Entry taken from the book The Plantagenets
Contrary to what literature and cinema have told us, John the Landless was a much more important king in the history of England than his famous older brother Richard the Heart of Lion. John not only reigned longer and with more presence and dedication to English affairs than Richard, but all the English kings until almost three hundred years later were descendants of John Sin Tierra (Lionheart died without offspring).
Richard was the prototype medieval king who gained his fame by successfully fighting for the Plantagenet family's possessions in France and less successfully in the Holy Land, where he won several victories but failed to win. managed to reconquer Jerusalem from Saladin's troops. However, Richard was probably the least English of the kings of England. Of the ten years of his reign (1189-1199) he only spent six months in the country and always saw England as a source of income to squeeze to finance his contests, whether in France or in the Holy Land.
The episode of Richard's captivity in Germany after the Crusades and his return to England after paying a huge ransom is well known thanks to stories like Robin Hood or Ivanhoe . but, once his wayward brother Juan was brought to heel, Ricardo's stay on English soil after his release was very brief; he soon returned to the continent to continue his fight for his possessions in France. In one of those actions, the siege of Châlus-Chabrol castle, an arrow from the defenders hit him and as a result of his wounds Richard died on April 6, 1199.
Upon his death, having no offspring, his brother Juan sin Tierra succeeded him. The fact that John was a more significant king in English history than his brother Richard's does not imply that he was a good king. The first years of his reign were spent almost entirely on French territory and he ended up losing almost all the Plantagenet possessions on Gallic soil, except for Gascony. In addition, disputes over the family inheritance with his nephew Arthur of Brittany ended abruptly when the boy disappeared forever while he was a prisoner of John, unanimously considered responsible for the murder of Arthur of Brittany.
From 1205 John focused his reigned in England, where he faced the two greatest powers of the State in addition to his own:the clergy and the nobles. And in both contests, as had happened in France, he was defeated.
His dispute with the Church began with his opposition to the candidate chosen by it for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, even proposing his own candidate and vetoing the suggested by the pope. Juan did not flinch when Pope Innocent III declared the country under interdict and excommunicated the monarch himself. Moreover, at first he took advantage of the inactivity of the clergy to dispossess the Church of many of its assets, but finally the threat that any European monarch could invade England with the papal blessing, forced him to bow to Rome and submit to its demands.
Juan encountered difficulties with the nobility and had disagreements for two fundamental reasons:the assumption by the monarch of functions of the administration of justice that the lords and barons had been exercising in their lands and the monarch's desire to collect money that led him to fleece fines and payments of rights to many of his nobles whom he came to persecute through Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Curiously, as a consequence, John was the Plantagenet monarch who exercised the greatest dominion over the British Isles, in compensation for his losses on the continent.
In 1214 John felt strong enough to try to recover the lost possessions in France; however, the expedition was a disaster and culminated in an English defeat at the Battle of Bouvines. Juan had to return to England with his fame and prestige on the ground. This was used by his nobles to openly rebel against him. The rebels came to take London and after much back and forth John and his nobles reached a compromise that was sealed on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede; this document, called the Magna Carta, is considered a milestone in English history, due to the limitation it established on the absolute powers that the Plantagenet monarchs were accustomed to exercising.
Juan Sin Tierra dedicated the rest of his life to trying to annul the commitments assumed in Magna Carta, with the support of Pope Innocent III who declared that it was a null document and threatened to excommunicate whoever applied it. For its part, the rebellious nobility came to ask for help from the traditional enemy of England, France, who sent an army under the command of the dauphin Luis. However, Juan's struggle was brief, since on the night of October 18, 1216, he died, leaving a difficult inheritance to his ten-year-old son, Henry III... but that's another story.
To conclude, as Dan Jones says in his book The Plantagenets, which has served as the basis for writing this post, Juan was probably neither more cruel nor more greedy than his father Henry II or his brother Richard I, but he lacked the magnetic charisma of both, and above all, unlike them, he ended up failing in everything he tried.