JERUSALEM
For a kingdom whose adherents regarded it as founded by God, the kingdom of Jerusalem exhibited disappointing fragility and disunity. It was never entirely free from the menace of invasion; civil war erupted or was threatened in 1133–4, 1152, 1182 and 1186. Its rulers, including a bigamist homosexual and another who married a bigamous wife, conspicuously failed to produce healthy male heirs. The dynastic line faltered alarmingly and damagingly. Actively disputed in 1100, 1118, 1163 and 1186, no succession went entirely uncontested, although much the same could be said of twelfth-century England. Only twice in eighty-eight years did son succeed father, in 1143 and 1174. On both occasions the heir was a minor, on the second he proved to be a leper as well. Minors inherited on three occasions. Inevitably, factional jostling and feuding marked the regime, the intimacy of political action in and around the royal court compounded by the small geographical extent of the kingdom and the lack of economic or fiscal necessity for barons to spend time of their estates. Visiting western grandees found the local political scene poisonously rebarbative and introspective.26 Jerusalemites gained a reputation in the west, certainly from the Second Crusade, for shiftiness and decadence, in contrast to Arabic contemporaries, who noted their bellicose nature and lack of personal hygiene. Yet Jerusalem in the twelfth century remained the emotional, political and strategic heart of Outremer. Its ideology infused by militant Christianity; its rulers thoroughly acculturated to the demands of the east, four of them – Baldwin I, II, III and Amalric – marrying Armenian or Greek princesses; its fate an issue for western rulers no less than churchmen, pilgrims, settlers and crusaders, its history was already a matter of epic and legend.27 It says much for the material foundations of the kingdom that this was so.
When Godfrey of Bouillon died in Jerusalem on 18 July 1100, only quick action by his followers prevented the newly installed patriarch, the former papal legate Daimbert of Pisa, from asserting his claims to ecclesiastical rule over the tiny enclave in Judea.28 Desperate for military aid, the previous December Godfrey had agreed to be invested with Jerusalem by Damibert, who had just arrived in the Holy City with his ally Bohemund and Baldwin of Edessa to fulfil their vows. Armed with the power of his Pisan entourage and wealth, Daimbert had subsequently forced Godfrey to concede to him ownership of Jerusalem and Jaffa, with the duke retaining only a life interest. The departure of the Pisan fleet and the arrival of a Venetian one strengthened Godfrey’s hand before he died. Afterwards, the fortuitous absence of Daimbert from Jerusalem allowed the duke’s military household to launch a coup d’état, seizing the Citadel and sending urgent messages to Godfrey’s brother, Baldwin of Edessa, to assume the inheritance. On this news, Daimbert and Tancred, fresh from conquering Galilee and Haifa and long an enemy of Baldwin, looked to invite Bohemund to come south, but he had left Antioch to campaign in the north, where he was captured by the Danishmends in August. In the event, Baldwin had to secure Antioch before in October leaving Edessa in the hands of his cousin, Baldwin of Le Bourcq, to march south. Defeating a Damascene army at the Dog river, Baldwin reached Jerusalem in November. With Tancred withdrawing to Galilee, then assuming the regency of Antioch in the new year, Daimbert was compelled to submit. Whereas Godfrey merely continued with his own title of duke and allowed others to describe him as the Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, with Baldwin, an educated lapsed cleric himself, no equivocation over titles or authority was permitted. On Christmas Day 1100, tactfully perhaps, pointedly certainly, in the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem rather than in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, Baldwin was crowned by Daimbert as, in his later phrase, ‘king of the Latins in Jerusalem’.29
Baldwin of Boulogne created the kingdom of Jerusalem. Always a man on the make, the youngest son of Eustace II of Boulogne, originally destined for the church, Baldwin abandoned the cloth in search of secular success, although all his life maintaining a slightly ecclesiastical air in dress and manner.30 Married three times for worldly advancement, once bigamously, he was probably homosexual, one of his more exotic intimates being a converted Muslim who later tried to betray him during the siege of Sidon in 1110. Apparently they were inseparable, even while the king relieved himself.31 Failing to secure a niche in the lucrative Anglo-Norman nobility through his first marriage to Godechilde of Tosni, who died at Marasch in 1097, Baldwin used the First Crusade to better his status. He matched boldness with a single-minded concentration on personal advancement, in Cilicia in 1097, where he enlisted Muslim assistance to get the better of Tancred, and at Edessa in 1098, when he showed no compunction in sacrificing his patron Thoros. His second marriage, to the Armenian Arda, served a similar function to his first, providing Baldwin with a political stake of his own. Summoned to rule Jerusalem, he proved an outstanding military leader and, unlike his somewhat supine brother Godfrey, a cunning, clear-headed politician. Constant aggression towards his neighbours, a policy of strategic conquest, and the firm imposition of royal authority over his lay and ecclesiastical vassals formed the basis of successful kingship. Not even his own chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, claimed Baldwin was pious, nor did his later eulogists. Instead Baldwin was his people’s ‘shield, strength and support; their right arm; the terror of his enemies’.32
The early years of the reign saw the conquest of the coastal ports interrupted by some desperate defence against Egyptian invasions in 1101 and 1105, on which the survival of the kingdom depended. Damascus, the army of which Baldwin had defeated on his way south in 1100, stood aloof, not wishing to assist a Fatimid reconquest of Palestine. However, as Frankish success increasingly denied them free access to the coast, the Damascenes contested the fortification of Galilee by Baldwin’s vassals and sought allies from Iraq. Between 1109 and 1115, Baldwin’s attention was regularly occupied in the north, in 1109 settling the squabbles between Antioch, Edessa and Tripoli and thereafter providing military assistance against repeated attacks from Mosul. In 1113 Mawdud of Mosul, in alliance with Damascus, attacked Palestine, defeating Baldwin at es-Sinnabra in Galilee but failing to capture any towns or fortresses. Mawdud’s murder by Assassins the same year produced a diplomatic rapprochement with Tughtegin of Damascus, who, as fearful of Seljuk domination as of Fatimid, reckoned the Franks served a useful purpose in balancing power in the region. With northern pressure reduced, Baldwin realized that his kingdom’s security would be enhanced by extending his influence over the Bedouin and the desert trade routes between Egypt and Syria. Twice reconnotring the region south of the Dead Sea in 1100 and 1107, in 1115 and 1116 he imposed Frankish authority east of the Wadi Araba, penetrating to Petra and south to the Gulf of Aqaba. Two castles were built, at Montréal (Shawbak) in Edom and Li Vaux Moise, near Petra, although in the 1140s the centre of what became known as the lordship of Oultrejourdain was transferred north to Kerak in Moab, closer to the eastern shore of the Dead Sea and, on a clear day, within sight of the Mount of Olives. These forts allowed the Franks to tax commerce and the pilgrim traffic on the road from Syria to Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz and to impede hostile militiary activity. However, aggression from Egypt via Ascalon persisted, threatening Jerusalem (in 1113) and Jaffa (in 1115). To counter this, Baldwin led a raid in the Nile in 1118, presumably hoping to coerce the Fatimids into peace. Instead, he fell mortally ill, dying on the return journey at el-Arish on 2 April 1118.
Baldwin I’s achievements were startling. He established a stable kingdom with defined and defensible borders from Beirut to Beersheba and beyond, controlled by a new, coherent political community whose power rested on exploiting existing resources of rural and commercial wealth. If he relied on force of personality and circumstance rather than law or constitutions, his idiom of authority was understood by his followers and clients. However, his career was hardly unique. From the chaos of late eleventh-century Syria, Iraq, Anatolia and Egypt, Baldwin was not alone in carving out a kingdom that survived its creator. Similar events and aptitude plotted the careers of fellow Latins Bohemund and Tancred, the Seljuk Kilij Arsl
an, the Mosul atabeg Zengi and his son Nur al-Din of Aleppo, and, later, the Kurdish mercenary Saladin. For each, legitimacy derived not from long inheritance or tradition but from military force, the leadership of loyal warbands and the wealth generated by employment, plunder and tribute. They all shared the justification of religion.
In the Near East, determined use of violence, diplomacy and patronage allowed small, often tiny groups, no larger than an extended military household of a few score or hundreds of warriors, to assert authority over large, settled civilian populations largely through control of the economically and politically dominant cities. The structure of Near Eastern society rested on myriad communities, variously defined by religion, culture and ethnicity in town and country. Rural wealth was exploited by absentee landlords who also controlled the commerce that flowed though urban centres. Cities and towns dominated the rural population; military warlords dominated the cities and towns. The Franks were unusual in massacring or expelling urban populations, a habit that ceased after the capture of Sidon in 1110. Yet the importance of cities to the political economy was well understood. Baldwin I and II made strenuous efforts to attract local Christians to Jerusalem. Frankish authorities tolerated racial and religious diversity in the great ports of Acre, Tyre or Tripoli. Baldwin I’s kingdom, like those of Tughtegin at Damascus or Kerbogha at Mosul, revolved around personal loyalty of a well-rewarded inner circle into whose hands power and wealth were bestowed; successful war and diplomacy; and the ready exploitation of the economy of the indigenous population. A characteristic feature of Muslim Near Eastern patronage was the grant of an iqta, an assignment of revenues from designated land, not its ownership. In Latin Palestine the equivalents were grants of rents and money-fiefs. While Baldwin’s conquest of Palestine found parallels in Robert Guiscard’s in southern Italy, Rodrigo Diaz’s in Valencia or even William the Bastard’s in England, it chiefly mirrored local conditions. While inevitably employing western language, customs and mentalities, Baldwin acted as a Levantine potentate. The contrast found visible expression in the mourners following his funeral bier as it wound its way up the Valley of Josaphat to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday 1118. Grieving beside Baldwin’s shocked protége, the corrupt old stager Patriarch Arnulf, and the Latin community were Syrian Christians and passing Muslims.33
The main legacies bequeathed by Baldwin I to his cousin Baldwin II included tight control over the disposal of lordships and fiefs; mastery of the church of a sort frowned upon in fashionable circles in the west; an understanding of the importance of maintaining the diplomatic balance between Aleppo, Damascus and Egypt; and practical over-lordship and protection over the northern territories. Military generalship remained fundamental to a royal power that rested at the heart of the legal and political structure. Modified over time and reduced by dynastic failure and faction, the essence of Baldwin I’s system of royal hegemony survived until 1187.
Behind the territorial conquests, the king created fiefs for his leading vassals, including the lordships of Caesarea, Arsur, Sidon, Jaffa, Hebron and Oultrejourdain. Fealty and homage were insisted on from the princes of Galilee after Tancred’s show of independence under Duke Godfrey. Jerusalem was one frontier where private enterprise operated only within a clear hierarchical system centred on the crown, which retained its ability to manipulate the structure and disposition of the major fiefs in the kingdom.34 The kings kept as their domain Judea and Samaria (with the centres of Jerusalem and Nablus) and the vastly lucrative lordships of Acre (1104) and Tyre (1124). In their domain, as the great lords in theirs, the king exercised jurisdiction through viscounts and collected or farmed taxes on trade and industry (e.g. sugar production), as well as the poll tax on Muslims. Formal relations with his tenants-in-chief, major vassals holding lands directly from the king, were conducted in the High Court (Haute Cour) attended also by leading ecclesiastics, including the heads of the military orders, and the occasional grand visiting crusader. By the reign of Amalric, the assise sur la ligece provided for rear-vassals (i.e. vassals of the king’s vassals) to swear oaths of direct liege-homage to the king, thus, in theory, opening access to the Haute Cour to them and their litigation. Amalric also claimed the right to oaths of fealty from freemen. The desire for direct relations between the crown and free tenants finds an echo in the contemporary legal reforms of Amalric’s nephew, Henry II of England. However, effective legal authority, in England or Jerusalem, depended on material wealth. Apart from income derived from his domain, the king enjoyed the profits of coining, customs and tolls in his ports, tribute from the Bedouin, highway dues, and the right of wreck. Special taxes for war and defence were agreed by the Haute Cour or wider assemblies in 1167 and 1183, perhaps a sign that ordinary revenues were being over-stretched, a phenomenon that may explain why, increasingly, secular lords passed lands to the church and the military orders. Baldwin I’s successors, despite concessions agreed at the Council of Nablus in 1120s, asserted a de facto control over appointments to the episcopacy and the masterships of the military orders.
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 ins
talled 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
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