Amaury de Lusignan would prove to be much more successful than his younger brother. Assuming power in Cyprus after Guy’s death, he managed to get the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich to recognize him as King of Cyprus in 1197. He eventually became King of Jerusalem, dying of food poisoning in April 1205, but the de Lusignan dynasty would continue to rule Cyprus for almost three hundred years.
After Sybilla’s death, the crown should have passed to Isabella, but no one wanted to see Humphrey de Toron crowned and Conrad took full advantage of that reluctance. Great pressure was put upon Isabella to disavow her marriage to Humphrey. This eighteen-year-old girl showed considerable courage, insisting that she loved her husband and did not want to be separated from him although she faced opposition from her mother, Maria, and stepfather, Balian, virtually all of the Poulain lords, and the princes of the Church. They believed that Conrad would be a far better king than Humphrey, and they finally convinced Isabella that this was a sacrifice she must make for her beleaguered kingdom. The papal legate and the Bishop of Beauvais dissolved her marriage and she was wed to Conrad of Montferrat in November of 1190.
As readers of my novel Lionheart know, this marriage lasted less than two years. In April of 1192, Conrad was elected king by the Poulain lords, but he was soon murdered by two members of the Assassin sect. Isabella, then pregnant, thwarted an attempt by the French to take control of Tyre, and when Henri, the young Count of Champagne, arrived in Tyre, he found himself acclaimed as the kingdom’s savior, implored by the citizens, lords, and churchmen to marry their newly widowed queen. Henri had misgivings, for like most crusaders, he had never planned to remain in the Holy Land. But Isabella was willing, so he agreed to wed her and was soon smitten with his beautiful bride. Henri and Isabella had what seems to have been a happy marriage before his unexpected death in a bizarre fall in September 1197. Isabella had little time to grieve, for Outremer needed a king, and so she wed Amaury de Lusignan. Isabella died at thirty-three, not long after Amaury, in April 1205. Maria, her daughter by Conrad, then became queen. Isabella and Henri had three daughters, one of whom became Queen of Cyprus. She and Amaury had two daughters and a son, who died very young. Humphrey de Toron, Isabella’s unfortunate first husband, moved to Cyprus with Guy de Lusignan and died soon afterward; he never remarried.
After the surrender of Jerusalem, Balian d’Ibelin and Maria Comnena lived in Tripoli, although they eventually joined Guy and the other Poulain lords at the siege of Acre. Balian and Maria allied with Conrad, who would become their son-in-law after his marriage to Isabella. Balian appears occasionally in my novel Lionheart; he helped to negotiate the peace treaty between Saladin and Richard I. He was dead by the end of 1193, for he disappeared from historical accounts after that. Even though Maria was only thirty-nine at his death, she never remarried; she apparently died in 1217. Their two sons, John and Philip, rose to prominence during the reigns of Isabella and her daughter, Maria; John, in particular, became a trusted adviser, serving as constable and regent of the kingdom. Their daughters, Helvis and Margaret, made prestigious marriages. Helvis first married Renaud de Sidon (Denys in my novel), who was much older than she. They had three children before Renaud’s death in 1202. Helvis then wed one of the de Montforts—yes, a kinsman of my Simon de Montfort in Falls the Shadow. During the thirteenth century, the d’Ibelins became one of the most influential families in the Levant, Balian and Maria’s children and grandchildren benefiting from their blood bond to the queens of Jerusalem.
Balian’s elder brother, Baudouin, seems to have died in 1187; the last reference to him occurs in June of that year, before the battle at Haṭṭīn. I could find no date of death for his third wife, Mary de Brisebarre, or for his daughter, Etiennette. Esquiva died in 1196, her son by Amaury becoming King of Cyprus. Baudouin’s only son, Thomasin, seems to have died very young, probably in 1188.
Women often slip through history’s cracks, so we do not know for sure when Stephanie de Milly or Joscelin de Courtenay’s wife, Agneta de Milly, died. There is some confusion about Joscelin’s death, but it seems likely that he was dead by 1200; he apparently played no role in politics after the battle of Haṭṭīn. The death date of the Princess of Galilee and Countess of Tripoli, Eschiva de Bures, was not noted, either. Her sons had important roles in the politics of the kingdom.
Patriarch Eraclius died at the siege of Acre in the winter of 1190–1191. Joscius, Archbishop of Tyre, served as chancellor to Henri of Champagne and Isabella and died circa 1202.
Upon regaining his freedom, Gerard de Ridefort assumed command of the Templars and took part in the siege of Acre. He died at the siege in October 1189, and there are two different accounts of his death. One claims that he died fighting, refusing to retreat. The more credible one by the Saracen chronicler al-Athīr reports that he was captured by Saladin, who had him beheaded, for he’d sworn a holy oath that he’d not fight against the Saracens after being freed.
We know nothing of the family or fate of Balian’s squire, Ernoul, but he deserves to be mentioned here, for he wrote a history of the last years of their kingdom, a continuation of the history written by William of Tyre. Sadly, his history was lost, but we have several garbled versions of it in other continuations. These chronicles have a fascinating and confusing history of their own, which I discuss in the author’s note.
Bohemond, the Prince of Antioch, died in 1201. His second son and namesake, who became the Count of Tripoli, outmaneuvered his older brother and eventually ruled both Antioch and Tripoli. Bohemond’s wife, Theodora, may have wed a Poulain lord after their divorce.
The Third Crusade helped to confer immortality upon both Saladin and Richard the Lionheart. Saladin and Richard signed a peace treaty in September 1192; see my novel Lionheart for these events. Saladin died in March of 1193, at age fifty-five. His eldest son, al-Afdal, became the amir of Damascus and another son became the sultan of Egypt, but none of the sultan’s sons inherited their father’s abilities and the brothers were soon fighting among themselves. Not surprisingly, the far more capable al-‘Ādil eventually took power in 1200 and had a very successful reign, dying in 1218 at age seventy-three. His eldest son, known to history as al-Kamil, also had a long and successful reign. There are no death dates for the wives of the sultans; even their names are not known, with only a few exceptions.
Taqī al-Dīn died while besieging a Syrian castle in October of 1191. ‘Imād al-Dīn wrote several biographies of Saladin and died in 1201.
After Balian convinced Saladin to accept the peaceful surrender of Jerusalem, their kingdom consisted only of Tyre and several defiant castles. This would change with the Third Crusade. Richard I’s enemies dismissed the crusade as a failure because he’d not recaptured the Holy City, and Richard himself saw it that way. But by the time he left Outremer in October 1192, the kingdom stretched down the coast from Tyre to Acre and Ascalon was no longer in Saladin’s control. While he’d not retaken Jerusalem, Richard did buy the kingdom one hundred more years of life, for it existed in its truncated form until May of 1291, when Acre and then Tyre were captured by the Mamluk sultan of Egypt. The kingdom still survived longer than Antioch, which was taken by Sultan Baibars in 1268, and Tripoli, which fell in 1289.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Researching The Land Beyond the Sea was one of the easiest and yet most challenging tasks I’ve faced. It was easy because I’d been collecting books about the Holy Land and the Crusades for years, preparing to write Lionheart. So by the time I was ready to write about the Kingdom of Jerusalem, I already had an extensive library. It was still challenging because both the medieval chroniclers and subsequent historians all had their very own sharp axes to grind. There is something about the Levant that seems to make it impossible for people to be objective or dispassionate, and so I had to sort through a fair amount of propaganda in order to find a plausible version of what really happened.
There is one very reliable account of the history of the
kingdom, written by the man considered to be one of the greatest historians of the Middle Ages: William, the Archbishop of Tyre. His A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea offers us a riveting glimpse into a bygone world, and it is filled with personal details that historical novelists rarely encounter: William’s graphic description of Amalric’s obesity, Guillaume of Montferrat’s fondness for wine, and William’s heartbreaking story of discovering that Baldwin might be a leper. Unfortunately, his chronicle ends in 1184; it is such a loss to history that we were denied William’s perspective on the events leading up to the fateful battle at Haṭṭīn.
William’s history was widely read during the Middle Ages and beyond. For a long time, historians tended to take his chronicle as gospel; today it is recognized that he was writing to convince the rest of Christendom that they had a vested interest in the survival of Outremer. With that aim in mind, he sometimes gave a spin to known facts; for example, he made it seem as if young Baldwin was the one solely responsible for their remarkable victory over Saladin at Montgisard, whereas the Saracen chroniclers all identified Reynald de Chatillon as the battle commander. Yet William never lied; any sins he committed were sins of omission. A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea was translated into English in 1943, and for years it was very difficult to obtain. But, as I mentioned in the acknowledgments, it is now available from Amazon as an ebook.
After William’s death, a continuation of his history was written by a man named Ernoul; he is believed to have been Balian d’Ibelin’s squire, although nothing else is known about him. Unfortunately, Ernoul’s history was subsequently lost, and here is where the confusion set in. Later chroniclers wrote their own histories of the period, making use of Ernoul’s book with their own embellishments and additions. There are several of these “continuations” of William’s work, and we have no way of knowing how much was drawn from Ernoul’s history. They were written in the thirteenth century, too, and so it was inevitable that mistakes would be made. For example, we know that the number of the Acre garrison executed by Richard I after the fall of Acre was twenty-six hundred, as Richard himself mentioned that number in a letter to the Abbot of Clairvaux, and it was confirmed by a contemporary Saracen chronicler. Yet one of these continuations reports that sixteen thousand were slain at Richard’s order! So these accounts have to be approached with caution.
We do have several valuable Saracen chronicles of the period, which I relied upon for Lionheart and again for this novel. They offer a fascinating portrayal of Saladin written by men who actually knew him; details are given in the acknowledgments.
Mark Twain observed that “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” That is so true of the medieval accounts written after William’s death and true, too, of many of the modern histories of this period. I’ve been writing for more than thirty years and I cannot recall ever encountering so many biased sources. Let’s start with the portrayals of Agnes de Courtenay. William loathed her and delivered a devastating verdict, describing her as “a woman detestable to God.” He thought that she was power hungry, greedy, and ruthless. But he never even implied that she was sexually promiscuous. That was not the case with the thirteenth century “continuations” of his work, for they transformed her into the Whore of Babylon, claiming that she flaunted her lovers—among them Amaury de Lusignan and Patriarch Eraclius—and rewarded them with high offices.
There is no evidence for these claims, but subsequent historians accepted them without hesitation, including some of the most respected scholars of the era. Eventually, Bernard Hamilton took a hard look at these accusations; and in The Leper King and His Heirs, he argues convincingly that Agnes has been maligned. One reason historians accepted this view of Agnes is due to a misreading of a paragraph in William’s history. He was discussing the annulment of Amalric’s marriage to Agnes, but some historians erroneously thought that he was saying Agnes had been disavowed by her fourth husband, Renaud de Grenier, called Denys in my novel. This is not so; they were wed circa 1170 and were still married at the time of Agnes’s death in 1184. Had historians realized this, they would not have been so quick to believe that Agnes openly took lovers and lavished favors upon them. A medieval lord like Renaud would never have allowed himself to be publicly cuckolded like that. Agnes certainly had her flaws, but sexual sins were not among them. Other historians, Peter Edbury in particular, provide a more balanced analysis of the power struggle that would eventually doom the kingdom; I cite Edbury’s work at greater length in the acknowledgments. But earlier historians, such as Steven Runciman, offer an outdated and inaccurate image of Agnes.
Another historical figure whose reputation has fluctuated as much as Agnes’s is Raymond, the Count of Tripoli. Historians like Runciman and Marshall Whithed Baldwin saw the civil strife in the kingdom as a struggle between hawks and doves, and cast Raymond as the hero. The hawks were Agnes and her brother, Joscelin; Reynald de Chatillon; Gerard de Ridefort; and Guy de Lusignan, seen as aggressive newcomers who scorned the Saracens as evil infidels. The doves were the native-born barons, the Poulains like the d’Ibelins and the lords of Sidon and Galilee and Caesarea, led by the Count of Tripoli, men more knowledgeable about life in the Levant, understanding that survival was possible only through accommodation. In this reading, the doves were the good guys and the hawks were the villains. And Baldwin? He was more or less overlooked, dismissed as the invalid king whose mortal illness made him vulnerable to manipulation by his mother and her allies.
Reality is never this simple, of course. The pendulum may swing widely in its historical arc, but eventually it swings back; and in recent years, historians have followed the lead of Bernard Hamilton and Peter Edbury, recognizing Baldwin’s remarkable courage and arguing that the court factions were not so clearly drawn. Raymond’s actions were stripped of that heroic haze and he was viewed in a less-admiring light. I personally think he was a man motivated mainly by self-interest; and his credibility was so damaged by his past actions that his enemies were not willing to listen when he did act selflessly, trying desperately to convince them that it would be madness to take Saladin’s bait at Haṭṭīn. They saw his charge with the vanguard as an act of treason, many sure that he was still conspiring with Saladin. It would have been impossible for Raymond and his men to fight their way back up that steep slope to rejoin the battle; any doubts I may have had were dispelled as soon as I looked upon that rocky terrain for myself. There is confusion, too, as to whether he was acting on his own or at Guy’s behest when he led the vanguard in that final charge, as the chroniclers tell differing stories. Whatever the truth, I do not see it as treachery; had he succeeded in scattering Taqī al-Dīn’s men, the rest of the Franks could have followed him as the infantry tried to do.
While researching the history of Outremer, it struck me that there were few villains, that most of them were flawed people doing what they thought was best for their homeland and for themselves. That cannot be said of the Templar grand master Gerard de Ridefort, whose vengefulness and arrogance did so much to bring about the kingdom’s downfall. As king, Guy de Lusignan must bear the ultimate responsibility for riding right into Saladin’s trap, but their fatal march was Gerard’s doing. A few of the historians who have rejected the hawks-versus-doves scenario have gone even further and attempted to rehabilitate Guy’s reputation, arguing that his decision to venture into an arid wasteland without water was not as mad as it seems. For example, one of them sought to excuse Guy’s refusal to halt at Tur‘an by citing modern statistics to argue that the spring at Tur‘an would not have had enough water for such a large army. But Saladin thought otherwise; we know that he was greatly relieved when he heard that the Franks had bypassed Tur‘an and were marching on to their doom. The most scathing verdicts come from fellow soldiers, from the military historians I cited in my acknowledgments. The battle of Haṭṭīn is considered to be one of the great battlefield blunders of all time, right up there with the Little Big Ho
rn and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
Readers will be interested to know that my description of the end of the battle comes from an eyewitness, Saladin’s son al-Afdal, who later related the day’s events to the Saracen chronicler al-Athīr. I was able to use some of the actual dialogue in the confrontation between Reynald de Chatillon and Saladin in the latter’s tent and again at other times during the battle. We do not know how Balian managed to break free with the survivors of his rearguard, but the suggestion of the historian David Nicolle made the most sense to me—that he took advantage of the distraction of the Blue Wolf’s men.
As always, historical novelists must fill in some of the blanks. We do not know the exact death dates for many of the major characters, including Balian, Baudouin, Maria, William, Agnes, and even Baldwin. Nor do we know the year of Balian’s birth, with historians estimating it at between 1143 and 1150. I thought the German scholar Hans Mayer made the most convincing argument for 1150 and adopted that one. We do not know the name of Amalric and Maria’s second daughter, who died very young, so I gave her the name of Amalric’s mother. And we do not know the cause of death for many of the characters, which is a common problem for historical novelists. William reported only that Sybilla’s first husband, Guillaume of Montferrat, sickened and died within two months. Nor do we know the ailment that claimed Baldwin’s life. Because kidney failure was so common among lepers, I chose that as a likely cause of his death. And we do not know what killed Baldwin’s nephew, the young king. After learning that Saladin’s eldest son suffered from asthma, I selected this as the fatal malady for that unlucky little boy.
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