Can I prove that Richard suffered from PTSD? Of course not. It is challenging even to attempt to reconstruct the physical outlines of a medieval life; it would be impossible to map a man’s interior world. But we know enough about PTSD and the human psyche now to recognize how difficult captivity would have been for a proud, willful, hot-tempered king like Richard.
We all hold certain basic assumptions that allow us to find order in the midst of chaos, and the shattering of those assumptions can be devastating. The risk of PTSD is much higher if the traumatic event is sudden, unpredictable, of long duration, involves a serious risk to life or personal safety, and the person feels powerless. For fifteen months, Richard was balanced on the crumbling edge of a cliff, knowing that Heinrich was quite capable of turning him over to the French king, a fate truly worse than death, and, indeed, Heinrich played masterfully upon this fear. The emperor only overreached himself at the end, with that eleventh-hour double cross at Mainz, and even then Heinrich still managed to extort one final concession, the forced homage that shamed Richard to the depths of his soul. For a crusader king, his ordeal must have seemed utterly inexplicable. How could he not question why God had let this happen? And how could those questions not erode the foundations of his faith?
Did his imprisonment leave psychic scars? Well, his temper became even more combustible after his captivity. He was less inclined to pardon. His relationship with his wife had seemed amicable enough when they were in the Holy Land, but deteriorated dramatically upon his return from Germany, as often happens with PTSD. Despite a love of pomp and pageantry, he had to be coaxed into the crown-wearing ceremony and his Christmas courts were surprisingly low-key. And his hatred for the French king was all-consuming. If seen in isolation, these actions may not seem meaningful. Seen as a pattern of behavior, they reveal a man haunted by memories he could neither understand nor escape.
There has been some confusion among medieval chroniclers as to the identity of the man who shot Richard at the siege of Chalus. The usually reliable Roger de Hoveden was less so when he wrote of affairs in Aquitaine and the Limousin, for he had to depend upon secondhand accounts and rumors. The best sources for the events at Chalus are Ralph de Coggeshall, who seems to have had an eyewitness to Richard’s last days, probably the Abbot of Le Pin, and Bernard Itier, the librarian of Saint-Martial, a monastery less than twenty miles from Chalus. It is from Bernard Itier that we learn there were only two knights and thirty-eight people within the castle at the time of the siege. He identified the crossbowman as Peire Basile, a local knight from the Limousin, but he said nothing of the fate of Peire Basile or the castle garrison.
Roger de Hoveden is the only chronicler who reported that Richard ordered the hanging of the castle garrison and that Mercadier disregarded Richard’s pardon of Peire Basile and “after the king’s death, first flaying him alive, had him hanged.” This has been the accepted story, one I’d never thought to question. But then I found Histoire de Chalus et sa région, by Paul Patier, and was taken aback to learn that the author is convinced Peire Basile was not flayed alive. He cites a charter dated June 6, 1239, as proof that Peire Basile survived for years after the fall of Chalus. Is he right? I do not know; he himself admits that the Peire Basile mentioned in this charter is “très probablement” the same Peire Basile whose crossbow bolt killed Richard. I decided that “very probably” was not enough to rewrite history. The author also contends that the other knight taken at Chalus, Peire Brun, was later permitted to reclaim his castle at Montbrun. If this is true, it would mean that the Chalus garrison were not hanged, either, and Roger de Hoveden’s account was merely a rumor that he’d found credible. I would like to believe he was in error, that Peire Basile was spared such an agonizing death at Mercadier’s order. But until a French historian decides to do some serious research about Richard’s death and the fate of the men captured at Chalus, I can only accept the “traditional” account by Roger de Hoveden, perhaps with an asterisk added.