While English and French rulers still haggled over the terms of an alliance that would allow them to leave their lands with an easy mind, Frederick Barbarossa, the last to take the Cross, set out from Germany, rapidly crossed Hungary and Bulgaria, reduced the Greek Emperor to hostile inactivity by threats and military display, and began a victorious campaign through Asia Minor. Here fate intervened to help the Mahometans, for while fording a river in Cilicia the Emperor was swept from his horse by the current and drowned. So passed away Frederick the ‘Red Beard’, and with him what his strong personality had made an army. Some of the Teutons returned home, while those who remained degenerated into a rabble, easy victims for their enemies’ spears and arrows. In the meantime Richard of England (1189-99) and Philip of France had clasped the hand of friendship, and, having levied the Saladin Tithe, a tax of one-tenth of the possessions of all their subjects, in order to pay their expenses, set sail eastwards from Marseilles. Both were young and eager for military glory; but the French king could plot and wait to achieve the ultimate success he desired while in Richard the statesman was wholly sunk in the soldier of fortune. To mediaeval chroniclers there was something dazzling in the Lion-Heart’s physical strength, and in the sheer daring with which he would force success out of apparently inevitable failure, or realize some dangerous enterprise. ‘Though fortune wreaks her spleen on whomsoever she pleases, yet was he not drowned for all her adverse waves.’ ‘The Lord of Ages gave him such generosity of soul and endued him with such virtues that he seemed rather to belong to earlier times than these.’ ‘To record his deeds would cramp the writer’s finger joints and stun the hearer’s mind.’ Such are a few of the many flattering descriptions the obvious sincerity of which paints the English king as he seemed to the men who fought beside him. A clever strategist, a born leader in battle, fearless himself, and with a restless energy that inspired him when sick to be carried on cushions in order to direct the fire of his stone-slingers, Richard turned his golden qualities of generalship to dust by his utter lack of diplomacy and tact. Of gifts such as these, that are one-half of kingship, he was not so much ignorant as heedless. He ‘willed’ to do things like his great ancestor, the Conqueror, but his sole weapon was his right hand, not the subtlety of his brain. ‘The King of England had gallows erected outside his camp to hang thieves and robbers on ... deeming it no matter of what country the criminals were, he considered every man as his own and left no wrong unavenged.’