Another one of Richard’s legends—the man was a veritable magnet for myths—is that he was laying siege to Chalus to claim a treasure that had supposedly been found by the castellan. This story has been discredited in recent years, the most thorough exploration of the legend and its sources in “The Unromantic Death of Richard I,” by John Gillingham, in his Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century. Richard was conducting a punitive military campaign against an often disloyal vassal, the Viscount of Limoges, not a treasure hunt.
I had always assumed that Joanna had died in childbirth, unable to deliver her baby. It was a surprise, therefore, to find that this was not so. In trying to determine why she’d suffered such a dangerous pregnancy, my friend Dr. John Phillips was a great help. As soon as I told him that Joanna had given birth to three children in three years, he told me that she would have been very anemic, which medieval medicine could neither diagnose nor treat. We will never know for a certainty what caused her death, but I think hyperemesis gravidarum is a definite possibility. Women who are prone to motion sickness are more vulnerable to HG, and we do know that Joanna was so seasick on her way to Sicily in 1176 that they’d had to continue her journey on land. Most people are unfamiliar with HG, although it is probably better known today now that the Duchess of Cambridge was afflicted with it in the early months of her pregnancy. It is an awful illness and was often fatal until the advent of IVs and antinausea drugs. It has been suggested that Charlotte Bront? died of HG, possibly complicated by TB, in the fourth month of a problem pregnancy, for her symptoms matched perfectly with those of HG.
For those who would like to learn more about HG, I highly recommend Beyond Morning Sickness: Battling Hyperemesis Gravidarum, by Ashli Foshee McCall, a collection of powerful, harrowing first-person stories by women who suffered from HG during their pregnancies. Some of them had been so ill that they’d been desperate enough to seek abortions, and then were guilt-stricken and remorseful that they’d done so. As for Joanna’s caesarean, it is one of the earliest reported cases of this procedure; in the Middle Ages, it was only done after the woman had died in an attempt to baptize the baby and save a soul.
It may be a cliché but it is also a truism that history is usually rewritten by the victor. One of the more blatant examples of this revisionism is surely the Tudor depiction of Richard III as a moral monster, done in order to validate Henry Tudor’s tenuous blood claim to the throne. Richard III was still more fortunate than Raimond de St Gilles, the sixth Count of Toulouse. Unlike Richard, Raimond has no society devoted to clearing his name and his foe cast a far greater shadow than those upstart Tudors—the medieval Church.
Raimond was one of the victims of the Albigensian Crusade, which began in 1209 and ravaged the lands today known as Languedoc. He made mistakes, ill served by an irreverent sense of humor and slow to see the danger until it was too late. In the end, he could save neither himself nor his people from the French invaders who claimed they were doing God’s will as they plundered the rich lands of the south. He died an excommunicate, falsely branded as a heretic, unable to keep the Inquisition from taking root and knowing that Toulouse was doomed.
Thousands of men, women, and children would die, the great majority of them Catholics, not Cathars. The most notorious of the massacres occurred at Béziers, whose citizens refused to surrender the two hundred Cathars living in their midst. When the town was captured, it was said that the papal legate, Arnaud Amaury, was asked how the soldiers were to distinguish Catholics from Cathars and he replied, “Kill them all. God will know His own.” Some historians have cast doubt upon this statement, for it was not reported until a few years later, but I have no trouble believing it, for I read the letter that Arnaud Amaury wrote to Pope Innocent, proudly declaring that neither age nor sex was spared and twenty thousand had been slain. There was not quite that much blood on his hands; the death toll was probably about nine thousand, including priests. When Raimond’s nephew, Raimond-Roger Trencavel, sought to surrender Carcassonne to spare it the fate of Béziers, his safe conduct was not honored and he was put in chains in his own castle dungeon, dying a few months later at age twenty-four. The townspeople of Carcassonne were turned out with just the clothes on their backs, “taking only their sins,” as a chronicler gleefully put it.