Sadly, I think some of the criticism directed against Richard hints at an anti-gay bias. Accusing him of being irresponsible and careless echoes the stereotype that many who are homophobic have of gay men.
I tend to agree with the British historian Elizabeth Hallam, who concluded that what little evidence there is paints Richard as a womanizer, if not on the epic scale of his father and brother John. When considering Richard’s sexuality, we must always place it in the context of his times, though. I am proud to live in one of the sixteen states in which same-sex marriage is now legal. They were not as enlightened in the Middle Ages, and the Church taught that a man who bedded other men was guilty of a mortal sin. And this makes the utter silence of the French chroniclers highly significant.
Philippe’s court historians, Rigord and Guillaume Le Breton, did all in their power to portray Richard as the Antichrist. They accused him of murdering Conrad of Montferrat, of poisoning the Duke of Burgundy, of sending Saracen Assassins to Paris to kill Philippe, of taking bribes from the Saracens, and even of betraying Christendom by a secret alliance with Saladin. Yet they never accused Richard of sodomy, a sin that would have stained his honor and damned his immortal soul. If they’d had such a lethal weapon at hand, I cannot believe they would not have used it. But I suspect that this debate will continue, for it is the Age of the Internet, people enjoy speculating about the sex lives of celebrities, and we can never be utterly sure of another person’s sexuality, especially one who has been dead for over eight hundred years.
The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” is a new one, only dating from 1980, but PTSD has always been with us. In my Acknowledgments, I cite a book, Achilles in Vietnam, whose author makes a convincing case that Homer understood the psychological damage wrought by war and the impact combat and imprisonment could have upon men, more than twenty-five centuries before PTSD was even diagnosed. He also shows that William Shakespeare recognized it, too, for his Hotspur in Henry IV suffers from many of the symptoms of those afflicted with PTSD. But few of us have the insight of a Homer or a Shakespeare. While chroniclers like Ralph de Coggeshall were aware that Richard had come home from his German imprisonment a changed man, they would not have understood why.
Can I prove that Richard suffered from PTSD? Of course not. It is challenging even to attempt to reconstruct the physical outlines of a medieval life; it would be impossible to map a man’s interior world. But we know enough about PTSD and the human psyche now to recognize how difficult captivity would have been for a proud, willful, hot-tempered king like Richard.
We all hold certain basic assumptions that allow us to find order in the midst of chaos, and the shattering of those assumptions can be devastating. The risk of PTSD is much higher if the traumatic event is sudden, unpredictable, of long duration, involves a serious risk to life or personal safety, and the person feels powerless. For fifteen months, Richard was balanced on the crumbling edge of a cliff, knowing that Heinrich was quite capable of turning him over to the French king, a fate truly worse than death, and, indeed, Heinrich played masterfully upon this fear. The emperor only overreached himself at the end, with that eleventh-hour double cross at Mainz, and even then Heinrich still managed to extort one final concession, the forced homage that shamed Richard to the depths of his soul. For a crusader king, his ordeal must have seemed utterly inexplicable. How could he not question why God had let this happen? And how could those questions not erode the foundations of his faith?
Did his imprisonment leave psychic scars? Well, his temper became even more combustible after his captivity. He was less inclined to pardon. His relationship with his wife had seemed amicable enough when they were in the Holy Land, but deteriorated dramatically upon his return from Germany, as often happens with PTSD. Despite a love of pomp and pageantry, he had to be coaxed into the crown-wearing ceremony and his Christmas courts were surprisingly low-key. And his hatred for the French king was all-consuming. If seen in isolation, these actions may not seem meaningful. Seen as a pattern of behavior, they reveal a man haunted by memories he could neither understand nor escape.
There has been some confusion among medieval chroniclers as to the identity of the man who shot Richard at the siege of Châlus. The usually reliable Roger de Hoveden was less so when he wrote of affairs in Aquitaine and the Limousin, for he had to depend upon secondhand accounts and rumors. The best sources for the events at Châlus are Ralph de Coggeshall, who seems to have had an eyewitness to Richard’s last days, probably the Abbot of Le Pin, and Bernard Itier, the librarian of Saint-Martial, a monastery less than twenty miles from Châlus. It is from Bernard Itier that we learn there were only two knights and thirty-eight people within the castle at the time of the siege. He identified the crossbowman as Peire Basile, a local knight from the Limousin, but he said nothing of the fate of Peire Basile or the castle garrison.
Roger de Hoveden is the only chronicler who reported that Richard ordered the hanging of the castle garrison and that Mercadier disregarded Richard’s pardon of Peire Basile and “after the king’s death, first flaying him alive, had him hanged.” This has been the accepted story, one I’d never thought to question. But then I found Histoire de Châlus et sa région, by Paul Patier, and was taken aback to learn that the author is convinced Peire Basile was not flayed alive. He cites a charter dated June 6, 1239, as proof that Peire Basile survived for years after the fall of Châlus. Is he right? I do not know; he himself admits that the Peire Basile mentioned in this charter is “très probablement” the same Peire Basile whose crossbow bolt killed Richard. I decided that “very probably” was not enough to rewrite history. The author also contends that the other knight taken at Châlus, Peire Brun, was later permitted to reclaim his castle at Montbrun. If this is true, it would mean that the Châlus garrison were not hanged, either, and Roger de Hoveden’s account was merely a rumor that he’d found credible. I would like to believe he was in error, that Peire Basile was spared such an agonizing death at Mercadier’s order. But until a French historian decides to do some serious research about Richard’s death and the fate of the men captured at Châlus, I can only accept the “traditional” account by Roger de Hoveden, perhaps with an asterisk added.
Another one of Richard’s legends—the man was a veritable magnet for myths—is that he was laying siege to Châlus to claim a treasure that had supposedly been found by the castellan. This story has been discredited in recent years, the most thorough exploration of the legend and its sources in “The Unromantic Death of Richard I,” by John Gillingham, in his Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century. Richard was conducting a punitive military campaign against an often disloyal vassal, the Viscount of Limoges, not a treasure hunt.
I had always assumed that Joanna had died in childbirth, unable to deliver her baby. It was a surprise, therefore, to find that this was not so. In trying to determine why she’d suffered such a dangerous pregnancy, my friend Dr. John Phillips was a great help. As soon as I told him that Joanna had given birth to three children in three years, he told me that she would have been very anemic, which medieval medicine could neither diagnose nor treat. We will never know for a certainty what caused her death, but I think hyperemesis gravidarum is a definite possibility. Women who are prone to motion sickness are more vulnerable to HG, and we do know that Joanna was so seasick on her way to Sicily in 1176 that they’d had to continue her journey on land. Most people are unfamiliar with HG, although it is probably better known today now that the Duchess of Cambridge was afflicted with it in the early months of her pregnancy. It is an awful illness and was often fatal until the advent of IVs and antinausea drugs. It has been suggested that Charlotte Brontë died of HG, possibly complicated by TB, in the fourth month of a problem pregnancy, for her symptoms matched perfectly with those of HG.
For those who would like to learn more about HG, I highly recommend Beyond Morning Sickness: Battling Hyperemesis Gravidarum, by Ashli Foshee McCall, a collection of powerful, har
rowing first-person stories by women who suffered from HG during their pregnancies. Some of them had been so ill that they’d been desperate enough to seek abortions, and then were guilt-stricken and remorseful that they’d done so. As for Joanna’s caesarean, it is one of the earliest reported cases of this procedure; in the Middle Ages, it was only done after the woman had died in an attempt to baptize the baby and save a soul.
It may be a cliché but it is also a truism that history is usually rewritten by the victor. One of the more blatant examples of this revisionism is surely the Tudor depiction of Richard III as a moral monster, done in order to validate Henry Tudor’s tenuous blood claim to the throne. Richard III was still more fortunate than Raimond de St Gilles, the sixth Count of Toulouse. Unlike Richard, Raimond has no society devoted to clearing his name and his foe cast a far greater shadow than those upstart Tudors—the medieval Church.
Raimond was one of the victims of the Albigensian Crusade, which began in 1209 and ravaged the lands today known as Languedoc. He made mistakes, ill served by an irreverent sense of humor and slow to see the danger until it was too late. In the end, he could save neither himself nor his people from the French invaders who claimed they were doing God’s will as they plundered the rich lands of the south. He died an excommunicate, falsely branded as a heretic, unable to keep the Inquisition from taking root and knowing that Toulouse was doomed.
Thousands of men, women, and children would die, the great majority of them Catholics, not Cathars. The most notorious of the massacres occurred at Béziers, whose citizens refused to surrender the two hundred Cathars living in their midst. When the town was captured, it was said that the papal legate, Arnaud Amaury, was asked how the soldiers were to distinguish Catholics from Cathars and he replied, “Kill them all. God will know His own.” Some historians have cast doubt upon this statement, for it was not reported until a few years later, but I have no trouble believing it, for I read the letter that Arnaud Amaury wrote to Pope Innocent, proudly declaring that neither age nor sex was spared and twenty thousand had been slain. There was not quite that much blood on his hands; the death toll was probably about nine thousand, including priests. When Raimond’s nephew, Raimond-Roger Trencavel, sought to surrender Carcassonne to spare it the fate of Béziers, his safe conduct was not honored and he was put in chains in his own castle dungeon, dying a few months later at age twenty-four. The townspeople of Carcassonne were turned out with just the clothes on their backs, “taking only their sins,” as a chronicler gleefully put it.
Men willing to shed blood so cavalierly would have no compunctions about vilifying those they destroyed, and so it happened to Raimond de St Gilles. Catholic chroniclers painted him in the most lurid of colors, maligning him as a godless Cathar, a man steeped in sin, an enemy of Holy Church, seeking to justify what was done in God’s name. As I said in the Afterword, his true sin was tolerance, incomprehensible to the medieval mind. By the time he died, his reputation was in tatters, and for centuries it was accepted that the Count of Toulouse had been a dissolute womanizer and a heretic.
Raimond’s character assassination at the hands of the Church spilled over into his marriage to Joanna, too. You will find it claimed by Wikipedia, and even some histories, that she was unhappy and was fleeing to Richard for refuge when she learned of her brother’s death. This is not true. The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens said of Joanna, “She was an able woman of great spirit, and after she had recovered from childbed, she was determined to counter the injuries being inflicted upon her husband at the hands of numerous magnates and knights. She therefore took arms against the lords of Saint-Felix, and laid siege to a castrum belonging to them known as Les Cassés. Her efforts were of little avail; some of those with her treacherously and secretly provided arms and supplies to the besieged enemy. Greatly aggrieved, she abandoned the siege, and was almost prevented from leaving her camp by a fire started by the traitors. Much affected by this injury, she hastened to see her brother King Richard to tell him about it but found that he had died. She herself died, whilst pregnant, overcome by this double grief.” This testimony is all the more convincing for being written by a man who was a devout Catholic and a supporter of the Albigensian Crusade, seeing it as necessary to combat heresy.
But Raimond continues to be portrayed as a neglectful or abusive husband, despite all evidence to the contrary, mainly because he remains a peripheral figure, a minor player in the histories of other men. The translators of William of Puylaurens’s chronicle, W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly, are renowned scholars, but even they get Raimond’s marital history wrong, reporting that he had five wives, which is indeed true; however, they, too, have confused the Damsel of Cyprus with the daughter of Amaury de Lusignan, listing the latter and eliminating the Damsel altogether. Raimond de St Gilles is a man desperately in need of his own biographer, and maybe a Raimond de St Gilles Society to repair some of the damage done to his memory.
Peire Basile’s crossbow bolt did more than change the history of England and France. It altered German history, too, for without his powerful uncle’s support, Otto’s hold on power was much more precarious. And that bolt would have a devastating impact upon Languedoc. Had Richard not died at Châlus, he would never have permitted a French army to invade lands he saw as within the Angevin orbit. I still think the conquest of Languedoc was inevitable; the Church saw it and its pleasure-loving people as a genuine threat, and the French barons saw it as a plum ripe for the picking. But it would not have happened while the Lionheart lived.
The circumstances of Constance of Brittany’s capture and imprisonment by her husband, the Earl of Chester, remain somewhat murky and confusing. The Bretons naturally blamed Richard, but that did not seem likely to me as he was still attempting at that time to coax her into allowing Arthur to be raised at his court; moreover, he would have known that the Bretons would never have agreed to trade Constance for Arthur, as indeed they did not. I chose to follow the chronology set forth in Dr. Judith Everard’s excellent history, Brittany and the Angevins, which remains the best source for Brittany in the twelfth century.
Ralph de Coggeshall reported that Robert de Nonant, the brother of the Bishop of Coventry, was starved to death in prison, and I see no reason to doubt him, for Richard would not have forgiven de Nonant’s defiance during their confrontation at Mainz. But he was imprisoned in 1194 and died at Dover Castle in 1195, so clearly he must have been given some sustenance for him to have survived that long; I concluded, therefore, that he was put on a bread-and-water diet. His brother, the bishop, who was hand in glove with John, was more fortunate, for he died in comfortable French exile in 1197.
Some readers may have felt a sense of déjà vu while reading several passages in A King’s Ransom—the garden scene between John and Joanna after he’d made his submission to Richard at Lisieux and the scene in Chapter 33 in which Eleanor accused John of conniving again with the French king. Your memories were not playing you false; variations of both scenes first appeared in Here Be Dragons. And readers of my mysteries will have noted the occasional appearances of Justin de Quincy and his nemesis, Durand de Curzon, both serving Eleanor as they have done since the publication of The Queen’s Man.
A few readers may also have been struck by the ambiguous way I described an ugly episode in the war between Richard and Philippe in Chapter 33, where I related that both kings had blinded prisoners, each one accusing the other of committing the atrocity first. The French chronicler Guillaume Le Breton claimed that Richard, in a fury, had ordered French prisoners blinded after several thousand of his Welsh mercenary troops had been slain in an ambush. The English chronicler Roger de Hoveden also reported the blinding of prisoners, only he placed the blame on the French king as the instigator. Historians generally give greater credence to the English chroniclers, for they were more independent of the Angevin kings, not penning court histories as Guillaume Le Breton and Rigord were, and were therefore much more critical of Henry and his sons than the French chroniclers
were of Philippe Capet. And Roger de Hoveden, in particular, is considered one of the most respected historians of the twelfth century. Nonetheless, I found it difficult to decide which of the conflicting accounts—Hoveden’s or Guillaume Le Breton’s—was likely to be the true one, probably because I could see both Richard and Philippe giving such a command in a royal rage; there is no doubt that their war had become very bitter and very personal by then. So I finally decided to include both accounts of the atrocity and then discuss my ambivalence in the Author’s Note, allowing readers to make up their own minds.
We do not know the fate of Richard’s Cypriot stallion, Fauvel. According to a later legend, Richard was riding Fauvel at the second battle of Jaffa and after Fauvel was slain, Saladin dispatched a stallion to the English king in tribute to his courage. Only that is not true. Richard did not take Fauvel with him as he sailed to Jaffa; he had only eleven horses at the time of Saladin’s surprise attack upon his camp, those they’d found in Jaffa or captured from Saracens. And of course, Saladin never sent him a horse during the battle. The gift of two Arab stallions was made by his brother, al-Malik al-Adil, and that was done afterward; not even the most chivalric of souls was going to provide his foe with another horse in the midst of a battle. Fauvel was safely stabled back at Acre while his master was burnishing the Lionheart legend. I am sure Richard would have arranged for the transport of Fauvel and his two Arab stallions; horses were highly valued in their world, especially horses of Fauvel’s caliber. So unless Fauvel was unlucky enough to encounter a fatal storm at sea, he and Richard would have been reunited after the latter regained his freedom. A chronicler mentioned Richard’s fiery Lombardy stallion; since he did not give us the Lombardy destrier’s name, I called him Argento.