Men willing to shed blood so cavalierly would have no compunctions about vilifying those they destroyed, and so it happened to Raimond de St Gilles. Catholic chroniclers painted him in the most lurid of colors, maligning him as a godless Cathar, a man steeped in sin, an enemy of Holy Church, seeking to justify what was done in God’s name. As I said in the Afterword, his true sin was tolerance, incomprehensible to the medieval mind. By the time he died, his reputation was in tatters, and for centuries it was accepted that the Count of Toulouse had been a dissolute womanizer and a heretic.
Raimond’s character assassination at the hands of the Church spilled over into his marriage to Joanna, too. You will find it claimed by Wikipedia, and even some histories, that she was unhappy and was fleeing to Richard for refuge when she learned of her brother’s death. This is not true. The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens said of Joanna, “She was an able woman of great spirit, and after she had recovered from childbed, she was determined to counter the injuries being inflicted upon her husband at the hands of numerous magnates and knights. She therefore took arms against the lords of Saint-Felix, and laid siege to a castrum belonging to them known as Les Cassés. Her efforts were of little avail; some of those with her treacherously and secretly provided arms and supplies to the besieged enemy. Greatly aggrieved, she abandoned the siege, and was almost prevented from leaving her camp by a fire started by the traitors. Much affected by this injury, she hastened to see her brother King Richard to tell him about it but found that he had died. She herself died, whilst pregnant, overcome by this double grief.” This testimony is all the more convincing for being written by a man who was a devout Catholic and a supporter of the Albigensian Crusade, seeing it as necessary to combat heresy.
But Raimond continues to be portrayed as a neglectful or abusive husband, despite all evidence to the contrary, mainly because he remains a peripheral figure, a minor player in the histories of other men. The translators of William of Puylaurens’s chronicle, W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly, are renowned scholars, but even they get Raimond’s marital history wrong, reporting that he had five wives, which is indeed true; however, they, too, have confused the Damsel of Cyprus with the daughter of Amaury de Lusignan, listing the latter and eliminating the Damsel altogether. Raimond de St Gilles is a man desperately in need of his own biographer, and maybe a Raimond de St Gilles Society to repair some of the damage done to his memory.
Peire Basile’s crossbow bolt did more than change the history of England and France. It altered German history, too, for without his powerful uncle’s support, Otto’s hold on power was much more precarious. And that bolt would have a devastating impact upon Languedoc. Had Richard not died at Chalus, he would never have permitted a French army to invade lands he saw as within the Angevin orbit. I still think the conquest of Languedoc was inevitable; the Church saw it and its pleasure-loving people as a genuine threat, and the French barons saw it as a plum ripe for the picking. But it would not have happened while the Lionheart lived.
The circumstances of Constance of Brittany’s capture and imprisonment by her husband, the Earl of Chester, remain somewhat murky and confusing. The Bretons naturally blamed Richard, but that did not seem likely to me as he was still attempting at that time to coax her into allowing Arthur to be raised at his court; moreover, he would have known that the Bretons would never have agreed to trade Constance for Arthur, as indeed they did not. I chose to follow the chronology set forth in Dr. Judith Everard’s excellent history, Brittany and the Angevins, which remains the best source for Brittany in the twelfth century.
Ralph de Coggeshall reported that Robert de Nonant, the brother of the Bishop of Coventry, was starved to death in prison, and I see no reason to doubt him, for Richard would not have forgiven de Nonant’s defiance during their confrontation at Mainz. But he was imprisoned in 1194 and died at Dover Castle in 1195, so clearly he must have been given some sustenance for him to have survived that long; I concluded, therefore, that he was put on a bread-and-water diet. His brother, the bishop, who was hand in glove with John, was more fortunate, for he died in comfortable French exile in 1197.