Richard I of England

Richard I, known as Richard the Lionheart, was king of England from 1189 to 1199 and ruler of the vast Angevin lands in France. A celebrated soldier, he led the Third Crusade against Saladin, recovering much of the coast of the Holy Land but not Jerusalem, and spent most of his reign abroad, at war or in captivity. Later legend made him an ideal of chivalry; historians paint a more complicated picture.

Richard was born on 8 September 1157 at Beaumont Palace in Oxford, the third son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. His father ruled England and, through inheritance and marriage, Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Aquitaine, a group of territories often called the Angevin Empire, which stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. Richard was raised mostly in his mother's lands in south-western France and probably spoke little or no English. In 1172 he was formally installed as Duke of Aquitaine.

Henry II's sons were constantly in conflict with him and with each other. In 1173–1174 Richard, then sixteen, joined his brothers and mother in a revolt against their father; it failed, and Eleanor spent most of the next fifteen years in confinement. Richard then spent years suppressing rebellious barons in Aquitaine, earning a reputation as a hard and skilful commander. The deaths of his elder brothers, Henry the Young King in 1183 and Geoffrey in 1186, made him heir, but his father would not confirm it. In 1188–1189 Richard allied with the French king, Philip II Augustus, against Henry, who died defeated at Chinon on 6 July 1189.

Richard was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. The coronation was followed by attacks on Jews in London, and in March 1190 by a massacre at York, where many of the city's Jews died, some killing themselves, in the castle where they had taken refuge. Richard had already taken the cross after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, and his first priority was to raise money for the crusade. He sold offices, lands and privileges on a large scale, and released William I of Scotland from his oath of homage in return for payment. He left England in December 1189, leaving the government in the hands of ministers.

Richard and Philip II set out together in 1190 and wintered in Sicily, where Richard seized Messina in a dispute with its king, Tancred. Sailing east in 1191, part of his fleet was wrecked off Cyprus; when its ruler, Isaac Komnenos, mistreated the survivors, Richard conquered the island in a few weeks. There, on 12 May 1191, he married Berengaria of Navarre. He reached the besieged port of Acre in June, and the city surrendered in July. Philip returned to France soon afterwards, leaving Richard as the leading commander of the crusade.

When negotiations over the terms of Acre's surrender stalled, Richard had about 2,700 Muslim prisoners killed outside the city in August 1191, an act that shocked Muslim chroniclers and that some historians see as a calculated military decision rather than an outburst. He then marched south along the coast and defeated Saladin at Arsuf in September 1191, and took Jaffa. Twice he advanced to within reach of Jerusalem, but he judged that he could take the city but not hold it once the crusaders went home, and he turned back. In August 1192 he relieved Jaffa against a surprise attack by Saladin. The two leaders never met, but they exchanged envoys and gifts, and in September 1192 they agreed the Treaty of Jaffa, a three-year truce that left Jerusalem under Muslim rule while allowing Christian pilgrims to visit it and leaving the crusaders a strip of coast from Tyre to Jaffa.

Travelling home overland in disguise, Richard was captured in December 1192 near Vienna by Duke Leopold V of Austria, whom he had insulted at Acre. He was held at Dürnstein Castle and then handed to the emperor Henry VI of the Holy Roman Empire. The emperor demanded a ransom of 150,000 marks, several times the crown's yearly income. His mother Eleanor took charge of raising it through heavy taxes on England and his other lands, while his younger brother John and Philip II offered the emperor money to keep him imprisoned. Richard was released in February 1194.

Richard returned briefly to England, where John submitted and was forgiven, and was crowned a second time at Winchester. In May 1194 he left England for the last time. The rest of his reign was spent fighting Philip II, who had taken advantage of his absence to seize lands in Normandy. Richard won back much of what had been lost, and built Château Gaillard, a powerful castle overlooking the Seine, between 1196 and 1198. His chief minister in England, Hubert Walter, raised the money for these campaigns.

In March 1199, while besieging the small castle of Châlus-Chabrol in the Limousin during a dispute with a rebellious vassal, Richard was struck in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt. The wound became infected, and he died on 6 April 1199, aged 41. His body was buried at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou, at his father's feet, his heart at Rouen. He had no children, and his brother John succeeded him; within five years John had lost Normandy and most of the Angevin lands to the Kingdom of France.

Richard spent perhaps six months of his ten-year reign in the Kingdom of England. For centuries English writers celebrated him as a heroic crusader, and the later Robin Hood legends cast him as the rightful king betrayed by his brother. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some historians condemned him as a ruler who used England only as a source of money for foreign wars. Modern historians tend to judge him as a ruler of a large set of territories, of which England was one, and credit him as an exceptional general and organiser of supply and siegecraft, while noting the heavy cost of his wars. He was also a patron of troubadour poetry and wrote songs himself in French and Occitan. Claims that he was homosexual, first made in the twentieth century, are disputed and rest on uncertain evidence. His equestrian statue stands outside the Palace of Westminster.