A History of the Crusades-Vol 2 (53 page)

The Lady Agnes never liked the relatives of her
various husbands and disapproved of the Ibelins. Some years before a knight
from Poitou, Amalric, second son of the Count of Lusignan, had arrived in
Palestine. He was a good soldier; and on Humphrey of Toron’s death he was
appointed Constable. About the same time he married Baldwin of Ibelin’s
daughter Eschiva. He was also Agnes’s lover. He had in France a young brother
called Guy. With Agnes’s backing he began to tell Sibylla of the extraordinary
good looks and charm of this youth till at last she begged him to bring him out
to Palestine. While Baldwin was at Constantinople Amalric hurried home to fetch
Guy, and to prepare him for the part that he was to play. Sibylla found him as
handsome as she had been told and announced that she intended to marry him. The
King, her brother, protested in vain; for Guy, as anyone could see, was a weak
and foolish boy. The Palestinian barons were furious to realize that they might
have as their future king this youngest son of a petty French noble whose only
distinction was his descent from the water-fairy Melusine. But Agnes and
Sibylla pestered the sick weary King till he gave his consent. At Easter 1180
Guy was married to Sibylla and was enfeoffed with the counties of Jaffa and
Ascalon.

1180: The
Patriarch Heraclius

For political as well as for personal reasons
the Ibelins were disgusted, and the breach between them and the Courtenays,
supported by Reynald of Chatillon, grew greater. In October 1180 the King tried
to bring them together by betrothing his half-sister Isabella to Humphrey IV of
Toron. Isabella was Balian of Ibelin’s stepdaughter and Humphrey Reynald of
Chatillon’s stepson. Humphrey was, moreover, as grandson and heir of the great
Constable and heir-apparent through his mother of the fief of Oultrejourdain,
the most eligible of the local nobility, whom the marriage might be expected to
gratify. Owing to the youth of the Princess, who was only eight, the actual
ceremony was postponed for three years. But the betrothal did no good. A few
days later the Courtenays showed their power in the appointment of a new Patriarch.
The Patriarch Amalric died on 6 October. On 16 October the Chapter of
Jerusalem, under pressure from the Lady Agnes, elected as his successor
Heraclius, Archbishop of Caesarea. He was a barely literate priest from the
Auvergne whose good looks Agnes had found irresistible; and her favour had
procured his steady advancement. His present mistress was the wife of a draper
at Nablus, Paschia de Riveri, who was soon to be known throughout the realm as
Madame la Patriarchesse. William of Tyre came bustling from his diocese to try
to prevent the election, but in vain. The electors named him as their second
choice; but the King, at his mother’s bidding, confirmed the appointment of
Heraclius.

Power was now firmly in the hands of the
Courtenays and the Lusignans and their allies, Reynald of Chatillon and the new
Patriarch. In April 1181 they struck at William of Tyre, who, as the King’s old
tutor, was dangerous to them. On a trivial excuse Heraclius excommunicated him.
After fruitless attempts to heal the breach, William left in 1182 or 1183 for
Rome, to plead his cause at the papal Court. He stayed on there; and there he
died, poisoned, men said, by an emissary sent by the Patriarch.
Raymond
of Tripoli was the next to be attacked. When early in 1182 he prepared to cross
from his county into his wife’s territory of Galilee, the King’s officers
forbade him to enter the kingdom; for Agnes and her brother Joscelin had
persuaded Baldwin that he was plotting against the Crown. Only after furious
protests from the barons of the kingdom would Baldwin relent. He reluctantly
consented to see Raymond, who convinced him of his innocence.

1180-2: The
Reign of Alexius II

The intrigues round the dying leper King would
have been less dangerous had not the foreign situation been critical. On 24
September 1180, the Franks lost their most powerful ally, when the Emperor
Manuel died at Constantinople. He had genuinely liked them and had genuinely
worked for their benefit, except when it had clashed with the interests of his
Empire. He had been a brilliant and impressive man, but not a great Emperor;
for his ambition to dominate Christendom had led him into adventures that the
Empire could no longer afford. His troops had been sent into Italy and into
Hungary when they were needed on the Anatolian frontier or in the Balkans. He
had treated his treasure-chest as though it were inexhaustible. The disaster at
Myriocephalum was a deadly blow to his over-strained army; and in a long series
of commercial concessions made to the Italian cities in return for immediate
diplomatic advantages he had sapped the economic life of his subjects; and in
consequence the Imperial treasury would never be full again. The splendour of
his Court had dazzled the world into the belief that the Empire was greater
than in fact it had become; and, had he lived longer, his fleet and his gold
might yet have been of value to the Franks. His personality had held the Empire
together; but with his death its decline became evident. He had fought against
death, determinedly clinging to prophecies that offered him fourteen more years
of life, and he made no effort to arrange for the regency that his son would
need.

The new Emperor, Alexius II, was aged eleven.
According to the old-established precedent the Empress-Mother took over the
regency. But the Empress Maria was a Latin from Antioch, the first Latin to be
ruler of the Empire, and as a Latin she was disliked by the people of
Constantinople. Manuel’s love for the Latins had long been resented. The long
sequence of ecclesiastical wrangles at Antioch had added to the bitterness of
the Byzantines. The tumultuous passage of the Crusaders through imperial
territory had never been forgotten, and there were memories of the massacres of
Cyprus, and massacres by Venetians, Pisans and Genoese. Most hated of all were
the Italian merchants who strutted through Constantinople, complacent in their
control of the Empire’s trade, obtained, often, by attacks on peaceful citizens
in the provinces. The Empress took as her adviser and, it was thought, as her
lover, a nephew of her husband, the Protosebastus Alexius Comnenus, the uncle
of Queen Maria of Jerusalem. He was unpopular and unwise. Together they leaned
on the Latin element and especially on the Italian merchants. The opposition to
the Empress was led by her stepdaughter, the Porphyrogennete Maria and her
husband Rainier of Montferrat. Their plot to murder the favourite failed; but
when they took refuge in the Church of St Sophia he further offended the
populace by attempting to profane the sanctuary. The Empress was forced to
pardon the conspirators; but in her insecurity she begged her brother-in-law,
Bela III of Hungary, to come to her rescue. Her husband’s cousin, Andronicus
Comnenus, forgiven after his career of seduction in the East, was now living in
retirement in Pontus. His compatriots remembered his gallantry and glamour; and
when his friends put him forward as a national leader there was a ready
response. In August 1182 he marched across Anatolia. The few troops that did
not rally to him were easily defeated. Soon the Empress was left in
Constantinople with only the Latins to support her. As Andronicus approached
the Bosphorus the people of Constantinople suddenly fell on all the Latins in
the city. Latin arrogance had provoked the massacre, but its horrible course
shocked many of the most patriotic of the Byzantines. Only a few Italian
merchants survived. They took to their ships and sailed westward, raiding the
coasts that they passed. The road to Constantinople was open to Andronicus.

His first action was to eliminate his rivals.
The Protosebastus was imprisoned and cruelly blinded. The Porphyrogennete Maria
and her husband suffered mysterious deaths. Then the Empress was condemned to
be strangled and her young son was forced himself to sign the warrant.
Andronicus became joint-Emperor; then, two months later, in November 1182, the
boy Alexius II himself was murdered, and Andronicus, at the age of sixty-two,
married his widow, the twelve-year-old Agnes of France.

1185: The Fall
of Andronicus Comnenus

Apart from these murders Andronicus began his
reign well. He purged the civil service of its corrupt and supernumerary
members; he insisted on the strict administration of justice; he forced the
rich to pay their taxes and he protected the poor against exploitation. Never
for centuries had the provinces been so well governed. But Andronicus was
frightened, with good cause. Many of his kin were jealous of him and the
aristocracy resented his policy; and foreign affairs were menacing. He realized
the dreadful impression made in the West by the massacre of 1182 and hastened
not only to make a treaty with Venice in which he promised a yearly indemnity
as compensation for Venetian losses, but he also sought to placate the Pope by building
a church for the Latin rite in the capital; and he encouraged western merchants
to return. But the main enemies of Byzantium were the Hohenstaufen Emperor and
the King of Sicily; and in 1184 an ominous marriage took place between the
Emperor Frederick’s son Henry and William II’s sister and heiress, Constance.
Knowing that the Sicilians were certain to attack him soon, Andronicus wished
to be sure of his eastern frontier. He saw that Saladin was in the ascendant
there; so, entirely reversing Manuel’s policy, he made a treaty with Saladin,
giving him a free hand against the Franks in return for his alliance against
the Seldjuks. It seems that details of the divisions of future conquests and
spheres of influence were planned. But the treaty came to nothing; for
Andronicus, fearful for his position at Constantinople, began to take
repressive measures that increased in ferocity till no one in the capital felt
safe. Not only did he strike at the aristocracy, but even merchants and humble
workmen were arrested by his police on the flimsiest suspicion of conspiracy,
and were blinded or sent to the scaffold. When in August 1185 a Sicilian army
landed in Epirus and marched on Thessalonica, Andronicus panicked. His
wholesale arrests and executions drove the populace into revolt; which broke
out when an elderly and inoffensive cousin of the Emperor’s, Isaac Angelus,
succeeded in escaping from his jailers to the altar of St Sophia and appealed
from there for help. Even his own bodyguard deserted Andronicus. He tried in
vain to flee across to Asia, but he was captured and paraded round the city on
a mangy camel, then tortured and torn to death by the furious mob. Isaac
Angelus was proclaimed Emperor. He restored some sort of order and made a
humiliating peace with the King of Sicily. But he was utterly ineffectual as a
ruler. The ancient Empire had become a third-rate power with little influence
in world-politics.

The decline of Byzantium upset the balance of
power in the East. The Princes of Armenia and Antioch were delighted, and
celebrated their relief by quarrelling with each other. On the news of Manuel’s
death Bohemond III repudiated his Greek wife in order to marry a loose lady of
Antioch called Sibylla. The Patriarch Aimery had not liked the Greek marriage,
but he was shocked by the adultery. He excommunicated Bohemond, put the city
under an interdict, and retired once more to Qosair. The nobles of Antioch
hated Sibylla, with reason; for she was a spy who received an income from
Saladin in return for information about the strength and movements of the
Frankish armies. They supported Aimery. A civil war was breaking out, when King
Baldwin sent an ecclesiastical deputation, headed by the Patriarch Heraclius,
to arbitrate. In return for financial compensation Aimery agreed to raise the
interdict but not the excommunication, but Sibylla was recognized as Princess.
Many of the nobles were dissatisfied with the settlement and fled to Roupen’s
court. Relations between the two Princes were further complicated at the end of
1182, when the Byzantine governor of Cilicia, Isaac Comnenus, in revolt against
Andronicus, sought help from Bohemond against Roupen and admitted his troops
into Tarsus. Bohemond promptly changed his mind and sold Tarsus and the
governor to Roupen, then repented of it. The Templars ransomed Isaac on the
understanding that the Cypriots, who sympathized with him, should pay them
back. Isaac thereupon retired to Cyprus, where he set himself up as an
independent Emperor and forgot about the debt. Roupen next alarmed his
neighbours by swallowing up the little Armenian principality of the
Hethoumians, which had lasted on at Lampron in the north-west of Cilicia under
the patronage of Constantinople. His extension of power alarmed Bohemond, who
in 1185 invited him to a banquet of reconciliation at Antioch and arrested him
on his arrival. But Roupen’s brother Leo finished off the conquest of the
Hethoumians and attacked Antioch. Roupen was released on ceding Mamistra and
Adana to Bohemond; but on his return to Cilicia he soon recovered them and made
himself master of the whole province. Bohemond made various ineffectual raids
but achieved nothing more.

1181: Reynald of
Chatillon breaks the Truce

These deplorable squabbles between the petty
Christian rulers were very convenient for Saladin. Neither Byzantium nor even the
Franks of northern Syria would impede his progress nor send help to the kingdom
of Jerusalem. The only Christian state in the East that commanded respect
amongst the Moslems was the distant kingdom of Georgia, at present engaged in
growing at the expense of the Seldjuk princes of Iran, whose difficulties were
very convenient to the Sultan. Under these circumstances it was essential for
the kingdom to keep the truce of 1180. But Reynald of Chatillon, lord now of
Oultrejourdain, could not understand a policy that ran counter to his wishes.
By the terms of the truce Christian and Moslem merchants could pass freely
through each other’s territory. It irked Reynald to see the rich Moslem
caravans passing unscathed so close to him. In the summer of 1181 he yielded to
temptation and led his local troops out eastward into Arabia, to Taima, near
the road from Damascus to Mecca. Close to the oasis he fell upon a caravan that
was travelling peacefully to Mecca and made off with all its goods. He seems
even to have contemplated moving down to attack Medina; but Saladin, who was in
Egypt, sent a hasty expedition under his nephew Faruk-Shah from Damascus into
Oultrejourdain, which brought Reynald hurrying home. Saladin complained to King
Baldwin of the breach of the treaty and demanded compensation. Baldwin admitted
the justice of the claim; but in spite of his urgent representations, Reynald
refused to make any amends. His friends at the Court supported him, till Baldwin
weakly let the matter drop. But Saladin followed it up. A few months later a
convoy of fifteen hundred pilgrims was forced by the weather to land in Egypt
near Damietta, ignorant that the truce had been violated. Saladin threw them
all into chains and sent to Baldwin offering to release them as soon as the
merchandise pillaged by Reynald was returned. Once again Reynald refused to
give anything back. War was now inevitable.