Richard I by Thomas Asbridge

Author:Thomas Asbridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141976860
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

4

The Warrior King

When King Richard left the Near East in early October 1192, he most likely expected to be back in England by the start of the New Year. Had the journey home passed smoothly, the Lionheart would have found his realm all but untouched by his absence. Up to this point, the plans laid and systems of governance instituted to secure the kingdom while he crusaded in the Levant had proved remarkably successful. As it was, Richard did not return for close to eighteen months – and in that time, terrible, near-fatal damage was done to the Angevin realm.

Having set sail from the Holy Land, the king rejected the idea of retracing his outward route via Marseilles, probably for fear of attracting unwanted attention from Philip Augustus and his agents. Ever since he returned to France a year earlier, King Philip had pursued an energetic propaganda campaign designed to blacken Richard I’s reputation in the West. The Angevin monarch was accused of ‘treason, treachery and mischief’ – with his crimes supposedly including collusion with Saladin – and despite the fact that he was under papal protection as a crusader, calls were made for the Lionheart to be arrested and tried.

With this in mind, Richard sailed up the Adriatic, hoping to reach the lands of his German brother-in-law, Henry the Lion. However, a heavy storm forced the Lionheart to shore near Venice, leaving him little choice but to continue his journey overland through Austria – the domain of Duke Leopold V, a veteran of the recent crusade who harboured a vengeful hatred of the Angevin king. When Acre fell in July 1191, the duke had sought to stake a claim to a portion of the city’s spoils by raising his banner above its walls, but Richard was in no mood for such presumption. The emblem was ripped down and, it was said, cast ‘into the mud and trampled upon’. Fuming with anger at this act of stark humiliation, Leopold returned home. When rumours began to circulate regarding the Lionheart’s whereabouts in late 1192, the duke seized upon his chance to exact retribution and a furious chase began.

Accompanied by only a handful of his closest supporters, Richard resorted to disguising himself as a common traveller and managed to narrowly evade capture on two separate occasions. But the net eventually tightened in mid December 1192 and the Lionheart was caught in or around Vienna, in what was described as a ‘disreputable house’, his jewel-encrusted ring having supposedly given away his true identity. The king was now a prisoner – the only English sovereign ever to be held captive by a foreign power.1

For a time, Richard was kept in the Austrian castle of Dürnstein, perched above the River Danube, but in March 1193 Leopold handed him on to his overlord, Emperor Henry VI of Germany, who had recently forged an alliance with Philip of France.fn1 There was little danger of the Lionheart coming to any physical harm given his royal status and potential

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