RICCARDO I, king of ENGLAND, known as LIONHEART. — Fourth son of King Henry II Plantagenet and Eleonora di Aquitania, b. at Oxford on 8 September 1157, d. at Châlus in the Limousin on 6 April 1199. After his elder brother Guglielmo (1153–56) died at a tender age, and his younger brother Enrico died without heirs in 1183, R. ascended the throne without difficulty in 1189. But he had previously rebelled several times, together with his mother and brothers, against Enrico II, at the instigation of the kings of France Luigi VI and Filippo-Augusto; and it was precisely in 1189 that the king of England died, defeated and abandoned by his own men.
R. devoted himself to strengthening the truly «imperial» ambition of his dynasty and directed his attention exclusively to his overseas territories, especially Aquitania; thus, like his father, he hoped one day to dominate the county of Toulouse and reach the Mediterranean. During the Crusade, he married at Cyprus a Spaniard, Berengaria, daughter of King Sancio VI of Navarra (May 1191); he also dreamed of becoming king of Jerusalem and of claiming for himself the imperial crown of Enrico VI and his claims on Constantinople. R.’s megalomania might have destroyed Capetian sovereignty, surrounded on every side, had France, under Filippo-Augusto, not possessed an intelligent and energetic king; R. nevertheless succeeded in exhausting the resources of the Angevin Empire and might have completely ruined Enrico II’s work, had he not had good and faithful servants in England, which, however, he did not deign to visit except on rare occasions.
Enrico II had died on 6 July 1189; R. went to spend six months in England to be crowned (5 September); but by the end of the year he had already departed for the Crusade, from which he did not return until five years later (1194).
The kings of the West had joined in an alliance to wrest Jerusalem from Saladino, into whose hands it had fallen in 1187. R. and Filippo-Augusto, bound by an apparent friendship, departed together, lingered in Sicily, and then separated, one to conquer Cyprus and the other to reach S. Giovanni d’Acri. Together they recaptured the city from the infidels, after a siege that was the longest and most deadly of the Middle Ages (June 1189–July 1191), and R. there acquired a legendary reputation for valor. Having fallen out with Filippo, R. attempted on his own to retake Jerusalem; but in vain, since he had to negotiate a truce with Saladino allowing pilgrimages. On his return to the West through central Europe, R. was imprisoned by the duke of Austria Leopoldo, handed over to the emperor Enrico VI, and released upon payment of a ransom.
On his return, R. found his states in precarious and dangerous condition; Filippo-Augusto had attempted to take advantage of his absence to dismember the Plantagenet Empire, encouraging the ambitions of Giovanni Senza-terra, his ungrateful brother, who sought to usurp his absent brother’s possessions and perhaps even his crown; he was in fact stirring up the discontent of the English barons and bishops and supporting the citizens of London, who were forming themselves into a commune. But R.’s interests were well defended and his errors corrected by Walter Hubert, the great «justiciar» and archbishop of Cantorberry, who governed England from 1193 to 1198 with an iron fist. Thanks to him, R. could content himself with making a brief appearance in his Kingdom in 1194 and then return to his possessions on the Continent, from which he never came back.
Although Normandia, administered in an orderly fashion, remained loyal, Aquitania was continually the scene of feudal uprisings. R. also encountered strong resistance from the Bretons, loyal to his nephew Arturo, whom he intended to despoil. Everywhere the Plantagenet met the hostility of the Capetians. During R.’s absence, Filippo had annexed the eastern regions of Normandia (Vexin, the county of Aumale, and Eu). After the return of the King of England, war ravaged the borders of Berry and Normandia for five years; Filippo was defeated several times, especially at Fréteval in 1194, and his adversary, to prevent him from gaining access to Normandia, built a series of fortresses, of which Château-Gaillard, in the valley of the Seine, remains the most important testimony. R. also aroused new adversaries against him: Renaud of Boulogne and, above all, the count of Flanders, Baldovino IX; and he added to his allies the emperor Otrone of Brunswick, against whom the king of France sought to set Filippo of Swabia. It seemed, therefore, that R. was destined to triumph; yet everyone forgot the Crusade; and the Pope, recalling it to their memory, very opportunely for Filippo-Augusto, imposed a truce on the two enemies (1199). A few months later, R.’s ambition and glory collapsed at
