the random details come straight from the pages of these chronicles: Philippe’s lost falcon at Acre. The Saracen slave girl who charmed Richard with her singing during his visit with al-’Ādil. Complaints about the tiny flies called cincelles. The postern gate at Messina and the Templars’ stairway at Jaffa. The pears, plums, and snow sent by Saladin to Richard when he was ailing. Richard’s one glimpse of the Holy City. The sudden mist that swept in from the sea and cut off Richard’s rear guard on the march to Jaffa. The logistics of a medieval army on the move, which I’d never encountered anywhere else. Richard’s unfair banishment of Guillaume des Barres in Sicily and their reconciliation after al-’Ādil’s attack upon the rear guard. Philippe’s unexpected interest in Joanna. Richard’s despair as he struggled to reconcile the competing demands of king and crusader. Even the names of the men killed in combat. Dialogue that occasionally came from the mouths of the men themselves. And Fauvel, the Cypriot stallion that so bedazzled Richard and the chroniclers.
Richard did, indeed, break his sword in his squabble with that understandably irate Sicilian villager, and he only had one knight with him at the time; I took the liberty of letting Morgan be the man. He really did arrive in Cyprus just in time to rescue his sister and betrothed, mere hours after Isaac Comnenus had issued his ultimatum to Joanna and Berengaria; no writer would have dared to invent high drama like that. I actually tried to tone down his battlefield heroics, as reported by the chroniclers, not wanting my readers to think I’d gone Hollywood on them. But he truly did ride up and down alone before the Saracen army at Jaffa. If that had been reported by Richard’s chroniclers, I’d have been skeptical, but it comes from two of the Saracen chroniclers; Bahā’ al-Dīn was mortified that none had ridden out to accept Richard’s challenge.
I took only one historical liberty with known facts, in Chapter Thirty-two. Richard did advise his nephew Henri to take the Jerusalem crown while warning him of the perils of marriage to Isabella; Richard was convinced that she was still legally wed to Humphrey de Toron. But Richard and Henri had no face-to-face encounter; it was done via messengers due to the time pressure, for the poulains were eager to have the marriage done ASAP. Since this is a novel, though, I opted for the greater drama of a personal discussion between the two men. I also shifted Richard’s killing of the wild boar from April to February. And because the chroniclers neglected to describe the palace at Acre, I used the description of the palace at Beirut.
In any historical novel, there are always times when we have to “fill in the blanks.” As I’ve said before, medieval chroniclers could be utterly indifferent to the needs of future novelists. We often do not have birth dates, wedding dates, sometimes not even death dates, and, more often than not, we don’t know the cause of death, either. All we know of the demise of King William II of Sicily is that he died of an illness, it was not prolonged, and it was unexpected. So I chose an ailment that was very common in the Middle Ages: peritonitis. I also had to select a birthdate for Isabella’s daughter by Conrad of Montferrat. We know Isabella was pregnant when she wed Henri in May of 1192, for one of the Saracen chroniclers was horrified by this, seeing it as proof of the immorality of the Franks. So Maria was born sometime during 1192, and, rather than keep my readers in suspense, I let her be born before the book’s end.
Aside from the “poetic license” I took in letting Henri unburden himself in person to Richard, I did not stray from the truth of this remarkable episode in Outremer history. Isabella did indeed defy the French; Henri hurried back to Tyre after learning of Conrad’s murder, where he was embraced by the population and the poulain lords, who urged him to claim the young widow and the crown; and Isabella did come to him on her own, against the advice of others, as I have her do in Lionheart. Henri’s reluctance was not at all unusual. Few crusaders intended to remain in the Holy Land; the great majority returned home after fulfilling their vows. Not even the promise of lands and titles was enough to tempt many men into renouncing their