PREPARATIONS, FINANCES AND LOGISTICS

The Angevins and Capetians may have taken their time to start the crusade, but they at least made detailed and comprehensive campaign preparations. This meant that Richard I left Europe with the twelfth century’s most organised and best-funded crusading army. Soon after taking the cross in January 1188, Henry II and Philip Augustus imposed a special crusading tax in both England and France, with the aim of amassing the fortune needed to finance their expeditions. Known as the Saladin Tithe, this levy of ten per cent on all movable goods was enforced by the threat of excommunication. Members of the Templar and Hospitaller orders were also drafted in to aid in gathering the duty.

Among those staying in the West, this unprecedented tax proved deeply unpopular, with voluble complaints raised within secular society and the ecclesiastical hierarchy alike. But in the Angevin Empire, at least, the tithe worked. Before his death, Henry II managed to amass around 100,000 marks. Richard then intensified and broadened money-raising efforts. According to one eyewitness, in England ‘he put up for sale all he had, offices, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, towns, lands, everything’. The Lionheart was even supposed to have joked that he would have sold London if he could.¹⁴

The mountain of cash raised had a direct bearing upon the fortunes of the Third Crusade. In part this was because both Richard and Philip were expected to pay their soldiers’ wages for the duration of the expedition, so a ready supply of money would be critical to the maintenance of morale and martial momentum. The Lionheart also made extensive but judicious use of his fiscal resources before leaving Europe to secure the logistical underpinnings of his campaign. Thanks to the unusually fastidious attitude towards record keeping in England, some details of these preparations can be recovered. In the financial year 1189–90 (then measured from Michaelmas on 29 September) Richard spent around £14,000–the equivalent of more than half of the annual crown revenue from all England. He is also known to have ordered 60,000 horseshoes from the Forest of Dean and Hampshire, 14,000 cured pig carcasses, an abundant supply of cheeses from Essex and beans from Kent and Cambridgeshire, as well as thousands of arrows and crossbow bolts.

Philip Augustus had far less success implementing the Saladin Tithe. He lacked the absolute regnal authority enjoyed by English kings since the time of the Norman Conquest, nor could he rely upon the same developed governmental and administrative machinery at Henry’s and Richard’s disposal. Thus, although Philip’s right to exact the levy was accepted at Paris in March 1188, within a year he had to withdraw the tax and actually apologised for ever having sought its imposition. The Capetian monarch therefore began the crusade with a considerably smaller war chest, even though the Lionheart does seem to have paid off the 20,000 marks his father promised Philip at the settlement of July 1189.

Careful economic planning and preparation were all the more imperative because the Angevins and Capetians decided to travel to the Levant by ship. This form of transport was potentially quicker and more efficient. Given the costs involved, it also drastically curtailed the ability of poor, ill-equipped non-combatants to follow the crusade. These factors suited Richard’s and Philip’s plans to lead more competent, professional armies to the East and to minimise the amount of time spent away from their respective realms. However, hiring or commissioning ships was an expensive business, involving massive upfront outlay even before the campaign was properly begun. And naval transport also carried with it considerable risks–such as difficulties of navigation and coordination, and the ever present threat of shipwreck.

Attention was needed if military discipline was to be maintained during a confined, uncomfortable and perilous sea journey. With this in mind, Richard enacted a detailed set of regulations in 1190, mandating harsh penalties for disorder: a soldier who committed murder would be tied to the corpse of his victim and thrown overboard (and if the offence took place on land, he would be tied to the body and buried alive); attacking someone with a knife would cost you your hand, while for hitting someone with a fist you would be plunged into the sea three times; thieves would be shaved of their hair, and then have boiling pitch and feathers poured over their heads ‘so that [they] may be known’.¹⁵

In the course of the Third Crusade, Richard I and Philip Augustus managed, by and large, to negotiate all of the potential problems with naval transport. In doing so they established an important precedent and, from this point onwards, it became far more common for crusade armies to depend on sea travel to reach their objectives.

TO THE HOLY LAND

Richard I and Philip Augustus met to discuss final preparations for the crusade on 30 December 1189 and again on 16 March 1190. At last, on 24 June, the Lionheart took up his pilgrim scrip (satchel) and staff in a public ceremony at Tours, while the French king performed an identical ritual that same day at St Denis (following in the footsteps of his father Louis VII). On 2 July the two monarchs met at Vézelay and agreed to share any acquisitions made during the coming campaign. Then, on 4 July 1190, exactly three years after the Latin defeat at Hattin, the main Angevin and Capetian crusading armies set out together. To distinguish between the two hosts it had been decided that Philip’s men would wear red crosses, while Richard’s bore white. These two forces separated at Lyons on the understanding that they would regroup at Messina in Sicily before setting sail for the Levant.

Richard had been able to muster and equip a large host–drawing upon the resources of the expansive Angevin realm and the riches accumulated through the Saladin Tithe. He probably departed from Vézelay with a royal contingent of around 6,000 soldiers, although by the time he left Europe he may have accumulated a total force of 17,000 men. The Lionheart made his way south to Marseilles, whence he took ship down the Italian coast to arrive at Messina on 23 September, while a portion of his army sailed on directly to the Holy Land under the command of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury. Richard had also managed to prepare a fleet of some one hundred vessels from England, Normandy, Brittany and Aquitaine, which sailed round Iberia to rendezvous with the king in Sicily. Philip Augustus’ personal contingent appears to have been far smaller. From Lyons he marched to Genoa and there negotiated terms of carriage to Sicily and the Near East, paying a hire price of 5,850 marks on ships for 650 knights and 1,300 squires. The Capetian king reached Messina in mid-September.

With winter fast approaching and the seas becoming more treacherous, it was decided that the onward journey to the Levant would have to wait until the following spring. In any case, Richard had political concerns to resolve. William II, king of Sicily, the Lionheart’s brother-in-law through marriage to his sister Joanne, had died in November 1189, leaving Sicily in the grip of a succession dispute which, upon his arrival, Richard quickly resolved. Once peace had been restored, the crusaders spent the winter refitting their fleets and amassing further stores of weapons and equipment–Richard, for example, secured a supply of massive catapult stones. In this period the Lionheart also met with Joachim of Fiore, a Cistercian abbot who was gaining a notable reputation for prophecy. Joachim promptly announced a vision predicting Richard’s capture of Jerusalem and the imminent onset of the Last Days of Judgement, apparently affirming that ‘the Lord will give you victory over his enemies and will exalt your name above all the princes of the earth’–words that served merely to bolster the Lionheart’s egotistical confidence.¹⁶