A ll along, the Doctor knows that Richard’s Third Crusade will fail. “Even now his armies are marching on a campaign that he can never win,” he says in the final episode – after telling Vicki how the so-called ‘Lion’ will see Jerusalem, but “Only from afar. He won’t be able to capture it…”
On 2 September 1192 – having twice been forced to retreat from the Holy City, and with his brother John threatening to usurp him at home – Richard indeed signed the Treaty of Jaffa and withdrew from the Holy Land.
So ended the Lionheart’s ill-fated foreign adventure. Neither Richard nor his sister would live to see the dawn of the 13th century. Richard would die of gangrene caused by an accidental injury, aged just 44, and Joanna (usually ‘Joan’) died in childbirth less than six months later, aged just 33. The mighty Saladin, first Sultan of Egypt and Syria, fell to a fever in March 1193, not long after Richard’s retreat. Saphadin outlived them all, ruling as Sultan of Egypt from 1200 to his death in 1218, aged 73.