The Unfortunate Journey of King Richard the Lionheart

The journey of King Richard the Lionheart back home to England was gruelling, long and expensive. Giant piles of his own silver expensive. In fact, it wasn't very much of a return journey as a very bad holiday, trekking through Jerusalem and much of Arabia through to Greece, Italy, Austria (where he was captured by Duke Leopold and then had to be let free for a king's ransom, England obviously having to pay up for him back), Switzerland and, finally, somewhere rotting in a field in France, after being shot by an arrow in a siege trying to reclaim parts of Normandy that the French had seized back from him (keep in mind that by then France was tiny and half of it was owned by England.)

He was besieging the 'tiny, virtually unarmed' castle of Chasluç-Chabròl when he was hit by a crossbow bolt in the shoulder on the 26th March 1199. It was not the actual wound that ended up killing him but the gangrene that it caused (Unlike what Robin Hood tells us: that he did come back and depose King John- old John took over the throne later in 1199 after Richard died.) He also was not a great man himself either- he showed extreme acts of anti-Jewish violence and it is reported that all of the Jewish leaders bearing gifts for him at his coronation were stripped down, beat and flogged before literally kicking them out of court. This was very strange as, a little over a century ago, William I of Normandy (more commonly known as William the Conqueror) had encouraged Jewish merchants to move to and live in England and treated them rather well in his kingdom.

Richard In the Crusades

King Richard, before his return journey from Israel, was fighting in the Third Crusade in a religious Holy War known as the crusades. In 1187, two years before his coronation, the genius Muslim leader Salah al-Din (known by the crusaders as Saladin) had reclaimed the holy city and pilgrimage site Jerusalem from the Templars, restarting the conflict between Islam and Christendom. The Pope at the time, Gregory VIII, called for another crusade to reclaim Jerusalem from Saladin, and so the Third Crusade was led by King Richard the Lionheart. After he heard that John, the soon-to-be-king had started a rebellion against him, Richard had to abandon the war and headed back to England, the Third Crusade failing horribly.

After giving up on Jerusalem, he set off for England again. The return journey, like the war against Salah al-Din, was a complete train wreck. Or should I say shipwreck, as merely days from departure he was shipwrecked on the Byzantine island of Corfu, and had to disguise himself as a Knight Templar to escape from the enemy Byzantines who were angry at him for trying to take the island of Cyprus. After stopping off at Italy, travelling through mainland Europe, being captured in Dürnstein Castle and having a terrible time in Switzerland, he was then killed in France, dying horribly. His successor, King John, yes, the rebellion-leader John, who took over after him, was no better.