Richard I

Fred A. Cazel Jr.

There is enough violence and intrigue to appeal to any reader; one wonders why Richard's life has not been made into a movie. The book should appeal to any reader, and its mastery will be obligatory for any serious student of the period... . A splendid book.
— History: Reviews of New Books

Nicholas Vincent

Deserves to be regarded as definitive, and ... will surely find its way on to the shelves of every student of the period. As befits the magnificence of his subject, Gillingham is a truly great historian.
— Times Literary Supplement

S.D. Church

In John Gillingham, Richard I has found his most able biographer. This is a tremendous book and a great read compellingly written." —S. D. Church, English Historical Review

Scott L. Waugh

An authoritative reading of Richard and his times ... with a lively and engaging style that makes the book highly readable. The result is medieval political history at its best.
— Albion

Times Literary Supplement

The greatest knight in Christendom, or an overweight homosexual thug whose indulgence in foreign adventure bankrupted England and paved the way for a French conquest of his father's hard-won empire, Richard I was fast acquiring mythical status, even before his body was laid to rest in the Plantagenet mausoleum at Fontevraud. No other medieval king of England can claim to have been portrayed both as the "gay" hero of a Broadway musical and as a cuddly lion in Walt Disney's Robin Hood. What was it in Richard that has inspired such legends?

In part, he has shared the fate of other great men who die young. Had he not been struck down by a chance crossbow bolt while besieging the obscure French fortress of Chalus- Chabrol, he might have reigned for a further thirty years. He was, after all, only forty-one at the time of his death, younger than J. F. Kennedy and not much older than Mozart. In part, too, the debacle that followed his death - the disastrous reign of his younger brother, John, and the ensuing collapse of the Plantagenet "empire" in France - has served to cast a rosy glow on Richard's own reign. In 1199, was Richard on the verge of a decisive victory against the French, sufficient, perhaps, to expel King Philip from Paris and to establish a permanent Anglo-Plantagenet hegemony over France? Could he have gone on to launch another crusade in which Jerusalem, now no longer held by Saladin but by Saladin's feuding heirs, might have been restored to Christian rule? No doubt such speculations have helped to fuel the Lionheart's legend, and yet, as John Gillingham has so amply demonstrated, Richard captured the imagination of his contemporaries, just as much as he has come to fascinate posterity. Even the myth that was to supply Richard with his leonine nickname - of the King, imprisoned in Germany, seducing his captor's daughter and then, with his bare hands, reaching down the throat of the lion sent to devour him, to pluck out and eat the lion's heart - was in circulation barely a century after his death. Stripped of legend and reduced to his proper historical proportions, Richard retains an almost superhuman stature. Not even Sir Walter Scott would have dared to invent a king of England who conquered Sicily and Cyprus and who came close to reconquering Jerusalem; who, although a crusader returning in Christian triumph from the Holy Land, was to spend more than a year as a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor in Germany, composing poetry to while away his time.