The Kingdom in the Sun (65 page)

a century later Dante was even to allow her a place in Paradise— though admittedly in the lowest heaven—on the strength of it.
¹

But whatever Constance's new subjects thought about the marriage, for the Papacy it spelt disaster. Ever since the days of Robert Guiscard, when the Normans in the South had first become a force to be reckoned with, the thought of any alliance—let alone a union— between its two mighty neighbours had been a recurrent papal nightmare. Now that the Lombard cities had gained their independence, the danger of encirclement might seem a little less fearsome than before; but the cities still acknowledged the Emperor as their suzerain, their relations with Rome were strained, and they might even serve to increase the potential pressure if they had a mind to do so. In such an event the Papacy—which even in the days of the Sicilian alliance had often been hard put to hold its own—would be cracked like a nut.

The aged Pope Lucius was dead.
²
His successor, Urban III, seeing that there was nothing further to be done, had bowed gracefully to the inevitable and had even sent legates to Milan to represent him at the ceremony. He had not, however, been told about the

¹
Sorella
fu,
e
cost
le
fu
tolta

Di
capo
I'ombra
delle
sacre
bende.

Ma
poi
che
pur
al
mondo
fu
rivolta

Contra
suo
grado
e
contra
buona
usanza,

Non
fu
dal
vel
del
cor
gia
mai
disciolta.

Quest'
e
la
luce
della
gran
Costanza

Che
del
secondo
vento
di
Soave

Genero
il
terzo
e
l'ultima
possanza.

She too a nun, her brows were forced to part

With the o'ershadowing coif she held so dear.

Yet, when against her will—and though to thwart

That will was sin—she found herself re-cast

Upon the world, she stayed still veiled in heart.

This light is the great Constance: from one blast,

The second Swabian, did she generate

The third imperial whirlwind, and the last.

(Tr. Bickersteth)

Paradiso,
iii,
113-2

¹
He died at Verona and was buried in the cathedral. In
1879
a great storm blew down part of the apse on to his tomb, smashing its sixteenth-century cover and revealing the original stone, bearing a portrait of the Pope in high relief and a neat but pointless inscription not worth transcribing here. It has now been built into the wall of the little chapel to St Agatha.

plans for the coronation, news of which threw him into a fury. To crown a son in his father's lifetime was always a dangerous precedent in papal eyes, since any strengthening of the hereditary principle in the imperial succession could only weaken the Pope's own influence; moreover, the coronation of the Lombard Kings was traditionally the privilege of the Archbishop of Milan—a post which Urban himself had held before his election to the Papacy and which he had never technically given up.

The Patriarch was excommunicated for his presumption; and from that moment, in the words of a contemporary, Arnold of Liibeck, 'the quarrel between the Emperor and the Pope became open, and great trouble arose in the Church of God'. After Frederick returned to Germany, leaving Italy at the mercy of his son, the situation grew even worse; Henry soon showed that he understood no argument save that of violence. Open warfare soon broke out, the King of Lombardy at one moment even going so far as to cut off the nose of a high-ranking papal official. Ten years after the Treaty of Venice, it seemed as if breaking-point had once again been reached; the Pope's patience was exhausted and the Roman Emperor once again faced the prospect of excommunication.

That he escaped it was due neither to himself nor to Urban, but to Saladin. In mid-October 1187, as the Bull of Excommunication lay on the Pope's table ready for signature, a Genoese mission arrived at the papal court with the news of the fall of Jerusalem. Urban was old and ill, and the shock was more than he could bear. On 20 October, at Ferrara, he died of a broken heart.

As usual, the West reacted to the sad tidings from Outremer with genuine emotion but too late. To most Europeans, the Crusader states of the Levant were remote to the point of unreality—exotic, privileged outposts of Christendom in which austerity alternated with sybaritic luxury, where
douceur
and danger walked hand in hand; magnificent in their way, but somehow more suited to the lays of troubadour romance than to the damp and unheroic struggle that was the common lot at home. Even to the well-informed, Levantine politics were hard to follow, the names largely unpronounceable, the news when it did arrive hopelessly distorted and out of date.

Only when disaster had actually struck did they spring, with exclamations of mingled rage and horror, to their swords.

So it had been forty years before, when news of the fall of Edessa and the fire of St Bernard's oratory had quickened the pulse of the continent and launched the ludicrous fiasco that was the Second Crusade. And so it was now. To any dispassionate observer, European or Levantine, who had followed the march of events for the past fifteen years, the capture of Jerusalem must have seemed inevitable. On the Muslim side there had been the steady rise of Sala-din, a leader of genius who had vowed to recover the holy city for his faith; on the Christian, nothing but the sad spectacle of the three remaining Frankish states of Jerusalem, Tripoli and Antioch, all governed by mediocrities and torn apart by internal struggles for power. Jerusalem itself was further burdened, throughout the crucial period of Saladin's ascendancy, by the corresponding decline of its leper King, Baldwin IV. When he came to the throne in 11
74
at the age of thirteen, the disease was already upon him; eleven years later he was dead. Not surprisingly, he left no issue. At the one moment when wise and resolute leadership was essential if the kingdom were to be saved, the crown of Jerusalem devolved upon his nephew, a child of eight.

The death of this new infant king, Baldwin V, in the following year might have been considered a blessing in disguise; but the opportunity of fading a true leader was thrown away and the throne passed to his stepfather, Guy of Lusignan, a weak, querulous figure with a record of incapacity which fully merited the scorn in which he was held by most of his compatriots. Jerusalem was thus in a state bordering on civil war when, in May 11
87,
Saladin declared his long-awaited
jihad
and crossed the Jordan into Frankish territory. Under the miserable Guy, the Christian defeat was assured. On
3
July, he led the largest army his kingdom had ever assembled across the Galilean mountains towards Tiberias, where Saladin was laying siege to the castle. After a long day's march in the most torrid season of the year, they were forced to camp on a waterless plateau; and the next day, exhausted by the heat and half-mad with thirst, beneath a little double-summited hill known as the Horns of Hattin, they were surrounded by the Muslim army and cut to pieces.

It only remained for the Saracens to mop up the isolated Christian fortresses one by one. Tiberias fell on the day after Hattin; Acre followed; Nablus, Jaffa, Sidon and Beirut capitulated in quick succession. Wheeling south, Saladin took Ascalon by storm and received the surrender of Gaza without a struggle. Now he was ready for Jerusalem. The defenders of the Holy City resisted heroically for twelve days; but on 2 October, with the walls already breached by Muslim sappers, they knew that the end was near. Their leader, Balian of Ibelin—King Guy having been taken prisoner after Hattin —went personally to Saladin to discuss terms for surrender.

Saladin, who knew and liked Balian, was neither bloodthirsty nor vindictive; and after some negotiation he agreed that every Christian in Jerusalem should be allowed to redeem himself by payment of the appropriate ransom. Of the twenty thousand poor who had no means of raising the money, seven thousand would be freed on payment of a lump sum by the various Christian authorities. That same day the conqueror led his army into the city; and for the first time in eighty-eight years, on the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed was carried in his sleep from Jerusalem to paradise, his green banners fluttered over the Temple area from which he had been gathered up, and the sacred imprint of his foot was once again exposed to the adoration of the Faithful.

Everywhere, order was preserved. There was no murder, no bloodshed, no looting. Thirteen thousand poor, for whom ransom money could not be raised, remained in the city; but Saladin's brother and lieutenant, al-Adil, asked for a thousand of them as a reward for his services and immediately set them free. Another seven hundred were given to the Patriarch, and five hundred to Balian of Ibelin; then Saladin himself spontaneously liberated all the old, all the husbands whose wives had been ransomed and finally all the widows and children. Few Christians ultimately found their way to slavery. This was not the first time that Saladin had shown that magnanimity for which he would soon be famous through East and West alike;
¹
but never before had he done so on

¹
Four years before, when he laid siege to the castle of Kerak during the wedding celebrations of its heir, Humphrey of Toron, to Princess Isabella of Jerusalem, he had carefully enquired which tower contained the bridal chamber and had given orders that it was to be left undisturbed.

such a scale. His restraint was the more remarkable in that he had not forgotten the dreadful story of 1099, when the conquering Franks had marked their entry into the city by slaughtering every Muslim within its walls and burning all the Jews alive in the main synagogue. The Christians, for their part, had not forgotten it either; and they could not fail to be struck by the contrast. Saladin might be their arch-enemy; but he had set them an example of chivalry which was to have an effect on the whole of the Third Crusade—an example which was to remain ever before them in the months to come.