The King of England behind bars in Worms Stadt Worms

Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on February 4, 1194, £100,000 ransom was paid for Richard I, King of England after having been taken prisoner in Erdberg near Vienna by Duke Leopold’s men [Duke Leopold V of Austria of the Babenberg dynasty] or or about December 21st or 22nd in 1192.

The Devil's Brood: Part VIII-The Ransom of a King
"The Devil's Brood examines the Angevin Dynasty, otherwise known as the Plantagenets, which ruled over England and the greater part of France until John lost most of the family lands in Europe. Henry II was the first Angevin king of England, and was succeeded by his son Richard I. Part VIII examines Richard's capture on his return from Palestine and his struggle to evict King Philip of France from Normandy.

Cast of Characters:
Richard I-King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou
Eleanor of Aquitaine-Duchess of Aquitaine and Richard's mother
John-Richard's only living brother
Joan-former queen of Sicily and Richard's sister
Constance-duchess of Brittany and Richard's sister-in-law
Arthur-Constance's only son
Philip II-king of France, Richard's nominal overlord for Normandy, Aquitaine and Anjou
Adela-dowager Queen of France, mother of Philip
Henry I-Count of Champagne, Adela's brother, vassal and rival to Philip
Theobald V-Count of Blois, Adela's brother, vassal and rival to Philip, would-be suitor/kidnapper of Eleanor of Aquitaine
Stephen I-Count of Sancerre, Adela's brother, vassal and rival to Philip
Alys-daughter of King Louis VII of France and his second wife, Constance of Castile
Philip I-Count of Flanders
Tancred-King of Sicily
Henry VI-King of Germany
Leopold-Duke of Austria
Baldwin IX-Count of Flanders and Hainaut

Sources:
The Plantagenets: the Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England-Dan Jones
The Restless Kings: Henry II, His Sons and the War for the Plantagenet Crown-Nick Barratt
The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones-Thomas Asbridge
Richard I-John Gillingham
Lionheart & Lackland: King Richard, King John and the Wars of Conquest-Frank McLynn
King John and the Road to Magna Carta-Stephen Church
Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings-Amy Kelly
Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life-Alison Weir
The Angevin Empire-John Gillingham
The Plantagenet Empire: 1154-1224, Martin Aurell, translated from the French by David Crouch
Angevin England 1154-1258-Richard Mortimer
Tales from the Long Twelfth Century: The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire-Richard Huscroft
Medieval Flanders-David Nicholas"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN5aLZV8XaQ

Images:
1. Richard I in captivity in Germany - contemporary illustration shows Richard lying on the ground kissing the emperors feet in a ceremony of submission
2. Queen Eleanor
3. It was Eleanor who paid her son's ransom when he was captured
4.


Background from [https://blog.dgwbirch.com/?p=593]}
At the siege of Acre in 1191, during the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart supervised the building of siege engines to breach the walls of the city and thus led to its fall in July of that year. He immediately quarrelled with Duke Leopold V of Austria over the spoils of war and eventually tore down Leopold’s banner and sent his army on their way, thus ending early attempts at a common European foreign policy in the Middle East. In October, after decapitating 2,800 prisoners in another dispute with Saladin, Richard left for England to stop his brother Bad King John (“Lackland”) from usurping him.
On his way back to England, Richard could not go through France because John had come to an agreement with Philip of France that closed French harbours to him. He instead came via the Adriatic and was making his way overland when he was captured by Leopold near Vienna on 20th December 1192. Stories of his capture vary, but the most plausible version of events seems to me to centre on coins. Richard was disguised as a merchant and sent his serving boy to the market to buy provisions, but gave him coins minted in Syria that did not fail to attract attention in an Austrian village! It would be the same as paying with a £50 note in the Woking Weatherspoons today – people would talk. The coin caused Leopold’s men to pay particular attention to the boy, who showed up in the market a couple of days later with Richard’s ornate and expensive gloves – at which point he was taken and tortured to reveal Richard’s location in a nearby tavern.
Leopold was quite rightly excommunicated for this kidnapping by Pope Celestine III (imprisoning a crusader really did cross the line in the twelfth century) but he didn’t seem that bothered. He first imprisoned Richard in Dürnstein Castle and then sold him to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI (who was also excommunicated).
Henry demanded a ransom for 150,000 marks for the release of Richard. This is something in the region of two billion quid at today’s prices but that figure doesn’t quite convey the magnitude of the ransom. Sending two billion quid from London to Vienna can be done today with a transit van full of 500 euro notes, but in 1193, the problem of moving something like twice the total annual income of the English Crown across a thousand miles of warring European principalities took some amazing logistics. This was a unique episode in English history and had far-reaching consequences. In 2006 my good friend David Boyle, author of the brilliant “Blondel’s Song: The Capture, Imprisonment and Ransom of Richard the Lionheart”, gave a superb talk on this early experiment in pan-European cross-border multi-currency funds transfer at the Digital Money Forum in London and his observations on the unpredictable consequences on the transition from a feudal to a money economy were fascinating.
In particular, without the use of coins, no such ransom would have been possible. David writes about the profound impact of this ransom on English government, noting that while the “accounts may have long since disappeared – and may even have been destroyed by those who felt embarrassed by the public record of their generosity to Richard when his brother was on the throne” this episode marked the beginning of the shift from feudal payments to the very start of taxing income.
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It would be impossible to imagine collecting taxes on such a massive scale (or, indeed, at all) in many modern countries, so the feat of collecting such a large sum of money from a medieval economy should not be underestimated. It took an inventive series of taxes, enforced and collected, to get the King back. In fact “both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes”. Scutage was the tax paid by knights to get out of military service. Carucage was the land tax.
The authorities had imposed carucage on anyone with property worth more than ten shillings. But this didn’t bring in the anticipated revenue, so later on it was turned into a full-blown land tax. It was first imposed in 1194 and fell upon landowners at an initial rate of two shillings per 100 acres. After Richard died in 1199 to be succeeded by John, who my friend Dominic Frisby in his book “Daylight Robbery: How tax shaped our past and will change our future” rightly called “one of the most infamous tax collectors in history”. John raised scutage and carucage many times and these taxes became one of the main causes of the discontent leading to the Magna Carta in 1215. This seminal document owes its existence not only to taxes, of course, but to wider a economic crisis: bad harvests, shortage of coin—as we will see—inflation, disruption of trade and a general decline in productivity under John.
(If you are wondering why people refer to Bad King John, even Graham Seel’s 2012 book “King John: An Underrated King” explains that a contemporary chronicle “The History of William Marshall”, otherwise known as England’s greatest knight, calls John faithless, unwarlike, unwise, mean, nasty and suspicious. His critics called him far worse.)
Through scutage, carucage and other taxes, the English gathered several tons of silver. David says twenty tons, but in Alison Weir’s “Eleanor of Acquitaine: By the Wrath of God, Queen of England“, the figure implied is considerably higher, more like fifty tons. The money was brought to London in the form of treasure (melted down to form ingots) and coins, which were all silver in those days.
(My 1962 copy of “Money in Britain” says that there were no continuously minted gold coins in England until the reign of Henry III (1216-72). The coins for the ransom must have been mainly in the form of the silver pennies brought into existence under Richard’s father, Henry II. His mint master, Isaac the Jew, set the 92.5 percent pure silver standard which became known as the “the ancient right standard of England” and continued until the 1920s! In 1257 the twenty penny, that was one-twelfth of a pound Sterling, gold coin was struck. This didn’t last very long and in 1265 it was replaced with a twenty four penny “florin” worth one-tenth of a pound. There were still florin coins when I was a kid, as they were minted until 1967, but they didn’t have the same economic impact as Henry III’s florin which was worth a couple of hundred quid at today’s
Under Queen Eleanor’s direction, the growing piles of cash were stashed in the crypt of St. Paul’s, which was then the administrative centre of London. It took a long time to build the ransom there, since the Faster Payment System of the day was a horse and cart. When the Emporer’s men popped in in 1193 to see how things were coming along — checking out the tally sticks and the pipe rolls to assess the rate of collection and to take delivery of the first tranche of the ransom — there were only about fifteen tons of silver. This was loaded onto a fleet of ships and sent off to Henry. The collection continued and at the end of the year, on 20th December 1193, Queen Eleanor set off with the rest of the cash, arriving at Henry’s court on 17th January, so it only took three weeks.
The money was transported to Henry under a simple pre-PSD2 regulatory structure, known as the “King’s Peril”, which meant that were the money to have been lost along the way, it was an English problem. Until the money was actually in Henry’s hands then it was Richard’s responsibility, even in Henry’s lands. Eleanor made it, and handed the balance of the ransom over on 4th February and Richard was released. He landed back in England on 13th March 1194, bringing this incredible episode in English history to an end and the only records of the greatest tax raid in English history that remained were the tally sticks.
Why did they send atoms, rather than bits about atoms? They had no alternative. The bill of exchange, the standard cross-border payment instrument in these pre-Bitcoin times, was a century away. And in any case, bills of exchange were not cheap. Peter Spufford in his magnificent Power and Profit, the Merchant in Medieval Europe, talks about the “specie point” at which it became cheaper to transport bullion than to buy a bill of exchange! And while bills of exchange boosted the money supply for commerce, they did not replace bullion, as sooner or later imbalances would need to be settled and so the wagon trains of gold and silver would rumble between trading centres.
The colossal ransom paid for Richard had some considerable consequences. The impact on Austria remains to this day. Leopold’s share of the ransom was used to build the new city walls of Vienna as well as to found the towns of Wiener Neustadt and Friedberg in Styria. It was also used to found the Austrian mint in 1194 to make coins from the silver handed over. This had an impact across central Europe as other rulers began to centralise their coinage too and local currencies began to vanish. Henry VI also created a new silver coinage (in Sicily).
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The impact back in England was also long lasting, and for one group of people in particular it was catastrophic. The Jews who, though few in number, were central to the economic life of England. This is why, as David Carpenter’s detailed commentary on the Magna Carta (released on the 800th anniversary in 2015) makes clear, there a several references to them in the Great Charter itself.
Throughout this period, the Jewish community in England were called upon to extend huge loans to the Crown to add to the ransom. This had a terrible consequence, because in order to provide these loans they had to call in their loans to other people — minor aristocrats, farmers, business people and so on — which caused great resentment against their community rather than the King (which was, of course, why it was done). In March 1194 a conference of Jewish financiers was organised in Northampton and representatives from major cities attended, other than (for example) York and Bury St. Edmunds, since the Jews in those places had already been slaughtered in the pogroms of 1190.
(These were widespread. Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews, for example, tells how “all the Jews who were found in their own houses in Norwich were slaughtered”.)
The purpose of the 1194 conference was to work out how much more the Jews could contribute to the ransom, as indeed they were called on to do. Under Richard, there had been an inquiry into the pogroms and Christian-Jewish financial supervision committees created. David says these were partly an early attempt at banking regulation and partly to protect the Jewish community in return for its considerable contributions to the ransom. Christopher Dyer explores this further in Making a Living in the Middle Ages—The People of Britain 850-1520, saying that the Jews were the Crown’s mechanism for indirectly taxing landowners. The heavy taxes imposed on the Jewish community were passed on in interest rates, so that the common borrowers would blame the Jews rather than government spending for their reduced circumstances. Having come to England after the Norman conquest as moneychangers and bullion dealers, England’s Jews were reduced by a combination of taxation and murder until they were eventually expelled in 1290.
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A side effect of the silver exodus form England was that while local currencies circulated to substitute for the missing pennies for a while, the money literally ran out. After all, a quarter of England’s coinage had vanished (which David calls a “deflationary shock that England needed”), but somehow commerce continued. In the absence of a medium of exchange. Spufford reminds us that “Only in the short run did political, or occasionally religious, actions have greater effects than trade balances on the large-scale movement of silver and gold, coined and uncoined”.
It is an astonishing testament to England’s medieval wealth and administration that the very, very high level of taxation necessary to pay that (literally) King’s Ransom could be imposed and collected, yet in the long run the economy survived and grew."

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Thank you for the history share, David. I have visited many of these places and particularly enjoy Trifels castle.

Isn't it strange how much of English History is mostly German (and French)? I don't know if folks realize what exactly a "King's Ransom" meant in the Middle Ages...for most of the years between a thousand and fourteen hundred- 2 pounds a year was about average for a common worker. Skilled folks, like Stone Mason's might go as high as six or eight pounds. For Ten to twelve pounds you could build a cottage! So Imagine what One hundred thousand pounds meant - it was truly a "King's Ransom."