Death of a duke, a king, and a sad queen

On August 25, 1192, Richard’s nemesis, the Duke of Burgundy, died at Acre after a short illness. Richard himself was lying gravely ill at Jaffa, stricken with another malarial attack after his remarkable victories on August 1st and 4th. He came close to dying—at one point, the Saracen chronicler Baha al-Din reported a rumor that he had died—but when he was told of Burgundy’s death, he was said to have taken a turn for the better. Of course the French then put it about that he’d poisoned Burgundy. Heinrich threw a laundry list of \accusations against Richard at his trial before the Imperial Diet at Speyer, but he did not raise the poison charge; that was too much even for Heinrich. The mortality rate for crusaders was very high, and most of them died of illness, not on the field of battle. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Count of Flanders, Heinrich’s brother Friedrich, the Count of Perche (Jaufre’s father) among the highborn victims, just to name a few.
The only French king to be canonized as a saint, Louis IX, grandson of Philippe Capet, also died on August 25th, in 1270 at Tunis, on his second crusading attempt.
And on August 25, 1482, Marguerite d’Anjou’s life came to a sad end, at age 52. I was not able to dramatize her death scene; by that point, Sunne was over 900 pages. But I did not forget her.
Sunne, page 860.
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On the same day that Edward learned Berwick Castle had surrendered to Richard, Marguerite d’Anjou was breathing her last in the modest chateau of Dampierre in her native Anjou. Her death came eleven years after the battle of Tewkesbury, came for her eleven years too late, and was the occasion for little comment, either in England or in France. Upon hearing of her death, the French king at once wrote and demanded that all her dogs be sent to him. He was her heir, he said, and the dogs were all he’d be likely to get from her estate.
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A man known as the Universal Spider was not much given to sentiment, but Louis seems to have genuinely liked dogs.