Richard the Lionheart

Remembering an All-Timer on His Birthday

Richard the Lionheart by Hong Wen

The story of Richard I of England (1157-1199)—the Lionheart—is almost impossibly epic, as though written by an imaginative young novelist who hadn’t yet learned to dial things back just a little for the sake of good taste.

Richard’s father was a dynamo and a dynasty-builder, and his rich and beautiful mother was one of the age’s most formidable women. Their marriage was uneasy at best. At one point husband and wife went to war against each other—not the figurative war of marital strife, but actual war which finally ended with Henry arresting Eleanor. Richard and his brothers, who would later fight against each other, joined on Eleanor’s side. In subsequent family warring, Richard made allies with the King of France (son of his mother’s ex-husband!), who would later become a resentful enemy. Growing up Plantagenet was complicated.

Though Richard was born to fight—and was already a legend-in-the-making even as a teenager battling down the unruly barons of Aquintaine—he was the kind of warlord who knew what’s what. Local and familial wars lost urgency when word reached Europe in 1187 that Jerusalem had fallen to the invincible Saracen commander Saladin. Richard became the first European prince north of the Alps to take the Crusader’s vow. This show of conviction upset Richard’s more scheming father, but the old man died shortly thereafter, and in 1189 Richard became King of England and master of his destiny. He had been preparing his whole life for this.

On the Crusade that would make him a legend, Richard was “first in every attack; by his own daring example he at once gave courage to his own men and carried dismay amongst the foe,” in the words of chronicler Geoffrey de Vinsauf. He also made a habit of relocating in the middle of the skirmish to help his most beleaguered soldiers—“now here, now there, wherever the attacks of the Turks raged the hottest.” His deeds in battle read as though straight out of a medieval version of The Iliad: helmets cloven in half by the swing of his sword, sparks flying, heads and arms lopped off, the more wary Saracens backing away as he approached. “Whoever felt one of his blows had no need of a second,” the chronicler writes, with excellent understatement. Though they sound embellished, these episodes are largely confirmed by the Muslim sources as well: the Arab historian Baha ad-Din, a member of Saladin’s court, said, “God alone was able to save us from [Richard’s] malice.”

In addition to his ferocity with a sword, Richard possessed a genius for command. His campaign at Cyprus was a thing of technical beauty which won a base from which generations of future Crusaders could launch operations into Outremer. At every turn on his Crusade he proved superior, but especially at the Battle of Arsuf, one of the most electrifying (and underrated) cavalry clashes in the history of Western war. He saw the traps set by his enemies and refused to take the bait—saving his strength for a devastating charge that the Saracens would remember for many years.

The more noble of the Saracens came to admire him, even as he was breaking their aura of invincibility. During the Battle of Jaffa, Saladin’s brother was so taken with the man’s exploits that he sent him a prized horse in the middle of the fight—just because he wanted Richard to have the gift. “Such is bravery,” Vinsauf writes, “recognizable even in an enemy, since the Turk who was our bitter foe thus honored the king for his distinguished valor.”

Saladin himself paid the ultimate compliment when treachery back home (thanks to his brother John and the King of France) forced Richard to halt the Crusade just shy of Jerusalem. In response to Richard’s announcement that he’d return to the Holy Land to finish what he started, Saladin replied that if Jerusalem had to fall there was no one he’d rather lose it to than such a worthy champion as Richard.

A still more powerful anecdote from Richard’s Crusade involves a time when his men desperately needed him. After the Crusaders had taken Jaffa, Saladin retreated to Jerusalem and contented himself with harassing Richard’s foraging parties. In one instance, some Crusaders found themselves trapped and outnumbered. The king received word of their peril and rode to their aid with a rescue party, but when they came upon the scene his companions judged it to be hopeless, saying it was not possible to save the men from such a large host of Turks. “It is better that they die alone than that you risk death in this attack, and so endanger the whole Crusade.” This counsel had its logic, but the great man wasn’t about to hear it.

“I sent those men there,” Richard said, his face changing color. “If they die without me, may I never again be called a king.” So they charged and drove off the Turks, and many of his doomed men survived as a result. Imagine what it meant to them to see Richard the Lionheart—the greatest man in the world—risk everything to fight for them in their hour of need. Christlike. This is why we still remember him eight centuries after his death.

Richard the Lionheart was not saintly in the general way we use that term today. He lived in dangerous and brutal times and did things that would make those of us who enjoy more comfortable times squeamish. He was also a red-blooded man who loved women and had abundant opportunity to gratify his desires.

But this unsaintly man risked everything to answer the pope's call for a Third Crusade in service of the Lord. For the king of a hotly contested realm, a man with lots of enemies—including in his own family—this was a lot to ask. He had more to lose than anybody. And still he answered the call eagerly, putting more on the line for the Lord than most people can imagine and taking that Crusade further than any man could have taken it, even if he couldn’t take it all the way to Jerusalem.

So when the Bishop of Rochester in 1232 reported seeing three different visions of Richard the Lionheart being welcomed into Paradise after thirty-three years in Purgatory, maybe he was on to something. Saint Richard the Lionheart has a great ring to it.