Great Britain -- History -- Richard I, 1189-1199; Great Britain -- Kings and rulers -- Biography; Richard I, King of England, 1157-1199
It has been suggested that the “Casellum Balneorum” of _Itin._, 298,
may represent Amwas (= “Fountains”), otherwise called Nicopolis (see
Stubbs’s note to _Itin._, _l.c._). This identification is possible;
but it seems very unlikely that a small fraction of the host should,
for no apparent reason, put itself so nearly into the lion’s mouth by
going to camp eight or nine miles in advance of the rest, and less
than two miles from the encampment of Saladin, which at that time
was at Natroun. Moreover, in a later passage common to _Estoire_ (l.
9846) and _Itinerarium_ (369) we find “la fontaine d’Esmals,” “ad
fontem Emaus,” in a context which plainly shows that these names
stand for Amwas-Nicopolis; but in p. 307 of _Itinerarium_ the context
seems to preclude an identification of Casellum Balneorum with Emaus
= Amwas, and to point to some place much further north or north-west;
and later commentators have found such a place, bearing a name which
translates the Latin one more exactly than Amwas, in Umm-el-Hummum,
near Mirabel. On the other hand, the extant text of the _Estoire_, as
we have seen, has nothing at all answering to “Castellum Balneorum”;
it makes the Turkish ambush and the king spend the night of January
2-3 at, or close to, one and the same place, the Casal of the Plains.
Whence, then, did the Latin writer get his “Casal of the Baths”? He
can hardly have invented it for himself. If his work be really a
translation of that of Ambrose, he must either have made it from a
copy which had _Bains_, not _Plains_, in l. 7731, or he must have
had some other source of information which made him deliberately
substitute “Baths” for “Plains” in his rendering of that line. The
substitution cannot be explained as a misreading on his part, since
“Casal des Plains” in l. 7720 is correctly represented in his text
by “Casellum de Planis.” That he knew, from a source other than the
_Estoire_, something about the Casal of the Baths is clear from his
earlier mention of that place, in p. 298. A different theory as to
the relation between the two books suggests that that source may have
been personal knowledge. However this may be, his second mention of
“Casellum Balneorum” certainly makes the passage in which it occurs
far more intelligible than the corresponding passage in the existing
text of the _Estoire_. Ambrose’s story, as it stands there, is
scarcely credible. The Turks and the king lie in wait for one another
all night, the former “on the sandhills above the Casal of the
Plains,” the latter at the Casal of the Plains itself, yet neither
party catches the other till, evidently to the utter surprise of the
Turks, they meet before the camp at Ramlah or Lydda, to which they
must, if this version of the affair be correct, have ridden at almost
the same time, parallel with and in close proximity to each other for
about eight miles, and almost from one and the same starting-point!
Surely, by the light—whencesoever derived—of the Latin version, we
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