Conrad of Montferrat (Italian: Corrado del Monferrato; Piedmontese: Conrà ëd Monfrà) (died 28 April 1192) was a nobleman, one of the major participants in the Third Crusade.

A handsome man, with great personal courage and intelligence, he was described in the Historia brevis occupationis et amissionis Terrae Sanctae ("A Short History of the Occupation and Loss of the Holy Land"): Conrad was vigorous in arms, extremely clever both in natural mental ability and by learning, amiable in character and deed, endowed with all the human virtues, supreme in every council, the fair hope of his own side and a blazing lightning-bolt to the foe, capable of pretence and dissimulation in politics, educated in every language, in respect of which he was regarded by the less articulate to be extremely fluent.

In 1179, following the family's alliance with Manuel I Comnenos, Conrad led an army against Frederick Barbarossa's forces, then commanded by the imperial Chancellor, Archbishop Christian of Mainz.

Now in his mid-thirties, his personality and good looks made a striking impression at the Byzantine court: Niketas Choniates describes him as "of beautiful appearance, comely in life's springtime, exceptional and peerless in manly courage and intelligence, and in the flower of his body's strength".

Conrad, recently widowed, had taken the cross, intending to join his father in the Kingdom of Jerusalem; instead, he accepted Isaac's offer and returned to Constantinople in the spring of 1187.

[6] However, feeling that his service had been insufficiently rewarded, wary of Byzantine anti-Latin sentiment (his youngest brother Renier had been murdered in 1182) and of possible vengeance-seeking by Branas's family, Conrad set off for the Kingdom of Jerusalem in July 1187 aboard a Genoese merchant vessel.

Some popular modern histories have claimed that he was fleeing vengeance after committing a private murder: this is due to a failure to recognise Branas's name, garbled into "Lyvernas" in the Old French Continuation of William of Tyre (sometimes known as The Chronicle of Ernoul), and Roger of Howden's abridgement of his own Gesta regis Henrici Secundi (formerly attributed to Benedict of Peterborough).

Roger had initially referred to Conrad as "having slain a prominent nobleman in a rebellion"—meaning Branas; in his Chronica, he condensed this to "having committed homicide", omitting the context.

He arrived first off Acre, which had recently fallen to Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb), and so sailed north to Tyre,[7] where he found the remnants of the Crusader army.

Raymond III of Tripoli and his stepsons, Reginald of Sidon and several other leading nobles who had escaped the battle had fled to Tyre, but most were anxious to return to their own territories to defend them.

With the support of the established Italian merchant communities in the city, Conrad re-organised the defence of Tyre, setting up a commune, similar to those he had so often fought against in Italy.

Tyre successfully withstood the siege, and desiring a more profitable conquest, Saladin's army moved on south to Caesarea, Arsuf, and Jaffa.

Arabic writers claimed that he also carried propaganda pictures to use in his preaching, including one of the horses of Saladin's army stabled (and urinating) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and another of a Saracen slapping Christ's face.

There were also objections on grounds of canonical incest, since Conrad's brother had previously been married to Isabella's half-sister, and Church law regarded this kind of affinity as equal to a blood relationship.

During that winter, Conrad opened direct negotiations with Saladin, suspecting that Richard's next move would be to attempt to wrest Tyre from him and restore it to the royal domain for Guy.

Richard sold Guy the lordship of Cyprus, where he continued to use a king's title, to compensate him and to deter him from returning to Poitou, where his family had long had a reputation for rebelliousness.

In 1970, Patrick A. Williams argued a plausible case for Henry of Champagne's guilt, but if so, it is difficult to imagine him taking such a bold step without his uncle Richard's approval.

Later, while returning from the crusade in disguise, King Richard was first recognized by Meinhard II of Görz and then imprisoned by Conrad's cousin, Leopold V of Austria.

When Rashid al-Din Sinan requested for the ship's crew and treasure to be returned, he was rebuffed and so a death sentence was issued for Conrad of Montferrat.

The timing of the murder and its consequences (the pregnant Isabella was married off to Henry of Champagne only seven days later, much to the disgust of Muslim commentators) suggest that the chief motive may be sought in Frankish politics.

Their youngest brother Renier was a son-in-law of the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus, and the eldest, William, had been the first husband of Sibylla and father of Baldwin V of Jerusalem.

In Carmina Burana 50: Heu, voce flebili cogor enarrare, he is described as "marchio clarissimus, vere palatinus" ("the most famous Marquis, truly a paladin").

A rare exception to this is the epic poem Cœur de Lion (1822), by Eleanor Anne Porden, in which he is depicted as a tragic Byronic hero.

An entirely fictionalised, unambiguously wicked version of Conrad appears in Walter Scott's The Talisman, misspelt as 'Conrade of Montserrat' (the novelist apparently misreading 'f' as a long 's' in his sources) and described as a "marmoset" and "popinjay".

These works reflect the later Renaissance and Gothic novel cultural/ethnic stereotype of the 'Machiavellian' Italian: corrupt, scheming, dandified, not averse to poisoning, even (as in Shelby's novel) sexually sadistic.

In contrast, the Russian-born French novelist Zoé Oldenbourg gives him a more positive but fleeting cameo role— proud, strong, and as handsome as Choniates described him—in her 1946 novel Argile et Cendres (Clay and Ashes, published in English as The World Is Not Enough in 1948).

In Cecil B. de Mille's 1935 film The Crusades, he is played by Joseph Schildkraut as a scheming traitor, plotting King Richard's death with Prince John in England at a time when he was actually already defending Tyre.

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's 1963 film Al Nasser Salah Ad-Din also shows Scott's influence in its hostility towards Conrad (played by Mahmoud El-Meliguy) and Philip, while depicting Richard more favourably.

In painting and drawing, Conrad figures in a small contemporary manuscript sketch of his ship sailing to Tyre in the Annals of Genoa, and various illustrations to Scott's The Talisman.

There is an imaginary portrait of him, c. 1843, by François-Édouard Picot for the Salles des Croisades at Versailles: it depicts him as a handsome, rather pensive man in his forties, wearing a coronet and fanciful pseudo-medieval costume.