Physically, Richard was gorgeous. He spoke fluent French. He even wrote poetry in French. In fact he didn't speal English at all. He was tall and athletic, with red hair and soft grey eyes. He also had a passion for violence and poetry that was the romantic ideal in the 12th century. And most of the press in the English speaking world remains favorable towards Richard even now; but then he only spent 6 months in England in his entire life, so they never got to know him very well.
Richard was the favorite and eldest son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the smartest, most lovely, most duplicitous women of her age and clearly one of the worst mothers ever born. This woman should never have had children. Doctor Phill would have had a field day with her. Richard was also the second son of Henry II, the smartest of the smart and violent Plantagenet Kings. Richard was like his father in every way, except he was more violent and less smart.
With the help of his mother, Richard finally cornered his sick and elderly father and took him prisoner. Richard then had the satisfaction of hearing his father call him “a bast-rd” from his death bed. And you thought you didn't get along with your old man. But it was the rights of nobility that raised Richard's simple neruoses to the level of a full blown psychosis.
Placing a crown on his head instantly converted Richard Plantagenet into Richard I, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Ireland and Cyprus, Count of Anjou and Nantes and Overlord of Brittany, also known as Richard Coeur de Lion, or Richard the Lion Heart.
Richard celebrated his coronation in June of 1189 by having the local Jews, who had showed up bearing gifts for him, whipped and flogged. He followed this by a general massacre of all the Jews in London and in York. Baldwin d’Eu, the Archbishop of Canterbury, summed up Richard's theory of nobility this way, “If the King is not God’s man, he had better be the devil’s”. And Baldwin should know, being the son of a liaison between an Archdeacon and a nun.
The first thing the new King did, after cleaning up all those Jewish corpses, was to lay heavy taxes on everybody to pay for a Third Crusade, to rescue the Holy Land from the Muslims, and to save Richard's immortal soul from punishment for all the sins he had already committed. “I would have sold London if I could have found a buyer,” said Richard, in a statement his loyal subjects in England never heard.
In May of 1191 Richard’s army of 40,000 knights and 40,000 footmen arrived on the island of Cyprus, where Richard threw the local Christian ruler into a dungeon in chains, pillaged the island for even more money and slaughtered any Christian who objected. Being on Crusade not only cleaned up Richard's past sins, it earned him a pass on any sins he might committ while on crusade; the Pope had said so.
After annexing Cyprus as his personal property, Richard then moved on to the Holy Land, where he joined the King of France and other European nobility in slaughtering Muslims, Christians and Jews without discrimination as to race, religion, age or sex. During the siege of Acre Richard had servants carry him about the fortifications in a sedan chair while he took pot shots at the defenders with a crossbow.
When Acre fell, (and while its citizens were being slughtered) Richard’s banner and that of Phillip of France were planted on the cities’ walls. So was the banner of Leopold V, of Austria, who figured he was entitled as the sole representative on this crusade of the Holy Roman Emperor, who had died enroute. But Richard disagreed and had Leopold’s banner torn down. Well, Leopold already had a problem with Richard because Leopold was related through his mother to the ruler of Cyprus, whom Richard had imprisoned. And the instant his banner floated down to the gutters of Acre, Leopold pulled his army out of the Crusade and sailed for home. 
Within a month Phillip of France had also gotten fed up with Richard and he sailed for home, leaving the Lion Heart with only about a third of his army left, and burdened with more than 3,000 Muslim prisoners captured at Acre. The Muslum leader, Saladin, wasn't willing to pay the ransom Richard was demanding, So Richard had all the prisoners executed.
That little faux paux ensured that Saladin, who had been trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the Christians, would continue the war just to make Richard bleed as much as possible. At the same time Richard’s overbearing personality had produced a rebellion in Cyprus, which eventually forced him to sell his island conquest to a cousin.
Richard's arrogance and ignorance also led to the election of the anti-Richard crusader, Conrad de Montforrat as the new King of Jerusalem. That made Conrad the leader of the Christian army, which made him Richard’s boss. And Richard did not like bosses. Richard's participation in the crusades came to a bloody end on April 28, 1192, when Conrad was stabbed to death on the streets of Tyre by two Muslim assassins. So low had Richard’s reputation fallen that everyone assumed (and still assumes, I must add) that Richard had financed the murder. It was all based on flimsey evidence, but with Richard it was always the wise choice to believe the worst. HIs ego had finally run out his string.
In September 1192 Saladin finally decided to provide Richard with enough of a fig leaf to let him escape the hole he had dug for himself. Salidin agreed to allow Christians to visit Jeruselum at anytime of year, something he had secretly negotiated with Conrad de Montforrat, before Conrad had been murdered. Richard could now claim to have secured the religious freedom of the Holy Land, even if nobody outside of Richard's sycophants believed that.
Richard had gone on Crusade with a full war chest, 80,000 men and strong allies in France and the Holy Roman Empire. That money was now gone and most of the army was dead. Richard was leaving the holy land with just a handful of personal bodyguards and with every political power broker in Europe gunning for him. He had to sneak back home. And he didn't make it.
Just before Christmas 1192, at an inn outside of Vienna, his old enemy Leopold V caught up with him. Richard was arrested while dressed as a lowly pilgrim. And it is interesting to note that there was not even a rumor that "the Lion Heart" so much as slapped the men who captured him.
Richard was hustled off to Durnsetin castle, high above the Rhine River. And once he was safely under lock and key Leopold set the price for his release at 65,000 pounds of silver. Who, the nobility of Europe must have wondered, would pay three times the annual income of the English crown to free the most pompous, most arrogant and most violent English King there was?
His mommy, that’s who; Eleanor of Aquitaine laid out her personal fortune, and put the squeeze on churches, the nobility, merchants and peasants from the mountains of Aquitaine to the beaches of Normandy, to the misty shores of Ireland. Of course, at the same time Richard’s own younger brother John, together with Phillip the king of France, were offering 80,000 pounds of silver if Leopold would just hold on to Richard for another year. I guess you could say that Eleanor won this contest, in that, in February of 1194, King Phillip sent brother John the following terse note, “Look to yourself. The devil is loose.”
And so he was. Richard might have wanted to pay back the entire continent for his bad treatment, but his ransom and his own boorishness and love of destruction had bankrupted his own lands, so that he could no longer afford to make war on his neighbors. So for the last five years of his life Richard the Lion Heart had to be content with butchering his own subjects, slaughtering them with all the zeal and blood lust he had once displayed on the international stage.
And then in the spring of 1199 Richard heard a rumor that a cache of Roman gold had been discovered in the Limousin region of the Aquitaine, a region so wealthy (before Richard) that luxury autos of a later age would later be named for it. There was no gold, but Richard the Lion Heart, Richard the Dunder-Head, Richard the Rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread, immediately laid siege to the walled city of Charlus and demanded payment of the non-existant gold. And it during that siege that a brave young patriot named Bertrand de Gurdon pierced Richard’s shoulder with a crossbow bolt. You know how you say to yourself about violent and dangerous leaders, "I wonder why somebody doesn't just shoot him"? Well, somebody finally shot Richard. Gangrene set in and the arrogant jackass was finally dead on Tuesday April 6, 1199, dying in his mommy's arms. As a final insult they buried Richard at his father's feet, in Rouen Cathedral at Fontefrault.
On his deathbed Richard had insisted that the young crossbowman Bertrand was to be pardoned and set free with 100 shillings, but of course that didn’t happen. Instead one of Richard’s captains, named Mercadier, had the boy skinned alive and hanged. It was a fitting legacy for one of the most violent lunatics of the middle ages, made King, as the thinking at the time was, by the grace of God.
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