Isabella, Princess of Jerusalem

Although she reigned as queen in her own right for twelve years, Isabella of Jerusalem is most often portrayed in history books and literature as a pawn. She was married four times, divorced once, and widowed thrice. She was the mother of six daughters and a single son, who died just weeks before Isabella herself. She had been besieged by Saladin on her first wedding night, was the object of a coup attempt, and endured the hardships of a siege camp during the Frankish siege of Acre 1189-1191. One husband spent more than year in Saracen captivity, another died in her arms after being struck down by assassins, and her third husband died at the age of 33 in a bizarre accident. Isabella died, possibly from the complications of her son’s birth, at the age of 32. 

Isabella’s life was short, eventful and tragic, but writing Isabella off as a pawn of the men around her does no justice to a woman who played a crucial role in the history of the Holy Land. In two entries, I will be examining her life and role in history. Today, her life as princess, and later her life as queen.

Isabella was the daughter of King Amalric (also Aimery) of Jerusalem by his second wife, Maria Comnena, who was a great niece of the Byzantine Emperor, Manuel I. Isabella was born in early or mid-1172, or 11 and 12 years respectively after her father’s son and daughter by his first wife. At the time of Isabella’s birth, her half-brother Baldwin had already been diagnosed with leprosy, so there can be little doubt that her sex was a disappointment to her father; King Amalric had undoubtedly hoped for a son that might replace the stricken Baldwin as his heir. (It was the custom in the Kingdom of Jerusalem for noblemen who contracted leprosy to renounce their secular titles and join the religious Order of St. Lazarus.) Amalric was still young (in his thirties), and his wife Maria not yet twenty, however, so he undoubtedly hoped the vital male heir would yet be forthcoming.

Just two years later, however, Amalric fell victim to dysentery and died suddenly. Isabella’s half-brother Baldwin was recognized as King of Jerusalem, and placed under the regency of the Count of Tripoli. Isabella’s mother was now a widow at just 21 years, and retired from court to the wealthy barony of Nablus, her dower portion. Nablus was known for its scents and soaps, and for its large, cosmopolitan population of Jews, Orthodox, Latin Christians, and Muslims. (The latter were specifically granted the right to engage in the haj to Mecca.) One imagines it must have been an exciting place to grown up.

Three years later, when Isabella was just five years old, her mother chose a new husband. Maria Comnena’s choice fell on the younger (landless) brother of the wealthy Baron of Ibelin, Ramla and Mirabel (see Maria Comnena, Lady of Ibelin). The King, who explicitly sanctioned the marriage, was probably responsible for persuading the Baron if Ibelin, Ramla and Mirabel to transfer the comparatively insignificant barony of Ibelin to his younger brother to ensure he was a more “suitable” match for the Dowager Queen of Jerusalem. Thus, Maria became the Lady of Ibelin, and her second husband, Balian, became Isabella’s step-father ― and, indeed, the first and only father whom Isabella and consciously known.

Initially Isabella remained with her mother and step-father, spending time (one presumes) at both Nablus and Ibelin. She soon had two new half-siblings, a sister Helvis and a brother John, born to her mother and step-father. Her idyllic childhood, however, came to an abrupt end at the age of eight. The King’s mother, Agnes de Courtenay, had long been a bitter rival of Maria Comnena because the latter had replaced her in her husband’s bed and been crowned queen in her place (See Agnes de Courtenay). By 1180, Agnes enjoyed the King’s confidence sufficiently to be able to influence him. She convinced him that his half-sister was a threat, who needed to be completely “controlled” by people loyal to the Courtenays. The means to achieve purely political objective was to betrothe the eight-year-old Isabella to another pawn, the underage nobleman Humphrey de Toron. 

Humphrey was himself firmly under the control of  his widowed mother and her new and already notorious husband: Reynald de Châtillon (See Rogue Baron).  Thus, Isabella was taken from the only family she had ever known -- over the furious objections of her mother and step-father -- to live as a virtual prisoner in one of the most exposed and bleak castles of the kingdom on the very edge of Sinai: Kerak. She was, furthermore, in the hands of the brutal and godless Reynald de Châtillon. To add insult to injury, his lady prohibited the child from visiting her parents for the next three years. In this phase of her life, Isabella was indeed nothing but a pawn.

Interior of Kerak

In late 1183, for reasons lost to history, someone (Châtillon? The King? Agnes de Courtenay?) decided it was time for Isabella and Humphrey to marry. Isabella was only eleven and below the canonical age of consent; she had nothing to say in the matter. Her mother and step-father were not present and presumably not consulted. Humphrey was by now at least fifteen and possibly a couple years older, which may have prompted the marriage as there was the risk that, now that he did have a say over his affairs, he might haven chosen to break the betrothal. A marriage on the other hand could not be so easily reversed. Whatever the reasons, the marriage was planned and the nobility of Outremer invited to attend.

Instead, the castle of Kerak found itself under siege by the forces of Saladin, while the bulk of the barons of Jerusalem were attending a session of the High Court in Jerusalem. Trapped inside were largely their ladies, notably Isabella’s mother, who was seeing her daughter for the first time in three years, Isabella’s half-sister Sibylla (now 23 and married for a second time), and the Queen Mother Agnes de Courtenay. The siege lasted roughly two months before the Army of Jerusalem under Baldwin IV came to the castle’s relief. Although no harm came to any of the high-born guests, Isabella spent her wedding night in a castle under siege and bombardment. (Allegedly, Saladin agreed to spare the tower in which the nuptials were taking place, but continued bombarding the rest of the castle with his siege engines.) Furthermore, we can assume there was considerable uncertainty about when the relief army would arrive and whether food and water would last until help came --  not to mention that the sanitary conditions in a castle crowded with townspeople and extra guests must have been quite unpleasant. It was not an auspicious start to married life, even for an eleven-year-old. 

The next phase of Isabella’s life is poorly recorded. Humphrey de Toron, selected as Isabella’s husband by a woman bitterly hostile to her, lived-up to her expectations of spinelessness. He surrendered (voluntarily?) his important barony of Toron to Agnes de Courtenay’s brother, Jocelyn of Edessa, taking a “money fief” (read: pension) instead. Isabella and he appear to have lived in town houses in either Acre or Jerusalem. For Isabella the implications of her husband’s abdication of effective baronial power may not have been evident (she was only eleven after all), and she probably enjoyed at last being able to visit with her mother, step-father and Ibelin half-siblings (of which there were now four).

Then in 1186, the boy King Baldwin V, who had succeeded the “Leper” King Baldwin IV, died without a direct heir. The barons of Jerusalem had sworn to seek the advice of the Kings of England and France, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, but they were far away. Furthermore, Isabella’s half-sister, the mother of Baldwin V and sister of Baldwin IV, felt that she ought to succeed to the throne. While no one doubted her claim, the majority of barons and bishops abhorred her husband and so resisted crowning her. Without the consent of the High Court of Jerusalem but with the help of the Templars and Reynald de Châtillon, Sibylla contrived to have herself crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; she then crowned her husband Guy de Lusignan as her consort. 

Sibylla and Guy from the Hollywood Film "The Kingdom of Heaven"

The majority of the barons and bishops were not in Jerusalem to witness Sibylla’s usurpation of the throne; they were meeting in Nablus to discuss options. The news that Sibylla had seized the throne and crowned her detested husband, pushed them to take action. It was agreed that Isabella, as the other surviving child of King Amalric, should be crowned in Bethlehem as a rival (but in this case legitimate because chosen by the High Court) queen to Sibylla. Automatically, her husband would by law become her consort and so king. But the barons had not reckoned with Humphrey de Toron’s cowardice and/or duplicity. Either from fear or simply because he remained abjectly loyal to his step-father, Humphrey foiled the baronial plot by sneaking away during the night to do homage to Sibylla and Guy. Without an alternative rallying point, the baronial resistance to Sibylla/Guy’s coup d’etat collapsed. 

That is all recorded history, but what is left out of it is how Isabella felt. Did Isabella side with her husband ― and the man who had kept her imprisoned for three years? Or did she side with her mother and step-father, who both vehemently opposed Sibylla’s usurpation of the throne? Did fourteen-year-old Isabella want to be queen? Or not? We have no way of knowing. 

But just because the historical record is silent, we should not assume that she simply didn’t care. The historical record that we have is scanty and written almost exclusively by male clerics, who rarely considered the opinions or actions of women important. The fact that they took no interest in Isabella’s feelings should not induce us to do the same. We know that Isabella, like most of the barons except Tripoli and her step-uncle of Ramla and Mirabel, accepted the fait accompli, but most of the barons (and presumably bishops) nevertheless deeply resented what Sibylla and Guy (on one hand) and Humphrey (on the other) had done. Isabella may have been in an identical situation: she had to accept what Humphrey had done and make her peace with Sibylla and Guy, but she may also have resented it, possibly intensely. It might even have created marital tensions.

Whatever her feelings, however, history was about to swamp her with new problems. Less than a year after usurping the crown, Guy de Lusignan led the Army of Jerusalem to an unnecessary and devastating defeat (See Hattin.) Not only was the battle lost, thousands of fighting men were slaughtered, the remainder enslaved, and the bulk of the barons of Jerusalem were taken captive; among them was Isabella’s ever ineffective husband Humphrey.

There are various versions of what happened next. Saladin evidently offered to release Humphrey in exchange for the surrender of the critically important Frankish border fortresses of Oultrejourdain (which Humphrey had just inherited because Saladin had personally decapitated Reynald de Châtillon). According to some (probably romanticized) versions, Humphrey arrived home, only to have the garrisons refuse to obey his orders, at which point he voluntarily (or at his mother’s “loving” urging) returned to Saracen captivity. It is more probable that Humphrey’s release was contingent on the surrender of Kerak and Montreal, and the surrender never occurred (no chivalrous return from freedom to captivity.) Either version of events, however, underlines the fact that Humphrey was 1) prepared to surrender vitally important fortresses just for the sake of his freedom and 2) that the men of the garrisons had so little respect for him they did not follow his instructions.  Both castles, however, were eventually reduced by siege, and at that point Saladin agreed to release Humphrey as he served no useful purpose in prison. 

Humphrey and Isabella were reunited in early 1189 after roughly 18 months of separation. Where Isabella had been between the catastrophe of Hattin and her reunion with Humphrey is unrecorded. Most likely, she was with her mother and step-father, because her stepfather had managed to escape the trap at Hattin. With King Guy and most of the High Court in captivity, Ibelin was unquestionably one of the most important men in the entire kingdom (Arab chronicles from the period refer to him as “like a king.”) Furthermore, he commanded the respect of those fighting men who had, with him, escaped capture. It would, therefore, have been logical for Isabella to seek his protection in this period. 

Ibelin was in Tyre, the only city in the entire kingdom that did not fall or surrender to Saladin in the wake of Hattin. Also in Tyre at this time was Conrad de Montferrat. Montferrat was the brother of Sibylla’s first husband, uncle of Baldwin V, and related to both the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France, in short a man of very high birth and good connections. More important, he had taken command of the defense of Tyre in a critical moment and enjoyed the support of the people, residents and refugees, crowded into it. If she was in Tyre, Isabella and Conrad would have met and probably known each other well.
 

When Humphrey returned from captivity, however, he joined not the men who had successfully defended what was left of the kingdom but the architect of the disaster: Guy de Lusignan. Thus when Guy de Lusignan (for no logical reason) decided to besiege Saracen held Acre, Humphrey went with him. Significantly, Isabella accompanied him. 

A siege camp is not a pleasant place for anyone, much less a high-born lady, which begs the question: why would Isabella choose to expose herself to the sordid life-style and the mortal hazards of a siege? Was it love of her husband? The passionate desire not to be separated from him again after the eighteen months of forced separation caused by his captivity? Did she go to at the insistence of her half-sister Sibylla, who was also at the siege with her two infant daughters and could have commanded the attendance of her little sister? Did Humphrey insist on Isabella coming with him because he was jealous of a budding friendship between Isabella and Montferrat? Did King Guy command her to come (and Humphrey dutifully comply) because he (Guy) feared she might be used by the barons (who had always opposed him and now detested him more than ever) to challenge his (much tarnished) right to the throne? 

We will never know. The only thing that is certain is that she was still there in November of 1190, when her half-sister Sibylla and both her nieces died of fever. In the eyes of the High Court, which had favored her since the constitutional crisis of 1186, Isabella was no longer a princess but the rightful queen of Jerusalem.

Isabella is an important character in both:

Defender of Jerusalem 

and

Envoy of Jerusalem 

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Agnes de Courtenay, Wife and Mother of Kings

Agnes de Courtenay is without doubt one of the women in the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem who played a decisive — not to say sinister — role. She is an example of how women exercised power in the 12^th century crusader kingdoms, and a reminder that female influence was not always benign.

Agnes de Courtenay was the daughter of the powerful Courtenay family. The French Courtenay’s were of distinguished enough lineage for a daughter of the family to marry the younger brother of King Louis VII of France. In the crusader kingdoms the family derived its importance from the fact that Joscelyn de Courtenay was a first cousin of the Baldwin de Bourcq, one of the leaders of the First Crusade, who had been Count of Edessa before he was elected King of Jerusalem to rule as Baldwin II. At Baldwin de Bourcq’s elevation to King, he invested his cousin Joscelyn de Courtenay with his former County of Edessa, which he ruled as Joscelyn I. 

However, under his son Joscelyn II, the County was over-run and lost to the Saracens, in large part due to the neglect and poor leadership of Joscelyn II. The city of Edessa was lost to Zengi in November 1144, and by 1150 the last remnants of the once rich and powerful County were in Saracen hands. Joscelyn II himself was captured in the same year by Nur al-Din and tortured. He eventually died, still in captivity, in 1159. Thus his son, Joscelyn III of Edessa inherited his father’s title — but none of the lands or income that went with it. As titular Count of Edessa he was to prove a singularly ineffective (not to say incompetent) leader, who distinguished himself by getting captured at a disastrous battle in 1164, playing a key part in the usurpation of the even more disastrous Guy de Lusignan, and finally by surrendering Acre to Saladin in haste when it was completely defensible. His sister was Agnes.

Agnes de Courtenay had not had an easy childhood. She had been married, possibly at an early age, to Reynald of Marash, who was killed in battle in 1149. The following year, her father was captured and never seen again. Her family had fallen in six years from one of the richest and most powerful in the crusader states, to “poor cousins” living on a few estates in Antioch that Agnes’ mother had from her first marriage. Agnes was a widow with no land and no dowry. She was also possibly no more than 10 or 12 years old, as she would have had to be at least 8 at her marriage to Reynald.

Under these circumstances, it appears that Agnes languished for some time in her mother’s much reduced household and was eventually betrothed to a man of comparatively obscure origins and only recent prominence: Hugh d’Ibelin. Hugh was the son of an adventurer of unknown origin, Barisan, who had distinguished himself as a knight and administrator in the reign of Baldwin II and been rewarded with the Constableship of Jaffa and then the newly created barony of Ibelin. Ibelin was small. It owed only ten knights to the feudal levee, and Agnes may have felt it was beneath her dignity as the daughter of a count.  In any case, in 1157, sometime shortly after the betrothal, Hugh d’Ibelin was taken captive at Jacob’s Ford.

This left Agnes in a very difficult position. She was probably about 17 years of age, penniless, her father was still in a Saracen prison, her brother was probably even younger than she was, and now her betrothed was in captivity as well. She may have assumed he would suffer the same fate as her father and never return. She may have felt vulnerable and desperate, or she may simply have been flattered to find that the King’s younger brother took an interest in her. Whether she was the seducer or the seduced, or whether she was outright abducted (as some historians have suggested; see H.E. Mayer, “The Origins of King Amalric”), sometime in 1157 she “married” Prince Amalric of Jerusalem, then Count of Jaffa and Ascalon.

Agnes proceeded to give the Count of Jaffa two children, a daughter, Sibylla, born in or about 1159 and a son, Baldwin, in 1161. Then in February 1163, her brother-in-law, Baldwin III of Jerusalem, died childless. Amalric as his brother, a young and still vigorous man with experience in war and peace, seemed the most obvious candidate to succeed him. But far from being immediately acclaimed king, Amalric faced serious opposition — because of his wife. In fact, the High Court of Jerusalem had such strong objections to Agnes that they refused to acknowledge Amalric as King of Jerusalem unless he set Agnes aside.

Why, we do not know. Officially, the Church suddenly discovered and was “shocked, simply shocked” to discover (after six years of marriage) that Amalric and Agnes were related within the prohibited degrees. But even the highly educated Church scholar and royal insider William of Tyre found this explanation so baffling that he had to do extra research to track down the relationship. The issue of the pre-contract with Hugh d’Ibelin was certainly another canonical ground for divorce, although not explicitly mentioned. However, the objections of the High Court are not likely to have been legalistic in view of the fact that the High Court explicitly recognized Amalric’s children by Agnes as legitimate.  This strongly suggests that the High Court was not uneasy about the legality of Amalric’s marriage but about the character of his wife — or her relatives as Malcolm Barber suggests. Perhaps it was simply the fact that she was a powerful woman, or already a notoriously grasping one, or perhaps, as the Chronicle of Ernoul suggests, she was seen as insufficiently virtuous for such an elevated position as queen in the Holy City. Such speculation is beside the point; the naked fact is that Agnes was found unsuitable for a crown by the majority of the High Court. That’s a pretty damning sentence even without knowing the reason, and that’s not just a matter of “bad press,” as Bernard Hamilton suggests.

Agnes then married (or returned to) her betrothed, Hugh d’Ibelin, and, when he died in or about 1170, married yet a fourth time. For a dowerless woman, that’s quite a record, and suggests she may have had charms that are inadequately conveyed by the historical record. She had no children by any of her husbands (or lovers) except Amalaric, and until the death of King Amalric, she had no contact with her children by him.  Even after Amalric’s death, during her son Baldwin’s minority, she appears to have been excluded from the court.

Then in 1176, Baldwin IV took the reins of government for himself and invited his mother to his court. She rapidly established herself here as a key influence upon her still teenage son. This was derived from her apparently affectionate relationship with her son, who was by this point obviously afflicted with leprosy.  She travelled with him even on campaigns, and appears to have taken a motherly interest in his health and welfare. Since Baldwin IV was unmarried, Agnes’ influence was all the stronger.  Thus, although she never wore a crown, she was undoubtedly the most powerful woman at court of Baldwin IV, and by the end of Baldwin’s reign she took part in the sessions of the High Court.

She was also, at this stage in her life, allegedly promiscuous. She would have been in her late 30s when her son invited her back to court and she had been widowed three times. Although technically married to Reginald of Sidon, she is rarely mentioned together with him, and they appear to have lived completely separate lives. While her husband kept to his estates and fought the enemy, Agnes was “at court,” where she is said to have had the Archbishop of Caesarea, a native by the name of Heraclius, as her lover. Either after him or simultaneously with Heraclius, she is alleged to have had an affair with Aimery de Lusignan as well.

While her morals are arguably her own affair and modern sensibilities are not greatly offended by a mature woman finding sexual pleasure wherever she pleases, it was Agnes influence on her son that from a historical perspective was reprehensible.  Within a few short years, Agnes de Courtenay had succeeded in foisting her candidates for Seneschal, Patriarch and Constable upon her young and dying son. These were respectively: 1) her utterly underwhelming brother, Joscelyn of Edessa, 2) the controversial figure Heraclius, who may not have been as bad as his rival William of Tyre claims and may not have been Agnes lover as the Chronicle of Ernoul claims, but hardly distinguished himself either, and finally an obscure Frenchmen, also alleged to have been Agnes’ lover, Aimery de Lusignan. Not a terribly impressive record for “wise” appointments – even if Aimery de Lusignan eventually proved to be an able man.

Worse, Agnes also engineered the marriage of not only her own daughter, Sibylla, but of her step-daughter, Isabella, the child born to Amalric by his second wife, Maria Comnena, after Agnes had been set aside. No other actions in Agnes de Courtenay’s life were so detrimental to the welfare of the Kingdom of Jerusalem as these two marriages.  We are talking here about Guy de Lusignan and Humphrey de Toron respectively.

The latter, Humphrey, was a man of “learning,” who distinguished himself by cravenly vowing allegiance to the former after Guy seized power in a coup d’etat that completely ignored the constitutional right of the High Court of Jerusalem to select the monarch. He then promptly got himself captured at Hattin. Although he lived a comparatively long life and held an important barony, Toron apparently never played a positive role in the history of the kingdom. Not exactly a brilliant match or a wise choice for a future Queen of Jerusalem.

Agnes’ other choice, the man she chose for her own daughter was even more disastrous. At best, Guy de Lusignan was freshly come from France, young, inexperienced and utterly ignorant about the situation in the crusader kingdoms.  At worst he was not only ignorant but arrogant and a murderer as well. (See my entries on Guy and Aimery de Lusignan.)  In a short space of time he alienated his brother-in-law, King Baldwin IV, and he never enjoyed the confidence of the barons of Jerusalem. The dying king preferred to drag his decaying body around in a litter -- and his barons preferred to follow a leper -– than trust Guy de Lusignan with command of the army.

Nor was this mistrust on the part of the barons misplaced. When Sibylla crowned her husband king and all the barons (except Ramla and Tripoli) grudgingly accepted him, he led them to the avoidable disaster at Hattin. In short, Agnes de Courtenay’s interference in the affairs of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, led directly to the loss of the entire Kingdom.

In retrospect, Agnes de Courtenay was clearly an ambitious woman, who clawed her way from comparative helplessness and impoverishment to the pinnacle of power -- behind the throne of her son. She suffered a number of set-backs in her life, most notably the High Court’s refusal to recognize her as Queen, and she must have been embittered by this. She is credited with hating her successor as Amalric’s wife, the woman who was crowned queen in her place, Maria Comnena bitterly.  The extent to which her subsequent actions were motivated by a consuming thirst for revenge should, therefore, not be under-estimated. Whatever her motives, whether a conscious desire to humiliate those she blamed for her own humiliation or simply a lack of intelligence commensurate to her ambition, her overall impact on the history of the crusader states was tragically negative.

Agnes plays a major role in the first two books of my three part biography of Balian d'Ibelin:

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Read more about Agnes and other women in the Kingdom of Jerusalem at: Balian d'Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.


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“Ruthless and scheming” – Maria Comnena or Agnes de Courtney

Bernard Hamilton (“Women in the Crusader States: Queens of Jerusalem 1000 - 1190” published in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker, Basel Blackwell, Oxford, 1978), argues that Baldwin IV's mother, Agnes de Courtney, had the “misfortune” to have “bad relations to the press.”  He notes that “all contemporary sources are hostile to her”, but argues that that “her influence was not as baneful as the Ibelins and the Archbishop of Tyre would like posterity to presume.” He then goes on to describe Agnes’ rival, Maria Comnena, as “a ruthless and scheming woman.” Now Bernard Hamilton is a noted historian, but my father taught me to judge a person by his/her deeds — not by what others said about them.

Sybilla of Jerusalem as portrayed in the film "Kingdom of Heaven"

So let us look at the record, not the reputation, of the wives of Amalric I of Jerusalem: Agnes de Courtney and Maria Comnena.

Agnes de Courtney was, according to Malcolm Barber, betrothed to Hugh d’Ibelin, but instead married Prince (later King) Amalric of Jerusalem. Whether she did this voluntarily is not recorded. She might have been seduced or abducted, or she might also have been very happy to give up the comparatively obscure and unimportant Hugh in favor of the heir apparent to the throne.  Whatever her motives at the time of her marriage, when Baldwin III died childless, the High Court of Jerusalem had such strong objections to Agnes that they refused to acknowledge Amalric as King of Jerusalem unless he set Agnes aside.

Why, we do not know. There was the issue of being married within the prohibited degrees on consanguinity, and the issue of the pre-contract with Hugh d’Ibelin, both of which were canonical grounds for divorce.  However, the objections of the High Court are not likely to have been legalistic in view of the fact that the High Court explicitly recognized Amalric’s children by Agnes as legitimate.  This strongly suggests that the High Court was not uneasy about the legality of Amalric’s marriage but about the character of his wife. Perhaps it was simply the fact that she was a powerful woman, or a notoriously grasping one, or perhaps, as the Chronicle of Ernoul suggests, she was seen as insufficiently virtuous for such an elevated position as queen in the Holy City. Such speculation is beside the point; the naked fact is that Agnes was found unsuitable for a crown by the majority of the High Court. That’s a pretty damning sentence even without knowing the reason, and that’s not just a matter of “bad press.”

The City of Jerusalem

Agnes then married (or returned to) her betrothed, Hugh d’Ibelin, and, when he died, married yet a third time. Until the death of King Amalric, she had no contact with her children by him, and even after Amalric’s death, during her son Baldwin’s minority, she appears to have been excluded from the court. Then in 1176, Baldwin IV took the reins of government for himself and invited his mother to his court. Within a few short years, Agnes de Courtney had succeeded in foisting her candidates for Seneschal, Patriarch and Constable upon her young and dying son. These were respectively: 1) her utterly underwhelming brother, Joceyln of Edessa, 2) the controversial figure Heraclius, who may not have been as bad as his rival William of Tyre claims and may not have been Agnes lover as the Chronicle of Ernoul claim, but hardly distinguished himself either, and finally an obscure Frenchmen, also alleged to have been Agnes’ lover, Aimery de Lusignan. Not a terribly impressive record for “wise” appointments – even if Aimery de Lusignan eventually proved to be an able man.

Hamilton next applauds Agnes “cleverness” in marrying both heirs to the throne, her daughter Sibylla and her step-daughter Isabella (Maria Comnena’s daughter), to “men of her choosing.” We are talking here about Guy de Lusignan and Humphrey de Toron respectively. The latter was a man of “learning,” who distinguished himself by cravenly vowing allegiance to the former after Guy seized power in a coup d’etat that completely ignored the constitutional right of the High Court of Jerusalem to select the monarch, and then promptly got himself captured at Hattin. Although he lived a comparatively long life and held an important barony, he apparently never played a positive role in the history of the kingdom. Not exactly a brilliant match or a wise choice for the future Queen of Jerusalem.

Agnes’ other choice, the man she chose for her own daughter according to Hamilton, was even more disastrous. At best, Guy de Lusignan was freshly come from France, young, inexperienced and utterly ignorant about the situation in the crusader kingdoms.  At worst he was not only ignorant but arrogant and a murderer as well: he allegedly stabbed the unarmed and unarmoured Earl of Salisbury in the back, while the latter was escorting Queen Eleanor of England across her French territories. He certainly alienated his brother-in-law King Baldwin IV within a short space of time, and he never enjoyed the confidence of the barons of Jerusalem. This is not a matter of “hostile sources” just the historical record that tells us the dying king preferred to drag his decaying body around in a litter -- and his barons preferred to follow a leper – than trust Guy de Lusignan with command of the army.

Nor was this mistrust of the baronage in Lusignan misplaced. When Sibylla crowned her husband king and all the barons but Tripoli grudgingly accepted him, he led them to the avoidable disaster at Hattin. In short, Agnes de Courtney’s interference in the affairs of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, led directly to the loss of the entire Kingdom.

In contrast, there is only one known instance of Maria Comnena actively intervening in the affairs of the Kingdom. This was when she pressured (or “browbeat” according to Hamilton) her daughter Isabella into assenting to the annulment of her marriage with unimpressive and militarily useless Humphrey de Toron in order to marry the man who had just salavaged the last remaining free city in the Kingdom of Jerusalem from destruction. Hamilton portrays this as an act of unbridled, sinister power-seeking on the part of Maria.  Why Agnes’ five appointments should be “clever” (despite the disastrous consequences) but Maria’s effort to rescue the kingdom from the appalling and patently destructive leadership of King Guy should be seen as “power-hungry”  is baffling. It is certainly not an objective assessment of the behavior of the two women.

True, Isabella appears to have become fond of Humphrey de Toron, but she was the heir to the throne and princesses do not marry where their hearts lead but rather for the sake of the kingdom. To an objective observer, forcing an eight year old girl to marry a total stranger is considerably more manipulative and inhumane then for the a mother of a 17 year old princess to put pressure on her teenage daughter to put the interests of the kingdom ahead of her personal preferences. 

To make matters worse, Hamilton reports – with apparent approval! – that Agnes prevented the child Isabella from visiting her mother, effectively imprisoning her in her castle at Kerak from the age of 8 to the age of 11, a period in which, incidentally, Kerak was besieged by Saladin. In short, Agnes was hardly keeping Isabella “safe” – she may even have been courting her capture and death to ensure there was no rival to her own daughter for the throne.  But as that is speculation, I will leave motives aside and focus on the fact that she keep a little girl imprisoned in an exposed castle, denying her the right to even visit her mother.

In short, Hamilton suggests it is legitimate – indeed clever -- to separate an eight year old from her mother and step-father and expose her to danger, but it is devious and self-serving when the mother of a seventeen year old persuades her to set aside the husband forced on her as a child. That’s a warped view of affairs in my opinion.

The English chroniclers and Hamilton attribute to Maria evil motives and accuse her of “scheming” and deviousness without bringing forth a single example to support these allegations – aside from the above instance of pressuring her daughter into an unwanted divorce. In her one recorded act of “interference” she induced her daughter to marry not some adventurer, who would lose the kingdom, but the only man the barons of Jerusalem were willing to rally around after the disaster of Hattin. Her choice for her daughter was a proven military commander, who had just rescued Tyre from falling to Saladin. So even if her “interference” was as selfish and self-seeking as Hamilton implies, it was considerably wiser than Agnes’ choice of Guy de Lusignan.

A 19th Century depiction of a Byzantine Queen

After this one act, although her daughter was queen of Jerusalem from 1192 to 1205 and Maria herself did not die until 1217, there is not a single instance of her “interfering” in the affairs of the Kingdom again – very odd behavior for Hamilton’s unscrupulous, devious and power-hungry woman.  In short, not a single fact supports the allegations against her.

Even taking into account how historians love revisionism, an objective observer ought to recognize that the contemporary sources favorable to Maria may indeed have had justification -- and those hostile to Agnes de Courtney were probably just as right. It’s time modern historians stopped slandering Maria Comnena just for the sake of re-writing history.

Read more about both Maria and Agnes at: Balian and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Maria Comnena plays a major role in my three part biographical novel of Balian d’Ibelin. Read more in:

Book I: Knight of Jerusalem, released September 2014.

A landless knight,

                       a leper king, 

                                  and the struggle for Jerusalem.

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