Bernard Knight - Crowner's Crusade

William de L’Etang agreed. ‘Our long journey must have made half of Europe aware that you are travelling home with an escort of Templars. And the news of two visits to Corfu and then your generous endowment to Ragusa cathedral must have spread widely and places you firmly in the Adriatic. I doubt we can slip by them into Hungary without being recognized for who we are.’

‘So what do you suggest we do?’ asked the king. ‘By hook or by crook, we need to reach sanctuary with Henry the Lion in Saxony.’ Richard was the supreme tactician when it came to fighting battles, but this particular problem was unfamiliar to him.

‘My Lord, our Templar brothers here are the most obvious pointer to our identity,’ ventured John de Wolfe. ‘If they would discard their revealing surcoats, we could all pose as shipwrecked pilgrims returning from, say the Virgin Mary’s house in Ephesus. We all obtained anonymous clothing after the wrecking in Ragusa, so with our long hair and beards that would fit in well with the deceit.’

Richard looked dubious, as his natural desire to flaunt his kingship battled with necessity. ‘And who am I supposed to be in this mummer’s pageant you suggest?’

The diplomatic Baldwin jumped into the breach, sensing the king’s reluctance to hide his royal light under a bushel. ‘You could pose as a rich merchant, my lord, with a retinue of a few servants leading a band of pilgrims back to France.’

Richard’s mercurial temperament seized on the novelty of this plan, which as he always demanded, made him the leader. ‘Very well, I shall call myself Hugo of Tours. First, we shall need horses, if they have such things in this God-forsaken place.’

They looked despondently around at the miles of empty marshland, until one of the Templars spotted thin smoke rising from behind a small mound about a mile to the east.

‘We’ll try there first, if we can make the natives understand a single word,’ commanded the king. ‘Philip, have you any notion of what tongue they would speak here?’

The clerk considered this problem. ‘I would think that west of here, it would be some dialect of the north of Italy. But we must be in or certainly near Carinthia and the lands of the Archbishop of Salzburg, so the Germanic languages would prevail.’

‘And we speak none of them?’ replied Richard, sardonically. ‘But no doubt money speaks all tongues, given in sufficient quantity!’

Before they set off to walk in search of a habitation, the six Templar knights who still had their surcoats with the distinctive red crosses, reluctantly discarded them. Of the eighteen men, a dozen still had their swords, the rest having lost them in the confusion of two shipwrecks. John still had his under his long grey mantle and Gwyn had kept his battered weapon slung in its scabbard across his broad back.

The king’s remark about money opening mouths, led to another ceremony before they moved off the head of the beach. The small treasure chest was opened and Richard directed William to distribute much of the remaining coinage amongst the company.

‘We cannot lug this heavy box across Europe,’ he announced. ‘And it is very likely that we shall be split up at some stage, so I am giving each man sufficient for his sustenance, keeping the remainder for horses and whatever situations may arise.’

Each of the knights received a handful of silver lira which they stuffed into the scrips on their belts, Gwyn and the Templar sergeant being given the same. The rest was distributed for safe keeping between the king’s inner circle of clerk, chaplain, admiral, Baldwin, William and de Wolfe. As well as the silver coins from Lucca, there were some heavy gold bezants , the more valuable coins from Constantinople. Richard kept many of these for himself, but included a few in the dole to his closest retainers. He secreted his slim coronial circlet and his Great Seal into a wide pocket inside his cloak, then the empty chest was thrown into the nearest gully, stuffed with the discarded Templar garments.

The small band of fugitives then set off across the marshes — it was December the tenth, two months and a day since they had slipped away from Acre.

The smoke came from a miserable hamlet built slightly above the flood level of the plain. Too small to be called a village, the dozen huts thatched with reeds contained a frightened handful of peasants, none of whom could speak or understand anything the travellers said. Terrified by the arrival of almost a score of large foreigners, all that could be gained from the headman was the word ‘Aquileia’, accompanied by vigorous pointing north-eastwards.

At least there was a track leading away from the hamlet, better than the endless stumbling through reeds and jumping across ditches that they had endured coming from the beach. Within a couple more hours, they had covered about six miles and arrived at a dilapidated town built amongst the crumbling ruins of what had been a vast settlement. There were still columns and walls that marked it as the ancient Roman metropolis, though an odd feature for such a modest town was a large and much more recent basilica with a tall bell tower. What was of more interest to the king’s party was the sight of a small priory adjacent to the basilica, built of old red bricks salvaged from the Roman ruins.

Brother Anselm went inside and found someone with whom he could speak Latin and soon, with the stimulus of some of the royal silver, they were being fed in the refectory that catered for the dozen monks. The rich merchant ‘Hugo’ and his ‘steward’ Baldwin, offered the prior a fictitious account of their pilgrimage to Ephesus and the more honest account of their latest shipwreck. They learned that the basilica was the seat of the Patriarch of Aquileia, who was currently in Venice, having been chased out again by the Counts of Gorz, vassals of the Holy Roman Emperor.

The prior informed them that the nearest large town was Gorizia, where Count Englebert III was one of the Advocates, his brother-in-law Meinhart II being the other, residing in the more northerly town of Udine, up towards the edge of the Alps.

The next problem was horses and John de Wolfe and Gwyn volunteered to go with one of the monks to scour the little town for steeds. Though John was unable to either read or write any language, over years of campaigning he had picked up a rudimentary knowledge of dog-Latin, so was able to stumble through some basic words to do with horses. To find enough of them for sale in a place this size was asking a great deal, but they were fortunate in that it was a market day and amongst the goats, sheep and skinny cattle being sold, they found ten horses and four ponies. The monk arranged for the animals to be brought to the priory, where the king grandly dispensed his silver to pay for the overpriced steeds, in spite of the muted protests of his clerk at yet another example of the royal extravagance. It was now about noon, according to the position of the watery sun seen between the scudding clouds.

‘How far is this place called Gorizia? Can we ride there before darkness falls?’ demanded the Lionheart, who spoke excellent Latin, though he had never bothered to learn a word of the native language of his English kingdom.

He was assured that if they set off at once, they should cover the nineteen miles by time the winter dusk set in, as the remains of the old Roman road was straight and still in fair condition.

The next problem was conveying eighteen bodies on only fourteen horses. The senior Templar, Sir Gerald de Clare, wryly observed that four of his fellow knights could demonstrate the original full title of their Order — The Poor Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon — and ride two to a horse to emphasize their poverty. The Great Seal of the Templars actually depicted two knights squeezed on to the back of a single beast.