Richard the Lionheart

Richard was born on September 8, 1157, at Beaumont Palace in Oxford, the third son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine ^[1]. His parents ruled a sprawling collection of territories that historians call the Angevin Empire, stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. As a younger son, Richard was not raised to expect the English crown. His inheritance was to come through his mother: the duchy of Aquitaine, a wealthy and turbulent region of southwestern France ^[2].

Eleanor took a close hand in her favorite son's upbringing, and Richard spent much of his youth in her lands rather than in England. He grew up speaking the langue d'oc of the south and the French of the northern courts, and there is no firm evidence that he ever learned to speak English ^[1]. The culture of Aquitaine, with its troubadour poetry and courtly music, left a permanent mark. Richard composed verse himself, and two of his songs survive, including the lament he wrote during his later imprisonment ^[3].

In 1172, at the age of fourteen, Richard was formally installed as Duke of Aquitaine in ceremonies at Poitiers and Limoges ^[2]. The duchy's fractious barons gave him an early education in warfare. Through his teenage years he besieged castles, put down revolts, and developed the tactical instincts that later commanders would come to fear.

The family into which Richard was born tore itself apart with remarkable regularity. In 1173, encouraged by Eleanor, Richard joined his elder brothers Henry the Young King and Geoffrey in open rebellion against their father ^[1]. The revolt failed. Henry II forgave his sons but imprisoned Eleanor, who remained in custody for the better part of sixteen years. Richard, still only sixteen, submitted to his father and was sent back to Aquitaine to govern it in Henry's name ^[2].

Over the following decade Richard built his military reputation in the constant small wars of the south. His most celebrated early feat came in 1179, when he captured the supposedly impregnable fortress of Taillebourg in Saintonge after a siege of only a few days ^[2]. Chroniclers began to attach the nickname that would define him: Coeur de Lion, the Lionheart, a tribute to his personal bravery in combat ^[1].

The deaths of his elder brothers changed everything. Henry the Young King died of dysentery in 1183 and Geoffrey was killed at a tournament in 1186, leaving Richard as heir to the whole Angevin inheritance ^[4]. Relations with his father collapsed when Henry II appeared to favor the youngest son, John. Richard allied with Philip II Augustus of France and made war on his father in 1188 and 1189. Henry, defeated and dying, conceded to his son's demands at Ballan and died at Chinon on July 6, 1189 ^[1]. Richard was invested as Duke of Normandy that month and crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey on September 3, 1189 ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Richard the Lionheart usually arrives first at the Third Crusade, the enterprise that consumed his reign and made his European reputation. Richard had taken the cross in 1187, almost immediately after news reached the West that Saladin had crushed the crusader army at Hattin and captured Jerusalem ^[5]. Once crowned, he raised money with single-minded energy, selling offices, lands, and privileges. He is reported to have joked that he would have sold London itself if he could have found a buyer ^[1].

Richard departed in 1190 alongside Philip II of France. The journey itself produced conquests. After a dispute over the treatment of shipwrecked crusaders and his sister Joan, Richard seized the island of Cyprus from its self-styled ruler Isaac Komnenos in May 1191, an acquisition that supplied the crusader states with grain and revenue for the next century ^[5]. On June 8, 1191, he landed at Acre, where a long siege was grinding on, and the city surrendered within five weeks of his arrival ^[4].

The march south from Acre produced his most admired battlefield performance. On September 7, 1191, near Arsuf, Saladin's army attacked the crusader column in force. Richard held his formation under hours of harassment, then released his knights in a charge that broke the Muslim line and drove it from the field ^[5]. He rebuilt the fortifications of Jaffa and twice advanced to within a dozen miles of Jerusalem, in the winter of 1191 to 1192 and again in the summer of 1192, but both times concluded that the city could not be taken and held with the forces available ^[4]. In August 1192 he saved Jaffa from recapture, wading ashore from his ships at the head of a small band. The Treaty of Jaffa, sealed with Saladin in September 1192, left Jerusalem in Muslim hands but secured the coastal strip from Tyre to Jaffa for the crusaders and guaranteed Christian pilgrims safe access to the holy sites ^[5].

The crusade also left a dark stain on his record. After the fall of Acre, when negotiations over the terms of surrender stalled, Richard ordered the execution of some 2,600 Muslim prisoners outside the city walls, an act condemned by many modern historians and remembered bitterly in the Islamic world ^[5].

Richard's homeward journey in the autumn of 1192 turned into one of the most dramatic episodes of his life. Storms forced his ship into the Adriatic, and he attempted to travel overland in disguise through the territory of Leopold V, Duke of Austria, a man he had publicly insulted at Acre by casting down his banner ^[1]. Recognized near Vienna in December 1192, Richard was arrested and handed over to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, in early 1193 ^[4].

The emperor demanded 150,000 marks of silver for the king's release, a sum roughly equal to two or three years of the entire royal revenue of England ^[1]. Eleanor of Aquitaine, now in her seventies, threw herself into raising it. Taxes were levied on income and movable goods, church plate was melted down, and the wool crop of the Cistercian monasteries was seized ^[4]. While Richard sat in captivity he wrote the song Ja nus hons pris, a prisoner's complaint that survives in both French and Occitan versions and remains the best-known piece of his poetry ^[3].

His brother John and Philip II of France worked actively to prolong the imprisonment, reportedly offering the emperor money to keep Richard in custody. The offer was refused. With the bulk of the ransom paid and hostages delivered for the remainder, Richard was released on February 4, 1194 ^[1]. He returned to England, was crowned a second time at Winchester that April to reassert his dignity, and forgave John with a dismissive remark about his brother's childishness ^[4].

Richard married Berengaria of Navarre, daughter of King Sancho VI, at Limassol on Cyprus on May 12, 1191, while en route to the Holy Land ^[4]. The match served strategy: Navarre's friendship protected the southern flank of Aquitaine. To make it, Richard broke a betrothal of more than twenty years to Alys, sister of Philip II, a slight that poisoned relations between the two kings for the rest of the crusade and beyond ^[1]. The marriage to Berengaria produced no children, and the couple spent long periods apart. She is often described as the only queen of England never to set foot in the country during her husband's reign, although some historians allow that she may have visited after his death ^[6].

Richard acknowledged one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac, who appears briefly in the records of the period ^[4]. Debate about the king's private life has occupied historians since the twentieth century. Some scholars have read chronicle passages, including a hermit's rebuke of 1195 and accounts of his shared table and chamber with Philip II in 1187, as evidence of relationships with men. Others, including his biographer John Gillingham, argue that these episodes reflect medieval conventions of penance and political friendship rather than sexuality. The evidence is thin in both directions, and the question remains open ^[1].

Contemporaries described a tall, striking figure with red-gold hair and a commanding presence, a man of sudden temper, real learning, and sharp wit. He enjoyed music and could reportedly conduct the clerks of his chapel with voice and hand ^[3]. Among the memorable Richard the Lionheart facts is that this king of England probably spent no more than six months of his ten-year reign in the kingdom itself, treating it chiefly as a source of revenue for wars elsewhere ^[2].

The last five years of the reign were spent almost entirely in France, recovering what Philip II had taken during the captivity. Richard proved as effective in this long attritional struggle as he had been on crusade. He won a string of engagements, including a victory at Gisors in 1198 where his horsemen drove Philip's knights into the river Epte, and he steadily pushed the French king back from Normandy's borders ^[4].

The centerpiece of the campaign was Château Gaillard, the great fortress Richard built at Les Andelys above the Seine between 1196 and 1198. Constructed at enormous speed and expense, it incorporated the most advanced military engineering of the day and was intended to lock Philip out of Normandy permanently. Richard called it his fair castle of the Rock and boasted that he could hold it even if its walls were made of butter ^[2].

His death came not in a great battle but at a minor siege. In March 1199 Richard invested the small castle of Châlus-Chabrol in the Limousin during a dispute with the viscount of Limoges. On the evening of March 26, riding close to the walls without full armor, he was struck in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt. The wound turned gangrenous. Richard died on April 6, 1199, aged forty-one, with his mother Eleanor at his side ^[1]. Chroniclers reported that he pardoned the crossbowman who shot him, though one account says the man was flayed alive after the king's death. His body was buried at Fontevraud Abbey beside his father, his heart at Rouen Cathedral, and his entrails at Châlus ^[4]. The crown passed to his brother John, under whom most of the continental empire was lost within five years.

Few medieval rulers have enjoyed a posthumous career like Richard's. Within decades of his death he had become the model of crusading kingship, celebrated in romances and chronicles across Europe, and in Arabic tradition his name was reportedly invoked to frighten children ^[5]. The legend attached itself to other legends: from the sixteenth century onward, storytellers placed the outlaw Robin Hood in the reign of the absent king, an association with no medieval basis that still dominates popular culture ^[6]. Carlo Marochetti's bronze equestrian statue of Richard, sword raised, has stood outside the Palace of Westminster since 1860, a Victorian tribute to a king who barely knew England ^[6].

Scholarly judgment has swung widely. Nineteenth and early twentieth century historians such as William Stubbs condemned him as a bad ruler and a worse son, a soldier who bled England for foreign adventures. Later work, above all John Gillingham's studies, rebuilt his reputation as an intelligent strategist and a competent administrator who chose able ministers, notably the justiciar Hubert Walter, and whose government functioned well in his absence ^[1]. Any balanced Richard the Lionheart biography now has to hold both pictures together: the massacre at Acre and the chivalric legend, the neglected kingdom and the disciplined genius of Arsuf.

The list of Richard the Lionheart achievements is nonetheless concrete. He conquered Cyprus, restored a crusader state on the Levantine coast that endured for a century, secured pilgrim access to Jerusalem without taking the city, recovered nearly everything Philip II had seized from him, and built in Château Gaillard one of the most sophisticated castles of the Middle Ages ^[4]. In 2013 a forensic analysis of the embalmed remains of his heart, preserved at Rouen, found traces of frankincense, myrtle, and mint, a rare glimpse of the burial rites accorded a twelfth century king ^[7]. Eight centuries on, the lion on the three-lion royal arms of England, first used in his reign, still carries his mark ^[6].