It also surprised me to learn that his health was not robust, that he was often ill, for that makes his battlefield exploits all the more remarkable. The Richard of legend smolders like a torch, glowering, dour, and dangerous. But the Richard who comes alive in the chronicles had a sardonic sense of humor, could be playful and unpredictable; Bahā’ al-Dīn reported that he habitually employed a bantering conversational style, so it wasn’t always easy to tell if he were serious or joking. And while I’d known he was well educated, able to jest in Latin and write poetry in two languages, I admit to being impressed when I discovered him quoting from Horace. Even his harshest critics acknowledge his military genius; he hasn’t always been given enough credit, though, for his intelligence. The mythical Richard is usually portrayed as a gung ho warrior who cared only for blood, battles, and what he could win at the point of a sword, but the real Richard was no stranger to diplomatic strategy; he was capable of subtlety, too, and could be just as devious as his wily sire.
But I was most amazed by his behavior in the Holy Land, by his willingness to deal with the Saracens as he would have dealt with Christian foes, via negotiations and even a marital alliance. As tragic as the massacre of the Acre garrison was, it was done for what he considered valid military reasons, not because of religious bias, as I’d once thought. However serious he was about offering Joanna to al-’Ādil, it was revealing that he’d entertained an idea that would have horrified his fellow crusaders, and it is impressive that he managed to keep it secret; we know of this only because the Saracen chroniclers reported it. He was not the religious zealot I’d expected. The man who was the first prince to take the cross refused to lay siege to Jerusalem, alarmed his own allies by his cordial relations with the Saracens, and although he believed they were infidels, denied God’s Grace, he respected their courage. According to Bahā’ al-Dīn, he formed friendships with some of Saladin’s elite Mamluks and emirs, even knighting several of them. That was the last thing I’d have imagined—knighting his infidel enemies in the midst of a holy war?
I don’t expect Lionheart to change the public perception of Richard I any more than The Sunne in Splendour could compete with the Richard III of Shakespeare. But I do hope that my readers will agree with me that this Richard is much more complex and, therefore, more interesting than the storied soldier-king. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised by what my research revealed. As an Australian friend Glenne Gilbert once observed astutely, “There had to be reasons why he was Eleanor’s favorite son.”
War was the vocation of kings in the Middle Ages, and, at that, Richard excelled; he was almost invincible in hand-to-hand combat, and military historians consider him one of the best medieval generals. It was in the Holy Land that the Lionheart legend took root, and his bravura exploits won him a permanent place in the pantheon of semimythic heroes, those men whose fame transcended their own times. Even people with little knowledge of history have heard of Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon—and Richard Lionheart. This would have pleased Richard greatly, for he was a shrewd manipulator of his public image.
But if Richard is the best-known medieval king, he is also the most controversial. His was an age that gloried in war and that jars modern sensibilities. The darkest stain upon Richard’s reputation is the killing of the Acre garrison. It certainly contributed greatly to my own negative feelings toward Richard, especially after I read in Stephen Runciman’s A History of the Crusades that the families of the garrison were slain, too. Human beings are conditioned to react to numbers; we find the deaths of two thousand six hundred men more shocking than the death of one man or a dozen. And the deaths of noncombatants is particularly reprehensible. So when I wrote Here Be Dragons, I was not at all sympathetic to Richard, repulsed by the blood of so many innocents on his hands.
More than twenty years later, when I began to do extensive research about the man, I was astonished to learn that the story of the killing of the women and children has no basis in fact. It first struck me that Runciman cited no source for his statement, and that really surprised me, for this is such a basic tenet of historical research. I then found that only older books like Runciman’s (which was written more than fifty years ago) made the claim that the families were killed, and not a single one offered any evidence to substantiate this accusation. This charge is not found in any of the more recent histories, including those written by historians specializing in the era of the Crusades.
This was of such importance that I put everything else aside and devoted my time to researching all the contemporary sources for the siege of Acre. I read every chronicle I could find that dealt with this tragic episode; I even sought out different translations of Ambroise and Bahā’ al-Dīn. In none of them did I find it said that the families of the garrison were put to death. To the contrary, Arab Historians of the Crusades, the translation of Bahā’ al-Dīn’s account of the massacre, refers to the martyrdom of three thousand men in chains. I also found a passage in al-Athir’s chronicle in which he said Saladin had sworn that all Franks taken prisoner would be killed in revenge for the men put to death at Acre; see The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh, Part 2, “Crusade Texts in Translation,” translated by D. S. Richards, page 390. So this turned out to be just another one of the myths that trailed in Richard’s wake—and a valid reason for not recommending the Runciman book. (Bahā’ al-Dīn said three thousand had been slain, Richard said two thousand six hundred, and I decided he was in the better position to know.)
The execution of the garrison remains troubling, though; these were men who’d fought bravely and surrendered in good faith, believing that they would be ransomed. But Richard was ruthless when he waged war, and the matter-of-fact tone of his letter to the abbot of Clairvaux shows that he felt himself justified in executing them after Saladin defaulted on the terms of the surrender. Bahā’ al-Dīn admitted that Saladin had been seeking to delay their departure from Acre, although I find it highly unlikely that he expected to have his bluff called in such a brutal fashion. But the Saracens must have seen Richard’s action as a military decision, for how else could Richard have formed friendships with so many of Saladin’s emirs and Mamluks?
I still found myself feeling enormous sympathy for the slain men and the loved ones they left behind. I felt sympathy for all those who died during the Third Crusade, soldiers and civilians alike. It is not always easy for an instinctive pacifist to wade through so much blood and gore while writing of medieval battles! As a writer and a reader, I am faced with one of the greatest challenges, which is not to judge people of another age by our standards of conduct. The truth is that virtually every medieval ruler committed acts that we would find abhorrent, and that includes Richard, his father, Henry, Saladin, and most of the men I’ve been writing about over the years, with the possible exception of poor, addled Henry VI. But I never feel too sanctimonious, not when I remember the death toll for civilians in the wars that have convulsed our world during my own lifetime. St Francis of Assissi has always been a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness.
Lionheart was a unique writing experience. I’ve never had such a wealth of eyewitness accounts of events; the closest I’d come was Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral. This was beyond wonderful, spoiling me for other books. I had amazing resources to draw upon—two chronicles written by men who accompanied Richard on the Third Crusade, and three Saracen chronicles written by men who were there, two of them members of Saladin’s inner circle. There were other chronicles, too, which I list on my Acknowledgments page, but it was the ones written by the poet Ambroise, the clerk Richard of the Temple, and Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād that I found absolutely riveting.
Imagine being able to read accounts of battles by the men who actually fought in them. Bahā’ al-Dīn watched as Richard landed on the beach at Jaffa, vividly describing his red galley, red tunic, red hair, and red banner. Ambroise’s account of the crusaders’ march along the coast reads like a battlef
ield dispatch. The author of the Itinerarium compared the fleet Saracen horses to the flight of swallows, and explained how the stings of tarantulas were treated with theriaca, which only the wealthy could afford. Both the crusader and Saracen chroniclers reported Guilhem de Préaux’s heroic sacrifice. Occasionally, I had to reconcile differing accounts. Ambroise said the huge Saracen ship was rammed by Richard’s galleys when they could not capture it; Bahā’ al-Dīn said the captain gave the order to scuttle it. So I went with the most likely scenario that both chroniclers were correct.
Even the random details come straight from the pages of these chronicles: Philippe’s lost falcon at Acre. The Saracen slave girl who charmed Richard with her singing during his visit with al-’Ādil. Complaints about the tiny flies called cincelles. The postern gate at Messina and the Templars’ stairway at Jaffa. The pears, plums, and snow sent by Saladin to Richard when he was ailing. Richard’s one glimpse of the Holy City. The sudden mist that swept in from the sea and cut off Richard’s rear guard on the march to Jaffa. The logistics of a medieval army on the move, which I’d never encountered anywhere else. Richard’s unfair banishment of Guillaume des Barres in Sicily and their reconciliation after al-’Ādil’s attack upon the rear guard. Philippe’s unexpected interest in Joanna. Richard’s despair as he struggled to reconcile the competing demands of king and crusader. Even the names of the men killed in combat. Dialogue that occasionally came from the mouths of the men themselves. And Fauvel, the Cypriot stallion that so bedazzled Richard and the chroniclers.
Richard did, indeed, break his sword in his squabble with that understandably irate Sicilian villager, and he only had one knight with him at the time; I took the liberty of letting Morgan be the man. He really did arrive in Cyprus just in time to rescue his sister and betrothed, mere hours after Isaac Comnenus had issued his ultimatum to Joanna and Berengaria; no writer would have dared to invent high drama like that. I actually tried to tone down his battlefield heroics, as reported by the chroniclers, not wanting my readers to think I’d gone Hollywood on them. But he truly did ride up and down alone before the Saracen army at Jaffa. If that had been reported by Richard’s chroniclers, I’d have been skeptical, but it comes from two of the Saracen chroniclers; Bahā’ al-Dīn was mortified that none had ridden out to accept Richard’s challenge.
I took only one historical liberty with known facts, in Chapter Thirty-two. Richard did advise his nephew Henri to take the Jerusalem crown while warning him of the perils of marriage to Isabella; Richard was convinced that she was still legally wed to Humphrey de Toron. But Richard and Henri had no face-to-face encounter; it was done via messengers due to the time pressure, for the poulains were eager to have the marriage done ASAP. Since this is a novel, though, I opted for the greater drama of a personal discussion between the two men. I also shifted Richard’s killing of the wild boar from April to February. And because the chroniclers neglected to describe the palace at Acre, I used the description of the palace at Beirut.
In any historical novel, there are always times when we have to “fill in the blanks.” As I’ve said before, medieval chroniclers could be utterly indifferent to the needs of future novelists. We often do not have birth dates, wedding dates, sometimes not even death dates, and, more often than not, we don’t know the cause of death, either. All we know of the demise of King William II of Sicily is that he died of an illness, it was not prolonged, and it was unexpected. So I chose an ailment that was very common in the Middle Ages: peritonitis. I also had to select a birthdate for Isabella’s daughter by Conrad of Montferrat. We know Isabella was pregnant when she wed Henri in May of 1192, for one of the Saracen chroniclers was horrified by this, seeing it as proof of the immorality of the Franks. So Maria was born sometime during 1192, and, rather than keep my readers in suspense, I let her be born before the book’s end.
Aside from the “poetic license” I took in letting Henri unburden himself in person to Richard, I did not stray from the truth of this remarkable episode in Outremer history. Isabella did indeed defy the French; Henri hurried back to Tyre after learning of Conrad’s murder, where he was embraced by the population and the poulain lords, who urged him to claim the young widow and the crown; and Isabella did come to him on her own, against the advice of others, as I have her do in Lionheart. Henri’s reluctance was not at all unusual. Few crusaders intended to remain in the Holy Land; the great majority returned home after fulfilling their vows. Not even the promise of lands and titles was enough to tempt many men into renouncing their old lives. Joffroi de Lusignan had been made Count of Jaffa and Ascalon, but he still sailed for Poitou after the truce with Saladin. When a French churchman, Jacques de Vitry, was elected to the bishopric of Acre, his initial response was horror, for he saw this as lifelong exile. Guy de Montfort, the uncle of “my” Simon in Falls the Shadow, journeyed to the Holy Land and wed Balian d’Ibelin’s daughter Helvis, but after her death he returned to France. So Henri’s ambivalence about the offer made to him at Tyre was not that surprising, and while his marriage to Isabella seems to have been a happy one, it is telling that he never sought to be crowned and continued to call himself the Count of Champagne.
Now, on to the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat. The French did their best to convince the rest of Christendom that Richard was responsible for Conrad’s murder, and one of the Saracen chroniclers, Ibn al-Athir, claimed that Saladin had arranged with Rashīd al-Dīn Sinān to have both Richard and Conrad killed, but neither Richard nor Saladin are considered serious suspects by historians. Richard was desperate to leave Outremer in order to save his own kingdom and Saladin had just concluded a treaty with Conrad. The consensus is that the most likely explanation is the one given by one of the chroniclers—that Conrad had rashly offended the Assassins by seizing one of their ships.
I have always been glad when readers alert me to mistakes; otherwise, I’d keep on making the same errors instead of going on to new ones. So I was grateful to the readers who told me there were no brindle greyhounds in the Middle Ages, that foxes do not have black eyes, and medieval roses were not ever-blooming. But there is no need for readers to write and tell me that “fire” is a word that should be used only with gunpowder weapons, not crossbows. I am familiar with this argument, but I am a novelist, not a purist, and I found it impossible to write a battle scene with just the one verb, “shoot.” And while I’m on the subject of mistakes, Joanna’s and Berengaria’s belief that they were at their most fertile immediately after their “flux” was in error, but it was theirs, not mine; medieval understanding of the reproductive process was not always reliable.
I was confronted with two mysteries when I began to research Lionheart—why it took so long for word of Henry II’s death to reach Sicily and why word of the Sicilian king’s death did not reach France until the following March. This is rather bizarre as it was quite possible for a messenger to travel from London to Rome in a month. One of Richard’s couriers even managed to get from Sicily to Westminster in just four weeks, although that was extraordinarily fast. But four months is beyond slow. Yet when William II died on November 18, 1189, he did not know that Henry had died that past July, and a chronicler specifically said that Richard learned of William’s death during his meeting with the French king Philippe, at Dreux Castle, in March 1190. What news could have been of greater significance than the death of a king? Since there is no hope of solving this puzzle, the best I could do was to offer plausible explanations for the inexplicable delay. For readers wanting to know more about the speed of travel in the Middle Ages, I recommend The Medieval Traveller by Norbert Ohler.
While writing Lionheart, I made an interesting discovery. Henry II is believed to have used two lions as his heraldic device, and I’d assumed that Richard had done the same in the first years of his reign. But Richard’s crusader chroniclers referred often to his “lion” banner. So I did some research and found that the chronicles were right; Richard did begin his reign with a single lion rampant. In 1195, he ado
pted the coat that would remain the royal arms of England: gules, three lions passant guardant or. An excellent account of the evolution of early heraldry can be found in The Origin of the Royal Arms of England: Their Development to 1199, by Adrian Ailes. Richard also used a dragon standard at times. It has been suggested that Saladin may have used an eagle heraldic device, so I gave him one in Lionheart.
I try to avoid using terms that were not in use during the Middle Ages. So my characters do not refer to the Byzantine Empire, instead calling it the empire of the Greeks. It was even more of an inconvenience not to be able to employ the word “crusade.” Medievals spoke of “taking the cross” or “going on pilgrimage”; the first term is unwieldy and the second conjures up peaceful images at variance with the reality of crusading warfare. As always, I do allow myself a bit more leeway when I am speaking in the narrative voice. It is always a challenge to decide whether to use medieval or modern place-names. In Lionheart, I went with the latter for geographical clarity; for example, I used Haifa rather than Caiphas, and Arsuf instead of Arsur. And I continue to struggle with the bane of historical novelists—the deplorable medieval habit of recycling the same family names. Thankfully, many names have variations; otherwise, my readers couldn’t tell the players without a scorecard. So in Lionheart, we have Geoffrey, Geoff, Jaufre, and Joffroi; William, Guillaume, and Guilhem. I chose not to use the name that the crusaders called Malik al-’Ādil—Saphadin—because it is not familiar to readers and could have created some confusion, unlike the much better known sobriquet Saladin. And for the curious, Richard was being called Lionheart even before he became king.