A History of the Crusades-Vol 3 (13 page)

On 10 September 1197 his troops assembled
in the palace courtyard; and Henry reviewed them from the window of an upper
gallery. At that moment envoys from the Pisan colony entered the room. Henry
turned to greet them, then, forgetting where he was, stepped backward through
the open window. His little dwarf, Scarlet, was standing by him and grabbed at
his clothes. But Henry was a heavy man and Scarlet very light. They crashed
together on to the pavement below and were killed.

1198: Marriage of Isabella and Amalric

The sudden elimination of Henry of
Champagne threw the whole kingdom into consternation. He had been very popular.
Though a man of no outstanding natural gifts, he had by his tact, his
perseverance and his reliance on good advisers proved himself a capable ruler,
ready to learn from experience. He had played a useful part in ensuring the
continuance of the kingdom. But the barons could not afford to waste time on
grief. A new ruler must be found quickly, to deal with the Saracen war and the
German Crusade and all the regular problems of government. Henry’s widow,
Princess Isabella, was too utterly distraught by her bereavement to take
charge; but she was the pivotal figure, as heiress of the royal line. Of her
children by Henry two little girls, Alice and Philippa, survived. Her daughter
by Conrad, Maria of Montferrat, known from her father’s rank as La Marquise,
was only five years old. It was clear that Isabella must remarry. But the
barons, while acknowledging her position as heiress, considered it their
business to choose her next husband. Unfortunately they could not agree on a
suitable candidate. Hugh of Tiberias and his friends proposed his brother
Ralph. His family, the house of Falconberg of St Omer, was one of the most
distinguished in the kingdom. But it was poor; it had lost its lands in Galilee
to the Moslems; and Ralph was a younger son. It was widely felt that he lacked
sufficient wealth and prestige. In particular, the Military Orders opposed him.
While the debate went on, news came that Jaffa had fallen without a struggle.
The Duke of Brabant had set out for its relief. Now he turned back to Acre and
took charge of the government. A few days later, on 20 September, Conrad of
Mainz and the German leaders arrived from Cyprus. Conrad, as a prelate of the
Western Empire and confidant of the Emperor, and friend, as well, of the future
Pope, Innocent III, was a man of immense authority. When he suggested that the
throne should be offered to King Amalric of Cyprus, there was no opposition,
except from the Patriarch, Aymar the Monk, whose own clergy would not support
him. It seemed an excellent choice. Amalric’s first wife, Eschiva of Ibelin,
had recently died; he was free to marry Isabella. Though many of the Syrian
barons could not quite forget that he was a Lusignan, he had ostentatiously
abandoned any partisan policy, and he had shown himself a far abler man than
his younger brother Guy. His election pleased the Pope, to whom it seemed wise
to combine the Latin East under one chief. But the Chancellor Conrad’s motive
was subtler. Amalric owed his Cypriot crown to the Emperor Henry, whose vassal
he had become. As King of Jerusalem would he not therefore bring his new
kingdom under imperial suzerainty? Amalric himself hesitated a little. It was
not till January 1198 that he came to Acre. On the morrow of his arrival he was
married to Princess Isabella; and a few days later the Patriarch crowned them
King and Queen of Jerusalem.

The union of the crowns was not to be as
complete as the Pope or the Imperialists had hoped. Amalric made it clear from
the outset that the two kingdoms were to be administered separately and that no
Cypriot money was to be spent on the defence of the mainland. He himself was
only a personal link between them. Cyprus was a hereditary kingdom; and his
heir there was his son Hugh. In the kingdom of Jerusalem hereditary right was
admitted by public sentiment, but the High Court preserved its claim to elect
to the throne. There Amalric owed his position to his wife. If he died she
might remarry, and the new husband be accepted as king. And her heir was her
daughter, Maria of Montferrat. Even if she bore Amalric a son it was doubtful
whether the child of a fourth marriage could claim precedence over a child of
the second. In fact their surviving children were two daughters, Sibylla and
Melisende.

Though he regarded himself as little more
than regent, Amalric was an able and active ruler. He persuaded the High Court
to join him in a revision of the constitution, in order that the royal rights
should be clearly defined. In particular he made a point of consulting Ralph of
Tiberias, his rival for the throne, whom, we are told, he esteemed but did not
like. Ralph was celebrated for his legal knowledge, and it was natural that he
should be asked to edit the
Livre au Roi,
as the new edition of the Laws
was called. But Amalric feared that Ralph’s learning might be used against him.
In March 1198, when the Court was riding through the orchards round Tyre, four
German horsemen galloped up to the King and fell on him. He was rescued without
serious hurt. His assailants refused to say on whose behalf they were acting;
but Amalric announced that Ralph was guilty and sentenced him to banishment.
Ralph, as was his right, demanded trial by his peers; and John of Ibelin, the
Queen’s half-brother, persuaded the King that he must submit the case to the
High Court; which found that the King had done wrong in banishing Ralph without
a hearing. The matter was only resolved when, probably owing to the tactful
intervention of John of Ibelin, Ralph himself announced that as he had lost the
King’s good-will he would go into voluntary exile, and retired to Tripoli. The
episode had shown the barons that the King could not be opposed with impunity,
but it had shown the King that he must abide by the constitution.

His foreign policy was vigorous and
flexible. In October 1197, before he had accepted the throne, he had helped
Henry of Brabant to take advantage of the Moslem concentration at Jaffa by
sending a sudden expedition, composed of Germans and Brabancons, under Henry’s
leadership, to recover Sidon and Beirut. Sidon had already been demolished by
the Moslems, who had thought it untenable. When the Christians arrived there,
they found the town a mass of ruins. The pirate-emir Usama at Beirut, finding
that al-Adil was sending him no aid, decided that he would destroy his town.
But he started too late. When Henry and his troops came up, they found the
walls dismantled, so that they could easily enter them, but the bulk of the
town was intact and soon repaired. Beirut was given as a fief to the Queen’s half-brother,
John of Ibelin. With Jebail already restored to its Christian lords, the
kingdom once again marched with the county of Tripoli. But the coast round
Sidon was not yet entirely cleared of the enemy, who remained in possession of
half the suburbs.

1197: The German Crusade of 1197

Encouraged by their success at Beirut, the
German Crusaders, with the Archbishop at their head, planned next to march on
Jerusalem. The Syrian barons, who had hoped to restore peace with al-Adil on
the basis of ceding Jaffa and keeping Beirut, tried vainly to dissuade them. In
November 1197 the Germans entered Galilee and laid siege to the great fortress
of Toron. So vigorous was their first assault that the Moslem garrison soon
offered to abandon the castle, with the five hundred Christian prisoners lying
in its dungeons, if the defenders could be assured of their lives and personal
possessions. But the Archbishop Conrad insisted on unconditional surrender; and
the Frankish barons, eager to make friends with al-Adil and fearing that a
massacre might provoke a Moslem
jihad;
sent to warn the Sultan that the
Germans were not wont to spare lives. The defence continued with renewed
vigour; and al-Adil persuaded his nephew al-Aziz to send an army from Egypt to
deal with the invaders. The Germans began to grow weary and slacken their
efforts. Meanwhile news had come to Acre that the Emperor Henry had died in
September. Many of the leaders were therefore anxious to return home. And when
news followed of a civil war in Germany, Conrad and his colleagues decided to
abandon the siege. On 2 February 1198 the Egyptian army approached from the
south. The German rank and file was ready to do battle, when suddenly a rumour
went round that the Chancellor and the great lords had fled. There was a
general panic. The whole army never paused in its flight till it had reached
the safety of Tyre. A few days later it began to embark on its return journey
to Europe. The whole Crusade had been a fiasco and had done nothing to restore
German prestige. It had, however, helped to recover Beirut for the Franks; and
it left a permanent institution behind in the organization of the Teutonic
Knights.

The older Military Orders, though they
were officially international, had recruited few German members. At the time of
the Third Crusade some merchants of Bremen and Lubeck organized a hospice for
Germans at Acre on the lines of the Hospital of St John. It was dedicated to
the Virgin, and it saw to the care of German pilgrims. The arrival of the
German expeditions in 1197 inevitably increased its importance. When a number
of Crusading knights determined not to return at once to Germany, the
organization copied the example of the Hospital of St John a century before. It
incorporated these knights, and in 1198 received recognition from the King and
from the Pope as a Military Order. It is probable that the Chancellor Conrad
was aware that a purely German Order might be of value in furthering
imperialistic designs and himself was largely responsible for its inception. It
was soon endowed with rich estates in Germany and began to acquire castles in
Syria. Its first possession was the tower over the Gate of St Nicholas at Acre,
granted by Amalric on condition that the knights surrendered it back at the
King’s command. Soon afterwards they purchased the castle of Montfort, which
they renamed Starkenberg, on the hills dominating the Ladder of Tyre. The
Order, like those-of the Temple and the Hospital, provided soldiers for the
defence of the Frankish East but did not facilitate the government of the
kingdom.

As soon as the German Crusaders had gone,
Amalric opened negotiations with al-Adil. Al-Aziz had returned quickly to
Egypt; and al-Adil, eager to secure the whole Ayubite inheritance, had no wish
to quarrel with the Franks. On 1 July 1198, a treaty was signed leaving him in
possession of Jaffa and the Franks in possession of Jebail and Beirut, and
dividing Sidon between them. It was to last for five years and eight months.
The settlement proved useful to al-Adil, for it left him free, on al-Aziz’s
death in November, to intervene in Egypt and annex the late Sultan’s lands. His
increased power made Amalric all the more determined to keep the peace with
him, the more so as there was trouble again at Antioch.

1197: The Succession to Antioch

Bohemond III had attended the siege of
Beirut, and on his return had planned to attack Jabala and Lattakieh. But he
had to hurry home. The happy arrangement by which Cilicia and Antioch were to
be united in the persons of his son Raymond and his Armenian bride broke down
when Raymond suddenly died early in 1197. He left an infant son,
Raymond-Roupen, who was heir to Antioch by hereditary right. But Bohemond III
was already close on sixty, and unlikely to survive till his grandson came of
age. There was every danger of a minority and a regency dominated by the boy’s
Armenian kin. Bohemond sent the widow Alice back with her infant son to
Armenia, perhaps because he planned that one of Sibylla’s sons should succeed,
perhaps because he thought that they would be safer there. It was about the
time of Leo’s coronation; and Conrad of Mainz, eager to secure the throne of
Antioch for one of his master’s vassals, thus complementing his work at Acre,
hastened from Sis to Antioch, where he obliged Bohemond to summon his barons
and make them swear to uphold Raymond-Roupen’s succession.

Conrad would have done better to have gone
to Tripoli. Bohemond, Count of Tripoli, Bohemond III’s second son, was a young
man of great ambition and few scruples, well versed in the law and able to find
an argument to justify his most outrageous actions. He was no friend of the
Church. He had already supported the Pisans, no doubt for money, in a dispute
over some lands with the Bishop of Tripoli; and when the Bishop, Peter of
Angouleme, was appointed Patriarch of Antioch and appointed a successor to his
see of Tripoli with uncanonical haste, the Pope accepted his excuse that with a
ruler like Bohemond the Church could not afford the risk of delay. Bohemond was
determined to secure the succession to Antioch, and at once refused to
acknowledge the validity of the oath sworn in favour of Raymond-Roupen. He
needed allies. The Templars, furious at Leo’s retention of Baghras, gladly
joined him. The Hospitallers, though never very eager to work with the
Templars, were won over by judicious grants. The Pisans and Genoese were bribed
with trade concessions. Most important, the Commune of Antioch itself was
frightened of the Armenians and hostile to any action taken by the barons. At
the end of 1198 Bohemond of Tripoli appeared suddenly in Antioch, ejected his
father and induced the Commune to take an oath of allegiance to himself.

But Leo had one formidable ally, Pope
Innocent III. Whatever doubts the Papacy might have felt about the sincerity of
the submission of the Armenian Church to Rome, Innocent was unwilling to
alienate his new vassals. Cordially dutiful messages and requests poured into
Rome from Leo and his Catholicus; and they could not be ignored. Owing,
probably, to the opposition of the Church, the young Bohemond allowed his
father back to Antioch and himself returned to Tripoli; but somehow he managed
to reconcile himself with the old Prince, who veered round to his side.
Meanwhile the Templars brought all their influence to bear at Rome. But Leo
ignored hints from the Church that he should restore Baghras to the Order; for
Baghras was strategically essential to him if he were ever to control Antioch.
He invited old Prince Bohemond and the Patriarch Peter to discuss the whole
question; but his intransigence drove even the Patriarch over to Bohemond of
Tripoli’s side. The Church in Antioch joined the Commune and the Orders in
opposing the Armenian succession. When Bohemond III died in April 1201,
Bohemond of Tripoli had no difficulty in establishing himself in the city. But
many of the nobility, mindful of their oath and fearful of Bohemond’s
autocratic tastes, fled to Leo’s court at Sis.