Richard stayed a year longer in Palestine, yet he never entered Jerusalem and had finally to retire with a disappointing truce and to spend another year, and more, languishing in German prisons. The events of these months do not concern the history of Normandy, but if we would behold Richard in his fairest light we must see him as he rushed to the relief of Joppa on the first of August, 1192, wading ashore from his red galley with the cry, “Perish the man who would hang back,” covering the landing of his followers with his crossbow, making his way by a winding stair to the house of the Templars on the town wall, and then, sword in hand, clearing the town of three thousand Turks and pursuing them into the plain with but three horsemen; or, four days later, repelling a Mameluke attack in force by a most skilful tactical arrangement of his meagre army, directing the battle on the beach while he also kept the town clear, “slaying innumerable Turks with his gleaming sword, here cleaving a man from the crown of his head to his teeth,” there cutting off with one blow the head, shoulder, and right arm of a Saracen emir, his coat of mail and his horse bristling with javelins and arrows like a hedgehog, yet “remaining unconquerable and unwounded in accordance with the divine decree.”[43] * * * * * What most concerned the Norman empire was the king’s absence since the summer of 1190, prolonged by his captivity in Germany until the spring of 1194. Although Philip had taken an oath before leaving Palestine to respect Richard’s men and possessions during his absence, and even to protect them like his own city of Paris, he sought release from this engagement as soon as he reached Rome on his homeward journey, and once back in France he soon began active preparations for an attack on the Plantagenet territories. With Richard safe in a German dungeon, he seized a large part of the Norman border and made a secret treaty with John which secured the surrender of all the lands east of the Seine and important fortresses in Anjou and Touraine. He offered huge sums of money to secure Richard’s custody or even his continued detention in Germany, and when early in 1194 he warned John that “the Devil was loose” at last, he was besieging the great fortress of Verneuil on the Norman frontier. When Richard landed at Barfleur in May, amid the ringing of bells and processions singing “God has come again in his strength,” it is small wonder that he came breathing vengeance and slaughter, and that the rest of his life is a record of scarcely interrupted war against the king of France. For many years he is said to have refused the sacrament lest he might have to forgive his enemy. Again and again he had Philip on the run. Once Philip lost all his baggage and saved himself by turning aside to hear mass while Richard rode by; on another occasion Richard drove the French into Gisors so