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 12th 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 Baldwin de Bourcq, one of the leaders of the First Crusade. Baldwin was first Count of Edessa but was later elected King of Jerusalem to rule as
Baldwin II. When Baldwin de Bourcq became 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.
Read more about Agnes and other women in the Kingdom of Jerusalem at: Balian d'Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
My three-part biographical novel is dedicated to bringing Balian, his age and society "back to life."
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