Seeking Jerusalem Page 6

  That make Richard’s mind up for him and he smiled broadly.

  ‘That’s nonsense Guy; you are the crowned king. Of course I shall support you.’

  ~#~

  Richard de Cuille had arrived at Famagusta to find that, yet again, Isaac had given him the slip. He was reported to be heading for Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, with about two hundred men. Richard was just about to set off in pursuit again when he saw a small fleet enter the harbour. Richard arrived at the quayside just as his king disembarked.

  ‘Well, de Cuille, where is this Isaac Comnenus who I sent you to apprehend?’ Richard scowled at his namesake. Before he had left Limassol another emissary had arrived from Philipp Augustus. This time it was the Bishop of Beauvais who wasn’t as polite as Guy had been.

  ‘Sire, King Philip is wasting time before the walls of Acre whilst you gallivant around capturing an island that is already Christian. This isn’t what the Pope called a crusade for. You need to remember why you are here. Please give the order to embark for Acre now.’

  ‘And you need to remember your place, bishop. No-one speaks to me like that, not even Philip of France or the Pope himself.’ Richard was almost spluttering with rage. ‘Now get out of my sight before I have you thrown into the dungeons of Famagusta Castle.’

  Richard de Cuille had listened to this exchange with a number of other barons and nobles. Suddenly the king rounded on him. ‘What are you smirking about? And why are you still here? Your job is to bring Comnenus to me in chains.’

  Richard wasn’t about to be bullied. ‘You told me to wait here for King Guy of Jerusalem and his men before pursuing Isaac, sire’ he replied in what he hoped was a placatory manner.

  ‘Huh! Guy won’t be much use to you, but his men might, I suppose’ the king muttered. ‘You are going to have to handle Guy diplomatically; he’s a king and you are only a baron after all. But don’t let him do anything stupid, like he did at that debacle at the Horns of Hattin.’

  Richard bowed and left the king’s presence thinking that the man expected miracles.

  The next day Guy arrived, having ridden overland from Limassol. He brought with him his one hundred and sixty knights and another hundred mounted serjeants. Best of all, he was accompanied by fifty knights Templar. The King of Jerusalem was tired after his long ride and refused to leave Famagusta until he and his men were rested. King Richard had sailed back to Limassol as soon as Guy had arrived and so Richard de Cuille had no option but to kick his heels for another day whilst the emperor was busy calling up his nobles and their men from the interior.

  By the time that Guy and Richard arrived at Nicosia they found that Isaac had marched out of the town and drawn up his army on the plain of Tremathousa. It consisted of about six hundred foot soldiers, a hundred archers and fifty mounted cataphracts, the heavy cavalry of the east. Against this, the crusaders had two hundred and forty knights and a hundred and forty serjeants, fifty of whom had crossbows. Although they were outnumbered two to one Guy was supremely confident of repeating the Lionheart’s victories at Limassol and Kolossi. However, as Richard de Cuille pointed out to him, these foot soldiers were armoured and carried stout shields as well as spears. They wouldn’t be so easy to defeat.

  Guy brushed Richard’s objections aside and started to issue orders for an immediate charge when Richard grabbed his bridle and trotted off, taking the surprised king with him. Once they were out of earshot Richard stopped.

  ‘Now you listen to me, Guy de Lusignan. I have very specific orders from King Richard and they don’t include a repeat of the farce at Hattin. We can defeat Isaac’s army but only if we use our brains. Now, you can continue to pretend that you are in command to save face but we will fight this battle my way or I’ll kill you here and now and then we’ll do it the way I want. Your choice, my lord king.’

  Guy was speechless for a moment then he drew himself and was about to stand on his dignity when he saw that Richard had a dagger in the hand that was hidden from the perplexed crusader army by his horse. He nodded in resignation.

  ‘I’ll follow your advice but I will never forget or forgive this, de Cuille.’ Richard shrugged and then explained his plan.

  The crusaders drew up their forces with the hundred serjeants on foot in the middle and the forty crossbowmen in advance of them. The squires held the sergeants’ horses with their own and the spare mounts for their knights in the rear. The fifty Templars took post on the left flank and Richard and his conroi of thirty on the right. Guy’s hundred and forty knights were held in reserve.

  This time the crossbows had less impact. Most quarrels penetrated the heavy wood shields but didn’t go through them. Those that did were stopped by the chain mail vests of the spearmen. Then Isaac sent his own bowmen forward. They lacked the range of the crossbow so few arrows found a target, but two lucky shots each found a Templar destrier. The arrows didn’t penetrate far and they were only flesh wounds, which warhorses normally coped with well. However, this time the two horses that were wounded crumpled to their knees whinnying in agony and died.

  ‘Poisoned arrows’ Richard exclaimed. ‘I didn’t believe anyone would stoop so low.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be surprised’ Miles told him. ‘I’m told that poison is the Byzantines’ favourite way of killing.’

  ‘Crossbowmen, kill those archers,’ Richard yelled ‘and no quarter to the filthy dogs who use poison.’ A low growl from the crusader ranks greeted this order, Richard raised his hand and, waiting for the senior Templar at the far end of the line to raise his to indicate that he had seen it, Richard dropped his arm and his conroi started to canter round in a semi-circle outflanking the enemy foot. The Templars did the same.

  Meanwhile the crossbowmen were steadily killing the enemy archers. Although the crossbow takes a long time to load its range was far greater than the Byzantine bow. The Cypriot archers wore chainmail vests or scale armour but they had no shields. The quarrels punched through their armour and before long a third of them were down. One serjeant was unlucky enough to suffer a cut to his face from an arrow which ricocheted off the helmet of the man in front of him and he too died in torment, frothing at the mouth and squirming on the ground.

  By the time that the archers broke and fled, the Templars on one side and Richard’s knights on the other were closing in on the cataphracts standing stationary in the rear of the main body. The charging crusaders formed two wedges and, too late, the cataphracts realised what was about to happen to them. They turned to face the flanks and prepared to receive the knights’ charge but they were scarcely moving at more than a walk when the two wedges hit them at a full gallop.

  Richard was riding knee to knee with Miles on one side and Hervey de Keith on the other. He looked along his lance and picked out a big cataphract who had just succeeded in turning his horse and lowering his own lance, but he was practically stationery and therefore couldn’t manoeuvre into the right position to exchange blows with his opponent. Richard lifted his lance tip a fraction at the last moment and the point scored a direct hit on the chain mail veil hanging from the man’s helmet. This was designed to protect the face but a lance point travelling at that speed just pushed the links of metal halfway through his head. The lance point lodged in the cataphract’s brain and he died whilst he was still flying backwards through the air over the rump of his horse.

  Many of the knights had scored similar success and no more than fifteen of the enemy were left alive, whereas the cataphracts had only managed to kill three knights and unhorsed five others. Miles spurred his destrier at one of the surviving enemy horsemen, drawing his sword as he went. Whilst the two men tried to hack each other to death the two horses attempted to bite each other; something that all war horses were trained to do. Unfortunately Miles’ horse was at a distinct disadvantage. Its only protection was a light caparison designed solely to keep the worst of the sun off, whereas the cataphract’s horse wore a similar coat to a caparison but with a cover over its head. Metal scales had been
sewn onto the heavy cotton material, making it invulnerable to attack by other horses and protecting it in much the same way as chain mail protected its master.

  Suddenly the cataphract’s horse dropped to the ground and rolled over trapping its rider. Miles looked round to see Richard pulling his sword out of the horses’ eye socket. Richard dismounted and swiftly cut the throat of the cataphract. Mounting again he looked around but no more enemy horseman could be seen, except for one rider on an Arabian stallion heading away from the battlefield as fast as he could go.

  Richard groaned. ‘The king will not be pleased that we have let Isaac slip though our fingers once more.’

  ~#~

  Richard de Cuille sat and looked up at the St. Andrea monastery at the end of the Karpas Peninsula which stuck out at the north-eastern tip of Cyprus: the last refuge of the Byzantine emperor. He was relieved that, at long last, the quest has come to an end.

  After the battle of Nicosia, the infantry had surrendered and swore allegiance to King Richard. Guy had been very cool towards Richard de Cuille after what had happened but he seemed more than happy to take the credit for the victory when they arrived at the harbour of Kyrenia, where the king met them with part of his fleet.

  When the town submitted, Isaac Comnenus was nowhere to be found. He had once again slipped through the net, escaping on his stallion once more, but leaving behind his daughter. King Richard thought her quite beautiful and so, when she threw herself at his feet and begged for mercy, he packed her off to serve Queen Berengaria at Limassol as a lady-in-waiting, much as he had done with the two slave boys.

  The king now joined de Cuille and his men, leaving Guy to secure Kyrenia and to ensure the submission of the local populace. Whatever the public announcements about the defeat of Isaac’s last army, King Richard was in no doubt as to the architect of that victory, mainly because Guy had been stupid enough to complain to his fellow sovereign about de Cuille’s treatment of him.

  After Kyrenia they had chased Isaac from castle to castle. Each would have been difficult to take through siege but, such was the fearsome reputation of Richard and his crusaders by now, that the garrisons rushed to surrender as soon as the king appeared. But each time Isaac Comnenus had somehow managed to escape.

  Now he had nowhere to run to.

  Two men emerged from the monastery and rode down towards the crusaders on donkeys, probably loaned to them by the monks. Taking de Cuille and his standard bearer with him, King Richard rode to meet them. One of the emissaries was the official from the beach at Limassol, now looking much thinner.

  ‘My master, his Imperial Highness, the Emperor of Cyprus, Isaac Comnenus, is willing to surrender to the noble King Richard on one condition,’ he began in his poor Latin. ‘That he is not put in irons. He has a horror of that ever since his many years in captivity in Armenia.’

  ‘What’s he saying? I don’t understand a word of it,’ King Richard, whose Latin was not as good as de Cuille’s, turned to him to translate. After he had done so King Richard turned back to the emissary.

  ‘Tell his Imperial Highness that I am happy to assure him that I will not cast him in irons.’

  That night the king put a local blacksmith to work and, when Isaac surrendered the next day, he was put into chains of silver. Back at Kyrenia be was handed over to the Knights Hospitaller who took him across the sea to their dark and dreary castle at Margat on the coast of Syria.

  ‘Well, I only promised not to chain him with iron,’ Richard remarked to de Cuille as he watched the galley leave the harbour.

  Chapter Four – Barbarossa – June 1190

  Whilst the French and English crusaders were making for Sicily by sea, Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of much of Germany and Northern Italy, had set out overland for Acre.

  Frederick was a great bear of a man who had sported a bushy red beard in his youth – Barbarossa meaning red beard in Italian – though now, at the age of sixty eight, most of his hair had turned grey. He had risen from comparative obscurity as a German duke to become in turn King of Germany and then Holy Roman Emperor, both elected appointments, due to his military prowess and political acumen. Much of his life had been devoted to the conquest of the city states of Italy and he had become King of Italy in 1154, the same year that he was awarded the imperial crown.

  He preferred campaigning to life at court and so, when the Third Crusade was announced, he made his son, Henry, King of Germany and raised a crusader army of twenty thousand men including three thousand knights, supplemented by another two thousand Hungarians led by Prince Geza, who joined him en route. Those who had taken the cross with him included his grandson, Duke Frederick of Swabia, and Duke Leopold of Austria, Prince Geza’s brother-in-law.

  The overland route was full of hardship and danger. The army suffered alternately the bitter cold of the Anatolian Mountains and the baking heat of the plains of Asia Minor. Matters were not improved by the perfidious treachery of the Byzantines, who kept Saladin informed of the crusaders progress so that they were continually beset by attacks on their foraging parties.

  Eventually they arrived before Iconium in May 1190. Barbarossa was well aware that there was a large Turkish field army approaching him, led by the son of the Sultan of Rum, so he left the assault on the town to his grandson whilst he kept ten thousand men in reserve in case they were caught unawares by the relief force.

  The emperor’s foresight probably saved his army from annihilation. The Duke of Swabia and his men had just broken into the city and were fully committed to the assault when a Turkish army some seventeen thousand strong appeared on the plain of Konya near the city. Barbarossa led his men out of their camp to intercept the Turks and drew his men up with five units of foot in the centre with a thousand crossbowmen in front. His knights were organised into three battalions of a thousand each; one battalion on each flank and one in reserve.

  The Turks drew up their seven thousand lightly armed foot facing the German infantry with five thousand light horse on each flank. The horsemen were armed with bows and spears in almost equal numbers. They started their attack by sending the five thousand horse archers in to ride along the space between the two armies peppering the front ranks with arrows. The crossbowmen responded.

  Whereas the Germans, Italians and Hungarians had large shields to shelter behind, the Turks wore a light chainmail vest and helmet at best. The hail of quarrels brought down several hundred horses and killed quite a few of their riders. Whilst the horse archers rode back again for another volley the crossbowmen had to shelter in the ranks of foot soldiers to reload. The next time the Turks made another pass only half of the crossbowmen fired but they still took out several hundred Turks. When they came round again the second half of the crossbowmen fired. By now at least a thousand horse archers had been killed, wounded or had lost their mounts.

  Qutb al-Din, the son of the Turkish sultan and commander of his army, decided to withdraw his archers and send in the other half of his horsemen against the knights on the flanks. As soon as the knights saw the Turks start their charge they moved forward at a trot, then broke into a canter before lowering their lances and changing to a gallop just before the two sides clashed. Although the knights were significantly outnumbered, their charge smashed through their more lightly armed foes. The initial charge reduced the odds to two to one before the battle turned into a hand-to-hand melee.

  The knights on the right flank were more than holding their own but those on the left were in difficulties so Frederick sent half of his reserve to their assistance. The charge by five hundred fresh knights turned the fight back in the crusaders’ favour and on both flanks the Turks started to break and flee.

  Frederick ordered his trumpeters to sound the general advance. The foot moved forward against their opposite numbers, who didn’t wait for them to arrive but started to run away; meanwhile the remainder of Frederick’s reserve wheeled around the main battle and charged against the horse archers, who had reformed i
n the rear. They fired one volley at the oncoming knights, killing and wounding a number of horses but making no serious impact on the charge. Seeing death continue in its inexorable approach, the Turks wheeled their horses almost as one and galloped away across the plain.

  Qutb al-Din realised that the battle was lost and joined his fleeing army, calling down imprecations on the infidels and his fleeing men alike as he went. The crusaders’ losses had been relatively light, less than five hundred dead and wounded; whereas the Turks had lost some seven thousand killed, wounded and captured during the battle itself and the ensuing pursuit.

  After resting for five days at Iconium, the army pressed on to Cilicia and a month later they arrived at the Calycadus River. Leopold of Austria, who had been placed in command of the vanguard, was in his early forties and was an ambitious man who had inherited a duchy at war with its more powerful neighbour, the kingdom of Bohemia. Not only had Leopold managed to conclude an honourable peace but he had incorporated both Styria and Upper Austria into his duchy. Now he sought to enhance his reputation on Crusade and increase his influence with the emperor.

  Crossing the hot and dusty Cilician plain in Anatolia had exhausted his men and they had long ago emptied their water skins so, when they came in sight of the River Calycadus, they forgot the discipline that had been instilled in them and rushed down to the river’s edge to slake their thirst and splash themselves with cool water.

  Leopold was beside himself. If the emperor saw his vanguard in this state, without even any picquets out to guard against attack, Leopold would lose whatever kudos he had gained so far. He rode up and down the bank with a horse whip seized from a carter literally whipping his men back into line. Eventually he restored some semblance of order amongst the grumbling soldiers.