1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (28 page)

As soon as Acre had been captured, Philip returned to France. A contemporary historian from Marchiennes, in north-eastern France, wrote that Philip and those of his men who returned with him – many preferred to stay and fight with Richard – ‘ran like frightened rabbits’. In consequence the Third Crusade became Richard’s crusade. It was he who took the decision to execute some 3000 Muslim prisoners captured at Acre when Saladin failed to meet the agreed ransom terms. In the end Richard failed to recover Jerusalem, but – even though Saladin held all the logistical advantages – he regained the vital coastal strip of Palestine, and negotiated a treaty that enabled Christian pilgrims to visit the Holy City. His combination of knightly prowess, brilliant generalship and skilful diplomacy won him the admiration of even Saladin’s headquarters staff. Presumably these warriors understood the cruel military logic that had led to the massacre of Acre. Moreover, by conquering Cyprus on his way to Acre, Richard had transformed the strategic situation in the eastern Mediterranean. From now on the West possessed a secure forward base that could be used both as a source of renewable supply to the remaining rump of the crusader states and as a springboard for future crusades. It was this conquest that enabled the crusader states to survive for another hundred years. A pious tourist trade developed: from Marseille or the Italian ports convoys sailed so regularly to Acre that pilgrimages to the Holy Land were organised like package tours.

While Richard’s leadership of the crusade made him a legend in his own lifetime, there was not much John could do but watch from afar – unless, of course, he were to be tempted to take advantage of Richard’s absence. In fact, however jealous he might have been of his elder brother’s reputation as the heroic champion of Latin Christendom, while Richard was fighting Saladin, he made no move against him. It was not until after the crusade was over and Richard, captured at Vienna by Duke Leopold of Austria, was held prisoner by Emperor Henry VI of Germany that John decided to risk rebellion. Even though he himself never went on crusade, he knew perfectly well that those who did won respect and admiration. This he had demonstrated in 1185 when he begged his father for permission to go. In the crisis of 1215 he would play the crusade card once again.

Richard I’s crusade caused the Eastern Mediterranean and the Muslim world to loom large in English minds. Like many westerners they were fascinated by the great champion of Islam. The contemporary Yorkshire historian, William of Newburgh, had a story to tell about Saladin. Two Cistercian monks were taken prisoner and brought before him. On hearing that they followed a profoundly Christian philosophy, he asked, through an interpreter, about their life and principles. They told him that they followed the Rule of St Benedict. When he learned that, among other things, they professed celibacy, he asked whether they drank wine and ate meat. They replied that they had a daily allowance of wine, but were not allowed to eat meat, unless they were ill or compelled to by necessity. He ordered them to be detained in prison and supplied them with meat and water served by two attractive women. They ate and drank what the women brought to them, but took care not to get into conversation with such dangerous creatures. When Saladin was informed of this, he ordered the meat and water to be changed for fish and wine in conformity with the rule of their order. But they forgot the apostolic injunction: ‘Use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake’ (1 Timothy 5: 23) and, encouraged by the women, drank a little too much. Inevitably they fell into temptation. When the monks were discovered next morning in the women’s arms, they were taken, sobered up and weeping, before Saladin. ‘Does it not seem’, he said, ‘that the author of your philosophy of life, Benedict, was foolish to forbid you meat, which, after all, has no effect on the will, and allow you wine, which has the power to disturb even the strongest mind? Was not our Muhammad far more sensible? But since you have broken your own rule, what can you do now in expiation?’ ‘Penance according to the judgement of our abbot,’ they replied. ‘Then since you cannot find that here, go back home to your own people,’ and with those words he set them free.

William of Newburgh defended the western custom of allowing monks to drink wine in moderation and called Saladin ‘a man too quick to scoff at what he did not truly understand’. None the less he was impressed by the story – as is shown not only by the fact that he repeated it, but also by his own explanation for the enmity between Muslims and Christians: ‘It was and is’, he wrote, ‘the luxury and greed of our Christian world, displayed in our feasting and drunkenness, that has made the Muslims hate us, for they glory in their frugality.’

As scholars, as crusaders, as pilgrims to Rome and Compostella, as litigants at the papal curia, in all of these roles Englishmen were now travelling more frequently than ever to Spain, Italy and to the eastern Mediterranean. The growth of international commerce made a major contribution to this development. The twelfth-century Arab geographer Edrisi called the Bay of Biscay ‘the sea of the English’. Spain was the chief supplier of silk and oriental spices to Henry II’s court. To judge by purchases recorded in the records of the English Exchequer, the Pipe Rolls, Queen Eleanor had a highly developed taste for pepper, cumin, cinnamon and almonds. Sugar first appears in the Pipe Rolls in John’s reign, as its cultivation spread from Egypt and the Middle East to Sicily and Spain. John also bought rice, cloves, ginger and saffron. As Spain was thought of as the principal source of high-class leather, members of the English guilds of shoemakers were called cordwainers, the name derived from that of the great Muslim city of Cordova. In the 1160s a Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, noted the presence of English merchants at Alexandria, where western businessmen dealt with Muslim traders bringing spices and silks from the East. By the later twelfth century there was an English business community in Genoa.

England was becoming more closely integrated into a wider European economy. Because English coins were ‘fine’ – that is they contained a high silver content, over 1.3 grams of silver in each penny – sterling came to be regarded as the standard of fineness for silver in the two greatest ports of the western Mediterranean, Venice and Genoa. While no coins with a face value of more than one penny were produced anywhere in the Latin West at this time, the high value sterling penny functioned as a coin worth three pence, four pence or five pence in continental currencies. Imitation sterling coins were manufactured in continental mints. The raising and spending of English money on the Third Crusade and on Richard’s ransom resulted in large quantities of sterling silver being taken into the Mediterranean region. Western Europe became a sterling zone.

Commerce and the crusades took international politics to a new level. The family connections of the Plantagenets were vastly more cosmopolitan than those of all preceding kings of England. Roger of Howden’s narrative of the negotiations that preceded the marriage of Joanna to William II of Sicily gives a good idea of how much travel this involved. Three high-ranking Sicilian envoys, two bishops and a count arrived in London in 1176, asking on behalf of William for Joanna’s hand. With Henry’s permission they moved on to Winchester to inspect her. ‘When they had seen how pretty she was, they were very pleased indeed.’ On their return journey to Henry’s court, they travelled with another foreign visitor, Cardinal Hugo Pierleone, the papal legate. Once the two parties had reached agreement, one of William’s envoys was sent back to Sicily, with four of King Henry’s envoys, two clerks and two laymen, to confirm the terms. On 15 August 1176 a council at Winchester decided that Joanna’s uncle, Count Hamelin, and three more of Henry II’s men, the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Ely and the bishop of Evreux, should escort her to the port of St Gilles on the south coast of France where galleys sent from Sicily would be waiting for her. Early in 1177 Joanna, accompanied by Bishop Giles of Evreux, was received at Palermo. The party arrived at night, and to greet them the city of Palermo was magnificently illuminated. (It was no doubt stories of occasions like this that led Gerald de Barri to state that Palermo alone generated a larger regular annual income for the king of Sicily than the whole of England for the king of England.) In June 1177 Bishop Giles returned to England, bringing with him a charter listing the estates and revenues assigned to Joanna as her dower. (Howden made a careful copy of the document.) At every stage of these negotiations the principal envoys had been accompanied by entourages of their own: their own status required this. In any case both kings sent not only envoys but also splendid treasures, which had to be carefully guarded. Not that the journeys were entirely incident-free. When Henry’s first embassy sailed back from Messina to St Gilles, two galleys sank loaded with treasure.

Earlier in 1177 Henry II had received two delegations from Spain. The kings of Castile and Navarre asked him to arbitrate in their territorial dispute. As well as diplomats and clerks both kings had sent along champion knights in case he decided that it should be settled in trial by battle. Henry summoned a great council to London so that as many as possible of his English subjects should see and hear this evidence of his standing in the wider world. It was this great court occasion, when Henry posed as the arbiter of western Europe, that led Matthew Paris to write that the great days of King Arthur seemed to have returned.

When the king of Germany, Frederick Barbarossa, quarrelled with Henry the Lion, the latter was forced into exile and decided to stay at the court of his father-in-law, Henry II. From this moment on the kings of England were to be crucially involved in the internal politics of Germany. Plantagenet support for Henry the Lion’s family, the Welfs, led to the Hohenstaufen, the German royal dynasty, entering into closer ties with the Capetians of France. After the death of the Hohenstaufen Henry VI in 1197, Richard I’s wealth and standing were such that he was able to secure the election of his nephew, Henry the Lion’s son Otto, as Otto IV of Germany. (Later Otto was crowned emperor by Pope Innocent III at Rome.) Under John the Plantagenet-Welf alliance faltered and in the end the consequences for both him and Otto were disastrous. Otto’s defeat in the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 meant that he lost the German and imperial throne and that John was confronted by the Magna Carta rebellion. English affairs were now part of a wider political world.

By the time Columbus sailed in 1492 people knew a great deal more about the world than they had known in the time of John Holywood and Alexander Nequam. Above all, they knew much more about Asia, thanks to the accounts composed by thirteenth-century travellers, missionaries and businessmen who went to the Mongol court at Karakorum in Mongolia, then on to China and India. So immense were the distances involved that it took the first of these pioneers, Giovanni di Piano Carpini – a Franciscan who had known St Francis – fifteen months to reach the Mongol camp outside Karakorum in July 1246 in time to witness the enthronement of Genghis Khan’s grandson as Great Khan. Chinese silk was first available in Genoa in 1257. A later traveller, the Venetian Marco Polo, provided a glowing description of Kublai Khan’s palaces at Shangtu (Xanadu) and Khanbalik (Peking). He also reported that the Great Khan was interested in Christianity. In 1305 a Franciscan friar, John of Monte Corvino, reported that he had built a church in Peking and baptised six thousand of the city’s inhabitants. Two years later he was appointed archbishop of Peking.

In 1215 Europe stood on the threshold of the discovery of Asia. But by now envoys, pilgrims, litigants, businessmen and students had been criss-crossing Europe with such frequency that already a real sense of European community had developed. One sign of this was the fact that people were choosing their names from the same rather limited pool. In the eleventh century it had been easy to tell just from their names whether a person was English, or Scots, or French, or Slav or German, or Italian. But from the twelfth century onwards the same names crop up over a wider area. Slav princely families took German names. The English gradually adopted the French names of their conquerors such as Alice, Blanche, Constance, Eleanor, Geoffrey, Henry, Isabella, Joan, Katherine, Matilda, Philip, Robert and William. Biblical names such as John, Mary, Nicholas, Peter and Thomas became increasingly popular everywhere in Europe.

It was the same with saints. In the eleventh century many churches and shrines were dedicated to local saints whose cults were unknown outside a small region. But from the twelfth century onwards, new churches all over Europe tended to be dedicated to the same saints: George, Catherine, Nicholas, Lawrence, Mary, John, Thomas, Stephen. By 1215 contacts between England and the continent, including the Mediterranean region, were on a scale not seen since the days when Britain had been a province of the Roman Empire. John’s England was fully integrated into a new Europe.

We have granted all the aforesaid things for God, for the reform of our realm and the better settling of the quarrel which has arisen between us and our barons
.

Magna Carta, Clause 61

I
n January 1215 John met his baronial opponents at a conference in London. They came armed, an unmistakable signal that rebellion was in the air, and he prepared for the worst. He ordered trusted castellans to put royal castles in a state of readiness for war. Yet at the same time he continued to make things worse – by insisting, for example, on his right to collect scutage to meet the costs of the recent campaign. Despite his unpopularity would-be rebels had their problems too. The king was within his rights when he demanded scutage and when he demanded payment of debt. He sent agents to Rome, urging the pope to condemn subjects who disobeyed an obedient son of the church – as he now chose to represent himself.

In 1215 rebellion was far from easy to justify. This might seem an odd thing to say since there had been rebellions against William I, William II, Henry I, Stephen, Henry II and Richard – every king since the Norman Conquest. But in virtually all of these confrontations the rebels had been able to present themselves as men fighting not in their own private interests but for a just cause. The English rebelled against William the Conqueror on behalf of the old royal family. In William II’s and Henry I’s reign rebels took up arms on behalf of their elder brother Robert Curthose. The barons had fought for the Empress Matilda against Stephen, for Henry II’s sons against their father. A few had even been willing to fight for John against Richard I in 1193–4.