Did It Happen: Blondel the Minstrel and King Richard

It's one of the enduring motifs of Richard the Lionheart's legend.  Richard, secretly imprisoned in an unknown location by the evil Duke of Austria, hears a familiar voice beneath his window, singing a song that only he and one other person on earth know because they wrote it together.  He recognizes the voice as that of his faithful minstrel Blondel and responds, singing the second verse.  "My heart was a lion and now it is chained..."  It's the opening scene of the 1952 movie Ivanhoe, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor and features as one of the main plotlines in the novel on which the movie was based, Sir Walter Scott's, Ivanhoe.

So, did it happen.  Not a bit of it.

First, a little bit of background and some beef between several major leaders of the Third Crusade (1189-1192).  That Crusade was called the Kings' Crusade because of the number of titled rulers who each claimed to be leading it, including the Kings of France, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Duke of Austria.  The Crusade began with the siege of Acre 1189-1191, which took two years to break.  Richard was late to the party, having arrived after dealing with the matter of his sister Joanna's dowry and the theft of his war chest and crusading funds by the Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Comnenus.  Richard believed that his late intervention broke the siege, while others, including Phillip of France and Leopold of Austria, who had been there longer than Richard, believed they deserved the credit.  When Leopold displayed his standard on the walls of Acre, Richard had it torn down and his own standard flown instead.  Leopold would remember this insult. 

Long after several of the other rulers had given up on Jerusalem and returned to Europe, Richard pressed his advantage almost to the Holy City before brokering a truce with Saladin the Magnificent and returning home.  The only problem was that England and the Plantagenet domains in France were a long way away, including a journey across the lands of Tancred of Sicily, Leopold of Austria and Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor.  There was potential safety in the realm of Saxony, where Richard's brother-in-law, another Henry (the Lion) ruled, but Richard was captured near Vienna by agents of Leopold of Austria, who imprisoned him in Durnstein Castle.  Here, fiction plays a tug of war with fact.  In reality, there was no mystery about Richard's imprisonment.  The fact that he'd been captured and where he was being held were known throughout Europe within weeks.  There was too much at stake for Leopold, and his overlord Henry VI, to keep it secret.  They knew that in England, Eleanor of Aquitaine and nobles loyal to Richard would turn the country inside out to provide a king's ransom, and that's just what happed.  More on this drama in a later post.

Was there a minstrel named Blondel?  Several chansons or courtly songs of the era were attributed to a Blondel de Nesle.  This is believed to be either Jean I of Nesle (1155-1202) or his son Jean II of Nesle (d 1241), both of whom were minor nobles, but also French trouvieres or minstrels, as we would term them today.  Both of them may have gone on Crusade, Senior serving in the Third Crusade and Junior in the Fourth, but there's no evidence that either one of them knew or worked for King Richard.  The legend only became popular in the years after all three men were dead and gone.  Blondel is a longstanding nickname for a blonde person, which both Jean I and II could have been.  It It is also a common name on the Isle of Guernsey, were King Richard granted a fief to someone named Blondel.  Could this person have been someone who worked for him in some capacity or did him a favor that he wanted to repay?  Did it have something to do with Richard's captivity.  It's possible, but we don't know what it was or when it happened, now.  That it involved a traveling minstrel seeking a captive king in hiding.  Nope.