God's Wolf

by Jeffrey Lee

  When Reynald de Chatillon was captured he had been in his mid-thirties. By his release he was probably over fifty and past his prime. He was remarkably durable, however, and emerged brimming with drive and intensity. Inevitably his ordeal had left its mark: ‘Although still young,’ lamented Peter of Blois, ‘his whole head was sprinkled with untimely grey.’ But neither age nor imprisonment had withered him, and Reynald would soon prove his worth to the crusader cause. As his ransomers must have hoped, his skills had not rusted through lack of use, and his hand had not forgotten how to grip a sword.

  The release of these inspirational leaders was a fillip for the Frankish cause. Peter of Blois wrote that Reynald’s ‘much-longed-for release’ was received everywhere with ineffable joy. But not all his peers in the East were ecstatic to see Reynald back in the crusader ranks. At first Reynald returned to the city where he had initially scaled the heights of power, but he found nothing to keep him in Antioch. He retained the title of ‘Prince’ for life, but had no rights to position or property in the principality. His wife was dead. His children had gone to Byzantium. The patriarch was still the indestructible Aimery of Limoges, Reynald’s sworn enemy. The current prince, Reynald’s stepson Bohemond III, was now in his thirties and well established in his rule. He had no desire to see another Prince of Antioch in the city, especially not a predecessor and potential rival with the ambition and awesome reputation of his stepfather. Reynald soon abandoned the state where he had achieved his remarkable rise. A landless knight-errant again, endowed with little more than an empty title, he may even briefly have considered returning to Europe. But his tastes, character and abilities were better suited to the precarious luxury, the extreme risks and rewards of the war-torn East. He had already made his name and one fortune in Outremer. His fame, his contacts and his future lay there too, as did, perhaps, the religious motivation to protect the Christian gains in the East. Besides, the years of brooding in captivity may have left him with a strong sense of unfinished business. Of the three Latin states, only one offered Reynald any opportunity. Antioch was barred to him; the county of Tripoli, ruled by his rival, Raymond III, was equally unwelcoming. The ageless adventurer swallowed his princely pride and left Antioch to try his luck in a new realm. Reynald rode south through the territory of Antioch and Tripoli and into the promised Palestine of milk and honey that was the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

  Not all the land was as rewarding as God had described it to Abraham. There were foetid, fever-ridden swamps in places and, from the central town of Ramleh southwards, vast tracts of the kingdom were essentially sand. There were areas of plenty, though; port cities like Beirut, Tyre and Acre thrived as trading emporiums between East and West. Plantations of sugar cane and citrus flourished along the humid coast, while olive groves covered the hills inland. And everywhere the land was lush with holy places.

  To get to Jerusalem, Reynald might have hugged the coast, then turned east at Jaffa onto the main pilgrim road to Ramleh and up through the hills. Alternatively he could have ridden inland, then south across the uplands of Samaria. Either way, he would have been riding across holy ground. The north included Galilee, with its capital Tiberias on the great lake or ‘sea’ where Jesus walked on the water. Jesus’ home town of Nazareth was nearby, as were the sites of the miracles at Cana (water into wine) and Capernaum (healing the centurion’s servant). Conical Mount Tabor with its great monastery was visible for miles. Armageddon, Lebanon, Hermon, Carmel, Samaria, the River Jordan, the Dead Sea – the very geography of the kingdom was biblical; and, at its spiritual heart, on the edge of the barren hills of the Judean Wilderness, lay Jerusalem.

  Reynald’s destination was the holiest place of all – the very wellspring of the crusading spirit. Pilgrims flocked from all over Christendom to pray nearby at Christ’s birthplace in Bethlehem, and to bathe in the Jordan where he was baptized. In the city itself they could follow the stations of his passion to pray at the very holy of holies, the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  When Reynald arrived in 1176, Jerusalem had been a Christian city for three-quarters of a century. After its capture from the Muslims in 1099, the Jewish and Islamic populations had been massacred and any survivors expelled. As Fulcher of Chartres had written, poor crusaders found themselves living in great mansions. Still, apart from its role as a tourist trap, Jerusalem was not a wealthy town. Isolated in the hills, it lay on no trade route, nor was it strategically sited. The ports generated much more revenue, and many sites would have been more convenient as capital, but Jerusalem was supreme through its holy associations. The main business of Jerusalem was power – it was a military base and the spiritual and temporal capital of the kingdom.

  The Patriarch of Jerusalem ruled over the Palestinian Church, and the Military Orders were also headquartered there. The Knights Templar were based on the gigantic platform of the ancient Temple Mount, in Solomon’s temple – actually the mosque of Al-Aqsa. The Knights Hospitallers’ headquarters were in their great Hospital of St John.

  Reynald would have found Jerusalem weakly fortified, though. No invader had threatened the city for decades, and the walls were in a decrepit state. Only the powerful citadel, the Tower of David, was in good repair. It was an appropriate place for Reynald to celebrate his freedom, though; with a lot of pilgrim tourists and soldiers around, the capital had a reputation as a decadent, licentious party town. We don’t know how fully he took advantage of the entertainment on offer, but we do know that at court he walked into a snakepit of intrigue.

  Rumour and conspiracy swirled around the boy-king Baldwin IV. The immediate incentive was who would govern when King Baldwin’s leprosy made him too sick to rule. A little further ahead, ambitious nobles like Raymond of Tripoli saw an even greater prize on offer – the succession itself. Baldwin would not live long. He could not father children, and there was no clear heir apparent. Two main cliques had coalesced in the contest for power; and Raymond of Tripoli headed one of these factions. Through Baldwin IV’s minority, Raymond had been too passive as regent. He had appointed the brilliant Archbishop William of Tyre as chancellor and had managed to hold the realm together, but he had signally failed to inhibit the inexorable rise of Saladin. Raymond had recently surrendered the regency when Baldwin came of age, but he was left with a taste for high office and harboured ambitions for the very summit. His support came from numerous barons, especially the influential Ibelin family, led by the prominent knight Baldwin of Ibelin and his younger brother Balian. Critically for Reynald’s subsequent reputation, the historian William of Tyre was of this faction, as was the chronicler Ernoul, the squire of Balian of Ibelin.

  Until the return of Reynald, the second ‘royal’ faction had no clear leader. It was centred on the king’s mother, Agnes de Courtenay, and her brother, Count Joscelin de Courtenay, titular Count of Edessa and Reynald’s long-time companion in prison. They were deeply suspicious of Raymond’s regal ambitions. Their allies included a group of pushy newcomers from Poitou in France, led by the de Lusignan family. The leading churchman in their group was the Archbishop of Caesarea, Heraclius.

  On his arrival, Reynald may well have met with hostility from Count Raymond, stemming from their time as POWs. And Raymond could still have harboured rancour for Reynald’s part in the jilting of his sister Melisende. Even without any personal animus, Raymond and his baronial supporters would have been very wary of the prodigal Prince Reynald as a dangerous new rival on the scene. And rightfully so.

  The forceful and ambitious Reynald was a formidable recruit for the royal Courtenay clique at court. In Reynald’s unswerving loyalty to the crown, Raymond’s lust for supreme power would find an insuperable obstacle. For the next ten years and more, the internal politics of the kingdom would be dominated by this struggle between the two men who had suffered for years in the jails of Aleppo – Raymond of Tripoli and Reynald de Chatillon. In their bitter rivalry they would each enjoy spells of pre-eminence, and their final split woul
d come to a head in the most decisive battle of the crusades.

  The Muslims had no doubt that Raymond and Reynald were the two most important Frankish leaders. Both were constantly cursed and denigrated, though Raymond was often credited with intelligence, shrewdness and wisdom, while Reynald was not. Reynald, on the other hand, was clearly regarded as the more dangerous opponent and was the more hated, feared and vilified. It was these two leaders whom Saladin’s aide, the Qadi Al-Fadil, would ask the sultan to eliminate, because ‘victory can only be achieved with their deaths’. From the perspective of domestic Frankish affairs, it is equally clear that Reynald was consistently the most prominent, determined and effective leader of the faction opposing Raymond’s designs on the kingdom.

  Despite suspicion from some quarters, Reynald returned to a hero’s welcome in the Holy City. Even more than the size of his ransom, the phoenix-like resurgence of Reynald’s career after his release is proof of the regard that he inspired in his fellow Franks. It is also testament to his remarkable energy and constitution. Unlike so many, who emerged broken from captivity, fifteen years of hard time had not dimmed his health or his capability for energetic and decisive action. Nor had it diminished his swagger, his vaulting ambition or his capacity to be in the right place at the right time.

  The first high-level task Reynald was given demonstrates the respect in which he was held and emphasizes an aspect of his character that was clear to contemporaries, but has been almost universally ignored by subsequent historians – his diplomacy. The young King Baldwin IV chose Reynald, stepfather to Emperor Manuel’s wife, Maria of Antioch, to head an embassy to Constantinople, to negotiate a strategic alliance with the empire.6

  In contrast to the kingdom’s passive stance under Raymond’s regency, Reynald’s re-emergence opened the door to a more combative Frankish strategy. Reynald clearly believed that the crusaders should – and, significantly, could – defeat the Muslims on the battlefield. Since the death of Nur al-Din, the Muslim emirates in Syria were weak. The real threat came from the wealthy and well-populated country of Egypt. Under Raymond, the Franks had missed a chance to strike while Saladin was still establishing his rule and they needed to remedy that mistake. Reynald’s task was to convince the emperor to join in a combined invasion of Saladin’s realm. The Byzantine fleet would attack Egypt from the sea and the Frankish army by land. It was an ideal first assignment for Reynald: a chance to recuperate, grow stronger and enjoy his freedom. The trip must also have been gilded with the anticipation of reuniting with his son Baldwin, now an officer in the imperial army. It is not known whether he was able to meet his daughter, Queen Agnes of Hungary, or his infant grandsons, the future kings Emeric I and Andrew II. Reynald was probably also fulfilling a duty in seeing Manuel and Maria again; if the emperor had indeed underwritten his enormous ransom, perhaps at the urging of his wife, then Reynald needed to express his gratitude. As he approached the Golden Horn and the great sea walls of Constantinople in that autumn of 1176, he must have been in a positive frame of mind, confident that his relationship with the emperor would deliver results.

  But Manuel was no longer the man Reynald had bowed to in Mamistra. Earlier that year, in the summer of 1176, the emperor had marched his army into Asia Minor to crush the Seljuks of Iconium once and for all. The sultan, Kilij Arslan, offered generous peace terms, but Manuel, confident of victory, rebuffed him. His monstrous army marched on complacently and, on 17 September, pushed through a narrow pass near the ruins of the fortress at Myriokephalon. The Turks allowed the vanguard to emerge from the pass, then fell upon them from all sides. The units strung out along the trail suffered heavy casualties as they struggled up through a blinding dust storm to join the main battle. Some of the leading divisions were all but annihilated. The defeat was severe. It was not nearly as disastrous as that of Manzikert (at least Manuel had escaped, unlike the Emperor Romanus Diogenes in 1071), but it turned out to be just as significant. Sometime during the battle the iron-willed Manuel’s nerve had snapped. He was never quite the same afterwards, and the empire as a whole would never fully recover from the calamity. Kilij Arslan failed to decisively exploit his victory, but it definitively ended Byzantine attempts to restore imperial authority in Anatolia, and left the Greeks permanently on the defensive. In Syria, too, the impact was not immediately felt, but it would not be long before Saladin realized that he was free to act against the Latin states without any real threat of Byzantine military intervention.

  When Reynald arrived in Byzantium, the disastrous legacy for Christendom of Myriokephalon had not yet become clear, but its impact on Reynald personally was immediate and wounding. His son Baldwin had commanded a division of the Byzantine army at the battle. When the Turks surrounded them, he led his cavalry in a defiant attack. If better supported, Baldwin’s charge might have swung the battle, but Manuel’s leadership and his courage had deserted him. Baldwin died fighting along with all his men, ‘displaying desperate courage in their daring and noble deeds’.7 Reynald could be proud of his son, but what a devastating blow this tragedy must have been to him, still in the first flush of joy at his freedom. Amongst the many things that fifteen years of imprisonment had cost Prince Reynald was the chance ever to know his son as a man.

  Despite Byzantium’s weakened state and Reynald’s personal loss, the mission had a positive outcome. Essentially it reaffirmed the Byzantine protectorate over Jerusalem previously agreed by King Amalric. The terms of the deal are interesting as they reflect those negotiated by Reynald to save his skin back in 1159. Manuel agreed to send his fleet, which was still intact, to conquer Egypt with the Franks. In return, the Kingdom of Jerusalem would recognize Byzantine suzerainty and accept the return of an Orthodox patriarch to the Holy City. The attack on Egypt was set for the campaigning season of 1177. To crown the success of his embassy, Reynald also succeeded in negotiating the betrothal of his stepson, Prince Bohemond of Antioch, to the emperor’s great-niece Theodora. Bohemond and Reynald may not have seen eye-to-eye, but when it came to marriage alliances, Bohemond let the master weave his magic.

  Reynald’s diplomatic accomplishment immediately added to his prestige and further impressed the new generation of nobles in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Reynald had a princely title and a reputation, but neither would have carried any weight with the cynical baronage without his obvious abilities and their proofs – such as his diplomatic success. The landless Joscelin had risen to the post of seneschal immediately on his release, but he was King Baldwin’s uncle, brother of the king’s mother, the influential Queen Agnes. Reynald had the support of his old cellmate, but no family connections in Jerusalem. He had no land or wealth to buy support, or vassals to enforce it. He had to walk the walk and exploit his energy and charisma. With his reputation running high on his return from Constantinople, Reynald set his sights even higher.

  Of the most powerful political roles in the kingdom, Joscelin had taken the office of ‘Seneschal’, as we have seen. The chief military post, that of ‘Constable’, was occupied by the greatly respected Humphrey II of Toron. The greatest prize still on offer was the hand of La Dame du Crac, Stephanie de Milly, widow of the murdered Miles de Plancy. Stephanie carried with her the rights to the fief of Oultrejordan and its great fortresses, the Crac de Mont Real and the incomparable Crac de Moab (Kerak). Reynald again managed to position himself correctly and, just as he had outwitted other suitors in Antioch to marry Constance, so he was selected by the king as the ideal candidate for this job – a critical one for the kingdom’s defence. The Prince of Antioch was resurrected as Seigneur of Oultrejordan, Lord of Kerak and Mont Real. The new wife, Stephanie de Milly, came with the territory. His contemporaries were clear about why Reynald was so rewarded:

  Because he had guarded the Land of Antioch so well, and because of what a fine knight he was, they gave him the Lady of Kerak and Mont Real to be his wife.8

  We do not know how old Stephanie was when she married Reynald – she may still have been in her twentie
s – but she was already an old hand at political marriages. Her first was to Humphrey III of Toron, son of the constable, by whom she had two children, Humphrey IV and Isabelle. On her first husband’s death in 1173, she was quickly wedded to the seneschal Miles de Plancy, who was murdered in 1174. An intriguer in her own right, she was firmly embedded in the Courtenay clique at court. There is no evidence that she had any particular attraction or emotional attachment to Reynald. Whereas Reynald’s first marriage in his twenties was partly romantic, his second at around fifty years of age appears to have been purely political. Reynald was to prove himself a loyal father to his new stepchildren, but he and Stephanie would have no children of their own.

  Once again, Reynald had fallen on his feet in a spectacular way, but his resurgence was not universally popular in Jerusalem. Ambitious local barons had hoped to marry the eligible Dame du Crac, and would have been miffed at this outsider swooping in and stealing her from under their noses. Raymond and his baronial supporters would have seen it as a significant power shift towards the Courtenay faction. Reynald’s marriage to Stephanie de Milly further committed him to this party; Stephanie had no love for Raymond, suspecting him of the murder of her previous husband, Miles de Plancy.

  As Lord of Oultrejordan, Reynald added immense wealth and power to his personal strengths. Overnight he became one of the mightiest feudal barons in the country, owing the service of sixty knights to the crown. Oultrejordan’s knight-service was exceeded only by the hundred knights owed by Raymond’s principality of Galilee, by the lordship of Sidon and by the fief of Jaffa and Ascalon, traditionally granted to a royal prince or husband of a princess.9