15. Excalibur
Before the rendezvous at Vezelay, we travelled to La Rochelle to meet the armada of crusaders that had left England. When we arrived, almost a hundred ships were at anchor in the port. There had been mayhem in the town, as the English and Norman sailors and artisans had overwhelmed the taverns and whorehouses. Their disappointment in not finding enough mead, beer or women turned to anger, which soon boiled over into rioting and looting. Women were raped, including the daughter of the Castellan.
The King’s fury knew no bounds. He ordered that twenty men be executed on the harbour wall and 200 flogged. When it was pointed out that it was difficult to know who the guilty ones were, his answer was blunt.
‘Like the Romans, decimate them. One man in ten is to be flogged; after the flogging, one in ten of those is to be hanged.’
He knew how many men were in his fleet and had already done the arithmetic. After the punishments, he stood on the battlements of the keep that towered over the harbour and spoke to the assembled fleet.
‘Listen carefully to my words, for woe betide anyone who does not. Any man who kills another will be bound to his body. If at sea, he will be thrown overboard with the body, and if on land, into a pit. Any man who rapes a woman shall suffer emasculation by her hand. Any man who uses blasphemous or abusive language will be fined one ounce of silver for each offence and any act of theft will be punished by tarring and feathering and being put ashore at the next landfall.’
The King stared out over his huge flotilla; there was silence from the men, punctuated only by the cries of seagulls and the lapping of waves. The men knew he meant what he said. When he turned away, the silence continued for several moments before the men returned to their duties.
To my astonishment and the King’s, despite his threats, the same chaos happened when the fleet anchored on the Tagus in Lisbon, and again in Marseilles. The same punishments were meted out on both occasions and the decimation was doubled, then trebled. But the effects were only temporary.
As the Lionheart said later, in a moment of reflection, ‘They are the scum of the earth; let’s pray that they treat Saladin with the same contempt as they treat me.’
After our rendezvous at Vezelay, the main army and that of Philip Augustus marched south to Marseilles. The Grand Quintet had joined us, making a combined force of 1,500 knights and 10,000 men. Armies of that size were rarely seen. Only when we reached the open plain of the Lower Rhone valley could the end of the column be seen from the front, and only then if viewed from high ground.
In our vanguard was Walter of Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, who carried aloft the Holy Host in a golden pyx. Behind him came small contingents of new recruits to the ranks of the ‘Soldiers of Christ’ in their distinctive cappa robes: there were the Knights Templar with their crimson crosses, the Teutonic Knights with their black crosses, and the Knights Hospitaller with their white, eight-pointed Amalfi crosses.
Each contingent had its own colours on their shields, but it had been decided that all the gonfalons and pennons would bear the crimson cross of the Crusade. As a consequence, we painted the broad valley with a long snaking ribbon of white, splashed with blood red. Previous Crusades had cost many lives. As I watched the vivid column pass, I wondered how much of the symbolic blood on display would be real by the time we returned.
At Marseilles, a Genoese fleet carried us to Sicily in several convoys, but instead of the island being merely a staging post on our journey to the Holy Land, it became much more. We made landfall at Messina at the end of September and entered the city with all the panoply befitting the arrival of kings.
The Sicilian King, Tancred of Lecce, was hardly a foreigner to the Normans among us. A descendant of the Normans who had ruled southern Italy for 120 years after its foundation under Roger the Great, he governed a land noted for its diverse population of Greeks, Muslims, Jews and Christians, who had all lived side by side without malice for years. But Tancred was a new King, said by most to be a usurper and not all that popular. A small hedgehog of a man, with no obvious redeeming features, he was no more than the illegitimate cousin of the previous King.
Infuriatingly, on only our second night there, we were awoken in the early hours by trouble on the streets of Messina. There were just too many crusaders, too taken by drink and too amorous for their own good. Fights had broken out with King Tancred’s militia and had spread to the local population. Some of the army had begun to intimidate the local Jews and Muslims, who had retaliated, causing more bloodshed.
Tancred was furious and summoned Richard and Philip to demand an end to the fighting and recompense for the damage. It was a difficult meeting. With the sounds of looting and burning only yards away, I stood at the Lionheart’s shoulder as Philip and Tancred bickered about who was to blame and how the fighting should be stopped.
After half an hour, King Richard’s patience was exhausted. He had taken a dislike to Tancred, who he thought was an uncouth bully. He got up from his chair and marched towards the door. As he did so, he calmly issued his orders to me.
‘Tell Godric to send your men to Mercadier and the others with instructions to wake their men. Muster my personal conrois. We will take control of the city and occupy Tancred’s citadel.’
All those years of training to build a new army, which had begun when his Brabancon mercenaries went on the rampage in the Limousin, in 1177, then paid off. The King’s conrois were in their billets and sober when I roused them. When the Grand Quintet and their men arrived, we swept through Messina. We arrested those who surrendered, but cut down any who did not, regardless of whether they were Sicilians or members of our own army.
By dawn, the city was calm. We disarmed King Tancred’s personal garrison and locked them in their barracks.
Then the Lionheart marched back into Tancred’s hall, where he still sat with Philip. They were calmly eating a breakfast of fresh bread, cold cuts and beer.
‘Join us, Richard. I see you have been busy.’
The Lionheart did not respond, nor did he sit; he just took some bread from the table and quaffed a pot of beer.
Tancred continued in a supercilious tone.
‘As my guest, it’s not very polite to maraud through the streets of my city, arresting my men and assaulting my garrison.’
Philip then intervened.
‘Our view was that we should let them fight it out; it gets rid of troublemakers.’
The two men had obviously struck some sort of deal, but Richard was not in the slightest concerned. He took another swig of beer and a piece of bread, then left with only a brief comment.
‘At the moment, the objective of every Christian ought to be to fight Saladin, not one another. When you two realize that, I’ll release the arrested men and unlock the barracks.’
The impasse lasted for several weeks. Richard spent the time constructing a wooden palisade close to Tancred’s main palace, in Palermo, as his quarters. He thought Tancred a fool, but was furious that Philip had not helped him bring the city to order. He took the view that this kind of issue of command needed to be resolved in Sicily rather than in Palestine. When he discovered that Philip had been promised ships by Tancred and was planning to take his smaller army of 2,000 men to the Holy Land on his own, he was even more annoyed.
The stalemate became even more intractable. Tancred’s mood of apparent indifference changed. His considerable pride had been wounded and he became more and more angry that King Richard maintained an iron grip on his city and his garrison and refused to relinquish his hold.
Then news arrived that changed the situation significantly. It was carried by the personal herald of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and what he had to say mortified us all.
The army of the Emperor, a mighty host over 70,000 strong, passed into the Byzantine Empire at the end of 1189. They were warned in advance by Queen Sybilla of Jerusalem that the Byzantine Emperor, Isaac Angelus, had entered into a secret pact with the Sultan Saladin. They therefore avoided Constantinople and the Golden Horn, but the Byzantine Emperor did all he could to impede the crusaders’ progress by laying waste all around
