Copyright © 2012 Malcolm Barber
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barber, Malcolm
The crusader states/Malcolm Barber.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-300-11312-9 (cl : alk. paper)
1. Latin Orient—History. 2. Crusades. 3. Jerusalem—History—Latin Kingdom, 1099–1244. 4. Christianity and other religions—Islam. 5. Civilization, Medieval. I. Title.
D182.B37 2012
956’.014—dc23
2012009776
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Dominic, Sam, Rhys, Calum and Cieran
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1 The Expedition to Jerusalem
2 Syria and Palestine
3 The First Settlers
4 The Origins of the Latin States
5 The Military, Institutional and Ecclesiastical Framework
6 Antioch and Jerusalem
7 The Second Generation
8 The Zengid Threat
9 The Frankish Imprint
10 King Amalric
11 The Disintegration of the Crusader States
12 The Battle of Hattin and its Consequences
13 The Third Crusade
Conclusion
Chronology
Abbreviations
Notes
Further Reading
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Plates
1 The Ascension of Christ. The tympanum of the church of Montceaux-L'Étoile (Saône-et-Loire), early twelfth century. Reproduced by permission of Auguste Allemand.
2 Castle of Saone, Nosairi Mountains. Reproduced by permission of the Institut Française d'Archéologie, Beirut.
3 Mount Tabor. Reproduced by permission of Richard Cleave.
4 Main street of the Roman city of Jerash, Gilead Hills. Author's photograph.
5 St George's Monastery, Choziba. Author's photograph.
6 Ornamental initial P from a sacramentary produced by the Scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, 1129–30. Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, Ms. McClean 49, reproduced by permission of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
7 The Melisende Psalter, front cover, scenes from the life of David, c.1135. BL, Egerton 1139, reproduced by permission of the British Library.
8 The Melisende Psalter, the Descent from the Cross, c.1135. BL, Egerton 1139, reproduced by permission of the British Library.
9 Full page miniature of St John, from the Gospel of St John, produced by the Scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, 1140s. BN, Ms. Latin 9396, reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
10 Aqua Bella, eastern side. Author's photograph.
11 Coins issued by King Baldwin III, c.1152 and King Amalric, c.1163–74. Reproduced by permission of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
12 The castle at Jacob's Ford, on the Jordan River. Reproduced by permission of Duby Tal and Moni Harmati, Albatross, Tel Aviv.
13 Castle of Belvoir, Galilee. Reproduced by permission of B. Boas.
14 Castle of Kerak in Moab. Reproduced by permisison of Richard Cleave.
15 The Virgin leading an apostle through the perils of Hell. Capital from the shrine-grotto of the church of the Annunciation, Nazareth. Reproduced by permission of Pantheon, Florence.
Maps and Plans
1 The Latin patriarchate of Antioch. B. Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States. The Secular Church, London: Variorum, 1980, p. 393.
2 The Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem. B. Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States. The Secular Church, London: Variorum, 1980, p. 394.
3 The Near East in the twelfth century.
4 Syria and Palestine.
5 Plan of Antioch. G. Downey, A History of Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conquest, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961, no. 11.
6 The road from Jerusalem to the Jordan in the twelfth century. D. Pringle, ‘Templar Castles on the Road to the Jordan’, in The Military Orders. Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick, ed. M. Barber, London: Variorum, 1994, p. 149.
7 The kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century.
8 Northern Syria in the twelfth century. Adapted from M. Amouroux-Mourad, Le Comté d'Édesse, 1098–1150, Paris: Bibliothèque archéologique et historique d'Institut français d'archéologie du Proche-Orient, 1988.
9 The county of Edessa in the first half of the twelfth century. Adapted from The Crusades: An Encyclopedia, ed. A. V. Murray, vol. 2, Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2006, p. 381.
10 The county of Tripoli in the twelfth century. Adapted from J. Richard, Le Comté de Tripoli sous la dynastie toulousaine (1102–1187), Paris: Geuthner, 1945.
11 Losses of territory in the principality of Antioch after the battles of Harran (1104) and the Field of Blood (1119). T. Asbridge, 'The significance and causes of the battle of the Field of Blood’, Journal of Medieval History, 23 (1997), pp. 304–5 (published by Elsevier Science Ltd).
12 The abbey of St Lazarus at Bethany, showing lower and upper levels. D. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. A Corpus, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, nos. 59, 60, pp. 128–9.
13 Plan of Jerusalem in the twelfth century. A. Boas, Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades. Society, Landscape and art in the Holy City under Frankish Rule, London: Routledge, 2001, p. xvi.
14 Plan of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. D. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. A Corpus, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, no. 283, p. 39.
15 Plan of the Hospitaller area (the Muristan), Jerusalem, showing basement level. D. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. A Corpus, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, no. 322, p. 196.
16 The village of Magna Mahumeria, al-Bira: location and plan. D. Pringle, ‘Magna Mahumeria (al-Bra): the Archaeology of a Frankish New Town in Palestine’, in Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. W. Edbury, Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1985, pp. 148, 150.
17 Egypt in the 1160s.
18 The location of the battles of the Spring of the Cresson and of Hattin, 1187. B. Z. Kedar, ‘The Battle of Hattin Revisited’, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar, Jerusalem and London: Israel Exploration Society and Variorum, 1992, between pp. 192 and 193.
19 Plan of Tyre. D. Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. A Corpus, vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 179.
20 The campaigns of Saladin and his commanders, June–October 1188. Adapted from P. Deschamps, Les Châteaux des Croisés en Terre-Sainte, vol. 3, La Défense du Comté de Tripoli et de la principauté d'Antioche. Bibliothèque archéoloque et historique, 90, Paris: Geuthner, 1973, p. 128.
21 The siege of Acre, 1189–91. Adapted from J. Prawer, Histoire Royaume de Jérusalem, vol. 2, Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Sci
entifique, 1970, p. 47.
Figures
1 The secular and ecclesiastical rulers of the Crusader States in the twelfth century.
2 The descendants of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem.
Preface
THIS is a book about the history of Palestine and Syria in the twelfth century. In 1097, these lands felt the first effects of a series of western invasions that have since become known as the crusades, introducing yet another new element into the complex politics and culture of the region. In one sense my approach has been quite orthodox since I have largely maintained a chronological structure, which necessarily means a relatively continuous narrative. However, less conventionally, within that structure I have tried to incorporate as many aspects of twelfth-century life as possible, rather than dividing the book into a series of separate thematic chapters. Political and military narrative inevitably forces itself upon anybody who reads the sources in any depth, but at the same time the Latins built castles, churches, monasteries, city walls, houses, both urban and rural, mills and harbours, they cultivated the soil and created new settlements, they developed industrial processes for products like sugar, they sculpted, painted, and wrote and copied manuscripts, and they traded with the entire known world. The aim, therefore, is to try to show this society as an integrated whole.
My deepest thanks go to those who have had such a profound influence upon the study of this subject in the last sixty years, whose work I have tried to absorb both through their publications and through personal contact. The bibliography and notes reflect this, especially in their references to Jaroslav Folda, Bernard Hamilton, Rudolf Hiestand, Beni Kedar, Hans Mayer, Joshua Prawer, Jean Richard and Jonathan Riley-Smith. Moreover, I am most grateful for the generous help received in many different ways from Elizabeth Barber, Keith Bate, Peter Edbury, Norman Housley, Nikolas Jaspert, Rachael Lonsdale, Heather McCallum, Sophia Menache, Piers Mitchell, Alan Murray, Helen Nicholson, Denys Pringle and Rita Tyler.
1 The Ascension of Christ. The tympanum of the church of Montceaux-L'Etoile (Saône-et-Loire). The theme is derived from Acts 1: 9–11, when the appearances of Christ after the Resurrection are finally concluded with the ascent into Heaven. On the lintel the Virgin Mary and the Apostles stare upwards and two angels point to the mandorla in which Christ is encompassed. Sculpture on local churches such as those of the Brionnais would have been familiar to those contemplating pilgrimage and crusade.
2 Castle of Saone, seen from the west. The castle is built on a spur formed by two water-courses in the Nosairi Mountains about fifteen miles north-east of Latakia. It is divided into two enceintes, of which the upper, north-eastern end is the more heavily fortified. Here the Franks greatly strengthened the defences of what was primarily a Byzantine castle, built after its capture by Emperor John Tzimisces in 975.
3 Mount Tabor rises 500 metres above the plain of Jezreel, making it the most striking physical feature of the area. From the mid-fourth century, it was identified as the high mountain described as the place of the Transfiguration in Matthew 17: 1–8. A Byzantine church and associated buildings were situated there when the crusaders first arrived and Tancred established a Benedictine community soon after the fall of Jerusalem in July 1099. Although this was destroyed in 1113 it was restored soon after and survived until raided by Saladin's forces in June 1187.
4 Roman Jerash was an impressive example of the achievements of past civilisations. Although it was not occupied permanently by the Franks, it was certainly known to them, for King Baldwin II reached it in 1121.
5 St George's Monastery, Choziba, stands on the north side of the road to Jericho and the place of Christ's baptism in the River Jordan, an event recorded in the first three gospels. This was an important pilgrimage route, most of which was through rocky desert. By the second half of the twelfth century it was protected by Templar forts.
6 Ornamental initial P from a sacramentary produced by the scriptorium of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, 1128–30. The scriptorium was established by the 1120s and capable of producing required liturgical books from that time. This page is from the earliest surviving example.
7 Melisende's Psalter, c.1135. It has ivory covers, the front of which shows the life of King David together with the traditional battles between the Virtues and the Vices.
8 Melisende's Psalter contains 24 New Testament scenes. This example shows the Descent from the Cross.
9 Full page miniature of St John, from the Gospel of St John, produced by the scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre in the 1140s.
10 Aqua Bella, eastern side. This was part of a series of associated Hospitaller buildings in the vicinity of the road between Jerusalem and Ramla. The Hospitaller estates in the area were protected by the castle of Belmont. The function of Aqua Bella is not known for certain, but it was probably an infirmary of some kind.
11 Billon deniers issued by King Baldwin III (top), c.1152, and by King Amalric (bottom), c.1163–4. Amalric recoined his deniers and oboles, reissuing them with a new design.
12 The site of Chastellet at Jacob's Ford on the Upper Jordan situated between Lake Huleh and the Sea of Galilee. The unfinished castle was destroyed by Saladin in August 1179.
13 Castle of Belvoir, Galilee. The castle is set high above the Jordan valley, eight miles south of the Sea of Galilee. It was bought by the Hospitallers in 1168 and during the 1170s they rebuilt it in concentric form. Its defences were strong enough to defy Saladin's besiegers until January 1189, eighteen months after the defeat at Hattin.
14 The castle of Kerak in Moab lies ten miles to the east of the southern end of the Dead Sea. It was refortified by Pagan the Butler and his successors from 1142 onwards. Despite his best efforts, Saladin was unable to overcome it and it did not fall until October or November 1188, when, isolated by the sultan's other conquests, its defenders were starved out.
15 Capital from the church of the Annunciation at Nazareth. This is one of five capitals intended for the shrine-grotto inside the church, which was believed to have been the childhood home of Christ. It would probably have been attached to the arcading of the lower storey. Here, the Virgin leads an apostle through the perils of Hell, all the while assailed by demons brandishing weapons.
Introduction
ON 18 October 1191, in the course of extended negotiations with Saladin, King Richard I of England instructed his envoy as follows:
You will greet him and say, ‘The Muslims and the Franks are done for. The land is ruined, ruined utterly at the hands of both sides. Property and lives on both sides are destroyed. This matter has received its due. All we have to talk about is Jerusalem, the Holy Cross and these lands. Now Jerusalem is the centre of our worship which we shall never renounce, even if there were only one of us left. As for these lands, let there be restored to us what is this side of the Jordan. The Holy Cross, that is a piece of wood that has no value for you, but is important for us. Let the sultan bestow it upon us. Then we can make peace and have rest from this constant hardship.’
After the sultan had read this message, he summoned the leading men of his council and consulted them about what to reply. What the sultan decided to say in reply was:
Jerusalem is ours as much as it is yours. Indeed, for us it is greater than it is for you, for it is where our Prophet came on his Night Journey and the gathering place of the angels. Let not the king imagine that we shall give it up, for we are unable to breathe a word of that amongst the Muslims. As for the land, it is also ours originally. Your conquest of it was an unexpected accident due to the weakness of the Muslims there at that time. While the war continues God has not enabled you to build up one stone there. From the lands in our hands we, thanks be to God, feed on the produce and draw our benefit. The destruction of the Holy Cross would in our eyes be a great offering to God, but the only reason we are not permitted to go that far is that some more useful benefit might accrue to Islam.1
This exchange was recorded by Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, who was qadi (judge) of the army un
der Salah al-Din Yusuf, or Saladin, between 1188 and 1193. Saladin was the most successful proponent of the jihad in the twelfth century, for it was for the cause of Islam that he had made himself ruler of Egypt, Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul, and Ibn Shaddad makes no attempt to hide his admiration for him. Nevertheless, Ibn Shaddad was no credulous hagiographer, for he remained close to the centre of power throughout, and his account of those years offers an invaluable insight into Saladin's thinking. An abiding theme of the later part of the narrative is the negotiations between King Richard I and Saladin, negotiations impelled both by mutual exhaustion and by the inability of either side to deal a decisive blow. When Richard finally sailed away from Acre in October 1192, he left an agreement for a three-year truce and a division of territories between what Ibn Shaddad calls the Uplands and the Coast, in which the Muslims retained Jerusalem, but the Christians were granted visitation rights to the holy places.
As Ibn Shaddad shows, this was not a satisfactory outcome for either side. The armies of the First Crusade had wrested Jerusalem from the control of the Fatimids of Egypt in July 1099, and had established a hegemony over the holy places in Palestine that had lasted for nearly a century. Four viable states had been created, centred on Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli and Jerusalem, and a constant stream of crusaders, legates, pilgrims, mercenaries and merchants had flowed into the land. Although Edessa had been lost to Zengi, atabeg of Mosul, in 1144, and the Second Crusade had failed in its attempt to capture Damascus, the Latins of the East did not lose confidence, for, during the 1160s, determined efforts were made to conquer Egypt. Ultimately these attempts were unsuccessful, mainly because they had been opposed by Shirkuh and his nephew, Saladin, two members of a Kurdish family in the employ of Nur al-Din, son of Zengi and ruler of Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus. They had prevented Amalric, king of Jerusalem, from extending his power into the Nile Delta, and, after the deaths of Nur al-Din and Amalric in 1174, Saladin had set about creating an empire that united the Muslim lands of Egypt and Syria. In July 1187, he won a great victory over the Christians on the hillside of Hattin within sight of the Sea of Galilee, and in the following months cut a swathe through the crusader states so that, by the end of the year, the only major cities left in Christian hands were Tyre, Tripoli and Antioch. The greatest prize was the city of Jerusalem, captured on 2 October, enabling him to purge the city of ‘Christian pollution’ and the Muslims once more to attend Friday prayers in the al-Aqsa mosque. Saladin now seemed to be on the verge of fulfilling his plans, but the events of 1190 and 1191 prevented their realisation. Waves of crusaders came from the West and their efforts culminated in the recapture of Acre in June 1191, soon followed by Richard I's victory in the battle of Arsuf in September. The truce of 1192 therefore represented a major diminution of Saladin's ambitions, and his death only a few months later, in March 1193, meant that he was unable to take advantage of Richard's departure.
The Crusader States Page 1
