Count of Tripoli (1137–1152), a crusader lord remembered for his troubled marriage to Hodierna of Jerusalem and for being the first prominent Frank murdered by the Nizari Assassins.
Raymond II was count of Tripoli from 1137 to 1152, ruler of the southernmost of the crusader states, which his great-grandfather Raymond of Saint-Gilles had founded. The son of Count Pons, he inherited a county squeezed between the Muslim powers of Syria and the other Frankish states, and spent his reign defending it against the growing power of the atabeg Nur ad-Din of Aleppo.
His reign is remembered as much for its private drama and its violent end as for its wars. His marriage to Hodierna of Jerusalem was notoriously unhappy and jealous, and in 1152 Raymond became the first prominent Frankish lord to be struck down by the Nizari Assassins, murdered at the gate of his own capital.
Raymond was born about 1116, the son of Count Pons of Tripoli and grandson of Bertrand, of the great southern French house of the counts of Toulouse, whose head Raymond of Saint-Gilles had founded Tripoli on the First Crusade. When his father Pons was captured and killed by the Damascenes in 1137, Raymond succeeded to a beleaguered county.
He married Hodierna, a daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, binding Tripoli to the royal house of Jerusalem, as the crusader states increasingly did to hold together against their enemies.
Raymond II is remembered as a capable but jealous and suspicious man, whose personal failings the chroniclers dwelt on almost as much as his rule. His marriage to Hodierna became a byword for domestic strife: his obsessive jealousy grew so extreme that the queen of Jerusalem, Melisende, had to travel to Tripoli to try to reconcile the couple.
As a ruler he was diligent in the hard defence of an exposed and shrinking county, welcoming the military orders — he made important grants to the Knights Hospitaller, including the great castle of Krak des Chevaliers — to help hold his frontiers. But the impression that survives is of a hard, anxious, and unhappy lord, whose reign ended as troubled as it had been lived, in sudden and shocking violence.
Raymond's county faced relentless pressure from the rising power of Nur ad-Din, and he leaned heavily on the military orders to defend it, granting the Hospitallers a swathe of frontier territory and castles — among them Krak des Chevaliers — that they would make into a bulwark of the crusader states.
In 1152 his marital crisis came to a head: after Queen Melisende brokered a reconciliation, Hodierna set out to visit Jerusalem, and Raymond, having escorted her from the city, was returning through the gate of Tripoli when he was set upon and killed by members of the Nizari sect — the "Assassins". He was the first great Frankish lord to die at their hands.
Raymond II's murder in 1152 left his young son Raymond III as heir, under the regency first of his mother Hodierna and then of the king of Jerusalem. His killing by the Assassins sent a shock through the crusader states and marked the sect's dramatic entry into the politics of the Latin East.
Raymond II is remembered as the count whose murder introduced the Assassins to the front rank of crusader politics, and whose reliance on the Knights Hospitaller helped create the great castle-network — above all Krak des Chevaliers — that defended the crusader states. He passed to his son Raymond III a county that would, under that abler ruler, play a central part in the last decades of the Kingdom of Jerusalem before Hattin.