old lives. Joffroi de Lusignan had been made Count of Jaffa and Ascalon, but he still sailed for Poitou after the truce with Saladin. When a French churchman, Jacques de Vitry, was elected to the bishopric of Acre, his initial response was horror, for he saw this as lifelong exile. Guy de Montfort, the uncle of “my” Simon in Falls the Shadow, journeyed to the Holy Land and wed Balian d’Ibelin’s daughter Helvis, but after her death he returned to France. So Henri’s ambivalence about the offer made to him at Tyre was not that surprising, and while his marriage to Isabella seems to have been a happy one, it is telling that he never sought to be crowned and continued to call himself the Count of Champagne.
Now, on to the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat. The French did their best to convince the rest of Christendom that Richard was responsible for Conrad’s murder, and one of the Saracen chroniclers, Ibn al-Athir, claimed that Saladin had arranged with Rashīd al-Dīn Sinān to have both Richard and Conrad killed, but neither Richard nor Saladin are considered serious suspects by historians. Richard was desperate to leave Outremer in order to save his own kingdom and Saladin had just concluded a treaty with Conrad. The consensus is that the most likely explanation is the one given by one of the chroniclers—that Conrad had rashly offended the Assassins by seizing one of their ships.
I have always been glad when readers alert me to mistakes; otherwise, I’d keep on making the same errors instead of going on to new ones. So I was grateful to the readers who told me there were no brindle greyhounds in the Middle Ages, that foxes do not have black eyes, and medieval roses were not ever-blooming. But there is no need for readers to write and tell me that “fire” is a word that should be used only with gunpowder weapons, not crossbows. I am familiar with this argument, but I am a novelist, not a purist, and I found it impossible to write a battle scene with just the one verb, “shoot.” And while I’m on the subject of mistakes, Joanna’s and Berengaria’s belief that they were at their most fertile immediately after their “flux” was in error, but it was theirs, not mine; medieval understanding of the reproductive process was not always reliable.
I was confronted with two mysteries when I began to research Lionheart—why it took so long for word of Henry II’s death to reach Sicily and why word of the Sicilian king’s death did not reach France until the following March. This is rather bizarre as it was quite possible for a messenger to travel from London to Rome in a month. One of Richard’s couriers even managed to get from Sicily to Westminster in just four weeks, although that was extraordinarily fast. But four months is beyond slow. Yet when William II died on November 18, 1189, he did not know that Henry had died that past July, and a chronicler specifically said that Richard learned of William’s death during his meeting with the French king Philippe, at Dreux Castle, in March 1190. What news could have been of greater significance than the death of a king? Since there is no hope of solving this puzzle, the best I could do was to offer plausible explanations for the inexplicable delay. For readers wanting to know more about the speed of travel in the Middle Ages, I recommend The Medieval Traveller by Norbert Ohler.
While writing Lionheart, I made an interesting discovery. Henry II is believed to have used two lions as his heraldic device, and I’d assumed that Richard had done the same in the first years of his reign. But Richard’s crusader chroniclers referred often to his “lion” banner. So I did some research and found that the chronicles were right; Richard did begin his reign with a single lion rampant. In 1195, he adopted the coat that would remain the royal arms of England: gules, three lions passant guardant or. An excellent account of the evolution of early heraldry can be found in The Origin of the Royal Arms of England: Their Development to 1199, by Adrian Ailes. Richard also used a dragon standard at times. It has been suggested that Saladin may have used an eagle heraldic device, so I gave him one in Lionheart.
I try to avoid using terms that were not in use during the Middle Ages. So my characters