In the meanwhile Richard chafed in a dungeon where he was loaded with irons. His perpetual incarceration, or his assassination, being fraught with too much danger to his captors, it was determined to bring him to judicial disgrace. He was therefore summoned before the Diet of the Empire at Worms, and formally accused of crimes of all sorts, such as having insulted the Duke of Austria, having assassinated Conrad of Montferrat, having concluded a disgraceful treaty with Saladin. The royal captive, with marvellous self-restraint for him, deigned to explain these matters; then he burst out into indignant denunciation of his captors. The princes of Germany were made ashamed of the ignominy that in their name had been thrust upon the foremost hero of the age. Even prelates at length remembered that Richard had remained alone in Palestine when others were wearied with the defence of the faith. Henry VI. was forced to release his royal captive. Yet he managed to fix as his ransom a hundred and fifty thousand marks. This large amount it was difficult to raise. The churches of England melted their plate; prelates paid a fourth of their income, the lower clergy a tenth, and all ranks a commensurate tax. Queen Eleanor in person bore the sum thus collected to Mayence (1194). Henry, however, could not yet brook his victim’s escape. Having received the ransom, he ordered Richard’s rearrest; but the English ship that bore him slipped from the mouth of the Schelde before the officers could overtake it. Philip of France sent this ungraceful but timely warning to Prince John: “Take care of yourself; the devil is broken loose.” One chronicler notes that at the very hour in which the king landed in England there appeared “a brilliant and unusual splendor in the heavens, of a very white and red color, about the length and breadth of a human body.” He also observes that Duke Leopold of Austria was horribly punished for his cruelty to Richard. Infernal fires were kindled in his limbs, whose progress he in vain tried to stay by amputating his own foot with an axe, and at length expired in dreadful agony. Romance has invented a pleasing story of Blondel, Richard’s friend and minstrel, who discovered the place of his king’s imprisonment by singing in its proximity a familiar song, to which Richard responded. It is true to the times, but the historian cannot vouch for its basis in fact. Before Richard reached his throne his great competitor for renown in arms, Saladin, had passed away (March, 1193). He had retired to Damascus. A year after the peace, feeling the approach of the last enemy, and realizing that a greater than Richard was upon him, he ordered that his burial shroud, instead of his usual standard, should be carried through all the streets of Damascus, while his herald cried, “This—this is all that remains of the glory of Saladin, who conquered the East.”