Eleanor Of Aquitaine (42 page)

Thence Philip crossed the Alps, traversed Maurienne, and reached Paris shortly before Christmas in 1191.
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From Paris rumors spread about the perfidy of Coeur-de-Lion in the Land of Promise, his insolence to his allies, his luxury and pride.
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These of course very soon reached London and Rouen and gave Queen Eleanor a deep anxiety which greatly aggravated the troubles she was already having with the regency in Britain.

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There were heroic episodes in the warfare between paynim and crusader after Philip Augustus sailed away: brilliant and costly battles in which the noblest blood of Christian and Saracen flowed freely in the arid sands; prodigies of valor, martyrdoms that never won their meed of glory in this world. But the cause that had aroused such ardors and drawn such treasure of men and gold from Europe in the early summer of 1190 now languished in the late summer of 1191
.
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Only about one fourth of those who had set out ever returned home. They had been consumed by disease, the sword, starvation, or intolerable labor. "Blessed," quotes the chronicler, "are the dead who die in the Lord."

As Philip turned his prows westward, Coeur-de-Lion took stock of the remainder of that mighty host that had gone out from Vézelay with flags flying and the fervor of the
Lignum Crucis
on the lips of every highhearted pilgrim soldier. Conrad, in dudgeon over the denial of his kingship, held aloof in Tyre with chief barons of the Latin Kingdom and offered a rallying post for all the malcontents in the divers forces left to Richard's banners. When besought to join forces with Coeur-de-Lion, he declared openly that he was not such a fool as to place himself in the service of the English king. Like Philip Augustus, he lived in dread of secret plots.

The Franks and Burgundians bequeathed to Richard under the compact of Vézelay and left under command of the Duke of Burgundy were little disposed to support any triumph of the English king, though they needed his subsidy to carry on at all.
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Many of the more prescient among these had already folded their tents and taken passage home without ever a sight of Jerusalem. Even the Templars and the Hospitallers were divided, and the Italian merchant princes abetted one faction or the other as their own interests decreed.

Left thus with only a fraction of the Christian forces, yet by his very presence challenged to action, Richard was reduced to limited objectives, risky exploits, and sudden forays against the Saracens. With stout fighting he took coastal towns southward from Acre, but never succeeded in gathering a united host to push inland to Jerusalem. Twice the Christian armies came within a few leagues of the Holy City; and once Richard, as sole guerdon for his valor, caught sight from the high ground of Emmaus of the clustered domes and towered walls of Zion. Says the
Itinerarium
, the army now rejoiced that they should soon set their eyes on the Lord's sepulcher; and all began to brighten up their armor, their helmets, and their swords, so that not a single spot should spoil their brightness.
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But, explains Bernard the Treasurer,
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the Franks under the Duke of Burgundy, begrudging the English king the glory of entering the gates, demurred, and the vision, like mirage in the desert, dissolved into thin air. With tears and lamentations the soldiers of Christ, denied at the eleventh hour the boon for which they had suffered their hardships and their losses and put their lives in danger, turned away from that glorious prospect and set their faces toward sunset and the sea. "God," says the chronicler, "did not yet judge them worthy of the higher bounties of His grace."

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In times of stress the barons of the Latin Kingdom, who had learned to live with danger and gamble for time in their unremitting struggles with the Saracens, found ways of bargaining with Saladin even while war was in progress. Conrad, after the conclave in Acre had denied him the kingship, employed all his Byzantine experience in the wiles of diplomacy to secure agreements with Saladin that might bring profit to himself or discomfiture to Richard.
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Threatened with this snare, Coeur-de-Lion found that he too had a knack for politics. And Saladin, as keen in strategy as in warfare, did all he could in parley with one or the other to rive them apart in order to devour them separately. Encouraged by the departure of Philip Augustus for his own lands, Saladin produced a competition between Conrad and Richard for prior settlement with him.

In the course of these negotiations, Richard conceived a brilliant plan by which at one stroke to end the holy war with credit, extinguish forever the pretensions of Conrad, and reestablish the Angevins on the throne of Jerusalem. Since Saladin, after the successes of the Christians at Acre, was extravagantly eager to see Coeur-de-Lion set sail in the wake of Philip Augustus, it was not difficult to open parley.

Coeur de Lion, without, as it subsequently appeared, having sufficiently warmed up his project beforehand with his own following, made a generous proposal to Saladin: nothing less than that he should bestow his widowed sister Joanna in marriage upon the Moslem Saphadin, the valorous brother of Saladm himself. The pair, according to the plan, were to receive the titles of King and Queen of Jerusalem and obtain Palestine and the shrine city as their dower; and the Christians were to recover the sacred rood and have free access forever to the holy places In a burst of enthusiasin, Richard went through the ceremony of dubbing Saphadin in the western manner and offered to have him baptized. To this alliance Saladin, who asked only to see the Christians turning homeward, interposed no obstacle.

But an Arab chronicler relates that Joanna Plantagenet, when the plan was broached to her, entered into a genuine Angevin passion, which she justified on religious grounds, and called all the clergy to witness in her behalf. The throne of Jerusalem might be a high seat and one upon which her great grandfather Foulques of Anjou and his descendants had sat; but the crusading queen declared that she would not be brought, even for the peace of Christendom, to mount the throne with one of the very paynim she had journeyed to Palestine to defy. For his part, Saphadin, though he submitted to be dubbed, rejected the rites of baptisin and the sumptuary restrictions of Christianity.

At this crisis in the negotiations Richard visited the splendid tent of Saphadin, where he was entertained with gifts, refreshments, and an exhibition of Oriental dancing women. When they finally came to business, Richard said nothing about Joanna's indignation, but related that he had struck an unexpected snag in the attitude of his clergy. He meant, however, to take the matter over their heads to the Pope, who could act with sovereign authority in the marrying of widows; and if by any chance he should fail to get the Pope's consent to his sister's bestowal in marriage, he declared he would engage to give Saphadin instead his niece Eleanor, the "pearl of Brittany," who, being a maiden, was disposable by himself without clerical interference. But since this compact seemed rather vaguely contingent, the Saracens dallied with it no further.

The intricacy of this diplomacy, with the frequent necessity of acting on the low ground of expediency rather than on the high plateau of principle, was not clear to the limited understanding of the populace; wherefore the news that Richard was trafficking with the infidel brought him no honor even in his own following. In Tyre, in Acre, in Rome, in Gaul, the story circulated that he, who had been the first of Christian princes to take the cross, had sought to make terms with the despoiler of Jerusalem, the wanton profaner of the holy rood; and the farther from the scene the rumor flew, the more dreadfully it resounded in the ears of Christendom.

Through the winter of 1192 Richard lingered on, hoping against hope for some favorable turn of fortune. He had sent urgent messages to the of Clairvaux and to the magnates of influence who could still be moved by the afflictions of the Christians overseas, beseeching them to send new levies and the subsidies needed to sustain them in the field. His treasury touched bottom. Joanna's Sicilian dower had gone with the rest. As these harassments increased, a new disquietude took possession of his mind and paralyzed his will. Early in 1192 envoys reached him with secret messages from Ely the Chancellor, reporting the burgeoning of seditious plots in Britain, involving Philip Augustus and Prince John; describing disorders in the regency in Britain; and imploring him, as he valued his crown, to give over the conquest of the Saracens and come home on the wings of the wind. Through Lent many other messengers arrived, each more pressing than the last.

With mind divided and uneasy, Coeur-de-Lion marked time through the winter in Ascalon. He himself wrought with the masons relaying the ashlar of its toppled walls. In April there arrived another embassy. This time John of Alengon came directly from Queen Eleanor with letters of the utmost urgency. As regent she reported Philip Augustus' attempts, in contravention of his vows in Acre and in defiance of papal prohibitions, to invade Normandy, to recover Alais and her dower, and to seduce John. The queen warned Coeur-de-Lion that John was pillaging the exchequer, seizing royal domains, demanding oaths of allegiance from the English barons, and intriguing with Philip to repudiate the Countess of Gloucester and marry Alais himself as a step toward grasping the crown. Eleanor had employed her energies heart and soul to promote the crusade; but she now implored Richard to abandon every other project and return with all speed to his own estates.

In the spring a fresh attack of fever brought Coeur-de-Lion to the very point of death. His physicians whispered to his anxious familiars that few recovered from the semitertian, and the rumor spread that the King of the English was about to "migrate from this world." These tidings, with reports of the quandary in Richard's mind and the division among his counselors whether he should go or stay, were discussed in Tyre and encouraged Conrad to press again the issue of the kingship. The barons of the marquis's following and the forces of the Duke of Burgundy refused allegiance to Guy of Lusignan, and there was now no means of sustaining him. The decision, submitted to the bishops and the barons who would have to carry on if Richard were to depart, went strongly in favor of Conrad. Guy for the forfeit of his crown was contented with a little kingdom of his own in Cyprus, which he colonized with refugees from the strife and havoc on the mainland.

The young Count of Champagne was sent to Tyre to confirm the judgment of the magnates. When the news of Conrad's triumph spread, the streets of the city were hung with banners and the flowery garlands of the early spring, and the place resounded with joyful noises in every quarter of the city and the port. The people borrowed money for robes and display, and the garrisons polished their rusty arms, sharpened their swords, rubbed their lances, and gave rein to their rejoicing with tournaments. But the jubilation was hardly stilled when the music of tabor and flute rose again suddenly in the mournful rhythm of ululation, and the city was thrown into a panic. Conrad, returning to his palace from a convivial dinner with the Bishop of Beauvais, was set upon as he passed the Change by a pair of villains and foully slain in the street. The assassins accosted him from opposite sides of the narrow passage and, while one proffered him a message, the other drove a poniard into his back. The marquis was borne still living to a church and then to his palace, but he breathed only long enough to adjure his young wife Isabelle to protect the Kingdom of Jerusalem from imposters, and to commend his soul to God.

One of the murderers was killed on the spot; the other, who took sanctuary in a church, confessed himself under torture a disciple of the "Old Man of the Mountain," of the secret cult of the "Assassins,"
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and declared that he had been employed for six months in Christian disguise as a servant in Christian houses in Tyre, in order to find an opportunity to kill the marquis. Only on this very day, at the climax of Conrad's triumph, had he found a chance to fulfill his mission.

Employed by whom
? The instigator of the murder has never been certainly identified. So many persons might have profited by the death of Conrad that the circumstantial evidence pointed in no one direction. The question was asked on every hand, and it was variously answered. The partisans of Conrad openly charged Richard with thus ridding himself of a hated rival, and reminded the world that Conrad had himself foretold the villainy; and certain Arab annalists upheld this view. The King of the English denounced the slander and called to witness the assassin, who stuck to his original testimony that he and his accomplice were avenging the private grievance of the Old Man of the Mountain, whose ships had been seized by Conrad in the port of Tyre and whose appeal for redress had been ignored.
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One Moslem chronicler declares that Saladm himself procured the murder.

It was May when flower and leaf are renewed.

Ambrose

The affairs of the Latin Kingdom were again thrown into utter confusion. The crown of Jerusalem once more became a hollow symbol grasped in the frail hands of a woman. The Franks on the spot urged the taking of Tyre for Philip Augustus. But the young queen refused to yield it up.
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And to whom should it be yielded? With consternation the barons of all factions cast about for a likely third husband for Isabelle. In the canvass of possibilities, one eligible was found in Henry, Count of Champagne. As nephew of both Richard and Philip Augustus, he offered some promise of reuniting the Christians in Syria and Palestine. He was in the flower of his age, a noble cavalier bred in the famous court of the Countess Marie of Champagne, personable, one whose valor in the holy war had been many times displayed.