MATTHEW OF WESTMDTSTEB. A.D . 1192. him to obtain that kingdom from Tancred. Secondly, he advanced a charge in the matter of the king of Cyprus, who was united to him by relationship, urging that he had unjustly deposed him from his sovereignty, and thrown him into prison, and had violently seized on his territories and treasures, and had sold the island to a stranger. And afterwards he accused him of the death of the marquis of Montserrat, his heir, as if it had been owing to his treachery that the marquis was slain by the assassins, whom he had also sent to slay his superior lord, the king of France, to whom also he had preserved no fidelity, as he ought to have done, in their common pilgrimage, though such fidelity had been confirmed by each one to the other by a mutual oath. Next, he complained that he had thrown the standard of the duke of Austria, his kinsman, while fighting in the Holy Land in the cause of God, into a common sewer, to show his contempt for the duke, and that he had insulted his Teutonic knights by word and action. To all these charges king Richard eloquently and distinctly replied, taking the charges in their regular order, in such a manner that he appeared to all his hearers to have completely exculpated himself. Moreover, he sent an imperial embassy to the Old Man of the Mountain, requiring him and his assassins to write a letter which should prove his innocence of the crime with which he was charged ^ and such a letter was sent the following year. And so the fame of the king was cleared before all men with respect to all the accusations that had been brought against him, and from that time forth the emperor began to deal more mildly with him ; and his ransom was taxed at a hundred and forty thousand marks of silver of the standard of Cologne. To pay which, all the chalices in England, and a fourth part of aie revenues of the realm, as I have said before, went into the possession of foreigners to procure the king's liberation, which was a ruin and irreparable loss to England. But still, for the redemption of such. a great king, it appeared slight to the loyal subjects of the kingdom, and to the king's friends. But count John, the brother of king Richard, believing that king Richard would never be released, but rather that all the money paid for his ransom would be lost as well as the king himself, entered into a treaty of friendship with the king of France, to the injury of the king, his brother. For he knew that Philip hated him, and he designed to be crowned himself, but he was hindered by the virtue of