John’s answer was drowned out by a shout from the bows. Land was in sight. They had almost made it home.
They scuttled into the harbor of Kyrenia as the last light of day was squeezed out by the rain that came thundering down on decks, sea, and quay. In fact, they were flung violently against the quay, as the following seas broke against the stonework. Within minutes everyone, including the Ibelins, were completely drenched and fled to the castle. By nightfall, the rain had indeed turned to sleet, and howled around the walls of the castle so furiously that the shutters rattled and the smoke was forced back down the chimneys. It was a dreadful night even for the highborn, much less the poor, but Lord Aimery had brought his wife and children safely home.
† Greek: Κώρυκος; Latin Chronicles: Gorhigos
Chapter Twenty
A Crown for Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus,
May 1196
THE ARCHBISHOPS OF TRANI AND BRINDISI had been appropriately wined and dined, loaded with gifts, and bathed in praise. Now, at last, they had withdrawn to get a good night’s sleep before continuing their journey via Limassol to Acre. There they were to prepare the way for the Holy Roman Emperor, who had announced his intention to lead an army to the Holy Land this year. Aimery had arranged for Barlais and Cheneché to escort his bishops as far as Limassol, and had no need to see them again before their departure. Eschiva, who had risen from her sickbed to gallantly play the role of consort with the grace and dignity innate to her, had retired exhausted. Aimery assured her he would come shortly, but first he needed to be alone, and so he dismissed his squires.
King Aimery—Aimericus Rex.
Aimery stared at the crown and scepter in awe. Having accepted his homage in proxy, Henry VI Hohenstaufen had entrusted the regalia of monarchy to the worthy Archbishops of Trani and Brindisi and tasked them with delivering crown and scepter to Aimery de Lusignan. The Emperor had also sent the message that he expected his “subject state of Cyprus” to welcome, provision, and support him with men, horses, arms, and supplies in his coming expedition to retake Jerusalem. It was to further this great cause that the Emperor had seen fit to accept the “submission” of Cyprus to his rule and had raised Aimery up from “lord” to “king.”
The Emperor added the admonishment that Aimery must reconcile with the King of Jerusalem, the Archbishops had intoned. The kings of two Christian countries on the forefront of the struggle against the Antichrist, they lectured pompously, could not be enemies. As for the coronation itself, the Archbishops suggested that could best take place when the Emperor himself came to Outremer and could personally place the crown on Aimery’s head.
Aimery had no objection. He could certainly wait a few months for the formal ceremony. The point was that both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor had accepted the principle that Cyprus should be a kingdom. The writs were signed and sealed. Jubail had done homage in Aimery’s name. The crown and scepter lay before him. He would date his reign from this day: May 18, 1196.
Aimery took the crown and held it between his two hands. It was composed of a solid-gold base and large panels of gold, each encrusted with large stones: sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and opals. It was a “closed” crown after the Eastern fashion: two bands of gold, each nearly an inch wide, curved up from the sides to meet over the center of the head. Standing upright on the double-thick meeting point of these two bands was a cross with an amethyst the size of an almond set in it. It was very heavy: Aimery estimated four to five pounds. The inside of the crown was lined with velvet so it could be worn in comparative comfort.
Aimery looked around the room once more to be sure he was alone, and then he placed the crown on his head. It sat snugly on his forehead, not too tight nor too loose. But the cross unbalanced it somewhat, unlike a well-fitted helmet. He had to hold his head absolutely upright, or the weight of the cross tipped his head one way or another. He reached up and removed the crown from his head to look at it more closely.
The workmanship was magnificent. The Holy Roman Emperor had either spent a fortune—or he had captured it somewhere and held it in reserve for an appropriate occasion. Or, Aimery frowned, it might be Isaac Comnenus’ crown. Richard of England had seized that as part of the loot he’d taken when capturing the island. Very probably it had ended up in Henry VI’s hands as part of the English King’s ransom to the Hohenstaufen.
The thought pleased Aimery as he turned the crown around in his hands, looking for indications of Greek workmanship that would support this theory. Aimery was not an expert, but he thought the settings of the stones were more Greek than Latin in style. Maybe Maria Zoë would know. At an appropriate time, he would ask her to look at it. He would also ask her about the crown she had sold to Isaac in the year after Hattin. It had been her coronation crown, sent with her from Constantinople. It ought to be a perfect fit for Eschiva, if they could only locate it in time. Aimery had not forgotten that he’d promised to make Eschiva a queen, and after all she had gone through this past winter, he was more determined than ever to see her crowned.
If this was Isaac Comnenus’ crown—Aimery’s attention returned to the crown in his hands—then it would establish an important bridge to the past. He hoped that his subjects (what a lovely word!) would be proud to be part of a kingdom. His Frankish supporters had definitely liked the idea! Barlais and Henri de Brie had been loudest in their glee—and immediately demanded the title of “baron.” “We’ll lay our hands in yours first thing tomorrow morning!” Barlais had declared. “Or, well, as soon as we return from seeing the Archbishops off.”
Aimery had no objection to that idea, either. The sooner he bound these proud fighting men to him, the better. And not just them. Aimery had spent hours poring over maps of the island identifying, based on lists of Byzantine dignitaries and their landholdings, just how many fiefs the island could support. He estimated the island could support some three hundred knights and two hundred mounted sergeants. Nothing to what the Kings of Jerusalem had once commanded, but not so much less than the King of Jerusalem commanded today.
Aimery wanted those knights and sergeants to be his own men. He was fortunate, he reckoned, that so many of the Greek lords had already fled the island. They had been emigrating since the time of Isaac Comnenus, because of his onerous taxes and erratic behavior. The exodus had increased under Templar rule and during the tragic interlude under Guy. The Greek aristocracy, after all, usually had lands on the mainland or houses in Constantinople to which they could withdraw. The armed struggle had been left to the lower classes and led by the Church, not the nobility. Fortunately. Aimery suspected he would have had a much harder time putting down the unrest if he’d been facing fighting men rather than priests, pirates, and peasants.
Now, however, he saw an even greater advantage in their conspicuous absence: he had land to distribute. All he needed to do was lure the disinherited fighting men of Jerusalem to Cyprus—just as Cheneché, Brie, Jubail, Rivet, and the Ibelins had come already.
Obviously, if there were Greek lords still occupying their estates, he would not expel them, provided they did homage to him. So the first thing he had to do was send out clerks to the fiefs listed in the tax registers to find out which were de facto vacant and which were still occupied. He would then demand homage of those still present, and any man who refused would see his lands expropriated to the Crown. After that, he would know just how many Greek knights had accepted his rule and how many vacant fiefs were left over. Once he knew exactly what lands he had to bestow on worthy men, he could start recruiting.
As his eye fell again on the crown, however, he reminded himself that he did not want to end as Isaac Comnenus had—driven from the island by the indifference and betrayal of his own subjects. If the Greek Emperor decided to reclaim the island, the Holy Roman Emperor might send aid—or he might not. Or his assistance might arrive too late. He would not be able to hold the island against any hostile power, whether it was the Greek Emperor or the Sultan of Cairo, with jus
t three hundred knights and two hundred sergeants—not if he had no infantry. And the infantry would have to be drawn from the Greek population.
Which was why this peace Ibelin had made with the Greek archbishop made so much sense. Let the Greeks have their own churches and their own laws, as long as they paid taxes to the Crown. And those taxes didn’t have to be tithes for land. On an island as rich as this, he could tax (as the Greek Emperors had done) the timber and the mines, the tanneries, potteries, and glassworks, the wine presses and the oil presses, the taverns and bathhouses, the mills, and the markets. Not only that, there were harbor dues and anchorage, salvage, customs, and export duties. There were so many different ways of raising revenue that no single tax need be particularly high. The key would be to spread the burden across all layers of society and all professions. Manuel I had understood that very well, based on what the Cypriot tax officials had reported to him.
Again Aimery nodded to himself. Ibelin was wise. Restoring the laws of Manuel I not only quieted the fears of the native population and cloaked his laws in legitimacy, they also gave him more than adequate revenues—provided, of course, that the island returned to normal levels of economic activity. That might take a couple of years, even half a decade.
No matter. He had no need for coffers full of gold. He’d lived frugally all his life (in contrast to Guy), and Eschiva was anything but a spendthrift. She had always shown a prudent capability to hold their income together and prioritize expenditures, always meeting her own needs last. That was about to change. Even at current low levels of prosperity, the revenues of the Cypriot Crown vastly exceeded anything Aimery and Eschiva had ever had at their disposal in the past. They were, from what the clerks told him, at least double the revenues of his once rich father-in-law, the Baron of Ramla and Mirabel.
Then again, he would need a considerable fortune to outfit knights for a new crusade, if the Emperor really came to the Outremer. After a second, Aimery resolved to worry about that later. The Emperor might not come at all. He was anything but pious, Aimery reflected cynically. In fact, he was a self-serving, cynical bastard—and Aimery, for one, would be happy for him to stay where he was. The crown was here.
Aimery took it again in his hands, full of wonder, admiration, and satisfaction—only to feel a stab of guilt. He was acting no better than the greediest sultan. Worse, perhaps. In sincere contrition, he dropped to his knees and closed his eyes. “Dear God, in the name of your Son, protect this crown and the men who will wear it. Protect them from excessive greed, excessive pride and hubris. Grant the men who wear this crown wisdom, compassion, and piety instead. Inspire them to rule over this island kingdom judiciously and prudently for the good of their subjects, both high and low, Greek and non-Greek, men and women. Most of all, dear God, make me worthy of this crown, that I may pass it to my sons with due humility and go to You when my time comes. Amen.”
Paphos, Cyprus, September 1196
They had opened all the windows of the tower room to let the sea breeze inside in the vain hope of cooling it down. Although the breeze helped, the temperature at this time of year was still oppressively hot, and Ibelin had dispensed with stifling armor to dress in nothing but a yellow silk surcoat over a pale-blue cotton shirt and hose of the same color. His feet were shod in comfortable, low leather shoes, and his head was bare. Maria Zoë was likewise dressed for the heat of high summer in a loose silk shift, over which she wore a crinkled cotton surcoat with long, loose sleeves. The shift was cream-colored, the surcoat a transparent green, and both materials were so light that even the slightest breeze lifted and fluttered them.
John burst in on his parents excitedly. “Pomegranates!” he announced, carrying a small basket before him.
Maria Zoë looked over with a smile, exclaiming, “Isn’t it too early?”
“They’re from Troodos, the vendor told me. He said up in the mountains, the first frosts have come.”
“Have you tried one?” Balian asked, coming over to inspect the fruit in John’s basket. John watched his father’s expression eagerly. Ibelin had been famous for its pomegranate orchards, and John knew that pomegranates were his father’s favorite fruit. Now Balian could not resist taking one of the fruits, still half yellow, and with his eating knife he lopped the top off.
Maria Zoë came down from her perch in the window seat, and snatched a glass bowl from a mosaic table beside the cold fireplace to bring it to her husband. He was already intent on carefully cutting the outside skin of the pomegranate. When the fourth cut was finished, he set the knife aside and broke the pomegranate open over the glass bowl. Some kernels fell into the bowl, but more clung to the membrane of the pomegranate, and Balian started to pick them free with the tip of his knife.
John watched with satisfaction. This was a scene from his childhood: his father gently extracting the kernels of a pomegranate for his mother. It was a ritual. Maria Zoë loved the fruit nearly as much as Balian did, but hated getting her fingers stained by pomegranate juice or the squirts of juice (inevitable in the process of picking it clean) on her dress. The kernels of this pomegranate were a very light ruby color, rather than garnet, but when Maria Zoë reached for the first little handful her face lit up in delight. “Wonderful!”
“Are they?” Balian asked. As if he doubted her word, he helped himself to a generous handful. His expression gave him away before he nodded in satisfaction and looked over at the basket to remark, “I don’t think these are going to last very long. Can you find the vendor again?”
John laughed. “I can do better! I was thinking, we should ask him to take us to the source. I could do with a long ride out of the city. What do you think?”
“If there’s been frost in the mountains already, it should be much cooler there as well,” Maria Zoë noted. “I’d like some respite from the heat.”
“We could take a picnic,” John enthused, “and make a day outing of it!”
Balian looked from his son to his wife. “Is this a conspiracy?”
“Hardly,” Maria Zoë countered, “but you have been working very hard lately.”
“There’s so much to do,” Balian countered with a sigh and a glance at the papers spread out across the table. He had been in Paphos almost a year, although he had not been officially granted the fief until Aimery had received the crown of Cyprus this past May. Ever since their arrival, however, Balian had sought to establish a functioning administration. He had attempted to engage the professional bureaucrats from Isaac Comnenus’ reign or before—but some of these men had left, others were old or corrupt, and yet others were hostile to the Franks. Finding out who they could trust had been a painful process of trial and error.
At the same time, they had faced the acute need to re-establish law and order on the streets and offshore. Petty crime, theft, and even assaults were rampant in the city at night, and while Famagusta had been a pirates’ nest, Paphos was a smugglers’ den. The ships trading here were almost all merchantmen, roundships more than galleys, but their cargoes were mostly contraband. No one took kindly to someone trying to tax them. After a half-decade doing as they pleased and reaping 100 per cent of the profit, neither shipmasters nor merchants much cared if the duties Ibelin was trying to enforce dated back to the reign of Manuel I Comnenus or not.
No sooner had Ibelin reopened the customs house on the quay, manned entirely with customs officials who had previously served the Greek Emperor, than ships started trying to avoid the harbor and landing their cargoes at various nearby coves and bays. Ibelin had engaged Erik Andersen to patrol the coastline, offering him 100 per cent of the customs duties of any ships he seized and brought back to port for a full year—the contract to be renegotiated at that time. Andersen had raised credit from the Venetians, using the customs duties he anticipated as collateral, in order to build a small snecka. Haakon’s Ghost soon struck terror in the hearts of the smugglers, and most preferred to pay customs duties rather than risk an encounter with the Norsemen. Still, resentment simmere
d among the ship owners and importers alike.
The hostility of the shopkeepers, millers, tavern owners, and bath keepers was if anything greater, because their profit margins were lower in the first place. There had been a minor riot in the market when Ibelin’s men had come to collect the market dues. Another ugly incident occurred when the bakers went on strike to protest the higher cost of wheat, which they blamed on the fact that the new Latin landlords were now collecting rents again. . . .
Meanwhile, since the opening of the sailing season, more and more immigrants from the Holy Land were turning up in Cyprus generally and Paphos specifically. The news of the peace the previous fall had been rapidly overshadowed by the spectacular story of the Lady of Lusignan’s kidnapping. Men hearing of that audacious raid concluded that Cyprus was still a wild and dangerous place. But when Cyprus was made a kingdom under a Latin King, men revised their opinion. It helped that King Aimery sent repeated invitations to “men with skills, trades, and courage” to join him in “rebuilding” the island.
Many of the newcomers were Syrian Christians, who despite speaking Arabic, shared most of the traditions and theology of the Greek Orthodox Church, but there were also Samaritans and Jews among the recent immigrants, as well as Latin Christians. What they all had in common was the loss of their homes, their possessions, and often their loved ones in the collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem following Hattin. Some had been in Saracen slavery; others had escaped only to find themselves homeless, penniless, and superfluous in the surviving Christian cities of Tyre, Acre, and Jaffa. On the whole they were willing and able to work, but they did not necessarily have favorable attitudes towards the Cypriots. There had been tavern brawls and even some more sinister acts of violence arising from the tensions between the native Cypriots and the immigrants.
The Last Crusader Kingdom Page 44