God's War: A New History of the Crusades

did at St Denis, outside Paris, accompanied by the duke of Burgundy and the count of Flanders, a veteran of his own crusade in 1176–7. As arranged, the two kings met at Vezelay on 2 July, a place at once convenient for the march south, in neutral territory, and sanctified by the precedent of Bernard of Clairvaux preaching the Second Crusade. At Vezelay, the kings agreed to rendezvous at Messina in Sicily and, more controversially, to share any acquisitions they made, whether separately or only jointly is, and perhaps was, crucially unclear. For all the gaudy show of unity on display, the Vezelay agreement provided an accurate barometer of mistrust between the two leaders.⁷⁵

Richard and Philip led their armies out of Vezelay on 4 July, three years to the day after Hattin. They began by travelling together, with only their household troops, their armies and the other contingents which were joining them all the time following behind. At Lyons, the armies divided, Philip heading east then south to Genoa while Richard followed the Rhone due south to Marseilles, where he arrived on 31 July. The journey was uneventful after the collapse of a bridge across the Rhone at Lyons beneath the weight of crusaders; Richard had it replaced by a pontoon, the sort of practical and decisive leadership for which he became famous. The arrival of such large forces taxed the capacity of the Mediterranean ports of southern France and Italy to provide shipping, especially outside the central contracts agreed with the kings. Some crusaders had to find passage from as far away as Venice or Brindisi. Nevertheless, the agreed muster point for most if not all of those who travelled south in the early summer of 1190 was Messina. Even those delayed, such as Count Philip of Flanders, who only made his way to Sicily in the early months of 1191, regarded it as such.⁷⁶

With characteristic impatience, Richard, after waiting a week for his fleet, decided not to delay further in Marseilles. He hired a substantial flotilla, one part of which, under Archbishop Baldwin and Ranulf Glanvill, sailed directly to Acre, which they reached on 21 September. This division of forces may have been prompted by the desire to send immediate help in response to news of Frederick Barbarossa’s death. Alternatively, it may have been designed to conserve Richard’s political interests in the Acre besieging force now dominated by French nobles such as the count of Champagne. For the remainder of his troops at Marseilles, Richard provided ten busses and twenty galleys, probably capable of carrying between 2,500 and 3,000 passengers and crew.⁷⁷ Again, Richard’s improvisation, backed by clear strategy and cash, confirmed his reputation for firm action. On the leisurely summer cruise down the Italian coast to Sicily that followed, the king behaved equally in character, by turns tricky, aggressive, inquisitive, reckless and showy. He enjoyed robust diplomatic exchanges with Philip II at Genoa; snubbed Pope Clement III by avoiding Rome while bullying his legate; engaged in strenuous sightseeing at Naples and Salerno; and provoked a needless but dangerous fracas with some local Calabrian peasants before performing a grand public entry to Messina on 23 September.

This jaunt allowed the full crusade force to assemble. Philip had slipped into Sicily a week earlier and Richard timed his arrival to coincide with his grand fleet, which had chased him from Marseilles. Although Philip made a rather petulant show of immediately trying to leave for the Holy Land, the season was effectively too late for a crossing before the following spring. The kingdom of Sicily, which included most of southern Italy as well as the island itself, although economically prosperous with a strong maritime tradition, proved an uneasy billet. The death of William II in November 1189 had led to a succession dispute between his cousin Tancred, who had seized the crown, and William’s aunt, Constance, and her husband, Frederick Barbarossa’s eldest son Henry VI, now king of Germany. When the crusaders arrived, Sicily, a polyglot society of Greeks, Normans, northern Italians and Muslims, was a volatile place, nervously expecting Henry VI’s invasion and threatened by a Muslim revolt on the island itself. The crusaders were faced by Tancred’s uneasiness at their military strength, the overt hostility of the mainly Greek inhabitants of Messina and the occupational problem of high food prices. Their stay was marked by intricate diplomacy punctuated by violence as Richard, in particular, sought to impose himself through high-handed aggression.

Riots between locals and his men prompted Richard and his Angevin army to sack Messina on 4 October, ignoring the presence of Philip of France, who was lodged in the city, let alone the fact that the citizens, despite crusaders’ dark comments about miscegenation with Muslims, were Christian subjects of a friendly power. The pressure on Tancred was maintained by building a wooden castle outside the walls nicknamed ‘Mategriffon’, roughly ‘kill the locals’.⁷⁸ Tancred bowed to the pressure on 6 October by agreeing to pay 40,000 gold ounces in lieu of William II’s legacy to Henry II and the dower of William’s widow, Richard’s sister Joan, who had been under house arrest since her husband’s death. To keep Philip sweet, on 8 October Richard, in the spirit of the Vezelay compact, gave a third of his winnings to the French king, who used some of it to bail out his followers. Thereafter, at a popular level, there were no more disturbances, as the kings worked hard to control prices and imposed new discipline on the crusaders’ behaviour by regulating gambling and repayment of their debts.

During the winter of 1190–91 Richard found time to refit and expand his fleet, to extend rather patronizing largesse to Philip by giving him some ships in February, and to redraw part of the diplomatic map of western Europe. In the October treaty with Tancred, he had promised a marriage alliance between his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, and Tancred’s daughter, as well as help against any invasion of Sicily. Attempts by Philip to cast doubt on Richard’s sincerity came to nothing. For himself, Richard completed arrangements for his own marriage to Berengaria, daughter of the king of Navarre. She arrived in Messina, escorted by the indefatigable septuagenarian femme fatale of the Second Crusade, Eleanor of Aquitaine, at the end of March 1191. By this time Philip, fresh from his failure to turn Tancred against the English king, had reluctantly absolved Richard from his longstanding obligation to marry his sister Alice in return for another 10,000 marks. Armed with this subsidy and the English ships, Philip sailed from Messina on 20 March 1191, arriving at Acre on 20 April. According to a Muslim observer, Ibn Shaddad, Philip came with just six large cargo ships carrying his supplies, horses and retinue. A hostile western source depicted him as sneaking to shore in only one ship, without fanfare. Elsewhere his companions are described as including the count of Flanders, who probably travelled with the count of St Pol, the duke of Burgundy and a group of curial nobles and officials led by Count Routrou. One Muslim witness implied that Philip of Flanders travelled separately.⁷⁹ The group around Philip II mirrored the structure of Richard’s own force, some great nobles but the core provided by the king’s own household and court, but on a smaller scale and probably lacking infantry. Muslim sources recorded the defenders’ relief at the modest size of the French royal fleet. Once established in the Christian camp, Philip took the lead in pressing forward new attacks on Acre as Saladin brought up reinforcements to combat the new threat of the western monarchs. Whatever Philip’s intentions, the final push for the city waited on the appearance of King Richard.

Having received his future bride Berengaria at Messina, Richard put the finishing touches to his great fleet, which was to carry food, treasure, siege engines and even the dismantled wooden castle of Mategriffon, as well as horses, arms and men. On one plausible set of calculations, the fleet of 219 ships could have carried 17,000 passengers and crew.⁸⁰ This armada left Sicily on 10 April heading for Crete. Three days later a westerly gale started to blow, scattering the formation. At least twenty-five ships had become detached from the main squadron, including that carrying Richard’s sister Joan and fiancee Berengaria. Waiting at Rhodes between 22 April and 1 May, Richard learnt that some of the missing ships had been blown by the storm as far as the southern coast of Cyprus, where three of them had been shipwrecked and their survivors ill treated by the locals. The remainder, including the princesses’ ship, stood offshore. The independent Greek ruler of the island since 1184, Isaac Comnenus, fearing an invasion, fortified Limassol, sought a treaty with Saladin and tried to entice the princesses into his clutches, perhaps to serve as hostages against an attack by Richard, risky policies in the face of internal opposition and the crusaders’ overwhelming military superiority. Limassol had most likely been fixed as a rendezvous for the fleet from Sicily and Richard may have already contemplated subduing the island to assist the crusaders on the mainland of Palestine with a ready, secure source of supplies. The affray at Limassol and Isaac’s belligerent behaviour provided Richard with an excuse and a reason to intervene in Cyprus. Richard himself explained three months later that, because of Isaac’s behaviour towards the shipwrecked crusaders, ‘we were spurred to revenge’.⁸¹

What may have begun as a rescue soon became a conquest. Richard arrived off the south coast on 5 May. Having forced a landing at Limassol, pressing inland he made Isaac withdraw after a brief skirmish. On 12 May, in the chapel of St George at Limassol, Richard, Europe’s most eligible (and, some hinted, most confirmed) bachelor and Berengaria of Navarre were married. By this time, Isaac had sued for peace terms. Richard also received an embassy from Acre led by Guy of Lusignan, who asked for the king’s support against attempts to replace him as king of Jerusalem by Conrad of Montferrat, who enjoyed the backing of the French. A few days later, French ambassadors joined in urging Richard’s presence at Acre. Meanwhile, the truce with Isaac had broken down and Richard embarked on a systematic investment of the whole island. His fleet sailed round the island capturing