Richard I of England, known to history as Richard the Lionheart, is the subject of many a romantic legend—a handsome blonde giant of a man, a warrior, a troubadour, crusader, friend of Robin Hood, and elder brother of the wicked Prince John. He is one of the few English monarchs to be known by a flattering nickname instead of a regnal number (Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror are the other exceptions) but, in truth, he was not a good king to his people.
On March 26, 1199, fighting in a squalid little battle, he received a wound from which he would not recover.
Though Richard was born in England in 1157 and spent some childhood years there, he seems not to have spoken English and spent only a few months of his adult life in his homeland. He was the third son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, but he was not a loyal child of his father, rebelling against him on more than one occasion and preferring to spend his time in the southern French homeland of his mother.
Richard, having outlived his older brothers, became King of England in 1189 on the death of his father and almost immediately chose to go on a joint crusade to the Middle East with Philip II of France and Frederick Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire. The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem had just been overrun by the forces of the Muslim sultan Saladin and the three great European monarchs meant to recapture the Holy Land.
On his way to the Levant, Richard burnished his reputation as a war leader by defeating enemies he made in Sicily and Cyprus. When he arrived in the Holy Land in 1191 he discovered that the German contingent had largely melted away (Barbarossa having drowned en route), and his high-handed ways soon made enemies of the remaining German knights as well as the leaders of the French army.
Before too long Philip and the Germans had sailed home, leaving Richard with a much-diminished force. Though he defeated Saladin every time their armies clashed, the Lionheart was not able to recapture Jerusalem. He negotiated an honourable peace that solidified the crusaders’ hold on certain cities, and abandoned his quest in 1192.
Meanwhile, back in France, Philip was hard at work trying to capture many of Richard’s lands and castles, and in England his weaselly brother John was trying to undermine Richard’s position as well. They were both delighted when Richard foolishly tried to sneak unrecognized across the lands of his German enemies and was taken prisoner and held for an enormous ransom.
Released in 1194, Richard spent the rest of his life battling Philip, trying to regain his lost lands in France, and crushing rebellious nobles. One such treacherous aristocrat was Aimar of Limoges, lord of a prosperous holding which Richard was trying to subdue in the spring of 1199. He laid siege to an insignificant castle, supposedly because he had been told that it contained treasure—solid gold statues, it was said, relics many centuries old. He was walking near the walls carelessly wearing no armour when he was wounded by a crossbow bolt shot by one of the defenders. The projectile was removed only with great difficulty and the wound turned septic.
While the king was battling for his life, the castle fell and the guilty crossbowman was brought before him. The culprit was just a boy, Peter Basil, who revealed that Richard had killed his father and brothers. In a rare act of mercy—he had a nasty reputation for murdering prisoners—Richard forgave the lad, telling his followers to give him a purse of silver and release him.
After 12 days of fever and pain, the Lionheart died of blood poisoning. His followers immediately disobeyed their master’s wishes and took vengeance on his killer, torturing and hanging the unfortunate Basil.
Richard left instructions about how his body should be disposed of—instructions that tell us a great deal about where his loyalties lay. His heart was to be buried in Normandy, as befitted a great-grandson of William the Conqueror; his entrails were to be deposited in Aquitaine, his mother’s lands, where he was slain; and the rest of his body was put to rest in Anjou, the home of his father’s family. Nothing of him was to be buried in England.
