Lionheart (21 page)

There is no record of her feelings at being wrested from a young and affectionate husband to be bedded by a hardened middle-aged warrior, who was intent on rapidly getting her pregnant so that he could look forward to being regent to an infant heir on the throne of Jerusalem. This was all done despite Conrad being known to be married, albeit under the Orthodox rite, to Princess Theodora, who was still alive. Furthermore, since Isabella’s half-sister had previously been married to her new bridegroom’s elder brother William Longsword the match was incestuous under canon law. It was indeed a tangled web to be woven in the middle of a total war! Conrad, having recently been wounded, the newly-weds departed from Acre to the relative safety of Tyre, so that he could convalesce. His potency clearly had not been affected by the wound, because Isabella gave birth to a daughter by him the following year.

Talk of wounds during the crusades perhaps gives a false idea today when most severe injuries in combat come from explosives. In medieval hand-to-hand combat, both knights and men-at-arms suffered injury from slashing blades, stab wounds and broken bones. The worst were those inflicted by cudgels and maces, especially of the ball-and-chain variety – the preferred weapon of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother of William the Conqueror. It has been said that his choice of weapon indicated great holiness, in that he simply stunned his adversaries, but this betrays a misunderstanding of the weapon and times: Odo’s probably spiked weapon crushed skulls and shattered ribs and limbs horribly, but enabled him to claim as a churchman that he was not shedding blood.

It was common for men to have lost fingers, ears and noses, to have permanently damaged legs and arms or to have scarred faces. Indeed, the nasal piece had been added to the basic helmet after thousands of men lost their noses in combat. Because the essence of hand-to-hand fighting was brute strength allied with trained reflexes, in the intervals between combat outside Acre men of all ranks would be seen hacking away at the
pell
, a stout post driven into the ground that had been used since Roman times to practise delivering a blow with all one’s strength and recovering control of the sword immediately afterwards to foil an opponent’s counter-strike. And no one could ever relax. The Norman
trouvère
and chronicler Ambroise, who travelled with the Third Crusade and was first to use the epithet ‘Lionheart’, reported an incident in which a knight squatting to relieve himself in the siege camp was surprised by a Turk on horseback. Warned by his comrades’ cries just in time, the knight grabbed a stone from the ground and killed the Turk with it, capturing his horse into the bargain.
¹³

In addition to skirmishes, there were some major battles. On 11 October 1190 several thousand men of the garrison made a sortie from Acre, but were repulsed with heavy losses. On 31 October a flotilla of fifty Muslim galleys broke through the crusader blockade, with heavy losses on both sides. Their shallow draught enabled them to sail right into the silting-up port, bringing men, food and weapons to the besieged city, enabling the garrison to make another sortie on 11 November. An even larger fleet from Egypt reached the safety of Acre’s harbour on 26 December. In the siege camp, conditions were at their worst, with knights slaughtering their own horses for food and the common troops reduced to eating grass and weeds, just to put something in their stomachs. Shortage of food was made worse by the Pisan merchants, who controlled supplies, inflating prices to levels impossible for the ordinary crusader to pay: a handful of peas for a silver penny or a sack of corn for 100 or 200 gold coins.
¹⁴
The common soldiers were so hungry that the bishop of Salisbury had some flogged for resorting to cannibalism, unable to afford the inflated prices where even the common fig sold at seven for 1
bezant
.

There was in Europe a general prohibition on eating horsemeat because horses were considered noble animals and even poor people tried to avoid eating the flesh of animals that died. These and other prohibitions went by the board in the siege camp, where horses that had died of starvation were butchered to provide the only meat available, however tough, for many starving men.
¹⁵
The arrival of supply ships laden with wine, oil and corn brought prices tumbling down, so that the same measure of corn which had been for sale at 200
bezants
could now be bought for six.
¹⁶
Taking advantage of the Christians’ poor physical condition and general demoralisation, on 13 February 1191 Saladin’s men managed to break through the siege lines and reach the city gates, which were kept open just long enough to allow a fresh garrison to replace the exhausted original force.

With the improved weather, a contingent of Rhinelanders commanded by Duke Leopold V of Austria arrived by ship from Venice. He then assumed command of the survivors of Barbarossa’s army, Frederik of Swabia having died the previous month. Leopold must have wondered into what hell he had brought his men, but can have had no idea how famous an insult was to make him, as captor of the king of England.

Conrad was nothing if not a trier. In February he attempted a seaborne invasion, but his attack on the Tower of Flies failed when a ship went aground on a reef. In March a fully laden corn ship arrived and off-loaded its cargo for the crusader camp. After others followed, bellies could again be filled, at a price. News that the kings of England and France were on their way with their armies caused Saladin to write to the Muslim rulers of North Africa and Spain for assistance, but he received little except polite replies.

N
OTES

1.
  R. Gertwagen, ‘The Crusader Port of Acre: Layout and Problems of Maintenance’, in
Autour de la Première Croissade
, ed. M. Balard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), p. 553.

2.
  Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, pp. 23–4.

3.
  Gertwagen, ‘Port of Acre’, pp. 555, 559–60.

4.
  Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 25.

5.
  See Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 26 for a comparison of dates given in the various Christian and Muslim histories.

6.
  Quoted in J. Bradbury,
The Medieval Siege
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), p. 123.

7.
  Hyland,
The Medieval Warhorse
, p. 163.

8.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 143.

9.
  Bradbury,
Medieval Siege
, p. 124, quoting Baha al-Din.

10.
  Hyland,
The Medieval Warhorse
, pp. 48, 168.

11.
  Quoted in Maalouf,
The Crusades
, p. 208.

12.
  Count Henry’s mother was a daughter of Queen Eleanor by her first husband Louis VII.

13.
  Quoted in Bradbury,
Medieval Siege
, p. 124.

14.
  Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 33.

15.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
,
pars
posterior
, p. 69.

16.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 145.

12

Of Cogs and Cargo

R
ichard’s decision to make the greater part of the journey to Outremer by sea was possibly influenced by Eleanor, who had not only suffered much privation on the overland route to the Second Crusade with her first husband Louis VII, travelling via the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary and Byzantium, but also seen half the French army wiped out by Turkish hit-and-run tactics in the mountains of Anatolia before ever reaching the Holy Land. It is possible, too, that unconfirmed rumours had reached Richard’s ears of a secret pact made with Saladin by the Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelos to delay the crusading army of Holy Roman Emperor Frederik Barbarossa on the fatal overland route through his territory in 1189.

Although British schoolchildren used to be taught that the Royal Navy could trace its history back to King Alfred (849–99), this is not true. Most of Alfred’s military activity was on land, although he used ships to intercept Viking raiders at sea. In 875 he put to sea against seven invading vessels, captured one and drove the others off. In 855 his ships intercepted and captured sixteen Danish ships off the coast of Essex, but were then defeated by a larger force of Danes.
¹

Alfred’s was not the first royal fleet in the British Isles, then divided into several kingdoms. In fact, defensive fleets of these islands dated back to the Roman establishment of the Saxon Shore forts, ports and fleets in the third century. We know from the tenth-century
Senchus Fer n-Alban
– or History of the Men of Scotland – that taxation in the seventh-century Irish/Scottish kingdom of Dalriada included a ship-levy which theoretically provided a fleet of 177 small ships, each manned by fourteen men. However, the only deployment reported seems to be in the year 719, not defending Dalriada against foreign invaders, but in a civil war!
²
Alfred’s son Edward and his warrior daughter Athelflaed continued to fight the Danes, using ships apparently modelled on the Viking longship and built with taxes levied by the
ship-soke
. They could, on occasion, raise 100 vessels to defend Wessex although, according to
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, by 1001 Ethelred the Unwise was desperately ordering the construction of more and more ships but could not assemble enough to keep the invaders at bay. There was thus no continuing policy of an established navy; rather, each king tried with inadequate tax resources to cope with the complex of current problems confronting him.

The Norman Conquest saw a comprehensive feudal taxation system imposed on the English but this provided no permanent fleet, although a royal transportation system did exist between south coast ports and Normandy so that the king’s household and messengers on official business could travel across the Channel conveniently. Richard’s father Henry II is reckoned to have crossed the Channel nearly thirty times in his reign – usually in his
esnecca
³
or ‘snake-ship’ because it was swift and thin compared with contemporary merchant vessels – but had no fleet to outflank the Welsh when first invading their country, and failing to conquer them. In 1165 he had to hire a Viking squadron from Dublin to harass the coast of Gwynedd. So, inheriting no Anglo-Norman fleet that could transport his army for the crusade when he came to the throne, Richard was faced with a problem. In order to avoid paying the extortionate rates demanded by the ship owners of Pisa and Genoa, who possessed the two great Christian fleets in the Mediterranean, he decided to raise a fleet by purchasing vessels in English ports and his continental possessions. As maritime historian Professor John Pryor has observed:

Most historians have written about medieval campaigns as though they took place in a geographic, meteorological and oceanographic vacuum. In most books, military forces move from one place to another without the slightest difficulty … naval forces are given even less consideration. They leave the West and arrive in the Holy Land as though their commanders had merely engaged the engines on their cruise ships and set course by the shortest possible route for the Holy Land … For the First Crusade the only crusader fleet to attempt to make the passage to the East in one passage was a Genoese flotilla of twelve galleys and a transport ship. The fleets of Pisa and Venice … wintered over in the Ionian islands and on Rhodes respectively. And even the Genoese took four months to make the voyage.
⁴