Richard the Lion Heart

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                        RICHARD THE LION HEART





                      [Illustration: (colophon)]


                      MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
                   LONDON. BOMBAY. CALCUTTA. MADRAS
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                               TORONTO




                               RICHARD
                            THE LION HEART


                                  BY
                             KATE NORGATE


                      MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
                     ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
                                 1924




                              COPYRIGHT


                       PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




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.