Richard I: Securing an Inheritance and Preparing a Crusade, 1189-1191 A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Edward M. Humpert June 2010 © 2010 Edward M. Humpert. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Richard I: Securing an Inheritance and Preparing a Crusade by EDWARD M. HUMPERT has been approved for the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences by Miriam T. Shadis Associate Professor of History Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 Abstract HUMPERT, EDWARD M., M.A., June 2010, History Richard I: Securing an Inheritance and Preparing a Crusade (71 pp.) Director of Thesis: Miriam T. Shadis Traditional assessments of Richard I’s first years on the throne treat him as a king interested only in draining the Angevin realm of men and money in the interest of the Third Crusade. Modern scholars still often consider Richard obsessed with combat, and disinterested with the protection of his inheritance. Richard apparently worked quickly to tear down all that his father, Henry II, had worked so hard to build up in the way of administration particularly in England. This thesis seeks to reassess Richard’s first years as king in order to correct the traditional narrative of Richard’s kingship. While Richard did make great effort to acquire funds and men for crusade, he also went to great lengths to establish the defense of his inheritance. Like any crusader, Richard had to establish the security of his lands in light of his upcoming absence. His dealings with family and his use of marriage diplomacy reveal a particular vision Richard had for his reign. That vision sought to break from the policies of his father, and to avoid warfare. While crusade ultimately shaped the rest of his reign, the actions Richard took in his first years display the course that Richard wanted his reign to take. Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Miriam T. Shadis Associate Professor of History 4 Dedication To my parents and brothers 5 Table of Contents Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Dedication ........................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 6 Taking the Cross: A Personal and Political Statement ..................................................... 14 Richard’s Itinerary, 1189-1190: Visiting an Inheritance .................................................. 22 Eleanor, Geoffrey and John: Dealing with Family ........................................................... 25 Three Brides: Marriage Diplomacy and the Angevin Border ........................................... 38 Alice or Berengaria: Choosing a Bride ............................................................................. 47 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 56 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 60 Appendix ........................................................................................................................... 67 6 Introduction Traditional assessments of Richard the Lionheart’s first years as king, between 1189 and 1191 look most often like the following. Richard became king of England at age thirty-two on September 3 1189. His one goal upon his accession was to drain his realm of men and money for his upcoming crusade. He remained in England only long enough to receive the crown, to make impetuous and ill-planned decisions for the governance of England in his absence, and to suck the country dry of every penny. His father, Henry II, had built up a highly efficient system of government, which Richard promptly began to tear down. He dismissed his father’s chief justiciar, Ranulf Glanvill, ousted his father’s sheriffs. Richard was unmarried and about to depart on crusade, from which he might not have returned. Richard did not designate a successor in the event of his death. He gave his brother John unreasonably vast grants of land including six whole counties, and nominated a bastard brother Geoffrey, who it was rumored had designs at the throne, to the archbishopric of York. In the words of J.T. Appleby, “Richard thus heaped up the materials for an explosion…and subjected the governmental system, painfully restored by his father…to the most severe strain.”1 However, for the four centuries after his death in 1199, Richard the Lionheart remained the model king that he had been in life. Richard was a model for Edward I and Edward II, and compared to Alexander the Great, and Charlemagne. Richard stood for contemporaries, like Roger of Howden, Richard of Devizes and Ambroise, as a model crusader king. The anonymous author of the Itinerarium explained, “King Richard had the valour of Hector, the heroism of Achilles; he was not inferior to Alexander, nor less 1 Richard of Devizes, Chronicon Richardi Divisensis de Tempore Regis Ricardi Primi, ed. J.T. Appleby (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), xiii. 7 valiant than Roland.”2 Until the seventeenth century, Richard retained this reputation. John Speed in The History of Great Britain (1611) said that Richard’s love and care of the English nation were of justice itself, and his death brought a black cloud over a “triumphal and bright shining star of chivalry.”3 This was not a king who heaped up an explosion to bring down what his father had established. Assessments of Richard would shortly change drastically. Just seven years after Speed’s assessment, Samuel Daniel in The Collection of the History of England (1618) trounced the model king narrative. He explained that Richard consumed more of the English kingdom than all his predecessors since the Norman conquest, and deserved his exactions less than any, having never lived on the isle, nor left behind any monument, or showed any love or care to the nation. Daniel first posed what became a traditional assessment of Richard as an ineffective and exploitative king. Criticizing the ignorant bliss of the chroniclers, David Hume in his History of England (1762) explained that Richard’s positive early reputation was attributed to the romantic spirit of the age. Richard ceased to be the model king. By the nineteenth century, Bishop William Stubbs wrote that Richard was indeed not a model king but rather an “unscrupulous and impetuous soldier,” whose “love of warfare kept him from paying proper attention to the administration of his inheritance from his father.”4 Stubbs’ impression of Richard still haunts scholars, as some of his editions of the Latin chroniclers remain the standard. Since the 1960s and 1970s, revisionists and apologists have begun to rehabilitate Richard, seeking to place him back in his proper twelfth century, contemporary context. 2 H.J. Nicholson, The Chronicle of the Third Crusade; a Translation of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997), 145. 3 In John Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), xv. 4 W. Stubbs, Historical Introduction to the Rolls Series (London: Longmans and Co., 1902), 321-323. 8 However, by returning to Richard’s context and restoring credibility to contemporary chroniclers, revisionists continue to emphasize Richard’s militarism as much as Stubbs had before them. Richard continued as a king predominantly interest in combat. Scholars credited Richard’s non-military successes, if they saw any, to his administrators. Richard’s reign often remains a “mere hiccup of chivalric combat” or even more severely an “interregnum.”5 Crusade historian Steven Runciman, adjusting Stubbs’ assessment (“bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler and a vicious man”) called Richard “a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier.”6 Jonathan Riley-Smith deemed Richard one of the finest crusade leaders who nonetheless was “vain…devious and self-centered.”7 Michael Markowski called Richard a leader who prolonged warfare, avoided peace and was “no hero, but a man who merely wanted to fight hand-to-hand forever.”8 Richard, in a reemphasized twelfth century context, still loved warfare and was an incompetent king. As J.A. Brundage and John Gillingham have pointed out, “The great problem of interpreting Richard’s career…is the question of what standards one should apply to his history.”9 Certainly perceptions of Richard shift if he is judged as crusader, or king of England, or count of Poitou, or son. The greater problem, though, is that Richard’s reign truly was consumed by combat. Of his ten year reign, around nine of those years were 5 R.V. Turner and R.R. Heiser, The Reign of Richard Lionheart: Ruler of the Angevin Empire, 1189-1199 (New York: Longman, 2000), 7; Edward Foss, Judges of England (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 324. 6 W. Stubbs, ed., Itinerarium Regis Ricardi in Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I (Rolls Series, 1864), I, 369; Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades, 3 vols (New York, 1952), vol. 3, 75. 7 J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (London, 1987), 113. 8 Michael Markowski, “Richard Lionheart: bad king, bad crusader?,” The Journal of Medieval