The salient point, however, is that by alienating and offending these two powerful noblemen, Sibylla and her husband had put the kingdom at risk. To be sure, Ramla’s feudal levees were commanded by his younger brother, Balian of Nablus, who thereby commanded the third largest contingent of troops in the feudal levee. However, Tripoli controlled many more, roughly one-quarter of the knights in the combined armies of Jerusalem and Tripoli. Even more dangerously, his wife’s barony of Galilee sat on the kingdom’s eastern border, straddling the Jordan River. If it were lost, the kingdom would become indefensible. Sibylla had usurped a crown and made her kingdom more vulnerable than ever in the process.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, in his hubris over his coronation, Guy de Lusignan was not content to let Tripoli withdraw to his lands and stew in his dissatisfaction. Instead, Guy declared his intent to bring Tripoli to heel and summoned the feudal army, intending to attack Galilee and force Tripoli into submission. Tripoli responded by concluding a defensive pact with none other than Sultan Saladin. In doing so, Tripoli put himself in the wrong, yet it is important to remember that he was the injured party. Not only was the constitution of Jerusalem on his side concerning Guy’s legitimacy, but Tripoli was also being threatened.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and Guy was persuaded not to attack. Balian d’Ibelin offered to mediate and eventually succeeded, but not before Saladin had taken advantage of the situation to carry out a ‘reconnaissance in force’ through Galilee into the province of Acre. This was the prelude to a full-scale invasion and retaliation for attacks by Reynald de Châtillon against Saracen convoys that were in blatant violation of a truce King Guy had just signed with Saladin.

Châtillon notoriously denied that King Guy could commit him to any truce, claiming complete independence from the king of Jerusalem as absolute lord in his barony of Transjordan. Châtillon’s stand revealed either the reason why he had supported Sibylla in the first place (he considered Guy so insignificant he could ignore him at will) or that he was one of Sibylla’s supporters who had expected her to replace Guy with a more competent new husband and now viewed Guy as illegitimate.

Whatever Châtillon’s motives for his attacks, Saladin’s counter-incursion provoked a response from the Templars and Hospitallers. On 2 May 1187, at the Springs of Cresson, a small force of roughly 110 knights clashed with a Saracen army, allegedly 6,000 strong, that wiped out the Franks. Shaken by the sight of Christian heads spiked on the lances of the withdrawing Saracens, Tripoli agreed to reconcile with Lusignan. Tripoli knelt before Lusignan in homage, and King Guy raised him, embraced him and gave him the kiss of peace.

It was not a moment too soon. Just over a month later, Saladin was back again, this time with his entire army. It was his seventh and largest invasion. Guy called up the feudal army, denuding the cities and castles of their defenders. Notably, all the barons of Jerusalem followed the king’s summons, including erstwhile rebels and insubordinate barons such as Tripoli and Châtillon. While the army of Jerusalem gathered at the Springs of Sephorie, Saladin seized the city of Tiberias in Galilee, which was defended by its feudal lord, Lady Eschiva, Tripoli’s wife. She sent word to her feudal overlord, King Guy, requesting relief.

As was customary, King Guy called a council of war to seek the advice of his barons. Tripoli advised caution, arguing it was a trap and the Frankish army should stay where it was and force the Saracens to come to them. Such a policy, however, contradicted the traditions of the kingdom; for nearly a century, it had been most successful when on the offensive. Furthermore, Guy had been heavily criticised by the barons of Jerusalem for not going on the offensive in 1183. The decision to advance towards Saladin was, therefore, not inherently foolish. In his detailed analysis of the battle, historian John France suggests that the army’s initial advance to the springs at Turan was strategically sound. France argues that at Turan, ‘Guy would have been in an unassailable position … and from there he could threaten to advance and oblige Saladin to keep his forces on the edge of the plateau in readiness. This was a game that Saladin’s army could not play indefinitely’.24

Guy’s mistake was in continuing across the arid plain against the advice of his barons, who nevertheless followed him. France quotes a letter from Saladin to the Caliph in Baghdad in which he says: ‘Satan incited Guy to do what ran counter to his purpose’. Namely, he took his army away from the water at Turan. Before the army of Jerusalem could reach the springs of Hattin, it had been surrounded. The Christian forces were forced to camp for the night on the arid plateau without water, mocked by the surrounding Saracens who poured their surplus water on the earth. The Saracens also lit fires upwind of the army of Jerusalem so that the smoke aggravated Frankish thirst. The following day, on 4 July 1187, battle began. After a day-long struggle, the feudal army of Jerusalem was all but obliterated. Only three barons fought their way off the field with a few hundred knights and an estimated 3,000 infantry. These were Raymond de Tripoli, Reginald de Sidon and Balian d’Ibelin. Joscelyn of Edessa also escaped capture, but it is unclear if he took part in the battle or had remained behind in Acre. The rest, including King Guy, were either dead or captured by the enemy.

And Queen Sibylla, who had brought this disaster to the kingdom by refusing to divorce Guy at her brother’s or her own followers’ urging? Sibylla was in Jerusalem. Yet when the sultan demanded the city’s surrender, it was a delegation of burghers, not Sibylla, who offered defiance. Rather than rallying the defenders of the holiest city in Christendom, Sibylla begged to be allowed to join her husband in captivity. That is: the reigning queen of Jerusalem begged to be allowed to desert her kingdom and her subjects to place herself in the hands of her enemies for the sole purpose of being near her husband, who had just led her kingdom to a disastrous defeat.

Saladin naturally obliged. Sibylla was allowed out of Jerusalem to join her husband in captivity in Saracen-held Nablus while his armies swept over the rest of her kingdom. Without defenders, city after city offered terms to spare the citizens rape and slaughter. The few cities that showed defiance – Jaffa and Beirut – were overrun, and the inhabitants were mercilessly put to the sword or dragged away into slavery. By the end of September 1187, only the island city of Tyre and isolated castles such as Kerak and Crak des Chevaliers held out, along with Jerusalem itself. The latter was flooded with tens of thousands of refugees who had fled before the Saracens from other inland cities and the surrounding countryside. After a spirited defence in which non-combatants outnumbered fighting men by fifty to one, the Holy City fell to Saladin. The Kingdom of Jerusalem effectively ceased to exist.

The shock allegedly killed Pope Urban III and set in motion a new crusade that has gone down in history as the Third. This crusade was led by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, King Philip II of France and King Richard I of England. Yet before the cumbersome process of finding the finances, volunteers and ships for this great expedition to the east was complete, Saladin released King Guy from captivity on the basis of an oath to never take up arms against Muslims again. It was 1188, and the moment Guy de Lusignan was released, he went to Antioch and raised an army of roughly 700 knights and an unknown number of other volunteers. With this force at his back, Guy resumed the fight against the Muslims in blatant violation of his oath to Saladin. Sibylla rode at his side.

Guy’s immediate destination was Tyre, the only city in his wife’s former kingdom still in Christian hands. To Guy and Sibylla’s surprise, their reception in Tyre was frigid. The nobleman in command of the defences of Tyre was a certain Conrad de Montferrat, the brother of Sibylla’s first husband, William de Montferrat. Conrad kept the city gates closed and bluntly told Guy de Lusignan that he had lost his crown when he lost his kingdom; Sibylla did not rate even a mention.

So, Guy continued down the coast until he came to Acre. The inhabitants of Acre, who had surrendered to Saladin in 1187, had been allowed to withdraw with their moveable goods. When Guy and his small army arrived in 1189, Acre was garrisoned by Egyptian troops devoted to Saladin. Guy’s decision to lay siege to Acre proved nearly as senseless and costly as his insistence on leaving the springs of Turan to advance towards Hattin. The siege of Acre swallowed tens of thousands of Christian lives in the next two years, including the Patriarch of Jerusalem, 6 archbishops, 12 bishops, 40 counts and 500 barons. As much as seventy-five per cent of the men who took part in the siege, most of them crusaders who arrived from the West ahead of the armies led by the crowned leaders, perished. Most fell victim to disease and malnutrition, even starvation, but many died in the near-constant skirmishing and occasional assaults. Militarily, this siege was senseless. In terms of immobility, filth and misery it was reminiscent of the trench warfare of WWI. Yet, in one way, it proved poetically just; this brainchild of Guy de Lusignan killed his last remnant of royal legitimacy, Queen Sibylla.

In October 1190, while living in a tent in the squalid siege camp before Acre, Queen Sibylla died of fever. So ended the life of one of Jerusalem’s most powerful queens. Like Melisende, she ruled in her own right, not as a consort, and throughout her reign was in a position to influence the course of events directly. Had she married the mastermind behind the rout of Saladin at Montgisard, Baldwin of Ramla, for example, Saladin might have been trapped at Turan rather than obliterating the army of Jerusalem at Hattin.

Sibylla had power, and she could be ruthless in exploiting it, as her usurpation of the throne in 1186 demonstrates. Yet she used her power only to elevate her husband and then to slavishly submit to him thereafter. To her last breath, Sibylla appears to have loved Guy de Lusignan more than she loved her kingdom, her subjects or her life. While such love is romantic and admirable in Victorian literature, it is misplaced and ridiculous in a ruling queen. Fortunately for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, her sister was made of much sterner stuff.

Chapter 4

The Crusader States, 1190–1291

A Queen for All Seasons: Isabella I

Isabella was the youngest of King Amalric’s children, born to his second wife, the Byzantine Princess Maria Comnena, after his coronation. In the eyes of many contemporary legal scholars, this gave her precedence over her elder half-siblings, born of a dissolved marriage before her father was crowned. She was, however, only 2 years old at the time of her father’s sudden death, and the High Court of Jerusalem had elected her half-brother Baldwin as her father’s successor. Nevertheless, her unimpeachable legitimacy and close ties to the Byzantine royal house made her a latent threat to Agnes de Courtenay’s two children, born of an invalid marriage before Amalric was anointed.

Agnes sought to reduce the risk to her offspring by removing Isabella from her mother and stepfather’s care at age 8 to betroth her to a man unlikely to defend Isabella’s claims to the crown. The man she chose was Humphrey IV of Toron. Humphrey was a minor under the control of his mother’s third husband, the infamous Reynald de Châtillon. Châtillon conducted the marriage negotiations on his ward’s behalf, but not necessarily in his interests. Humphrey lost his barony, which reverted to the crown in exchange for a money fief. Three years later, at age 11, Isabella married Humphrey in Châtillon’s fortress of Kerak in the midst of a Saracen siege. When Baldwin IV died less than two years later, the majority of the High Court chose Isabella as their queen over her sister Sibylla. Humphrey preferred to do homage to the usurpers Sibylla and Guy rather than wear the crown himself. He loyally fought with King Guy at Hattin and went into captivity with him. On his release from Saracen detention, he joined Guy at the siege of Acre, and Isabella joined him there.

Thus, Isabella was living in his tent in the siege camp outside Acre when in October 1190, her sister Queen Sibylla succumbed to illness and died without heirs. It is worth reviewing this in detail since the most fulsome contemporary account of what happened next has coloured all subsequent histories and warped perceptions of Isabella ever since.

The anonymous Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, written by someone close to the English court, describes with blistering outrage how Conrad de Montferrat had long schemed to ‘steal’ the throne of Jerusalem and, at last, struck upon the idea of abducting Isabella – a crime he compares to the abduction of Helen of Sparta by Paris of Troy, ‘only worse’. To realise his plan, the Itinerarium claims, Conrad ‘surpassed the deceits of Sinon, the eloquence of Ulysses and the forked tongue of Mithridates’. According to this English cleric, who was unlikely to have ever met any of the principals, Conrad set about bribing, flattering and corrupting bishops and barons as never before in recorded history. Throughout, the chronicler says, Conrad was aided and abetted by three barons of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Sidon, Haifa and Ibelin) who combined ‘the treachery of Judas, the cruelty of Nero, and the wickedness of Herod, and everything the present age abhors and ancient times condemned’.25 The anonymous slanderer then admits that, although Isabella at first resisted the idea of divorcing Humphrey, she was soon persuaded to consent to it because ‘a woman’s opinion changes very easily’ and ‘a girl is easily taught to do what is morally wrong’.26

It should be clear to modern readers that something is wrong with this account. First, the author notably brings no evidence of a single act of treachery, cruelty or wickedness and, second, completely ignores the High Court of Jerusalem and its constitutional right to elect kings and select husbands for heiresses. Rather than looking at the legitimate interests of the kingdom and the political forces at play, the chronicler wallows in melodrama, slander and prejudice.

The situation looks significantly different if seen through the eyes of the power brokers on the ground in Acre in 1190: the barons of Jerusalem. The hereditary queen was dead. She had been predeceased by all her children, while her husband had been foisted upon the kingdom in a secret marriage that circumvented their legitimate constitutional right to select husbands for heiresses to the crown. Sibylla had then usurped the crown, without obtaining the consent of the High Court for her coronation, and personally crowned the man she had promised to set aside. This man had promptly attacked his most powerful baron, the Count of Tripoli, driving the latter into an alliance with Saladin. When threatened by a Saracen invasion, he arrogantly ignored the military advice of the collective barons. As a result, the army was crushed, thousands of Christians killed and many more enslaved, while Saladin swept over and occupied the entire kingdom, bar only a single city.

In short, Guy had been detested since he married Sibylla ten years earlier, and his popularity had declined ever since. By October 1190, he had not a shred of credibility or support left, and with Sibylla’s death, he lost the last lingering whiff of legitimacy. In short, anointed or not, the barons refused to view him as their king and were determined to elect a new monarch.

In the established tradition of seeking a new monarch from among the closest relatives of the deceased monarch, the barons focused on Sibylla’s most immediate blood relation, namely her sister Isabella, whose claim to the throne was arguably better than Sibylla’s (or Baldwin IV’s) claim had ever been. The barons were happy to recognise Isabella as their reigning queen, but in so doing, her husband would automatically become king consort and commander of Jerusalem’s armies.

That was the problem. Isabella’s husband, Humphrey de Toron, was as unacceptable to the barons as Guy de Lusignan, if for different reasons. Aside from his alleged femininity, he had already betrayed the High Court in 1186, when they offered him the crown only for him to do homage to the very man they were trying to depose. The barons would not have Humphrey as their king, which meant their support for Isabella was contingent upon her setting Humphrey aside and marrying the man of their choice as she should have done in the first place. It will be remembered that the High Court had also required Isabella’s father (Amalric I) to separate from his wife, Agnes de Courtenay, before it recognised him as king.

In short, there were legal precedents and rational reasons for the barons’ actions that the Itinerarium ignores in its effort to explain events as base deeds of ‘corruption’, ‘treachery’ and ‘cruelty’. Far from being corrupted by a treacherous, greedy and corrupt Montferrat, the barons of Jerusalem chose a man they believed would serve their interests best. In November 1190, the barons and burghers of Jerusalem wanted a militarily competent leader around whom they could rally, and there were not many candidates available after the debacle of Hattin. Conrad de Montferrat, however, seemed to fit the bill.

This Italian nobleman had rescued the only free city in the kingdom when it was on the brink of surrender. He had defended it twice against sieges by Saladin, thereby retaining a bridgehead in the Levant into which massive reinforcements had been poured, first from Sicily and then from farther West. Nor were Montferrat’s military successes in the Holy Land his first; he had a distinguished military career fighting in the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires. As an outsider, he did not raise one local baron above the others. Finally, he was the first cousin of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and a more distant cousin of Philip II of France. As such, he was a far more suitable spouse for the ruling queen of Jerusalem than the obscure and impoverished Guy de Lusignan had been.

His only flaw was that his second wife, a Byzantine princess, was still alive in Constantinople. Montferrat somehow convinced the barons she was dead or that he was legally separated from her, or perhaps he simply convinced them to close their eyes to this undesirable fact as they had once been willing to ignore Baldwin I’s marriage to the Armenian Lady Arda when he married Adelaide of Sicily. What no one could cover up or overlook, however, was the fact that Isabella had been married to Humphrey de Toron since 1183. This marriage needed to be publicly dissolved before marriage to Montferrat could be celebrated.

Four years earlier, Sibylla had promised her supporters she would set Guy aside after she was crowned, only to break her word and place the crown on Guy’s head. The surviving members of the High Court remembered that deceit all too well. Determined not to be tricked and trapped a second time, they insisted that Isabella rid herself of Humphrey before they would recognise her as queen. This is the context in which Isabella’s alleged ‘abduction’ took place.

As to what happened, all chronicles, including the Itinerarium, are in surprising agreement. Shortly after Sibylla’s death, knights entered the tent Isabella shared with Humphrey and removed her against her will. She was not, however, taken to Conrad, much less raped by him, but rather put in the care and protection of high-ranking clerics. She was sequestered and protected to prevent harm from coming to her while a clerical court was convened to rule on the validity of her marriage to Humphrey. The case hinged on the critical theological principle of mutual consent. Humphrey claimed that Isabella had consented, but when challenged by a witness to prove his word with his body (i.e., in judicial combat), Humphrey hung his head and refused to take up the thrown gauntlet. Isabella testified that she had not consented.

Ultimately, a clerical court headed by the papal legate ruled that Isabella’s marriage to Humphrey was invalid because, regardless of consent, she was not of legal age at the time of the marriage. That is, she was not yet 12 years old, the age at which girls were deemed adults and legally capable of giving consent. On 24 November 1190, Isabella married Conrad de Montferrat. Immediately following the marriage, the barons of Jerusalem did homage to her as their queen.

The question that remains is Isabella’s role in this affair. There seems little doubt she was taken by surprise when strange knights burst into her tent in the dark of night and dragged her away from the man she had viewed as her husband for the past ten years. When they took her, she could not have known what they intended to do. She may have believed they were Saracens in disguise or simply unscrupulous men intent on rape for the sake of a crown. Resistance was logical and understandable.

Once she had been separated from Humphrey and put under Church protection, however, the situation was explained to her by her mother, the dowager queen of Jerusalem, Maria Comnena. The Lyon Continuation of William of Tyre’s history, which is believed to be based primarily on sources from within the crusader states rather than Western sources states:

[Queen Maria] remonstrated with [Isabella] repeatedly and explained that she [Isabella] could not become lady of the kingdom unless she left Humphrey. She reminded her of the evil deed that [Humphrey] had done … [when he] had done homage to Queen Sibylla. … So long as Isabella was his wife, she could have neither honour nor her father’s kingdom.27

This text confirms that Isabella was initially reluctant to take her mother’s advice because she presumably loved Humphrey. Yet all sources agree that, in the end, she not only testified she had not legally consented to the marriage with Humphrey but also went willingly into the marriage with Montferrat. The latter is significant. While the clerical court ruled that Isabella’s marriage to Toron – when she was only 11 – was invalid, it also explicitly told her she was free to marry whomever she chose now. She could have decided to remarry Humphrey immediately; she did not. The reason seems obvious. Isabella understood that the barons refused categorically to do homage to Humphrey. She could not have both Humphrey and her kingdom. Unlike her sister Sibylla, Isabella chose the crown over the man.

The following spring, the kings of England and France arrived with large armies to reinforce the stalled siege of Acre. Philip II of France recognised his cousin Conrad de Montferrat as king of Jerusalem, but Richard I of England backed Guy de Lusignan. As long as the powerful western monarchs were present in the Holy Land, squabbles over claims to a kingdom that had effectively ceased to exist seemed irrelevant. Guy continued to call himself king yet docilely followed Richard the Lionheart wherever he went. Conrad remained in Tyre and tried to cut a separate peace with Saladin, while the sultan attempted to play Conrad against Richard.

Meanwhile the crusaders forced the garrison of Acre to surrender on 12 July 1191. Immediately afterwards, the French king abandoned the crusade, weakening Conrad’s (and Isabella’s) position, while the rest of the crusading army continued down the coast under Richard the Lionheart’s leadership. Outside Arsuf on 7 September, the joint Frankish/crusader army effectively rebuffed an attempt by Saladin to halt their advance. On 10 September, they recaptured Jaffa and turned towards the ultimate goal: Jerusalem.

Saladin, however, had garrisoned Jerusalem strongly and poisoned the wells around it. By late December, the crusaders were forced to face the fact that they did not have the strength for an assault nor the time to besiege the city. More importantly, as the local barons, Templars and Hospitallers noted, even if they took Jerusalem by storm, they could not retain it for long because the vast majority of the crusaders would return to the West. The forces remaining in the Holy Land were insufficient to defend an isolated outpost such as Jerusalem against the overwhelming might of Saladin. The combined Frankish and crusader host withdrew to the coast.

Here, Richard of England received word that his brother John and the king of France were trying to steal his inheritance. Since he would soon have to return home to defend his empire, Richard finally conceded that he had to leave Jerusalem in the hands of a king capable of protecting the gains he had come so far and fought so hard to achieve. He agreed to let the barons of Jerusalem elect their king, as was their constitutional right, and they unanimously elected Conrad de Montferrat. Richard accepted their decision, dropping his support for Guy de Lusignan. The English king, however, softened the impact of withdrawing his support from Lusignan by allowing him to buy the island of Cyprus.

Richard had captured Cyprus on his way to Acre. While the Mediterranean island was technically a part of the Byzantine empire, an unpopular Greek tyrant, Isaac Comnenus, had seized it several years earlier and declared his independence from Constantinople. The English king captured the island in less than six weeks without incurring significant casualties, largely because he had been welcomed by most of the island’s residents as a liberator. He secured their continued cooperation by promising to restore the laws of Manuel I Comnenus, the powerful and highly respected Byzantine Emperor and so ruler of Cyprus from 1143 until 1180.

Yet Richard’s interests in Cyprus were not dynastic. He did not need or want another lordship. Richard the Lionheart was a consummate strategist who recognised Cyprus’ military and strategic importance in securing the lines of communication between the West and the Holy Land. Cyprus controlled the Eastern Mediterranean and, with it, the coast of the Levant. Richard rightly foresaw that Cyprus would become an important staging ground for future crusades and a breadbasket for the territorially diminished crusader states on the mainland. In other words, although the Third Crusade restored Frankish control over the key coastal cities and the coastal plain between them, this much-reduced kingdom was not self-sufficient in foodstuffs. It was dependent on supplies of many vital materials from Cyprus. By selling Cyprus to Lusignan, Richard replenished his coffers and distracted Guy from losing his former kingdom while ensuring Cyprus remained in Latin Christian hands.

Just when everything appeared settled, however, assassins struck down Conrad de Montferrat in the streets of Tyre on 28 April 1192. Mortally wounded, he was carried to Isabella and died in her arms. At the time, she was carrying his child.

Isabella was now a 20-year-old widowed queen. She was not a pawn; her barons had already paid homage to her. She could legally marry whomever she liked – or choose not to remarry. Yet she was also the queen of a fragile and vulnerable kingdom surrounded by enemies. The powerful crusading armies that had come to restore it were already disintegrating. The king of France had left, and the king of England had declared his intention to leave shortly. With him would go most of the crusaders. If Jerusalem were to survive, it would need a king capable of defending it, a king the barons respected and were willing to obey.

Most narratives of what happened next focus poetically on personalities rather than institutions. Some accounts say King Richard recommended a candidate as Isabella’s next husband, while other accounts claim that the ‘people of Tyre’ spontaneously acclaimed him. Both versions ignore – again – the geopolitical reality in Outremer. The notion of the common people of one city in the kingdom having the right to ‘elect’ a king by acclamation is ludicrous. By this time, Acre, Caesarea, Arsuf, Jaffa and Ascalon were also in Frankish hands. If the common citizens elected Jerusalem’s kings, then the burghers of all these cities would have had a say in his election. But the common people in the Kingdom of Jerusalem did not – and never had – elected their kings any more than the commoners of England or France did.

As for the English king, he had only days earlier acknowledged that the barons of Jerusalem had the sole right to select their king. Therefore, he would not have attempted to impose his candidate on them. The Lyon Continuation of Tyre correctly states that Richard acting ‘on the advice of the barons of the kingdom’ went to Tyre with their favoured candidate.28 Yet, it is equally unthinkable that the barons would have made a recommendation (as they had the last time) without first consulting their ruling queen and obtaining her consent. The man they proposed to King Richard was, therefore, most likely Isabella’s choice, possibly based on the advice of her barons, but not against her wishes. It was Henri de Champagne.

As the son of Marie de Champagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter by her first husband, Louis VII of France, Champagne was a nephew of both Philip II of France and Richard I of England. This made Champagne a worthy match for the ruling queen of Jerusalem and a highly diplomatic choice since neither the French nor English crown could object. He was also an ardent crusader who had come out to the Holy Land in advance of the main crusading armies. He was wealthy, young, courageous, courteous, educated and pious – in short, the personification of chivalry – and single. He was also just 26 years old. There is every reason to believe that Isabella knew and liked him before the proposal was put forward.

Yet the accounts of his selection agree he was a reluctant candidate for the crown of Jerusalem. On the one hand, he wanted to return home. On the other hand, Isabella was pregnant by Montferrat, which meant that if she bore a son, this boy would take precedence over any of Champagne’s children. The Lyon continuation of Tyre claims that Champagne was only persuaded to take up the burden of Jerusalem and marry Isabella because of promises made to him by Richard of England; the English king allegedly vowed to return with an even greater army in a couple of years and conquer all the former Kingdom of Jerusalem and more. The Itinerarium, on the other hand, claims that while the magnates of the kingdom were attempting to persuade a reluctant Henri to become their king, Isabella herself ‘came to the count of her own accord and offered him the keys of the city’.29 It goes on to say the marriage was hastily prepared and celebrated on 5 May 1192 (seven days after Conrad’s death). The author, who was so ready to insult Isabella, her mother and her stepfather a few pages earlier, now writes approvingly: ‘I don’t think that those who persuaded the count to do this had much to do, for it is no effort to force the willing’!30

The important point is that Isabella, with astonishing fortitude under the circumstances, was prepared to do the right thing for her kingdom: marry a man acceptable to her barons and do so without insisting on a year of mourning or other conditions. Henri proved his worth immediately; he persuaded his uncle Richard, and so, the entire crusading host, to remain in the Holy Land throughout the summer rather than return to the West at once. Although a second march on Jerusalem ended like the first and for the same reason, the English king’s dramatic victory over Saladin at Jaffa, at last, forced the sultan to the negotiating table. On 2 September 1192, Richard the Lionheart’s envoys, headed by Isabella’s husband and stepfather, signed a three-year truce with Saladin. As one of the last crusaders to depart, Richard the Lionheart sailed from Acre on 9 October 1192. Less than six months later, Saladin was dead. Isabella’s kingdom had been saved, if in a more compact form.