Richard the Lionheart (Warriors)
He was King of England for ten years and spent less than six months of those ten years in England. He was born in Oxford and died in France from a crossbow bolt fired by a boy defending a castle that contained nothing worth taking. Between the birth and the death there were the Crusade and the captivity and the ransom and Saladin and Philip of France and the songs he composed in Occitan and the castle he built on the Seine and the march formation that solved the tactical problem that had destroyed every Crusading army before him.
He was Richard I of England. They called him the Lionheart. The name was accurate.
Richard the Lionheart: The King Who Lived for War enters the consciousness of the greatest warrior king of the medieval world - the man who organized the Third Crusade, led the march from Acre to Jaffa in the formation that made his army undefeatable in the field, won at Arsuf and at Jaffa, came within sight of Jerusalem twice and turned back twice because the military calculation said the assault would fail, negotiated the treaty that gave Christian pilgrims access to the Holy City, and was captured on his way home by Duke Leopold of Austria and held for fourteen months until his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine organized the largest ransom in the history of the medieval world.
The book follows the full arc of a life organized around war. The Angevin world into which he was born - the empire of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most turbulent royal family in the history of England, the family in which rebellion against the father was as natural as breathing. The troubadour culture of Aquitaine that made him a poet as well as a soldier, the man who composed songs in Occitan from a German prison and who designed Ch teau Gaillard with the same intelligence he brought to the march formation. The Third Crusade - the siege of Acre, the march to Jaffa, the two approaches to Jerusalem, the battle outside the walls when the army stood without horses and held Saladin's cavalry with crossbows and courage. Saladin himself, the opponent who could not defeat him in the field and who negotiated with him across the gap of their mutual respect.
The captivity. Eleanor organizing the ransom. The return to England for two months and then Normandy and the wars with Philip that consumed the final five years. Ch teau Gaillard, the finest castle in western Europe. The crossbow bolt at Ch lus-Chabrol. The pardon of the man who killed him. Eleanor at his side when he died.
Richard the Lionheart is the sixth book in I. Ioakim's Warriors series - full-length literary historical fiction that enters the minds of history's greatest warriors and stays there long enough to understand what it cost, and what it meant, to be that particular person in that particular world.
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