On the morrow Richard called together the people of Feb. 20 the city and made peace among them.[861] Soon afterwards the meeting with Conrad at Casal Imbert took place, but without any practical result.[862] Next, Richard demanded repayment of the loan which he had made to the duke of Burgundy six months before. Hugh acquitted himself of the debt by assigning to the king the most valuable of Philip’s Saracen prisoners, who were still in Conrad’s custody at Tyre; but he made no sign of rejoining the Crusade. Such a state of affairs threatened ruin to the whole enterprise, and after long and anxious deliberation in his own mind Richard took private counsel with the “elders and wise men of the land” as to what had best be done. They gave their judgement that the marquis had forfeited his rights under the settlement of July 1191, and should be deprived of the revenues then assigned to him in the kingdom.[863]
It was doubtless to keep some sort of watch upon Conrad that Richard remained at Acre till the end of March.[864] During the latter part of his stay there he was again engaged in negotiations with Saladin. When a messenger arrived at Jerusalem with a request that Safadin might be sent to confer with the king, nothing was known there of the Crusaders’ advance to Ascalon; Richard was believed by the Sultan to have placed his troops in winter quarters at Joppa and gone back thence straight to Acre.[865] Saladin Feb.-Mar. bade his brother go by way of the Jordan valley and Mount Tabor, collect the troops of those parts in readiness for a renewal of hostilities, and then—as usual—go and hear Richard’s proposals, and if they were not acceptable, drag out negotiations till the whole Saracen army had had time 1192 to re-assemble. A note was given him containing the utmost concessions that Saladin was willing to make. They were these: an equal division of the land; the Cross to be given back; the Christians to have priests in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and pilgrims to have access to it, provided they went unarmed. “He was,” says Bohadin, “driven to offer these terms, by the general weariness of long-continued warfare, by a load of debt, and by the long absence of his followers from their homes; for there were many who never left him, and who dared not ask for leave.”[866]
March 20
Safadin set out on March 20. At Keisan he was met by Humphry of Toron with a message to this effect: “The division of the land is agreed upon already; but we must have the whole of the Holy City except the Temple of the Rock,” otherwise called the Mosque of Omar. This message Safadin transmitted to his brother, and the Sultan’s council—so Bohadin says—actually thought its terms near enough to their own to be “quite acceptable.” Safadin’s first messenger, however, was followed by another who March 27 reached Jerusalem on the 27th with tidings that Richard had gone back to Joppa.[867] If it be true that Richard knighted Safadin’s son on Palm Sunday, March 29, at Acre,[868] the announcement must have been slightly premature; but by the time that Safadin himself returned to Jerusalem, on April 1,[869] Richard was certainly back at Ascalon.[870]
The king was “much chafed and troubled in mind”; for Holy Week was begun, and he knew that Conrad and Hugh had been urging the French who were still at Ascalon to join them at Tyre, and that his promise of a safe-conduct to those who wished to depart at Easter for home would in all likelihood be immediately claimed by every one of them; and so it was, on Wednesday, April 1.[871] He gave them an escort,[872] and when they set out next day himself 1192 rode a little way with them, “weeping, and beseeching them to stay with him at his expense, and so keep together; but they would not.” Finding his efforts useless, he returned to Ascalon and sent off a messenger in haste to Acre bidding his officers in charge of that city not to admit the French within its walls.[873] This desertion of more than seven hundred of the finest chivalry of Christendom was a grievous loss to the host. Richard did what he could to comfort and encourage the faithful remnant by holding on Easter Day (April 5) a great court outside Ascalon; his tents were thrown open to all comers, and furnished with abundance of meat and drink and everything that could be procured to enhance April 6 the magnificence of the feast. Next day he set everybody to work again on the fortifications, taking upon himself the responsibility and the expense of completing the portions which the French had left unfinished.[874]
The season of the “latter rains” was now almost over, and both Christians and Saracens had to lay their plans for a new campaign. The former had already, while Richard was at Acre, profited by the improvement in the weather to make two brilliant raids, one on March 27 from Joppa across the plain to Mirabel, where they seem to have intercepted a rich caravan, for they slew thirty Turks and brought back fifty prisoners besides a number of cattle and booty said to have been worth two thousand eight hundred bezants; the other from Ascalon next day, when “all men who had horses” rode out by the southern road to capture a “prey” of which the scouts had told them; “and they did well this time, for those who were there reported that they went right into Egypt, four leagues beyond Darum, and they brought back great troops of horses, asses, camels, oxen, and sheep, besides near two hundred prisoners, men, women, and children.”[875] Saladin heard of it, and promptly despatched some troops to intercept the raiders on their way back, but they were too quick for him.[876] Saladin’s wisest policy 1192 clearly was to collect his forces and remain with them in his present position till he saw what his enemies would do. Richard as usual began by reconnoitring in person. His first attempt to ascertain the defences of Darum had been cut short by the necessity of bringing to the camp, or despatching in safety to their homes, the Christians towards whom he had acted the part of S. Leonard. On Easter Tuesday (April 7) he set out again in the same direction; that day he viewed Gaza, where also there seems to have been a Moslem garrison, and on the Wednesday went on April 8 and perambulated Darum to see on which side it could be most easily assaulted. Its garrison vainly hurled at him missiles which failed to reach their aim and insults in a tongue which he did not understand.[877]
A few days later[878] there came to Ascalon a messenger from England with tidings which filled the whole host with dismay. He brought letters from the justiciars beseeching the king to return at once, as John was trying, with a considerable prospect of success, to make himself master of the realm. Richard called the barons together and set forth the matter fully to them. He added that if he should be, as he feared, obliged to depart from Syria, he would leave three hundred knights and two thousand men-at-arms to continue serving there at his expense; and he asked his own followers to let him know who among them wished to go with him, and who wished to stay, for he would put no constraint upon any man. The barons, after holding a consultation among themselves, came back and told him frankly that unless he appointed as lord over the land someone who had a knowledge of war, and to whom all, no matter whence they came, could adhere, every one of them would leave the country and set out for home. Richard at once asked them which they would have of the only two possible kings—Guy or Conrad. “And all of them, great and small, knelt down before him and prayed that he would make the marquis their lord, for this was the most helpful and useful thing for the realm.” Some of them had hitherto been 1192 bitter against the marquis, and these Richard upbraided for their sudden change of front; but when fully assured all were now unanimous in their choice he gave it his assent, and ordered that an honourable escort should go to fetch the king-elect and the French, and thus all should be reunited.[879]
As head of the royal house of Jerusalem, guardian of the realm, and commander-in-chief of the crusading host, Richard would not have been justified in withholding his assent from the course of action thus unanimously recommended by both the native and the western Crusaders. Their decision was probably the wisest possible under the circumstances. Although Conrad had done more than any other man (except possibly Philip Augustus) to sow dissension among the Christian forces, he was nevertheless the leader who, when Richard was gone, would divide them the least; for when once he was acknowledged as their chief, it would be his own interest to keep them together and to further the object of their enterprise to the utmost of his power; he was, unquestionably, by far the most capable and energetic, next to Richard, of all the princes of the Crusade; and his so-called wife and their infant daughter were the sole surviving representatives of the royal house of Jerusalem. The crowned king, Guy, had no following of his own, and it seems quite clear that he had, tacitly at least, resigned all claim to authority in the realm as well as in the host; so that no disloyalty to him was involved in Richard’s assent to the election of a new sovereign. Count Henry of Champagne and three other envoys of rank carried the great news to Tyre; Conrad and all the folk there were delighted, and began to prepare for immediate return to the host at Ascalon.[880] But before any of them had set out, the situation was suddenly changed again; on April 28 the marquis was assassinated.[881] The murderers were caught red-handed, and, of course, promptly put to death. At Saladin’s court they 1192 were reported to have declared that they had been hired by Richard to commit the crime.[882] Saladin, with whom Conrad had been in negotiation for several weeks past, had at the time an agent in Tyre from whom this report was derived;[883] and if it did not actually originate with Conrad’s friends and allies at Tyre, its circulation among Richard’s enemies and rivals and its transmission to Europe were certainly encouraged by them.[884] A few years later, however, one Moslem historian gave a very different account of the matter: Ibn Alathyr says the men were hired by Saladin to kill Richard if they could, or, failing him, Conrad, and that they chose the latter alternative as the easier of the two.[885] This story is probably worthless except as an illustration of the importance of both king and marquis in Saracen eyes. The best confutation of the other tale lies in the simple fact that Conrad’s death could not be of the slightest profit to Richard, but, on the contrary, upset all his plans for his own return to Europe. The Norman pilgrim-poet of the Crusade tells us that the men who stabbed Conrad were “Assassins” not only in the modern conventional sense of the word, but also in its original and etymological sense; by their own confession, they were Hashashîn, that is, followers of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” and acted under his orders.[886] This is confirmed by two of our best English authorities,[887] and by the French historians who lived and wrote in the Holy Land; one of the earliest of these latter says that “some people” reported the murderers to have been hired by Richard, “but,” he adds, “this was not a bit true”;[888] while another states that the deed was done to avenge certain other Ismaïlites whom the marquis had caused to be first robbed and then drowned.[889] 1192 This story is at any rate more intrinsically probable than either Ibn Alathyr’s or that which was accepted at Saladin’s court and sent to Europe by Conrad’s friends; indeed, the relations between these latter and Richard during the rest of their stay in the Holy Land seem hardly compatible with a real belief on their part in Richard’s guilt.
There were now some ten thousand Frenchmen, under Hugh of Burgundy and other barons, lodging in tents outside Tyre. As soon as Conrad was buried these barons called upon Isabel to surrender the city to them to hold in trust for the king of France. She boldly answered that “when the king returned, she would willingly surrender it to him, unless before that time it had another lord.”[890] The 1192 closing words of this answer were a scarcely veiled announcement of her resolve to assert her independence as queen by right of inheritance and bring in a new claimant to the lordship of the land by taking another consort; and it is scarcely possible to avoid a suspicion that she had already made her choice. Count Henry had gone back from Tyre as far as Acre;[891] there he received the news of Conrad’s death. He at once returned to Tyre; “and when the people saw him, they straightway elected him as sent by God to be their ruler and lord, and prayed him to accept the crown and wed its heiress, the widow of the marquis.” He answered that he must first ascertain how his uncle King Richard would regard the project. When Richard heard the whole of the strange story, he brooded over it for a long while; at last he said to Henry’s messengers: “Sirs, I should greatly wish that my nephew might be king, if it please God, when the land shall be conquered; but not that he wed the marchioness, whom the marquis took from her rightful lord and lived with in such wise that if Count Henry trusts my counsel he will not take her in marriage. But let him accept the kingship, and I will give him in demesne Acre and its port-dues, Tyre, Joppa, and jurisdiction over all the conquered land. And then tell him to come back to the host and bring the Frenchmen with him, as quickly as he can, for I want to go and take Darum—if the Turks dare wait there for me!”[892]