Getting Away With Murder: Runciman and Conrad of Montferrat’s Career in Constantinople

In the second volume of his History of the Crusades (1952), Steven Runciman claimed that Conrad of Montferrat arrived in Tyre in 1187 after involvement in ‘a murder’ in Constantinople. This alleged murder was Conrad’s defeat in battle of the rebel general Alexios Vranas, described by Niketas Choniates and other chroniclers. Runciman’s use of sources is examined, together with possible reasons for misrepresenting the incident. Questions are raised about the relationship between academic and popular historiography through the uncritical repetition of the murder accusation in later popular works, and Conrad’s stereotyping in English-language fiction.


Getting Away with Murder: Runciman and Conrad of Montferrat's Career in Constantinople
In summer 1187, Conrad of Montferrat embarked from Constantinople for the Holy Land on a Genoese merchant ship belonging to Baldovino Erminio. 1 Finding Acre in Saladin's hands, he landed at Tyre, and took charge of its defence.His efforts there are generally held to have saved the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem from extinction.However, since the 1950s, popular English-language historiography has represented his departure from the Byzantine empire as the flight of a fugitive killer.This accusation first appeared in Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades (1951-54): 'He [Conrad] had been living at Constantinople but had been involved in a murder there; so he sailed secretly away with a company of Frankish knights to pay a pilgrimage to the Holy Places'. 2 Later popular writers have repeated and elaborated it.Geoffrey Hindley, in Saladin (1976), wrote, 'He had arrived from Constantinople, a fugitive from justice', and called him 'a mere adventurer' 3 -not the late King Baldwin V's paternal uncle.Percy Howard Newby's Saladin in His Time (1983) echoed this, describing Conrad as 'a fugitive from Byzantine justice', a 'soldier of fortune' who 'left Constantinople in a hurry because otherwise he would have been arrested for complicity in a murder'. 4According to Robert Payne's The Dream and the Tomb (1984), he 'left Constantinople suddenly as a result of a blood feud'. 5In Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today's World (1988), Karen Armstrong (who declared herself indebted to Runciman) claimed: 'he had been involved in a murder there and hurriedly escaped as a 'pilgrim' to Jerusalem'. 6In their 1994 BBC series and book The Crusades, Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, who named Runciman as one of their 'overall consultants', wrote: 4 Soon after Conrad's arrival and the wedding festivities, news came that Alexios Vranas, the military commander who had defeated the Sicilians the previous year, had had himself proclaimed as Emperor Alexios in his home city of Adrianople.He was now marching on Constantinople to seize the throne.The threat was a serious one: Vranas was related to the Komnenoi through his mother and also by his marriage to Anna Vatatzaina, one of Emperor Manuel's nieces, and had a history of military success.Isaac turned to prayer, but Conrad spurred him to action, 'becoming as a whetstone to the Emperor for the razor of war'. 21Choniates gave no date for the revolt, and dating it from his description of a solar eclipse is problematic. 22en the imperial army faced Vranas before the city walls, it was Conrad, leading his Latin troops, who commanded at the centre: When the sun was ablaze at its highest, the signal for battle was given, and Conrad made the first move, bearing as the distinguishing mark of his and his company's lances [a device] of Phoenician purple dye.On this occasion, he fought without a shield, and wore about his body, in the manner of a cuirass, a woven garment of linen, folded many times over and soaked considerably in salted wine.So resistant and compacted it was with salt and wine, that it was proof against all missiles: the folds of the fabric numbered more than eighteen.
Having reduced the space between both armies to its narrowest, he made his stand.After the infantry drew up their lines so that the dense-packed spears rose like a tower in close array (for 'buckler pressed against buckler, helmet against helmet, and long shields clashed against each other in battle'), 23 the cavalry, lances couched, then spurred on their horses, the Emperor's division following close behind.Vranas's men could not endure even the first charge of Conrad's spear-wielding infantry, nor yet the surging onslaught of his cavalry: they turned tail, and scattered.The remaining divisions, having got word of this, also turned to flight.
Vranas himself yelled and shouted aloud: 'Stand fast, Romans!For we fight as many against a few, and I myself shall be first to meet the enemy faceto-face!'But no sooner had he done as he said, he convinced not one member of his army to turn.Then he levelled his lance against Conrad, who was fighting without a helmet -but it did not wound the Caesar mortally, but scraped his shoulder, and fell in vain from Vranas's hands.Conrad, grasping the shaft of his own lance tightly in both hands, thrust at the cheekpiece of Vranas's helmet, making his head reel, and casting him down from his horse.After this, the Caesar's bodyguard, who had surrounded him, pierced him through with their spears.It was said that at first when Vranas was wounded by Conrad, he feared being finished off, and begged not to die.But Conrad replied that he had no need to fear, for he would suffer nothing disagreeable -only beheading.And so it was done at once. 24me high-ranking rebels were pardoned, but Isaac was unforgiving of Vranas's popular support.He had the Propontis attacked with Greek fire, and sent Conrad's Latin troops on a punitive expedition.This degenerated into rioting and looting by the city mob, which accompanied them.Retaliatory attacks against Latin civilians followed, which may have made Conrad's position increasingly insecure, given his brother's fate five years previously.
It is unknown when Conrad left Constantinople.Frankish and Arabic sources agree that he knew nothing of Saladin's victory at Hattin (4 July) or the fall of Acre (July 9), and that he arrived off Acre shortly after its surrender. 25This makes a September or October date unlikely.Also, he clearly had time to organize the commune of Tyre before issuing charters on its behalf in October. 26Choniates associated his departure with Isaac's preparations for his campaign against the Vlachs: But Conrad was patently dissatisfied with the favour he obtained from the Emperor, regarding it as in disharmony with his lineage and discordant with his marital affinity to the Emperor -his overweening hopes having ended only in wearing on his feet shoes not of the colour of those of the majority (I speak of the insignia of the Caesars).Besides, at home, a short time before, he had proposed to take the cross and travel to Palestine, which had already fallen under the Saracens of Egypt, but en route had married the Emperor's sister.He assented, then, to go forth with the Emperor to help organize the proposed war, to prevent, with God's will, misfortune of the Romans at the hands of the Mysians [i.e. the Vlachs] -but he turned his mind to other matters.
For with a new-built ship, compact and well fitted-out, he set his course for Palestine, and came to anchor at Tyre.He was welcomed there among his own people, who saw he was superior in ability. 27oniates made no suggestion that Conrad was fleeing a murder, only that he believed he had been insufficiently rewarded.He does not seem to have received a Greek name, whereas his own brother Renier became Ioannes when he married Maria the Porphyrogenita; her previous fiancé, Béla of Hungary, became Alexios; Béla's daughter Margaret, now Isaac Angelos's child-bride, became Maria.Was this a slight, or had there simply not been time?The brevity of his sojourn in Constantinople raises the question whether he and Theodora were married, or whether the festivities preceding Vranas's revolt had been a formal betrothal only.A betrothal or an extremely brief marriage, annulled by Isaac after Conrad's departure, may explain why Choniates, usually alert to scandal, failed to comment on his marriage to Isabella of Jerusalem in 1190. 28Guy of Lusignan's supporters accused Conrad of having 'one wife still living in his own country, and another in the city of Constantinople, both noble, young and beautiful, and well suited to his needs', but they had political motives to prevent or discredit his marriage to Isabella. 29It seems unlikely that Isaac's ambassadors to Montferrat were deceived about his first wife's death: Boccaccio's fable of a Marchioness of Montferrat outwitting Philip of France's advances cannot stand as evidence. 30However, Theodora's legal status remains uncertain.Runciman claimed, 'it is probable from the tone of Nicetas's account that his Byzantine wife had also died', 31 but she was living in 1195-98 -information published by Papadopolous-Kerameus in a 1909 article. 32irteenth-century Frankish chroniclers did not accuse Conrad of murder.Robert of Auxerre wrote that 'he had recently fought vigorously against a certain member of the imperial family, who […] had desired to depose and usurp the Emperor, and slew the usurper himself', which stirred the Greeks' envy against him. 33Similarly, Salimbene de Adam and Alberto Milioli drew on a now-lost chronicle by Bishop Sicardo of Cremona: In single combat, he beheaded Vranas, the attacker of the Emperor and the imperial city, and liberated Greece from that foe.However, he incurred many people's jealousy and hatred, wherefore, to escape the schemes of the Greeks, embarking on a ship, he set out to visit the Lord's sepulchre. 34e claim that an ungrateful emperor threatened Conrad's life first appeared in Robert of Clari's account of the Fourth Crusade.He misdated Vranas's revolt to the reign of Alexios III, using his alleged treachery towards Conrad to explain Boniface's support for Isaac's restoration: […] Now at this point, a high-ranking man of the city had besieged the Emperor in Constantinople, so that the Emperor dared not go out from it.
When the Marquis saw this, he asked how it was that he had so besieged him, that he dared not go out to fight him; and the Emperor replied that he had neither the heart nor the help of his people, therefore he had no wish to fight him.When the Marquis heard this, he said that he would help him in this, if he wanted; and the Emperor said he wanted it, and that he would be very grateful for it.Then the Marquis told the Emperor that he would summon all those of the law of Rome, all the Latins of the town, to have them with him in his company, and that he would wage war with these and form the vanguard; and the Emperor should take all his men with him, and follow him.So the Emperor summoned all the Latins of the town.When they had all come, the Emperor commanded them all to arm themselves, and when they were all armed and the Marquis had made all his own men arm themselves, he [i.e. the Marquis] took all these Latins with him and drew up his troops as best as he could; and the Emperor was also fully armed, and his men with him.Then what did the Marquis do but set out on his way in front, and the Emperor followed after him.Then as soon as the Marquis was outside the gates with all his army, the Emperor went and had the gates locked behind him.But as soon as Vranas, who was besieging the Emperor, saw the Marquis was advancing hard to do battle with him, he rose up -both he and his men -to go to meet the Marquis.And as they were approaching, what did Vranas do but spur himself forward, about a stone's throw ahead of all his men, to make haste and rush against the Marquis's battle-line.When the Marquis saw him coming, he spurred to meet him, and struck him with his first blow in the eye, and struck him dead with that blow; so he struck right and left, both he and his men, and they killed many.When these saw their lord was dead, they began to break up, and turned in flight.When the traitor Emperor, who had had the gates locked after the Marquis, saw they were fleeing, he went out of the city with all his men and started to pursue those who were fleeing; and the Marquis and the others won many spoils, horses and many other things.And thus the Marquis avenged the Emperor on him who had besieged him.
When they had routed them, both the Emperor and the Marquis came back to Constantinople.When they had returned and disarmed, the Emperor thanked the Marquis most firmly for avenging him so well on his enemy, so that the Marquis asked him why he had had the gates locked behind him.
'Bah!All is well now!' said the Emperor.
'Now -by God's grace!' said the Marquis.
And it was not long after that the Emperor and his traitors plotted a great deed of treachery, because he wanted to have the Marquis killed; but an old man, who knew it, took pity on the Marquis, and came before him in the noblest manner, and told him, 'Sire, for God's sake, get out of this town, for if you linger here a third day, the Emperor and his traitors have plotted a great treachery, to capture you and have you killed'.
When the Marquis heard this news, he was not at all at ease.So that same night, he went and had his galleys prepared, and put to sea, before it was day, and left that place; and so he did not stop until he reached Tyre. 35nciman used Robert of Clari's narrative in Lauer's 1924 edition, but ignored his account of Vranas's death, just as he ignored that by Choniates.When the Marquis came, he armed himself and went out against Vranas, mounted on a very fine horse.He asked who was this Vranas, and they pointed him out, and he spurred towards him.And when he was close to Vranas, he spurred his horse to a gallop and struck Vranas full in the body, and cut him down dead, and turned back to Constantinople.
When those who had been besieging Constantinople saw that their lord was dead, they turned in flight.When the Emperor saw this, he ordered Conrad to his palace, and kept him there with him, because he did not want those in the city whose kinsman he had slain to do him harm or evil.There Conrad remained with the Emperor until that hour when it was time for him to go to the land of Outremer, to defend the city which God had preordained He would leave to the Christians.
[…] Now I shall tell you of the counsel and aid that God sent to Tyre.
Conrad the Marquis, who was in Constantinople, came to the Emperor and told him: 'Sire, my knights and men who are with me wish to go to Jerusalem to the Holy Sepulchre, and I can no longer hold them back; but they have promised me that when they have made their pilgrimage, they will return to me, for I cannot leave you'.And he convinced the Emperor that he would not be leaving, because he wanted neither city nor the Emperor himself to know that he was going to away; for he knew well that if they knew in the city that he was going to leave, the kinsmen of Vranas, whom he had slain, who were in the city, would ambush and kill him.The Emperor had a ship equipped, and well victualled and armed, and the Marquis's men went aboard, and when they had the weather, embarked.
At the point they set sail, the Emperor and the Marquis were at the Boukoleon.When the Marquis saw the ship pass the Boukoleon, he came to the Emperor and told him: 'Sire, I had forgotten I need to tell my men something they must ask my father'.So the Marquis went and got on a boat and went after the ship.When he reached the ship, he boarded her.And when she was under sail, the Lord God gave her good weather and a good wind; and so they did not stop sailing until they came off Acre. 37e Colbert-Fontainebleau L'Estoire de Eracles retained Robert of Clari's misidentification of the Emperor as Alexios III, and mistakenly claimed that Conrad's ship was Pisan. 38The later Lyon Manuscript (c.1248) shared these errors, and romantically replaced Robert's old man with Conrad's bride, Theodora: Because he had slain Vranas, Vranas's kindred threatened to kill him.He himself was so valiant that the Emperor Alexios [sic] mistrusted him most harshly.He wanted to put out his eyes.His wife found this out, and informed him of it, because she loved him much, and begged him to take care that he came to no harm. 39vertheless, whatever their fictional additions, these accounts agreed with Choniates that Conrad killed Vranas in battle; so, too, did secondary works such as Ilgen's biography and Usseglio's history of his family. 40Where, then, did Runciman find the murder allegation?
The closest verbal parallel is in Roger of Howden's Chronica: 'The Marquis Conrad, brother of the aforementioned William, Count of Jaffa, having committed homicide in the city of Constantinople, fled thence, leaving his wife, the niece [sic] of the Emperor Isaac of Constantinople'. 41The ablative absolute, 'facto homicidio', is eye-catching.Roger had written, more accurately, in his Gesta Regis Henrici II, that Conrad 'previously slew a leading nobleman during a rebellion in Constantinople; and, having left his wife, the Emperor Isaac's sister, came to the city of Tyre'. 42Runciman privileged Roger's least accurate account over Greek and French descriptions of Vranas's rebellion, and left a misleading footnote.
The footnote error is most easily explicable.Runciman described his research methods to an American interviewer, David Plante: I've got a rather fitful memory.When I go into a library and don't happen to have a notebook on me and I see somewhere in a book something that is of great interest, I think that I shall certainly remember it.A month or two later, I want to use the material.I remember exactly what it looked like on the page, but I can't remember which book it is in.In the end, I'll locate it. 43 is easy, then, to see how he could make a mistake.
Runciman's attitude towards historiography raises other questions: 'I wasn't drawn to it [history] by a scientific desire for knowledge.Oh, no.I was drawn by romantic imaginings'. 44He lamented the rise of analytical history at the expense of history as literature: '[…] historians are now terrified of telling a story, as though that were fiction, and not history'. 45His own aspirations were to the epic: 'Homer as well as Herodotus was a Father of History'. 46Why, then, did Choniates' Homeric tale of Conrad's victory fail to appeal to him?He said that 'the most useful trait that the historian can possess is an imaginative sympathy' 47 -yet he withheld that from Conrad.As Robert Irwin observed, Runciman made his sympathetic characters 'men who would not have been out of place in Bloomsbury'. 48He characterized Isabella's previous husband, Humphrey of Toron, as 'a charming youth, gallant and cultured', whose 'beauty was too feminine to be respected by the tough soldiers around him': a description from the Itinerarium Peregrinorum, 49 but glossed sympathetically, perhaps reflecting his own friendships among the 1920s jeunesse dorée. 50By contrast, he portrayed Conrad as a 'grim middle-aged warrior', 51 later re-emphasizing 'the grimness of the ageing Piedmontese to whom she [Isabella] had been forcibly united'. 52This novelistic interpretation is repeated by the same writers who repeat his murder allegation: Jones and Ereira claimed 'he certainly didn't make poor Isabella happy' -although her feelings are unrecorded. 53Boyle called him 'brutish', and a 'grizzled old warrior': as he was probably still under fifty, this is revealingly inconsistent with Boyle's claim that Richard I (in his forty-second year) died 'in his prime of life'. 54However, Runciman could have chosen evidence to depict Conrad as another of his cultured, 'charming' noblemen, had he wished.Besides Choniates' praise for his talents and looks, an anonymous chronicler described him as 'extremely clever both in natural mental ability and by learning, amiable in character and deed', and fluent in several languages. 55His family dominated Occitan-speaking chivalric culture in northern Italy: his brother Boniface made Montferrat a famous centre of trobar, 56 and one of his sisters married Albert of Malaspina, himself a troubadour. 57He himself became the hero of Bertran de Born and Peirol's crusade songs: the 'valiant and noble Marquis'. 58Why, then, did Runciman make 'grimness' the keynote of his characterisation?His interpretation of Conrad may have been soured by Boniface's leadership of the Fourth Crusade.He regarded the Crusades in general as 'a vast fiasco', 'nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost', 59 but in particular, he blamed the Fourth Crusade, which he ascribed to 'deliberate malice', 60 for the eventual Ottoman conquest of Constantinople: It was the Crusaders themselves who wilfully broke down the defence of Christendom and thus allowed the infidel to cross the Straits and penetrate into the heart of Europe.The true martyrs of the Crusades were not the gallant knights who fell fighting at the Horns of Hattin or before the towers of Acre, but the innocent Christians of the Balkans, as well as of Anatolia and Syria, who were handed over to persecution and slavery. 61here was never a greater crime against humanity', 62 he claimed: an assertion which -so soon after Hitler and Stalin's industrialized slaughters and the atomic bomb -seems, at best, naïve.Relying on Choniates, he ignored Boniface's earlier career, with potential for a morally more complex characterisation, to depict him as one of the 'greedy cynics' in charge.63 However, by simultaneously ignoring Choniates' positive portrayal of Conrad, he did the latter a disservice.
Runciman's use of Roger of Howden reveals another influence.He knew Roger's works and the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi in William Stubbs's Rolls Series editions.Although no admirer of Richard I, 64 Stubbs absorbed and endorsed his chroniclers' contempt for the poulain nobility and for Conrad.In a footnote to Roger of Howden's Chronica, he called Conrad 'the evil genius of the Third Crusade'. 65In his preface to the Itinerarium Peregrinorum, he claimed it must have taxed Richard 'to have pretended a regard for one so faithless and selfish as Conrad of Montferrat', 66 and drew on a Machiavellian, Renaissance Italian stereotype in comparing him to Guy of Lusignan: Guy of Lusignan was a brave soldier, a good commander, an honourable and generous enemy, and faithful friend; but he had two great faults in the eyes of the native Franks, he was without wealth or powerful connexions, and he was devoid of that craft which in them took the place of strength and honest dealing.Conrad of Montferrat, although at first objected to as an adventurer, soon convinced them that his character was much more to their liking.He was strong in the relationship of the emperors of both East and West; whilst Guy came of a family which, though honourable for antiquity, possessed as yet only a third-rate fief, and that by a very questionable title: he was rich, ruthless in enmity, faithless in friendship, cunning and unscrupulous enough to pass for an Italian of a later age; and withal, a famous captain by sea and land. 67rtainly, the succession dispute dangerously divided the Franks; but Guy was equally culpable in clinging to the crown, which he held through marriage, after his wife and daughters' deaths.He was the real fugitive, banished from Poitou for participating in killing Patrick, Earl of Salisbury, in 1168. 68Nevertheless, Stubbs even blamed Conrad for his own assassination: 'the character of Conrad was such, and the persons whom he had injured so many and various, that it is a wonder he was not disposed of earlier than he was'. 69 In The Talisman, Scott followed Enlightenment historians in idealizing Saladin, but, by making the Franks' 'official enemy' a hero, he was forced to find villains elsewhere.He resorted to Gothic genre stereotypes, as Charles Mills had chided him for doing in Ivanhoe (1819): 'when he wants a villain to form the shadow of his scene, he as regularly and unscrupulously resorts to the fraternity of the Templars as other novelists refer to the church, or to Italy, for a similar purpose'. 71The treacherous Italian of post-Reformation drama had been revived in late eighteenth-to early nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which painted Italy as 'a country of incest and intrigue, violence and hypocrisy, whose Church was Anti-Christ, […] and whose intellectuals were typified by the fiendish Machiavelli'.To its population of 'malignant marquisses scheming in gloomy castles' 72  Later, he is described as 'a voluptuary and an epicurean', and a '"double-faced traitor"', 74 'generally accused of versatility, of a narrow and selfish ambition, of a desire to extend his own principality, without regard to the weal of the Latin kingdom of Palestine, and of seeking his own interest, by private negotiations with Saladin, to the prejudice of the Christian leaguers'. 75Scott never acknowledged that Conrad's 'own principality' was the Latin Kingdom: Queen Isabella and the resident nobility do not exist in The Talisman.He also inserted anachronisms suggestive of the Fourth Crusade: Conrad's brother Enguerrand (Boniface renamed) arrives with 'a gallant band of twelve hundred Stradiots, a kind of light cavalry raised by the Venetians in their Dalmatian possessions'. 76ortly before his death in 1832, in a revised introduction to The Talisman, Scott defended his treatment of Conrad: Considerable liberties have also been taken with the truth of history, both with respect to Conrade of Montserrat's life, as well as his death.That Conrade, however, was reckoned the enemy of Richard, is agreed both in history and romance.The general opinion of the terms upon which they stood, may be guessed from the proposal of the Saracens, that the Marquis of Montserrat should be invested with certain parts of Syria, which they were to yield to the Christians. 77r him, then, Conrad's dispute with Richard ('a name so dear to Englishmen') 78 was reason enough to vilify him; but his 'proposal of the Saracens' comes from King Richard, a fanciful fourteenth-century romance discussed in his 'Appendix to the Introduction'. 79He knew the poem from parts in the Auchinleck Manuscript, then in the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, and from his acquaintance with George Ellis, author of Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (1805).While omitting its 'most astonishing and monstrous' incidents, such as cannibalism, 80 Scott quoted Richard's accusations from Ellis's summary of it -which he misattributed to Mills's History of Chivalry: 'The Marquis, he said, was a traitor, who had robbed the Knight Hospitallers of sixty thousand pounds, the present of his father, Henry; that he was a renegade, whose treachery had occasioned the loss of Acre; and he concluded by a solemn oath, that he would cause him to be drawn to pieces by wild horses, if he should ever venture to pollute the Christian camp by his presence […]' 81 One wonders whether the misattribution was by error or malice: he had accused Mills of being 'not, it may be presumed, aware that romantic fiction naturally includes the power of such invention, which is indeed one of the requisites of the art'. 82The danger was that Scott's reputation as an antiquarian lent his inventions credibility.Consciously or subliminally, The Talisman has pervaded later portrayals of Conrad in English-language history and fiction. 83 turn, Runciman's influence pervades the work of later popular writers, who perpetuate his depiction of Vranas's death as murder, and Conrad's voyage as a wanted criminal's flight.Most of these authors have a background in literature, not history, which affects their research method and relationship with texts. 84They treat Runciman's A History of the Crusades as a canonical text -a substitute primary source.Like him, they accept the Old French Continuations' romance-tinted fables for the sake of storytelling, with clearly defined heroes and villains.Armstrong repeated the folk-tale of the heiress of Botron being weighed in gold, including Runciman's speculation on her weight. 85She and Reston revived Old French Continuations' erroneous claim that Reynald of Châtillon captured Saladin's sister, since exaggerated further as murder on film. 86 Boniface's wife.Philip's epithet, 'the One-Eyed' ('il bornio'), is not attested elsewhere.In any case, the story is a generic folk-tale of Oriental origin, to which their names and titles His favourite sources were the family of manuscripts known as the Old French Continuations of William of Tyre -all post-1230 in their present form.In the footnote for the paragraph mentioning the 'murder', he cited two editions: the Chronique d'Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier and the Colbert-Fontainebleau L'Estoire de Eracles Empereur et la Conqueste de la Terre d'Outremer.However, both describe Vranas's death in battle in terms broadly compatible with Choniates, albeit with romance-influenced embellishments. 36According to the Chronique d'Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier, which correctly identified the Emperor as Isaac: […] When the Emperor saw that Vranas was coming upon him with an army, he begged the Marquis who was in Constantinople to stay longer with him in Constantinople […] and be his man; and the Marquis tarried there.When the day came on which Vranas came before Constantinople to besiege it, Vranas was in the first rank of battle.The Emperor would not go out to meet Vranas, because he was of great lineage in the city [and lest they would lock the gates behind him.Thus he kept himself always within the city.] What caused such hostility?Behind Stubbs and Runciman lies the influence of a novelist who, more than any historian, shaped Conrad's negative image: Walter Scott.As Runciman told Jonathan Riley-Smith in Interviews with Historians (Institute of Historical Research, 1996): 'I think most historians have started by being romantic children […] And that starts one's imagination working […]' His childhood reading of Scott kindled his interest in Byzantium: 'I think one ought to write a study on the works that inspire you by irritating you, and certainly Walter Scott, I thought, got mediaeval history pretty wrong, and I didn't believe that Byzantium was as he depicted it in Count Robert of Paris'.Count Robert of Paris -'a dreadful book' in Runciman's estimation 70 -is one of Scott's lesser-known novels.It is unlikely the future historian would have read it without already knowing The Talisman (1825).
Scott added Conrad, whom he consistently misspelled as 'Conrade of Montserrat', misreading 'f' as 'long s'.He also included another evil Templar -a fictional Grand Master, Giles Amaury -who murders Conrad.Scott made Richard say: '[…] Oh, ay, Conrade of Montserrat -who knows not the popinjay?Politic and versatile, he will change you his purposes as often as the trimmings of his doublet, and you shall never be able to guess the hue of his inmost vestments from their outward colours.A man-at-arms?Ay, a fine figure on horseback, and can bear him well in the tilt-yard, and at the barriers, when swords are blunted at point and edge, and spears are tipped with trenchers of wood instead of steel pikes […]' 73 Boyle quixotically aimed at the 'rehabilitation as serious history' of the Blondel legend, 'one of the most romantic stories in even in absentia, was politically inconvenient: see Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, trans.and ed. by D. S. Richards (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp.121-22; letter to Philip II, attributed to French envoys, in Roger of Howden, Gesta Regis Henrici, II, pp.51-53, and Ralph of Diceto, Opera Historica, ed. by William Stubbs, Rolls Series, 68, 2 vols (London: Longman and Co., 1876), II, pp.58-60, and merged with Conrad's letter of 20 September 1188 to the Archbishop of Canterbury (Ralph of Diceto, pp.60-62) in Roger of Wendover, Liber qui dicitur Flores Historiarum ab anno Domini MCLIV annoque Henrici Anglorum regis Secundi primo, ed. by Henry G. Hewlett, Rolls Series, 84, 3 vols (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1886-1889), II (1887), pp.436-37.For secondary sources, see Charles M. Brand, 'The Byzantines and Saladin, 1185-1192: Opponents of the Third Crusade', Speculum, 37 no. 2 (April 1968), pp.167-81 and Byzantium Confronts the West, pp.177-78; Paul Magdalino, 'Isaac II, Saladin and Venice', in The Expansion of Orthodox Europe: Byzantium, the Balkans and Russia, ed. by Jonathan Shephard (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp.83-106.Savvas Neocleous.'The Byzantines and Saladin: Opponents of the Third Crusade?', Crusades, 9 (2010), 87-106, takes an opposing view.29 Itinerarium Peregrinorum, p. 122; Ambroise, The History of the Holy War: Ambroise's 'L'Estoire de la Guerre Sainte', ed. and trans.by Marianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber, 2 vols (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), I, p. 66, lines 4124-29.30Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decamerone, Day 1, Novel 5, told by Fiammetta.While Philip's journey to Genoa en route to the East fits 1190, Conrad had not travelled as 'standard-bearer of the Church' ('gonfaloniere della Chiesa'): this description better fits Boniface in the Fourth Crusade.If Philip flirted with the wife of a Marquis in 1190, she was probably