1189, His reign got off to a decidedly shaky start. To begin with, all went well,

with lots of guests bringing lavish gifts for the new king. But when a group of

Jews arrived to give their presents, part of the crowd went berserk with anti-

Semitism and viciously attacked the visitors.

Before the coronation, Richard was already embroiled in the affairs of the

Middle East. He had promised to go on a crusade, and when the old king died,

he was raising money to take an army to the eastern Mediterranean to defend

the tiny Christian territory in the Holy Land. By selling charters to towns, and

by accepting cash for jobs in both the state and the church, Richard soon

had enough money, and before the end of the year, he was off on his expedition

to the Holy Land.

In the East, Richard the Lionheart showed himself worthy of his famous nickname.

He won an important victory over the famed Muslim leader Saladin, captured

the city of Acre for the Christians, and showed himself to be both a brave

fighter and an intelligent military tactician. He stopped short of trying to take

the city of Jerusalem, the goal of many Crusaders. Instead, Richard negotiated

a deal with Saladin that allowed Christian pilgrims to visit the city safely.

In 1192, Richard began his return journey to England, conscious that his duty

now lay with his new kingdom. But Richard, who had dodged danger in battle

in the Holy Land, now fell foul of fate. He was captured by an enemy, Duke

Leopold of Austria, who sold him to a more powerful enemy, the German

emperor Henry VI. Henry put an enormous price on the king’s head: 100,000

marks would secure his release. But if the English refused to pay up, Richard

would be handed over to his arch-enemy, Philip of France, who was itching to

break up Richard’s empire and get his hands on the former Crusader’s French

territory.

Back in England, Queen Eleanor started fundraising to free her son. The

church’s arm was twisted, and sacred vessels were melted down for the precious

metals. A year’s wool production from the northern Cistercian abbeys –

Virtually all of Yorkshire’s fleeces – was donated. Even so, all this booty

wasn’t enough to pay the whole of the emperor’s enormous ransom demand.

But Henry decided to let Richard go anyway, on the condition that the

English king paid homage to the emperor. The power Henry exerted over

Richard by holding and then releasing him was a signal that the English king

was below the emperor in the European pecking order and, in theory, gave

Henry the excuse to grab control of the country if Richard ever stepped out

of line. In practice, however, Henry’s power over Richard didn’t mean a lot

once he’d been released, except that Richard returned home to England, and

disaster, for the moment, was averted.

Richard couldn’t relax, though. When he was in England, Philip Augustus

threatened his French lands. No sooner had Richard got home when he set

out again for France to protect his domains there. He spent his last five years

In France and never saw England again.

Hero or villain?

Richard cut a fine figure, dashing around the world fighting battles. He was

brave on the battlefield, and his soldierly qualities made him both feared by

his enemies and admired by his friends. In the Middle Ages, people expected

kings to spend a lot of time on the battlefield defending their kingdoms or

carving out new ones. And Europeans also saw crusading – which people

today see as European land-grabbing in the East – as a noble occupation.

But there was a problem. All this fighting meant that Richard hardly spent

any time at all in England. Did this make him a bad king?

Well, Richard had good staff – some of them inherited from his efficient

father, Henry II – so the country was not badly governed. It wasn’t so much

Richard’s absenteeism that was the problem as his war-mongering. War has

always cost a lot of money, and Richard fought on a grand scale. He employed

more and more mercenaries, built big castles, and shelled out loads of cash

to various nobles in Germany and the Netherlands to bribe them to stay on

England’s side against France. And his English nobles got royally fed up when

Richard tried to make them provide fighting men for longer than previous

monarchs had done.

The truth was that Richard, who had been brought up in Aquitaine, in the

south of France, cared more about France than England. Fittingly enough, he

died fighting in the middle of his beloved Aquitaine. When besieging the

castle at Chalus in 1199, one of the defenders fired a crossbow at the king.

The bolt hit Richard in the chest. The surgeon who was sent to tend the king

made a mess of trying to remove the missile, and Richard, in a typical fit of