I usually try to anticipate readers’ queries, and am doing so now. I also plan to do a blog in which I discuss my Lionheart research and material I could not include in the Author’s Note. Although the poleaxe did not come into common usage until the fourteenth century, there is a twelfth-century painting in the cathedral at Monreale that shows one, and I thought it would be fun to mention since Richard was very interested in weaponry innovations. Contemporaries of Berengaria’s brother, Sancho, reported that he was extremely tall, and according to Dr. Luis del Campo Jesus, who examined his bones, Sancho was over seven feet in height. And assuming that the skeleton discovered in the abbey founded by Berengaria at Epau is indeed hers, she was just five feet in height. We do not know her exact birth year, although Anne Trindade, the more reliable of Berengaria’s two biographers, makes a convincing case that she was born circa 1170. The most quoted comment about Berengaria’s appearance came from the snarky Richard of Devizes, who sniped that she was “more prudent than pretty.” But he never laid eyes upon her. The chronicler Ambroise, who probably did, described her as very fair and lovely, and the author of the Itinerarium claimed Richard had desired her since he was Count of Poitou, which is a sweet story but rather unlikely, for medieval marriages were matters of state, and I doubt that Richard had a romantic bone in his entire body. While only one chronicler, Robert de Torigny, the abbot of Mont St Michel, mentions Joanna and William’s son, Bohemond, he is a very reliable source, for he was a good friend to Henry II and was accorded the great honor of acting as godfather to Henry and Eleanor’s daughter, Eleanor, who’d later become Queen of Castile. As I explain in the Afterword, we do not know the names of Isaac Comnenus’s second wife and daughter, called the Damsel of Cyprus by the chroniclers; Sophia and Anna are names of my choosing. Ranulf and Rhiannon’s son Morgan is one of the very few purely fictional characters to make an appearance in one of my novels, as is his love, the Lady Mariam. As I did in The Reckoning with Ellen de Montfort’s attendants, Hugh and Juliana, I had to create histories for Joanna’s ladies-in-waiting, Beatrix and Alicia, for all we know of them are their names and their utter devotion to Joanna. And now a word about Arnaldia, the baffling illness that almost killed Richard at Acre. It was not scurvy, as is sometimes reported. That was known in the army camp, and the crusaders distinguished it from Arnaldia; moreover, scurvy is caused by a deficient diet, and Richard had just spent a month in Cyprus. It remains a mystery, having defied diagnosis for more than eight hundred years.
Even for me, this is turning out to be a very long Author’s Note. I’d like to close with a mea culpa and an apology. I have a section on my website called Medieval Mishaps. Sometimes apparent inconsistencies in my books are not errors but merely reflect the “accepted wisdom” at the time I was writing. For example, sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that Eleanor has shed two years since Here Be Dragons and my first mysteries; it was always assumed she’d been born in 1122, but Andrew W. Lewis convincingly demonstrated that she was actually born in 1124. Sometimes my mistakes are revealed by subsequent research, such as my women wearing velvet in the twelfth century or Richard III having the world’s longest-lived Irish wolfhound. Until now I considered my most infamous mistake to be the time-traveling little grey squirrel in Sunne. But that squirrel has been utterly eclipsed by the mistake I recently found in Chapter Seventeen of The Reckoning, where I have Edward I telling Roger de Mortimer that crossbows were more difficult to master than long bows. I was truly horrified, for just the opposite is true. What makes this so baffling to me is that I knew this at the time I wrote The Reckoning, and I never drink and write at the same time. So how explain it? I haven’t a clue, but it is extremely embarrassing, and I’ve been doing penance the only way I can—by calling as much attention to this bizarre blunder as I can.
After the mea culpa, the apology. In the Author’s Note for Devil’s Brood, I did something well intentioned but foolish—I offered to provide material from my blogs for readers without access to the Internet. I did not anticipate the volume of letters and found it impossible to respond to them all, for I do not have any assistants to help with correspondence, reader requests, research, etc. So I would like to say I am sorry to those who wrote to me and received no response. The sad truth is that e-mail, blogs, websites, and social networking sites like Facebook have become the only realistic means for writers and readers to interact.
I’d initially intended to tell Richard’s story as one book, but I soon realized that I’d underestimated the extent of the research I’d need to do, though this is Richard’s fault more than mine. The man’s travel itinerary would put Marco Polo to shame—Italy and Sicily, Cyprus, the Holy Land, Austria, Germany, France; a pity he didn’t have frequent-flier miles. As the deadline loomed and Richard and I were still stuck in Outremer, I began to panic. Fortunately, my friend Valerie LaMont came up with a brilliant idea; why not write two books about Richard? It made perfect sense, for there is a natural breaking point—the conclusion of the Third Crusade. Much to my relief, my publisher was amenable to this approach, and so A King’s Ransom will pick up where Lionheart ended, as Richard sails from Acre for home. Of course he has no idea what lies ahead—an unlikely encounter with pirates, shipwreck, capture, imprisonment, ransom, betrayal, his deteriorating marriage, and an all-consuming war with the French king. A King’s Ransom will also be my final farewell to the Angevins, surely one of history’s most dysfunctional and fascinating families. I will miss them.
S.K.P.
February 2011
www.sharonkaypenman.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My acknowledgments pages must sometimes read like that classic line from Casablanca—“Round up the usual suspects.” But few writers have been as fortunate as I have been in the course of my writing career, for I have had the same editor and agents for nigh on thirty years, almost unheard of in the publishing industry. So once again I want to thank my editor extraordinaire, Marian Wood, and my wonderful agents, Molly Friedrich and Mic Cheetham. At the risk of embarrassing them, I feel truly blessed. I would also like to thank Kate Davis of G. P. Putnam’s, Paul Cirone and Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency, and Dorian Hastings for a superb copyediting job. The “usual suspects” list includes Valerie and Lowell LaMont; no writer could ask for a better book midwife than Valerie, and Lowell continues to exorcise my computer demons with his usual finesse. I want to thank my friend and fellow historical novelist Elizabeth Chadwick for pointing me in the right direction as I sought to envision Fauvel, Richard’s famed Cypriot stallion. The admiring chroniclers described him as a dun, but there are bay, red, and grey or grulla duns. Elizabeth reminded me that Fauvel was a popular medieval name for chestnut horses, thus giving me a eureka moment—Fauvel was a red dun! I am very grateful to Dr. Larry Davis, Dr. Diego Fiorentino, and Ellie Lewis for their efforts to diagnose Richard’s mystery ailment, the mystifying Arnaldia, which has been baffling historians and physicians for over eight hundred years. I allowed Morgan to borrow the evocative phrase “whispers of the blood” from Dana Stabenow, author of the brilliant Alaskan mystery series. And I want to say Diolch yn fawr to my friend Owen Mayo for his kindness in vetting Morgan’s Welsh, which is Morgan’s native tongue but not mine. Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge my Facebook friends and blog readers for their encouragement as I worked on Lionheart. Too often, it can seem as if writers operate in a vacuum, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology that is no longer true. Think what Shakespeare could have done with his own Facebook page.
More and more of my readers have been asking me to include a bibliography for my novels. I have begun listing some of my sources on my website and blog, but that doesn’t help those readers without Internet access. So I am going to cite here the cream of the crop, those books I found to be most helpful and most reliable. The gold standard for Ricardian biographies remains John Gillingham’s Richard I, published in 1999 by the Yale University Press; he has also written Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War
in the Twelfth Century. I am not sure I could have written Lionheart without The Itinerary of King Richard I, with Studies on Certain Matters of Interest Connected with His Reign, by Lionel Landon; unfortunately, this book is almost as hard to find as the Holy Grail. The Reign of Richard Lionheart: Ruler of the Angevin Empire, 1189–1199, by Ralph Turner and Richard R. Heiser, does not address the most consequential and fateful event of Richard’s life—the Third Crusade—but it does cover the remainder of his reign, and has an excellent concluding chapter called “Richard in Retrospect,” which analyzes the way his reputation has fluctuated over the centuries. Kate Norgate’s Richard the Lion Heart, published in 1924, has stood the test of time surprisingly well. In all honesty, I have not read the second half of Frank McLynn’s Richard and John: Kings at War, but the half of the book about Richard is accurate and insightful. I also recommend Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth, edited by Janet Nelson; The Legends of King Richard I, Coeur de Lion: A Study of Sources and Variations to 1600, by Bradford Broughton; and The Plantagenet Empire, 1154–1224, by Martin Aurell, translated by David Crouch. And since so many of my readers have seen the wonderful but historically inaccurate The Lion in Winter , here are two excellent books about medieval sexuality: The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages, by Pierre J. Payer, and Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, by Ruth Mazo Karras; I hope to have a comprehensive bibliography about this subject on my website by the time Lionheart is published.
My favorite book about Richard’s mother is Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, a notable collection of essays edited by Bonnie Wheeler. There are a number of biographies written about Eleanor, more than Henry, which would probably not please him much. Just to list a few of her biographers: Ralph Turner, Régine Pernoud, Jean Flori, D. D. R. Owen, Marion Meade, and Amy Kelly, though the last two authors’ conclusions about the so-called Courts of Love are no longer accepted. I also recommend The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, edited by Marcus Bull and Catherine Leglu, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, by Ffiona Swabey.
I was blessed with a treasure-trove while researching and writing Lionheart—two chronicles written by men who’d accompanied Richard on crusade and two by members of Salah al-Dīn’s inner circle. I felt very fortunate to have access to Helen Nicholson’s translation of The Chronicle of the Third Crusade: The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, and Marianne Ailes’s translation of The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la Guerre Sainte. These wonderful books make fascinating reading and provide invaluable footnotes about the persons and places mentioned in the texts. Another crusader chronicle is The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation, by Peter W. Edbury, and then there is Chronicles of the Crusades, edited by Elizabeth Hallam. Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād wrote a compelling account of his time with Salah al-Dīn; in Lionheart, I quoted from the nineteenth-century edition, Saladin, or What Befell Sultan Yûsuf, translated by the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, but there is a more modern translation by D. S. Richards, complete with valuable annotated notes, titled The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, which I recommend highly. Other contemporary chronicles are The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period, from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh, Part 2, also translated by D. S. Richards, and a chronicle written by one of Salah al-Dīn’s scribes, Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, translated into French by Henri Masse as Conquête de la Syrie et de la Palestine par Saladin. There is also Arab Historians of the Crusades, translated by Francesco Gabrieli. Non-crusading chronicles include The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, translated by J. A. Giles; The History of William of Newburgh, translated by Joseph Stevenson; The Annals of Roger de Hoveden, translated by Henry T. Riley; and History of William Marshal, translated by S. Gregory and annotated by D. Crouch. The quotation from the Comtessa de Dia’s song, “Cruel Are the Pains I’ve Suffered,” in Chapter Eleven, comes from Lark in the Morning, translated by Ezra Pound, William De Witt Snodgrass, and Robert Kehew.
Moving on to Sicily and Cyprus, there is The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, translated by Roland Broadhurst, a remarkable account of a pilgrimage to Mecca made by a Spanish Muslim in 1183–1184; his description of a deadly storm in the Straits of Messina was my inspiration for Alicia’s shipwreck in Chapter One of Lionheart. The Kingdom in the Sun, by John Julius Norwich, is a beautifully written book about Norman Sicily, although his “take” on Richard is outdated. Another outstanding book about Sicily is Admiral Eugenius of Sicily, his Life and Work and the Authorship of the Epistola ad Petrum and the Historia Hugonis Falcandi Siculi, by Evelyn Jamison. For the history of medieval Cyprus, readers need look no further than Peter Edbury’s The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191–1374. There is also George Hill’s four-volume A History of Cyprus; volume I concerns Richard’s conquest of the island.
The best book about the Crusades, IMHO, is Thomas Asbridge’s riveting The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land. Other books on my Favorites List include God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, by Christopher Tyerman; Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades, by Jonathan Phillips; Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land, by Norman Housley; the six-volume A History of the Crusades, edited by Kenneth Setton; and The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam, by Bernard Lewis. The definitive study of Salah al-Dīn is still Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War, by Malcolm Cameron Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson. I also recommend The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, by Carole Hillenbrand. Some social histories are The World of the Crusaders, by Joshua Prawer; The Crusaders in the Holy Land, by Meron Benvenisti; Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon, by Piers D. Mitchell; and Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World, by James E. Lindsay. For books dealing with warfare during the Crusades, a classic study is Crusading Warfare, 1097–1193, by R. C. Smail; there is also David Nicolle’s two-volume Crusader Warfare.
Lastly, for books that cover medieval warfare in general, I have several exceptional books to recommend: By Fire and Sword: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare, by Sean McGlynn; Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, edited by Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi; Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000–1300, by John France; Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades, edited by Michael Gervers and James M. Powell; and War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217, by Matthew Strickland.
ALSO BY SHARON KAY PENMAN
THE HISTORICAL NOVELS
The Sunne in Splendour
Here Be Dragons
Falls the Shadow
The Reckoning
When Christ and His Saints Slept
Time and Chance
Devil’s Brood
THE MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES
The Queen’s Man
Cruel as the Grave
Dragon’s Lair
Prince of Darkness
Sharon Kay Penman, Lionheart
(Series: # )
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