By late October, faced with the failure of his own negotiations, King Richard ordered his depleted army to advance on Jerusalem without a realistic hope of taking it. By then the Sultan had destroyed all habitations with their crops and orchards all along the route, polluting wells and watercourses to deny the Christians anything that might sustain them. It took them two months to re-establish a defensible supply line from their base in Joppa, creeping forward to arrive at Christmas at the ruined town of Bayt Nuba in the Judaean hills, just four leagues from the Holy City. But by that time the Christian army were not only blocked by a large force of Muslim reinforcements recently arrived from Egypt, but afflicted by appalling weather.
‘Their misery of mind and body was so great that no pen can write nor tongue describe it,’
King Richard’s annalist recorded, before demonstrating that if anyone could do it, he was the man.
‘Their earlier sufferings were nothing to those they now endured from fatigue, rain, hail and floods.’
(Outraged, as men have always been, when adverse weather spoils their plans.)
‘It seemed that heaven itself intended to destroy them. The ground beneath them was so treacherous and muddy that men and horses were hard put to keep their footing, and some sank never more to rise. Who can report the calamities they suffered! The bravest soldiers shed tears like rain and wearied of their very lives! When their sumpter beasts fell in the mud, the provisions that they carried were either spoiled or saturated. And in this manner, cursing the day they had been born, beating their mules with their bare hands, they retreated like roaches from the lamplight to the Port of Ascalon, which they found so dismantled by the Saracens that they could scarcely enter through its gates for heaps of stones.’
King Richard and his army spent the early spring rebuilding Ashkelon to consolidate their southerly advance, with Jerusalem as unattainable as ever.
In February, Conrad de Monferrat made an abortive move to annex Acre, assisted by the Genoese and what remained of the French army. In April, things came to a head with news from Normandy that its French neighbours were threatening King Richard’s borders abetted by his brother John. The time for his adventuring in Palestine was running out. The Latin Kingdom was without a king to take his place. The feud between Conrad de Montferrat and Guy de Lusignan was unresolved – and if Richard was to have a chance of reaching Normandy before winter closed the sea lanes and the mountain passes, he had to find a swift solution. So he called a council of the Christian leaders, and simply put it to a vote: Guy or Conrad? Which for king?
It was a big mistake from Richard’s point of view; tactically huge. For, as before and to a man, they voted for the stronger leader – King Philippe’s cousin Conrad.
Historians have consistently fudged what happened next, to divert blame from King Richard and
his
cousin Isabella. So for the sake of argument, let us suppose that I’m a Justice and you’re a knight-juror, sitting in one of the new Crown Courts set up in England by Richard’s father, Henry.
These are the facts. So let’s suppose that they await your verdict on King Richard and his part in Conrad’s death.
APRIL 17
th
1192. Two days after the leaders’ council votes for Conrad, King Richard sends the Marquess a message that he’s to be crowned King of Jerusalem. The messanger he sends by ship to Tyre is Count Henri of Toulouse – a son of his half-sister, Marie, a grandson of Eléonore and his own acknowledged favourite.
APRIL 20
th
. Henri and his embassy arrive in Tyre to give Conrad the good news (and Isabella the bad news that she’s no longer to be sole Queen of the Kingdom, but must herself crown Conrad King in his own right). That April Isabella is just twenty. Count Henri, described as ‘tall and handsome’, is twenty-five. Conrad de Montferrat, who less than two years earlier was forced on Isabella as a husband, is grim-visaged and well past his prime. It’s not recorded that Isabella and Count Henri speak privately. But he stays in Tyre at least two days and has the opportunity to do so.
APRIL 28
th
. Isabella leaves her palace for the hamman bath-house at an unusually late hour of the morning. Conrad receives an invitation to dine with the Bishop of Beauvais, but on arriving at his house in Tyre finds that he’s dined already. Riding home, he is attacked by two young men, who stab him in the back and chest. One is killed by Conrad’s escort, the other held for questioning. Conrad himself is taken to the Hospitaller’s infirmary and dies there shortly afterwards. His attackers supposedly belong to a fanatical sect of religiously inspired killers known as
hashishiyun
(the prototype for all future
‘assassins’
). But the dead assassin is recognised as a servant of the young Queen’s mother, while the other has been seen in Isabella’s own household.
APRIL 29
th
. French troops camped outside Tyre demand admittance to the city. But Isabella locks the gates and sends a message to Count Henri, then in Acre, to the effect that she and the Latin Kingdom are at the disposal of his uncle, King Richard. At the same time it’s rumoured that, under torture, the surviving assassin confesses he was hired by Richard – an accusation bitterly contested in the King’s Itinerarium.
‘Oh infamous and malicious envy that always carps at virtue, hates what is good and endeavours to blacken the splendour it cannot extinguish!’
protests its loyal author.
APRIL 30
th
. Count Henri of Toulouse returns to Tyre, and is reported on arrival to have been admitted ‘at night’ by Isabella.
April 31
st
. A hasty betrothal is announced between Queen Isabella and Count Henri.
MAY 9
th
. Henri and Isabella are married a bare eleven days after Conrad’s interment. Isabella is already pregnant with Conrad’s child. But they still consummate the union – to the disgust of the Muslim, Muhammad ibn Hamed Isfahani, who’s present at the wedding.
‘You see the licentiousness of these foul unbelievers,’
he later writes.
‘I asked one of their courtiers to whom paternity would be awarded, and he said it will be the Queen’s child.’
What’s more, by prior agreement Henri has reinstated Isabella as sole Queen of the Latin Kingdom, modestly declining to have himself crowned king.
MAY 11
th
. Henri announces that he and the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Burgundy and the remains of his army, will join King Richard in his proposed attack on the Muslim stronghold of Darum, ten leagues south of Ashkelon. Which in due course they do.
My case, as they say, rests.
At the very least, the murder of Conrad was fortunate for Isabella, for Count Henri – and most especially for King Richard, who was quoted as remarking afterwards that the Marquess’s fate had been predictable; adding, to account for his own cheerful mood, that excessive mourning was of no help to a dead man.
Yet in the end, not even the removal of Conrad de Montferrat could save Richard from the humiliation of a negotiated peace, which achieved neither of the stated aims of his campaign.
The city of Jerusalem remained, as Sultan Salahuddin had always sworn it would, in Muslim hands. So did the holy relic of the Cross – although, in much the way of Conrad’s timely death and of the emergence the magic sword Escalibor in time for the croisade – by some miraculous coincidence, two hitherto lost fragments of the One True Cross had come to light that very June. One surfaced from a bishop’s reliquary. The other, if you will believe it (and I’m sorry but I don’t) – from an inspired scrape in the sand. Two lucky (more than lucky) finds for Richard to present as evidence of his success as a redeemer. But Jerusalem was still too big a rabbit altogether for him to pull out of his pot helm. So when the other Christian leaders chose to demonstrate their loyalty to Henri and Queen Isabella by marching in a body on the Holy City, he told them wearily that they would never take it; and when they finally abandoned the assault, he left them for his palace up the coast in Acre.
King Richard’s final months in Outremer were marked by bouts of sickness and ill-temper. In August he returned by sea to Joppa – to defend its Christian garrison against a Saracen attack, and provide his chroniclers with one last chance to praise him for his courage and heroic presence. Tricked out in silver armour on his fabulous Fauvel, he knew by then (and Sultan Salahuddin, whose reinforcements outnumbered his troops six to one, knew better still) that the
Bellum Sacrum
was already over bar the shouting.
Early in September, Richard agreed a three-year truce to salvage something from the wreck of his croisade, granting Isabella and the Latin Kingdom a hundred mile strip of sandy littoral from Tyre to Joppa that excluded Ashkelon and Darum – and naturally the Holy City. The deposed king, Guy de Lusignan, was offered Cyprus as a compensation. In all its main essentials it was the deal the Sultan and King Philippe had agreed in Tyre two years before – to render Richard’s whole campaign unnecessary, his military failure absolute.
We are at war. The war is over.
How often have we trotted out those phrases through Man’s long and violent history – with always so much lost, so little gained between them?
One condition of the peace was that Christian pilgrims should be given leave to worship at the holy places of Jerusalem; a privilege the Sultan had never actually withdrawn. Amongst the first to take advantage of the extended offer was Bishop Hubert Walter – and having knelt before the shrine that all the wretched fuss was over, he was received by Salahuddin, for what can only be described as a debrief. Inevitably the two men discussed the absent king, who had returned by then to Acre for his voyage home. But in the end they could agree on only one aspect of His Christian Majesty’s personality. His courage.
The Bishop praised King Richard for his generosity. But God’s Shadow on the Earth, who’d buried what was left of three thousand Muslim hostages at al-Ayadiyeh, called him ‘precipitate and reckless’ – a more than generous understatement in the circumstance!
‘Thy King is far too careless of his own existence,’ remarked the Sultan, who in the recent skirmish over Joppa had felt obliged to send replacement mounts for Richard when Fauvel was shot beneath him. ‘I will go further and tell you for my own part that, however much I have achieved by conquest, I’d sooner rule my territories with wisdom and with moderation than indulge in arrogance and vain displays of valour.’
The Sultan Salahuddin’s words to Bishop Hubert Walter, as recorded by his clerk, are likely to ring true. King Richard’s declamation from the deck of his departing galley three weeks later, as detailed in the
Itinerarium
, sounds more like spin.
‘O Holy Land, I commend thee to God, and if His heavenly grace shall grant me so long to live, that I may in His good pleasure afford thee assistance, I hope as I propose to be able some day to succour thee.’
His annalists claim great achievements for King Richard in the mere sixteen months of his campaign. But if the King himself says anything at all when his new flagship,
Franche-Nef,
puts out to sea, I’d think it likely that he’s drawing on his extensive stock of oaths involving God’s most personal anatomies, while he lies bathed in sweat with a return of his old fever. He is the only man in Palestine who doesn’t welcome peace. Jerusalem has always been for him as much an idea as a real city built of stone and mortar – which is perhaps why he declined to visit it with Bishop Walter when he had the chance. In any case, he’s not the hero of the moment.
I know the man I’d cast as hero of the Kings’ Crusade, and I think you do as well.
It isn’t Richard, is it?
In my book (which after all this is), the true hero of the conflict has to be al-Malik al-Nasir, Salahuddin al-Din Abu ’I-Muzaffar Yusuf ibn Ayyub ibn Shadi; Allah’s Deputy, God’s Shadow on the Earth, Defender of The One True Faith, Sultan of Egypt, Syria and Yemen, Ruler of Aleppo and Damascus, Prince of Believers, Commander of the Faithful, Giver of Unity and the True Word, Adorner of the Standard of Truth, Corrector of the World and of the Law. The man that we call Saladin.
‘I’ll march if you say march. But I’ll not… not fight!’
I had already drunk too much to be sure if I spoke the words or shouted them. They just came out of me because they had to. And when they hauled me shambling, stinking of the tavern, to face our Bishop Walter in his tent, they came out backwards. ‘Fight – not, not fight…’
‘Suppose you tell me why then. You are a little young I think for full retirement.’ The bishop seemed more amused than angry – a long-limbed man with a slight stoop and steady way of looking at you underneath his brows.
‘Because I’ve come to see – you see, Your Grace,’ I told him blearily, ‘you see we only learn by lis’… by lis’-ening.’
‘You are extremely drunk, young man.’
‘I know. But doesn’ matter, does it – ’cos I wouldn’ fight if I was sober as a pope. ’Cos when you’re fightin’ you aren’ lis’-en-ing…’ I said it very slowly to be sure of being understood. ‘And when you kill, you kill y’er chance of uner’stanning, d’ye see?’
For a moment he did not reply, perhaps to let me hear the slurring echo of my words – and even then, in my inebriated state, I saw myself as Bishop Walter must have seen me. Swaying gently. Trying to explain and sounding idiotic.