Eleanor would have been familiar with them from her time in the schools: ‘In a tempest, the captain says the ship must be lightened to give a chance of survival. Which do you throw overboard, an old slave who has served you well but no longer has any monetary value or your expensive new horse?’ It was a dilemma that would have made any twelfth-century knight think twice before doing the right thing. With a fair wind in summer, it might have been a pleasant week’s voyage to Antioch’s crusader port of St Simeon – now Simangad – but Eleanor and her ladies embarked on that small convoy of frail Byzantine merchantmen knew the risks they ran by putting to sea before the end of winter. Before the advent of the magnetic compass,1 it was necessary to hug the coastline and navigate by sight and soundings from one landmark to the next, which increased the risk of being driven onto a lee shore where no headland was available for shelter from a storm. The ‘round ships’ in which they were embarked were uncomfortable in any conditions above a light breeze.
