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 130 THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE. Conrad, the son of the Marquis of Montferrat, who, as we have Conrad in Seen, after the defence of Isaac Angelos in Constan- jerusaiem. tinoplc had refnscd to follow the emperor to Adri- anople, had gone to the Holy Land. In the year 1191 he was at Tyre, which he saved from an attack of the Saracens. His aged father had surrendered on his parole, and was prisoner in the hands of the Saracens at Damascus. Saladin promised to release him and to give him rich possessions in Syria if Conrad would open to him the gates of Tyre. If the son refused, Saladin threatened to place the old man in the fore- front of the battle. Conrad replied that he despised the gifts which Saladin offered, that the life of his father was less dear to him than the cause for which the Christians were lighting, and that if the sultan was sufficiently barbarous to kill an old man who had given himself up on parole, he would glory in being the son of a martyr. The city Avas saved. Conrad, like most of the members of his house, was full of ambition, and conceived the idea of making himself King of Jerusalem. On the death of Sybilla, the wife of Guy de Lu- signan, the heir to the sacred throne was her sister Isabella, who was wife of Humphrey of Thoron. Conrad determined to marry her, but there were two obstacles in the way : each party was already married. Conrad persuaded Isabella to ap- ply for a divorce on the ground that she had married Hum- phrey against her will. Conrad possessed, says Geoffrey de Yinsauf, the eloquence of Ulysses. He bribed the court and corrupted the clergy. In vain did the Archbishop of Canter- bury protest against the divorce as a bigamous or, as Geoffrey says, a trigamous marriage, and threaten the thunders of the Church. A council of churchmen declared Isabella's mar- riage null, and Conrad, who had already been married in Con- stantinople, where his wife was still living, took to himself a second wife.' ' Conrad, Avlio succeeded to the title of ^larquis of Montferrat, is said to have been thrice married. Of his tirst wife nothing is known. His second was Theodora, sister of the Emperor Isaac Angelos, whom he married in 11 8G, at the time when he was present in Constantinople and gave aid in suppressing the rebellion of Branas. The story of the mar-