Lionheart (23 page)

While the English flotilla was moored in the estuary of the Tagus awaiting the arrival of the squadron from Richard’s continental possessions commanded by Guillaume d’Oléron, there occurred a shameful episode that foreshadowed the sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. Welcomed at first by King Sancho, grateful for the armed assistance of the London crusaders at Silves in the previous year, some of the crews volunteered to assist Sancho’s army to repel another attack under the king of Morocco. After his death and the subsequent withdrawal of the Moors, the crusaders ran amok back in Lisbon, burning down houses, fighting among themselves and with the townsfolk, stealing property and raping women. Sancho put a stop to this by closing the gates of Lisbon and throwing into prison 700 rioters trapped within the walls.
¹⁷
The episode was whitewashed in many contemporary and later accounts by the pretence that the fleet was delayed by these men heroically capturing Silves from the Moors.

Released by agreement with Robert of Turnham and Henry of Cornhill, the men were forced to swear that in future they would abide by the rules of conduct laid down by King Richard. On 24 July William de Fors arrived with thirty more big ships, divided into five squadrons commanded by Archbishop Gérard of Auch, Bishop Bernard of Bayonne, Richard de Camville, Guillaume d’Oléron and Robert de Sablé, who was in overall command. After mooring in the estuary of the Tagus, they were given two days to re-provision before sailing away on 26 July, to the evident relief of the Portuguese, and passed the point of no return at the straits of Gibraltar on 1 August. The land on both sides of the strait was occupied by the Moors, but with insufficient naval power to prevent so large a Christian fleet passing through. In any case there was, as Saladin discovered, little sense of solidarity among Muslims of the Maghreb with those fighting the crusaders in Outremer. However, southern Spain was all Moorish territory, so, after Gibraltar, they were unable to land and re-provision until reaching Christian territory at the mouth of the Ebro in north-east Spain. From there, the plan was to rendezvous with King Richard and the bulk of his army, travelling by land, at Marseille on the southern coast of France.

N
OTES

1.
  N.A.M. Rodger,
The Safeguard of the Sea
(London: Penguin/National Maritime Museum, 2004), pp. 6–7.

2.
  Rodger,
The Safeguard of the Sea
, p. 5.

3.
  Also spelled
snecca
,
enecca
and
énèque
.

4.
  B.Z. Kedar, ‘Reflections on Maps, Crusading and Logistics’, in
Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades
, ed. J.H. Pryor (Farnham: Aldershot Publishing, 2006), p. 288.

5.
  Rodger,
The Safeguard of the Sea
, p. 45 quoting Pipe Roll 2 Richard I, pp. 7–8, 53, 104, 112–13.

6.
  Rodger,
The Safeguard of the Sea
, p. 45.

7.
  Ibid, p. 47 and endnote.

8.
  Possibly from ‘Muslim’ or ‘Mosul’ as in the case of cloth muslin.

9.
  See
www.royalnavalmuseum.org

10.
  Kedar, ‘Reflections on Maps’, p. 263.

11.
  R. Gertwagen, ‘Harbours and Facilities along the Eastern Mediterranean Sea Lanes to Outremer’, in
Logistics of Warfare
, p. 103, quoting from
The Book of the Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri
, trans. A. Stewart (London: PPTSL, 1893–96).

12.
  Hyland,
The Medieval Warhorse
, pp. 144–6.

13.
  C. Tyerman,
Who’s Who in Early Medieval England
(London: Shepeard-Walwyn, 1996), pp. 240–1.

14.
  
The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First
, ed. and trans. J.T. Appleby, Nelson’s Medieval Texts (London: Nelson, 1963, p. 10.

15.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
,
pars
posterior
, Vol 3, p. 46.

16.
  Kedar, ‘Reflections on Maps’, p. 263.

17.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, pp. 119–20.

13

Sea-Sickness and Siege

W
ith 70 per cent of the money raised in England already spent on the fleet and other preparations, Richard made a compact of mistrust with Philip Augustus on 18 January 1190, under which they swore to depart together and return together, meanwhile behaving as brother crusaders, their territorial disputes put on hold for the duration of the crusade. Expanding the peace treaty of Villandry, they also imposed a truce on all their vassals remaining in France for as long as the crusade lasted.

Richard’s travels throughout his continental possessions, exacting more taxes and punishing vassals who failed to pay up, were interrupted by the arrival of Queen Eleanor, crossing the Channel and bringing with her Prince John, Geoffrey the Bastard and a posse of prelates that included both William Longchamp and Hugh of Durham. Also in the party was Princess Alais, a hostage of the Plantagenets for twenty-one of her thirty years. Eleanor was by this stage desperate that Richard should marry and father a legitimate child, so that if he died on crusade, John would not succeed to the throne. And if Richard’s heir were an infant, who better than his astute and experienced grandmother to act as regent until it came of age? Marrying Alais, who had been betrothed to Richard for more than two decades, would have solved this problem. She had borne at least one child to Henry and was therefore known to be fertile. Since the marriage would also cement a new alliance between the Capetian royal family and the Plantagenets, it would have been a political masterstroke. Refusing the match at this moment was one of the worst moves in Richard’s erratic reign.

To correct another ill-considered decision, he forced Prince John and Geoffrey the Bastard to swear that they would not return to England in the following three years – the likely duration of the crusade – without his express permission. Eleanor was rightly alarmed: with John itching to lord it over his possessions on English soil, it was extremely probable that, if forced by this oath to remain idle in France, he would collude in some way with Philip’s vassals, with incalculable results. She therefore persuaded Richard to release John from the oath, so that he could occupy himself with governing his English territory. Geoffrey the Bastard was obliged to remain in France – an archbishop of York forbidden to set foot in the country of his diocese! A factor in this decision was the considerable income of the see that was to go to the Exchequer during his absence.
¹

England was a ferment of crusading fever; knights who did not take the Cross were presented with a distaff, symbolising the women’s work of spinning. Some of the stay-at-homes were even derisively labelled ‘Holy Mary’s knights’.
²
A few courageous individuals argued publicly that it was wrong to rejoice in the slaughter of thousands of Saracens, who were human beings, although unbelievers. The chronicler Radulphus Niger, a future dean of Lincoln Cathedral, went so far to declare that the obsession with terrestrial Jerusalem was a chimera that distracted men’s minds from the true goal of a spiritual Jerusalem or ‘heaven on earth’. But he was swimming against the tide. For many people, the idea of killing Saracen unbelievers in the Holy Land became confused with killing non-Christians closer at hand, as it had in the two previous crusades. England’s Jewish community was seen as an obvious target with the spurious justification that its property could afterwards be sold to raise funds for the crusade.

A series of pogroms climaxed in a mass suicide at York on 16 March 1190 – the feast of
shabbat ha-gadol
or the Great Sabbath at the end of
Pesach
or Passover. The former leader of the community, named Baruch – Latinised to Benedict – had already been killed during the pogrom in London at the time of Richard’s coronation. In the renewed violence his palatial home was set on fire, his family murdered and their possessions looted. This prompted the 150 surviving Jews in the city to take refuge in a wooden fortress standing on a motte and known as Clifford’s Tower.
³
Fearing that the constable of the tower would betray them, the Jews refused to let him in, arguing that the tower was the property of the king, under whose direct protection they were. When the sheriff John Marshal was told that they had illicitly taken possession of the tower, the militia was ordered out. This in turn attracted a mob intent on ‘tasting Jewish blood’, in which a prime mover was one Richard Malebisse, a noble deeply indebted to Jewish creditors at a very high rate of interest in the region of 250 per cent per annum, comparable to the interest rates of the instant cash companies of today. So high was the risk of default on loans from Jews that interest rates like this were the norm.

A friar celebrated mass in front of the motte each day. After he was killed by a stone thrown from the tower, the terrified Jews suffered several days of anguish while small siege engines were dragged into position below the motte. After a fire broke out in the wooden building from causes unknown, in the smoke and confusion, a French rabbi from Joigny advised the men to kill their wives, rather than have them raped before death. This they did, after which the rabbi killed sixty of the men in a scene reminiscent of the Roman siege at Masada. Many bodies were thrown from the tower onto the mob outside.
⁴
The remaining Jews, trusting to promises of safe conduct if they converted to Christianity, emerged to be massacred by the mob, whose ringleaders never had any intention of sparing them. Malebisse then led a group of other debtors to the cathedral to destroy the copies of their loan agreements stored there, before making good his escape, reputedly to Scotland.

At Bury St Edmunds fifty-seven Jews were murdered on Palm Sunday, and many others died in similar pogroms at Kings Lynn, Stamford, Colchester, Thetford and Ospringe in Kent. Probably the richest man in the kingdom, Aaron of Lincoln had founded a nation-wide banking organisation, financing major works like the construction of cathedrals and monasteries. On his death in 1186, so great had been his fortune that a
scaccarium judeorum
, or Jews’ Exchequer, was established under the Exchequer of Westminster to administer the estates of deceased Jews. Although cloaked by the argument that the Jews ‘had killed Christ’, most pogroms were incited by Christians who owed them money and had good reason to kill their creditors, loot their property and destroy evidence of the debts. In a few places, wise administrators forestalled this. At the first sign of trouble in Lincoln, the sheriff Gérard de Camville allowed the community to take refuge in the castle with all their valuables while he and his officers restored order in the town.

Furious that so much taxable wealth had been destroyed or stolen elsewhere, Richard ordered that, in future, copies of Jewish loan documents be held by the Crown, so that, when the lenders were killed, debts due to them automatically became enforceable as property of the king, removing the prime motive for murder by their debtors, although, as a Christian, he could not demand interest on the outstanding loans.
⁵
Hubert Walter later arranged the other details.

In the immediate future, Richard ordered William Longchamp back to England with his brother Osbert to arrest and punish the instigators of the pogroms and the office-holders who had failed to prevent them. Sixty pairs of iron fetters were purchased at a cost of 15 shillings for those arrested in Lincoln and the diocese was placed under interdict. Before Longchamp was finished, among his prisoners was Bishop Hugh of Durham, arrested ostensibly for his responsibility for what had happened at York on 16 March. Trusting to letters from Richard confirming him in office, he had returned to England, only to be shown later letters from the king justifying his Aye-and-Nay nickname by giving Longchamp jurisdiction. These were used to deprive him of his offices, most of his wealth and his liberty.
⁶