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Re: Hold the Fort! --Andelys



Laurel
 
You are correct my hurried translation was in error. "Au somme d'une falasise abrupte se dressent les ruines de Chateau-Galliard, forteresse edifiee par Richard Coeur de Lion au retour de croisade (1196-1197)."
 
Guide de La Route Selection de Reader's Digest S.A Paris 1997
 
Sinclair
----- Original Message -----
From: Spirit One Email <laurel@spiritone.com>
Sent: Friday, June 11, 1999 3:40 AM
Subject: Hold the Fort! --Andelys

>
> I have been reading the description of Richard the Lionhearted's
> imprisonment in the book "Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings" by Amy
> Kelly.  This gives almost a day by day discription of the events and at no
> time was Richard in French territory. Richard  was moved from Trifels to
> Hagenau.  Then Emperor Henry Hohenstaufen sent for him to be brought to
> Worms.  There followed a long negotiations that involved many countries, the
> Pope and even Eleanor, Richard's mother came.  "All wept.  Henry of
> Hohenstaufen condescdnded grandly; the captive's fetters were unloosed; the
> ransom was conveyed; the hostages were given over, among them the Archbishop
> of Rouen, who had been the queen's stay in so many crises, her protector on
> so many journeyings; and the queen herself, worn with labor and anguish,
> fell weeping into the arms of Coeur-de-Lion.  She wa, as she had sritten to
> Pope Celestine, "worn to a skeleton, a mere thing of skin and bones, the sap
> consumed in her veins, tears all but dried in the fountains of her eyes.'
> All the bystanders let their tears flow at the spectacle of this aged woman,
> the most astute and venerable soverign in Europe, still at seventy-two a
> figure of significance in the counsels of men, raining her tears on the
> bosom of her glorious son.  There may have been in that concourse some
> patriarcal bishops who remembered her as the young Queen of France getting
> herself and her baggage wains over the Rhine in this very city of Minz a
> half-century before on her way to the Holy Land, for she too had been signed
> with the cross; for the hyounger generation the mere sight of her would
> evoke the airs of troubgadours' and minnesingers' sons that had kept her
> name alive in all the intervening time with malice or with praise."
>     "the queen and her son accepted the invitation of the Bishop of Cologne
> to spend the end of the week in the capital of his diocese on their way down
> the Rhine to the sea.  In Cologne the prelate did hs best with suptuous
> banquets and valley wines.....From Cologne.....it is related that after
> Richard had passed out of Swabia, Henry Hohenstaufen, stimulated anew by
> pressures from Philip of France, repented him of having so lightly delivered
> his captive and sent followers to pursue and overtake him; and that Philip
> cooperated in this plan by placing ships in the Channel to intercept the
> royal party.  However this may have been, the king and queen avoided all
> these traps and came at last to Antwerp.....Richard's admiral, Stephen of
> Turnham, received the travelers on the famous ship Trenchemer.....they made
> their way among the islands by day.....and by night for greater comfort and
> security lay upon a great galley that came out from Rye.  On March 12 ...the
> ships bore into the harbor of Sandwich.
>
> So he was never in France at that time.  But then in 1196 he returns to
> build a fortress upon a peerless height that should surpass anything yet
> seen in Europe.  A very mountain of defiance to obstruct the valley of the
> Seine by river and by road.  2/3 of the distance, as the crow flies from
> Paris to the sea, the river described a deep loop, washing the chalky cliffs
> of an abrupt eminence that offered a panoramic survey of the whole region to
> its remote horizons.  This height, the "Rock of Andelys," had not escaped
> the appraising eye of Philip, but it loomed a few leagues beyond his reach.
>     The Angevin genius for building stirred mightly in Coeur-de-Lion as he
> reconnoitered this matchless site.  >From the days of his earliest memory he
> had prowled about the massy ancient piles reared by Foulques the Black,
> William the Conqueror, Henry Beauclerc, Geoffrey the Fair and Henry
> Fitz-Empress (Richard's father) on the heights of Loches, Falaise, Chinon,
> and many another dominating lookout.  In the Latin Kingdom he had explored
> with Amazement and delight the newest military construction of the TEMPLARS
> and hospitallers at least in Margab and Acre, Ramleh and Ascalon.
>     (info on the construction)  "Behold," exclaimed the architect king to
> his amazed liege men at the end of 1196. "how fair my daughter has grown in
> a single year."  With raillery he named the pile "Chateau Gaillard.  Saucy
> Castle, or Petulant Castle, it has been called, though the English hardly
> renders the mocking challenge of the French.
>
> ======
>     The town of Gisors is nearby and this is said about it. "Gisors, where
> once the vast elm had marked the place of parley between Capetian kings and
> the Norman dukes"
>
> Laurel
>
>
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