The History Of The Renaissance World - Plot & Excerpts
On that date, the kings of England, France, and Germany would depart for the Holy Land, prepared to drive Saladin out. “Let your hearts be strengthened in the Lord,” Henry II of England wrote to the beleaguered bishops in Jerusalem and Antioch. “Sooner than you could believe . . . vast multitudes of the faithful will by land and sea come to your rescue.”1 He was a skilled king, but a poor prophet. The peace with Philip lasted barely six months; in July of 1188, Henry was forced to abandon his preparations in England and return to France to protect his lands there. And an unexpected development was complicating his relations with Philip. Richard, Henry’s oldest surviving son, had struck up a friendship with the enemy. “Richard remained with the king of France,” says the English chronicler Roger of Hoveden, “though much against the will of his father, and the king of France held him in such high esteem, that every day they ate at the same table, and from the same dish, and at night their beds were not separate.”2 As the historian John Gillingham points out, this phrase doesn’t necessarily suggest sex; Ralph of Diceto uses the same wording to describe Henry the Younger’s amicable relationship with his father in 1175.
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