Lionheart A Novel - By Sharon Kay Penman Page 0,338

easy to tell if he were serious or joking. And while I’d known he was well educated, able to jest in Latin and write poetry in two languages, I admit to being impressed when I discovered him quoting from Horace. Even his harshest critics acknowledge his military genius; he hasn’t always been given enough credit, though, for his intelligence. The mythical Richard is usually portrayed as a gung ho warrior who cared only for blood, battles, and what he could win at the point of a sword, but the real Richard was no stranger to diplomatic strategy; he was capable of subtlety, too, and could be just as devious as his wily sire.

But I was most amazed by his behavior in the Holy Land, by his willingness to deal with the Saracens as he would have dealt with Christian foes, via negotiations and even a marital alliance. As tragic as the massacre of the Acre garrison was, it was done for what he considered valid military reasons, not because of religious bias, as I’d once thought. However serious he was about offering Joanna to al-’Ādil, it was revealing that he’d entertained an idea that would have horrified his fellow crusaders, and it is impressive that he managed to keep it secret; we know of this only because the Saracen chroniclers reported it. He was not the religious zealot I’d expected. The man who was the first prince to take the cross refused to lay siege to Jerusalem, alarmed his own allies by his cordial relations with the Saracens, and although he believed they were infidels, denied God’s Grace, he respected their courage. According to Bahā’ al-Dīn, he formed friendships with some of Saladin’s elite Mamluks and emirs, even knighting several of them. That was the last thing I’d have imagined—knighting his infidel enemies in the midst of a holy war?

I don’t expect Lionheart to change the public perception of Richard I any more than The Sunne in Splendour could compete with the Richard III of Shakespeare. But I do hope that my readers will agree with me that this Richard is much more complex and, therefore, more interesting than the storied soldier-king. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised by what my research revealed. As an Australian friend Glenne Gilbert once observed astutely, “There had to be reasons why he was Eleanor’s favorite son.”

War was the vocation of kings in the Middle Ages, and, at that, Richard excelled; he was almost invincible in hand-to-hand combat, and military historians consider him one of the best medieval generals. It was in the Holy Land that the Lionheart legend took root, and his bravura exploits won him a permanent place in the pantheon of semimythic heroes, those men whose fame transcended their own times. Even people with little knowledge of history have heard of Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon—and Richard Lionheart. This would have pleased Richard greatly, for he was a shrewd manipulator of his public image.

But if Richard is the best-known medieval king, he is also the most controversial. His was an age that gloried in war and that jars modern sensibilities. The darkest stain upon Richard’s reputation is the killing of the Acre garrison. It certainly contributed greatly to my own negative feelings toward Richard, especially after I read in Stephen Runciman’s A History of the Crusades that the families of the garrison were slain, too. Human beings are conditioned to react to numbers; we find the deaths of two thousand six hundred men more shocking than the death of one man or a dozen. And the deaths of noncombatants is particularly reprehensible. So when I wrote Here Be Dragons, I was not at all sympathetic to Richard, repulsed by the blood of so many innocents on his hands.

More than twenty years later, when I began to do extensive research about the man, I was astonished to learn that the story of the killing of the women and children has no basis in fact. It first struck me that Runciman cited no source for his statement, and that really surprised me, for this is such a basic tenet of historical research. I then found that only older books like Runciman’s (which was written more than fifty years ago) made the claim that the families were killed, and not a single one offered any evidence to substantiate this accusation. This charge is not found in any of the more recent histories, including those written by historians specializing in the era of the Crusades.

This was