Lionheart (26 page)

On 8 October the two kings met to agree frostily the future conduct of the crusade. Prices were laid down for foodstuffs, with profiteering to be punished – in extreme cases on the grim scaffold beside Mategriffon. It was also laid down that half of every knight’s money was to be devoted to the welfare of his men; debts contracted on the crusade must be honoured; and gambling was forbidden, except for knights and clerics – who were to be punished for excessive gaming, which the churchmen present said would include excommunication for transgressors.

Other bones of contention between the two kings were less easy to resolve. One of the many nobles related by blood or feudal duty to both sides in their dispute was Count Philip I of Flanders, shortly to die at the siege of Acre. At some point during November he avoided a schism that would fatally have split the crusade by brokering a settlement under which Richard was released from any obligation to marry Alais in return for a promise to return her and her dowry to Philip Augustus at the end of the crusade, plus a compensation of 10,000 marks
⁸
– which meant that she would be an asset for Philip Augustus to marry off to whomever he chose.

Whether or not the two Philips knew the true reason for Richard accepting the deal is not recorded: he had to clear the decks for an adventure he would rather have done without. Casting about for a match that would, so to speak, kill two birds with one stone, his mother had travelled across the Pyrenees to the court of King Sancho VI of Navarre to obtain the hand of his 25-year-old daughter Princess Berengaria, whom she considered a suitable bride for a king with Richard’s notorious lack of interest in marriage. It is true that he had once, while visiting Sancho’s court, written a poem for Berengaria, but that was just gallantry and indicated no emotional relationship. Although Richard admitted paternity of a serving wench’s child begotten long since, there was no trace of the litter of bastards traditionally left in the wake of a heterosexual duke of Aquitaine.

Historians disagree over how prevalent was the
jus primae noctis
or
droit de seigneur –
the law of the first night. It was in any event not a law, but a custom; troubadour poetry has many instances of a travelling knight coming across a lone shepherdess and raping her as by right, in contrast with the anguished yearning for a lady of his own class. Spreading his semen far and wide in this way was regarded as an enrichment of the common people’s bloodstock and there are many people in Aquitaine whose surnames are masculine first names, such as Pierre, which would originally have been ‘de Pierre’ because an ancestor had been a bastard offspring of a noble of that name.

After Eleanor dangled in front of Sancho the Wise the idea of becoming father-in-law to the king of England, he consented to the match and Berengaria was hustled away on a 1,300-mile journey to meet her unwilling bridegroom. Richard’s mother had been an extraordinary beauty in her youth and was still an impressive lady of great presence, but the bride she had chosen for her son was described as prudent, gentle, virtuous and docile – in short, a submissive wife with whom Richard might be able to perform his marital duty to provide an heir. Eleanor could feel satisfied with her mission: the second reason to marry Richard into the family of the king of Navarre was that it afforded an excellent way of safeguarding the common frontier of Aquitaine and Navarre. The deal she had made with Sancho did not include the marriage portion to which Berengaria should have been entitled as queen of England because Eleanor intended keeping that for herself. In compensation, she offered Berengaria the county of Gascony, the Ile d’Oléron and several towns on both sides of the Channel. The old queen and the queen-to-be hastened towards Sicily, so that Richard could be married – and the union hopefully consummated to get her with child – before he proceeded to the Holy Land.

With Joanna safely out of the way on the mainland, Richard spent much of Tancred’s money in a series of magnificent Christmas banquets designed to flaunt his wealth and show Philip Augustus up as the poor relative. The ‘entertainment’ was usually a
mêlée
, or mock free-for-all battle in which tempers could run dangerously high. In one of these Philip Augustus’ cavalry commander Guillaume des Barres, who had broken his parole when taken prisoner by Richard after the Battle of Châteauroux in August 1188, was unwise enough to wound the vanity of his erstwhile captor by unhorsing him. Some of Philip’s vassals had grown bored with the long stay on Sicily and departed with their own retinues in the hope of reaching the Holy Land before the spring gales, taking with them some of Richard’s vassals too. Tales soon filtered back of shipwrecks, disease and deaths in combat in the Holy Land.

Meanwhile Eleanor was chaperoning Berengaria, using a series of safe conducts to travel across Toulousain territory and down the length of Italy through the rigours of a hard winter. Coming after her journey into Navarre, all this travelling made considerable demands on a woman of 68, but she was taking no chances that Richard would wriggle out of the arrangement with Sancho the Wise if Berengaria arrived alone on Sicily. It would have been all too easy for him to invoke his crusader’s oath of chastity or the papal prohibition on women accompanying the crusade in order to continue celibate to the Holy Land.

Keeping up to date on the journey south was hardly as easy as picking up e-mails on one’s laptop in the overnight motel, but Eleanor did have a continuing feed of news from both the continental possessions and England: from time to time her cortège crossed paths with
nuncii
carrying letters from Sicily to the crusaders’ homelands and back. One significant meeting on her journey south came at Lodi, between Milan and Piacenza. Whether by accident or design, her visit coincided with that of Henry VI Hohenstaufen, eldest son of Barbarossa, who was on his way to Rome to receive the papal blessing on his succession to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. He was deeply displeased with Richard’s endorsement of Tancred’s claims to Sicily and southern Italy but the meeting passed with the usual courtesies, Eleanor being invited to witness a charter before leaving his court.

With repairs proceeding apace, Richard’s combined fleet had some 200 vessels lying idle at Messina, yet he did not send one to facilitate the journey of his mother and bride, letting them travel by land. This may well have been so that Philip was not presented with yet another insult in meeting Eleanor’s replacement for his half-sister, still locked up in Rouen, when Berengaria arrived on Sicily. On 30 March 1191, one day after Philip’s diminished fleet set sail, the old queen arrived at Messina with Richard’s bride-to-be. However, this was in the forty-day period of Lent, during which not even the archbishop of Canterbury could celebrate a marriage. There was also the crusader’s vow of celibacy to get around, if the marriage were to be consummated.

It was for Eleanor a brief reunion with her favourite son and Joanna, a daughter whom she hardly knew, having sent her to Sicily as a 12-year-old bride for William II fourteen years earlier. Affairs of state caused Eleanor to set aside any tiredness from the long journey and commence the return journey four days after arriving on Sicily.
⁹
She had learned that Prince John was using the time to acquire political leverage, taking advantage of the universal loathing for William Longchamp to bring over to his camp many of the nobility of England who outwardly professed loyalty to Richard but were all too aware that he showed no interest in his Anglo-Norman vassals, except to tax them. Statistically, there was one chance in four of a knight returning alive from crusade and the odds were even higher against Richard’s return, since he prided himself on always being in the forefront of any combat. So, to the dissident nobility of England it seemed very likely that John would wear the crown of England before long.

Armed with letters from Richard appointing Archbishop Walter of Rouen, who had been born in Cornwall, to replace Longchamp, Eleanor headed north after leaving Berengaria at Bagnara with Joanna acting as her chaperone until they could be safely embarked for the next stage of their journey to the east. The two royal pawns were said to be as happy in each other’s company as ‘two doves in a cage’
¹⁰
– a gruesome simile for the lives of noblewomen even of the highest rank. Because of the papal prohibition on women accompanying the crusade, they did not travel with Richard’s main fleet, but departed on 7 April in a fast Byzantine armed vessel of the type loosely referred to as
dromon
, having fifty oars a side, each rowed by one man, and a lateen sail. A word of caution is needed here. To landsmen, many ships look the same. As Professor John Pryor says, today people talk and write of yachts, but what exactly is a yacht? He makes the point that although the chroniclers of the Third Crusade called various Mediterranean vessels
dromons
, the true
dromon
had been replaced in the Mediterranean by swifter galleys before this time.

The royal vessel had both fore- and after-castles designed for defence against boarding by pirates on the high seas, and would have provided ample accommodation for the two royal ladies with their entourages and baggage, the decks being sheltered by awnings during fair weather. It sailed in convoy with two galleys, whose job was to see off any importunate pirates seeking to take hostage these important passengers. The arrangements should have ensured a safe and reasonably comfortable voyage to the Holy Land, but sea travel was never certain. Even the formidable Queen Eleanor had disappeared in these waters for six undocumented weeks on her return voyage from the Second Crusade after an encounter with Byzantine pirate galleys whose captains were intent on holding her to ransom.

On 10 April the rest of Richard’s fleet upped anchor or cast off mooring ropes and set sail, to the great relief of Tancred and most of his subjects who had at least avoided the fate that was about to befall their neighbours on Cyprus. Various contemporary estimates of the size of the fleet exist. Richard of Devizes gave the number as ‘156
naves
under sail (some of which were
taridae
or
huissiers
, each carrying twenty horses), twenty-four
buscae
(or northern round ships) and thirty-nine galleys’. Roger of Wendover gave the numbers as ‘thirteen three-masted
buscae
, 100
naves
under sail and fifty galleys’.
¹¹
Whatever the exact numbers, the fleet at this point was a mixture of ships that had sailed from England or Richard’s continental ports and hired Mediterranean vessels, together carrying some 8,000 men and the knights’ horses. Richard of Devizes recorded that this mass of shipping was divided into eight squadrons, so formed that a bugle call from one squadron could be heard by the next squadron and a man’s shout could be heard from one ship to the next in the same squadron; the king’s
esnecca
and the more manoeuvrable galleys brought up the rear, rounding up stragglers and towing them where necessary during calms.
¹²
As maritime historian Dr Ruthy Gertwagen comments, such station-keeping could only work with this number of vessels of dissimilar speeds during good visibility and calm sea conditions.

In case the idea of a sea voyage in those days seems like a chance to relax, on the Seventh Crusade half a century later, Jean de Joinville spoke for many when he wrote:

You may appreciate the temerity of the man who dares, with other people’s property in his possession, or in a state of mortal sin, to place himself in such a precarious position. For how can a voyager tell, when he goes to sleep at night, whether he may be lying at the bottom of the sea next morning?
¹³

At night, Richard ordered lanterns to be hoisted to the mastheads to aid station-keeping, but this was of no effect on the night of 13 April when a terrifying north-easterly storm, locally called
la tormenta
, sundered the fleet and forced those vessels that managed to keep station with Richard’s flagship to take shelter in the lee of the island of Crete, probably at the Gulf of Chandax, where the crews went ashore to replenish water barrels from streams that flowed down to the beach.
¹⁴

By this time, Mediterranean navigation was not totally devoid of scientific aids. Foremost of these was the compass, described by Richard’s milk-brother Alexander Neckham as a magnetised needle on a pivot in his book
De Utensilibus
and listed as an essential piece of on-board equipment in his
De Naturis Rerum
, published in the 1180s, together with its
modus operandi
:

When in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of the sun, or when the world is wrapped up in the darkness of the shades of night … [the sailors] touch the magnet with a needle. This then whirls round in a circle until, when its motion ceases, its point looks directly to the north.
¹⁵