the competing demands of king and crusader. Even the names of the men killed in combat. Dialogue that occasionally came from the mouths of the men themselves. And Fauvel, the Cypriot stallion that so bedazzled Richard and the chroniclers.

Richard did, indeed, break his sword in his squabble with that understandably irate Sicilian villager, and he only had one knight with him at the time; I took the liberty of letting Morgan be the man. He really did arrive in Cyprus just in time to rescue his sister and betrothed, mere hours after Isaac Comnenus had issued his ultimatum to Joanna and Berengaria; no writer would have dared to invent high drama like that. I actually tried to tone down his battlefield heroics, as reported by the chroniclers, not wanting my readers to think I’d gone Hollywood on them. But he truly did ride up and down alone before the Saracen army at Jaffa. If that had been reported by Richard’s chroniclers, I’d have been skeptical, but it comes from two of the Saracen chroniclers; Bahā’ al-Dīn was mortified that none had ridden out to accept Richard’s challenge.

I took only one historical liberty with known facts, in Chapter Thirty-two. Richard did advise his nephew Henri to take the Jerusalem crown while warning him of the perils of marriage to Isabella; Richard was convinced that she was still legally wed to Humphrey de Toron. But Richard and Henri had no face-to-face encounter; it was done via messengers due to the time pressure, for the
poulains
were eager to have the marriage done ASAP. Since this is a novel, though, I opted for the greater drama of a personal discussion between the two men. I also shifted Richard’s killing of the wild boar from April to February. And because the chroniclers neglected to describe the palace at Acre, I used the description of the palace at Beirut.

In any historical novel, there are always times when we have to “fill in the blanks.” As I’ve said before, medieval chroniclers could be utterly indifferent to the needs of future novelists. We often do not have birth dates, wedding dates, sometimes not even death dates, and, more often than not, we don’t know the cause of death, either. All we know of the demise of King William II of Sicily is that he died of an illness, it was not prolonged, and it was unexpected. So I chose an ailment that was very common in the Middle Ages: peritonitis. I also had to select a birthdate for Isabella’s daughter by Conrad of Montferrat. We know Isabella was pregnant when she wed Henri in May of 1192, for one of the Saracen chroniclers was horrified by this, seeing it as proof of the immorality of the Franks. So Maria was born sometime during 1192, and, rather than keep my readers in suspense, I let her be born before the book’s end.

Aside from the “poetic license” I took in letting Henri unburden himself in person to Richard, I did not stray from the truth of this remarkable episode in Outremer history. Isabella did indeed defy the French; Henri hurried back to Tyre after learning of Conrad’s murder, where he was embraced by the population and the
poulain
lords, who urged him to claim the young widow and the crown; and Isabella did come to him on her own, against the advice of others, as I have her do in
Lionheart
. Henri’s reluctance was not at all unusual. Few crusaders intended to remain in the Holy Land; the great majority returned home after fulfilling their vows. Not even the promise of lands and titles was enough to tempt many men into renouncing their old lives. Joffroi de Lusignan had been made Count of Jaffa and Ascalon, but he still sailed for Poitou after the truce with Saladin. When a French churchman, Jacques de Vitry, was elected to the bishopric of Acre, his initial response was horror, for he saw this as lifelong exile. Guy de Montfort, the uncle of “my” Simon in
Falls the Shadow
, journeyed to the Holy Land and wed Balian d’Ibelin’s daughter Helvis, but after her death he returned to France. So Henri’s ambivalence about the offer made to him at Tyre was not that surprising, and while his marriage to Isabella seems to have been a happy one, it is telling that he never sought to be crowned and continued to call himself the Count of Champagne.

Now, on to the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat. The French did their best to convince the rest of Christendom that Richard was responsible for Conrad’s murder, and one of the Saracen chroniclers, Ibn al-Athir, claimed that Saladin had arranged with Rashīd al-Dīn Sinān to have both Richard and Conrad killed, but neither Richard nor Saladin are considered serious suspects by historians. Richard was desperate to leave Outremer in order to save his own kingdom and Saladin had just concluded a treaty with Conrad. The consensus is that the most likely explanation is the one given by one of the chroniclers—that Conrad had rashly offended the
Assassins
by seizing one of their ships.

I have always been glad when readers alert me to mistakes; otherwise, I’d keep on making the same errors instead of going on to new ones. So I was grateful to the readers who told me there were no brindle greyhounds in the Middle Ages, that foxes do not have black eyes, and medieval roses were not ever-blooming. But there is no need for readers to write and tell me that “fire” is a word that should be used only with gunpowder weapons, not crossbows. I am familiar with this argument, but I am a novelist, not a purist, and I found it impossible to write a battle scene with just the one verb, “shoot.” And while I’m on the subject of mistakes, Joanna’s and Berengaria’s belief that they were at their most fertile immediately after their “flux” was in error, but it was theirs, not mine; medieval understanding of the reproductive process was not always reliable.

I was confronted with two mysteries when I began to research
Lionheart
—why it took so long for word of Henry II’s death to reach Sicily and why word of the Sicilian king’s death did not reach France until the following March. This is rather bizarre as it was quite possible for a messenger to travel from London to Rome in a month. One of Richard’s couriers even managed to get from Sicily to Westminster in just four weeks, although that was extraordinarily fast. But four months is beyond slow. Yet when William II died on November 18, 1189, he did not know that Henry had died that past July, and a chronicler specifically said that Richard learned of William’s death during his meeting with the French king Philippe, at Dreux Castle, in March 1190. What news could have been of greater significance than the death of a king? Since there is no hope of solving this puzzle, the best I could do was to offer plausible explanations for the inexplicable delay. For readers wanting to know more about the speed of travel in the Middle Ages, I recommend
The Medieval Traveller
by Norbert Ohler.

While writing
Lionheart
, I made an interesting discovery. Henry II is believed to have used two lions as his heraldic device, and I’d assumed that Richard had done the same in the first years of his reign. But Richard’s crusader chroniclers referred often to his “lion” banner. So I did some research and found that the chronicles were right; Richard did begin his reign with a single lion rampant. In 1195, he adopted the coat that would remain the royal arms of England: gules, three lions passant guardant or. An excellent account of the evolution of early heraldry can be found in
The Origin of the Royal Arms of England: Their Development to 1199
, by Adrian Ailes. Richard also used a dragon standard at times. It has been suggested that Saladin may have used an eagle heraldic device, so I gave him one in
Lionheart.

I try to avoid using terms that were not in use during the Middle Ages. So my characters do not refer to the Byzantine Empire, instead calling it the empire of the Greeks. It was even more of an inconvenience not to be able to employ the word “crusade.” Medievals spoke of “taking the cross” or “going on pilgrimage”; the first term is unwieldy and the second conjures up peaceful images at variance with the reality of crusading warfare. As always, I do allow myself a bit more leeway when I am speaking in the narrative voice. It is always a challenge to decide whether to use medieval or modern place-names. In
Lionheart
, I went with the latter for geographical clarity; for example, I used Haifa rather than Caiphas, and Arsuf instead of Arsur. And I continue to struggle with the bane of historical novelists—the deplorable medieval habit of recycling the same family names. Thankfully, many names have variations; otherwise, my readers couldn’t tell the players without a scorecard. So in
Lionheart
, we have Geoffrey, Geoff, Jaufre, and Joffroi; William, Guillaume, and Guilhem. I chose not to use the name that the crusaders called Malik al-’Ādil—Saphadin—because it is not familiar to readers and could have created some confusion, unlike the much better known sobriquet Saladin. And for the curious, Richard was being called Lionheart even before he became king.

I usually try to anticipate readers’ queries, and am doing so now. I also plan to do a blog in which I discuss my
Lionheart
research and material I could not include in the Author’s Note. Although the poleaxe did not come into common usage until the fourteenth century, there is a twelfth-century painting in the cathedral at Monreale that shows one, and I thought it would be fun to mention since Richard was very interested in weaponry innovations. Contemporaries of Berengaria’s brother, Sancho, reported that he was extremely tall, and according to Dr. Luis del Campo Jesus, who examined his bones, Sancho was over seven feet in height. And assuming that the skeleton discovered in the abbey founded by Berengaria at Epau is indeed hers, she was just five feet in height. We do not know her exact birth year, although Anne Trindade, the more reliable of Berengaria’s two biographers, makes a convincing case that she was born circa 1170. The most quoted comment about Berengaria’s appearance came from the snarky Richard of Devizes, who sniped that she was “more prudent than pretty.” But he never laid eyes upon her. The chronicler Ambroise, who probably did, described her as very fair and lovely, and the author of the
Itinerarium
claimed Richard had desired her since he was Count of Poitou, which is a sweet story but rather unlikely, for medieval marriages were matters of state, and I doubt that Richard had a romantic bone in his entire body. While only one chronicler, Robert de Torigny, the abbot of Mont St Michel, mentions Joanna and William’s son, Bohemond, he is a very reliable source, for he was a good friend to Henry II and was accorded the great honor of acting as godfather to Henry and Eleanor’s daughter, Eleanor, who’d later become Queen of Castile. As I explain in the Afterword, we do not know the names of Isaac Comnenus’s second wife and daughter, called the Damsel of Cyprus by the chroniclers; Sophia and Anna are names of my choosing. Ranulf and Rhiannon’s son Morgan is one of the very few purely fictional characters to make an appearance in one of my novels, as is his love, the Lady Mariam. As I did in
The Reckoning
with Ellen de Montfort’s attendants, Hugh and Juliana, I had to create histories for Joanna’s ladies-in-waiting, Beatrix and Alicia, for all we know of them are their names and their utter devotion to Joanna. And now a word about Arnaldia, the baffling illness that almost killed Richard at Acre. It was not scurvy, as is sometimes reported. That was known in the army camp, and the crusaders distinguished it from Arnaldia; moreover, scurvy is caused by a deficient diet, and Richard had just spent a month in Cyprus. It remains a mystery, having defied diagnosis for more than eight hundred years.

Even for me, this is turning out to be a very long Author’s Note. I’d like to close with a
mea culpa
and an apology. I have a section on my website called Medieval Mishaps. Sometimes apparent inconsistencies in my books are not errors but merely reflect the “accepted wisdom” at the time I was writing. For example, sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that Eleanor has shed two years since
Here Be Dragons
and my first mysteries; it was always assumed she’d been born in 1122, but Andrew W. Lewis convincingly demonstrated that she was actually born in 1124. Sometimes my mistakes are revealed by subsequent research, such as my women wearing velvet in the twelfth century or Richard III having the world’s longest-lived Irish wolfhound. Until now I considered my most infamous mistake to be the time-traveling little grey squirrel in
Sunne
. But that squirrel has been utterly eclipsed by the mistake I recently found in Chapter Seventeen of
The Reckoning,
where I have Edward I telling Roger de Mortimer that crossbows were more difficult to master than long bows. I was truly horrified, for just the opposite is true. What makes this so baffling to me is that I
knew
this at the time I wrote
The Reckoning
, and I never drink and write at the same time. So how explain it? I haven’t a clue, but it is extremely embarrassing, and I’ve been doing penance the only way I can—by calling as much attention to this bizarre blunder as I can.

After the
mea culpa
, the apology. In the Author’s Note for
Devil’s Brood
, I did something well intentioned but foolish—I offered to provide material from my blogs for readers without access to the Internet. I did not anticipate the volume of letters and found it impossible to respond to them all, for I do not have any assistants to help with correspondence, reader requests, research, etc. So I would like to say I am sorry to those who wrote to me and received no response. The sad truth is that e-mail, blogs, websites, and social networking sites like Facebook have become the only realistic means for writers and readers to interact.