stirrup. The horse was badly injured and, enraged by its pain, charged around the tiltyard, rearing and kicking, until it trampled Geoffrey to death beneath its hooves. The physicians did all they could to save him, but his injuries were too severe; his chest was crushed and he had deep wounds to his head.
The King was heartbroken. He had lost three sons – one in infancy, and now two more in their prime. Many said that the family was being punished for its sins and that the Devil’s Brood was now receiving the retribution that it deserved.
Life in Poitiers was very different after the arrival of Eleanor. The ‘Court of Love’ that she had created before her incarceration by the King returned. The routine we had enjoyed under the Lionheart – one of severe military training, frequent hunting and various forms of debauchery – was replaced by music and poetry, debate and learning, chivalry and manners. When Duke Richard needed to escape from the high morality of his mother’s court, he had to go in search of one or all of the Grand Quintet for baser amusements.
Although the Duchess – a title she held in her own right and much preferred to the title of Queen, which came courtesy of her husband – was closer to seventy years of age than sixty, there was no doubting her radiant beauty, nor her intellect and cunning. She was slim and shapely and walked like a woman half her age. She still had all her own teeth, all of which were unblemished and neatly aligned, giving her smile a wonderful symmetry; her face had few wrinkles and although her chestnut hair had become pure white, it shone with a healthy glow.
For a woman to be called both the most beautiful in Europe and its most powerful was a remarkable dual accolade. She was a patron of troubadours, poets and artists and a strong advocate of chivalry. She surrounded herself with handsome men and nubile women and encouraged them to let nature take its course, indulging their instincts. Rumours about her morality abounded and there were many tales of her numerous infidelities and sexual peccadilloes – most, no doubt, apocryphal.
Her exploits during the Second Great Crusade had added an almost supernatural allure to her reputation. She had taken the cross after hearing Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous clarion call, and insisted on taking personal command of her own domain as Duchess of Aquitaine. She recruited large numbers of ladies-in-waiting, who became known as her ‘Amazons’. She was feted in Constantinople as ‘Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons’, and she enthralled the Byzantines with her beauty and courage. Although the Crusade was largely a failure, her heroic journey to Jerusalem and back, usually dressed in armour, and her survival through mountains, deserts, shipwrecks and battles became fabled.
Like the Empress Matilda and her confidant, Earl Harold, the one overriding passion of Eleanor’s life was the preservation of the Plantagenet dynasty through her sons.
And her favourite son by some distance was Richard.
The early days of 1187 were a period of relative calm in the Empire, but as spring blossomed a thorny issue that had been pricking the King for many years became a much bigger issue.
Despite being under his care for twenty-five years, and at one time his concubine, Henry had still not found a husband for Alyse, the sister of Philip, King of France. The King had promised several times that she would be married to Duke Richard, but it had never happened. Philip wanted her back, or he wanted her wed; at the very least, he wanted her estates and castles in the borders between France and Normandy returned to him. Henry refused to return Alyse, fearing that Philip would use her to forge an alliance with someone else.
The powers of King Philip Augustus were waxing, while King Henry’s were waning, and both were aware of the changes in the other’s prowess. The French King calculated that the time was right to challenge the Plantagenets head on. And so, in the summer of 1187, two huge armies gathered near Chateauroux.
Towards the end of June, on a vast expanse of the flat, featureless farmland of Berry, all the lords and knights who could be mustered from the realms of Henry and Philip faced one another. At their sides were their allies from lands far and wide and thousands of bowmen, infantry and sappers, both regular soldiers and mercenaries, who made up the bulk of the two armies.
Most of the knights assembled had fought one another in tournaments many times, where the spilling of blood was commonplace, serious injuries were frequent and death part of the price they were prepared to pay for their sport. But what was in prospect on that inauspicious day was the mass slaughter of a major battle.
All was prepared. The din of men, armour and horses subsided and a menacing calm descended on the chosen field of battle. Pennons and gonfalons fluttered in the breeze, horses snorted, some peed or defecated on the ground. A few men did the same, or vomited where they stood.
I had been in many fights, some particularly vicious, but these were two mighty armies of huge proportions. I shifted uneasily in my saddle and took deep breaths to try to calm my racing heart.
Richard commanded the left flank, his brother John took the right and their father the middle. The Grand Quintet’s men supported Richard’s force, and I took command of Richard’s personal conrois. By the morning of 23 June 1187, all was ready for the mighty encounter to commence.
It was hard to count how many men faced one another that day. My estimate was at least 10,000 on each side. I had never seen so many men, let alone fought a battle amidst such numbers.
We were perhaps within an hour of the battle commencing when Father Alun rode up to our lines escorted by two men-at-arms. He carried a vellum scroll in his hand that would not only change the course of the day, but would also change our lives for ever.
Aware that a major battle between the two most powerful men in Europe was looming, he had travelled to Clairvaux in Champagne, the home of the Cistercian monk St Bernard of Clairvaux, whose passion for war had been focused on a world many miles from Europe, on a war driven not by the wants of men, but by the wishes of Christ himself.
St Bernard had been the main instigator of the Second Crusade of 1147 and one of the earliest supporters of the Knights Templar. Although he had been dead for over thirty years, his influence was still pervasive, and the great abbey of Clairvaux was still the spiritual focus of the crusader spirit in the Outremer.
It was well known that Christian control of the Holy Places was under threat and that Jerusalem itself was in danger, but the news that Father Alun carried was much more alarming. The Muslim leader, Salah al-Din Yusuf, known to the Christians as the Sultan Saladin, had issued a Jihad – a call to Holy War – in the spring and had been amassing a huge army ever since. The words of the Jihad had reached Rome and had sent a shiver down the spine of all who heard them, in every monastery and church in Christendom where they had been read:
Fight and slay the infidels wherever you find them.
Seize them, beleaguer them and lie in wait for them with every weapon of war.
Saladin’s reputation had spread far and wide in Europe. He was a man who had risen to rule the entire Levant by dint of his generalship and his code of chivalry, based on the Muslim knightly tradition of Futuwwa. He was much admired and widely imitated.
Although the Christian principalities in the Holy Land were powerful, and they had built imposing fortifications during the three generations they had been there, they lived a long way from western Christendom and were surrounded by millions of devoted Muslims. The Christians sometimes had the support of the Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire to their north, but that was not always guaranteed. Their main bulwark was provided by the military orders of fighting monks, the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller. They were redoubtable warriors, well funded and resourced from their properties and patrons in Europe, but they were jealous of one another and prone to competing rather than uniting in a common cause.
The figurehead for the Christian Outremer was the King of Jerusalem. In the past, these leaders had been warriors of great renown, but ten years earlier, the widowed Sybilla, Princess of Jerusalem, whose son had died, needed to produce a new heir to the kingdom. After much intrigue and haggling, a young French nobleman, Guy of Lusignan, was chosen and summoned from France. Sadly, he was not of the same calibre as the indomitable crusaders of the past. Since his arrival as King of Jerusalem, he had made several catastrophic mistakes in trying to meet Saladin’s growing threat.
When the Lionheart heard the detail of the situation in the Holy Land and read the contents of Father Alun’s scroll, he immediately sent a messenger to his father and brother. Within a few minutes, King Henry had called a council of war of his senior commanders and invited his opponent on the other side of the field of battle, Philip of France, to join him and the Plantagenets and to bring his senior nobles with him.
