AFTERWORD

I am not going to include the star players here; the fates of the Angevins are already well-known to us and will be covered in my usual obsessive-compulsive detail in A King’s Ransom. So I am focusing upon the historical figures who are not as familiar, some of whom might not even surface if Googled.

Philippe Capet will have a major role in A King’s Ransom. His sad sister, Alys, was finally returned to France in 1195, and Philippe immediately married her to the teenage Count of Ponthieu. Alys was then thirty-five, but she was able to conceive, giving birth to a daughter. Philippe’s youngest sister, Agnes, known as Anna after her marriage to the Byzantine Emperor’s son, lived for the rest of her life in Constantinople, taking Theodore Branas, a Byzantine general, as her lover and then her husband. She had a daughter, but after that, she disappears from the written record.

The Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich von Hohenstaufen, his consort, Constance de Hauteville, and Leopold von Babenberg, the Duke of Austria, will be appearing again in A King’s Ransom.

Tancred reigned as King of Sicily for only four years. He struggled valiantly to stave off the threat posed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Heinrich, but his fledgling dynasty was doomed after the sudden death of his eldest son, Roger, in December of 1193. Tancred himself died in February of 1194, leaving as his heir a four-year-old son. His widow, Sybilla, was forced to yield to Heinrich, who was crowned as King of Sicily at Christmas. Soon thereafter, he conveniently claimed to have discovered a conspiracy and brutally executed a number of Sicilian lords. Sybilla and her children were sent to Germany, where she and her daughters were confined to a convent for years; they eventually managed to escape to France. Her little son was taken to a German monastery and was never seen alive again. There are several accounts of his tragic fate; the most credible says that Heinrich had him blinded and castrated, and he died in 1198.

Isaac Comnenus was held at the Hospitaller stronghold of Margat until 1194. Upon regaining his freedom, he began to intrigue against the Byzantine Emperor, Isaac II. He died circa 1196, said to have been poisoned. His second wife, Sophia, returned to Sicily in 1192, but nothing more is known of her after that. Anna, the Damsel of Cyprus, accompanied Joanna and Berengaria back to Richard’s domains; her subsequent history will be related in A King’s Ransom. Neither Sophia’s nor Anna’s names were recorded by the chroniclers. W. H. Rudt de Collenberg, the author of “L’empereur Isaac de Chypre et sa fille, 1155–1207,” an invaluable scholarly article about Isaac and Cyprus, speculated that his daughter may have been called Beatrice, for a Beatrice received a generous bequest in Joanna’s will, and several of the Damsel’s maternal ancestors bore this name. But two of Joanna’s ladies took the veil at Fontevrault Abbey after her death, and one of them was Beatrice, which refutes his theory. So I had to choose names of my own for Isaac’s wife and daughter.

Salah al-Dīn’s health continued to deteriorate and he died of a fever on March 3, 1193; Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Shaddād reported that he’d given so much to the poor that there was no money to pay for his funeral. His sons fought over the succession, and in January 1200 his able brother, Malik al-’Ādil, was proclaimed the Sultan of Egypt. He had a successful reign and was succeeded by his son in 1218.

Guy de Lusignan did not govern Cyprus for long, dying in 1194. His brother Amaury managed to get the Emperor Heinrich to recognize him as King of Cyprus, a title Guy had not claimed, and the de Lusignan dynasty ruled the island kingdom for over three hundred years. Humphrey de Toron did not remarry; he apparently died soon after following Guy to Cyprus. I hope to deal with Balian d’Ibelin’s story at a later date.

Henri and Isabella had five happy years together before he was killed in a bizarre fall from a palace window at Acre in September 1197. Isabella was then wed to Amaury de Lusignan, Guy’s brother, now King of Cyprus. Isabella died in April 1205 at the age of thirty-three, having been widowed three times and divorced once. She and Henri had three daughters; one of them, Alice, would later marry a son of Amaury by his first wife and become Queen of Cyprus. Isabella’s daughter by Conrad, Maria of Montferrat, ruled as Queen of Jerusalem until her death following childbirth at age twenty.

The Third Crusade was considered a failure in Richard’s time because they’d been unable to recapture Jerusalem; Richard himself saw it that way, too. Ironically, successive crusaders adopted the military strategy he had wanted to pursue—assaulting Egypt. Richard did succeed in gaining the kingdom another hundred years of existence, until the fall of Acre in 1291.