The Mammoth Book of King Arthur by Mike Ashley

Author:Mike Ashley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781780333557
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Table 12.3 Constantinople and Jerusalem

The Angevin connection

This is not an idle concept because the intent behind the very first Crusade, in 1096, had been to foster links with Constantinople with a view to establishing a united Christian Empire with the Pope as its head, rather than simply a secular empire. Nevertheless, it is pretty certain that at the time of the Third Crusade, in 1189, a secular empire was uppermost in the mind of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa because of his flaming (though now somewhat grizzled) red beard.

The Third Crusade is the one most people remember because it involved Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, who captured Jerusalem in 1187. The two other main European leaders at the time were the French king, Philippe II and Frederick I. Of all the rulers in Europe, Frederick came closest to exemplifying the romantic image of the chivalric King Arthur. At the celebration of Pentecost in Mainz in 1188, Frederick was duly inspired and took the Cross. I strongly suspect that when Frederick led his vast army of some 100,000 men (Saladin believed it totalled a million!) out from Ratisbon in May 1189 – probably the largest and best equipped army ever to venture on a Crusade – he believed himself to be Arthur reborn. I also suspect that the latest generation of romancers had Frederick in mind when they wrote about Arthur.

Unfortunately, Frederick’s crusade ended in disaster. The Byzantine Emperor Isaac Angelus had colluded with Saladin to hamper the overland route from Europe through Constantinople to the Holy Land, and Frederick’s army had been forced to make a difficult crossing over the Bosporus, and through the mountains of Cilicia in southwest Turkey. Attempting to help his son, who was battling the Armenians at a bridge over the River Calycadnus (modern Göksu), Frederick rode his horse across the river, but was carried away in the current and drowned. Although dispirited, Frederick’s men took his body to the Holy Land and buried it at Antioch. However, just as in the legend of Arthur, rumours abounded that Frederick had not died but been washed away, and that he was presently sleeping and would return again to rule Germany.

Despite taking the Arthurian legend forward significantly by linking it to the legend of the Grail and Joseph of Arimathea, Robert was not a great writer, and his story is bland and straightforward. It required someone else to rework Chrétien’s Perceval in a more inspired form, and that someone was Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wolfram referred to himself as a minnesänger, the German equivalent of a French troubadour. He joked about his own illiteracy, although that may simply mean he was not well versed in French or Latin. Wolfram probably came from somewhere near the town of Anspach, in Bavaria in southern Germany, and from about 1203 onwards was under the patronage of Hermann, Landgrave (count) of Thuringia, at his court at Wartburg in Eisenach. Hermann was a renowned patron of the arts, and we

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.