MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

BOOK III.

HENRY VI—PHILIP—OTHO IV.

CHAPTER III.

HENRY VI. [1189 —1194.

German affaire—Peace with the Welfs—Sicilian affaire—Tancred’s Usurpation—Henry and Constance in Apulia— Seizure of Richard Coeur-de-Lion—His captivity—Ransom—Release

Henry VI, if infinitely the least amiable man, is by no means the least remarkable monarch, of the Swabian dynasty. His naturally slender and somewhat delicate frame had, under the effective regimen of knightly exercises, the chase, and the like, been hardened into fair health and strength. His naturally vigorous intellect had been as carefully cultivated by education; and the studies, originally compulsory, he still sedulously pursued when emancipated from the control of preceptors; at least such studies as were most adapted to form the monarch, the warrior, or the statesman. In his youth, he had condescended to trifle with poetry, the love strains of the troubadours; but; as if to mark the rapid progress of really modern literature, and of the development of living languages, Henry wrote, not like his father in the Provençal, which, as first really cultivated, had opened the way, but in his German, mother-tongue. In early manhood, such juvenile occupations and thoughts were cast aside by him, as idle; though through life he treated poets and scholars with a respect, reflecting the more honour upon himself, because not to have been anticipated from his coldly practical nature. He was a master of the Latin language, as of the history and laws of the countries over which he was called to reign; and also of the canon law. He is said to have been eloquent, was quick of comprehension, a keen observer, and an almost infallible appreciator of the character and abilities of those who approached him. Succeeding to the throne at the usually immature age of 23, and married to a woman by nearly ten years his senior, he was proof against, apparently insensible to all those refined, though sensual temptations and pleasures, amidst which princes so circumstanced are but too apt to waste their energies, forgetting their most important duties and interests. Add to these qualities, intense ambition, blunting, deadening all sympathy and sensibility, and Henry may perhaps be accepted as the very ideal of an able despot, well-principled, but not scrupulously conscientious. The blots of his moral character, avarice, which however he knew how to sacrifice when necessary, and inexorable implacability towards offenders, towards antagonists, towards all who had ever resisted his will, or in any way incurred his displeasure were the chief source of his few political blunders.

Frederic, without resigning any portion of his own sovereign authority, had early initiated his heir into the cares and the functions of royalty. He often consulted him, partly as a mode of conveying instruction, and gradually employed him more and more. After his marriage with Constance, the government of Italy, it has been seen, was intrusted to him, and he exercised it according to his harsh temper and arbitrary disposition. He. frightened and offended the Pope, and caused a Lombard bishop, who denied the Emperor’s right of investiture, to be scourged. From Lombardy he was recalled to Germany to receive his father s last instructions, and take charge of the whole Empire as his representative.

In Germany, Henry’s first business was settling the odious family feud in Misnia, which Frederic had so far allayed, that he had prevailed upon the son to release the father; but which, upon his departure, as though all controlling authority were thereby removed, raged fiercely as ever. Again the eldest son seized and imprisoned his father; and now the exasperated old Margrave, as well as the triumphant filial rebel, rejected the young King’s proffered mediation. In conjunction with the Diet, Henry then commissioned the Duke of Bohemia to reduce the refractory Margrave, in expectancy, to order. The Duke overran the margraviate; whereupon father and son, recovering their senses, listened to the King's remonstrances. The son released the father, and the father forgave the son.

But Henry’s attention was soon called to troubles more important to both the Empire and himself. In the autumn of this year, 1189, Henry the Lion, in violation of his oath, returned to Germany, alleging, in justification of his breach of faith, that the enjoined peace had not been duly observed towards his dominions. Even Guelph historians do not specify the aggression of which he had to complain; and, judging from his conduct upon his arrival, it seems most likely that he thought, as Frederic had apprehended he would, the opportunity ofr ecovering some of his forfeited possessions offered by the absence of the Emperor and his army: —invaluable, too much so, to be lost for an oath, which he would fain deem unfairly extorted.

Immediately upon the landing of the Duke of Brunswick, a second Hartwig, who now occupied the see of Henry’s old enemy, Hartwig, Archbishop of Bremen, not only declared in his favour, but gave him back his old booty, Stade, which he had been forced to restore to the see. His son-in-law, the King of Denmark, sent him a body of troops, and the Earls of Ratzeburg, Schwerin, and Wolpe, joined him. Thus strengthened, he easily raised the Brunswick vassals, and invaded his confiscated duchy of Saxony. Hamburg and some smaller towns opened their gates at his summons; and Holstein discovered such favourable sentiments towards its former suzerain, that Earl Adolf, who governed the county for his absent crusading father, the Earl of Holstein, retired for security to Lubeck. The old Lion next proceeded to fulfil a vow more congenial to his temper than the oath he had sworn to Frederic Barbarossa. He besieged Bardewick. Dreading the wrath their insolence had provoked, its citizens defended it stoutly; but in vain. In three days the Free Imperial city,—to which dignity the town had risen since it had ceased to be the Lion’s—was his, and those who had insulted his misfortune felt his vengeance. The men were mostly butchered, those who escaped the sword, with the women and children, were expelled or enslaved; the church treasures were removed to Ratzeburg, and the town was given up to pillage. When nothing more could be found, the houses were set on fire, the walls razed, and the ditch was filled. The Cathedral alone was spared, and over its door the Duke affixed his shield, with an inscription purporting that this was the “trail of the Lion.” His treatment of Bardewick, though an especial revenge for an especial insult, so terrified the Lubeckers, that they refused to attempt defence. When summoned, they merely demanded of the Duke an oath to respect the extension of privileges granted them by the Emperor, and to insure the safe departure of Earl Adolf, with his relations and property, ere receiving him and his troops within their walls. The Duke next made himself master of Lauenburg, one of Duke Bernard’s strongest fortresses.

King Henry, upon the first tidings of the Duke of Brunswick’s return, had assembled a Diet at Merseburg. He himself was highly incensed; regarding the Lion’s perjury, as indicating an expectation of being able to take advantage of a youthful King’s inexperience, and consequently as a personal insult. The Princes resented the violation of an oath imposed for the common good, and yet more the contumacious disregard of their authority, betrayed by this attempt to reconquer the territories, of which the sentence of the Diet had lawfully deprived him, from those princes to whom it had as lawfully assigned them. Again was the Lion laid under the ban of the Empire, again an Imperial army assembled to put the ban in execution, and at its head the King of the Romans marched against the rebel Duke. Hanover was quickly taken, and, in retaliation of the destruction of Bardewick, burned. Brunswick was besieged, but gallantly defended by another Henry, one of the Duke’s sons, until winter suspended all military operations, and, according to the custom of the age, both armies dispersed.

In the course of the winter, intelligence of the death of William II of Sicily put a stop to King Henry’s preparations for resuming hostilities against the Duke of Brunswick in the spring. Although he neither could nor would think of leaving Germany, until rebellion should there be suppressed, his sense of the urgent need of the lawful heirs, early presence in the Sicilies, determined him to aim at pacifying, rather than subduing the Lion, thus to effect a reconciliation between him and his neighbours. It would seem that, had Constance hastened to take possession of her heritage, this might have been secured without detriment to the affairs of Germany, or interruption of the King’s previous designs; but the German Henry VI was too like Henry VII of England, not to be jealous of his wife’s individual rights and possible authority. He detained the Queen in Germany until he should himself be at liberty to accompany her; and contented himself with despatching his Chancellor, Diether, and the Archbishop of Mainz, to claim the crown for himself and her, ascertain the state of affairs in their new kingdom, and in every way act for them. His two envoys unfortunately quarrelled, and the Archbishop returned to Germany, leaving the Chancellor to discharge his mission alone.

The most indispensable preliminary to Henry’s crossing the Alps being a peace with the Duke of Brunswick, upon the continuance of which some reliance could be felt, he immediately made overtures to that prince; and whilst both negotiations with him and warlike preparations, in case of their failure, were in progress, he addressed himself to conciliating the only other prince of whom he entertained any apprehensions. This still dreaded enemy was the unapostolic, and ambitious as powerful, Archbishop of Cologne. Henry was convinced that the apparent reconciliation with the Emperor, to which the Papal Legate had almost compelled the prelate, had been a mere external sacrifice to ecclesiastical decorum; and that nothing really prevented Philip from confederating with the rebel Lion, but his possession of a large portion of the ducal fiefs, without restoring which he could hardly even propose an alliance with the previous owner. But King Henry could bend his implacability when his interest required yielding; he controlled his own anger, and submitted to extortion with a good grace. He confirmed to the Archbishop various disputed pretensions to tolls, coinage, &c.; restored him some mortgaged lands; and at the Whitsuntide Diet of 1190, held at Nuremberg, treated him with such tender respect, rejecting every insinuated suspicion, that he seems to have effectually obliterated all lurking resentment of past quarrels. The Archbishop pro­mised him his cordial support, in the inforcement of his consort’s right to the kingdom of Sicily. 

The Duke of Brunswick had looked upon the Archbishop of Cologne as a prospective ally, whose co-operation might, when wanted, be certainly purchased by the renunciation of all claim to his Westphalian acquisitions; and the loss of such a possible future confederate was not the only deterioration his position underwent, in the spring of 1190. The Holsteiners, repenting of their revolt from their own mesne Lord, not only deserted the Duke to submit again to their Earl’s son, but, under his command, gave the Brunswickers battle, and defeated them; whilst the strong fortress the Duke was besieging, Siegberg, showed no disposition to surrender. Under these circumstances the old Lion was well pleased to escape from the ban of the Empire, not only without additional forfeiture, but with some little gain; and to be permitted to remain quietly in his dukedom of Brunswick, giving his eldest son, Lothar, as a hostage for his peaceable conduct, and sending the second Henry, surnamed, for distinction, the Younger, to perform, as his substitute, the feudal service due for his fiefs. The other conditions were, that the walls of Brunswick should in four places be broken down, and those of Lauenburg destroyed; in which dismantled state the town appears to have been left to him: whilst, as an Imperial gift, he was suffered to retain half of Lubeck, the second half reverting to the Earl of Holstein—its privileges as a Free Imperial City being forfeited, seemingly by its prompt submission to a rebel.

King Henry, now deeming himself free, was about to set forward for Italy, when new hindrances interposed to detain him. First, came tidings of the death of his cousin, Landgrave Lewis, of Thuringia, in Cyprus. The Landgrave had died childless; his brother and heir, Hermann, was still in the crusading army before Acre; and some active interference on the part of the sovereign was requisite, to insure to the new Landgrave his lawful heritage. Henry, although by this time perforce aware of Tancred’s usurpation, showed himself the less impatient of these delays, as Chancellor Diether, confining his investigations to the more loyal, continental half of the kingdom, where no pains had been taken to alienate the people from the rightful heir, sent him very satisfactory reports. Still he used the utmost diligence to remove all impediments, and was again prepared to start, when the yet heavier news of the Emperor’s death, in the very moment of success, again stopped him. He, the Imperial heir, was indeed already crowned and in actual possession of the sovereign authority; but this calamity, nevertheless, induced a necessity for various changes and new dispositions. To this business Henry now addressed himself; and still scarcely alarmed touching his wife’s succession, he determined to blend his Coronation Progress, with his expedition against the usurper of her acknowledged birthright.

But Diether had at length discovered that, misled himself by flattering reports, and by taking a part as a specimen of the whole, he, in his turn, had misled his master; and he now, with all earnestness, pressed Henry to hurry to southern Italy. The loyal portion of the Sicilian and Apulian nobles, who adhered to their oath of prospective allegiance, added their vehement remonstrances against further delay, to the Chancellor’s entreaties. But Henry, to whose nature anything like vacillation was repugnant, would not alter the arrangements he had made relative to his own movements. He, however, directed Testa, the Im­perial Vicar in Tuscany, to raise an army with the utmost possible despatch, and lead it into Apulia, there to enforce obedience and loyalty. He himself first completed the previous measures that had been planned for Germany, whilst he believed his right acknowledged in the Sicilies, and was not ready to begin his march until the autumn of this year, 1190.

These delays had been most unfortunate, as giving Tancred leisure to secure his usurped throne, and he, whose dexterity in extricating himself from his difficulties with the King of England has been seen, did not suffer this leisure to pass unprofitably. By a lavish distribution of the treasures, amassed by his predecessor, he, besides rewarding and securing the attachment of his original partizans, daily acquired more. In arms he subdued the Saracens in the mountains, constraining them to submit to the terms he dictated: whilst a brother of his wife’s, the Conte di Acerra, overran and subjugated the greater part of Apulia; and by the atrocious cruelty with which he persecuted all adherents of Constance within his reach, inspired a terror, that for the moment facilitated his success, although blended with a sullen resentment unpromising for its permanence. All this was in full progress when Testa, in obedience to King Henry, crossed the Apulian frontier with an army, and was immediately joined by the Conte d’Andria with a troop of loyal Apulians. Together they recovered many of Acerra’s conquests, and drove him to seek shelter at Ariano, where they besieged him. But the victorious Testa ravaged the country with a recklessness that effaced Acerra’s cruelties from men’s minds; and seeming to corroborate Matteo’s predictions of the evils that would follow in the train of a foreign monarch, alienated even the continental Sicilians from Constance. Acerra defended Ariano resolutely; and ere the loyalists could take it, the heats of summer engendered disease in their army, which, combining with a dearth of provisions, rendered the raising the siege unavoidable. In September, Testa retreated with his sickly troops to northern Italy, and Andria shut himself up in the strong fortress of Ascoli.

Andria was now in his turn besieged by Acerra. Ascoli was as resolutely defended as Ariano had been; and Acerra, despairing of taking it by force, made overtures to Andria for a general pacification. The negotiation meeting with obstacles at every step, Acerra proposed an interview, a personal conference offering the best chance of obviating or eluding difficulties, otherwise apparently insuperable. The unsuspicious, because honourable, Andria felt the justice of the remark, and left the security of his walls, to hold the proposed conference according to appointment. But no sooner was he without the gates, with an insufficient escort, than he was surrounded, seized, and put to death, by command of Acerra; who alleged, in his justification, that faith was not to be kept with a traitor. A doctrine as dangerous as it was nefarious—even could the staunch adherent of the heiress to whom all had, prospectively, sworn allegiance, be termed a traitor—and so the unforgiving Henry, who forgot neither precedent, nor promulgator of such doctrine, in due time taught Acerra to his cost. For the moment however, the crime seemed to answer its purpose. Willingly or unwillingly, Apulia submitted; and, in the spring, of 1191, Tancred was uncontested King of Sicily, both continental and insular. His eldest son, Roger, was generally acknowledged as his heir. As such Tancred had him crowned, and obtained for him the hand of the Constantinopolitan Emperor Isaac’s daughter, Irene, the affi­anced bride of King Henry’s youngest brother, Philip.

The latter portion of this time Henry seems to have idly allowed the usurper of his wife’s throne, for occupying himself with less urgent concerns. Late in the autumn of 1190, his business in Germany being despatched and his preparations completed, he crossed the Alps, accompanied by Constance, and at the head of the feudal army that ever attended the Coronation Progress. Towards the end of November he reached Milan, where, as everywhere throughout long-rebellious but now reconciled Lombardy, he was joyfully received, as an acknowledged and revered sovereign. But, if he encountered no opposition, he found the country in a state of distraction which, in his opinion, as imperatively required his presence and intervention, as the disorders of Germany had previously done. Postponing, therefore, both his coronation as Emperor, and the inforcement of his consort’s right to the Sicilies, he devoted the winter to the pacification of northern Italy.

The Lombard League, instead of profiting by the Peace of Constance, to insure, through the establishment of internal order, organization, and union, the enjoyment of the rights and liberties therein ceded to its members, had virtually dissolved itself, by the broils which rivalry and virulent reciprocal hatred had produced amongst the confederated cities; whilst scarcely less discord and dissension prevailed within the walls of the most. Thus he found Milan at war with Cremona and Bergamo, Parma with Piacenza, Verona with Padua, Mantua with Ferrara, &c., &c. Within the cities the democratic spirit was beginning to struggle against aristocratic pre-eminence, and when it prevailed, the form of government varied, as the passions or the caprice of the multitude dictated. As, for instance, Genoa soon after the middle of the century, added, to her four, five or six annual Consuls, eight Hew Consuls, whom Caffari calls de Causarum,—judges, apparently, the others being distinguished by him as de Communi. Subsequently, the number of both descriptions of these magistrates varied; and, in 1190, she substituted a foreign Podestà for her compatriot Consuls; but he gave offence by punishing a nobly-born murderer, and was forthwith superseded by Consuls, for the remainder of his allotted year; whilst for the next, 1191, a Podestà, this time a Milanese, was again substituted for the Consuls. He re-established some sort of law and order. Throughout the whole of northern Italy, the Trevisan march alone enjoyed any degree of tranquillity:—the mountainous character of the country securing the nobility in their strong castles against urban domination, and hatred of urban pretensions serving ag a bond of union amongst the nobles themselves.

This was the condition in which Henry VI found Lombardy, and which he exerted himself to remedy. He succeeded in formally reconciling the hostile cities to each other, and bound them, under a penalty of 200 lb. of gold, to keep the peace he had re-established. With their intermural dissensions he seems not to have meddled, thinking, perhaps, that their very excess must, by wearying the citizens, tend to disgust them with their republicanism, and reconcile them to the Imperial authority. He endeavoured, less successfully, to organize a Ghibeline League, in opposition to the Lombard, of which he still felt great mistrust. He obtained a pecuniary supply, by mortgaging a couple of Imperial fiefs to Piacenza for 2000 lb. of gold; and he secured the assistance of the fleets of Pisa and Genoa against Tancred, by promising those cities great commercial privileges in the Sicilies, privileges amounting to nearly a monopoly of the foreign trade of his future kingdom. What more he promised them is again one of the disputed points of the history of this period. Guelph writers affirm that, verbally or by letter, to each separately, he promised the cession of great part if not the whole of the island, with cities and districts in Apulia; Ghibelines aver that the Genoese and Pisan envoys chose so to interpret his observation, that the conquest would be more advantageous to them than to him, since Germans could not live in that climate, and they could. When the price, at which these commercial states obliged the Crusaders first, and the Kings of Jerusalem afterwards, to purchase their assistance, is recollected, it can hardly be doubted but that Henry must have promised, vaguely it may be, cessions somewhat analogous to that Erice, in the seaports of the kingdom to be conquered; but, assuredly, a promise so extravagant as of half the island and a quarter of Apulia, especially not being authenticated by a written convention, must have awakened suspicion of his not purposing to fulfil his engagement.

His business in Lombardy finished, Henry, with a considerable accession of strength from the junction of Italian great vassals for the Coronation Progress, in February, 1191, marched southwards. At Ferrara he required two oaths from the citizens, one of allegiance, and one not to sign the Lombard League ; upon receiving which he relieved the town from the ban of the Empire, under which it seems to have lain ever since Urban III there excommunicated the late Emperor. He admitted the excuses of Ancona for the expulsion of the rapacious Imperial officer, Margrave Gotibald, and to Bologna, where he was received with due honours, he granted the right of coinage, in consideration of an annual tribute.

Northern Italy, or what was then Lombardy, pacified, Henry proceeded towards Rome, where he found dissensions, as usual, between the Pope and his unruly subjects. After a prolonged absence from his see, a treaty had, in 1188, been concluded by Clement III with the Romans, in which they admitted all rights and dues of sovereignty to be the Pope’s, upon condition of his recognising their Senate and their city Prefect, and giving Tusculum up to their thirst of destruction. Upon this compact Clement had returned to Rome, but from compassion or want of power, had not yet delivered up Tusculum to its fate. The Romans were dissatisfied, and now sought in the Emperor a stay against the Pope. They proposed to Henry, that he should gratify their virulent hatred of Tusculum, as the price of his admittance into Rome, and of his coronation. The Tusculans simultaneously besought his protection against the Romans; and Henry, although he temporarily placed a German garrison in Tusculum for its security, held both parties in suspense as to his ultimate decision, whilst he negotiated actively with the Pope.

Between the spiritual and temporal Heads of Christendom, there were too many points in dispute to leave room for a cordial friendship. Some of these might indeed be disposed of without much difficulty. Of one, relative to a double election to the archbishopric of Treves, the Chapter of the see had got rid, by rejecting both the papal and the imperial candidate, and electing a third, unobjectionable individual. Another, made by Clement, in observance of his treaty with the Romans, a condition of his consent to crown Henry, viz. that he should pledge himself to ratify as Emperor all the rights and privileges the Romans claimed, the King for the moment suffered, in addition to divers papal pretensions, to pass, as a matter of course. But, still, grounds of dissension remained. Clement naturally inherited his predecessor’s resentment of Henry’s harsh and irreverent treatment of Urban III; and deeply did Henry resent Clement’s having invested Tancred with the Sicilian crown, in disregard alike of the acknowledged birthright of Constance; and, could that be set aside, of Henry’s claim to the kingdom as a lapsed fief of the Empire.

Such was the state of the parties towards each other, when, upon the 25th of March, 1191, Clement III died; and upon the 28th, the eighty-five-years-old Cardinal Hyacinth was elected in his stead. The new Pope, already mentioned as Celestin III, thought to wring from Henry, both for himself and for the Romans, the desired terms, by delaying his coronation until they should be granted; and this he could easily accomplish, even without apparent design, simply by delaying the ceremony of his own consecration, which must perforce precede the other Celestin, who had immediately recognised the Roman Senate, hoped, by compelling Henry to comply with the demands of the Romans, to secure their support of his own. But, in the active negotiations that ensued, the young king, assisted by his best diplomatist, his kinsman, Henry the Younger of Brunswick, outwitted the aged pontiff. The monarch, with whose policy no sense of compassion, or regard to implied engagements, was ever suffered to interfere, gained the Romans to his side by agreeing to withdraw his garrison from Tusculum, and abandon the place to their vindictive fury, as soon as he should be received into Rome for his coronation. And now Celestin, in some small measure conciliated by Henry’s sacrifice of claim to the authoritative post of patrician, and of some Imperial rights in and over Rome, was constrained by the Romans to give way.

Upon the 14th of April, Celestin himself was consecrated Pope. The following day, after receiving Henry’s oath to protect and honour the Church, he placed Imperial crowns upon the heads of Henry and Constance as at the altar they knelt before him for the purpose. There is an idle tale of Celestin’s having, after placing the crown upon Henry’s head, kicked it off again; apparently a monkish invention, altogether groundless. Few octogenarian princes, spiritual or temporal, unsupported by troops, and even by their own subjects, would venture thus to insult a powerful sovereign at the head of an army; and nothing in Celestin III’s pontificate points him out as one of those few; whilst assuredly Henry VI w as not the man to suffer an affront, or even an awkward accident, to pass with impunity.

The German garrison was now, according to agreement, withdrawn from Tusculum, and the town thus really delivered up to the Romans; the Pope, upon the brink of the grave, concurring, it is averred, in this horrible surrender of thousands to butchery. Even during the festivities with which, when practicable, it was customary to celebrate Imperial coronations, were the Romans slaking their thirst for blood. For not content, like the reputedly inhuman Frederic Barbarossa, with demolishing fortifications and houses, they massacred by far the larger portion of the adult male population, mutilating those whose lives they spared, and putting out their eyes. The few sad survivors sheltered themselves with the women and children, amidst or near the ruins of their former homes, in huts constructed with leafy branches of trees. Thence, when a new town arose within a short distance of the annihilated Tusculum, it was named Frascati, from frasche, twigs or boughs.

Such horrors were inauspicious accompaniments of coronation festivities, inauspicious as the inauguration of a friendship between the spiritual and temporal Heads of Christendom: who, had they honestly co-operated as Christians, to that end, might have prevented the perpetration of such atrocities. Nor did the friendship thus heartlessly and calamitously inaugurated long subsist. All mention of Sicily had by mutual tacit consent been avoided in the agreement respecting the coronation as Emperor. But now the Pope laboured to dissuade the Emperor from attempting to recover the birthright of his Empress, and to prevail upon him even to acknowledge the Papal vassal, Tancred, as King of Sicily. That he argued in vain hardly need be said, and Celestin, unlike a Pope who durst kick off an Emperor’s crown, tried no means stronger than argument.

Towards the end of April, shortly after the departure of the crusading Kings from Messina, the Emperor crossed the Apulian frontier, and upon the 29th took Rocca d’Arce, a supposed impregnable fortress, by storm. This exploit breathed confidence into his party, and so disheartened Tancred’s, that in Apulia the very idea of fu­ther resistance seemed to have vanished. The nobles hastened to do homage to Henry and Constance; towns and castles threw open their gates at their approach; and as far as the walls of Naples, the country was theirs. The Emperor sought to secure the attachment of his new subjects by confirming the charters of all towns that thus acknowledged him; but he did not, perhaps could not, prevent his feudal army from indulging in excesses and outrages, which such prompt submission ought to have averted. The discontented betook them to Naples, thus reinforcing the garrison, with which Acerra prepared to defend his brother-in-law’s continental capital to the uttermost.

In the month of May, Henry laid siege to this important place. His troops were the very flower of Germany and of northern Italy; both besiegers and besieged made prodigious exertions; and it was soon evident that the siege would be a tedious operation. Thereupon a deputation from Salerno waited upon ‘the Empress, with a petition that she, their Liege Lady and Queen, would not expose her sacred person to the inconveniences and annoyances of a camp, but honour her faithful city of Salerno, by taking up her temporary abode within its protecting walls. Henry, eager to cultivate Apulian loyalty, and too well received himself to feel now much jealousy of Constance, assented, and she was escorted to Salerno.

The siege proceeded; the Pisan fleet appeared, blockading the mouth of the bay; and now Acerra could calculate the hour when famine must compel a surrender. But ere it struck, a more powerful Sicilian fleet, under the gallant Grand-Admiral, Margaritone, a zealous partisan of his former colleague, Tancred, appeared upon the stage; the Pisans were glad to effect their escape by night, and Naples breathed again. It seemed, indeed, that this would be but a temporary respite, for Genoa announced the sailing of her fleet to join the Pisan; a union that must have retransferred the preponderance at sea to the Imperialists, thus renewing the complete blockade. But the junction had not yet been accomplished, when the usual protection of southern Italy against German conquest effectually relieved Naples.

The heat of summer produced a fatal epidemic amongst the besiegers, the ravages of which were not confined to the lower orders. The Archbishop of Cologne, and the Duke of Bohemia, were carried off by it; Henry himself being at death’s door. In the midst of this distress came tidings that Lothar, who was held as a hostage for his father, the Duke of Brunswick’s good faith, had died at Augsburg; and immediately afterwards, the Lion’s second son, Henry the Younger, deserted the apparently dying Emperor. Flying in disguise from the camp, he first sought a refuge in hostile Naples; thence making his way by the most circuitous roads—as though dreading pursuit, and some fearful doom if overtaken,—back to Brunswick. He excused this step upon the somewhat ignoble plea that his services in the negotiations with the Pope and the Romans had been inadequately remunerated. But the fact seems to be that, upon his brother Lothar’s death, Henry the Younger saw that his own escape from the power of the Emperor would relieve his father from the thraldom, to which the Emperor’s holding the persons of his sons subjected him

The Emperor was not a little troubled by this desertion, which foreboded, at the least, disturbances in Germany; and was now combined with rumours of cabals amongst his Italian allies and subjects, consequent upon the offer of large bribes by Tancred. These manifold apprehensions, added to the fear of losing nearly all his transalpine troops by the epidemic, and to his own utter prostration of strength both of body and mind by the disease, determined Henry VI to yield to necessity. He raised the siege, and retreated northwards, leaving garrisons, under German commanders, in Capua, Sora, and Rocca d’Arce.

Whether he would now have ventured to leave Constance at Salerno, in the hope that the presence of the native lawful Sovereign might keep alive feelings of loyalty, is doubtful, no choice having been allowed him in the matter. The fervent attachment of the Salernitans to their Queen, in whose defence they had sworn to die, had been generated by the triumphs of the Imperialists, and did not outlive their success. The tidings of the Emperor’s illness, and of the raising of the siege of Naples, were quickly followed by a report of his death; and now the professed adherents of Constance shrank into obscurity, whilst Tancred’s partisans amongst the citizens rose in arms. It is said that, from the time of her arrival at Salerno, individuals of that party had been endeavouring to persuade their hereditary Queen to abdicate in favour of her illegitimate nephew, Tancred. The story is most improbable; for by what argument, or what bribe, could they hope to induce her to renounce her patrimonial crown, thereby irremissibly offending her Imperial consort, whom they then knew to be alive and triumphant. But, whatever their previous measures, they now tumultuously besieged her in her palace. With calm fortitude she presented herself, we are told, in a balcony, and addressed the rioters, first in the language of mild remonstrance and admonition, succeeded, when these proved unavailing, by that of indignation. This was equally so, for troops she had none, and could not now threaten them with the only object of their fear, the immediate vengeance of her husband, since they believed him to be dead. She was altogether defenceless, and easily made a prisoner.

Constance was immediately carried to Sicily, and delivered up to Tancred. She appeared before him in imperial attire, and angrily he accosted her: “Could not the splendours of half a world content thee? Why earnest thou to grasp at my dominions? Lo! a just God has visited such sinful ambition upon thy husband and thyself!” With the quiet dignity apparently habitual to her, the Empress replied: “I sought not the dominions of others, but my own kingdom, of which thou hast sinfully robbed me. Our star is momentarily eclipsed, thine will set ere long!” Tancred detained his aunt in honourable captivity.

The Emperor had for the moment no power of regaining his wife; and, committing to Tancred’s patron, the Pope, the care of obtaining or extorting her release, he, as soon as his health would permit, returned in all haste to Germany, where his presence was much needed. So, indeed, was it in Apulia, where Tancred and Acerra speedily reconquered all Henry’s conquests. Even Capua they took, and only Sora and Rocca d’Arce remained Imperialist.

In Germany, meanwhile, the growl, if not the roar, of the Lion had again been heard. Fear for his sons, if it somewhat restrained him from openly proceeding to active hostilities, had not been of force to coerce the Duke of Brunswick into fulfilling his engagements. He neither ceded half of Lubeck to the Earl of Holstein, nor dismantled Lauenburg; and, one deviation from the narrow path of rectitude ever leading to another, he again violated all oaths and laws, respecting the possessions of absent Crusaders, to invade the Holstein territories. The news of this aggression brought the Earl home from Palestine to defend his patrimony; Bernard Duke of Saxony, and Otho Margrave of Brandenburg—aware of the consequences which the success of this aggression would produce to themselves—armed to assist him ; the Lion being, as before, aided by his Danish and Slavonian sons-in-law. In this position, Henry the Younger, when he reached Brunswick, found his father, whom his arrival freed from the last feeble check upon his ambition. War now blazed throughout the north of Germany, and he, who had enkindled it, was believed to be further machinating the election of an anti-king.

The Emperor’s return from Italy interrupted the progressive success of the Duke’s operations. The Obodrite son-in-law appears to have shrunk from open war with the sovereign of both his father-in-law and himself; the King of Denmark, diverted from German concerns by Danish affairs, materially reduced his succours; and the old Lion made overtures for a reconciliation with his Liege Lord. But Henry VI, exasperated as he had been by the desertion of the son at a moment when he most needed true friends and faithful vassals, and by the father’s disregard of his solemn engagements and oaths, was as yet too angry to listen to them. The Brunswick envoys were roughly dismissed, and the ban of the Empire hung for awhile suspended over the head of the perjured rebel.

In December of this year, died Welf Duke of Spoleto, the uncle of Frederic Barbarossa and of Henry the Lion. With his heritage, the Emperor, according to his father’s arrangements, immediately invested Conrad, his next surviving brother: upon whom he now likewise conferred the family duchy of Swabia, vacant by the death of their brother, Duke Frederic, before Acre.

The Emperor then applied himself to settling some feuds in southern Germany, and some ecclesiastical dissensions in the northern provinces. In most of these he succeeded to his wish; but one proved a matter of no little difficulty and annoyance. This dispute originated in his own irregular conduct, relative to the election of a Bishop of Liege. The last prelate had been one of the victims of the epidemic so destructive amongst the besiegers of Acre; and the contentions in the Chapter relative to the choice of his successor ended in the double election of Prince Albert of Brabant and of Albert von Reitest. In virtue of the Calixtine Concordat, the Emperor interfered; lawfully he rejected both; but then, in direct violation as well of that compact as of all religious feeling, sold the see for 3000 marks, to Graf Lothar von Herstall or Herstade, Dean of Bonn. The second Albert submitted to his rejection; not so the Brabant prince. He procured a recommendation from his kinsman and Metropolitan, Bruno, the new Archbishop of Cologne, with which he hastened to Rome; and, whilst his brother, Henry Duke of Brabant, waged war against his rival, Bishop Lothar, he obtained from the Pope a sanction of his election, together with an injunction to Archbishop Bruno to consecrate him, and in case Bruno should shrink from thus offending the Emperor, another to the Archbishop of Rheims, to act as his substitute.

When Prince Albert returned, strong in papal patronage, he found the Emperor in arms, supporting his own simoniacal bishop; and obstructing the navigation of the Rhine, as a visitation upon the Archbishop of Cologne for the recommendation he had given. Bruno dreading, as had been anticipated, further to provoke Imperial wrath, declared himself incapacitated by illness for the performance of any of his archiepiscopal functions. Albert repaired to Rheims, where the French prelate readily consecrated him; but, beyond the contested title of prince-bishop, he gained nothing by the ceremony. Lothar kept possession of the see; and at Rheims, whilst preparing to enforce his own, as he alleged, preferable claim, by arms, Bishop Albert was assassinated: why, or at whose instigation, was never clearly ascertained. The murderers were Imperial vassals, who won their intended victim’s con­fidence by announcing themselves as unjustly despoiled of, and expelled from, their fiefs by the Emperor. Bishop Lothar attested, on oath, his innocence of the crime, and for the moment retained his see. The criminals sought an asylum at the Imperial court, and were, in the first instance, so kindly received as to give some colour to the Guelph accusation of Henry VI, as the secret author of the bloody deed; and, indeed, the chief grounds for acquitting him of complicity, at least, are his subsequent conduct, and the absence of any adequate motive. Fear of having to refund the money received for the see, is the only one conceivable; and it seems impossible that the simoniacal prelate should have dared to publish his own guilt by openly demanding it, which, indeed, Henry ere long dared him to do. For the present, when informed of the falsehood and treachery by which the murderers had accomplished their nefarious purpose, the Emperor banished them from his dominions, and sought a reconciliation with the family of the victim. This he effected by sacrificing Bishop Lothar, and agreeing to a fourth election, which, by preconcert, bestowed the see upon Prince Simon, a younger son of the Duke of Limburg, and near relation of the Duke of Brabant and the murdered Bishop Albert.

While these transactions were in progress west of the Rhine, the war which the Duke of Brunswick—his pacific overtures having failed—was carrying on with his former vassals, and with his successor in his forfeited duchy of Saxony, grew daily less successful. The King of Denmark’s attention was more and more otherwise occupied; he was troubled, if not seriously alarmed, by the aggressive ambition of an illegitimate scion of his house, Waldemar, a natural son of Canute V. And, in addition to this domestic disturbance, he was in danger of being obliged to declare war against France. The cause of quarrel being one in which divers of our Dramatis Personae were successively implicated, must be explained. Philip Augustus, upon the death of his first wife, Isabella of Hainault, had asked the hand of the Danish Princess Ingeborg, with the Danish pretensions to the Crown of England as her portion. Canute VI was well pleased with the connexion, but chose rather to portion his sister with money, than to part with these idle pretensions, and this change was admitted. In 1193, Ingeborg was sent to France, and married to Philip; who, the very morning after the wedding, and, According to some writers, during the ceremony of the new Queen’s coronation, professed an invincible aversion to her person, originating, it has been suspected, in the alteration of her portion, from what gratified his hatred of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, to money; though in that case it might have been supposed he would simply have broken off the negotiation upon being refused the portion he had asked, which he had not done. But however caused, he indulged his dislike. He accused her of witchcraft, imprisoned her, and upon the strangely imagined plea of consanguinity to his deceased wife—through Charles the Good, the Danish Earl of Flanders, to whom Ingeborg was related on the side of his Danish father, Isabella of Hainault on that of his Flemish mother—sued for a divorce. His uncle, the Archbishop of Rheims, who held legatine authority in France, and his own clergy granted it. Ingeborg was refused an advocate, closely mewed up in a convent, and deprived of her Danish attendants; whilst her whole stock of French seems to have afforded only the ejaculation Mauvaise France, She succeeded, nevertheless, in appealing to Rome, earnestly supported by her brother; and the Pope conscientiously refused to sanction a divorce, sought for the mere gratification of a royal whim, grossly offensive to another regal house, and the alleged ground of which was manifestly false. Celestin ordered Philip to take back Ingeborg, and the King disobeyed the Papal mandate. Amidst such circumstances, the King of Denmark would not embroil himself with the Emperor, and afforded his father-in-law little help. The old Lion at length really wished for peace ; and, in 1194, he sent his offending son to the Imperial court to apologize for his own desertion, and express his father’s wishes.

Henry VI was less indisposed to a reconciliation now than formerly. Lapse of time, consciousness of power, occupation with other affairs, and more recent provocation from other offenders, had all contributed to allay the fierceness of his resentment; whilst the three great objects, to the attainment of which he now looked, as the glory of his reign, were gradually superseding all minor considerations in his thoughts. These objects were—1st, the consolidation of the political condition of Germany, through the universality of the hereditary principle, and more especially by its recognition relatively to the crown, which would secure it in perpetuity to his own family; 2d, the recovery of his wife’s heritage; and 3d, when thus strengthened, the reunion of the East-Roman with the Holy-Roman Empire; and the consequent re-establishment of the kingdom of Jerusalem, in vassalage, as the outwork of Christendom. Of these three projects the second must, he felt, take precedence in point of time, and he was eager to free himself from all impediments to a second expedition into southern Italy. Hence he received the deserter more graciously than might have been anticipated; nevertheless he still refused the concession most urgently solicited, to wit—the confirmation of the Duke of Brunswick’s usurping resumption of the mesne sovereignty over the lands north of the Elbe, which he had enjoyed as Duke of Saxony. In the very crisis of these diplomatic difficulties an incident occurred that, threatening so to revive the utmost bitterness of Guelph and Ghibeline hatred in Germany, as to render peace actually impossible, ended contrariwise in a revival of friendship, through a reduplication of the ties of kindred.

This incident, one of the few bits of romance that enliven the grave studies of the historical inquirer, is thus related by contemporary Chroniclers. The Rhine Palsgrave Conrad, Frederic Barbarossa’s brother, had only one living child left out of a numerous family. This one was a daughter named Agnes, acknowledged by both Lord Paramount and vassalage, the heiress of his principality. Whilst friendship subsisted betwixt Barbarossa and the Lion, her marriage with Henry the Younger, then a second son, had been arranged; and the intended bride and bridegroom, whilst children, having been allowed to play together, had attached themselves warmly to each other. When the Lion rebelled the projected marriage was, of course, broken off.

Agnes was now grown up, and was yet more celebrated for her beauty, and her qualities of heart and mind, than as heiress of the Palatinate. Suitors naturally abounded; but she shrank from every matrimonial proposal, and as yet no match had offered, for which her family deemed it worth while to constrain her inclinations. But her fame had spread into France, and, in 1194, King Philip holding himself a single man, upon the strength of the divorce pronounced by his own clergy, sought her hand. The Palsgrave laid the offer before the Emperor, who declared it to be his pleasure to see his lovely cousin Queen of France. Agnes and her mother, the Palsgravine Irmengard, were then resident at the Castle of Stahleck upon the Rhine; where a letter from Conrad communicated to his wife the French King’s offer, the Emperor’s will, and the day upon which he would arrive for the conclusion of the affair. The indulgent mother repaired to the Princess’s apartment, where the following dialogue is reported to have taken place.

The Palsgravine said: “A splendid lot, a royal nuptial bed, offers for thee, my child; Philip of France asks thee for his wife.” Agnes, greatly disturbed, answered: “Mother, I have beard how causelessly that King has disgraced and divorced fair Ingeborg of Denmark. Such an example frightens me.’’  “Is there any other,” the Palsgravine asked, “whom thou wouldst rather have to husband?” And, thus encouraged, Agnes rejoined: “Never will I give consent to sever me from him whose bride I was in childhood, whose beauty, valour, and virtue all tongues commend. He alone has ever been the beloved of my heart, and he alone—what care I for the feuds of men?—shall be my Lord and husband.” Irmengard was pleased with her daughter’s resolute words, and said, “As thou wiliest, so shall it be.’’

There was little time to counteract the Imperial and royal wills, and the Palsgravine lost none. She despatched a letter to Henry the Younger, telling him how her daughter was situated, and bidding him, if he wished to secure his long-promised bride, hasten to Stahleck. Love, it is to be hoped, as much as the prospect of succeeding to the Palatinate, winged the young warrior’s steps; and, disguised as a pilgrim, he presented himself at Stahleck the very day preceding that upon which the Palsgrave was expected. By command of the Palsgravine, her own chaplain immediately united the lovers in the sacred bonds of wedlock.

Early next day, the approach of the Palsgrave was announced; and Irmengard flew to receive him at the outer gate. So officiously affectionate was she, and withal so evidently agitated, that Conrad could not but notice it, and inquired if aught were amiss. She replied: “Lord Palsgrave, yesterday a hawk flew over our fields. He had a brown head and a white throat, with beak and claws well bent to clutch vigorously, and so widely do his beam feathers expand that it is clear his sire must have reared him upon a lofty branch. This hawk, a handsomer I never saw, have I caught and caged.” Before Conrad had quite made out the meaning of this allegorical intimation of her unwifelike, independent proceedings, Irmengard had led him into his daughter’s apartment, where sat Henry and Agnes playing at chess. They sprang from their seats and knelt hand in hand before him, whilst the mother said: “Here, my Lord, is my hawk, the son of the noble Lion of Brunswick, to whom I have given our daughter as his wife. May you approve what I have done.”

Approve the Palsgrave certainly did not. Startled at the bold act he stood long silent, and when at length he spoke it was to say: “It is done without my knowledge; may that be my excuse to my Lord the Emperor.”

The Emperor was enraged alike at the contempt shown of his advocacy of the French King’s suit, and at the prospective increase of dominion and power thus assured to a hostile family. He commanded his uncle instantly to dissolve a marriage so criminally contracted. The Palsgrave attested on oath his own guiltlessness, and ignorance of the whole transaction until it was too late; and he strongly represented to his Imperial nephew both the dishonour which the dissolution of her marriage must bring upon the Princess Agnes, and from her be reflected upon all her kindred, the Emperor himself included; and the ecclesiastical impossibility of dissolving a marriage lawfully solemnized and consummated. Henry, who however he might momentarily yield to passion, seldom acted upon its impulse, had now had time to cool; he felt the force of his uncle’s arguments, and began to perceive that the alliance might be used to promote his own views and purposes. He forgave all parties, and promised the bridegroom his future investiture with the palatinate, upon condition of his now prevailing upon his father to submit frankly to the sentence of the Diet, and co-operate like a kinsman and friend in the recovery of the Empress’s birthright.

Henry the Younger, accompanied by his father-in-law, now hastened to Brunswick, where, with no little labour, their united eloquence at length persuaded the Duke to purchase the Rhine Palatinate for his son and heir, by submitting to that decree of his brother Princes of the Empire in full Diet, which he had found himself powerless to resist; and also to permit that son, as his representative, and leading his vassals, again to attend the Emperor upon an Italian expedition. The mighty rivals then met, and the old Lion forswore both his grasping ambition and his consequent enmity to the Swabian dynasty of Emperors.

This now cordial reconciliation completed the tranquillization of Germany. The Empress Constance was no longer in the power of Tancred, a sort of hostage for the quiescence of her husband, whose right depended upon her life. She had been released by her nephew, it should seem, in compliance with the earnest entreaty, almost amounting to a command, of Celestin, whose favour he durst not risk forfeiting by disobedience. Different authors have indeed ascribed her liberation to different causes; some to the usurper’s fears of the sentiments of loyalty which the presence of the lawful Queen was awakening in Palermo; and others to the sheer magnanimity of Tancred. Thus, all circumstances being favourable, deficiency of pecuniary means for his Italian expedition became the only obstacle to Henry’s taking the first step towards the achievement of his vast design and of money he about this time obtained a supply in a w ay that shows his sense of honour and justice overborne by his avarice. For the explanation of this disgraceful source of profit it will be necessary to revert to the termination of the last Crusade. 

The homeward voyage of Richard Coeur-de-Lion was yet more harassed and impeded by storms than that to Palestine; his vessel, after much tossing, being driven to the part of the French coast of which the Earl of Toulouse was mesne Lord. Upon the territories of his old enemy, whom he must have looked upon as the usurper of one of his maternal counties, the King had no disposition to land, nor yet to traverse the dominions of Philip, whom he knew to be in league with his rebellious brother John, and caballing with his French vassals, to seduce them from their fealty. The north-western district of Italy was equally objectionable, the Marquess of Montferrat choosing to accredit the report of his being the instigator of Conrad’s murder. Richard resolved therefore to sail back round Italy, and land, as originally designed, it should seem, at the head of the Adriatic. The Templars having a considerable Preceptory in Dalmatia, endowed by the blind Bela of Hungary in 1138, no curiosity would be awakened by the arrival of a Templar’s ship. And thence, in Templar’s garb, Richard proposed crossing Germany to the principality of his brother-in-law, the Duke of Brunswick. That this scheme was adopted, not through a reckless thirst for adventure, but to expedite his reaching his own dominions, where his presence was urgently wanted, is evident from Richard’s avoiding France and Western Italy, where he knew he must find enemies; and from his judicious arrangements for passing as a Templar; one of the very few characters, besides that of the simple Crusader, which could authorize an expectation of safety in setting foot upon any prince’s land without having asked and obtained, whether for money or through courtesy, a safe conduct. Even if discovered, Richard knew of no quarrel with the Emperor that could imperil him, whilst he probably thought the Duke of Austria would hardly venture upon a sacrilege so audacious as injuring a royal Crusader; and he could see little risk of his disguise being penetrated in a country where he was well nigh unknown.

But to the success of this scheme delay was fatal, and already had much time been lost through the tempestuous weather. So much, indeed, that the sister Queens of England and Sicily, whom the damage suffered by the fleet had induced to land in Southern Italy, had been sojourners at Rome long enough to make the non­appearance of the King matter of general remark and surmise. Nor were these delays over. In the Adriatic another storm had nearly thrown the vessel bearing Richard and his fortune upon the Greek coast, and the Lion-heart knew that his conquest of Cyprus had made the Emperor Isaac his enemy. This danger was surmounted, and again the ship stood out to sea, when she was attacked by two pirate barks, jointly so very decidedly superior to her in strength that not even Richard’s arm could render the issue of the conflict doubtful. But, in the thick of the combat, Englishmen were discovered amongst the pirates, and the King’s attendants at once, as the last resource of desperation, announced his presence on board their vessel. A spirit of loyalty, or at least of pride in the glory of their chivalrous monarch still clung to the hearts of these lawless men. They instantly threw down their arms; and, as if they had inoculated their comrades with their own sentiments, persuaded them, not only to do the same, but to offer England’s hero their assistance. Upon learning his plans, they told him that his having left Palestine in a ship of the Templars was now generally known, and he would be looked for wherever such a bark should land her passengers; but if he would trust himself with them, they would carry him and his company to Zara, where, landing from their boats, he would hardly be noticed. Richard accepted their offer.

Zara, then apparently a thriving commercial town, had long been a bone of contention between Hungary and Venice: and, subject sometimes to the one, sometimes to the other, was often sufficiently independent to become the resort of pirates who had booty to dispose of. There therefore, his new friends landed him without attracting attention. Richard, finding that his Palestine enemies had put their European friends on the alert as to his possible appearance in guise of a Templar, abandoned that plan, and it was under the name of Hugo, a merchant of Damascus, that he entered Zara. In that character he adopted the established mode of insuring protection to mercantile travellers; and sent a present of a ring to the Commandant, with a request for a free passage for himself and his people. But the Lion-heart, who wisely as boldly had trusted his royal person amongst pirates, was ill adapted to achieve an adventure, the success of which depended upon caution and dissimulation. Entirely upon these did it depend; for the Duke of Austria, aware of his intended journey in disguise, had, in utter defiance of sacrilege and of papal inhibitions, set vassals, kindred, connexions, hirelings, and allies on the watch for the object of his hatred. This is evident from the language of the Commandant of Zara, who, whether he were a Hungarian, a Venetian, or a Dalmatian, seems to have pledged himself to Leopold. The ring was so much too valuable for the occasion that the receiver returned it with this answer: “Not Merchant Hugo, but King Richard sent me this present; and I have bound myself by oath to arrest every Crusader. Nevertheless a Prince who spontaneously thus honours a stranger deserves not unworthy treatment. Let him take back his gift and freely wend his way.”

Richard proceeded accordingly; but halted for a night in a town the Governor of which being brother to the Commandant of Zara, had learned from him the King’s journey and assumed character. Less generous than his brother, or perhaps more intimately connected with the Duke of Austria, he ordered all the houses in which pilgrims were usually harboured to be searched for the person of the crusading monarch, with promises of immense rewards if he should be found. A Norman knight undertook the business in order to foil it, and diligently visited the hostelries. Upon recognising the King he warned him of his danger, urging immediate departure; and then returning to the Governor assured him that the report of his (Richard’s) arrival was erroneous, there being no one like him amongst the pilgrims. These vulgar dangers and escapes were repugnant to Richard’s temper, and he re-embarked to proceed, as far as was practicable, by sea; but was wrecked near either Pola or Aquileia, both towns being named, and the precise locality not very material. Whichever were the scene of his danger, Richard and his company with some difficulty made the shore; and the accident, it was hoped, promised to mend his chance of passing unsuspected. Again he set forward.

But Richard’s landing at Zara was already known, and Leopold’s friends where everywhere looking out for him. The first whose territories he crossed was Meinhard Graf von Gorz, who attacked his little band with utterly disproportionate numbers, and captured eight of them; the King escaping with the rest into Carinthia. Here he learned that Duke Ulrich was as inimically disposed towards him as Earl Meinhard, and bent his steps towards Salzburg; certain that in an ecclesiastical state a Crusader must find security, and be enabled to arrange by negotiation his farther journey. But, ere he could reach this asylum he was surprised near Friesach, by so considerable a body of troops, under Friedrich von Botesow, that his reduced band was wholly dispersed; and all who did not save themselves by flight in different directions were taken. Amongst those who escaped was Richard himself, followed by a single gentleman, Guillaume de l’Estaing, and a boy, who, speaking German, served them as an interpreter. It was now the depth of winter, and for several days and nights they wandered amidst forests and mountains, almost destitute of food or shelter; till at last they unfortunately reached the village of Erdberg, now one of the suburbs of Vienna, where, yet more unfortunately, the King was detained by severe illness, the effect of his privations and fatigues.

Leopold, informed of the several encounters with the detested royal Crusader, had ordered the strictest watch to be kept upon all travellers; and, whilst the most active vigilance was thus called forth, the boyish vanity of the lad, who was habitually sent into Vienna to purchase provisions, might have drawn attention, if slumbering, to the strangers. The young purveyor’s selection of expensive delicacies and thorough indifference as to the price, accorded so ill with the lowliness of his garb, as to provoke observation and questions; and his answer, that his master was a wealthy merchant, was discredited by the arrogance of his behaviour; as unsuited to the servant of even the wealthiest trader in those unlevelling days, as were the knightly gloves that he had at times indiscreetly displayed. The suspicions thus excited were strengthened by Richard’s own heedlessness, in retaining upon his finger a ring, the contrast between which and his apparel, amazed his hosts.

These circumstances were reported to the Duke, who commanded the lad to be seized when he should next present himself. He was tortured, and confessed that his master was King Richard. Upon the 21st of December, 1192, the house where the Lion-hearted monarch lay was surrounded. He started from his sick bed to defend himself, when the Duke entered the room, and thus addressed him: “In vain, Sir King, dost thou conceal and disguise thyself; thou art too well known. Do not idly thus attempt to withstand superior force. Thou canst not escape; and be assured that I am rather thy deliverer than thy foe. For hadst thou fallen into the hands of the Marquess of Montferrat, whose people are out seeking thee, though thou hadst a thousand lives they had not left thee one.” Richard saw that resistance was indeed hopeless, and yielded to his fate; whereupon he was delivered over to Hadamar von Chunring, to be held in close custody, in the strong castle of Dürrenstein, upon the right bank of the Danube.

Leopold, whose object was rather revenge than the extortion of a heavy ransom, or who at least meant thoroughly to satiate his vindictive passions before proceeding to fill his exchequer, involved the whole transaction in as much mystery as possible. Hence, Richard really seemed to have vanished from the stage of life; and the joy of his rivals and enemies, if somewhat alloyed by uncertainty, could be compared only to the intense, and almost despairing anxiety of his friends and his loyal vassals. Perquisitions were presently set on foot by the latter, but the most diligent and most successful seeker was his favourite troubadour Blondel; who had attended him throughout the Crusade and upon his return, until separated from him amidst the disasters of the journey from Pola. When Blondel heard of Richard’s disappearance he assumed the habit of a wandering minstrel; and strolling from castle to castle, of those in which he thought it possible the King might be a prisoner, sang under the walls the first stanza of a lay composed by his royal friend and patron in a species of partnership with himself.

Meanwhile, if the Duke of Austria hoped to break or even to depress his captive’s spirit, and to revel in his despondency, he was greatly disappointed. Richard, relying upon an immediate release by ransom, in lieu of betraying any dejection, amused himself, even boyishly, with his guards. Sometimes he would try feats of strength with them, in which they had no chance of triumphing over his incessantly and skilfully exercised Herculean frame. Sometimes he would invite them to a drinking bout, when he plunged them in the deepest intoxication, without damage to his own head; and played them divers similar tricks, that, to the refinement of the nineteenth century, appear unsuited to the character alike of king or knight. At other times he cheated the weary hours of durance, more congenially to modern ideas, by singing, and by poetic composition. One day as he was thus pouring forth a strain of earlier and happier days, a well-known voice took up the second verse. It was the voice of his attached Blondel! Whether any and what further communication took place betwixt the royal troubadour and his poetic brother; whether Blondel, by insinuating himself into the castle, obtained means of receiving a distinct message to convey from the King to his mother, or to his subjects, or at once hurried off with his discovery to those who were to act upon it, is unknown, and not very important.

The very discovery wrought a change in Richard’s lot; for no sooner were his position, his captivity, and his jailer known, than the Emperor, declaring it most unseemly for a mere Duke to hold a King as his prisoner, compelled Leopold to transfer the royal Crusader to his custody; upon receiving either a sum of ready money, variously estimated at from 20,000 to 60,000 marks; or, what is more likely, the promise of one half, or at least one third, of the ransom to be extorted, according to its amount. Henry caused Richard to be removed to Trifels, a peculiarly strong castle, in what was then Upper Lorrain, but is now Rhenish Bavaria; where he was closely confined and strictly guarded, but treated with the respect due to a crowned head, which he had not been in the Duke’s custody. Negotiations as to ransom were immediately opened, but, Henry’s demands being exorbitant, little progress was made.

The sister Queens were still at Rome when the news of Richard’s captivity reached them, and they instantly applied to the Pope. They called upon him to demand, to insist upon his release, urging that his Holiness was bound to protect, with all the thunders of the Church, the person of every Crusader, and not least that of the royal leader and hero of the Crusade. Celestin fully admitted the claims upon him, and interfered; but dreading the Emperor’s power, he interfered faintly, and of course fruitlessly. It is indeed very improbable that the most energetic admonitions, exhortations, and menaces, would have been of more avail; but such lukewarm intervention in behalf of her Lion-son, the wronged Crusader, roused the Queen-mother’s indignation. From England, Elinor addressed a vehement remonstrance to the Pope. She wrote: “Of yore, Papal Legates were despatched for every trifle; but now, when the most enormous of outrages is perpetrated, when a free King, a Crusader, a hallowed champion of the Cross, standing under the peculiar protection of the Church, is flagitiously imprisoned, no effort is made to procure his liberty, to punish his sacrilegious seizure. Of a truth, the honour of the Church and the tranquillity of Empires are little thought of now-a-days, unless something can be got by upholding them.”

This sharp rebuke touched Celestin’s conscience, and produced a stronger paternal expostulation, addressed to the Emperor upon his violation of the rights of crusaders; the sinfulness of which offence was enhanced by his ingratitude, in not requiting the Pope’s kindness, when, by threats of excommunication, he forced Tancred to release the Empress, with the like kindness, releasing the royal Crusader at his request. Of gratitude, Henry VI knew little, but he loved not useless tyranny; he desired not to keep Richard in prison; and if he had been dilatory in negotiation, it was only in the idea that impatience would spur the caged Lion to pay the higher price for his liberty. He listened, not unwillingly, to the Papal representations; and prepared to conclude a treaty with his prisoner, whom he had indulged with the society and assistance of his Chancellor, the Bishop of Ely. But the first step, that he took in professed obedience to the Papal injunctions, was designed at once to give a less odious colour to the seizure and detention of a free monarch, sacred as a Crusader, and to assert the Imperial supremacy over all European sovereigns: a supremacy which was then hardly disputed, and to which the most highly esteemed amongst the learned investigators of the political and legal antiquities of Germany maintain the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to have been entitled. They at the same time admit that few powerful monarchs acknowledged the claim, even limited to a purely nominal supremacy, less even than suzerainty, save when some end was to be attained by so doing.

With this object, Henry assembled an Imperial Diet at Haguenau, before which he brought his royal captive, and caused a sort of indictment to be laid against him. The heads of accusation were as follows:—King Richard had supported Tancred, the wrongful usurper of Sicily, thus obliging the Emperor, at a great expense, to conquer his inherited kingdom.—He had unjustly attacked Isaac, sovereign of Cyprus,—a near relation of the Emperor and of the Duke of Austria (Isaac had married one of the Austrian daughters of the Princess Agnes, according to some authors, according to others, a sister of Duke Leopold’s, which a consideration of years renders more likely)—had robbed him of his kingdom, and unworthily treated both him and his daughter and heiress.—In Palestine he had ill-used German pilgrims by word and deed, and especially had, with intolerable arrogance, outraged the Duke of Austria.—He had defrauded all of their fair share of booty.—He had been the instigator of the murder of Marquess Conrad of Montferrat, King of Jerusalem, the most active champion of the Christian cause.—He had received presents from Saladin, to whom he had needlessly abandoned Gaza, Nazareth, and Ascalon. These were the general charges; to which were added the separate accusations laid by the King of France, through an ambassador, before the Emperor; Philip Augustus, for the chance of prolonging his rival’s detention in prison, thus virtually recognising the Imperial supremacy. Philip Augustus accused Richard of having in various ways wronged him; of having deserted his long affianced bride, the French King’s sister, in order to marry the Princess of Navarre; of not having shared with him, as bound by convention, the monies received from Tancred and Isaac; of having, in Syria, endeavoured, although himself a vassal of the crown of France, to lure away his, the French King’s, knights; and to betray his person to the Saracens; and of having sent assassins after him to Europe, whose murderous designs had been baffled only by excessive watchfulness and precaution.

These accusations Richard boldly and decisively answered, after, first, as boldly asserting his regal dignity, by protesting against his amenability to the jurisdiction of the Diet. He said: “Not as being thereto bound, but for mine honour’s sake, I am willing, in presence of this illustrious assembly, to refute these base lies with my sword. I made war upon Tancred, whom I found crowned King of Sicily, because he had wronged my sister of her property; and when he satisfied her just claims I made peace with him; both without the slightest reference to his and the Emperor’s conflicting pretensions to that kingdom, with which I had no concern. I made war upon Isaac of Cyprus because he had injured Christians, had traitorously robbed and murdered vassals of mine own, and was in league with Saladin. I opposed Marquess Conrad of Montferrat’s pretensions to the kingdom of Jerusalem, so long as they appeared to me unjust; but never did I seek his life or the French King’s. Whether it was I or the King of France who hastily and prematurely deserted the Holy Land, thus treacherously abandoning it to Saladin, let impartial men say; and if his knights forsook his service for mine, it was because they esteemed their sacred vows above all earthly considerations. King Philip had his due share of all booty, and took a large sum of money to relieve me from the obligation of marrying his sister. Thus no ground whatever has he for complaint against me; but much have I for serious complaint against him, since, in defiance of the prohibition of the Church, and of his own repeated oaths, he is everywhere acting hostilely towards myself and my realms. Finally, if in heat of temper I may have offended any one, I have abundantly expiated it; and there can be no pretence for longer detaining me, a free King and a champion of the Cross of God, in unseemly and sacrilegious captivity.”

Richard’s words and demeanour made a deep impression upon the assembled Princes; and the Emperor, who now beheld him for the first time, was too clear-sighted not to appreciate his captive. He rose from his throne, and embraced him with assurances of the perfect conviction, produced by his vindication, of his guiltlessness; and with strong expressions of esteem and regard. But, as belief in the calumnious accusations had not been his motive for detaining the King of England in prison—resentment of his alliance with Tancred might have been a subsidiary motive—so was the conviction of their falsehood none for releasing him. The Emperor still demanded an exorbitant ransom, under the name of damages or compensation to himself and Leopold, for the alliance with Tancred, the treatment of Isaac of Cyprus, and the withheld booty—of which withholding he had apparently acquitted the royal captive: and Richard, being in his power, had no choice but to make the best bargain he, or his Chancellor, could. The ransom was at length settled at 100,000 marks, to be received before his prison door was opened; and 50,000 to be paid subsequently; for which last payment hostages were to be given, sixty to the Emperor, and seven to the Duke of Austria. This last sum, however, it was agreed, might be commuted for the execution of some secret article relative to the King’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Brunswick; an article that still remains a secret.

When King Philip and Prince John heard of this convention, they offered the Emperor larger sums to break it, and detain Richard in prison, until they should have severally accomplished their criminal objects, viz., have made themselves, severally, masters; the one, of the captive King’s French duchies and counties; the other, of his English kingdom. But Henry, if unscrupulous as to the means of attaining lawful ends, would not break his plighted word for a bribe, nor would the Diet, probably, have suffered him so to do. He not only rejected their offers, but proposed to Richard, for whom he really seems to have conceived as much esteem and regard as was consistent with his own interest, to grant him the Arelat, or part of it, to wit, Provence in vassalage; which from its proximity to his Duchy of Aquitaine he would probably be able to reduce to its former proper relation and subjection: and this achieved, he would be lord of the whole south as well as of the west of France. Richard appears to have been captivated with the idea; and why the scheme was afterwards abandoned, unless from the busy life and early death of each sovereign, is not clear. It has been asserted, that Richard was further compelled to do homage for his kingdom of England to the Emperor, as Lord of the Universe (domino universorum), and to promise him an annual tribute of 5000 marks.(199) But, though, as before said, the simple homage was not held to be degrading, and the nominal supremacy of the Emperor was hardly disputed, it is more likely that Richard actually received investiture of the Arelat, and that the old Chronicler mistook the kingdom for which homage was done.

But, if Henry would not perjure himself to oblige Philip and John, or even for a bribe, he was as little inclined to risk sacrificing any possible advantage for the sake of Richard. Hence new delays and difficulties: the sum being too large to be easily raised, notwithstanding the hearty zeal of Richard’s vassals and subjects to redeem their chivalrous monarch from a thraldom that they looked upon with loathing, as a dastardly attempt to plunder a warrior, whom none of his enemies durst meet in a fair field. A part only of the 100,000 marks could be paid down, and with that Queen Elinor repaired in person to Germany, to implore the Emperor to set her son at liberty upon receiving hostages for the remainder. The German Princes, ashamed of the prolonged unlawful imprisonment of a royal Crusader, merely to extort a heavy ransom, by which they were not to benefit, strenuously supported the Queen’s entreaties, and Henry perforce gave way. Upon receiving the two younger sons of the German Lion, as hostages for their Lion-hearted uncle, he released Richard from durance in February, 1194.

The King of England’s passage from the Continent was delayed by stormy weather and contrary winds, so that he did not land at Sandwich before the 20th of March. And now, his liberty closing the transaction in the eyes of his subjects, who felt little conscientious about paying an unjust debt, or redeeming unknown foreign princes, the difficulty of collecting the sums still due was so much increased, that Richard could pay only trifling instalments, dissatisfying his Imperial creditor. He then applied to the Pope, for the assistance of the Church, in his endeavours to obtain the release of the hostages and some reduction of the debt. Celestin—whose original view of the sacrilegious outrage perpetrated upon a Crusading King, under especial Papal protection, could not be affected by that King’s compulsory acquiescence in the payment of ransom, and who has, by one historian at least, been suspected, surely without sufficient grounds, of having resented as an usurpation of sovereignty the Emperor’s presuming to judge an independent king—more than complied with his requests. He insisted, with both the Emperor and the Duke, not only upon the release of the hostages and the remission of the money still due, but upon the restitution of all that had been received upon so unjustifiable a claim. Neither Emperor, nor Duke, paid more attention to the injunctions of the Pope, than to the remonstrances of the King. Celestin excommunicated the Duke; whether fulminating the same sentence against the Emperor, or merely renewing, with increased energy, his threat of so doing, seems doubtful.

Of the portion of the ransom actually paid, the Duke of Austria is said to have received about 20,000 marks, or perhaps a third, and a few crusading princes and bishops trifling sums, as compensation for claims to withheld booty. Upon which one modern German historian, Scheller, exclaims: “Little money for great shame!”

In the first part of this exclamation Leopold of Austria evidently would have concurred; he thought the money too little, and sent Richard word that if the remainder of his share was not forthcoming within a very short time, he would put the hostages to death. He did not long triumph in this defiance of Church authority. In the same year, before he could receive from Richard an answer to this threat, he broke his leg by a fall from his horse; and his own clergy pronounced the accident a judgment inflicted by the hand of God, for his contumacious disregard of the Pope’s commands, and of the fearful anathema under which he lay. No leech would set the fractured limb, no servant tend his bed of pain. Not till he had ordered the restitution of the money received in addition to the release of the hostages, could he obtain absolution, the rites of the Church, and medical aid. For the last it was now too late, and Duke Leopold died in the garb of a Cistercian. But his brother monks closed their cemetery against his remains, until his heir, Duke Frederic, and twelve of his nobles had pledged themselves to fulfil his promises. How far they redeemed those pledges is, in regard to the money, at best, doubtful.