Writing Biographical Fiction: Agnes de Courtenay

 

Agnes de Courtenay was the power behind Baldwin IV’s throne and she was a viperous enemy of my leading female character, Maria Comnena. Because of both these roles in history, I had to cede her a place in my novels. Furthermore, despite an attempt by historian Bernard Hamilton to rehabilitate her, the commentary of contemporaries and indeed the naked record of her actions condemn Agnes as a singularly stupid woman whose influence on her son was almost entirely negative. Something which, admittedly, fit in with her being the arch-enemy of Maria and so a prime candidate for a negative character in my novels. All novels need some negative characters after all….

So who was Agnes de Courtenay?

Agnes was the daughter of Joceyln II, Count of Edessa, who lost his county to the Saracens, in large part due to neglect and poor leadership. 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.  As a result, Agnes de Courtenay did not have 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. In just six years, her family had fallen from one of the richest and most powerful in the crusader states, to the status “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 probably no more than 10 or 12 years old, as she would have had to be at least 8 at her marriage to Reynald.

According to historian Malcolm Barber, she was next betrothed to Hugh d’Ibelin (Balian’s oldest brother), but instead married Prince (later King) Amalric of Jerusalem. Whether she did this voluntarily is not recorded. She might have been seduced or abducted, but 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.  While historians can leave unanswered the question of her feelings, a novelist cannot. Agnes’ feelings toward Hugh d’Ibelin are critical to the character Agnes in any novel about the Ibelins.

The (historical) plot thickens, however, when at the death of Baldwin III, who was childless, the High Court of Jerusalem refused to acknowledge his next of kin, Baldwin’s younger brother 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 rather about the character of his wife. Regardless of their reasons, such action could only have infuriated and enraged Agnes herself. Rather than becoming Queen, she was repudiated and sent back to her former betrothed (or husband) Hugh d’Ibelin. 

While historians don’t particularly need to figure out why Agnes was so despised by the High Court (the fact that she was is enough), for a novelist there is a gold mine here. It appears that Agnes was considered a ‘bad woman.’ Some historians have suggested that meant nothing more than that she was a Courtenay and expected to favor her family, but that was quite normal in the Middle Ages and hardly seems to justify such an unyielding stance on the part of the High Court. To the novelist, the insinuations that she was a woman of “easy virtue” ― alleged to have had affairs with a bishop (the later Patriarch Heraclius) and with Aimery de Lusignan is far more intriguing―even if not proved.

Likewise, while Agnes’ feelings do not much interest historians, they are hugely important to a novelist. How would a woman, who undoubtedly felt she ought to be queen, feel about the man she is forced to (re)marry to after losing a crown? It hardly seems likely that she was fond of Hugh under the circumstances, and the fact that the marriage was childless suggests it may have been no more than nominal. Certainly she was credited with hating the woman who took her place in Amalric's bed and became -- what she could not be -- his queen: the Byzantine princess Maria Comnena. Maria was latter wife of Balian d’Ibelin. 

But before that happened, Agnes had a stroke of luck. In 1176 Baldwin IV took the reins of government for himself and he invited his  mother to his court. Within a few short years, Agnes 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, Jocelyn 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 3) 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.

Her next acts of influence, however, were little short of calamitous: she arranged the marriage of her son’s two sisters (and heirs), Sibylla and Isabella, 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. Toron 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 historian Bernard 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 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. The dying King Baldwin IV 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 after 1183. 

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. But by then she was already dead.

As a novelist, I had no particular need to alter any of these facts or to engage in any form of revisionism with respect to Agnes. On the other hand, writing about history through the eyes of the Ibelins presented me with a problem usually overlooked by historians and novelists focused on the history of the kingdom. Namely: Agnes was Balian d’Ibelin's sister-in-law. She must have known both he and his brother very well, and their hostility to her (and vice versa) may have had more personal than political reasons. 

Historians tend to simply dismiss Ibelin hostility to Agnes as “ambition” from a “notoriously” ambitious family. But Balian and his brother belong only to the second generation of Ibelins, and they didn’t yet have a track record of being particularly ambitious or successful for that matter. Indeed, the Ibelins were hardly any different from any of the baronial families at this point. 

Alternatively, historians and novelists point to Agnes’ “natural” hatred of Maria Comnena, who had replaced her in her first husband’s bed and been crowned queen in her place. Certainly, this may have been the root cause of the hostility between Agnes and Maria, and through Maria to Balian and Baldwin d’Ibelin. But the tension might also have been older and deeper. It might have gone back to Agnes’ abandonment of Hugh d’Ibelin when he was in Saracen captivity just so she could marry the Prince of Jerusalem. This is the thesis I chose to expound upon in my novels as it is both logical and adds dimensions to the characters and their relationships.

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Writing Biographical Fiction: Maria Comnena

Maria Comnena, the wife of my central character Balian d’Ibelin, has an almost universally bad press. The Itinerarium characterizes her as “godless” and “fraudulent” and one of the most respected modern historians, Bernard Hamilton, describes her as “ruthless and scheming.” In literature, she is invariably cast as ― at best ― an unpleasant intriguer (e.g. Sharon Kay Penman in “Lionheart”) and ― at worst ― an evil witch (e.g. Hana Norton in “The Serpent’s Crown”) Yet, her marriage of Balian was almost certainly a love match on her part (if nothing else because no one, not even the king, could have forced a Byzantine princess and dowager queen of Jerusalem to marry against her will, nor was it the custom of the kingdom to do so). Furthermore, Balian’s devotion to her was demonstrated dramatically by his efforts to rescue her from Jerusalem even if it meant begging a favor of his worst enemy.  Why would Balian have been so devoted to a bitch (not to say witch)?

So my dilemma as a novelist was to try to first identify and understand why Maria was described in such negative terms by contemporaries and then decide if the characteristics that offended 13^th century clerics were truly offensive. And secondly, as with Balian, I had to go beyond what was written about her and try to find evidence of what she did that would give me insight into the kind of woman she really was.

After doing my research, it became clear that Maria’s negative image in contemporary and modern sources can be traced back to a single incident: she pressured her daughter Isabella into assenting to the annulment of her first marriage in order to enable a second marriage to Conrad de Montferrat. Because this second marriage was against the interests of the English king, his supporters heap insults on Maria (and incidentally Balian as well). Because Isabella’s divorce from her first husband also paved the way for her marriage to Henry of Champagne, and her daughters by Champagne laid claim to their father’s county several decades later. French chronicles (beholden to the local claimants to Champagne) were frantic in their efforts to defend their patrons ― even if it meant slandering a dead woman on the other side of the world. In short, the primary sources that heap abuse on Maria Comnena are biased against her and anything but credible. Furthermore, aside from this one instance of pressuring her daughter to do what was good for the kingdom, neither medieval nor modern historians bring forth a single other example of her “scheming,” “deviousness” or “treachery.” 

As for saying she was “steeped in Greek filth from the cradle,” this may have resonated well with Latin clerics after the sack of Constantinople by Western mercenaries (aka the 4^th Crusade), but it should not be used by modern historians (or novelists) as evidence of anything derogatory about Maria Comnena. On the contrary, what this actually tells us is that Maria Comnena was educated and raised at the most civilized city in the contemporary world: the imperial court in Constantinople. It means, objectively, that she enjoyed the high levels of education traditionally accorded the daughters of the Imperial family. She would have learned to read and write in Greek, Latin and French. Her great uncle was one of the most important patrons of the arts, responsible for a veritable artistic revival throughout the Eastern Roman Empire, and Maria personally is credited with inviting Byzantine artists to the Kingdom of Jerusalem to carry out a renovation of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem ― work whose quality we admire to this day.

Looking beyond the facile descriptions of Maria Comnena written by sources with an interest in discrediting her to her actions, I began to obtain a very different picture. As I note above, she was highly educated, and raised amidst not only splendor and elegance but at the vortex of power politics surrounding the most powerful monarch on earth at the time. Had she been destined for a nunnery, she might have remained apolitical or naïve, but instead she was selected for the diplomatically vital role of marriage to a foreign king at the age of about 13. (We don’t know the date of her birth, so her age is not certain, but her aunt Theodora was sent to the court of Jerusalem to marry Baldwin III when she was this age, so it is reasonable to assume Maria was roughly the same age when she was sent to Jerusalem.) 

Once she was Queen of Jerusalem she distinguished herself as a patron of the arts, but she also accompanied her husband on his trip to Constantinople. Conceivably, she was even behind this trip and may have at least been a factor inducing him to seek closer ties to the Eastern Roman Empire. If so, it was a very wise policy that offered the crusader kingdom the best form of defense against resurgent Islamic aggression. Her political astuteness ― or at least her presumed understanding of politics in Constantinople ― is confirmed by the fact that the Count of Flanders sought her political advice in 1177 when a joint military campaign with Constantinople was undertaken.

Maria Comnena’s second marriage is nothing less than a refutation of all allegations of being “power hungry.” A woman concerned with power and influence does not marry the landless younger son of a minor baron. Balian was so far beneath Maria in rank that the marriage would have been an insult and humiliation, and no one ― certainly not her teenage step-son, nor his unpopular mother ― could have forced Maria Comnena into it against her will. The precedent had been set in the Kingdom of Jerusalem (at the latest by Constance of Antioch, who defied a far more powerful monarch than the Leper King), that widows, even reigning widows whose choice of husband was far more political than for dowagers, married men of their own choosing. Maria Comnena, however, was doubly secure against any attempts to marry her against her wishes because she had the protection of Constantinople. Had a mere King of Jerusalem attempted to humiliate a daughter of the Imperial family with an unworthy marriage, the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire would have been compelled to defend his honor. The increasingly debilitated Baldwin IV would not afford and had no desire to provoke the wrath of Constantinople. Maria Comnena married Balian d’Ibelin because she wanted to. Period. 

As Balian’s wife, she stepped down from center stage and (unlike the “ruthless” and “scheming” woman of legend), engaged in no recorded act of political interference. Indeed, she does not appear in the historical record again until Saladin sends his bodyguard to Jerusalem to remove her from danger before he began his assault. We do, however, hear of her dower barony of Nablus being attacked by a Saracen army in 1184. Since the army of Jerusalem was at this time gathered to relieve the Castle of Kerak, Balian could not have commanded the defense. All Christians in the city found refuge in the citadel and there were no casualties, something found worthy of positive commentary. The name the commander is not recorded, but the defense was most likely commanded by Maria Comnena herself. It was her city and women in the Holy Land of this period usually commanded the garrisons in their husband’s absence.

Maria’s next appearance in history is when she tells her daughter Isabella that unless she divorces Humphrey of Toron she can have “neither honor nor her father’s inheritance” ― i.e. the crown of Jerusalem. Here Maria is acting very much as a daughter of her house but also in the interests of her adopted country to secure the crown for a military competent king who enjoys the backing of the High Court of Jerusalem.

After this one act, although Maria’s daughter was Queen of Jerusalem from 1192 to 1205, there is not a single instance of her “interfering” in the affairs of the Kingdom.  Again this is very odd behavior for an allegedly unscrupulous, devious and power-hungry woman.   

In short, not a single fact supports the allegations against her. 

Once I’d established the facts to my satisfaction, my objective as a novelist was to erase the slander obscuring our understanding of the historical Maria Comnena and to portray her as a woman who did her duty to her own family with her first marriage and followed her heart with her second. My Maria is thus highly educated, sophisticated and politically astute (as a daughter of the Byzantine court), but not in the least power-hungry, scheming or faithless. This is a woman who marries for love at 23 and thereafter devotes herself to the welfare of her family. This includes ensuring that her eldest child inherits the crown to which she is entitled (by extricating herself from an illegal and disadvantageous marriage), but does not entail trying to exercise undue influence over her daughter once she is queen. The Maria Comnena of my novels is competent, practical and financially savvy, but she has no need to be greedy, grasping or vindictive because she is supremely secure in herself and her love.

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