Sibylla was in no doubt about her unpopularity or the reason for it. The barons had never approved of Lusignan; he had been foisted on them by the queen mother, abetted by her protégé, the patriarch. Furthermore, the barons had forced Baldwin IV to rescind his appointment of Guy de Lusignan to the regency three years earlier. Finally, her brother’s attempts to force an annulment of her marriage received widespread backing among the barons. In short, the majority of the High Court vehemently opposed her husband, Guy de Lusignan, and were unlikely to elect him king.
However, Sibylla was the heir apparent and had the support of her mother and husband’s kin, namely the titular Count of Edessa, Joscelyn de Courtenay, who now enjoyed the Lordship of Toron he had inherited from his sister, the queen mother, and likewise the support of the constable, Guy’s older brother, Aimery de Lusignan. Also in Sibylla’s camp was the Patriarch of Jerusalem, a man who owed his appointment to her mother. In addition, she enjoyed the fickle support of the unscrupulous baron Reynald de Châtillon. Finally, she obtained the backing of the Master of the Knights Templar, a Flemish knight by the name of Gerard de Ridefort, who was a bitter enemy of the Count of Tripoli for entirely personal reasons. There may have been a scattering of lesser knights who likewise favoured the succession of Sibylla, but if they existed, their names are unknown.
Most of the barons and bishops remained staunchly opposed to Sibylla and her despised husband, Guy de Lusignan. They had, of course, sworn to seek the advice of the pope et al before selecting a new monarch, but this was not a practical solution given the acute threat from Saladin. At a minimum, it entailed a lengthy interregnum during which the advice of the Western powerbrokers was sought and required the election of a regent until a candidate had been selected. In short, the need to discuss the situation was urgent, and the acting regent, the Count of Tripoli, summoned the High Court to Nablus for deliberations.
There was nothing nefarious about such a summons. Tripoli had been legally appointed regent of the kingdom, and no new monarch had been crowned and anointed. It was his duty to summon the High Court. There was no single location where the High Court met. It had met in Acre and Nablus in the past, both lordships being part of the royal domain no less than Jerusalem itself. Other factors influencing the venue were a strong and hostile Templar presence in Jerusalem and the friendly protection offered by the Dowager Queen Maria and her second husband in Nablus.
Whatever the reasons, the High Court met in Nablus to discuss the succession. Anticipating that she would not be selected, Sibylla persuaded her supporters to crown her without the consent of the High Court. This was a blatant usurpation of the throne, and both Sibylla and her supporters knew it. Furthermore, Sibylla only managed to convince her followers to undertake such illegal action by promising to divorce Guy and marry again. However, the accoutrements required for a coronation were locked in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Masters of the Temple and the Hospital each had a key to the chest containing them. When the Master of the Hospital realised what Sibylla and her supporters planned, he refused to open the chest. A scuffle ensued in which the Templar Master and Châtillon intimidated and nearly overpowered the Hospitaller, who – in desperation – threw the key out of a window. This, of course, only delayed things by a few moments. The key was found, and a hasty coronation ceremony was staged.
No sooner was Sibylla crowned and anointed than she declared that her new husband would be the same as her old husband: Guy de Lusignan. This betrayal of her supporters was too much for even the patriarch to stomach. He refused to crown Guy de Lusignan, and Sibylla crowned him herself. The legitimacy of such a coronation was dubious at best.
The word of Sibylla’s coup rapidly reached Nablus, where the High Court hastily agreed that the best course of action was to crown Baldwin’s other sister, Isabella, as the legitimate queen. Since the Templars controlled Jerusalem, the barons planned to hold the coronation in Bethlehem, the site of Baldwin I and Baldwin II’s coronations.
The idea of two rival queens in a kingdom surrounded by enemies is often ridiculed as foolish or even treasonous, yet it was by no means unreasonable. The barons and bishops opposing Sibylla outnumbered her supporters significantly and commanded the bulk of the feudal troops. Furthermore, since she had deceived her followers by first promising to set Guy aside and then crowning him, it is unclear how many of Sibylla’s initial supporters were still with her. With the wisdom of hindsight, regardless of how dangerous it might have been to split the kingdom into warring factions, it would not have been worse than what Sibylla and Guy did – namely lose the entire kingdom to Saladin in less than one year.
The High Court’s plans to crown a counter-queen to challenge the usurper Sibylla collapsed when Isabella’s husband Toron slipped out of Nablus in the dark of night to go to Jerusalem and swear homage to Sibylla and Guy. This act made the coronation of Isabella impossible, as she needed a king-consort, and her husband had just disqualified himself. Until she rid herself of Toron, Isabella could not wear the crown. So, most of the barons and bishops of Jerusalem reluctantly caved in and came to terms with the situation. They paid homage to Guy de Lusignan, who made it as difficult for them as possible by gloating and exalting in his new status.
Two barons flatly refused to accept the patently illegitimate king: the Baron of Ramla and Mirabel and erstwhile suitor for Sibylla’s hand, Baldwin d’Ibelin, and Raymond, Count of Tripoli, the former regent. Instead of doing homage to Guy de Lusignan, Ramla demonstratively left the kingdom to seek his fortune in Antioch, where he was reputedly well-received. The Count of Tripoli, on the other hand, simply refused to recognise Guy as Jerusalem’s king. As the County of Tripoli was an independent political entity and not legally subordinate to Jerusalem, this position was perfectly legitimate. However, Tripoli also held the principality of Galilee by right of his wife. This was a component and strategically vital part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Tripoli’s refusal to do homage to Guy for his wife’s barony put him on a collision course with Lusignan and earned him the sobriquet of traitor in some accounts.
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.
