A History of the Crusades-Vol 2 (46 page)

1162: Death of
Baldwin III

Baldwin had seen the value of a Byzantine
alliance; but Manuel’s success had been greater than he wished in the Christian
north and less effective against Nur ed-Din, though it kept the Moslems quiet
for the next two years. After this diplomatic check over the Emperor’s
marriage, the King returned towards his kingdom. There his government had gone
smoothly ever since his mother’s fall from power. She had emerged in 1157 to
preside over a council of regency when Baldwin was away at the wars; and she
kept ecclesiastical patronage in her hands. When the Patriarch Fulcher died in
November 1157 she secured the appointment as his successor of a simple cleric
whom she knew, Amalric of Nesle, well-educated but unworldly and unpractical.
Hemes, Archbishop of Caesarea, and Ralph, Bishop of Bethlehem, opposed his
elevation; and Amalric was obliged to send Frederick, Bishop of Acre, to Rome
to secure papal support. Frederick’s tact and, it was hinted, his bribes
obtained confirmation from the papal Curia. In her church-patronage, Melisende
was seconded by her stepdaughter, Sibylla of Flanders, who refused to return to
Europe with her husband Thierry in 1158 but stayed on as a nun in the abbey
that Melisende had founded at Bethany. When Melisende died in September 1161,
while the King was at Antioch, Sibylla succeeded to her influence in the royal
family and in the Church till her own death four years later.

While he was passing through Tripoli, King
Baldwin fell ill. The Count of Tripoli sent his own doctor, the Syrian Barac,
to tend him; but the King grew worse. He moved on to Beirut, and there, on 10
February 1162, he died. He had been a tall, strongly-built man, whose florid
complexion and thick fair beard suggested good health and virility; and all the
world believed that Barac’s drugs had poisoned him. He was in his thirty-third
year. Had he lived longer, he might have been a great king; for he had energy
and a far-sighted vision and a personal charm that was irresistible. He was
well-lettered, learned both in history and in law. His subjects mourned him
bitterly; and even the Moslem peasants came down from the hills to pay respect
to his body as the funeral cortege moved slowly to Jerusalem. Some of Nur
ed-Din’s friends suggested to the Atabeg that now was the time to attack the
Christians. But he, just returned from a long-postponed pilgrimage to Mecca,
refused to disturb a people bewailing the loss of so great a prince.

CHAPTER IV

THE LURE OF
EGYPT

‘No; but we will
go into the land of Egypt.’
JEREMIAH XLII, 14

Baldwin III left no children. His Greek Queen,
Theodora, was still only sixteen when she was widowed. The heir to the kingdom
was his brother Amalric, Count of Jaffa and Ascalon. Eight days after Baldwin’s
death he was crowned king by the Patriarch Amalric. There had, however, been
some question about his succession. The barons were unwilling to abandon their
right of election, even though there was no other possible candidate. They had
one legitimate grievance. Some four years before, Amalric had married Agnes of
Courtenay, daughter of Joscelin II of Edessa. She was his third cousin, and
therefore within the degrees prohibited by the Church; and the Patriarch had
refused to confirm the marriage. There were other reasons for disliking Agnes.
She was considerably older than Amalric. Her first husband, Reynald of Marash,
had been killed in 1149, when Amalric was aged thirteen; and her reputation for
chastity was not good. The Patriarch and the barons demanded that the marriage
be annulled. Amalric consented at once, but he insisted that the legitimacy and
rights of inheritance of his two children, Baldwin and Sibylla, should be
recognized.

1162: King
Amalric

Amalric was now twenty-five. He was as tall and
handsome as his brother, with the same high colouring and thick blond beard,
though critics considered him too plump in the chest. He was less learned,
though well informed on legal matters. While his brother loved to talk, he
stammered a little and was taciturn, but was given to frequent paroxysms of
loud laughter, which somewhat impaired his dignity. He was never as popular as
his brother, lacking his charm and open manner; and his private life was
unpraiseworthy. His quality as a statesman was shown within a few months of his
accession, when Gerard, lord of Sidon and Beaufort, dispossessed one of his
vassals without due cause, and the vassal appealed to the Crown. Amalric
insisted upon the case being heard before the High Court of the realm. He then
passed an
assise,
based on other such precedents, which empowered
vassals to appeal against their lord to the High Court. If the lord failed to
appear before the Court, the case was held to have gone by default and the
vassal was reinstated. This law, by bringing the vassals of tenants-in-chief
into direct relation with the King, to whom they had to pay liege homage, gave
immense power to a strong king who dominated the High Court. But the High Court
itself was composed of that very class against which the law was directed. If
the king were weak, it could be used against him by applying it to the tenants
of the royal domain. This
assise
was followed by others regulating the
King’s relations with his vassals.

Map 5. Egypt in
the twelfth century.

1154: Intrigues
in Cairo

When he had firmly established his royal
authority at home, Amalric could attend to foreign affairs. In the north he was
ready to sacrifice Antioch to the Byzantines. About the end of 1162 there were
disturbances in Cilicia following the murder of Thoros’s brother Stephen, who
was on his way to attend a banquet given by the Imperial governor Andronicus. Thoros,
who had his own reasons for desiring Stephen’s elimination, accused Andronicus
of complicity and swept down on Mamistra, Anazarbus and Vahka, surprising and
murdering the Greek garrisons. Amalric hastened to offer support to the
Emperor; who replaced Andronicus with an able general of Hungarian birth,
Constantine Coloman. Coloman came with strengthened forces to Cilicia; and
Thoros retired with apologies back to the mountains. Bohemond of Antioch was
now eighteen and of an age to govern. In her desire to keep her power Constance
appealed to Coloman for military aid. The rumour of her appeal provoked a riot
in Antioch. Constance was exiled and Bohemond III installed in her place. She
died soon afterwards. The Emperor made no objection to the change of regime,
probably because Amalric gave guarantees that his suzerainty would be
respected. But as a safeguard he invited Constance’s second son Baldwin and,
later, her children by Reynald, to Constantinople. Baldwin joined the imperial
army and died in battle. While King Amalric openly supported the Byzantines, he
wrote at the same time to King Louis VII of France to ask if there was any hope
of his sending help to the Latins of Syria.

Byzantine good-will was necessary to Amalric to
carry out his chief political ambition, which was the control of Egypt. The
existence of the Latin states depended, as he well understood, on disunion
amongst their Moslem neighbours. Moslem Syria was now united; but so long as
Egypt was at enmity with Nur ed-Din, the situation was not desperate. The
Fatimid Caliphate was, however, in such decadence that its end seemed imminent.
It was essential that it should not fall into Nur ed-Din’s hands. Since the
loss of Ascalon there had been increasing chaos at the Caliph’s Court. The
vizier Abbas survived the disaster for a year. His son Nasr was the favourite
of the young Caliph al-Zafir; and their intimacy gave rise to scandalous
gossip. This infuriated Abbas, not for moral reasons but because he rightly
suspected that al-Zafir intended to play off the son against the father. Usama,
who was still at the Court, learnt that Nasr had indeed agreed to murder Abbas.
He hastened to reconcile them and soon persuaded Nasr that it would be better
to murder the Caliph instead. Nasr invited his benefactor to a midnight orgy at
his house and there stabbed him. Abbas affected to believe that the murderers
were the Caliph’s own brothers. He put them to death and, while seizing the
Caliph’s treasure for himself, placed on the throne al-Zafir’s young son, al-Fa’iz,
a boy of five, who had witnessed his uncles’ deaths and thereafter suffered
from chronic convulsions. The princesses of the family suspected the truth and
summoned the governor of upper Egypt, Ibn Ruzzik, an Armenian by birth, to
rescue them. He marched on Cairo and won round the officers of the garrison.
Abbas and Nasr packed up their treasure and on 29 May 1154 fled from the
capital, taking with them Usama, who had begun to intrigue with Ibn Ruzzik. As
they emerged from the deserts of Sinai, Frankish troops from Montreal fell on
them. Usama escaped safely and eventually reached Damascus. But Abbas was
slain, and Nasr and all the treasure was captured. Nasr was handed over to the
Templars and at once announced his wish to become a Christian. But the Court of
Cairo offered the Order 60,000 dinars for his person; so his instruction was
interrupted and he was sent in chains to Cairo. There the late Caliph’s four
widows personally mutilated him. He was then hanged, and his body swung for two
years at the Zawila Gate.

1163: Nur ed-Din
defeated at Krak

Ibn Ruzzik governed till 1161. In 1160 the
boy-Caliph died, to be succeeded by his nine-year old cousin, al-Adid, who next
year was forced to marry Ibn Ruzzik’s daughter. But the Caliph’s aunt, al-Zafir’s
sister, distrusted the vizier’s ambition. She induced her friends to stab him
in the hall of the palace. Before he died, in September 1161, he was able to
summon the princess to his presence and killed her himself. His son, al-Adil,
succeeded as vizier and ruled for fifteen months. Then he in his turn was
displaced and killed by the governor of upper Egypt, Shawar, who survived for
eight months, till August 1163 when he was ejected by his Arab chamberlain,
Dhirgham. Dhirgham, to consolidate his power, put to death everyone whose
ambition he feared; which left the Egyptian army almost entirely void of senior
officers.

In 1160 Baldwin III had threatened to invade
Egypt and had been bought off by the promise of a yearly tribute of 160,000
dinars. It had never been paid; and in September of 1163 Amalric made this the
excuse for a sudden descent on Egypt. He crossed the isthmus of Suez without
difficulty and laid siege to Pelusium. But the Nile was in flood; and by
breaking one or two dykes Dhirgham forced him to retire. His intervention had
been remarked by Nur ed-Din, who profited by his absence to attack the weakest
of the Crusading states, Tripoli. He invaded the Buqaia in order to lay siege
to the Castle of Krak, which dominated the narrow plain. Fortunately for the
Franks, Hugh, Count of Lusignan, and Geoffrey Martel, brother of the Count of
Angouleme, were passing through Tripoli with their following on their return
from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They joined Count Raymond; and an urgent appeal
to Antioch brought not only Bohemond III but also the Imperial general
Constantine Coloman down from the north. The united Christian army marched
swiftly through the hills, and surprised the Moslems at their camp below Krak.
After a short battle, in which Coloman and his troops particularly
distinguished themselves, Nur ed-Din fled in disorder to Homs. There he
regrouped his army and received reinforcements. The Christians therefore
abandoned the pursuit.

Soon afterwards the ex-vizier, Shawar, who had
escaped from Egypt, appeared at Nur ed-Din’s Court and offered, if Nur ed-Din
would send an army to re-establish him in Cairo, to pay the expenses of the
campaign, to cede districts on the frontier, to recognize Nur ed-Din’s
suzerainty and to provide a yearly tribute of a third of his country’s
revenues. Nur ed-Din hesitated. He feared to risk an army along roads dominated
by the Franks of Oultrejourdain. It was only in April 1164, after seeking
advice by opening the Koran at random, that he ordered his most trusted
lieutenant, Shirkuh, to set out with a large detachment and go with Shawar
across the desert, while he himself made a diversion by attacking Banyas. With
Shirkuh went his nephew Saladin, son of Najm ed-Din Ayub, a young man of
twenty-seven, who was not over anxious to join the expedition. Dhirgham in
terror sent off to ask help from Amalric; but so quickly did Shirkuh move that
he was across the Isthmus of Suez before the Franks were ready to intervene.
Dhirgham’s brother, with the few troops that he could muster, was defeated near
to Pelusium. By the end of May 1164 Shawar was reinstalled in Cairo and
Dhirgham was dead.