God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Poitevin nobleman, Guy of Lusignan, recently arrived in Outremer from the west, brother of a close associate of the Courtenays, some alleged Agnes’s lover, Aimery of Lusignan. As a sign of how tangled the personal and political affiliations had become in Outremer, Aimery, later (1181/2) constable and, later still, king of Jerusalem as well as ruler of Cyprus (1194–1205, king from 1197), had, on arrival in the east in 1174, married Baldwin of Ibelin’s daughter. Sybil’s hasty marriage to Guy spiked the plans of Raymond and Bohemund and provided Baldwin with an active male successor and available regent. As a vassal of Baldwin’s Angevin first cousin Henry II of England, Guy could also claim links to a major western power. However, to supporters of Raymond of Tripoli, opponents of the Courtenays and those blessed with the perception of hindsight, the whole episode reeked of court intrigue. Within two years, Sybil’s party had secured their authority and placed their adherents in key positions. Guy became the premier baron in the land as count of Jaffa and Ascalon, King Amalric’s old county. With Sybil, he began to be associated in royal diplomas as the heir apparent.⁴⁰ In 1180 the patriarchate of Jerusalem went to another supposed lover of Agnes of Courtenay, Archbishop Heraclius of Caesarea, a resourceful if possibly sybaritic politician and diplomat. However, he had pipped the historians’ historian William of Tyre to the job. The same year, the potentially troublesome Princess Isabella was removed from her mother and betrothed to Humphrey III of Toron, stepson of Reynald of Chatillon, the regime’s chief field commander. By 1182, Aimery of Lusignan had been appointed constable, the same year that the failure of another attempted coup by Raymond of Tripoli forced him to be reconciled with the government.

Guy of Lusignan’s emergence as Baldwin’s probable heir did not prevent resistance to Saladin, who was now stretched between defence of his northern frontier against the Seljuks of Asia Minor, designs on Mosul and Aleppo, ambitions in Outremer and protection of the desert-land routes between Syria and Egypt. A two-year truce, 1180– 82, ended with Saladin’s defeat at Le Forbelet in Galilee in July 1182, failure to take Beirut and the consolidation of Frankish control of the eastern bank of the river Yarmuk. To the south, Reynald of Chatillon disrupted not only Saladin’s material power but also the ideology of his political authority with a foray into the Arabian desert in 1181 and by sponsoring a prolonged raid along the Red Sea coast in 1182–3 that disrupted the annual haj. Saladin acknowledged the outrage by having two Frankish captives from the raiding fleet taken to Mecca itself where, at Mina outside the city, in front of crowds of pilgrims, they had their throats cut. Although of no lasting strategic impact, these raids alarmed the Muslim world, challenging Saladin’s pose as the Champion and Defender of Islam. No Christian fleet had sailed the Red Sea since the seventh century; the unfortunate captives were perhaps the first Christians to have set foot in Mecca since its capture by Muhammed in 629.⁴¹

Reynald’s southern campaigns proved the first kingdom of Jerusalem’s final fling. In June 1183 Saladin finally occupied Aleppo. In August he turned his attention southwards to Jerusalem. The kingdom mobilized a large army, according to William of Tyre 1,300 cavalry and 15,000 infantry, numbers swelled by the census earlier in the year and mercenaries paid by the subsequent tax.⁴² The Christian army gathered at Sephoria in Galilee. The great magnates were attending the king at Nazareth when Baldwin fell seriously ill and was thought to be dying. He summoned the High Court to his sickbed and appointed Guy of Lusignan as regent. The regency was to be permanent, Baldwin retaining only the title of king, ownership of the Holy City itself and an annual pension of 10,000 gold pieces with a promise from Guy not to alienate royal treasure or lands during the king’s lifetime.

Apart from initial skirmishes, the Galilee campaign in September and October 1183 saw no military engagement. The Christian army shadowed Saladin’s force as it manoeuvred in southern Galilee, but refused to confront the invaders, despite Muslim raids on Mt Tabor’s monasteries and threats to Nazareth. Unable to bring the Franks to battle and lacking the numerical superiority to launch an assault on their camp, Saladin withdrew to Damascus in early October. Tactically, the Franks had prevailed with the minimum of losses. However, many in the Jerusalem high command thought that strategically they had missed an opportunity to destroy Saladin’s army. Aggression had paid dividends in 1177 at Montgisard and in 1182 at Le Forbelet with far smaller forces at the Franks’ disposal. Moreover, it was the duty of Christian knights to protect holy sites such as Mt Tabor from Muslim desecration. In the eyes of some observers, admittedly hostile to Guy, the management of the campaign, despite its satisfactory if not triumphant outcome, left much to be desired. Some leaders had refused to cooperate with Guy. Tactical inertia, partly the result of this inability to command confidence and unity, had been matched by inadequate provisioning of food. Many saw Guy’s apparently supine performance as proof of his inability to lead. Four years later, memory of this perception proved fatal as the Franks, led once more by Guy, rejected the caution of 1183 only to be annihilated at the Horns of Hattin.

Guy’s perceived shortcomings as a war leader were immediately compounded by his refusal to accede to King Baldwin’s request to exchange Jerusalem for Tyre. Support for the regent ebbed. In November 1183 Saladin began a siege of Kerak in Oultrejordain while the castle was hosting the marriage between Princess Isabella and Humphrey IV of Toron. Facing this fresh crisis, Baldwin engineered a palace revolution. Guy was stripped of the regency and a new succession was arranged excluding him, signalled by the coronation of his stepson, the five-year-old Baldwin, son of Sybil and her first husband William of Monteferrat. To prevent Guy’s return to power, moves were begun to annul his marriage to Sybil. Command of the relief army to Kerak was handed to Raymond of Tripoli accompanied by the now blind and partly paralysed king in a litter. After the siege had been relieved, Guy, joined by his wife Sybil, shut himself in his city of Ascalon, risking civil war by defying Baldwin’s attempts to strip him of his fiefs. The process of annulment also ran into the ground. But Guy’s hopes of rule seemed at an end.⁴³

When the king despatched the Patriarch Heraclius to Europe in the summer of 1184 to try to induce a western ruler, perhaps one of Baldwin’s Angevin cousins, to come east to assume the regency, the political landscape appeared transformed. The regent of the year before was persona non grata; civil war had narrowly been avoided; Guy and Sybil had effectively been excluded from the succession that now hung on the life of an increasingly infirm leper and a weak child. When the king suffered another relapse in the winter of 1184–5, Raymond of Tripoli resumed the regency he had vacated over eight years before, although under restrictive terms, with Joscelin of Courtenay acting as young Baldwin V’s guardian. Acknowledging the fragility of succession arrangements, the High Court agreed that Raymond would retain the regency for ten years unless the young Baldwin died, in which case the competing claims of Princesses Sybil and Isabella would be adjudicated by the pope, the emperor of Germany and the kings of France and England. The earlier scheme of trying to attract a western regent was abandoned. Heraclius had met with no success, not having anything to offer western rulers other than temporary command of a fragile monarchy, a fractious nobility and a menacing enemy. The 1184–5 mission foundered on Jerusalem’s traditional diplomatic conundrum. Outside assistance was sought but with political strings protecting the power of the local royal family and nobility, hardly an attractive proposition. Paradoxically, the new succession arrangements in 1185 merely confirmed Jerusalem’s insularity.

The divisions within the ruling elite remained. Raymond held the regency, but Sybil was still married to Guy with her son, young Baldwin, in the custody of her uncle, Joscelin. Many suspected, possibly correctly, that Raymond still harboured designs on the throne while Princess Isabella’s party openly supported a settlement that denied the rights of Sybil and Guy. This time Baldwin IV did not recover. By 16 May 1185 he was dead.⁴⁴ The crisis within Outremer deepened precisely at a moment of opportunity. Saladin spent the year from spring 1185 to 1186 occupied with his attempts to subdue Mosul and northern Iraq. In December 1185 he fell gravely ill. Out of action for three months, his life despaired of, Saladin’s empire seemed about to fall apart. However, before leaving for Iraq, the sultan had once more agreed a truce with Raymond of Tripoli. Consequently, the Franks did nothing to intervene, despite the arrival of a few crusaders in the wake of Heraclius’s embassy. The flaw in Raymond’s pacific policy was exposed when, on his recovery in March 1186, Saladin finally annexed Mosul.⁴⁵ The encirclement described by William of Tyre was complete, and the Franks had done little to prevent it.

The death of the eight-year-old Baldwin V at Acre in the summer of 1186 drove Jerusalem near to civil war. While Raymond assembled a general council of the kingdom’s barons and clergy at Nablus, perhaps hoping to be elected king himself, Sybil’s partisans gathered at the Holy City for the young king’s funeral. With Sybil were Guy, the masters of the military orders, Reynald of Chatillon, the Patriarch Heraclius and Baldwin V’s paternal grandfather, William III of Montferrat, a veteran of the Second Crusade who had retired to the east in 1185. After the obsequies, despite the objections of delegates from Nablus, they proceeded to choose Sybil as queen. There was less enthusiasm about Guy becoming king. Before she was crowned, Sybil promised to divorce Guy on three conditions; their children (all daughters) were to be declared legitimate; Guy was to remain count of Ascalon and Jaffa; and Sybil was to have a free choice of new husband. However, once crowned by the patriarch, Sybil promptly selected Guy. This coup cannot have entirely pleased her supporters, but Sybil had shown that, like her father and