The only detailed biography of Richard known to me is that which Mr. G. P. R. James wrote many years ago. A wealth of material unknown at that time has since then been placed within our reach. This is especially the case with regard to the Crusade of 1191-1192. Richard’s struggle with Saladin is the phase of his career which has contributed the most to his fame; and my studies have led me to believe that he himself regarded it as the most important work of his life. Every step in his policy from the hour when he took the Cross till he set out for Holy Land appears to have been taken primarily, if not solely, with a view to the one enterprise which his contemporaries emphatically called “the work of God”; and there is no reason to doubt that when compelled to leave that work unfinished, he left it with the full intention of returning to complete it, and would have returned, had not his destiny been ordained otherwise. I have therefore allowed myself to tell the story of the Crusade with a fullness of detail which may be thought disproportionate to the brief space of time which the expedition actually occupied, and to its direct influence on the history of his dominions; and I have made a lavish use of the materials, Eastern and Western, contained in the publications of the various French literary and historical societies, especially the great _Recueil des Historiens des Croisades_. The chief treasure in that collection—chief, at least, for my purpose—is the elaborate edition of Bohadin with its French translation, superseding the crabbed Latin of Schultens; although, as will be seen, I cannot but think that Schultens’s work still retains a value of its own. Of the relations between the two versions of our chief Western authority for the story of the Crusade—the _Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi_ and the _Estoire de la Guerre Sainte par Ambroise_—I made, about fourteen years ago, a somewhat minute study based on the notes written by Mr. T. A. Archer in the margins of his copies of those two books; I having had the melancholy pleasure of becoming their owner after his death. The results of that study, with a brief statement of the circumstances which had impelled me to it and assisted me in it, appeared in the _English Historical Review_ for July 1910. After going over the ground again I see no reason to alter the conclusion which I had then formed on the subject; rather do I find myself confirmed in that opinion. I have, however, thought it right, when citing either or both of the two versions, to give in every case a separate reference to each of them. KATE NORGATE. _January, 1924._ CONTENTS BOOK I RICHARD OF AQUITAINE, 1157-1189 CHAPTER I PAGE THE BOY DUKE, 1157-1179 1 CHAPTER II