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PREFACE
The twenty-one studies that comprise this collection appeared between 1974 and 1997. All are concerned with the history and institutions of the kingdoms founded by the crusaders in the East: the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and Lusignan kingdom of Cyprus. Some of the earliest (III, VI, XII, XIII, XXI) draw on work that formed part of my doctoral dissertation, 'The Feudal Nobility of Cyprus, 1192-1400' (St Andrews, 1975). ‘William of Tyre and the Patriarchal Election of 1180’ (II) was written jointly with Professor John Gordon Rowe of the University of Western Ontario, and I am very grateful to John for generously agreeing to allow me to include it here.
This paper marked the start of a fruitful collaboration that culminated in the appearance of our William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East (C.U.P., 1988). The first paper in this volume was originally conceived as a response to a reviewer who pointed out that we could have said more in our book about William of Tyre and the politics of the Baldwin IV's reign. The other major project which occupied me for much of the late 1970s and 1980s centred on the island of Cyprus and eventually saw light of day as The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades (C.U.P., 1991). Most of the papers in the sections on Cyprus represent work done in connection with that book, either as pilot studies or by way of tying up loose ends after it was published. In recent years my interests have become increasingly concentrated on the legal texts from the Latin East. The papers in the section entitled ‘Lawyers and Legal Texts' reflect this current concern and also serve to demonstrate that my investigations into this field in fact go back a long way.
Inevitably in a collection of studies spanning almost a quarter of a century, there are mistakes and places where I now no longer hold to the views I once had. Some of the more significant of these points are touched on in the addenda et corrigenda at the end of this volume.
For various reasons it has been necessary to reset no. XV, and I have taken the opportunity to make a number of minor corrections. This paper originally appeared in the publication of a conference held at Poitiers in 1993 to mark the 600th anniversary of the death of Leo of Lusignan, the last king of Cilician Armenia: Les Lusignans et l'Outre Mer (Poitiers: Conseill Regional Poitou-Charente/Université de Poitiers, 1995), pp. 132-40. I thank the sponsors of this conference, the Association ‘Les Lusignans et Mélusine' for agreeing to allow me to publish this revised version. Two other papers were first published in French and appear here in English for the first time. They are no. XIX, originally 'La classe des propriétaires terriens franco-chypriotes et l'exploitation des ressources rurales de I'ile de Chypre' in M. Balard (ed.), Etat et colonisation au Moyen Age (Lyon, 1989), pp.145-52, and no. XX, originally 'Le régime des Lusignan en Chypre et la population locale’ in A. Ducellier and M. Balard (eds), Coloniser au Moyen Age (Paris, 1995), pp.354-8, 364-5. I am most grateful to Professor Michel Balard for consenting to their publication in this form.
I would also like to express my thanks to the copyright holders and publishers who have so generously given me permission to reproduce other studies here: E.J. Brill (1); The Oxford University Press (II, VI, VII); Professor P. Yannopoulos (III); The Royal Historical Society (V); Professor C. Yiangoullis, director of the Cyprus Research Centre (VIII, XVI, XXI); Frank Cass and Co. Ltd (IX); Professor M. Iacovou of the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation (XI); Professor P. Holt (XII); Elsevier Science (XIII); George C. Ioannides, President of the Society of Cypriot Studies (XIV); R. Oldenbourg Verlag (XVII); Professor Laura Balletto (XVIII).
PETER EDBURY Cardiff December 1998
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The articles in this volume, as in all others inthe Collected Studies Series, have not been givenanew, continuous pagination. In order to avoid confusion, and to facilitate their use where these same studies have been referred to elsewhere, the original pagination has been maintained wherever possible.
Eacharticle has been given a Roman numeral in order of appearance, as listed inthe Contents. Thisnumber is repeated oneach page and quoted in the index entries.
PROPAGANDA AND FACTION IN THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM: THE BACKGROUND TO HATTIN
One question a colloquium on the theme of Crusaders and Muslims in twelfth-century Syria might appropriately consider is why Guy of Lusignan and the army of the Latin East should have lost at Hattin. It is a question that can be answered on various levels, but historians are, I think, unanimous in believing that at least part of the blame for the Christians’ defeat rests on the divisions among their leaders. The Muslims under Saladin had entered the Latin Kingdom and, probably with the deliberate intention of drawing the Christians into battle, laid siege to Tiberias. The king meanwhile had mobilized his entire strength at Safftriyah. According to both Ernoul and Ibn al-Athir, Raymond of Tripoli pointed out the unwisdom of trying to relieve Tiberias, but Reynald of Chatillon, supported by the Templar master, Gerard of Ridefort, accused him of duplicity. King Guy, who had been helped to the throne by Reynald and Gerard but who had encountered bitter opposition from Raymond, seems to have rejected his advice. The army set off; progress was slow, and it pitched camp for the night in an arid spot. Raymond's worst fears had come true: Saladin had succeeded in getting the Christian army into an exposed position, and the outcome was the catastrophic defeat of 4 July 1187.'
An explanation of the background to the king’s decision to disregard Raymond's counsel is readily available in some of the best known books on the crusades published in the last fifty years. Ever since the time of the leper king, Baldwin IV (1174-85), so the story goes, there had been a polarization between the established baronage of the kingdom and what is often termed the ‘court party’, many members of which were, like Guy of Lusignan himself, first generation settlers in the East. Count Raymond III of Tripoli, Baldwin of Ramla and his brother Balian of Ibelin, the second husband of King Amaury’s widow Maria Comnena, Reynald, lord of Sidon, and Archbishop William of Tyre, the celebrated historian, are regarded as the leading figures on the baronial side, while the ‘court party’ is identified as including Baldwin IV’s mother, Agnes of Courtenay, her brother Joscelin, the seneschal of Jerusalem and titular count of Edessa, Reynald of Chatillon, a former prince of Antioch and now lord of Oultrejourdain, Guy of Lusignan and his brother Aimery, Patriarch Eraclius of Jerusalem and Gerard of Ridefort, who had become master of the Templars in 1185.
The weakness inherent in having a king who was a chronic invalid, coupled with disputes over the regency and the succession to the throne, had brought the tensions between these two groups to the fore. What was more, there was a fundamental division between them as to how to deal with the growing Muslim threat: the baronial faction, made up as it was of men who were long familiar with the ways of the Near East, favoured a peace policy; by contrast, the court faction, which included newcomers to the East anxious to strike a blow for the Faith and ignorant of political realities, favoured aggression.
Thus, in July 1187, Reynald and Gerard’s desire to confront the enemy and Raymond's advice to temporize were in keeping with their known attitudes. In the event Raymond's policy was vindicated, or, to be more precise, that of his opponents was discredited, and historians, taking their cue from the principal narrative accounts of these years, have in consequence tended to give the baronial party a ‘good press’ and regard their rivals with disdain. The clearest expressions of this interpretation of politics in the years leading up to Hattin are to be found in the writings of Marshall W. Baldwin and Sir Steven Runciman. Baldwin's seminal study, Raymond III of Tripolis and the Fall of Jerusalem, appeared as long ago as 1936 and his chapters in the first volume of the Wisconsin (née Pennsylvania) History of the Crusades in 1955, while the relevant volume of Runciman’s History of the Crusades was first published in 1952. Without doubt these scholars influenced a whole generation: for example, Hans Eberhard Mayer, whose highly successful one-volume history of the crusades first appeared in its English translation in 1972, was clearly in their debt when writing on this period.
So there were factions or parties in which newcomers were pitted against the old-established baronage; ‘hawks’ versus ‘doves’. It has been an influential orthodoxy, but an orthodoxy that needs to be called in question. It is unsatisfactory on several counts. For a start, the categorization simply will not do. Agnes and Joscelin of Courtenay were the direct descendants of a participant in the First Crusade and had lived all their lives in the East. Reynald of Chatillon, generally regarded as the greatest exponent of an aggressive policy towards the Muslims, had been in the East since the time of the Second Crusade, forty years earlier. Both he and Joscelin had endured long periods of captivity and so would have been well aware of the military realities and the penalties for any error of judgement.
To describe their party as a party of newcomers is therefore misleading, and it is quite unfair to insinuate that they were anxious to do battle with the Muslims because they were ignorant and inexperienced.* Nor was the ‘old baronage’ uniformly arrayed against them. The ‘court party’ saw the young Humphrey of Toron, a member of a distinguished baronial family, as a suitable husband for King Amaury’s daughter, Isabella, and in 1186 Humphrey showed where his own sympathies lay by refusing to allow himself to be used as a figurehead by Raymond of Tripoli in opposition to Guy of Lusignan. It might also be noted that Agnes of Courtenay remained married to the prominent baronial leader, Reynald of Sidon, until at least 1179 and probably until her death in about 1185.4
Similarly, to regard the ‘court party’ as a party of ‘hawks’ and the baronial party as ‘doves’ will not stand scrutiny. Our sources record two substantive truces between the kingdom of Jerusalem and Saladin in the years before Hattin. The first, agreed in 1180, lasted until early 1182. It is a moot point as to who had more to gain by a cessation of hostilities: Saladin wanted his hands free for a campaign in eastern Anatolia; the Christians needed a respite after their defeat the previous year. However, William of Tyre, who suggests that the initiative for the truce came from the Christian side, makes it clear that in 1180 Raymond of Tripoli was absent from the kingdom while the negotiations were taking place and that his opponents were in control.
The truce was therefore the work of the ‘court party’. Indeed, it is evident from William’s narrative that it did not cover Raymond’s own county of Tripoli.® The second truce was agreed in 1185 and held until the early part of 1187. On this occasion, Raymond, wha by now was regent in Jerusalem, was responsible. According to Ermnoul, he had the full support of the barons and had consulted the masters of the Hospitallers and Templars; the truce had been prompted by a drought that had led to food shortages and, once it had been agreed, traders from the Muslim lands were able to bring in plenty of supplies. There is nothing to suggest that the truce was sought because Raymond was opposed to war with the Muslims per se, and, if Ernoul is to be believed, it had the support of all, including presumably Gerard of Ridefort and Reynald of Chatillon.®
More pertinent in a discussion of the background to Hattin is the question of the policy to be adopted in the event of a Muslim invasion. The Christians could either do battle with the enemy, or they could seek to contain the invading forces by shadowing the movements of the main Muslim army and trying to cut off its supplies and reinforcements in the knowledge that sooner or later it would disperse of its own accord. Both responses had their dangers. Pitched battles were risky, and it is clear that the rulers of Jerusalem had insufficient troops to put an army in the field and also garrison their strong-points. In 1182, 1183 and 1187 the mobilization of the kingdom’s military resources to meet Saladin’s invading army had denuded at least some of the fortresses of defenders. Contemporaries would have been well aware that if the field army were defeated, there was no second line of defence. On the other hand, by not engaging the invader, the Christian leaders would expose the countryside to pillage and invite the censure of arm-chair strategists who would accuse them cowardice and inaction.’
During the decade before Hattin both strategies were employed. Thus in 1177 the forces of the Latin Kingdom scored a notable success in pitched battle against Saladin at Montgisard, although in 1179 at Marj ‘Uyun the Christians having sought battle, were caught off guard and defeated. In 1183, however, the Christians under Guy of Lusignan refused to give battle, and, despite the Muslim razzias, their policy of caution and containment can be said to have succeeded.* Raymond of Tripoli’s advice in 1187 to avoid engagement even although it meant risking the fall of his own city of Tiberias is famous; indeed, it is largely on the strength of this advice and the fact that he had negotiated the 1185 truce that his reputation as an advocate of peace and circumspection depends. Equally famous is the espousal by Reynald of Chatillon and Gerard of Ridefort of direct confrontation. What is less clear is whether it is right to assume that Raymond’s advocacy of avoiding battle should be seen as the hallmark of baronial attitudes in contradistinction to those of his opponents.
In 1182 Baldwin IV led his forces into Oultrejourdain to confront Saladin who was intent on attacking Reynald’s fortress of Kerak. According to William of Tyre, Raymond of Tripoli had advised against deploying the Christian forces there, since other parts of the kingdom would be left unprotected; and William, who evidently sympathized with Raymond’s viewpoint, went on to record how the Muslims were able to enter Galilee from the direction of Damascus and cause considerable havoc. Raymond’s attitude in 1182 would seem to have been consistent with his attitude in 1187: risk the fall of a particular fortified point (Kerak in 1182; Tiberias in 1187) rather than chance the outcome of a pitched battle, and at the same time keep the army in position for more general defensive duties. William’s disgust at the strategy chosen in 1182 was heightened by the fact that Baldwin's army missed its opportunities to catch Saladin’s forces at a disadvantage.°
But William’s account of the 1183 campaign suggests a very different approach by Raymond and the barons.'® The Christians, commanded by Guy of Lusignan who was now regent for the largely incapacitated Baldwin IV, rightly anticipated that Saladin would invade Galilee and so mobilized their own forces in readiness. At the end of September Saladin led his army across the Jordan. Guy brought his into proximity to the Muslims but refused to do battle. Although Saladin sent out raiding parties, Guy’s tactics in effect prevented him from achieving anything of significance, and after a few days he withdrew to Damascus. The presence of what was evidently a substantial Christian army would have stopped Saladin from undertaking any major siege, and at the same time the Christians could occupy the best water supplies and threaten the Muslims’ lines of communication.
All in all the campaign would appear as a text-book example of how to conduct a successful defensive strategy with minimum risk; in 1187 Raymond would presumably have expected events to have taken a not-too-dissimilar course had his advice been followed. However, according to William of Tyre, in 1183 Guy’s position as commander was deeply resented, and at the critical stage in the campaign, when Saladin was trying to draw him into a military engagement, he was faced by a refusal to cooperate on the part of at least some of the barons who were with him;'' then, when the campaign was over, these same barons—Raymond of Tripoli, Reynald of Sidon, Balian and Baldwin of Ibelin, together with Prince Bohemond III of Antioch—exploited the criticism he had incurred for his failure to join battle to have him removed from his regency. In other words, it has to be assumed that these men either believed, or affected to believe afterwards, that the Christian army should have accepted Saladin’s challenge and risked a fullscale conflict.
In matters of diplomacy and military strategy there is therefore no clear pattern. At different times truces were agreed by both Raymond of Tripoli and his opponents, and, if Raymond was the exponent of cautious containment in 1182 and 1187, Guy of Lusignan adopted this line of policy in 1183 only to incur the strident criticism of the barons. So rather than behave consistently as ‘hawks’ or ‘doves’, it would seem that all concerned tended to adopt a pragmatic view of the best policy to be adopted.
There is, however, no denying the existence of personal animosities among the higher nobility during these years. What is less clear is how far it is correct to speak of coherent groupings with identifiable aims or policies—indeed, whether it is helpful to think in terms of ‘factions’ or ‘parties’ at all. William of Tyre’s account of events is especially useful because he was not writing after Hattin and so did not have the benefit of hindsight or feel the urge to apportion blame. He was quite categorical: Raymond of Tripoli was the most capable figure in the kingdom."? Usually William’s partiality for Raymond is linked with the idea that Raymond had given him both the chancellorship and his archbishopric during his regency at the start of Baldwin IV’s reign. However, remarks made by Ibn Jubair, an Arab visitor to Palestine in 1184, would seem to confirm William’s opinion,'? and so it could well be that William was voicing a commonly held view. It would certainly be wrong to question the sincerity of his judgement on the basis of the charges that were being levelled against Raymond in the aftermath of Hattin at a time when some people were trying to hold Raymond responsible for the defeat.
But we must also consider William’s wider purpose in writing. At the very end of the Historia, with Baldwin too ill to continue ruling, he was concerned to portray the kingdom as being safe in Raymond’s hands; he wanted to believe, and he wanted his readers in the West to believe, that Jerusalem was being properly and ably governed. It has been argued elsewhere that his Historia is an apologia for the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and in particular for the kingship of Baldwin IV. William had emphasized Baldwin’s abilities as a capable military leader (although other evidence suggests that in 1177 the Christian commander at the victory at Montgisard was Reynald of Chatillon and not the king as William indicated) and stressed his legitimacy (although this was explicitly contradicted by Ernoul, and a contemporary Arabic letter suggests that his accession in 1174 was not accepted as readily as William would have us believe). William would not have wanted his readers to think any less of Baldwin’s effective successor. '*
William furnishes no evidence to suggest that the political divisions which emerged in the 1180s were already in existence during the previous decade. In 1174 Raymond had come forward as a candidate for the regency in opposition to Miles of Plancy, a recent arrival in the East who had enjoyed the favour of his distant kinsman, King Amaury. William named Humphrey of Toron the constable, Baldwin and Balian of Ibelin, and Reynald of Sidon as being among Raymond’s supporters. But bearing in mind that the other two major figures of the reign, Count Joscelin and Reynald of Chatillon, were still held captive and that Reynald of Sidon was Agnes of Courtenay’s husband, this list would seem to confirm William’s claim that there was a consensus calling for Raymond’s elevation and that Miles was politically isolated, rather than indicate that Raymond’s assumption of power rested on the support of a baronial clique.’ The men mentioned by William were indeed the leading figures of the time, as their position among the witnesses to Baldwin IV’s charters confirms, and he gave almost identical lists, although now with the addition of Reynald of Chatillon and Joscelin, when enumerating the chief participants in the military operations of 1177 and 1183.'° William provides no other references to Raymond acting in collusion with the barons before 1180—indeed, but for his presence at the battle of Marj ‘Uyin in 1179, Raymond seems have remained in the county of Tripoli after 1175'’—and William was sharply critical of two other ‘baronial’ figures: the constable, Humphrey of Toron, for his role in the campaign of 1175, and Reynald of Sidon for his role in 1179.
William has two further scraps of evidence that would seem to cut across the usual interpretation of political divisions. In his account of the events of 1175, he recorded the election of Eraclius to the archbishopric of Caesarea. At the time Raymond may still have been regent, and so it is possible that, as Bernard Hamilton has suggested, Eraclius, like William himself, owed his promotion to Raymond’s patronage or approval.'® Secondly, in 1177 he noted the marriage of Balian of Ibelin and King Amaury’s widow, Maria Comnena, with the king’s consent. In other words, at a time when it is assumed that the influence of the Courtenays was pre-eminent and with Raymond out of the way in Tripoli, the king allowed Balian to make an extremely advantageous union with a woman who was not only a close relative of the Byzantine emperor and mother of his own half-sister, but who also brought him her marriage portion, the valuable town of Nablus and its banlieue”.
William rarely drew attention to political infighting in Baldwin’s reign. One notable exception is his outburst directed at the king’s mother, Agnes of Courtenay, a woman who was a ‘utterly detestable to God and assiduous in her acquisitiveness’, and her brother Joscelin. The context was an incident that took place in late 1181 or early 1182 in which Baldwin, supposedly at their instigation and that of other evil counsellors, refused Raymond of Tripoli entry into the kingdom on the grounds that he was out to supplant him.”! There is no doubting that both Agnes and her brother the seneschal were using their position to acquire landed property for themselves—Hans Mayer has spoken of Joscelin’s ‘sheer and unparalleled greed’**—but precisely what was going on is not clear: maybe Raymond was making a bid to take control of the kingdom. William seems to indicate that it was the king’s attitude, rather than that of his advisers, that was crucial. He described how ‘the more important barons’ then persuaded Baldwin, much against his will, to let Raymond return to the kingdom and be reconciled to him.” This episode was clearly connected in some way with the events of 1180 when, as William records, Baldwin was stampeded by fear that Raymond and Bohemond III of Antioch were out to dethrone him into marrying his sister and heiress, Sybilla, to Guy of Lusignan.™
In late 1174 and 1175 Raymond had acted as regent; after 1175 he had spent his time in the north; when in 1180 and again in 1181 or 1182 he tried to make a comeback in the Latin kingdom he was rebuffed. As the closest adult potential heir to the throne and as count of Tripoli and, by marriage, lord of Tiberias, he could not but be a powerful figure in the kingdom should he choose to remain there. It therefore comes as no surprise that the king’s mother and uncle, who as seneschal would have had a considerable degree of control over the day-to-day running of the king’s government and household, opposed his return. There is no indication that in 1180 Raymond found any support within the kingdom, but in 1181 or 1182 it was a group of barons who persuaded the king to receive him back into favour. In the meantime Guy of Lusignan had married Sibylla, Baldwin’s sister and heiress. Guy had thus come to stand between Raymond and the regency just as he had come to stand between Raymond and the succession. What was more, if later evidence is to be believed, in marrying Sibylla, Guy had thwarted the ambitions of Baldwin of Ramla who had hoped to marry her himself.”
Guy is thus the pivotal figure in these events. The circumstances of his marriage at a time when Raymond and Bohemond were regarded as a threat to the political status quo in Jerusalem had the effect of tying the Courtenays to his own political fortunes; it also assured him of the hostility of Raymond and Ibelins. He was a newcomer whose meteoric rise caused resentment. William of Tyre was probably not alone in regarding him as unfitted by both birth and temperament for the responsibilities he now had to bear.”° In 1183 Guy became regent, but his critics did not have long to wait before they had an opportunity to strike.
As mentioned already, they seized on his conduct of the military operations of that year to discredit him, but in fact Guy played into their hands by allowing himself to be drawn into a quarrel with the king over a completely different issue, namely the king’s personal income. Perhaps it was because of this quarrel that Agnes’s voice was added to clamor calling for his removal from the regency. The upshot was a complete reversal of fortunes: Guy was dismissed and humiliated; the young Baldwin V was crowned in a move designed to pre-empt the possibility of Sibylla and her husband ascending the throne; Raymond was installed as regent.”” The king’s attitude was crucial: he may have been ill, but his wishes and opinions were nevertheless of the utmost significance. Just as in 1180-82 Baldwin had been determined to keep Raymond away from his kingdom, so at the end of 1183 he was determined to destroy Guy. Had Baldwin stood by Guy when he came under fire for his conduct of the 1183 campaign, it is unlikely he would have been toppled from power.
William’s Historia ends with a description of events at the beginning of 1184, and his final episode concerns Patriarch Eraclius. After the coronation of Baldwin V, relations between Baldwin IV and Guy continued to deteriorate to the extent that the king told the patriarch he wanted Guy’s marriage to Sibylla annulled. Guy then had the gates of Ascalon shut in Baldwin’s face. Eraclius, however, acting in concert with the masters of the military Orders, tried to intercede with the king on his behalf, and, when Baldwin remained obdurate, angrily stormed out of his presence.” In the past Eraclius has been subject to persistent calumny, but more recent research has done much to rehabilitate him and he has now emerged as an able and vigorous church leader.
His only other activities as patriarch that William recorded were his attempts in 1181 to reconcile Bohemond III and his opponents in Antioch—significantly he involved Raymond of Tripoli, at that time persona non grata in Jerusalem, which may suggest he was not too closely tied to Raymond’s detractors.” Perhaps in speaking up for Guy the patriarch wanted to do a political ally a good turn, but it is equally likely that his efforts on Guy’s behalf and his anger when thwarted came about because he was trying to do what he would have regarded as his duty as the senior churchman in the kingdom: act as peacemaker between the king and his brother-in-law, just as previously he had tried to act as peacemaker in Antioch. Exactly what happened next is not clear—wWilliam’s history ends at this point—but the marriage was not annulled, and soon afterwards Eraclius and the masters of the Orders were sent on a major diplomatic mission to the West. Despite their support for Guy, they apparently continued to enjoy the confidence of the king and his regent, Raymond of Tripoli.*'
The great problem in using William of Tyre’s Historia for the period under discussion is that it is difficult to read it without preconceptions. We know, and William did not, that in 1187 the Kingdom of Jerusalem foundered; we also know that other, later evidence suggests that William himself suffered at the hands of the ‘court party’; furthermore there is a strong tradition in modern historiography which believes that there were clearly drawn factions in the Latin East at this time and which tries to read these factions into William’s narrative. Elsewhere John Rowe and I have suggested that William’s political role in the time of Baldwin IV may have been misunderstood: rather than being ousted from the forefront of the political life in the kingdom by his supposed enemies, he may have chosen to concentrate on his ecclesiastical duties and deliberately took only a limited part in secular affairs. As for the election of Eraclius as patriarch in preference to William, it may simply be that Eraclius was regarded at the time as the better candidate.
Take away the polemic of later sources —Ernoul in particular—and the evidence for William as the victim of Agnes and her party is very thin indeed.” This is not to say that William did not applaud Raymond, detest the Courtenays, and regret Guy’s marriage to Sibylla. But you will look in vain in his Histona for evidence that the Courtenays plus Reynald of Chatillon plus the Lusignans and Eraclius had been running the kingdom for much of Baldwin IV’s reign in the face of a party of opposition made up of the landed baronage led by Raymond and the Ibelin brothers and numbering William himself among their supporters. Of course, it may be that William, in producing an apologia for the crusading enterprise and the Latin settlements in the East that was itself designed as a work of edification, wanted to avoid washing dirty linen in public; that, while owning up to some of the conflicts, he managed to conceal much of the party strife. But a more dispassionate appraisal of his Historia demands that we jettison some of the assumptions which have led to too much subtlety being read into his narrative and to the identification of patterns of political alignment which are just not there.
I want to turn now to the other principal narrative for events in the East in the decade before 1187: the chronicle by Ernoul. Ernoul’s original text is lost, but it was written after the Battle of Hattin and the Third Crusade. Accordingly it was influenced by what the author knew had happened later, in particular, by the internal struggles during the Crusade in which the party of Conrad of Montferrat, Balian of Ibelin and others sought to exclude Guy of Lusignan and his followers from power in what remained of the Latin Kingdom. Ernoul was also concerned to explain the disaster of 1187. That meant apportioning blame, and this he did, as a retainer of Balian of Ibelin, from the standpoint of the Ibelin family. The guilty men were Guy himself, his two principal military advisers, Reynald of Chatillon and Gerard of Ridefort, his wife’s uncle Joscelin of Courtenay, and Patriarch Eraclius who had assisted in the coup that brought Guy to power and had failed to give the moral leadership necessary to turn away God’s disfavour. Ernoul’s history has been transmitted to posterity in the various recensions of the Old French Continuation of William of Tyre, otherwise known as ‘Eracles’ and in the so-called ‘Chronicle of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer’.
In her study of these texts Ruth Morgan identified the version found in a Lyon manuscript of ‘Eracles’ as being the closest to Ernoul’s original and demonstrated that the group of texts she dubbed the abrégé (“Ernoul and Bernard’ and ‘Eracles’ variants C and G) was a much more distant derivative in which history was well on the way to being turned into romance and in which any additional detail was of doubtful historical value. As it is, the Lyon ‘Eracles’ is interpolated with material which suggests that it acquired its present form around the middle of the thirteenth century, and all the versions of the Continuation have lost the sections covering events before 1184, which were lopped off when they were stuck on to the end of the French translation of William of Tyre. The so-called ‘Chronicle of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer’ alone preserves a version of the earlier portions, but it is impossible to know how far they have been refashioned and how much credence the information contained within them deserves. If we are to treat with scepticism any additional material contained in the abrégé not found in the Lyons ‘Eracles’ for the period after 1184, we ought also to be cautious about the use we make of the earlier sections of ‘Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer’ for which we have no parallel.
Ernoul’s chronicle, as preserved in the Lyon manuscript, is strongly biased against Guy of Lusignan and his associates but not noticeably favourable to Raymond of Tripoli, and it gives scant support for the idea that he was the head of a baronial faction. Three episodes are relevant. First there is the assembly of barons Raymond called at Nablus in 1186 on the death of Baldwin V.* Previously they had sworn to recognize Raymond as regent until the kings of the West should determine the rights of succession, but now Joscelin of Courtenay had engineered a coup détat to put Guy and Sibylla on the throne. Various points may be suggested: the barons’ presence does not necessarily mean they were Raymond's partisans—simply that they were still prepared to accept his summons as the duly appointed regent; the proposal to put forward Humphrey of Toron as an anti-king was never feasible—as Jonathan Riley-Smith has pointed out, even if the barons had supported the idea, their combined military resources would have been far from overwhelming;*® once Humphrey had submitted to Guy, almost all the barons, including Balian of Ibelin, did homage to the new king; only Baldwin of Ramla preferred voluntary exile to reneging on his oath to uphold Raymond’s rights. Raymond was isolated. Ernoul then described Raymond’s behaviour at Tiberias.
Guy was threatening military action against him. Raymond was dependent on Saladin’s support, and Saladin was able to exploit this dependence by insisting that he allow a raiding party to enter the kingdom through his territory. Ernoul made no attempt to conceal Raymond’s treasonable behaviour in agreeing to this and he made little attempt to exculpate Raymond, since by the time of the raid Guy had changed tactics and decided to open negotiations with him. The upshot was the battle of Cresson on 1 May 1187 in which a hastily assembled Christian force under the masters of the military Orders was overwhelmed and the Hospitaller master killed.
A third episode also shows Raymond in a poor light: after the capture of Jerusalem he refused to allow the refugees to enter Tripoli and left them prey to the local brigands.*? The Ibelins, however, emerge well from these episodes. At Nablus Baldwin remained steadfast to his oath, while it was in response to Balian’s mediation that Guy was preparing negotiations at the time of Cresson; furthermore, the fact that refugees were allowed to leave Jerusalem at all was partly the result of Balian’s efforts.
Ernoul thus gives the impression that although Raymond and the Ibelins were united in their hatred of Guy, the bonds between them did not amount to anything more.
Ernoul gives the fullest version of the coup d’état that led to Guy’s coronation.” But we should be wary of viewing the coup as the work of a closely knit ‘court party’. Count Joscelin was the moving spirit behind it: his own interests would be far better served by the accession of his niece and her husband than by an interregnum presided over by Raymond. Ernoul explains Gerard of Ridefort’s backing for Guy in terms of Gerard’s private quarrel with Raymond. Indeed, it could well be that what united the perpetrators of the coup was a common hostility to Raymond as much as any positive support they may have had for Guy. Once Guy was crowned, they could be reasonably certain of success since most people would fall into line behind a duly consecrated monarch whose wife had a strong claim to the throne as the legitimate heiress.
More suggestive are the apparent attitudes of Reynald of Chatillon and Patriarch Eraclius. Reynald had nothing particular to gain from Guy’s accession—indeed it has been pointed out that he might have had more advantage from the accession of his step-son, Humphrey of Toron*!—nor was he conspicuous for his loyalty to other members of the so-called ‘court party’. He has the reputation for being the most ‘hawkish’ of all the Latin Syrian leaders and in the past has been censured for breaking both the 1180 and the 1185 truces.
Recently there has been some attempt to put his activities into a more explicable and hence less reprehensible context,” but, however reasonable his behaviour may have seemed at the time, breaking truces was an act of insubordination towards the ruler of Jerusalem, and on each occasion—at the beginning of 1182 and the beginning of 1187 —it was members of the ‘court party’ who were in control. According to the admittedly hostile Ernoul, in 1187 Reynald responded to King Guy’s order to return what he had taken in his raid on a Muslim caravan with a powerful assertion of independence: he was lord of his own lands just as much as Guy was of his, and he had no truces with the Muslims.“ Reynald was thus his own man. In 1186 he must have considered that allowing the coronation of Guy to go ahead was the best of the various alternatives.
Eraclius’ position was more complex. In 1184-5 he led a delegation to the West to find someone, preferably a member of one of the western royal families, to take charge in the East. Baldwin IV was now incapable of ruling, but it is not clear whether the patriarch was looking for a man who would himself become king and so supplant the royal dynasty, or whether he wanted someone to act as regent until there was a member of the royal house of Jerusalem able to take control for himself. Either way, the ambitions of both Raymond and Guy would be undercut. Eraclius’ activities at this time suggest, in Professor Kedar’s words, that he was ‘neither a diehard supporter of Guy nor a subservient tool of the “court party”’.** But the mission failed, and in 1186 the patriarch anointed Guy and Sibylla king and queen of Jerusalem. By then he must have taken the view that there was nothing else he could do.
So the ‘court party’ and also Raymond and his supporters would appear to have been no more than groups of individuals whose interests and sense of duty coalesced on the key point of whether or not they wanted Guy to rule over them. It is probably a mistake to see the individuals pilloried by Ernoul for the defeat at Hattin as comprising a cohesive group in the proceeding period; in his view they shared the blame, but that in itself does not make them a political party. Similarly, it is questionable how far the baronial supporters of Conrad of Montferrat after 1187 should be seen as a party before that date. Guy’s brother Aimery had been married to Baldwin of Ramla’s daughter since at least 1176, and, as has been seen, there were a number of other features of the politics of the period that would seem to cut across the usual understanding of the situation.
In their different ways both Ernoul and William of Tyre were writing propaganda. An older generation of historians was largely taken in by it. More recently there has been a reaction, with the result that the standing of Eraclius and Reynald of Chatillon and indeed of Guy himself has risen, while that of Raymond has fallen.” The problem in dealing with tendentious sources lies in knowing how much allowance needs to be made for their tendentiousness, and, in trying to ascertain what was happening, these narratives need to be considered carefully. It is my belief that notions of ‘party’ are misconceived and obscure the issues.
Guy had good reasons in 1187 for wanting to win a resounding victory. Hans Mayer has pointed out that to meet the Muslim threat he had, with the connivance of Gerard of Ridefort, seized a large part of the treasure that King Henry II of England had been stock-piling in the East against the day when he himself should fulfil his crusading vows; only a major success would serve to offset the row that would be certain to follow when Henry discovered what he had done. The late R.C. Smail drew attention to the more general aspects of the predicament Guy was in: he knew he was unpopular in certain quarters; he knew what had happened in 1183 when he had avoided battle; the only way to prove himself and silence his critics once and for all was a military triumph.“
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