CHAPTER II
THE OUTWARD VOYAGE
1190

A march of eight days brought the Crusaders to Lyons on July 10 or 13.[473] Here they were to cross the Rhône and then proceed down its left bank to the coast. The two kings with their personal followers crossed at once and encamped on the further side of the river (seemingly on a height whence their tents were visible from the hither side) to wait till the stragglers and late comers should overtake the main body of pilgrims, who lodged as they could in and around the city.[474] When the muster seemed to be complete, the kings gave the signal for departure by causing their tents to be struck.[475] The main body of the host on the other bank[476] thronged to the narrow wooden bridge; when a small number had crossed one of the arches broke down.[477] Only two persons were drowned, but the multitude left behind were sorely puzzled how to get across the “crested waters” of the Rhône in flood.[478] According to one account they in three days achieved the passage “as best they could, in little boats, with great difficulty.”[479] Another version, however, tells us that it was only Philip who had actually set out before the bridge gave 1190 way,[480] and Richard, having merely escorted him out of the camp, was still at hand when the catastrophe occurred; whereupon he, “whose constancy never failed in action,” quickly caused a bridge to be made of boats lashed together, and waited three days while by this means the whole host made its passage in safety.[481] Then, while the French king’s subjects followed their sovereign to Genoa or went by whatever route they chose to meet him at Messina,[482] the English king at the head of his own contingent set out[483] for Marseille, July 31 where he arrived on the last day of July.[484]

“From Marseille to Acre,” says a contemporary writer, “is a sail of only fifteen days. But,” he adds, “then you go through the Great Sea, so that after the mountains round about Marseille cease to be visible you will, if you keep the direct course, see no land either to right or left till you see the land of Syria.”[485] Some of the Crusaders who accompanied Richard—among them Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and Ranulf de Glanville—faced the mysterious terrors of the “Great Sea” and took this route[486] to Tyre, which they reached on September 16.[487] The two kings had chosen Messina as the final starting-point of their voyage at a time 1190 when they deemed themselves sure of finding there every possible facility for refitting and revictualling their ships, and substantial help of every kind for their enterprise; King William of Sicily being married to a sister of Richard, and having long ago promised every assistance in his power to the Crusade.[488] In March, however, they had learned that William had died in the preceding November.[489] The original scheme nevertheless had obvious advantages both for Richard, who knew that William had made some testamentary dispositions for his benefit, and for Philip, who “dreaded the sea.”[490] As the difficulties and dangers of the real overland route from northern France to Apulia and Sicily through the Alpine passes and Italy were apparently still considered even more formidable than those of the Mediterranean sea, Philip had arranged to be conveyed by the practised mariners of Genoa from their city to Messina, not exactly as an English chronicler says “by land,” but by the shortest and easiest coasting route. Richard on the contrary was minded to go by water as much as he could, and had ordered his fleet to meet him at the nearest Mediterranean port—Marseille.[491] When a week had passed and no fleet appeared, he grew weary of waiting; so he hired “two large busses and twenty well armed galleys,” in which he set sail with his household troops on August 7.[492] He was “grieved and confounded at the delay of his navy,”[493] and seems to have coasted along very slowly in the hope of its overtaking him, for it was not Aug. 13 till the 13th that he reached Genoa, where he went ashore to visit Philip, who was lying there sick. Next day, at Portofino, Aug. 14 he received a message from Philip asking for the loan of five galleys; Richard offered three, but this Philip declined. On the 23rd Richard relieved the tediousness of the slow Aug. 23 1190 coasting voyage by landing with a small escort at Baratto and hiring horses on which the party rode to Piombino; Aug. 24 there they rejoined their ships. “Then the king went on board the galley of Fulco Rustac” (or “Rustancri”) instead of the one in which he had been sailing (the “Pumbone”), and they proceeded to Porto Ercole, which was reckoned to be half way between Marseille and Messina. “But that day the sail of the galley in which the king was got torn; so he went back to the Pumbone.” On the same day, August 25, he landed at Ostia,[494] where he was met by the cardinal bishop and some other persons sent by the Pope to receive him and invite him to visit Rome; this he declined to do,[495] preferring, it seems, to spend a day in what a modern traveller might call seeing the sights of the neighbourhood. Aug. 28
  to Sept. 8 He spent nearly a fortnight in the same way at Naples, making excursions round about (August 28-September 8); thence he went on horseback to Salerno,[496] and stayed there till on September 13 he heard that his fleet had arrived at Messina, and at once set out to rejoin it.[497] The report was Sept. 14 premature; but the fleet did in fact reach Messina next day. The story of its voyage illustrates the spirit of adventure in which the men of the more remote western lands set out upon their Crusade. The “justiciars of the navy” appointed in the spring had apparently taken each the command of a little squadron, and these squadrons had sailed in April, according to the king’s order, from various ports of England, Normandy, Britanny, and Poitou. Ten ships of the English division set out from Dartmouth; some of them touched at Silvia in Portugal, others at Lisbon, and all stopped to help the Christian Portuguese in their war against the Moors. Other ships of Richard’s—perhaps from more distant ports—came into Lisbon harbour at the close of the war; the whole fleet sailed thence on July 26, passed the Straits of Gibraltar on August 1, and sailing along the coasts of Spain and Provence reached Marseille on August 22. Finding that the king was gone, they stayed a week for necessary refitting, set out again on the 30th, and came to Messina on Holy 1190 Cross day.[498] According to English accounts Philip of France Sept. 14 arrived there two days later;[499] his own biographer, however, says he came in August.[500] As he had no ships of his own, the greater part of his host had either gone before him to Messina or proceeded towards Syria by other routes; and to the disappointment of the townsfolk and the pilgrims assembled at Messina, who all hoped to see a king arrive with great pomp and majesty, only the ship which bore Philip himself came into the harbour, and landing at the steps of the royal palace[501] he slipped out of sight as quickly and quietly as possible.[502]

The disappointed spectators of Philip’s landing were to be more than compensated ere long by the arrival of another royal guest. By September 21 Richard, travelling leisurely along the coast from Salerno, had reached Mileto in Calabria. Here a characteristic adventure nearly brought to an untimely end both his enterprise and his life. He was riding forth next day, accompanied only by one knight, “and as they passed through a little township the king turned aside towards a house where he heard the voice of a falcon, and he went into the house and took the bird; and when he would not let it go, a number of villagers came running up and attacked him with stones and sticks. One of them drew his knife upon the king, and the king beat the man with the flat of his sword till the sword broke. The other assailants he overcame with stones, and narrowly escaping from their hands made his way to the Priory of La Bagnara.” There, finding himself close to what an English chronicler describes as “the great river which is called the Far of Messina,” he took boat and crossed it immediately, and “lay that night in a tent hard by the great stone tower which stands by the entrance to the Far on the Sicilian side”—that is, the pharos, lighthouse, or beacon-tower which gave the strait its medieval name.[503] He probably crossed in a vessel of his own fleet, the whole of which seems to have been assembled at 1190 the northern end of the strait in readiness to meet him. Sept. 23 Next day (September 23) he sailed at its head into the harbour of Messina. “The galleys filled the Strait; they were crowded with hardy looking warriors, and decked with pennons and banners. So came the king to the shore,”[504] amid such blowing of horns and trumpets that “all the city was alarmed at the sound.” Philip and the governors and people of Messina went down to the beach and stood there “marvelling at that which they saw and heard of the king of England and of his power.”[505] Richard “leaped ashore,” and went immediately to speak with Philip.[506] Meanwhile those of his barons who had reached Messina before him brought “the fine destriers which had come over in the transport ships; and he and his people all mounted on horseback,”[507] and rode to their lodging, which—the royal palace being, by permission of the new sovereign of Sicily, occupied by Philip—was being prepared for them in the house of one of the Sicilian king’s officers, “in the suburb outside the city wall, among the vineyards.”[508]

The next of kin to the late king of Sicily and the person whom he had designated as his successor was his father’s sister Constance; but she was far away in Germany—being married to the Emperor’s son—and a cousin, Tancred, had without much difficulty become master of the kingdom, or at least of its insular half. Tancred had, as has been seen, provided lodgings for his two royal guests at Messina; he himself was at Palermo, and so was the widowed Queen Joan, Richard’s sister. Richard knew that a very liberal dowry in land had been settled upon Joan by King William at their marriage,[509] and also that William had made a will containing a bequest to his father-in-law, Henry II, of “a golden table twelve feet long and a foot and a half wide, three golden tripods for sitting at the table, a silken tent large enough for two hundred knights to eat in it together, a 1190 hundred first-rate galleys with all necessary gear and food for the crews, sixty thousand seams of wheat, the same number of barley and of wine, and twenty-four cups and twenty-four dishes” of either silver or gold.[510] This bequest was evidently intended by William, who seems to have been long in ill-health and expecting an early death, as his contribution to the Crusade. Richard, as Henry’s heir, now claimed it from Tancred, and he also demanded that Joan should be sent to him immediately with her dowry and a golden chair[511] for her use “according to the custom of the queens of that land.”[512] Tancred sent Joan off at once by sea “with just her bedroom furniture” and a million terrini for her expenses.[513] Sept. 28 She reached Messina on Michaelmas Eve, and was conducted by her brother to a lodging prepared for her in the Hospital;[514] but he speedily took steps for removing her to a safer place; for trouble, possibly with Philip, certainly with the townsfolk of Messina and with their king, was now evidently close at hand.

The English king’s subjects who had reached Messina before him on the fleet had been refused admittance into the city; they were obliged to encamp on the shore, and suffered much annoyance and persecution from a section of the townsfolk whom one of them describes as “a parcel of Griffons and low fellows of Saracen extraction.” These people not only insulted the Crusaders in the vilest ways, but even killed some of them and outraged the corpses.[515] All “Ultramontanes,” or men from beyond the Alps, were hated by the two races with which Sicily was mainly peopled—the “Griffons” or Greek-speaking folk, and the Italian-speaking whom the western writers call Lombards. In the minds of the last-named especially the memory of the Norman conquest of Sicily and Apulia still rankled; “they always had a grudge against us,” says the Norman poet-historian of 1190 Richard’s Crusade, “because their fathers had told them that our ancestors had conquered them; so they could not love us.”[516] It seems not unlikely that Tancred had gained the support of both Griffons and Lombards by posing as the champion of a sort of national government in opposition to the representatives of the foreign royal line, and that they looked with suspicion upon the crusading host as possibly designed to be the instrument of a new Norman conquest; more especially when they discovered, as they very soon did, that although it had nominally two crowned leaders, its real and sole commander-in-chief was the Anglo-Norman king. On the morrow of his arrival Richard set up outside the camp a gallows for thieves and robbers. “His judges delegate spared neither sex nor age; and there was one punishment for a stranger and for one born in the land.” The French king took no notice of any ill-doing on the part of his own men, nor of any evil done to them; but Richard cared not whose subject the criminal might be; “considering every man as his own,” he left no wrong unpunished; “wherefore the Griffons called him the Lion and Philip the Lamb.”[517]

Both Griffons and Lombards did their utmost to make the position of the “tailed Englishmen”—as they called Richard and all his followers indiscriminately—absolutely intolerable. They tried to starve them by refusing to let them buy food in the city; they fell upon and slew any whom they caught in small parties and unarmed; they even began to raise the town walls, as if challenging the strangers to besiege them.[518] By the time of Joan’s arrival matters had come to such a pass that two days later (September 30) Richard with a small armed force re-crossed the strait into Calabria, turned the Griffons out of a fortress called La Bagnara, Oct. 1 and next day established his sister in it with a guard of his own men.[519] He next seized a very strong fort or tower, which went by the name of “the Griffons’ Minster,” on an 1190 island in the Far, midway between La Bagnara and Messina,[520] put its garrison to death, and made it a storehouse for the provisions which had been brought by his fleet from England and his other dominions.[521] Scarcely was this done when on October 3 a dispute between a pilgrim and a townswoman about the price of some bread which the woman brought into the camp for sale led to an outbreak of hostilities. Richard, hearing the noise, sprang on horseback and strove to recall his men, riding in and out among them and striking with his staff all whom he could reach, to check the attack which they were threatening on the city gate. His efforts and those of the “elders” of the city at length quieted the tumult.[522] Both parties, however, felt that the matter was not ended. Before nightfall Richard went by boat to the palace Oct. 4 and held a consultation with Philip.[523] Next morning the archbishops of Messina, Monreale, and Reggio, with the “justices of Sicily”—that is, the governors whom Tancred had put in charge of Messina, Margarit and Jordan du Pin[524]—and some others of Tancred’s chief counsellors came to Richard’s lodging, bringing with them the French king and some of his nobles, and also some of the chief nobles of Richard’s dominions, to discuss terms of peace.[525] Three times the colloquy was interrupted by tidings, first that the English were being attacked, next that they were getting worsted, and finally that they were being killed “both within and without the city.” The Sicilian members of the conference hurried away, ostensibly for the purpose of checking their own people, “but they lied,” says Richard’s Norman chronicler.[526] Richard 1190 hastened forth to control his troops, learned that the quarters of one of his Aquitanian followers, Hugh the Brown of Lusignan, had been attacked by a party of the townsfolk, and that another party was lying in wait for himself, the city wall bristling with armed men, and another strong body of citizens posted on the hills at the back of the town.[527] He hurried back for his armour and instantly gave orders to “assault the city all round by land and by sea.”[528] He himself began by driving out the assailants from the camp. With scarce twenty men at his back, he made for the quarters of Hugh the Brown; the Lombards turned and fled from him “like sheep from a wolf,” says one who saw the scene, and he drove them “as oxen are driven under the yoke” all the way to “the postern gate which is towards Palermo,” the west gate of the city.[529] Meanwhile the whole English host was in motion. The fleet could do nothing, because Philip, who had returned to the palace under a promise from the governor that he should not be molested, intercepted the galleys as they approached and forbade them to proceed.[530] The land attack met with a fierce resistance; part of the host endeavoured to storm the walls and the gates; Richard himself led a small party up a hill “so high and steep that no one would have thought they could by any means climb it,” drove down in headlong flight the Sicilians who occupied its summit,[531] and rejoined his main force in time to be one of the first to enter the city. “A good ten thousand went in after him,” says one of the number.[532]

1190

The suddenness and rapidity with which the city was captured, and the contemporary French form of its name, “Messines,” or in the Norman dialect “Meschines,” appear to have suggested to some Norman or Angevin rimester in the host a jingle which from the camp has found its way into history:

The whole fight had lasted less than five hours.[534] The town was plundered, “and there would have been more people slain, but that the king took pity” and restrained his men. The Sicilian galleys in the harbour were set on fire and destroyed.[535] Philip and his followers meanwhile had sat at their ease within the palace and the city, doing nothing to help their fellow-Crusaders, and totally unmolested by the Sicilians, among whom they seemed quite at home. But when Philip learned that the victorious host had set up their royal leader’s banners on the walls, he angrily declared that this act was an insult to himself as Richard’s feudal superior, and demanded that the banners should be taken down and replaced by his own. Richard at first ignored the demand; but some of the prelates and nobles brought about a compromise; the banners of both kings were placed on the towers together, and the custody of the fortifications was given to the Templars and Hospitaliers till it should be seen how matters would go between Richard and Tancred.[536] The compromise was a fair one on Richard’s part; as his poet-chronicler 1190 says, “Sirs, I ask your judgement—which of the two had the best right to set his banners over the city, the one who would take no part in its assault, or the one who dared the enterprize?”[537] “But,” he remarks no less truly, “the king of France’s envy on that subject was like to be lifelong; that was the origin of the war whereby Normandy was ruined.”[538] According to one account, Philip next, on the strength of the agreement made at Vézelay, demanded his share of the spoils of the city, and grew so insolent and quarrelsome that Richard prepared to load up his ships and depart on his pilgrimage alone with his own people rather than be tied any longer to so disagreeable a comrade. Hereupon, however, Philip made overtures for reconciliation, and Oct. 8 they renewed their alliance,[539] swearing and making their respective barons swear to keep good faith with each other Oct. 6 throughout the expedition.[540] Two days earlier, on October 6, the governors of Messina had given hostages to Richard, pledging themselves to keep peace towards him and his men and to let him have free possession of the city unless Tancred speedily satisfied all his demands.[541]

Those demands, for the whole of Joan’s dowry and William’s legacy to Henry, were now again transmitted to Palermo, by envoys who represented both the Crusader kings, for one of them was no less a personage than the duke of Burgundy.[542] In the Anglo-Norman camp it seems to have been reported that the French envoys returned loaded with gifts because they had carried a private message from Philip to Tancred encouraging him to resist Richard’s demands and promising that in any strife which might ensue the French would remain neutral.[543] However this may have been, the envoys of the English king brought back a very unsatisfactory reply to their master. “I gave to your sister Joan,” said Tancred, “a million terrins for quit-claim of her dower before she went away from me. Concerning your other demands I shall do whatever I ought to do according 1190 to the custom of this realm.”[544] During the absence of the envoys a very suspicious event took place at Messina. One night the two governors of the city, Jordan du Pin and Margarit, stole away with their respective households, taking with them all the gold and silver they possessed. Richard at once seized their houses, their galleys, and whatever other property they had left behind them. His own treasure was already stored in the “Griffons’ Minster,” which he further strengthened by digging a deep and wide ditch across the island on which the fort stood.[545] When his envoys returned from Palermo they found him busy with another piece of work “which gave him pleasure,”[546] the erection, on the top of a hill overlooking the city, of a strong wooden fortress to which he gave the name of Mategriffon, “Check” or “Kill-Greek.”[547] All these precautions did in fact check the Griffons effectually; but when Richard on hearing Tancred’s reply straightway retorted that he would enter upon no pleadings at law and would get what he wanted in his own way,[548] the Lombards again began to give trouble. They refused to sell even necessary food to the host, “and but for God and the navy, many would have led a poor life”; the ships, however, had ample stores. Philip was accused of being secretly in league with the Lombards. The city and the camp were guarded day and night. Mediators went to and fro between the palace and Mategriffon, but could not bring the two kings back to friendship.[549]

At last Tancred intervened. “He was,” says Ambrose the poet-Crusader, “very wise; he had heard tell of many happenings; he was a good scholar; he knew his business.”[550] Through all these months he had played a waiting game till he could feel sure which of the two kings would be most useful to him as an ally. At first he had inclined to Philip, and “would have given him untold gold” for the marriage 1190 of one of his daughters to either the French king himself or to his infant son Louis; but Philip declined this proposal because he did not wish to quarrel with Tancred’s rival, Constance’s husband, who was now king of the Germans and Emperor elect,[551] and whose friendship he doubtless foresaw might be useful to him in future struggles with Richard. By the end of October, however, Tancred not only knew that the townsfolk of Messina had gone too far; he also perceived that he had himself gone too far in his haughtiness towards the English Lion. He therefore despatched two messengers to Richard with an offer of alliance. He proposed to give twenty thousand ounces of gold to Joan instead of her dower-lands, and to Richard, in place of King William’s legacy, the same amount as the dowry of one of his (Tancred’s) daughters on condition of her marriage with Richard’s nephew, Arthur of Britanny.[552] Richard saw at once that this offer must be accepted. The necessity of coming to a settlement of some kind with Tancred, and the outrageous conduct of Tancred’s subjects, had already detained him in Sicily much longer than he had originally contemplated. Now it was quite clear that he would be obliged to remain there for several more months, as the season of the year had begun when the “inclemency of winds and waves and weather”[553] made navigation so difficult and dangerous that no fleet could attempt a voyage to Palestine till the return of spring. The same cause must of course detain Philip also; and to reject Tancred’s offer would have been to throw Tancred and Philip into each other’s arms. Nor was the offer itself a bad one. Whatever might be the intrinsic value of Joan’s dower-lands and of William’s legacy, there was obviously very little chance of ever gaining either the one or the other; while forty thousand ounces of gold would be a very convenient addition to the treasury of the Crusade. A treaty on these terms was therefore drawn up and executed forthwith. Richard promised that 1190 all questions about his sister’s dowry and his own claims should be henceforth at rest; that he and his men would faithfully keep peace by sea and by land with Tancred and all his subjects, and if the Sicilian realm should be invaded or attacked while they were in it, they would help the king against his assailants; that Arthur—“our dear nephew, and our heir if we should die without issue”—should be contracted to Tancred’s daughter; and that the bride should have a dower of lands within her husband’s duchy “befitting a lady so illustrious and the daughter of so magnificent a king.” If Arthur succeeded to the Crown, his wife was to have the customary dower of a queen of England. If, on the other hand, from any cause dependent on Richard or Arthur, the marriage should not take place “in due time” (that is, when the children should be old enough; Arthur was in his fourth year), the dowry given by the bride’s father was to be returned.[554] Tancred on his part promised that he and his subjects would keep peace with Richard and his men,[555] and he paid over the covenanted sum without delay.[556] Richard was in a pacific mood; although none of the gold which he had just received could fairly come under his agreement with Philip as to the division of conquests, he at once made Philip a peace-offering of part of it.[557] He next insisted on his men restoring to the townsfolk the plunder which they had taken from them, and Archbishop Walter of Rouen enforced this order by threatening to excommunicate those who failed to obey it. Finally, a set of ordinances for the regulation of intercourse and trade between the pilgrims and the townsfolk was issued in the joint names of all the three kings.[558] Thenceforth town and camp were on 1190 friendly terms, and so were—for a while—the two pilgrim kings. There was, however, some grumbling in the host, especially among the knights who had reached Messina before Richard, at their long detention there and the expense which it entailed on them, and at being forced to give back the plunder with which they had recouped themselves. Richard “was not avaricious or stingy”; he silenced the grumblers by a distribution of costly gifts, of which all ranks, down to the lowest foot-soldiers, received such a share that every Feb. 1191 man was fully satisfied.[559] Early in the next year he made a present to the French king of several of the ships which had come from England, and to his own troops, of all ranks, a further distribution of “more treasures than any of his predecessors had ever given away in a whole year.”[560]

Before Christmas Richard’s growing sense of the weightiness of his enterprise showed itself in another step in his preparations. One day he called together in the chapel of the house where he was lodging all the bishops in his host, came before them as a penitent, with three scourges in his hands, fell at their feet and openly confessed to them a vice in which he had lived and which he now solemnly abjured; he received his penance at their hands, “and thenceforth returned to his iniquity no more.”[561] At Christmas he entertained Philip and the French nobles at a great feast in Mategriffon.[562] The festivities were disturbed by a quarrel between the Genoese and Pisan sailors and some of the men belonging to Richard’s galleys, and not till some lives were lost did the two kings in person succeed in quelling 1191
Feb. 2 the strife.[563] An incident on Candlemas Day (1191) throws a 1191 curious side-light on one phase of Richard’s character of which there is little trace elsewhere, and also on his relations with the other crusading chiefs during this dreary time of waiting. He and some English and French knights, on their way back from a ride, met a countryman with a load of reeds or bulrushes and bought some for a game such as boys played, tilting with the rushes for spears. The king challenged William des Barres, with whom he had had at least two encounters in real warfare, and who (according to one account) on the second of these occasions,[564] being made prisoner, had committed a breach of the rules of chivalry which Richard was not a man to condone easily: he had regained his liberty by breaking his parole. When William’s first thrust broke the head of Richard’s bulrush, Richard was seized with one of those fits of unaccountable, irrational fury before which all persons accustomed to associate with the Angevin counts quailed as before a direct manifestation of the powers of darkness whence the house of Anjou was said to have sprung. He set his horse furiously at his opponent; the shock of the encounter failed to unseat William, but caused Richard’s own saddle to slip; he leapt from it, mounted another horse, and renewed the attack, but with no better success; nor did his angry threats disturb the coolness of the Frenchman. The Earl of Leicester, trying to intervene, was roughly bidden by his sovereign, “Leave me to deal with him alone!” and finally, after a long struggle and much bandying of words, the king burst out to William, “Get thee hence, and take heed that I see thee no more, for henceforth I will be an enemy to thee and thine for ever.” William, now thoroughly alarmed, went and besought counsel and help of his own sovereign. Philip in person interceded for his unlucky vassal; some of the highest nobles of France actually went down on their knees to Richard for the same purpose; but Richard would hear none of them; and on the third day William des Barres had to leave Messina “because the king of France would not keep him against the will of the king of England.”[565]

The time was now approaching when the seas would 1191 again be navigable, and Philip presently asked Richard to get ready to accompany him on what was called “the March passage” to Holy Land. Richard is said by a French chronicler to have answered that he could not go before August.[566] It seems that either August here must be a mistake for April, or Richard cannot have been serious in answering thus, unless indeed he entertained some vague project of going back for a short visit to his island realm before proceeding further eastward. Such a project is not impossible; for the reports which had been coming to him through the winter about the state of affairs in England were at once so disquieting and so contradictory that he may well have longed to see for himself how matters really stood and settle by his personal authority the quarrels which had arisen between his justiciars and his brother. In the end he committed the solution of these very puzzling difficulties to Archbishop Walter of Rouen. He had, however, another reason for delaying at least for a few weeks his own departure for Acre. Early in the year King Sancho of Navarre had placed his daughter Berengaria in Queen Eleanor’s charge to take her to Richard to become his wife.[567] Before the end of February the two ladies reached Naples, and Richard sent some galleys to meet them there; but “on account of the multitude of men who accompanied them” Tancred’s people refused them leave to go to Messina—which indeed must have been already overwhelmed with foreign visitors—and they had to spend a month in his continental dominions.[568] Their coming was a clear intimation that Richard was now fully determined to shake off the bonds of his engagement to Aloysia. Philip peremptorily bade him, as his vassal, choose between two alternatives: either to go with his overlord across the sea, in which case he should be at liberty to marry Berengaria, or, if he would not go, to keep his promise of marriage with Aloysia. Richard bluntly 1191 refused both.[569] Meanwhile Tancred had invited him[570] to a March 3 meeting at Catania. A splendid welcome was given him there on March 3, and for three days he was Tancred’s guest in the palace. Tancred offered him “gifts many and great” in gold and silver, cloth of silk, and horses, but Richard, “needing none of such things,” would accept only one small ring as a token of friendship; in return for this he presented Tancred with a sword which he seems to have asserted to be the famous Excalibur of King Arthur. Finally Tancred offered a substantial gift which Richard did not decline: a contribution of four large ships “which they call ussers” and fifteen galleys to the crusading fleet.[571] The Sicilian king escorted his guest on the way back as far as Taormina, where Philip was to meet them on March 8. There Tancred is said to have put into Richard’s hands a letter which he declared had been brought to him by the duke of Burgundy from the French king, containing an assertion that Richard had no intention of keeping faith with Tancred, and a promise that if Tancred were disposed to attack Richard, the French troops and their sovereign would give their help in effecting Richard’s destruction. Richard on this left Taormina before Philip reached it and returned to Messina by another way so as to avoid meeting him. When he did meet him again, he at first studiously avoided him or ignored his presence; when asked the reason, he showed the letter. Philip accused him of having invented the whole affair as an excuse for “casting off” the daughter of France whom he had promised to wed. Thus driven to extremity, Richard said plainly that a marriage between him and Aloysia was impossible, and gave a reason which, as he produced several witnesses who declared themselves ready to swear to its truth, fully justified his refusal.[572] The result was that Philip formally released him from his engagement and declared him free to marry whomsoever he would. On the basis of this and certain other conditions which were to take effect 1191 only at a later time, a “firm peace” was once again made between the king of France and his “friend and faithful liegeman, the illustrious king of England.”

The treaty was made before March 25;[573] shortly afterwards Philip and his “company” sailed, in the galleys which Richard had given him, for Acre.[574] Before starting he again besought Richard to pardon William des Barres, and Richard after some demur promised to keep the peace towards William so long as they were both engaged in the cause of the Cross.[575] He convoyed Philip through the Far, and then himself went to Reggio, having just heard that Eleanor and Berengaria had arrived there. He took them on board and brought his mother back with him to Messina, after, it seems, placing Berengaria at La Bagnara with Joan; the men of the queen’s suite seem to have been left at Reggio, and possibly even Eleanor and her ladies may not have landed at Messina at all, for she stayed with her son only four days and then departed for England.[576] He had nothing more to wait for. With all speed the fleet was made ready, and on April 10, the Wednesday before Easter, it put to sea.[577]

The ships which Richard had found awaiting him in the harbour of Messina when he arrived there are said to have numbered one hundred and fourteen.[578] Stragglers that had 1191 come in later, Tancred’s gift, and other vessels bought or hired by Richard had now raised the total to about two hundred.[579] Of these, some forty or fifty were galleys or battleships, built after the pattern of the old Roman liburnae or the “long keels” of Richard’s Norse forefathers, long, slender, with armed prows, and propelled by two tiers of oarsmen.[580] The rest were transport vessels; those of the largest size, of which there seem to have been now twenty-four, were called “busses” by the northerners and “dromonds” in the Mediterranean and the Levant. Of these vessels, fourteen which had formed part of the original English fleet had each of them three spare rudders, thirteen anchors, thirty oars, two sails, triple ropes of every kind, and a double set of everything else that a ship could need, except the mast and the boat; the lading of each consisted of forty war-horses, forty knights with all their arms and accoutrements, forty foot-soldiers, and fifteen sailors, with food enough for all these men and horses for a whole year. The other ships of burden, called “huissiers,” “ushers,” “enekes” or “smacks” (esneccae) were round-shaped vessels, seemingly dependent on sails alone; their carrying capacity was half that of the busses. The king had taken the precaution to distribute his treasure among all the transport ships, “so that if part were lost, another part should be saved.”[581]