God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  However, royal power was neither autocratic nor absolute. Baldwin I’s pious but equally energetic successor, Baldwin II, sustained his authority at a price. Formal complaints about his regency in Antioch in 1119 were voiced by the Jerusalem nobility. At the Council of Nablus in 1120, the king and secular lords relinquished control over ecclesiastical tithes and accepted a range of penalties for breaches of the law, sexual misconduct and miscegenation. By the end of his reign, the royal habit of disposing of the inheritance of fiefs at will rather than by customary rules had begun to give way to a presumption of hereditary succession, often, given the rapid extinction rates of families in the direct male line, widely interpreted. Nonetheless the crown retained considerable authority. The cohesion of the kingdom survived Baldwin II’s captivity in Aleppo (1123–4), affairs being conducted by his constable and the patriarch, including the important capture of Tyre. More generally, moves towards seigneurial hereditary succession were to be expected in the generation after the initial conquest: England after 1066 and Sicily after 1092 provided parallels. Confiscations continued for contumacious malcontents. At no time before the fall of the kingdom in 1187 were kings unable to interfere in the composition and structure of fiefs or in the disposition of unmarried heiresses. So far from consolidating territorial or jurisdictional power, many of the chief vassals – perhaps fewer that a dozen families – subdivided their fiefs or granted stretches of them to religious houses or military orders. Legally, Baldwin II managed to insist on the penalty of confiscation for prescribed offences against his rights and position both as feudal overlord and king (the Establissment dou roi Baudoin), although it is uncertain whether conviction and punishment lay with the king or trial in the Haute Cour. In practice, it probably made little difference as no monarch could proceed without the support of his barons. In 1133/4 Hugh count of Jaffa rebelled against King Fulk. By refusing to appear to answer in court charges and then inviting armed help from the Muslim garrison at Ascalon, Hugh’s treason was not in doubt, even to his own vassals. Yet, instead of having his fiefs confiscated, he was exiled for three years with the promise of subsequent restoration of his property. Politics, in this case Fulk’s unpopularity and baronial sympathy for Hugh, prevailed over law.35

  The case of Hugh of Jaffa arose as a consequence of the personal and dynastic, not constitutional, consequences of kingship. The main weakness of the regime created by Baldwin I lay in the chance circumstances of succession, which would have undermined any Latin monarchy of the time. Baldwin I left no children. He had repudiated his second wife, possibly on the spurious grounds of her having been raped by a Muslim. His bigamous marriage to Adelisa of Sicily (1113–16), which had offered the prospect of a Sicilian succession, ended in divorce and a promise from Baldwin to his barons not to remarry. On his death in 1118, a powerful faction in his household invited Baldwin’s elder brother, Eustace of Boulogne, to succeed but, by the time he reached Italy, news came that a rival group had installed Baldwin of Le Bourcq as king. Even so, Baldwin II’s position was only formally recognized in 1119 by coronation at Bethlehem. Pons of Tripoli had to be forced to acknowledge his overlordship in 1122. During Baldwin II’s captivity (1123–4), supporters of the house of Boulogne toyed with replacing him with Charles count of Flanders. As late as 1128, the pope had to declare Baldwin’s legitimacy.36

  Happily married, Baldwin II fathered only daughters. To secure his dynasty, he arranged for the eldest, Melisende, to marry Fulk V count of Anjou. A veteran pilgrim from 1120, Fulk arrived in Jerusalem in 1129 possessed of very grand western connections. In 1128, he had arranged the marriage of his son Geoffrey to Matilda, only surviving legitimate child and heiress of Henry I of England and his Anglo-French dominions. Henry’s interest in the east was further demonstrated when a member of his household, Raymond of Poitiers, was recruited as prince of Antioch in 1133 (although he only reached Syria in 1136). As with Henry I’s dispositions for his throne, Baldwin insisted on the rights of his daughter to the succession. However, Fulk expected to become king. In 1131, on his deathbed, Baldwin II complicated matters further by associating his infant grandson, later Baldwin III, as well as Melisende and Fulk in the succession, again echoing Henry I’s insistence on the ultimate inheritance by his grandson, the future Henry II. As in 1118, dynastic interests created political feuds, the rights of Melisende becoming identified with those of the existing baronage resentful of the parvenu Fulk. Relations cannot have been eased by Fulk’s genuine or affected amnesia for people’s names or faces, even among his household and protégés, a distinctly unsettling trait, deliberate or not, in a political universe revolving round personal contact and favour.37

  Given the lack of male heirs, the dynastic issue mattered. In 1118, a western stranger was almost imposed on Jerusalem. It occurred in Tripoli in 1109 and Antioch in 1136. In 1131, the Angevin connection in Jerusalem proved double-edged. While securing immediate stability, potentially it provided claims for Fulk’s European heirs, who also happened to be the ruling dynasty of the greatest empire in western Europe. The circumstances of 1118 and 1131 in fact left a number of other western ruling families – such as Boulogne, Blois and Flanders – with dynastic interests in the east, especially as Melisende’s succession had confirmed the cognatic principle of inheritance (the rights of any relative, male or female, to inherit, not just males in the male line). The protection of Baldwin’s dynasty exerted a powerful influence. It was of practical as well as symbolic importance that, as was later reported, Melisende was crowned and consecrated beside Fulk in 1131, now in the church of the Holy Sepulchre not, as previously, in Bethlehem.38 Patronage was at stake as much as who ruled. Baldwin II’s accession in 1118 and his regime can be seen as depending on a close family nexus of his own kin, whose power the invitation to Fulk was designed to protect by excluding existing rivals. Fulk’s subsequent confrontation with Hugh of Jaffa, prominent in Baldwin II’s own Rethel/Montlhéry family mafia, reflected his desire for independence and his own men, thereby challenging the vested interests of Hugh and Melisende’s other relatives.39 Despite exiling Hugh, Fulk was forced to share authority with Melisende, as Baldwin II intended.

  Although this ensured a smooth inheritance for Baldwin III on his father’s death in 1143, another victim of the medieval nobleman’s obsession with hunting, Melisende’s autonomous power created further tensions. In contrast with the unconsecrated Matilda of England, who relinquished her claims on her son’s majority, Queen Melisende continued to insist on her rights long after Baldwin III was old enough to wield power. His mother built up her own administration and support, including her cousin Manasses of Hierges, constable since 1143, and her second son Amalric. It took Baldwin’s victory in a civil war in 1152 to save the integrity of the kingdom.

  Factional instability, punctuated by political assassination, continued. Baldwin III died young, without children, in 1163. His brother Amalric succeeded only after putting aside a possibly bigamous marriage. His descendants loaded the rules of inheritance to breaking. Baldwin IV was a leper; his nephew Baldwin V a sickly child of nine; his sister Sybil married an unpopular foreigner, Guy of Lusignan, whom she spatchcocked into the kingship in a manner wholly unlike Baldwin II’s careful arrangements. Only in extremis, in 1184–5, with the leper king dying, his child-heir weak, his sister and brother-in-law in disgrace and his more distant eastern relatives eyeing up the royal prize lasciviously, did some in Jerusalem appear willing to contemplate a change of dynasty.40 The tenacity with which the ailing royal line of Jerusalem clung to power and respect owed much to the baronage. In 1163, while forcing Amalric to annul his marriage to Agnes of Courtenay, publicly on the grounds of consanguinity but probably because she was a bigamist, the barons and prelates illogically confirmed their children as legitimate. The alternatives – the European Angevin sons of Henry II of England, the count of Flanders, great-nephew of Baldwin I and Godfrey of Bouillon, or, more credibly, the descendants of Queen Melisende’s sisters, Raymond III of Tripoli or Bo
hemund III of Antioch – offered greater prospects of untoward intrusion into the familiar political round. After all, the Jerusalem barons could describe Amalric, a former count of Jaffa-Ascalon, as ‘one of us’.

  The sleaziness of Jerusalem politics was not new, with leading politicians subject to accusations of sexual impropriety and risking the murderer’s knife; Hugh of Jaffa survived in 1134; the unscrupulous Miles of Plancy, accused of usurping power in the early days of the minor Baldwin IV, was not so lucky in 1174. To support this crumbling edifice, a redeeming myth of the special moral virtue of the dynasty appeared. The 1180s Historia of William of Tyre, Jerusalem-born, protégé of Amalric I, tutor to Baldwin IV, who may well have seen King Fulk in person, promoted an image of an almost sacred dynasty descended from the saintly Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin I and Baldwin II, the unimpeachable veterans of the First Crusade.41 By a sleight of literary skill, William argued for the legitimacy of Baldwin II’s succession even while admitting it breached immutable laws of inheritance. Their descent from Baldwin II was central to William’s portrayal of the later kings. Melisende, who transmitted Baldwin’s blood to her successors, assumed a pivotal position. Instead of the disruptive, ambitious and, some might argue, graspingly selfish, unsuccessful political menace of history, Melisende emerged from William’s obituary of her as ruling wisely with her husband and son, a fount of active wisdom. As a dynastic progenitor, Fulk receded into oblivion, along with his awkwardly powerful (and healthy) western relatives. Fittingly, the carved ivory cover of the famous psalter probably written for Melisende in Jerusalem c.1135 shows scenes of the life of King David, the model of divinely inspired monarchy and of kings in the Holy City.42

  All political systems require defining ideas to provide identity and purpose, whether related to reality or not. The ideology of kingship in Jerusalem centred on the person of the king, as the monarchy had been an almost parthenogenic creation. In practice the result of political opportunism and military conquest, in description the consequence of especial divine favour, the Jerusalem kingship existed without any prior tradition or contemporary authority outside the practical choices of worried men in Jerusalem in 1099 and 1100. Only subsequently did the papacy acknowledge its existence. The monarchy’s survival and flourishing supplied its own legitimacy, a unique status among the new Christian monarchies of the time, all the rest of which sought the imprimatur of popes or emperors, from Hungary and Poland in the tenth and eleventh centuries to Armenia and Cyprus in the twelfth. Politically, legally and militarily, the importance of the kingship, if only to legitimize the ambitions of the baronage, remained conspicuous.

  The way Baldwin IV, who died in 1185 aged only twenty-four, was portrayed by his old tutor William of Tyre reinforces this image. William’s Baldwin overcame his leprosy to provide vigorous political and military leadership almost to the end of his life of a quality that would have been admirable in a ruler of maturity and health. William wrote of Baldwin’s effective dealings with his nobles and household and of his battlefield leadership, even when carried in a litter. The portrait was unashamedly and deliberately heroic, perhaps to counter the damaging conclusions of those who saw in the king’s leprosy, in Pope Alexander III’s pointed words, ‘a just judgement of God’.43 Yet the truth was almost certainly less glamorous. Throughout the reign administration and military command were delegated. Baldwin undoubtedly appeared in council chamber and battle. Yet his disease prevented him from fighting, his experiences of horses bolting under him and being carried on a soldier’s back or in a litter suggesting his presence in council and war, though astonishingly courageous, physically humiliating and painful, was iconic rather than active. Even William of Tyre admitted that some of Baldwin’s most fateful decisions were due to the influence on a sick man of his mother, Agnes, and her brother, Joscelin III, titular count of Edessa and seneschal of Jerusalem.44 The king was necessary to the cohesion of the political process. Repeatedly Baldwin’s attempts to retire failed as successive schemes for regents or replacements foundered. The king was indispensable even if only as a tragic figurehead.

  The reign of Baldwin IV demonstrated how the polity of Latin Jerusalem had developed since the desperate pioneer days of 1099–1102. Kings were still expected to be great warriors. Guy of Lusignan’s failure to engage Saladin in 1183 cost him the regency.45 However, by then the kingship no longer comprised the qualities of a bandit chief. Although politics not law determined relations between monarch and baron, these relations were increasingly described in legislative acts such as the assise sur la ligece. In common with the rest of western Christendom, royal, seigneurial and ecclesiastical administration adopted an increasingly bureaucratic mode, as in the use of written charters to record property transactions, even if the Jerusalem royal chancery remained relatively rudimentary, especially in comparison with contemporary western practices. The baronage of the kingdom assumed greater corporate identity whilst at the same time finding it harder to sustain its territorial power intact as fiefs were subdivided, partitioned, granted away or sold off. One excuse for the bitter court feuding of the 1170s and 1180s lay in the authority and patronage of the crown, not its decadence; there was something to fight for. The kingdom was not falling apart, even if a decline in resources forced the crown to appeal for a war tax in 1183. Yet this tax was granted by a national, representative assembly and conducted after a national census, indications of institutional sophistication.46 Above all sat an ideology of rule forged from the regime’s definition of itself as a garrison state protecting the Holy Places, in trust for Christendom.

  7

  East is East and East is West: Outremer in the Twelfth Century

  There is no more haunting passage in contemporary writing on the crusades than William of Tyre’s description of the young Baldwin IV, the blue-eyed (to hostile Arabic scrutiny) young prince of Jerusalem whose youthful promise turned into despair at the discovery of his leprosy. The pain of the account comes from personal involvement. William, then archdeacon of Tyre, was Baldwin’s tutor; it was in his household that the first symptoms appeared. William continued to chronicle the life of his pupil, who succeeded to the throne in 1174 aged thirteen and died in 1185, a ravaged, blind, crippled wreck only twenty-four. It was as a hero of Christendom, struggling and usually triumphing for the Faith against the enormous odds of the growing power of the infidel and his own disease that Baldwin was depicted. Yet this doomed child’s doctor, Abu Sulayman Da’ud, a native Syrian Christian born – like the Latin William of Tyre – in Jerusalem, had worked for the Fatimids in Egypt before being hired in the late 1160s by Baldwin’s father, Amalric I, an enthusiast for Arabic medicine, as was his predecessor Baldwin III. One of Abu Sulayman’s sons successfully taught Prince Baldwin to ride; another succeeded his father as Amalric’s physician. After 1187, the family enlisted in the service of Saladin, the enemy against whom Baldwin IV had expended so much of his wasting energy.1

  In common with other Levantine princelings, Baldwin grew up in a cosmopolitan court; his tutor steeped in Latin culture and learning, enhanced by a twenty-year stay in western Europe studying at Paris, Orleans and Bologna; his doctor and riding-instructor Syrians with experience of working for Muslim rulers; his stepmother, Amalric I’s second wife Maria Comnena, a Byzantine Greek. However, the image the regime wished to portray through its own rhetoric, one which received elaborate and forceful corroboration from the pen of William of Tyre himself, remained that of the frontier myth, the Latin rulers in Palestine and Syria as heirs of the legendary Christian heroes of the First Crusade, the defenders of the Faith in God’s own land, a myth excluding temporal realities, political compromises and social exchange. While demonstrating the nature of the Latin presence in Outremer as one of a number of communities at once cooperating, competing and coercing, William sought to explain past success and current weakness according to a two-dimensional myth of conquest and battle, not least because his audience in western Europe expected it and his eastern compatriots unders
tood its place in such a constructed justification for their existence. Yet myth it was and remains. Much of the twelfth-century kingdom of Jerusalem for most of the time did not resemble a military frontier, nor did its social and economic and hence legal and political arrangements follow crudely racist or supremacist ideology. Despite closer frontiers with aggressive Turks, similar conditions prevailed in the northern enclaves. The Latins dominated the regions they had conquered, imposing a hierarchy of power with themselves at the apex. Yet their community was isolated neither in city nor countryside, the settlers not withdrawn from the means of their survival. The livelihood of the Latin settlers and rulers depended on using, not ignoring, their surroundings and neighbours. In the absence of overcrowding, after the military phase of conquest, exploitation of resources did not necessarily or sensibly entail systematic persecution or discrimination of other communities. Westerners came east to live for Christ just as enthusiastically as to die for Him. As the assises (laws) of Jerusalem noted with reference to market courts where both Latins and Syrians comprised the jurors, witnesses were permitted to swear oaths on their respective holy books, Christians on the Gospels, Jews and Samaritans on the Torah, and Muslims on the Koran, ‘because be they Syrians or Greeks or Jews or Samaritans or Nestorians or Saracens, they are also men like the Franks’.2 The great hospital in Jerusalem run by the Order of St John, accommodating many hundreds of sick at any one time, was committed to treating anybody regardless of race or religion; only lepers were excluded, on obvious medical grounds.