Europe in the Middle AgesPlunket, Ierne L. (Ierne Lifford)
History
Europe in the Middle Ages
Plunket, Ierne L. (Ierne Lifford)
Europe -- History -- 476-1492
This typical high-handed action, no doubt splendid in theory as a
method of discouraging the crimes that had helped to ruin previous
campaigns, was, when put into practice, sufficient alone to account for
the hatred Richard inspired amongst rulers whose subjects he thus chose
to judge and execute at will. The King of France, we are told, ‘winked
at the wrongs his men inflicted and received,’ but he gained friends,
while Richard’s progress was a series of embittered feuds, accepted
light-heartedly without any thought of his own future interests or of
those of the crusade.
Open rupture with Philip II of France was brought about almost before
they had left the French coasts through Richard’s repudiation of his
ally’s sister, to whom he had been bethrothed, since the English king
was now determined on a match with Berengaria, the daughter of the King
of Navarre.
In South Italy he acquired his next enemies in both claimants then
disputing the crown of Sicily, but before he sailed away he had
battered one of the rivals, the Norman, Tancred, into an outwardly
submissive ally after a battle in the streets of Messina. The other
rival, Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, and afterwards the Emperor
Henry VI, remained his enemy, storing up a grudge against him in the
hopes of a suitable opportunity for displaying it.
From Cyprus Richard, pursuing military glory, drove its Greek ruler
because he had dared to imprison some shipwrecked Englishmen; and thus,
adding an island to his dominions and the Eastern Emperor to his list
of foes, arrived at last in Palestine, in the summer of 1191, just in
time to join Philip II in the siege of Acre.
‘The two kings and peoples did less together than they would have done
separately, and each set but light store by the other.’ So the tale
runs in the contemporary chronicle; and when Acre at last surrendered
the feuds between the English and French had grown so irreconcilable
that Philip II, who had fallen sick, sulkily declared that he had
fulfilled his crusading vow and departed homewards. Not long afterwards
went Leopold, Archduke of Austria, nursing cold rage against Richard
in his heart because of an insult to his banner, that, planted on an
earthwork beside the arms of England, had been contemptuously flung
into the ditch below.
The Lion-Heart was now master of the enterprise in Palestine, a terror
to the Turks, who would use his name to frighten their unruly children
into submission; but though he remained fourteen months, the jealousies
and rivalries of his camp, with which he was not the man to contend,
kept him dallying on the coast route to Jerusalem, unable to proceed by
open warfare or to get the better of the wily Saladin in diplomacy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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