As head of the royal house of Jerusalem, guardian of the realm, and commander-in-chief of the crusading host, Richard would not have been justified in withholding his assent from the course of action thus unanimously recommended by both the native and the western Crusaders. Their decision was probably the wisest possible under the circumstances. Although Conrad had done more than any other man (except possibly Philip Augustus) to sow dissension among the Christian forces, he was nevertheless the leader who, when Richard was gone, would divide them the least; for when once he was acknowledged as their chief, it would be his own interest to keep them together and to further the object of their enterprise to the utmost of his power; he was, unquestionably, by far the most capable and energetic, next to Richard, of all the princes of the Crusade; and his so-called wife and their infant daughter were the sole surviving representatives of the royal house of Jerusalem. The crowned king, Guy, had no following of his own, and it seems quite clear that he had, tacitly at least, resigned all claim to authority in the realm as well as in the host; so that no disloyalty to him was involved in Richard’s assent to the election of a new sovereign. Count Henry of Champagne and three other envoys of rank carried the great news to Tyre; Conrad and all the folk there were delighted, and began to prepare for immediate return to the host at Ascalon.[880] But before any of them had set out, the situation was suddenly changed again; on April 28 the marquis was assassinated.[881] The murderers were caught red-handed, and, of course, promptly put to death. At Saladin’s court they were reported to have declared that they had been hired by Richard to commit the crime.[882] Saladin, with whom Conrad had been in negotiation for several weeks past, had at the time an agent in Tyre from whom this report was derived;[883] and if it did not actually originate with Conrad’s friends and allies at Tyre, its circulation among Richard’s enemies and rivals and its transmission to Europe were certainly encouraged by them.[884] A few years later, however, one Moslem historian gave a very different account of the matter: Ibn Alathyr says the men were hired by Saladin to kill Richard if they could, or, failing him, Conrad, and that they chose the latter alternative as the easier of the two.[885] This story is probably worthless except as an illustration of the importance of both king and marquis in Saracen eyes. The best confutation of the other tale lies in the simple fact that Conrad’s death could not be of the slightest profit to Richard, but, on the contrary, upset all his plans for his own return to Europe. The Norman pilgrim-poet of the Crusade tells us that the men who stabbed Conrad were “Assassins” not only in the modern conventional sense of the word, but also in its original and etymological sense; by their own confession, they were Hashashîn, that is, followers of the