do not refer to the Byzantine Empire, instead calling it the empire of the Greeks. It was even more of an inconvenience not to be able to employ the word “crusade.” Medievals spoke of “taking the cross” or “going on pilgrimage”; the first term is unwieldy and the second conjures up peaceful images at variance with the reality of crusading warfare. As always, I do allow myself a bit more leeway when I am speaking in the narrative voice. It is always a challenge to decide whether to use medieval or modern place-names. In Lionheart, I went with the latter for geographical clarity; for example, I used Haifa rather than Caiphas, and Arsuf instead of Arsur. And I continue to struggle with the bane of historical novelists—the deplorable medieval habit of recycling the same family names. Thankfully, many names have variations; otherwise, my readers couldn’t tell the players without a scorecard. So in Lionheart, we have Geoffrey, Geoff, Jaufre, and Joffroi; William, Guillaume, and Guilhem. I chose not to use the name that the crusaders called Malik al-’Ādil—Saphadin—because it is not familiar to readers and could have created some confusion, unlike the much better known sobriquet Saladin. And for the curious, Richard was being called Lionheart even before he became king.
I usually try to anticipate readers’ queries, and am doing so now. I also plan to do a blog in which I discuss my Lionheart research and material I could not include in the Author’s Note. Although the poleaxe did not come into common usage until the fourteenth century, there is a twelfth-century painting in the cathedral at Monreale that shows one, and I thought it would be fun to mention since Richard was very interested in weaponry innovations. Contemporaries of Berengaria’s brother, Sancho, reported that he was extremely tall, and according to Dr. Luis del Campo Jesus, who examined his bones, Sancho was over seven feet in height. And assuming that the skeleton discovered in the abbey founded by Berengaria at Epau is indeed hers, she was just five feet in height. We do not know her exact birth year, although Anne Trindade, the more reliable of Berengaria’s two biographers, makes a convincing case that she was born circa 1170. The most quoted comment about Berengaria’s appearance came from the snarky Richard of Devizes, who sniped that she was “more prudent than pretty.” But he never laid eyes upon her. The chronicler Ambroise, who probably did, described her as very fair and lovely, and the author of the Itinerarium claimed Richard had desired her since he was Count of Poitou, which is a sweet story but rather unlikely, for medieval marriages were matters of state, and I doubt that Richard had a romantic bone in his entire body. While only one chronicler, Robert de Torigny, the abbot of Mont St Michel, mentions Joanna and William’s son, Bohemond, he is a very reliable source, for he was a good friend to Henry II and was accorded the great honor of acting as godfather to Henry and Eleanor’s daughter, Eleanor, who’d later become Queen of Castile. As I explain in the Afterword, we do not know the names of Isaac Comnenus’s second wife and daughter, called the Damsel of Cyprus by the chroniclers; Sophia and Anna are names of my choosing. Ranulf and Rhiannon’s son Morgan is one of the very few purely fictional characters to make an appearance in one of my novels, as is his love, the Lady Mariam. As I did in The Reckoning with Ellen de Montfort’s attendants, Hugh and Juliana, I had to create histories for Joanna’s ladies-in-waiting, Beatrix and Alicia, for all we know of them are their names and their utter devotion to Joanna. And now a word about Arnaldia, the baffling illness that almost killed Richard at Acre. It was not scurvy, as is sometimes reported. That was known in the army camp, and the crusaders distinguished it from Arnaldia; moreover, scurvy is caused by a deficient diet, and Richard had just spent a month in Cyprus. It remains a mystery, having defied diagnosis for more than eight hundred years.
Even for me, this is turning out to be a very long Author’s Note. I’d like to close with a mea culpa and an apology. I have a section on my website called Medieval Mishaps. Sometimes apparent inconsistencies in my books are not errors but merely reflect the “accepted wisdom” at the time I was writing. For example, sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that