Richard the Lionheart and the Kings Crusade

0:00Start the spring season off right with a new pair of Tecovas Western Boots. Handcrafted and over 200 steps from genuine leather, they're built to last and feel broken in the moment you put them on. From cowhide to exotic leathers, Tecovas blends timeless style with all-day comfort. Pair them with premium denim, Western shirts, and accessories for an effortless, polished look. Shop quality Western goods in-store or online at tecovas.com. Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone.

0:35You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app, when you spot it, a brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too? Alright, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app. Wayfair, every style, every home. In the year 1187, Jerusalem, a city which has been in the hands of crusaders for almost a century, has fallen.

1:09Jerusalem is located some 5,000 kilometers or 3,000 miles from England, and yet its centrality to Christian pilgrimage and Christian traditions has gone on for centuries. The first crusade, in 1096, had seen an army of Western Europeans sweep into the Near East and conquer Jerusalem and several other territories, setting up four little crusader states, which remained behind when the crusade was over.

1:42But now, in 1187, Jerusalem had been conquered by a coalition of Seljuk Turks with forces from Egypt and Syria under the command of a rising Muslim leader called Saladin. This led to an outcry for yet more military aid to come from Western Europe and recapture Jerusalem, so central to the Christian imaginary. The third crusade will be an answer to this call,

2:13and it is sometimes called the King's Crusade because it sets a record for the number of crowned heads going on a crusade to date. There will be three of them, each leading an army from Western Europe into the Near East, and each deeply distrustful of the others. The most famous of these kings by far was a man who will become known to history as Richard the Lionheart. And if you had to name one crusader, chances are good that his is the name that would spring to your lips.

2:46Richard is the English king who made his reputation on crusade, and his exploits have become the stuff of legends. You are listening to Villains and Virgins Podcast, and this is the second episode in a series on the Third Crusade. In our last episode, we covered the rise of Saladin, and so if you'd like to catch up on what was going on in Jerusalem and the Crusader states, and how Jerusalem fell, you can go and check out that episode as a preamble to this one.

3:20But before we get into today's story, there are a few announcements. We've been deep in the Middle Ages here on Villains and Virgins Podcast for some time now, and talking a lot about pilgrimages. And one of the most famous pilgrimages is the one to Canterbury, which got started after the murder of a certain Archbishop of Canterbury, which you might remember if you've listened to some of our earlier episodes. Now, in spring 2027, I'll be leading a trip walking in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims

3:50on the road to Canterbury, and I'm doing that in partnership with a company called Geek Nation Tours, which has a fantastic track record of organizing historical tours to all kinds of incredible locations, and ensuring that people on those tours have a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So if that sounds interesting to you, you can check out Geek Nation Tours' Eva Schubert, or take a look at the link in the description for today's podcast episode. I have to say a special word of thanks to those of you who support Villains and Virgins Podcast

4:23on Patreon, because you make it possible for me to continue producing these episodes on the regular schedule that I do. People who support the podcast on Patreon have access to even more history content, including a bonus monthly episode that is exclusively released to Patreon supporters. I also host live podcast episodes every month, and as a Villains and Virgins supporter on Patreon, you even get merch. So if that sounds interesting, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert

4:57and become a member of the Villains and Virgins support community. And I have to say a very special word of thanks to the Knights of the Patreon realm, our top-tier supporters, who are Sir Philip Barker, Sir Robert German, Sir Jim Jeffrey, Sir Jeffrey Silverman, Sir James Brown, Sir John Lacasse, Sir Stephen Skorick, Sir Aaron Silverstein, Dame Agnes Viner, Sir Gordon Carl,

5:28Sir Rick Kane, Sir Anthony Farnbach, Sir Timothy Williams, Sir Kenneth Jones, Sir Charles Vigneron, Sir Richard Huebner, and Sir Craig Davis. Thank you to you all. The man who would become known as Richard the Lionheart began his life in Oxford, England. Yes, that's the same Oxford that is now the home to one of the world's most famous universities. Richard was a member of one of the most fractured royal families in English history.

6:01And it's important to understand where he came from and the relationships that his family had with each other and with the kings of France in order to understand how the story of the Third Crusade plays out. And that's because these men didn't become one-dimensional crusaders the moment they took the crusader cross and stitched it onto their garments and made the vows that crusaders were required to take. These people took their existing identities and politics and histories and grievances with them when they went to the Near East.

6:39And so in order to understand what's going to go on between Richard the Lionheart and some of the other leaders of the Third Crusade, we're going to have to talk a fair bit about where Richard came from and what happens before the call to the Third Crusade. Richard was a tall, well-built man, at least six feet tall, possibly more. And this made him a standout amongst his contemporaries, taller than the average man. He had also inherited the red hair of his father, as well as the poetic skill of his mother, who was none other than Eleanor of Aquitaine.

7:17And her grandfather was William IX, the troubadour duke. So Richard came from a long line of Aquitaineans, people from a certain region in what is now southern France, which has a rich history of poetry and music. And Richard himself, as an adult, wrote poems and songs. He had skill in this area, which he'd inherited from a long line of his ancestors. But he'd also inherited the aggression and tendency to rage, which characterized his father, Henry, of whom we will have much more to say in just a moment.

7:56Richard may also hold the title of the King of England who spent the least amount of time in England itself, about six months of his adult life. And this may seem really surprising until you take a look at a map and you realize that the kingdom that Richard inherited from his father included England, but included at least the same amount of territory on mainland Europe in what is now modern France. So Richard inherits nearly half of the territory that is now part of modern France.

8:31And so England is a chunk of his kingdom, but it's not even the largest chunk. Richard's lands include Normandy, Aquitaine, Poitiers, and he spends much of his adult life on the Normandy side of the English Channel. Perhaps it was inevitable that Richard would go on crusade. After all, he came from a family that had been doing it for about three generations. And tales of adventure and sieges in the Near East were something that captured the imagination of noble families in Western Europe in his generation.

9:09His mother, Queen Eleanor, had actually gone on the Second Crusade from 1147 to 1149, and she had done so in the company of her then-husband, Louis VII, King of France. And while the Second Crusade was largely a disaster, without any significant military conquests, it did mean a fresh influx of tales of adventure from the Near East that came back to Europe in the mouths of not only Queen Eleanor, but everyone else who had survived that expedition and come home to tell a story about it.

9:44Now, I don't want to suggest that Queen Eleanor was spending long hours in the nursery telling stories to her son Richard and her other children. As a medieval queen, she had staff for that. Young Richard had a wet nurse who breastfed him alongside her own child. There were other servants involved in cleaning him and supervising his physical education and teaching him his letters. But his mother was in charge of supervising his education, and she remained closer to Richard than perhaps any of her other children.

10:20Perhaps she told him some of the stories that she had experienced during the Second Crusade, of being a guest in the gilded court of the Emperor of Constantinople, which was vastly wealthier and more sophisticated than anything she had ever seen in Western Europe. Or perhaps she told him about the shock and the terror of an ambush on Mount Cadmus, which nearly resulted in the death of the King of France. She could also have told him about the Council of War at Acre and the eventual siege of Damascus,

10:56which occurred before the Crusade finally ended. There were no shortage of stories, and Eleanor could have gone farther back than her own life. After all, her uncle, Raymond, was in charge of the crusader state of Antioch, and had lived decades of his life in the Near East, before dying heroically in the Battle of Inab, fighting the Seljuk Turks. And she could also have talked about her own grandfather, William IX, the troubadour duke of Aquitaine,

11:27who had gone on a crusade humorously called the Crusade of the Fainthearted in 1100. And that's because, in the enthusiasm that captured the imaginations of nobles across Western Europe, as soon as the First Crusade was over in 1099, there were a whole bunch of men who thought, that sounds like an adventure that I wish I'd been on. Maybe I should go to the same place and see if I can have some of this adventure for myself. And so many men who had abandoned the First Crusade, or had never even gone on it,

12:00gathered together in sort of a second wave, and went into the Near East in 1100, where most of them died disastrously on the plains of Anatolia. But William IX, Eleanor's grandfather, did not die. He survived and lived to return home to Aquitaine to write many a spicy song thereafter. But no doubt, he brought with him a trove of stories of running around as a fugitive, fleeing for his life in the wake of the slaughter of that crusader army,

12:32of spending time in Antioch, of perhaps learning some Arabic, and finally making his way the long road home back to southern France. The point I'm making here is that crusading wasn't something that had just happened. Even in this one family alone, Eleanor's family, Richard's family, there were generations of experience in the Near East with the stories that came out of that. And all of this had to influence young Richard as a child,

13:03growing up in the court of Eleanor and her husband, Henry. The Crusades even ran on the other side of young Richard's family tree. His paternal great-grandfather, a guy called Count Fouc of Anjou, had actually become king of the crusader state of Jerusalem in 1131. But no one knew at this time that young Richard would soon become the most famous crusader of them all. Not everyone in Richard's family was interested in crusading, though.

13:36His father, for example, a man called Henry II, or Henry Plantagenet, or Henry Angevin, had no interest whatsoever. So Richard's father, Henry, was just the Duke of Normandy and the Count of Anjou when he married Richard's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. So Henry was this very ambitious, young, red-headed man who was marrying Eleanor, who had just divorced King Louis VII of France.

14:08So young Henry, this upstart Count, is marrying the ex-Queen of France, who also happens to be the ex-wife of Henry's feudal overlord. Because guess what? Normandy and Anjou were territories in what is now modern France, and to hold those territories, Henry had to do homage, or fealty, to the King of France. So this was a very audacious move, to say the least.

14:40And the King of France was none too happy about it, particularly because when Eleanor marries Henry, she brings with her the vast territory of Aquitaine that is hers by inheritance. And that territory is now joined with the large amount of territory in mainland France that Henry holds, thus making him vastly more wealthy and powerful than he was before. In addition to that, Henry also stakes a claim to being the King of England

15:12through his mother's family. And within a couple of years of marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, becomes also the King of England, which at this point makes Eleanor the new Queen of England. So this is the beginning of what historians call the Plantagenet dynasty, or the Angevin dynasty. These two people, Eleanor and Henry, then have a whole bunch of children, five sons and three daughters.

15:44And Richard is son number three. Now, King Henry II is going to be dodging the opportunity to go on crusade repeatedly throughout his lifetime. And the first time this happens in a really visible way is in 1171. And it's in the wake of a very famous murder. The murder we were talking about earlier on the episode today, when I talked about that Archbishop of Canterbury who got hacked to death in his own cathedral. Now, Henry II didn't himself wield the sword,

16:18but the knights who did the hacking did so because they were fairly certain that King Henry II wanted Archbishop Thomas Beckett dead, and the knights went out there to do the job. The murder of Thomas Beckett is an absolute scandal. It's politically radioactive for Henry, and as a result, he has to make very public repentance for his part in the matter. And while he says, I didn't give the order, I didn't want Thomas Beckett dead, everybody knows that there had been fights going on between the king and the archbishop for years,

16:51that there was lots of bad blood between them, and that it was entirely credible that the knights wielding the swords thought they were doing so to fulfill the king's wishes. So, as part of his public repentance, Henry has to promise the Pope that he's going to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which is at that time a crusader state, and he does this in the early days of 1171, in the immediate wake of this terrible murder. But Henry II wasn't really big on keeping his promises. He has a long track record of saying whatever is useful at the time,

17:25and then just not doing it. And this is exactly what happens with this promise as well. He'd made the promise to go to Jerusalem, but then he said, you know, I've really got my hands full here with political matters in my kingdom. I can't actually go. How about I just build some abbeys and churches instead, and send some monetary donations? I'll send money to the crusader states in the Near East. And so that's what he does. He dodges making the journey to Jerusalem in 1171. But the call to crusade would come to Henry again,

18:00this time even stronger. And that happened in the year 1185. So that's two years before Jerusalem falls to Saladin. But this is the year that Baldwin IV, the leper king, who we talked about in our previous episode, dies. And when he does, there's a crisis of succession in Jerusalem and the crusader states. A child wears the crown and they need a strong warrior to step in

18:30and run the affairs of Jerusalem. And so a delegation arrives from the Near East to the court of Henry II, asking him to step in and do this job. After all, the family of Baldwin IV and the leper king are actually quite closely related to Henry via his grandfather, Folk of Anjou, who we've already talked about. It's not only that England has a connection with the crusader states, but that Henry himself has a direct bloodline connection to the family that wears the crown.

19:02So the Latin patriarch, or the head of the Christian church in Jerusalem, travels to Henry's court, along with the head of the Knights Hospitaller military order and the head of the Knights Templar. So these are three very important figures in the crusader states. They come in person to King Henry II, asking him to take up the cross, to take an oath to go on crusade, to head to Jerusalem and put affairs there in order.

19:34So you can imagine Henry sitting there in his court as these very important grave men from the Near East arrive. And the Grand Master of the Templars is there. The Master of the Hospitallers is there. The head of the Christian church in Jerusalem is there. And in public, in front of his courtiers, they're asking Henry to undertake this noble goal. And Henry is sitting there, essentially with his arms crossed, looking entirely uninspired. He's not at all motivated to get up

20:06and make any promises to go to the Near East. And after this interview, Henry is privately approached by one of his courtiers, who says, My Lord, you are greatly honored by these men and the thing that they're asking you to do. This is a service to God. And this would be a very important role to secure Jerusalem. And Henry's response is quite amazing. Supposedly, Henry says, If the patriarch or any others come to us, they seek their own advantage rather than ours.

20:39The clergy may well call us to arms and peril, since they will parry no blows on the battlefield, nor take on themselves any burdens that they can avoid. Unquote. So Henry's essentially saying, It's all very well for these guys to call on us to do their dirty work, but seeing as they're not going to be swinging any swords or putting their bodies on the line, I'm not particularly moved to go and be a tool in the hands of this Latin churchman from Jerusalem. Needless to say,

21:10Henry doesn't go to Jerusalem on this occasion. From Henry's point of view, he had his hands full, welding together an Angevin empire by force of arms. And at this point in his life as king of England and the husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and as the result of many decades of battles that he's been fighting with the king of France to continuously expand the lands under his control, Henry II is at least the peer of the king of France

21:43in terms of the amount of territory under his control and the amount of wealth that that represents. So leaving all of this, this newly assembled kingdom that he's forged together through battles and diplomacy and a good degree of broken promises and skullduggery, to leave all that vulnerable and go off to the Near East to fight for some tiny statelets that are very much surrounded by hostile neighbors seems to Henry like a really bad deal.

22:15It seems like putting aside something that he's built up and leaving it vulnerable behind him and going to fight in a neighborhood where any gains he's likely to make are quite likely to be transitory. So Henry's lack of enthusiasm for the Crusades has everything to do with the work he's been doing at home and he's not ready to leave it behind. Now this massive Angevin kingdom that Henry has been so busy building is going to be the source of a lot of contention

22:46and feuding and violence within his own immediate family. And that's going to be a large part of Richard's formative experiences and it's going to make him into the man that he is when he goes off on the Third Crusade. Richard is not the first son. He's the third son, as I previously said. So he wouldn't have expected to inherit the crown itself. But Richard's oldest brother died, leaving the second oldest brother as the crown prince.

23:18But unlike some noble families, Richard and his other brothers did expect to inherit chunks of the land that comprised their father's kingdom. So Richard was going to have an inheritance of land and that land was going to furnish him with his income and his noble titles and status. While Richard wasn't his father Henry's favorite son, he was the favorite of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. And this is significant because Eleanor chose Richard

23:49as the son who was going to inherit her piece of the Angevin kingdom, Aquitaine itself. Richard wasn't his father Henry's favorite son, but he was the favorite son of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. And that's important because Eleanor selects Richard as the one who's going to inherit her piece of the Angevin kingdom, the Duchy of Aquitaine, which is located in what is now southern France. It was a very large and a very wealthy duchy

24:22during the Middle Ages. So it's a very significant piece of land to inherit. In fact, when Eleanor's husband, Henry II, attempts to change this in 1173, he draws up a new plan for distributing the lands of the Angevin kingdom and which sons are going to be getting which pieces of land. And when he attempts to redistribute this so that Richard is no longer in line to receive Aquitaine, it's actually part of a rebellion that then ensues.

24:53Henry II finds that his three oldest sons, including Richard, rise up against him in rebellion. They're not going to accept his redistribution or reassignment of lands. And so these three sons take up arms against their father. There are actually armies clashing on the borders and they do this with the collusion of the King of France, their mother's ex-husband, Louis VII. And it's not hard to see why Louis VII would be interested in supporting this.

25:25After all, fomenting feuds inside the Plantagenet royal family makes it harder for King Henry of England to cause more problems for King Louis of France. So it was very much good policy for the King of France to encourage rebellious young English princes to rise up against their father. And Louis provides both moral and material support in this. And it's not only Louis who supports the rebellious princes. Eleanor herself supports her three oldest sons

25:58against their father, Henry II, at this moment. Now you might be wondering, why would she do such a thing? Well, at this point, Eleanor is in her 50s and she and Henry have been estranged for quite some time. She's born him eight children, but she's now essentially separated from him. They're not living in the same quarters. And King Henry II has had a long string of mistresses quite publicly. So Eleanor and Henry are estranged from each other and she thinks that her son's cause is just.

26:31So she's supporting them against their father and his sort of unilateral distribution of the kingdom. So this is a really ruinous period for England and France, especially on the borders, because you have to imagine forces and even mercenaries hired by these rebellious princes that are raiding castles, they're burning towns and villages, they're trying to gain control of some lands or punish other people who are on the wrong side. And then King Henry is sending his forces

27:02and making incursions into French territory or trying to retake territory that his sons had control of. So it gets really messy. And at a certain point, with the three rebellious princes already essentially living in the court of France out of their father's reach, Eleanor realizes that it's time for her to get out of Henry's reach as well, because she's been part of this rebellion and she's supported her sons. So in a moment that's absolutely classic Eleanor of Aquitaine behavior,

27:33she dresses up as a man and gets on a horse and attempts to ride for the border and get across into lands controlled by her ex-husband, Louis VII of France. And by the way, it would have been scandalous for a queen and a woman to be dressed in man's clothes and riding a horse like a man. But this is classic for Eleanor because she really didn't care what other people thought of her or what was conventional or proper in the eyes of other people. So she decides that this is the most effective way

28:05to sort of leave town and get out of Henry's reach. But she leaves this flight too late. She waits too long before trying to make her escape and she's apprehended by some of Henry's patrols. So she's captured and dragged back and she's now the prisoner of her husband, King Henry II. Needless to say, when Henry captures Eleanor, he's none too pleased. She's been involved in what he would regard as a treasonous plot

28:35against the authority of the king. That would be himself. And so he gives her a choice. He says, you can renounce all of your titles. You can give up the title of Queen of England and Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Poitou and all these things. And you can go and live in a nunnery. So you're going to take the vows of a nun and that's going to be a permanent retreat from public life. And Henry says, if you refuse this, then you're going to be my prisoner.

29:06You're going to be living under confinement and supervision and under my control. So you might have your titles, but you're stripped of all power and essentially all contact with the outside world. You're not going to receive any messages that aren't vetted by me first. You're not going to be communicating with anybody. You're going to be living under lock and key. Given the age difference between them, with Eleanor being about 52 and Henry being about 40 at this point, there was a pretty good chance that Eleanor would be living out

29:36the rest of her life as Henry's prisoner because she could expect to die before he did. It didn't turn out that way, but she couldn't have known that at the time. Defiantly, Eleanor refuses to relinquish her titles and her identity. And so she ends up going into confinement as a prisoner of her husband. This doesn't mean that she lives in a dungeon or that she's locked up in irons. She's kept in a castle keep, so it's clean and relatively comfortable,

30:08but very much isolated. And she's supervised by servants who are tasked with making sure that she can't communicate or go anywhere without the king's authorization. And while she's trotted out occasionally for official events during the long years of her confinement, she's going to spend more than a decade in this lonely solitude as punishment for supporting the rebellion of her sons. While Eleanor is largely cut off

30:38from contemporary affairs, outside her, the world changes rapidly. By 1186, which is 13 years after Eleanor goes into captivity, Richard and John are the only two surviving sons left. Of the three sons who had been in rebellion against their father, the older two are now dead, which means Richard is the oldest surviving son, and he's going to be in line to inherit

31:09his father's crown. He will be the future king of England. The other son is John, sometimes called John Lackland, and later to be known as England's most hated king. He's the guy who will eventually be forced to sign the Magna Carta by some of his nobles. But that's a story for another episode on another day. Richard and John are the only two sons left. You might be wondering what kind of relationship Richard had with his father after being involved

31:40in the same uprising that got Eleanor confined for life to a castle keep. And the answer is that Henry was much more willing to be reconciled with Richard than he was with his wife Eleanor. So while Eleanor is going to pay a very high price for being involved in this rebellion, Henry finds a way to patch it over with Richard relatively easily. And by 1186, Richard is now working for his father. And this is a key part of his identity formation

32:10because Richard develops a reputation for being incredibly effective at subduing rebellious vassals. And Henry II, the King of England, had quite a number of them. So kingship in the Middle Ages is based on the feudal system in which nobles hold their territories or their lands, such as the Duchy of Aquitaine or the County of Anjou, at the pleasure of their king. So the king says, you get to have this parcel of land,

32:41you get to have the noble title that comes along with it, and you get to collect the revenues from the labor of the serfs who work on your land. But you hold this land at my pleasure and as a reward for your loyalty to me. And you have some obligations to me, your feudal overlord, the king, in exchange for holding this land. So those obligations include taxes, they include military service, and other such things. So whenever a vassal gets into trouble for not paying some taxes or not providing

33:12military service, the king has to deal with that fairly sharply because it's a threat to his authority. And if that vassal gets away with it, not only is he not going to pay his dues, but he's going to give ideas to other vassals in the area, and pretty soon that king is going to be drastically weakened by having vassals that no longer serve under him or pay their taxes to him. So it's a serious threat. Henry II has quite a number of vassals who rise up in rebellion

33:43at various points, and Richard develops this reputation for being able to effectively subdue them. And if you think that subduing rebellious vassals in the Middle Ages was a result of diplomatic negotiations, you would be entirely mistaken. Subduing rebellious vassals was done at sword point and with fire. And so you have to think of Richard as being like an enforcer. Almost a mob enforcer is the analogy that I can give you. If you're not going to pay up to the king

34:14what is owed to him, Richard rolls up with his army and he burns your towns. He lays siege to your castle. He takes things. He punishes you and everything that you own. So this is actually where Richard develops his military capabilities which are going to serve him extremely well on the Third Crusade which is coming soon in our story. But he spends the decades of his youth in his 20s and 30s subduing rebellious vassals

34:46especially in the south of France in the lands that his father controls. Places like Aquitaine, Normandy. And he gets really good at siege warfare. He gets very good at attacking and seizing castles that look to be impregnable because they're heavily fortified and they're on top of hills that are difficult to reach. So it's almost a school of battle that Richard is involved in for more than a decade. And he does this as an enforcer for his father's kingdom.

35:18So even though he was involved in a rebellion against his father himself at one point, his father now realizes that Richard is much more valuable working for him than working against him. So while Richard and his father have had a pretty decent working relationship for some time now, in 1186 new problems arise. And this is because Richard's older brother, the former crown prince, is now dead. And Richard's father, Henry, wants to put Richard

35:48in that position. Which sounds like a good idea, right? You're going to be the new crown prince? Yes, but it wasn't actually something that Richard was a fan of because Henry's version of making you the crown prince was to give you a fancy title, but essentially to make you live on an allowance that the king paid you personally. So instead of having a title like the Duke of Aquitaine, which was your own land, and you as the duke collected the revenue from that land,

36:19and this was your cash flow and your financial independence, what Henry wanted to do for Richard was, I'm going to give you this title, the young king or the crown prince, so this is an elevation of your status on paper, but in fact, you're going to receive your money directly from me. So I, your father Henry, I'm going to hold the purse strings. You can't independently collect your own income from anywhere else. And this is a very shrewd tactic on Henry's part to ensure the loyalty

36:50of the son that he's going to publicly designate as his heir. After all, he doesn't want to be thrown over and lose the crown before he's actually dead. So this is a way of ensuring that the crown prince stays the prince until Henry himself dies. Richard is not a fan of this plan. He saw how it worked out for his older brother, who's now dead. And the years of frustration and bickering and money quarrels that ensued as the former crown prince

37:20was always asking the king for more money. And this was sort of the dynamic going on between them. Richard is quite happy being a duke and a count and having his own lands and waiting for his father to die. He doesn't want to step into having this higher title on paper, but effectively to be stripped of his financial and military independence. So this is now a sore point between Henry II and his son Richard. And Richard does what rebellious sons

37:51in the English royal family have been doing for some years now. Since he's at odds with his father, he goes off to the court of the King of France. And as we already mentioned, this is a well-established tradition. It had happened the last time the English princes were in rebellion against their father. They went off to the court of France and found a sympathetic ear and a warm welcome. And that warm welcome had been from King Louis VII of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine's ex-husband. By 1186, Louis VII is dead and his son,

38:22Philip Augustus, is the new King of France. And he's younger than Richard, significantly. But he recognizes the political sense that it makes to welcome rebellious English princes and continue his father's tradition here. And so Richard is feasted and welcomed and he's given gifts and he's allowed to be in the company of Philip Augustus all the time. So much so that French courtiers begin to whisper that these two guys

38:52share the same cup and they spend all their time together and perhaps they even share the same bed. So the whisper going on here is that the friendship between these two men is not just close, but might even have a sexual component. This is the court gossip. Now, for Richard, this is obviously a way of putting his thumb in his father's eye, right? You can't control me. You're not the boss of me. I'm going to go and hang out with the King of France who you absolutely hate.

39:23The King of France who has long been a sponsor and a supporter of people who are rebelling against you and trying to take your land. So if you try to push me around, then I, Richard, will go hang out with your arch enemy, the King of France, and be really, really close with him. Really very close indeed.

39:44So when Richard returns home from this little incendiary political visit, he hears the news that's going to shake Western Europe. It's the summer of 1187 and Jerusalem has fallen to the Saracens, or Muslim forces under the control of Saladin. And in our previous episode, we talked about the Battle of Hattin, which destroyed the field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, soon followed by the conquest of the city of Jerusalem itself.

40:14So the Crusader states are in crisis. They've lost their capital city, the seat of their government. The remaining Crusader nobility who've run these states have been forced to flee Jerusalem as refugees to the other territories that they hold. It's an urgent call for military aid. So in November 87, shortly after this news arrives in Western Europe, Richard takes the oath. He takes the Crusader Oath and the Crusader Cross. So this is a very public declaration.

40:45It's a solemn vow that he's going to go on crusade. He's going to lend military aid to the Crusader states. And this infuriates his father Henry, right? We already know that Henry's not a fan of crusading in general. He thinks it's actually a racket cooked up by the church. For their benefit and not to the benefit of the nobles who are doing the dirty work and putting their bodies on the line. So his perspective is already pretty anti-crusade. But even more so now that Richard is the heir to his kingdom

41:16and is now just promised to head off on a crusade in a foreign land where he has an excellent chance of getting killed. So what does that do to the carefully crafted kingdom that his father is trying to hand on to him? Richard being the son who has the military ability and acumen to actually take over