Count of Tripoli (1152-1187), lord of Tiberias (1174-1187), and twice regent of the kingdom of Jerusalem (1174-1176 and 1185-1186).
Raymond was the son of Raymond II of Tripoli and Hodierna, sister of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem. He was still a minor when his father was killed in 1152, and he took up the government of Tripoli in 1155. He was captured by Nur al-Din in 1164 while participating in a combined Frankish attempt to relieve the town of Artah, and he spent the next ten years as a prisoner, during which time Tripoli was governed by his cousin King Amalric of Jerusalem. Raymond’s captivity and his subsequent roles in the politics of the kingdom of Jerusalem meant that he was probably less involved in the affairs of his hereditary county of Tripoli than most of his predecessors.
Soon after being ransomed (by early 1174) Raymond acquired the lordship of Tiberias through marriage to Eschiva, widow of Walter of Saint-Omer. Thus on the accession of Amalric’s underage son, the leper king Baldwin IV (July 1174), Raymond was holder of the greatest lordship in the kingdom of Jerusalem as well one of the closest male relatives of the king. Later the same year, he demanded and received the regency of the kingdom, which he exercised until Baldwin came of age (July 1176), when he returned to Tripoli.
In the spring of 1180, Raymond and Prince Bohemund III of Antioch led their armies into the kingdom, evidently with the aim of ensuring that a candidate amenable to them would be chosen as a new husband for Baldwin IV’s widowed sister Sibyl, the heir to the throne. They were thwarted when the king had Sibyl married quickly to the Poitevin nobleman Guy of Lusignan. Despite a reconciliation with the king and Guy in 1182, Raymond came to be the leading figure among a growing number among the ruling class of Jerusalem (particularly the Ibelin family) who were implacably opposed to Guy becoming king. In 1185 the dying Baldwin IV, who by this time had also lost faith in Guy’s abilities, appointed Raymond as regent for his nephew Baldwin V, Sibyl’s son by her deceased first husband. Yet when the young king died in the summer of1186, Raymond was outmaneuvered by his opponents, who had Guy and Sibyl crowned in Jerusalem. Fearing an attack on Tiberias, Raymond admitted Saladin’s troops into the lordship, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of many that he intended to seize the throne himself, but he was forced into a new reconciliation with Guy by his own vassals in Tripoli and Tiberias after it became apparent that Saladin did not intend to renew his truce with the kingdom, which was due to expire in April 1187.
Raymond and his supporters were unable to persuade Guy to avoid giving battle to Saladin’s great army that invaded Galilee in June 1187. At the ensuing disastrous encounter at Hattin (4 July 1187), Raymond managed to fight his way through the Muslim lines with his stepsons and made his way to Tripoli, where he fell ill and died in September 1187, regarded as a traitor by many of his fellow Franks. Having no children of his own, he conferred the county of Tripoli on Raymond, the elder son of his old ally Bohemund III of Antioch. The latter, however, appointed his younger son, Bohemund (IV), as ruler.
-Alan V. Murray
Bibliography
Baldwin, Marshall W., Raymond III of Tripoli and the Fall of Jerusalem (1140-1187) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936).
Hamilton, Bernard, The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Richard, Jean, Le Comte de Tripoli sous la dynastie toulousaine (1102-1187) (Paris: Geuthner, 1945).
World History
