Annotations on Richard the Lionheart

Footnotes to Impossible Histories chapter 13

These are annotations for the thirteenth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p.240
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be:

Lord Jesus kyng of glorye
Suche grace and vyctorye
Thou sente to Kyng Rychard,
That neuer was found coward!
§Richard Coer de Lyon (C14).

p. 243
•The death of Thomas à Becket: This is the plot of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

•Death to the Greeks: The name of the tower was Mategriffon, and I had originally included it, but then chickened out, because how could Mategriffon mean “death to the Greeks?” But it turns out that that’s mate, as in checkmate, plus griffon, a debasement of the word “Greek” perhaps influenced by the griffons in Byzantine iconography.

•between Turk and Arab: Remember that the First Crusade had started as an attempt to conquer Turkish Jerusalem. By the time the Crusaders got to the Holy City, the Turks had been driven out, and Arabs ruled the place. This was (from the Crusaders’ POV) still unacceptable, and hardly stopped the sack of the city.

p. 244
•He was so generous: This generosity became proverbial, and let me just quote Gotthold Lessing’s 1779 drama, Nathan the Wise here:

Nathan: His House is large
Dervish: And larger than thou thinkest
For every beggar is a member of it.
N: Yet Saladin so hates the beggar tribe—
D: That root and branch he means to blot them out,
Though in the attempt himself become a beggar.

[Lessing, Laocoön; Nathan the Wise; Minna von Barnhelm (Dutton, 1970) p. 124.]

p. 245
•killed everyone they saw: “God will know his own” or “let God sort it out” are the traditional explanations for the Crusaders’ killing Christian and infidel indiscriminately; probably apocryphal.

p. 246
•He left England in the trust of his brother John: This is the traditional (I mean modern traditional, not traditional traditional; it’s from the nineteenth century) Robin Hood setup. Disney’s Robin Hood presents the situation in song:

While bonny good King Richard leads the great Crusade he’s on
We all have to slave away for this good for nothing John!

The song appears to be based on a bawdy nineteenth-century piece of filth, “The Bastard King of England,” attributed to Kipling and sometimes presented as the reason Kipling was never knighted. It’s that offensive!

•legend would maintain he was only sleeping: Fiction one-ups legend here: see Umberto Eco’s Baudolino (2000).

p. 247
•Tyre has always been notoriously hard to besiege: In the thirteenth-century German romance Ortnit, titular hero Ortnit loses 9,000 knights taking Tyre—and he had magical golden dwarf-made armor than cannot be broken, and, as an ally, the Russian bogatyr Ilya Muromets, strongest man in the world. [J.W. Thomas, trans., Ortnit and Wolfdietrich: Two Medieval Romances (Camden House, 1986) p. 24.]

•Conrad fired a crossbow at the old man: The story of Conrad’s intransigence echos a more famous anecdote about Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, who in 1296 led the defense of Tarifa; Guzmán’s son was held hostage outside the city walls, and besiegers threatened to slit his throat, so an accomodating Guzmán tossed a knife over the battlements.

Guzmán and his knife are a common subject in Spanish literature, but an Anglophone audience is perhaps most likely to encounter him as a hasty allusion in Cervantes’s Rinconete y Cortadillo. That’s where I learned about him, at least. [Rinconete and Cortadillo (Four Seas, 1917) p. 93.]

p. 250
•a cameo in Scott’s Ivanhoe: King Richard cameos is so many texts, including a large number of Robin Hood ones

and let us add only the fraudulent work of teenage genius con artist Thomas Chatterton (whom you will recall from IH p. 237), which presents Richard in battle thus:

The foemen fal arounde; the cross reles hye;         waves high
Steyned ynne goere, the harte of warre ys seen;
Kynge Rycharde, throrough everych trope dothe flie,
And beereth meynte of Turkes onto the greene;          bears many Turks
Bie hymm the floure of Asies menn ys sleene;          the flower of Asia’s men
The waylynge mone doth fade before hys sonne;          waning moon
Bie hym hys knyghtes bee formed to actions deene,          glorious actions
Doeynge syke marvels, strongers be aston.          astonished 

p. 255
•died gloriously in combat: Richard was the next to last English king to die in battle—Richard “my kingdom for a horse” III was, of course, the last.

p. 256
•epigraph:

We conquered the world with bravery and might, but we did not take it to the grave.
§Baburnama (1530).

p. 260
•Turks avoided shedding noble blood: When the Mongols executed the Caliph al-Muta’sim in Baghdad, for example, they rolled him up in a carpet and rode horses over it; it would have been a sign of great disrespect to stab him

p. 263
•France to join with the Turkish infidels: I can’t find the reference here, surrounded as I am by my back issues, but Dave Sim once wrote that the goal of every French-speaking people is to hurt their allies.

p. 264
•by most metrics the Balkans do not do well: Our idea of the Balkans as a backwards, savage part of Europe, marked out by cruelty and lawlessness, may be partially a question of perception and not reality. The most influential book, at least for English speakers, in shaping our ideas of the Balkans is Dracula, and needless to say most of Dracula is not true.

On the other hand, the character of Dracula is loosely based on a real Romanian ruler, Vlad the Impaler. Many countries have had cruel rulers who inflicted cruel punishments, but Vlad must have gone above and beyond to have been so thoroughly associated with one form of execution. James VI of Scotland ordered a lot of witches burned, but he's not known to history as James the Witch Burner (instead, oddly enough, he's known to history as James I of England). Impaling was a signature Ottoman punishment that never really caught on in Western Europe, and it seemed particularly brutal to the West—although it may not be objectively worse than the rack or other punishments. Whether Vlad the Impaler was objectively worse than other, non-Balkan bad rulers is perhaps subject to debate.

p. 265
•Until very recently: This book was in preproduction long enough that I had to add this qualifying phrase.

•a non-Greek philosopher, and most likely you’ll be naming a German or an Austrian: When Monty Python set up a soccer game between philosophers, it was, of course, the Germans against the Greeks.

On the other hand, their philosophy song, “The Bruces’ Song,” does include, Hume, Mill, Hobbes, and Descartes.

•few or none of them has garnered any international attention: This is a ridiculously unfair statement I probably put in just to give editors something to flag, and then forgot about. IH in fact cites two Rumanian writers (Eliade and Cioran) who are internationally famous as well as excellent.