The King Of Jerusalem Killed Days After His Crown

On 28 April 1192 in the city of Tyre, Conrad of Montferrat had been elected King of Jerusalem just days earlier and was walking home from dinner with the Bishop of Beauvais when two young men approached him in the street without cloaks and drove knives into his body as they ran past, and he fell in the road, and one assassin was killed immediately and the other was captured and tortured and said before he died that the order had come from the Nizari Ismailis — the sect whose name would become the modern word assassin — and Conrad died within hours, and his wife Isabella was pregnant with his child, and within days the leaders of the Third Crusade married her to a new husband without her consent, and suspicion for the killing fell on Saladin, and on the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, and on Richard I of England, who had violently opposed Conrad’s election, and nobody was ever certain, and nobody was ever charged, and the Crusaders never took Jerusalem.

Interesting Fact: The Nizari Ismailis operated from a mountain fortress called Alamut in Persia — the original castle of the assassins. Their leader, known as the Old Man of the Mountain, was said to drug his recruits with hashish — hence the name Hashashin, which became assassin. The captured killer at Tyre confessed under torture to the Nizari, but the Nizari leader later sent a letter to the Duke of Austria claiming Richard I of England had paid for the killing. Richard denied it. Historians have never resolved it. Conrad’s daughter by Isabella, born after his death, eventually became Queen of Jerusalem. He ruled for less than a week and never once entered the city he had been made king of.

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