The Middle Ages by Edwin S. Grosvenor

Author:Edwin S. Grosvenor [Edwin S. Grosvenor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Medieval
ISBN: 9781612300924
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2016-10-16T23:00:00+00:00

When they met in bloody war for the Holy Land, the champions of Christendom and Islam gave the medieval world a lesson in the honor of kings.

On June 8, 1191, King Richard Coeur de Lion joined the besiegers of the then-Palestinian port city of Acre, who in a curious turn of events were themselves besieged by the great army of Saladin. Richard was thirty-three and already a veteran, leading armies since he was sixteen. He was not only a brave knight but also a skilled commander, especially expert in siege craft and in the dull business of looking after supplies. He was tall and fair and handsome and was as well known for his poetry as for his courage. He loved beauty in every form and could inspire in his followers a lifelong devotion. But there were weaknesses in his character. His witty poet’s tongue could turn sharp and acidic; in any company, he must be first; he was stern, unyielding, combative and greedy.

For two years, he had been England’s king, but his throne was not secure; John, his younger brother, would displace him if he could. Nonetheless, he and King Philip of France had sworn to reclaim the Holy Land together. After a winter in Sicily and a detour by Richard to Cyprus, they moved on separately to join the Third Crusade already in progress on the Palestine coast.

On the European continent, France and England had been quarreling for a generation. Recently, Richard had made matters worse by refusing to marry Philip’s sister Alice, to whom he had been betrothed since childhood, giving as reason the rumors that she had been his father’s mistress. To clinch the matter, Richard’s mother brought Princess Berengaria of Navarre down to Sicily, and Richard married her on the island of Cyprus.

Relations between the two monarchs could scarcely have been worse. And although Richard had brought to Acre a finer body of troops and a larger sum of money than Philip, he could not command an army that contained the king of France because, as duke of Aquitaine, he had previously done homage to Philip. So Richard’s intention was to clear up the mess in Palestine and get home as soon as possible before trouble broke out in England.

However, the mess in this part of the world, known as Outremer (French for “overseas”) presented many complications. Almost 100 years earlier, in 1095, Pope Urban II had called upon Christian Europe to rescue the Holy Land from the infidels. In that First Crusade, groups of Frankish and Norman knights had assembled large retinues, crossed Europe, fought their way through Asia Minor, and finally managed to wrest Jerusalem from its Egyptian rulers.

But these restless, ambitious adventurers had come to make their own fortunes as much as to restore the Holy Places. Each knight seized and secured what he could for himself, warring constantly with his Christian neighbors. Thus, the Christian community was scarcely unified. It consisted principally of the kingdom of Jerusalem, which stretched from the

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