Far to the west, in 1159, Emperor Manuel rode through the streets of Antioch with its prince Reynald and King Baldwin III of Jerusalem walking behind him. Manuel negotiated marriages to celebrate Roman resurgence – his own to Maria of Antioch, his niece Theodora to Bohemond III, and his great-niece to Amaury of Jerusalem. In 1169, Manuel and King Amaury attacked Egypt, an ill-coordinated plan that failed to take the rich port of Damietta and had lethal blowback. They so weakened the Cairene regime that, after the death of Caliph al-Adid, his vizier, a talented Kurdish amir named Saladin, terminated the Fatimiyya caliphate and united Egypt and Syria into a single Sunni sultanate, a strategic nightmare for the wilting kingdom of Jerusalem, which was now surrounded.
Nor was this the only catastrophe looming for Christendom. In 1172, to the west, a new Berber dynasty had destroyed the Murabits, conquered north Africa all the way to Libya and then crossed to Europe to take much of Spain.*
Saladin was fortunate that Manuel the Great was overstretched. In 1176, the emperor, by now fifty-eight, was ambushed by the Seljuk sultan of Rum, a setback that exposed the fragility of Outremer. Jerusalem and the Christian states were crippled by a shortage of manpower. The original Franks had intermarried with eastern Christians and Armenians but also with Arabs: their mixed-race children, mocked by westerners as
In July 1187, at Hattin, Saladin surrounded and routed a feckless, underqualified king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, beheading the ex-prince of Antioch, Reynald, the 200 crack Templars and all the mixed-race turcopoles, who were especially despised. Then on 2 October he took the Holy City for Islam, showing remarkable mercy in contrast to the butchery of the Crusaders eighty-eight years earlier.
Christendom was shocked. In Ethiopia, King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela built a complex of rock-cut churches to create an African Jerusalem. In Europe, three impressive monarchs – Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Richard the Lionheart of England and Aquitaine and Philippe Auguste of France – raised armies. The failure of the Crusades unleashed anti-Jewish attacks: in York the entire community was burned alive as the kings set off for the east. Barbarossa died on the way, drowning in a river.* The other royal divas bickered with one another, but at Acre fought Saladin to a stalemate: Acre survived as capital of a rump Outremer, of which it was the main port; Saladin ruled from Egypt to Iraq; and Jerusalem remained under Islamic rule until 1917.
The eclipse of Manuel and the fall of Jerusalem benefited a remarkable queen, Tamara of Georgia. The southern Caucasus was a natural buffer between empires: there the ancient kingdoms of Georgia and Armenia, the first to convert to Christianity, nonetheless oscillated between Arab and Roman alliances.*
In 1178, the eighteen-year-old Tamara was crowned co-ruler alongside her embattled father Giorgi III, who married his other daughter Rusudan to a Komnenos prince. In the Latin west, most women in power were swiftly deposed by magnates, but influenced by the Constantinopolitan tradition of empresses, Tamara at least had a template. Queen at twenty-four on the death of her father, Tamara manoeuvred carefully to appease rebellious potentates who resented feminine power, but in 1185 she was forced to marry a Russian prince descended from Rurik, Yuri of Vladimir-Suzdal. The heyday of Rus was long gone. The Rurikovichi feuded constantly as they struggled to rule the most powerful principalities. Yuri got lucky, becoming king of Georgia, but Tamara was king of kings. She loathed the oafish Yuri, who, ‘when drunk, showed his Scythian habits; utterly debauched and depraved, he even embraced sodomitic behavour’. In 1187, she accused him of unnatural vices, divorced him and exiled him to Constantinople.
Liberated from the patriarchy of clergymen and barons, she now married – unusually, for love – her attractive, intelligent cousin David Soslam, an Ossetian prince whom she had known all her life. Faced with Islamic resurgence, she formed an alliance with Saladin, then unleashed her husband David against the Turkic rulers of eastern Türkiye and western Iran. When she was challenged by a Seljuk prince, she told him, ‘You rely on gold and numerous warriors, I on God’s power.’ Her coins, in Arabic and Georgian, just read: ‘Champion of the Messiah’.*
