Chapter I: Preface

“When History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of Englishmen, it will find the significance of Richard not in his Crusade or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish recognition of municipal life.” It may well seem strange to begin by quoting these words of the master who inspired my earliest venture—and thereby, indirectly at least, all my later ventures also—into the field of history, the preface to a book on Richard the First in which that sovereign’s island realm figures scarcely more than in the background, and the life of its people not at all. Certainly England and the English people ought to have stood in the forefront and to have been treated in the fullest detail, if this book were intended for a history of Richard’s reign; but it has been written with no such intention. It is merely an attempt to sketch, from materials of which some of the most valuable and interesting have become accessible to students only within a comparatively recent period, the life-story of a prince who reigned less than ten years and lived less than forty-two, yet whose personal character, peculiar circumstances, and adventurous career have given him—whether deservedly or not—a conspicuous place in mediæval history, and made him a hero of romance in every country from England to Palestine.

The only detailed biography of Richard known to me is that which Mr. G. P. R. James wrote many years ago. A wealth of material unknown at that time has since then been placed within our reach. This is especially the case with regard to the Crusade of 1191-1192. Richard’s struggle with Saladin is the phase of his career which has contributed the most to his fame; and my studies have led me to believe that he himself regarded it as the most important work of his life. Every step in his policy from the hour when he took the Cross till he set out for Holy Land appears to have been taken primarily, if not solely, with a view to the one enterprise which his contemporaries emphatically called “the work of God”; and there is no reason to doubt that when compelled to leave that work unfinished, he left it with the full intention of returning to complete it, and would have returned, had not his destiny been ordained otherwise. I have therefore allowed myself to tell the story of the Crusade with a fullness of detail which may be thought disproportionate to the brief space of time which the expedition actually occupied, and to its direct influence on the history of his dominions; and I have made a lavish use of the materials, Eastern and Western, contained in the publications of the various French literary and historical societies, especially the great _Recueil des Historiens des Croisades_. The chief treasure in that collection—chief, at least, for my purpose—is the elaborate edition of Bohadin with its French translation, superseding the crabbed Latin of Schultens; although, as will be seen, I cannot but think that Schultens’s work still retains a value of its own. Of the relations between the two versions of our chief Western authority for the story of the Crusade—the _Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi_ and the _Estoire de la Guerre Sainte par Ambroise_—I made, about fourteen years ago, a somewhat minute study based on the notes written by Mr. T. A. Archer in the margins of his copies of those two books; I having had the melancholy pleasure of becoming their owner after his death. The results of that study, with a brief statement of the circumstances which had impelled me to it and assisted me in it, appeared in the _English Historical Review_ for July 1910. After going over the ground again I see no reason to alter the conclusion which I had then formed on the subject; rather do I find myself confirmed in that opinion. I have, however, thought it right, when citing either or both of the two versions, to give in every case a separate reference to each of them.

KATE NORGATE.

_January, 1924._

CONTENTS

BOOK I

RICHARD OF AQUITAINE, 1157-1189

CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE BOY DUKE, 1157-1179 1

CHAPTER II

FATHER AND SONS, 1179-1183 32

CHAPTER III

KING HENRY’S HEIR, 1183-1189 57

BOOK II

RICHARD’S CRUSADE, 1189-1192

CHAPTER I

THE YEAR OF PREPARATION, 1189-1190 91

CHAPTER II

THE OUTWARD VOYAGE, 1190-1191 119

CHAPTER III

THE FALL OF ACRE, 1191 152

CHAPTER IV

FROM ACRE TO JOPPA, 1191 176

CHAPTER V

THE ADVANCE ON JERUSALEM, 1191-1192 193

CHAPTER VI

RICHARD AND SALADIN, 1192 230

BOOK III

RICHARD AND EUROPE, 1192-1199

CHAPTER I

RICHARD AND THE EMPIRE, 1192-1194 264