In four words the Norman poet-historian of the third Crusade has at once pronounced a rare and splendid panegyric on Guy of Lusignan as a man, and given us the clue to Guy’s failure as a statesman. “No king was endowed with better qualities save for one characteristic which he had: that he knew no evil. That,” adds the poet with a charming touch of perhaps unconscious irony, “is what men call simpleness.”[663] “Simpleness,” whether as a virtue or a failing, can certainly never have been laid to the credit or the charge of Conrad of Montferrat. He had in 1187 landed with a handful of followers at Tyre when it was literally on the eve of surrendering to Saladin, and had taken upon himself the command and defence of the place with such vigour that Saladin was compelled to raise the siege. An Arab historian called him “the mightiest devil of all the Franks”;[664] an English writer called him “a son of the piercing and crooked serpent.”[665] His valour and capability, together with the possession of Tyre, soon made him a personage of much greater importance than the titular king. In birth Conrad was much more than Guy’s equal; the marquisate of Montferrat, to which he succeeded in 1188, ranked among the chief principalities of the kingdom of Italy, and his mother was granddaughter to one emperor, sister to another, and aunt to a third; while Guy was merely the youngest of the five brothers of that Geoffrey of Lusignan who had been a ringleader in almost every Aquitanian revolt from 1167 onward, and who had finally, some months after Conrad’s arrival at Tyre, gone to expiate in Palestine the last and worst of his offences against Duke Richard. To avert civil strife, both parties agreed to submit the whole question of the Crown to the arbitration of the two western kings. Guy now laid before them a complaint that Conrad had “forcibly and unjustly taken from him” (probably during his absence in Cyprus) “the rights and revenues of the kingdom.” His brother Geoffrey appealed the marquis of disloyalty, perjury, and treason against the king of Jerusalem and the whole Christian host. Conrad for the moment avoided answering the appeal by slipping away to Tyre;[666] its prosecution was postponed, and with it the trial of the rival claims to the Crown; pending a decision, the royal dues and revenues of the market and port of Acre were sequestrated and entrusted to the Templars and Hospitaliers.[667]