The Handy Military History Answer Book. Samuel Willard Crompton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ that enterprise. The Germans held Richard for almost two years before his mother—Eleanor of Aquitaine—raised an enormous ransom and delivered it to the Holy Roman Emperor. Tradition has it that the price was 100,000 marks (or pieces) of silver. If so, this was probably at least three times the value of the annual budget of the Kingdom of England.

      Was nothing accomplished by the Third Crusade?

      The Third Crusade was one of the grandest of adventures (so long as one survived), but it accomplished virtually nothing.

THE FOURTH CRUSADE

      Why did Richard not lead the Fourth Crusade?

      Oh, how he wanted to! As soon as he returned to England, following his captivity in Germany, Richard set about raising men and money, intending to return to the Holy Land. Both his English and his Norman subjects were more suspicious, however, because they knew he had come so close (within eight miles) and turned back in 1192.

      Richard died in battle against the French in 1199, and the throne passed to his younger brother, John. Leadership of the Fourth Crusade, which commenced in 1202, went not to any of the monarchs, but to a group of top nobles. And when they looked for the best way to reach the Holy Land, these men decided to sail from Venice.

      What were the two wealthiest and most competitive merchant cities?

      Venice and Genoa, located on opposite sides of the Italian peninsula, became wealthy in the years following the success of the First Crusade. By 1202, these cities had become the richest in the Mediterranean. Venetian shipmasters were pleased to take the men of the Fourth Crusade aboard—for a handsome price—but not long after embarkation, they began to speak of how much easier, and more profitable, it would be to capture Constantinople.

      The city on the Bosporus was in a weak condition in 1204. The Byzantines had fought among themselves for years, and the willpower of the Byzantine leaders was at an all-time low. Even so, when the men of the Fourth Crusade came ashore to commence a siege, the Byzantines resisted fiercely. The western Europeans defeated their eastern cousins, capturing the city in August 1204. A puppet state was created, with Venice ruling the affairs of Constantinople for the next fifty years. Today’s tourist who admires sculptures in downtown Venice often does not realize that some of the finest of these came from Constantinople after the siege of 1204.

PHILIP VERSUS JOHN

      We know so much about Richard.Why do we hear so little of Philip II of France?

      When one looks at the two kings side by side, Richard was far more impressive. He was bigger, more intimidating, and more of a presence, all-around, than Philip II. Had Richard lived another decade, the two kings would have continued to fight, and the chances are good that Richard would have been victorious. But he died from a crossbow shot in 1199, while Philip lived another twenty years. And during that score of years, Philip was able to accomplish much of what had previously been denied him.

      Who was King John?

      John (ruled 1199–1216) was the youngest son of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and no one—except perhaps his father—ever suspected he would become king. John had three elder brothers, but two of them died and the third was a high churchman: the throne, therefore, went to John after Richard’s death.

       Was it confusing to the people at the time that England and France seemed to have been joined at the hip?

      To them it made sense. A peasant owed allegiance to the local strongman, who owed his allegiance to the local lord. If that lord declared his allegiance to England, for example, then so did all of the people in the village, even the county. True nationalism had not yet developed, and local, provincial loyalties were far stronger than they are today.

      John has a bad press—almost everyone agrees on this—but he does seem to have been something of a coward. Perhaps it was the overwhelming presence of his brother Richard that made this so; in any case, John cut a poor figure, both on the battlefield and off. Philip II, meanwhile, had had plenty of time to develop his strategy, which was to dispossess the English king of his domains in present-day France.

      How badly did King John stumble?

      He stumbled to the point that Pope Innocent III placed all England under interdict, declaring that none of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic faith could be performed in that country. This was enough to bring King John to heel, and in 1206 he signed a remarkable document—which still exists—declaring that he was a vassal of the Pope and owed him political, as well as spiritual, allegiance.

      John recovered from this disaster, only to stumble into military action against the French. John believed he would prevail because he had enlisted the aid of many German knights and nobles, but when Philip won the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, the poverty of John’s cause became extreme. He evacuated his men from nearly all their posts in France and practically signed away both Normandy and Aquitaine. His final humiliation was yet to come, however.

      How important was the Magna Carta (“Great Charter”)?

      The Middle Ages was an era practically teeming with charters. Towns chartered their independence from local lords, and villages established charters—written agree ments—with their local knights. Many of these charters still survive and can be seen in major institutions such as the British Library and British Museum, but the most famous of all, beyond doubt, was the Great Charter of 1215.

      Under its provisions, King John agreed that certain rights and privileges were beyond his royal power to remove. He could not, for example, seize a nobleman or distress him without the agreement of a council of the barons, and he could not have a man locked up in prison without allowing some sort of trial. To be sure, there were social gradients built into the Great Charter. Peasants had lesser rights; serfs had almost none. But the principle, the very idea that some people had specific rights which could not be removed, was little short of revolutionary. By forcing King John to sign this document, the barons, in 1215, asserted a powerful new trend, one that eventually led in the direction of greater personal liberties.

      The first page of the Magna Carta. Signed by King John, this 1215 charter is one of the most important documents in the history of legal rights. It acknowledged that citizens have certain rights that cannot be taken away, even by a king.

      What is the difference between a baron, a knight, and a lord?

      In the High Middle Ages, there were many knights and rather few barons (who might also be called “lord”). The barons usually came from longer lineages and could claim descent from the first knights of a given area. In 1215, the leading barons of England declared war on King John. They never aimed to overthrow him or to take him prisoner, but they asserted their right to defend their baronial privileges, which included near-absolute sovereignty over their lands. King John did not fight the barons—he knew that he would lose—but he came to an agreement with them in June 1215.

BORDER WARS

      When did the military revolution take place?

      Between about 1150 and 1300, a quiet and subtle economic revolution took place, which consequently gave birth to a military one. In that century and a half, the lower-income folk of medieval society began an economic rise that established СКАЧАТЬ