Conrad of Montferrat ( – 28 April 1192) was an Italian nobleman, one of the major participants in the Third Crusade. He was the de facto King of Jerusalem (as Conrad I) by virtue of his marriage to Isabella I of Jerusalem from 24 November 1190, but officially elected only in 1192, days before his death. He was also the eighth Marquess of Montferrat from 1191.Setton, Kenneth M., Wolff, Robert Lee; Hazard, Harry W., eds. (1969). A History of the Crusades, Volume II: The Later Crusades, 1189–1311 (Second ed.). Madison, Milwaukee, and London: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 66–116, passim
Conrad was the second son of William V of Montferrat and Judith of Babenberg. In his early career, he established himself as a skilled diplomat and general in the Byzantine Empire. After fighting on their behalf against Frederick Barbarossa, Conrad was awarded the title of Caesar by Isaac II Angelos. However, having previously sworn to take the cross, he left for the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187 shortly after the Battle of Hattin.
Upon his arrival in Tyre, Conrad organized the city's defenses and successfully repelled Saladin's forces. When Guy of Lusignan, the king of Jerusalem by right of his wife Queen Sibylla, was released from captivity in 1189, Conrad refused to allow him to enter the city. He was convinced to join Guy at the Siege of Acre later that year.
When Sibylla died of disease in 1190, Guy no longer had a claim to the throne, whose heiress was Sibylla's half-sister Isabella. The nobility consequently forced Isabella to annul her marriage to Humphrey IV of Toron so that she could marry Conrad instead. The succession of the kingdom would finally be settled in 1192, when Conrad was formally elected king. Just days later, however, Conrad would be killed by the Order of Assassins.
Early life
Conrad was born in around 1146 in Montferrat, which was a margraviate of the Kingdom of Italy in the Holy Roman Empire at the time; it is now a region of Piedmont in northwest Italy. He was the second son of Marquess William V of Montferrat, "the Elder", a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. His mother, Judith of Babenberg, was the daughter of the margrave of Austria, Leopold III. Conrad was the first cousin of both Frederick Barbarossa and King Louis VII of France through his grandmothers, Agnes of Waiblingen and Gisela of Burgundy.
Little is known about Conrad's early life. He is first mentioned in a charter in 22 September 1160, when serving at the court of his maternal uncle, Conrad of Babenberg, Bishop of Passau, who he may have been named after. Negotiations were made from 1166 to 1168 to marry one of William V's sons to one of Henry II of England's daughters, but it is unknown if this was in reference to Conrad. In 1172, Conrad appeared alongside Frederick Barbarossa; his family supported Emperor Frederick in his conflict with the Lombard League. When the Lombard League defeated Frederick on 29 May 1176 at the Battle of Legnano, Conrad took part in the peace negotiations alongside Christian of Mainz, a diplomat of the emperor.
Conrad's relationship with Christian went south in 1178, when Christian besieged the city of Viterbo to force its submission to Pope Alexander III; when the city submitted, Conrad led a revolt against him. In September of 1179, Conrad successfully captured Christian as a hostage, keeping him imprisoned for fifteen months.
He was active in diplomacy from his twenties, and became an effective military commander, campaigning alongside other members of his family in the struggles with the Lombard League. He first married an unidentified lady before 1179, but she was dead by the end of 1186, without leaving any surviving issue.
Byzantine Empire In 1179, following the family's alliance with Manuel I Comnenos, Conrad led an army against Frederick Barbarossa's forces, then commanded by the imperial Chancellor, Archbishop Christian of Mainz. He defeated them at Camerino in September, taking the Chancellor hostage. (He had previously been a hostage of the Chancellor.) He left the captive in his brother Boniface's care and went to Constantinople to be rewarded by the Emperor,Roger of Howden, Chronicle year 1179; Choniates, ed. van Dieten, Historia, vol. 1, p. 201, and ed. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium, p. 114. returning to Italy shortly after Manuel's death in 1180. Now in his mid-thirties, his personality and good looks made a striking impression at the Byzantine court: Niketas Choniates describes him as "of beautiful appearance, comely in life's springtime, exceptional and peerless in manly courage and intelligence, and in the flower of his body's strength".Choniates, loc. cit.
In the winter of 1186–1187, Isaac II Angelus offered his sister, Theodora, as a bride to Conrad's younger brother Boniface, to renew the Byzantine alliance with Montferrat, but Boniface was married. Conrad, recently widowed, had taken the cross, intending to join his father in the Kingdom of Jerusalem; instead, he accepted Isaac's offer and returned to Constantinople in the spring of 1187. On his marriage, he was awarded the rank of Caesar. However, almost immediately, he had to help the Emperor defend his throne against a revolt, led by General Alexios Vranas. According to Choniates, Conrad inspired the weak Emperor to take the initiative. He fought without a shield or helmet and wore a linen cuirass instead of mail in the battle in which Vranas was killed. He was slightly wounded in the shoulder, but unhorsed Vranas, who was then killed and beheaded by his bodyguards.Choniates, ed. van Dieten, Historia, vol. 1, pp. 386–87, and ed. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium, pp. 212–13.
However, feeling that his service had been insufficiently rewarded, wary of Byzantine anti-Latin sentiment (his youngest brother, Caesar "of Thessalonica" Renier, had been murdered in 1182) and of possible vengeance-seeking by Vranas's family, Conrad set off for the Kingdom of Jerusalem in July 1187 aboard a Genoese merchantman. Some popular modern histories have claimed that he was fleeing vengeance after committing a private murder: this is due to a failure to recognise Vranas's name, garbled into "Lyvernas" in the Old French Continuation of William of Tyre and Roger of Howden's abridgement of his own Gesta regis Henrici Secundi (formerly attributed to Benedict of Peterborough). Roger had initially referred to Conrad as "having slain a prominent nobleman in a rebellion"—meaning Vranas; in his Chronica, he condensed this to "having committed homicide", omitting the context.
Defense of Tyre
Conrad evidently intended to join his father, who held the castle of St Elias. He arrived first off Acre, which had recently fallen to Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb), and so sailed north to Tyre,Malcolm Barber, The Two Cities: Medieval Europe 1050–1320, 2nd edition, (Routledge, 2004), 125. where he found the remnants of the Crusader army. After his victory at the Battle of Hattin over the army of Jerusalem, Saladin was on the march north, and had already captured Acre, Sidon, and Beirut. Raymond III of Tripoli and his stepsons, Reginald of Sidon and several other leading nobles who had escaped the battle had fled to Tyre, but most were anxious to return to their own territories to defend them. Raymond of Tripoli was in failing health, and died soon after he went home.
According to the Old French Continuation of William of Tyre, Reginald of Sidon had taken charge in Tyre and was in the process of negotiating its surrender with Saladin. Conrad allegedly threw Saladin's banners into the ditch and made the Tyrians swear total loyalty to him. His rise to power seems to have been less dramatic in reality. Reginald went to refortify his own castle of Belfort on the Litani River. With the support of the established Italian merchant communities in the city, Conrad re-organised the defence of Tyre, setting up a commune, similar to those he had so often fought against in Italy.
When Saladin's army arrived they found the city well-defended and defiant. As the chronicler Ibn al-Athir wrote of the man the Arabs came to respect and fear as al-Markis: "He was a devil incarnate in his ability to govern and defend a town, and a man of extraordinary courage". Tyre successfully withstood the siege, and desiring a more profitable conquest, Saladin's army moved on south to Caesarea, Arsuf, and Jaffa. Meanwhile, Conrad sent Joscius, Archbishop of Tyre, to the West in a black-sailed ship, bearing appeals for aid. Arabic writers claimed that he also carried propaganda pictures to use in his preaching, including one of the horses of Saladin's army stabled (and urinating) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and another of a Saracen slapping Christ's face.
In November 1187, Saladin returned for a second siege of Tyre. Conrad was still in command of the city, which was now heavily fortified and filled with Christian refugees from across the north of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This time Saladin opted for a combined ground and naval assault, setting up a blockade of the harbour. In an incident described by the Itinerarium Peregrinorum (which is generally hostile to Conrad), the Old French Continuation and Sicardus of Cremona's second chronicle (now known through quotations by Salimbene di Adam and Alberto Millioli), Saladin presented Conrad's aged father, William V of Montferrat, who had been captured at Hattin, before the walls of the city. He offered to release William and bestow great gifts upon Conrad if he surrendered Tyre. The old man told his son to stand firm, even when the Egyptians threatened to kill him. Conrad declared that William had lived a long life already, and aimed at him with a crossbow himself.The Last Merovingian Saladin allegedly said, "This man is an unbeliever and very cruel". But he had succeeded in calling Saladin's bluff: the old Marquis William was released, unharmed, at Tortosa in 1188, and returned to his son.
On 30 December, Conrad's forces launched a dawn raid on the weary Egyptian sailors, capturing many of their galleys. The remaining Egyptian ships tried to escape to Beirut, but the Tyrian ships gave chase, and the Egyptians were forced to beach their ships and flee. Saladin then launched an assault on the landward walls, thinking that the defenders were still distracted by the sea battle. However, Conrad led his men in a charge out of the gates and broke the enemy: Hugh of Tiberias distinguished himself in the battle. Saladin was forced to pull back yet again, burning his siege engines and ships to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.
Struggle for the crown
In the summer of 1188, Saladin released king Guy of Lusignan, the husband of Queen Sibylla, from captivity. A year later, in 1189, Guy, accompanied by his brother Geoffrey, appeared at Tyre and demanded that Conrad hand over the keys to the city to him. Conrad refused this demand and declared that Guy had forfeited his rights to be king of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. He said that he was holding the city until the arrival of the kings from Europe. By this, he was invoking the terms of Baldwin IV's will, terms already broken by Guy and Sibylla: in the event of the death of his nephew Baldwin V of Jerusalem it had been Baldwin's will that Baldwin V's "most rightful heirs" were to hold the regency until the succession could be settled by Henry II of England, Philip II of France, and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. Conrad would not allow Guy and Sibylla to enter the city but did allow them to camp outside Tyre's walls with their retainers.
Conrad was persuaded by his cousin-once-removed, Louis III, Landgrave of Thuringia, to join Guy in the Siege of Acre in 1189. The siege lasted for over two years. In the summer of 1190, Conrad travelled north to Antioch to lead another young kinsman, Frederick of Swabia, safely back to Acre with the remnants of his cousin Frederick Barbarossa's imperial army.