Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2
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the Armenians, later to Byzantium. In 1136 Fulk installed Raymond of Poitiers
as Constance’s husband and prince of Antioch. This was the end of Norman
predominance there.
Great difficulties now arose from renewed Byzantine designs on Antioch
as a former Byzantine possession. When Emperor John Komnenos himself
appeared before Antioch in 1137 both Prince Raymond and King Fulk had to
accept terms which made Antioch a Byzantine fief. It was hoped that Byzantium
would provide decisive help against ‘Imad al-Din Zengi, a formidable foe who
had united Mosul and Aleppo in 1127–8.But such help did not come. Emperor
John refrained from entering Antioch until 1138 when he was driven out by a
popular riot because his army was still campaigning further east. Zengi now had
designs on Damascus. This led Damascus to an alliance with Jerusalem in 1139
which became the backbone of Jerusalem’s foreign policy until 1154.Nomatter
how severe the strain under which it came from time to time, it held. In 1140
Fulk conquered Banyas. It controlled the headwaters of the Jordan and fertile
lands in upper Galilee and was also important as a principal Muslim gateway
into the kingdom’s north. In the same year a papal legate deposed Patriarch
Ralph of Antioch who had been the last one to dream of an autocephalous
Latin church in the east. In the south-west Fulk contained the Egyptian outpost
of Ascalon by building a ring of fortresses around it and much was done in his
days for the Transjordan. In 1142 Emperor John Komnenos once more marched
into Cilicia and Syria. This time he even contemplated an armed ‘pilgrimage’
to Jerusalem. The project greatly alarmed Fulk who dissuaded him with some
difficulty. Antioch was saved by the emperor’s sudden death in April 1143,
followed in November by that of Fulk.
Fulk was succeeded by his minor son Baldwin III for whom his mother acted
as regent. The most pressing problems were, again, in the north. The history
of the county of Tripoli had been more or less uneventful since 1109 except
for a rapprochement in 1112 between Tripoli and Antioch which ended the
Provenc¸al–Norman antagonism that had arisen in 1098. Early in Fulk’s reign,
there had also been a Tripolitan attempt to throw off Jerusalem suzerainty.
But the pressure from the lesser amirates on the upper Orontes river who
successively came under Zengi’s control grew to a point where the counts of
Tripoli had doubts about holding their own. In order to protect their eastern
frontier they established two important and virtually independent frontier
marches, one in 1144 by giving the castle of Crak des Chevaliers near Homs to
the Knights Hospitallers, who much enlarged it, the other from 1152 when
the Knights Templar took over most of Tortosa, adding in the course of time
the mighty castle of Chastel Blanc. Both marches faced the Syrian branch of the
Assassins, an unruly and extremely dangerous Shi‘ite sect which, between 1132
and 1141, had established itself in the mountains east of Tortosa. Whereas the
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Hospitallers constituted a real threat to them, the Templars by 1173 protected
them in return for an annual tribute. In 1152,inone of their spectacular political
murders, the Assassins murdered Count Raymond II of Tripoli: it was the first
time that they had struck out at the Franks.
The fate of Edessa was more dramatic. The energetic count Joscelin I, from
the house of Courtenay, who had come to the east in 1101, had died thirty years
later, leaving his county to his son and namesake, an indolent d
´
ebauch
´
e who
indulged in luxuries and carried on interminable intrigues against Raymond
of Antioch, his feudal overlord from 1140. East of the Euphrates the county
had so often been ravaged by the Turks that it had become impoverished. In
the capital the stocks of food and arms had been allowed to fall below the
critical level. The Frankish element in the population was even smaller than in
the other crusader states and the city was defended by Armenian mercenaries
who were only irregularly paid. When Zengi laid siege to Edessa at the end
of 1144 it was too late. After the death of the Byzantine emperor in 1143 the
Byzantine army had evacuated Syria. Antioch now had to look after herself
and her prince was in no mood to do much for Edessa. Jerusalem, after King
Fulk’s death, was politically unstable. Queen Melisende did send an army of
relief but before its arrival Edessa fell on Christmas 1144, the event sparking off
the Second Crusade. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the county
should fall.
Areconquest of Edessa after Zengi’s death in 1146 lasted only a few days
and led to the town being pillaged and burnt and the Christian population
being enslaved and murdered. Edessa never fully recovered from this blow and
ceased to be an attractive target for the Franks. From a new capital further
west Joscelin II could hold the line of the Euphrates until he was captured in
1150, never to be set free again. What was left of the county now lay open to
Seljuq attacks from Anatolia. Neither Antioch, where Prince Raymond had
been killed in 1149, nor Jerusalem, where there was bitter internal strife, were
able to do more than cover the retreat. Consequently, and with Baldwin III’s
approval, the countess of Edessa sold the remaining six fortresses west of the
Euphrates to Byzantium in 1150, although they were lost to the Muslims within
ayear. Edessa, the first crusader state to have been founded, was the first to fall
after only half a century of a precarious Latin rule.
When Zengi was murdered in 1146 his dominions were divided between
his two sons, one of them, Nur al-Din, receiving Aleppo. He was to become
an even more redoubtable enemy for the Franks than his father had been.
Unlike Zengi, Nur al-Din was not occupied by Mesopotamian affairs and
could concentrate on fighting Damascus and the Franks. Following the sack
of Edessa, he took from Antioch most of her possessions east of the Orontes
in 1147–8,reducing the principality to a stretch of territory wedged in between
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the Orontes and the Mediterranean. The coming of the Second Crusade in
1148 forced him to march to the relief of Damascus. Owing to a rift which
had occurred between Louis VII of France and Raymond of Antioch, the
principality kept aloof from the crusade, as did Tripoli for other reasons. But
after the crusade Nur al-Din returned. In June 1149 he joined battle with the
Franks at Inab east of the Orontes and won his finest victory against them.
Prince Raymond was killed. The government of Antioch was placed in the
hands of Raymond’s widow Constance but was, in effect, exercised by the
patriarch Aimery of Limoges who, for much of his long pontificate of fifty-
three years, was the
´
eminence grise of Antioch politics. What had remained
of the principality east of the Orontes was now lost but to the west of it the
immediate effects of the battle were negligible. However, it established Nur
al-Din as the champion of Sunnite Islam and of the Holy War against the
Franks. Muslim propaganda supported his religious and political aims and the
reconquest of Jerusalem became a political programme.
In the south the kingdom of Jerusalem was badly split by internal strife
and it served King Baldwin III’s purposes that he had gained some prestige as
a military leader by campaigns in support of the northern crusader states as
well as by a successful expedition to Petra in the Transjordan. Warfare was one
field in which his mother could not compete with him, because in every other
respect she did.
It is not clear how, after initial difficulties, the joint rule initiated in 1131
had worked under Fulk. After 1134 the consent of his queen Melisende was
included in Fulk’s charters but it is not certain to what extent this reflected
areal share in government. What is easier to see is that Patriarch William of
Jerusalem (1130–45) had a more direct influence on royal government than any
other patriarch before or after him. Joint embassies attest to this. In a unique
exception from Jerusalem chancery usage William sealed a royal charter jointly
with the king and, even more significantly, once issued a charter in his name
but at the king’s command and concerning royal business. Melisende’s hour
came when Fulk died. Her son, King Baldwin III, was a minor and until 1145
Melisende was his regent. When Baldwin came of age Melisende continued
in her government as if nothing had happened, because as co-ruler she had,
already in Fulk’s days, held a (territorially undefined) share in the kingdom
which remained hers. For the kingdom this meant trouble.
By 1149 the chancellor, the very able Englishman Ralph, had to leave his
office and failed in a bid for the archbishopric of Tyre. For several years mother
and son failed to agree on a new chancellor and the royal charter business
was transacted in rival personal scriptoria by their respective chaplains. This
collapse was the most visible sign of the deep rift between mother and son
splitting the whole kingdom. Melisende had the support of the church. She
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controlled Jerusalem and Judaea and also Samaria and Galilee. Except for the
chancery she succeeded in creating her own household officials. The kingdom’s
chief military officer, the constable Manasses of Hierges, was a relative of hers.
The king only very gradually succeeded in turning the royal domain around
Tyre and Acre into a power-base. He was also successful in securing the loyalty
of the lords of Beirut and Toron in the north, and the lord of Toron also held
Hebron in the south for him as castellan.
Early in the crisis the Second Crusade gave Baldwin III a chance against
his mother. Given the fact that the alliance with Damascus was essential for
the peaceful development of Jerusalem, the plan to besiege it has baffled his-
torians as much as the execution of the siege. An explanation may be found
in the power-struggle going on in Jerusalem. There are signs in the sources
that Baldwin intended to give Damascus to the lord of Beirut, which would
decisively have swung the balance of power in his favour. Owing to treason-
able manoeuvres by the Jerusalem nobles the siege had to be abandoned and,
among others, Elinand of Galilee who, as lord of Galilee and as a partisan of
Melisende, would have been doubly affected by the king’s designs, was held
responsible for this.
From 1150 onwards a showdown was likely. The king had to rely for support
on the dispossessed and the disgruntled. The queen-mother had created vassals
of her own who claimed to owe allegiance only to her and who, in 1150,refused
to answer the king’s summons to serve in the army, arguing that they were
from Melisende’s portion of the kingdom. This was tantamount to a division
of the kingdom, but after the Second Crusade Melisende’s position began
to weaken. Galilee changed sides. She was able to offset this by creating her
younger son Amalric count of Jaffa in 1151.But she made a serious mistake
when, in 1150 or 1151, she arranged a marriage between her constable Manasses,
still a landless newcomer, and a very rich widow. This antagonized the old
families in general and the widow’s sons from the rapidly climbing powerful
Ibelin clan in particular. Baldwin III struck at Easter 1152.Hepetitioned the
patriarch to crown him in the absence of his mother. When, predictably, the
patriarch refused, the king marched through the capital wearing his crown.
It was a declaration of war. An immediate formal division of the kingdom
was ineffective and in a three-week civil war the king dislodged his mother
from power and brought down the unpopular Manasses, who had to return to
Europe. As a last remnant of her former share in the kingdom Melisende (d.
1162) was able to retain the royal domain in Samaria with a promise of non-
interference by the king. Occasionally she emerged from her retreat at Nablus
to exercise ecclesiastical patronage and even to voice opinions on policy, when
the king was out of the country. Otherwise the joint rule was dead. The former
chancellor Ralph was reappointed and rose to be bishop of Bethlehem in 1156.
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Only the most prominent supporters of Melisende re-entered royal service
quickly. Others were never readmitted or were kept on the sidelines for a long
time.
With his rule now secure Baldwin III looked for political success. In 1153,
after a siege of nearly seven months, during which seasonal pilgrims were
pressganged into the army and the king was brought to the brink of bankruptcy,
he conquered Ascalon, the last Muslim stronghold on the coast. He was now
strong enough to restore his brother Amalric, a strong supporter of Melisende,
to his graces by creating him count of Jaffa-Ascalon (1154).
The spectacular success at Ascalon may have made people forget that further
north things were not going at all well. Since 1149 Damascus had been internally
weak following the death of Unur, its able Turkish commander, who had struck
the alliance with Jerusalem in 1139.From1150 onwards Nur al-Din of Aleppo
increased the pressure on Damascus while his propagandists denounced the
treaty with the Franks. The king tried to bolster the defence of Antioch in
1150 by finding a new husband for Constance, the widow of the last prince.
Although he proposed candidates of convincing reputation she rejected all of
them and, in fact, all idea of a new marriage. Subsequent events demonstrated
that this was a mere pretext caused by a political impasse since, in 1150, the king
and his mother had been unable to agree on a suitable candidate. But within a
year of Melisende’s political fall Constance, in a move which took her vassals
totally by surprise but for which she had obtained the king’s approval, married
Reynald of Ch
ˆ
atillon, a reckless dare-devil from Burgundy who, having lost
his French patrimony, was serving as a penniless mercenary at Ascalon. Peter
of Blois later beatified him, mostly because of his undeniable bravery, and in
doing so he missed the mark. Reynald may have been helped by his claim to
an illustrious ancestry reaching back to a Gallo-Roman senatorial family but
Baldwin III should never have approved the marriage. From now on Reynald
made eternal trouble wherever he went. Hardly was he in office at Antioch
when he rid himself of the political influence of Patriarch Aimery by driving
him into an exile which lasted until 1159 through an act of extravagant brutality.
It is true that warriors were needed after the people of Damascus had opened
the gates of the city to Nur al-Din in 1154.Jerusalem had lost the relative
security enjoyed under the alliance of 1139.But with Aleppo and Damascus
now united against Antioch and Jerusalem, with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa
busy in Italy and with England and France eternally locked in their conflict
of interests, it was clear that the only power capable of supporting the Franks
was Byzantium. That alliance required a diplomatic skill which Reynald sadly
lacked. Fortunately, King Baldwin III was more skilful. He began negotiations
with Byzantium in 1157,trying to offset the very bad impression Reynald had
made in the previous year when, in cooperation with an Armenian prince
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from Cilicia, he had sacked the rich Byzantine island of Cyprus. The new
alliance between Jerusalem and Byzantium was concluded in September 1158
when Baldwin married a Byzantine princess. In political terms it was agreed
that Emperor Manuel Komnenos would bring help against Nur al-Din, and
Baldwin would acquiesce in the humbling of Reynald. In 1158 Manuel marched
into Syria with a well-trained army. Reynald submitted quickly, recognized the
emperor’s suzerainty and promised to install a Greek patriarch in the city. But
for the time being Manuel did not press this point.
In 1159 he concluded a truce with Nur al-Din which set up a system of
balance of power for north Syria which was to last until the Byzantine position
in Anatolia, and consequently in Cilicia and Syria, collapsed in 1176 in the
battle of Myriokephalon. While no direct Byzantine administration was set up
in Antioch, the principality came under heavy Byzantine influence. However,
this pax Byzantina meant security for the Franks. Nur al-Din understood that
Manuel was capable and willing, if need be, to intervene decisively on their
behalf. Conversely, Nur al-Din could rest assured that the Franks would not
engage in a full-scale war against his bases in Damascus and Aleppo.
Foradecade, the Franks directed their war efforts towards Egypt. In one
of the skirmishes in the north Prince Reynald was captured (in 1161, rather
than 1160) and remained imprisoned at Aleppo for sixteen years. No one
troubled to ransom him. When he was finally released from prison he was
more violently anti-Muslim than ever before. Following his capture, there
was a governmental crisis in Antioch in which both Constance and Patriarch
Aimery, who was supported by Baldwin III, claimed the rulership. Constance
sought to improve her position by marrying her daughter Maria to Emperor
Manuel but this led to accusations that she was inviting a Byzantine garrison
to be stationed in Antioch. Her own barons now drove her out and installed as
prince Bohemond III (1163–1201), her son by Raymond of Poitiers. Bohemond
was captured by the Muslims in 1164 and set free in 1165 but his ransom had been
set at an amount he was unable to pay without Byzantine help. In exchange he
had to accept a Greek patriarch in Antioch, the first since 1100, who was killed
in 1170 by his cathedral collapsing on him in the great earthquake which also
turned Tripoli into a ghost town. The Latin patriarch was then restored.
In 1163 Baldwin III died without offspring and his widow was soon to elope
with a Byzantine adventurer. Baldwin was succeeded by his brother Amalric
who could only become king, however, after he had separated from his wife,
whom he had taken away from his principal vassal to whom she had been
married at the time. Amalric left a record of being an outstanding law-maker,
even though Baldwin II and Baldwin III had set fine precedents. He is best
remembered in this field for his Assise sur la ligece (below, p. 672) and for his
creation of special courts dealing with commercial and maritime cases.
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The pact with Byzantium remained the backbone of Amalric’s foreign pol-
icy even though he placed increasing strains upon it. But in its shadow, and
protected by it on his northern flank, he embarked on an ambitious policy to
conquer Egypt. The door had been opened by the conquest of Ascalon but
the lure had always been there because Egypt, under the last Fatimid caliphs,
was politically weak and in the grip of competing viziers and corrupt Coptic
bureaucrats. It was, however, a country rich through trade and productivity: in
1168 it was seriously believed that the grant of the city of Bilbais and its contado
would provide the Knights Hospitallers with annual revenues of 100,000 gold
pieces. Since 1156 King Baldwin III had taken a hard line, trying to hit the
Fatimid navy by enforcing an embargo on shipbuilding materials and in 1159
he had discussed the conquest of Egypt with the Byzantine emperor.
Butitwas Amalric who seriously attacked Egypt. He invaded the country in
1163, 1164, 1167, 1168 and 1169. This aggressive policy, together with the internal
weakness of Egypt, was bound to attract Nur al-Din’s attention, and he sent
troops to Egypt. In 1164 he also put the pressure on Amalric by launching, in
spite of the pax Byzantina,ashort but dangerous campaign against Antioch
and Tripoli, capturing the rulers of both. Raymond III of Tripoli (1152–87)
remained in prison for ten years while King Amalric took over his county as
regent. Worse than this, Nur al-Din reconquered Banyas at the same time.
This caused the Franks a profound shock and it forced Amalric out of Egypt.
In 1167 he was obliged to return to the Nile to offset the effects of another army
which Nur al-Din had sent there. He and his Egyptian allies forced the Syrian
army to leave the country and a Frankish garrison was installed in Cairo to
supervise the collection of an enormous annual tribute to be paid to Jerusalem.
But Amalric was not satisfied. He now planned to conquer Egypt with
Byzantine help and strengthened his alliance by marrying a great-niece of Em-
peror Manuel immediately after the campaign of 1167.In1168 a formal treaty
on the conquest of Egypt was concluded. Byzantium was to provide the naval
support indispensable for blockading the Nile delta. But a war party persuaded
the king to commence the camapaign prematurely without Byzantium. Syria
and Egypt now formed a common front. Nur al-Din’s Kurdish general Shirkuh
made himself vizier of Egypt and, after his death in 1169, was succeeded in this
post by his nephew Saladin, the fifth vizier in only six years. Saladin came
from a Kurdish military family in Nur al-Din’s service and was to become the
founder of the great dynasty of the Ayyubids. He was obliged to bide his time
as master of Egypt under Nur al-Din’s formal overlordship even after he had
abolished the Shi‘ite caliphate of the Fatimids in 1171.
By that time he had beaten off Amalric’s last assault on Egypt in 1169, this
time launched against Damietta with the active support of a Byzantine fleet.
The understanding was that, in the event of a conquest, Jerusalem would
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receive the interior with Cairo and Bilbais and a port at Rosetta while the
rest would go to Byzantium. When the Byzantines sent an armada of 200
ships, Amalric had second thoughts and made a secret deal with Damietta
leading to the evacuation of Egypt. For the remainder of the twelfth century
this meant the end of the Frankish assault on Egypt. Nothwithstanding initial
successes Amalric’s Egyptian policy had ended in disaster. It had been very
costly to finance because the vassals had to be paid in cash when they were
called to serve outside the kingdom: the campaign of 1164 had been paid for
by an Egyptian ally, who put up generous per diems;in1167 an extraordinary
10 per cent tax was levied on the vassals remaining at home; in 1168 lavish
promises in Egypt were made to the participants; while in 1169 Byzantium was
the paymaster. Except for the short-lived tribute of 1167 the gains which had
been hoped for had not materialized nor had the country been occupied.
Onaroyal visit to Constantinople in 1171 Amalric was treated with lavish
magnificence but this probably covered up the acceptance of some son of feudal
dependence on Byzantium by the king. The result was a growing influence of
the Byzantine emperor in the kingdom of Jerusalem. The Greek church could
emerge more freely than before into the open. For the first time since 1099 a
Greek patriarch of Jerusalem was able to reside in Palestine for eleven months
in 1177–8.Greek painters and mosaicists embellished, at Manuel’s expense,
not only small crusader churches like the one at Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem
but also the principal shrines of the Nativity at Bethlehem and of the Holy
Sepulchre at Jerusalem. To the latter the crusaders had added a large choir
which had been completed in the days of King Fulk, although consecration
had been postponed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Jerusalem’s
conquest on 15 July 1149.InBethlehem Manuel was remembered in a bilingual
inscription. His portrait was painted in the church and a mosaic showing the
ecumenical council of 381 spoke, albeit in Greek, of the procession of the Holy
Spirit without reference to the filioque clause which had later been added to
the conciliar creed in the west. It seems that the bishop-chancellor Ralph of
Bethlehem truly merited William of Tyre’s verdict that he was utterly worldly.
Help from Europe, although constantly requested, did not come. Saladin
in Cairo was not idle. In 1170 he recaptured Gaza and drove the Latins out
of Aqaba on the Red Sea, thus reopening the land route between Egypt and
Mecca and threatening the Frankish Transjordan from the south. His political
power in Egypt grew steadily. Following the restoration of Sunnism there, he
came to be considered as the champion of Islamic orthodoxy by the Sunnites.
This led to an increasing estrangement between him and his Syrian master after
1171.Hewas rescued from these difficulties by the more or less simultaneous
deaths of Nur al-Din and Amalric in 1174.In1175 he was recognized by the
caliph as overlord of Egypt and most of Syria.
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Over the years Saladin became increasingly committed to destroying the
crusader states and it is for his overwhelming success on this score that his name
has gone down all through history, but he was not admired by everyone. Over
the centuries he has sometimes been forgotten in Islam and his renewed fame
only dates from 1898 when the German emperor William II extolled his fame
in a dinner speech in Damascus. William also restored Saladin’s mausoleum in
which consequently the Prussian eagle, sculptured in wood, is seen rising to
the skies.
Although Saladin did not neglect the war against the Franks, he was not
above concluding truces with them to gain time to advance his career in the
Islamic world. This, and the fact that in 1177 he suffered a crushing defeat at
the hands of the Franks, may have deceived some people in Jerusalem as to his
actual strength. The truth was that after 1183 the Franks were caught, as if in a
pair of tongs, by one man who ruled from Aleppo to Cairo.
Saladin’s rise accelerated the decline of the Franks. King Amalric was suc-
ceeded by his minor son Baldwin IV who was afflicted by leprosy. Impercept-
ibly his legs became paralysed and he had to change from horse to litter. By the
time he was twenty-one years of age he was a living corpse. He was beginning
to lose his eyesight and his face was now so disfigured that in public he had
to hide it behind a veil. As leprosy, in principle, rendered a king unfit for
office, and as he could not marry and have children, his succession became
a cause for concern in the east and in Europe. A regime of regents was not
sufficient to prevent the rapid disintegration of the kingdom at the hands of
greedy and opposing factions. In the beginning he had been under the thumb
of his late father’s favourite, the seneschal Miles of Plancy, who established
an unconstitutional regime and interrupted the normal contacts between the
king and his barons. It seems that it was the nobility which removed Miles by
murder. He was accused of having plotted to supplant the king, but so did
everyone else prominently in power in those years, including Count Raymond
III of Tripoli after 1184.
Raymond had been released from Muslim captivity in 1174 and had not only
regained his county but had also married the heiress of Galilee, which made him
one of the greatest magnates in the kingdom. During his two regencies (1174–6
and 1184–6), and always in close cooperation with Bohemond III of Antioch,
he conducted a cautious policy aiming at truces rather than battles. He headed
one of the rival parties in the kingdom, and the view of the disintegration of the
kingdom under the influence of rival factions in the decade before 1187 should,
I believe, be retained, although it has recently been questioned. Raymond,
who represented the interests of the old baronial families, was supported by
the chronicler William of Tyre, who had had close affiliations with the royal
family since his return from long studies in Europe in 1165. King Amalric had
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entrusted the education of his son to him and had commissioned him to write
his famous chronicle of the crusader states. Raymond appointed him royal
chancellor in 1174 and archbishop of Tyre in 1175.Until 1180 he was the chief
foreign policy adviser of the king and consistently advocated the alliance with
the Byzantines.
The opposing faction, today mostly referred to as the ‘court party’, was
actually a mixed bag of people. Most prominent among them was Agnes of
Courtenay, the mother of the king. Banished from the court and separated
from her children in 1163, she had made a return in 1175. After Raymond’s
regency had ended when the king reached his majority in 1176, she became
the dominant influence on the king and very skilfully built up a camarilla
which shamelessly enriched itself. In 1176 she bought the release of her brother
Joscelin III from Muslim captivity, where he had been since 1164. This titular
count of Edessa was appointed to direct the king’s financial administration.
On the same occasion Reynald of Ch
ˆ
atillon regained his liberty after sixteen
years of prison. He was a prince without a principality who could not return
to Antioch. His claims there had rested on his marriage to Princess Constance,
who had been replaced by her son Bohemond III in 1164.In1177 Reynald
received the hand of Stephanie of Milly, one of the richest heiresses in the
land. This made him lord of the Transjordan. Two Poitevin brothers, Aimery
and Guy of Lusignan, added their ambitions to those of the others. Aimery
became the king’s constable in 1181, after the towering figure of Humphrey
II of Toron, constable since 1152 and a fine soldier, had died in 1179.Itwas
Agnes who secured Aimery’s appointment, just as it was she who, in 1180,
obtained the election of an old favourite, Archbishop Eraclius of Caesarea, to
the patriarchate of Jerusalem. Eraclius was not, perhaps, the ideal candidate
but certainly better than his extremely poor medieval reputation made him
out to be.
The loser on this occasion was William of Tyre. From 1180 onwards he lost
more and more of his former influence. He saw others preferred to him on
important foreign missions and his political strategy of leaning on Byzantium
collapsed two years after the death of Emperor Manuel Komnenos when, in a
reaction to the regency of Maria of Antioch, the Latins in Constantinople were
massacred in 1182.One year later William resigned from the chancellorship. In
1184, worn down by the deepest pessimism, he was ready to end his chronicle
and could only with difficulty be persuaded to record future events of which
he hoped in vain utinam fausta feliciaque. When he died in September 1186 he
had written only one additional chapter, but at least his death spared him the
grief of witnessing the total collapse of the kingdom only nine months later.
While William remained at Raymond’s side, most of the clergy were brought
over to the ‘court party’; they were followed in 1186 by the Templars.
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