THE DECLINE OF THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM 1174–87
From the third quarter of the twelfth century, political society in Outremer, in western eyes prosperous, extravagant, self-absorbed, fractious and corrupt, suffered a cumulative crisis only partly the fault of its leaders. In the north, the principality of Antioch had been reduced by Nur al-Din to the coastal strip west of the Orontes. In the kingdom of Jerusalem, as has been seen, political stability was increasingly frayed by the rapid succession as monarchs of a possible bigamist (Amalric), a leper (Baldwin IV), a child (Baldwin V) and a woman (Sybil) with an unpopular arriviste husband (Guy). Protected by a series of truces with Saladin, appearances of wealth and power, noticed by Christian and Muslim travellers in the 1170s and 1180s, concealed and encouraged self-indulgent factional politicking. From 1174 to 1186 constant jockeying for control of the regency, the ill and infant kings or royal patronage diverted attention from the more intractable problems of defence and finance.
Although revenues from commerce, especially from the port of Acre, were buoyant, the incomes of the king and his greater barons seemed increasingly inadequate to meet expenditure, especially on defence. Across the kingdom there was a move towards castles and fiefs within lordships being acquired by wealthy ecclesiastical corporations, such as the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre and, especially, the military orders of the Templars and Hospitallers. These could draw on wide networks of resources from Outremer and estates in western Europe. In the lordship of Caesarea, by 1187, perhaps as much as 55 per cent of landed property was in religious hands, the bulk of it owned by the military orders. In the frontier lordship of Galilee, all the major castles except Tiberias itself seem to have been in the hands of the Templars or Hospitallers by 1168.24 If secular lordships were withering, sustained by money fiefs rather than land, the crown retained considerable powers of patronage and wide sources of revenue, including custom and harbour dues, taxes on Muslims and pilgrims, profits from minting coin as well as from the royal demesne, including the farming-out of proceeds from local industries, such as sugar production. However, with no new lands being conquered, the demands of patronage denied the crown much scope for increasing its ordinary income. The 1167 invasion of Egypt required a special 10 per cent income tax on those who declined to join the expedition, agreed at an assembly at Nablus that apparently included representatives of ‘the people’ as well as the clerical and lay magnates.25 In 1183, a comprehensive survey of landholdings in the kingdom was conducted (a census) to provide a basis for a new assessment of military obligation. According to the well-informed William of Tyre, chancellor of the kingdom at the time, faced with the prospect of greater pressure from Saladin, ‘the king and the barons were reduced to such a desperate state of need that their revenues were entirely insufficient to provide for the necessary outlay’, leading them to agree to a new national war tax on all inhabitants, regardless of language, race, religion or sex. This process of land census followed by fiscal imposition is reminiscent of the Domesday Survey of 1086 in England. The nature of the tax, 2 per cent on income above 100 besants as well as 1 per cent on land worth more than 100 besants, with a graded hearth tax below that, echoed that of 1166 and in part presaged the Saladin Tithe of 1188 and thirteenth-century English parliamentary taxation in the west, not least in the explicit element of consent described by William of Tyre: ‘by the common consent of all the nobles, both secular and ecclesiastical, and by the assent of the people of the kingdom of Jerusalem… for the common good of the realm’.26 This was parliamentary language.
The underlying problems were not just financial. Despite the de facto overlordship of the king of Jerusalem, Outremer’s disjointed authority (Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem) militated against coherent strategic planning along the whole of the Christian frontier, although the rise of the military orders may have acted as a compensating balance to this fissiparous tendency. More damaging in the circumstances of the 1170s and 1180s was the heavy political, administrative and military reliance on the person of the ruler. The severely disabled leper King Baldwin IV was forced to preside in person over his administration and meetings of his council and to attend campaigns and battles even if he had to be strapped to his horse or carried in a litter. Whenever he tried to relinquish the increasingly intolerable burden for a partly paralysed, nearly blind invalid, whose physical disintegration caused him to shun company, he found he could not. William of Tyre’s heroic Baldwin was trapped in a political system, fragile in its narrowness, vulnerable to internal faction as to external attack.27
In contrast with the system of consultative assemblies on display in 1167 and 1183, this lack of executive institutional sophistication matched limited military resources. An incomplete list of obligations from c.1180 indicated 675 knights owing to the king, which might represent about 700 in full, with service from churches, monasteries and towns, in the form of sergeants, potentially adding c.5,000 troops, as well as the military orders, perhaps another 700 knights and, crucially, bodies of mercenaries, such as Turcopoles or Bedouin.28 In theory, to these more or less trained troops could be added the levée en masse in times of emergency. Yet, as the campaign of 1187 revealed, raising the full complement of armed forces left vital castles and cities defenceless; the castle of Le Fève in Galilee was emptied of defenders during the preliminaries to Hattin and the city of Jerusalem contained just two knights by the time Saladin began his siege in October 1187.29 Any supplement of mercenaries required funds, which the kings and barons seemed increasingly to lack, in 1187 having to plunder the treasure deposited in Jerusalem by Henry II of England in expiation for his involvement in the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Yet it was lack of manpower not cash that posed the greatest threat. Small wonder that the refusal of western rulers to commit troops to Outremer in 1184–5 left Patriarch Heraclius ‘much distressed’.30
Despite containing Muslim pressure, increasing political dysfunction corroded Jerusalem’s unity of policy and purpose. The origins of the problems can be traced to the reign of Amalric. In 1163, the new king was forced at repudiate his wife, Agnes of Courtenay, sister of Joscelin III of Courtenay, heir to the lost county of Edessa. The stated grounds for the divorce were consanguinity, but some have argued that when Amalric and Agnes married in 1157, she was already married to Hugh of Ibelin, to whom she returned as wife after her separation from Amalric.31 Whatever the truth of the royal marriage, its annulment revealed a ruling elite that calculated personal and immediate gain above destabilizing the monarchy on which their own power depended. Behind opposition to Amalric may have lurked the decline in baronial wealth and authority within their own lordships, making royal patronage even more fiercely contested, raising anxieties lest Agnes, as queen, would seek to find lordships and fiefs for her landless brother and other dispossessed Edessans. The legacy of the civil war of 1152, when Amalric sided with his mother Queen Melisende against Baldwin III, may have fuelled suspicion, as well as personal dislike. Amalric’s taciturn dourness, absence of charm and lack of affability was noted even by his friend and protégé William of Tyre. Apparently, the new king was regularly heckled and insulted both in public and private, taunts he affected to ignore. More seriously, he was accused of failing to control his ministers and officials, although this may simply refer to the unpopularity of Amalric’s favourite and, from 1167, seneschal (i.e. head of the civil administration), Miles of Plancy.32 Some may have wished to annul Amalric’s marriage to free him to conclude a diplomatically more advantageous match, much in the fashion of Baldwin I’s marriage to Adelisa of Sicily half a century earlier (which was certainly bigamous). In 1167 Amalric did in fact marry Maria Comnena, great-niece of Manuel I.
Although the politics of Amalric’s reign revolved around the Egyptian war, later battle-lines began to coalesce around Amalric’s intimates and his new wife, Maria and, after 1172, her daughter Isabella, as opposed to his first wife, Agnes, and her children, Baldwin and Sybil. Even though Agnes had little or no contact with her children aft
er her divorce from the king, the reversionary interest that surrounded them pointed to her role as future queen-mother. Agnes also established extensive contacts within Jerusalem first by her marriage (or remarriage) to Hugh of Ibelin, lord of Ramla, linking her to the fastest-rising local seigneurial family, then, after Hugh’s death c.1169, her taking as her fourth husband (her first had died as long ago as 1149) Reynald Grenier, the ugly, intellectual lord of Sidon, noted for his command of Arabic language and literature.33 Such affiliations were lent increased significance by an oddity of Amalric’s reign, the fortuitous absence from the political scene of three leading lords who later dominated Jerusalem politics. Reynald of Châtillon, erstwhile prince of Antioch, had been in captivity in Aleppo since 1161; Joscelin III of Courtenay followed him into Aleppan captivity in 1164, as did Raymond III of Tripoli. The release of all three between 1174 and 1176, and their subsequent elevation to leading positions within the kingdom of Jerusalem, transformed the politics of the reign of Amalric’s leper son.
In monarchies where an element of hereditary succession, especially primogeniture, had become established, minorities were inevitable, paradoxical destabilizing tributes to greater dynastic stability, the rights of the genetic heir overcoming the practical need for leadership. On Amalric’s sudden death in July 1174, after a debate probably focusing on the already worrying signs of the thirteen-year-old heir-presumptive’s illness balanced by the lack of obvious, uncontentious or available alternatives, the High Court agreed to the accession of Prince Baldwin. His elder sister Sybil was an unmarried convent girl; his young half-sister Isabella was only two. A regency would only have to last until Baldwin was fifteen, the Jerusalem age of majority. If the young king’s leprosy had been diagnosed, almost certainly he would not have been chosen.34 Yet doubts either about the prospects for his survival or his ability to have children may have already surfaced. The marriage of his sister Sybil, with its direct implication for the succession, had been discussed a few years earlier. Baldwin’s accession and the rapid realization that he was a leper and would be short-lived and childless, meant that his reign was dominated by reversionary factions defined, at least in part, by the competing claims of the king’s sister and half-sister, each backed by their mothers, Agnes of Courtenay and Maria Comnena.
Partly as a result of the way the highly partisan William of Tyre described events, the feuding in Jerusalem after 1174 has often been characterized as between the old, indigenous baronage, cautious, shrewd, realistic, and a court coterie of grasping Courtenays, Agnes and her brother Joscelin, titular count of Edessa and seneschal of the kingdom, allied to newcomers from the west, rash, ignorant of local conditions and dangers, provocative towards Saladin, selfish and greedy in their pursuit of power and conduct of government. The evidence fails to sustain this interpretation.35 Under Baldwin IV the fiercest factional competition revolved around control of the machinery of government, under the king or, when he was incapacitated, through a regency, and over the succession. Separately, contrasting approaches to strategy in dealing with Saladin emerged. Some, such as Reynald of Châtillon, after his release from captivity in 1176 established as lord of Hebron and Oultrejordain, pursued an aggressive policy to distract Saladin from his conquest of Muslim Syria. Others, such as Raymond of Tripoli, advocated serial truces as a means of containing the sultan. Similarly, the importance given to diplomatic alliances with Byzantium and/or western powers provoked disagreement, not least, perhaps, after Amalric’s possible acknowledgement of Manuel I as his overlord during a visit to Constantinople in 1171.
Much antagonism sprang from personal rivalries nurtured in the hothouse of Outremer’s small, closed aristocracy, the complexities of which, while hard to follow, expose layers of intense suspicion and rivalry. Reynald of Châtillon’s wife, Stephanie of Milly, heiress of Oultrejordain, may have blamed the murder of her previous husband, Miles of Plancy, in 1174 on Raymond of Tripoli. A broken promise of a wealthy Tripolitanian heiress in the 1170s may have lain at the root of the hostility shown in the 1180s towards Count Raymond by Gerard of Ridefort, Master of the Temple (1185–9). William of Tyre’s own perspective may have been coloured by having been appointed archbishop of Tyre and chancellor of the kingdom in 1175 by Raymond of Tripoli during the regency of 1174–6 and being passed over for the patriarchate of Jerusalem in 1180, possibly at the behest of Agnes of Courtenay.36 One notably hostile source towards the opponents of Raymond of Tripoli in the 1180s may reflect the views of the count’s allies, the Ibelins.37 They had been allied to Agnes of Courtenay at the start of Baldwin IV’s reign but after the marriage of Balian of Ibelin to Dowager Queen Maria Comnena in 1177 supported the interests of Princess Isabella against her elder half-sister Sybil. In 1186, on the accession to the throne of Sybil and her husband, Guy of Lusignan, Baldwin of Ibelin quit the kingdom in disgust. There were also those whose loyalties rested not with any fixed party but with their own self-interest or with the monarch. Warriors such as Reynald of Châtillon and the constable, Humphrey II of Toron (d. 1179), remained conspicuously loyal to the king whatever their personal feelings towards whichever faction was dominant at court. Criticism of Reynald’s bellicose policy towards Saladin could with as much justice be directed at Baldwin IV, whose periods of rule showed him eager to take the battle to the enemy.
The evolution of the factions demonstrated fluid self-interest. After Amalric’s death most of the local baronage, including Agnes of Courtenay and Raymond of Tripoli, opposed the power of the unpopular seneschal Miles of Plancy. Yet after his assassination in October 1174, possibly organized by political rivals exploiting an old baronial feud, and Raymond’s subsequent regency (1174–6), political allegiances shifted. When Raymond surrendered the regency on Baldwin coming of age, 15 July 1176, the king appointed as seneschal and chief minister his recently released uncle, Joscelin of Courtenay, and immediately reversed Raymond’s policy of truce with Saladin, personally conducting two minor campaigns across the frontier in the same year. The arrival of William of Montferrat to marry Princess Sibyl in 1176 further alienated Raymond and his supporters. In 1177, on the sudden death of William of Montferrat in June, Baldwin, who was seriously ill, appointed Reynald of Châtillon as his regent, a snub less to the indigenous nobility or to Raymond personally than to the count’s supine foreign policy. With Reynald Baldwin won the famous victory at Montgisard in southern Palestine on 25 November 1177, when a potentially fatal Muslim invasion was caught off-guard and routed by a much smaller Frankish army. Yet earlier in the year a far greater prize, the prospect of a new amphibious attack on Egypt by the newly arrived Philip of Flanders together with a Byzantine fleet and a Jerusalem army, came to nothing, in part because of Philip’s ambitions laced with over-fastidious diplomacy, but in part because of the failure of the Outremer nobility to speak or act as one.38
For all his courage and determination, the longer Baldwin IV lived, the less able he was to rule. Nobody appreciated this more than the king despite his consistent political and public composure in the face of unimaginable physical and private agony. In 1177 he may have offered to abdicate in favour of his new brother-in-law, William of Montferrat. In 1178, after the birth of her son, another Baldwin, the king began associating Princess Sybil in official documents.39 Her remarriage became a central issue of Jerusalem politics, taking precedence over the threat from Saladin. In 1180, Raymond III of Tripoli, since his marriage to Eschiva of Bures lord of Galilee and thus one of the most powerful magnates in the kingdom, with his cousin Bohemund III of Antioch attempted a military coup d’état to secure a marriage for Sybil more favourable to their interests than the foreigners paraded as candidates over the previous three years. They invaded the kingdom and, it seemed to Baldwin IV, threatened his deposition as well as the removal of the Courtenays from power. The insurgents’ choice for Sybil’s hand appears to have been Baldwin of Ibelin, a former suitor rejected in 1178, brother-in-law to the Queen Dowager Maria. The king’s response was hurriedly to agree to the marria
ge of his sister to a 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 Châtillon, 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.
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