Chapter IX: Front Matter (9)

It remained to determine the future government of Jerusalem; and here the eternal problem of the relations of Church and State emerged. It might seem natural that the Holy City, conquered in a holy war by an army of which the pope had made a churchman, Bishop Adhemar, the leader, should be left to the government of the Church. But Adhemar had died in August 1098 (whence, in large part, the confusion and bickerings which followed in the end of 1098 and the beginning of 1099); nor were there any churchmen left of sufficient dignity or weight to secure the triumph of the ecclesiastical cause. In the meeting of the crusaders on the 22nd of July, some few voices were raised in support of the view that a "spiritual vicar" should first be chosen in the place of the late patriarch of Jerusalem (who had just died in Cyprus), before the election of any lay ruler was taken in hand. But the voices were not heard; and the princes proceeded at once to elect a lay ruler. Raymund of Provence refused to accept their nomination, nominally on the pious ground that he did not wish to reign where Christ had suffered on the cross; though one may suspect that the establishment of a principality in Tripoli--in which he had been interrupted by the pressure of the pilgrims--was still the first object of his ambition. The refusal of Raymund meant the choice of Godfrey of Bouillon, who had, as we have seen, become prominent since the siege of Arca; and Godfrey accordingly became--not king, but "advocate of the Holy Sepulchre," while a few days afterwards Arnulf, the chaplain of Robert of Normandy, and one of the sceptics in the matter of the Holy Lance, became "vicar" of the vacant patriarchate. Godfrey's first business was to repel an Egyptian attack, which he accomplished successfully at Ascalon, with the aid of the other crusaders (August 12). At the end of August the other crusaders returned,[12] and Godfrey was left with a small army of 2000 men, and the support of Tancred, now prince of Galilee, to rule in some four isolated districts--Jaffa, Jerusalem, Ramlah and Haifa. At the end of the year came Bohemund and Godfrey's brother Baldwin (now count of Edessa) on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The result of Bohemund's visit was new trouble for Godfrey. Bohemund procured the election of Dagobert, the archbishop of Pisa, to the vacant patriarchate, disliking Arnulf, and perhaps hoping to find in the new patriarch a political supporter. Bohemund and Godfrey together became Dagobert's vassals; and in the spring Godfrey even seems to have entered into an agreement with the patriarch to cede Jerusalem and Jaffa into his hands, in the event of acquiring other lands or towns, especially Cairo, or dying without direct heirs. When Godfrey died in July 1100 (after successful forays against the Mahommedans which took him as far as Damascus), it might seem as if a theocracy were after all to be established in Jerusalem, in spite of the events of 1099.

4. _The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem under the First Three Kings,[13] 1100-1143._--The theocracy, however, was not destined to be established. Godfrey had died without direct heirs; but in far Edessa there was his brother Baldwin, ready to take his place. Dagobert had at first consented to the dying Godfrey's wish that Baldwin should be his successor; but when Godfrey died he saw an opportunity too precious to be missed, and opposed Baldwin, counting on the support of Bohemund, to whom he sent an appeal for assistance.[14] But a party in Jerusalem, headed by the late "vicar" Arnulf, opposed itself to the hierarchical pretensions of Dagobert and the Norman influence by which they were backed; and this party, representing the Lotharingian laity, carried the day. Baldwin was summoned from Edessa; and when he arrived, towards the end of the year, he was crowned king by Dagobert himself. Thus was founded, on Christmas day 1100, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem; and thus was the possibility of a theocracy finally annihilated. A feudal kingdom of Frankish seigneurs was to be planted on the soil of Palestine, instead of a _dominium temporale_ of the patriarch like that of the pope in central Italy. Nor were any great difficulties with the Church to hamper the growth of this kingdom. For two years, indeed, a struggle raged between Baldwin I. and Dagobert: Baldwin accused the patriarch of treachery, and attempted to force him to contribute to the defence of the kingdom. But in 1102 the struggle ceased with the deposition of the patriarch and the victory of the king; and though it was renewed for a time by the patriarch Stephen in the reign of Baldwin II. (1128-1130), the new struggle was of short duration, and was soon ended by Stephen's death.

The establishment of a kingdom in Jerusalem in 1100 was a blow, not only to the Church but to the Normans of Antioch. At the end of 1099 any contemporary observer must have believed that the capital of Latin Christianity in the East was destined to be Antioch. Antioch lay in one of the most fertile regions of the East; Bohemund was almost, if not quite, the greatest genius of his generation; and when he visited Jerusalem at the end of 1099, he led an army of 25,000 men--and those men, at any rate in large part, Normans. What could Godfrey avail against such a force? Yet the principality of Godfrey was destined to higher things than that of Bohemund. Jerusalem, like Rome, had the shadow of a mighty name to lend prestige to its ruler; and as residence in Rome was one great reason of the strength of the medieval papacy, so was residence in Jerusalem a reason for the ultimate supremacy of the Lotharingian kings. Jerusalem attracted the flow of pilgrims from the West as Antioch never could; and though the great majority of the pilgrims were only birds of passage, there were always many who stayed in the East. There was thus a steady immigration into the kingdom, to strengthen its armies and recruit with new blood the vigour of its inhabitants. Still more important perhaps was the fact that the ports of the kingdom attracted the Italian towns; and it was therefore to the kingdom that they lent the strength of their armies and the skill of their siege-artillery--in return, it is true, for concessions of privileges so considerable as to weaken the resources of the kingdom they helped to create. While Jerusalem possessed these advantages, Antioch was not without its defects. It had to meet--or perhaps it would be more true to say, it brought upon itself--the hostility of strong Mahommedan powers in the vicinity. As early as 1100 Bohemund was captured in battle by Danishmend of Sivas; and it was his captivity, depriving the patriarch as it did of Norman assistance, which allowed the uncontested accession of Baldwin I. Again, in 1104, the Normans, while attempting to capture Harran, were badly defeated on the river Balikh, near Rakka; and this defeat may be said to have been fatal to the chance of a great Norman principality.[15] But the hostility of Alexius, aided and abetted by the jealousy of Raymund of Toulouse, was almost equally fatal. Alexius claimed Antioch; was it not the old possession of his empire, and had not Bohemund done him homage? Raymund was ready to defend the claims of Alexius; was not Bohemund a successful rival? Thus it came about that Alexius and Raymund became allies; and by the aid of Alexius Raymund established, from 1102 onwards, the principality which, with the capture of Tripoli in 1109, became the principality of Tripoli, and barred the advance of Antioch to the south. Meanwhile the armies of Alexius not only prevented any farther advance to the N.W., but conquered the Cilician towns (1104). No wonder that Bohemund flung himself in revenge on the Eastern empire in 1108--only, however, to meet with a humiliating defeat at Durazzo.

Thus it was that Baldwin waxed while Bohemund waned. The growth of Baldwin's kingdom, as it was suggested above, owed more to the interests of Italian traders than it did to crusading zeal. In 1100, indeed, it might appear that a new Crusade from the West, which the capture of Antioch in 1098 had begun, and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 had finally set in motion, was destined to achieve great things for the nascent kingdom. Thousands had joined this new Crusade, which should deal the final blow to Mahommedanism: among the rest came the first of the troubadours, William IX., Count of Poitiers, to gather copy for his muse, and even some, like Stephen of Blois and Hugh of Vermandois, who had joined the First Crusade, but had failed to reach Jerusalem. The new crusaders cherished high plans; they would free Bohemund and capture Bagdad. But each of the three sections of their army was routed in turn in Asia Minor by the princes of Sivas, Aleppo and Harran, in the middle of 1101; and only a few escaped to report the crushing disaster. Baldwin I. had thus no assistance to expect from the West, save that of the Italian towns. From an early date Italian ships had followed the crusaders. There were Genoese ships in St Simeon's harbour in the spring of 1098 and at Jaffa in 1099; in 1099 Dagobert, the archbishop of Pisa, led a fleet from his city to the Holy Land; and in 1100 there came to Jaffa a Venetian fleet of 200 sail, whose leaders promised Venetian assistance in return for freedom from tolls and a third of each town they helped to conquer. But it was the Genoese who helped Baldwin I. most. The Venetians already enjoyed, since 1080, a favoured position in Constantinople, and had the less reason to find a new emporium in the East; while Pisa connected itself, through Dagobert, with Antioch[16] rather than with Jerusalem, and was further, in 1111, invested by Alexius with privileges, which made an outlet in the Holy Land no longer necessary. But the Genoese, who had helped with provisions and siege-tackle in the capture of Antioch and of Jerusalem, had both a stronger claim on the crusaders, and a greater interest in acquiring an eastern emporium. An alliance was accordingly struck in 1101 (Fulcher II. c. vii.), by which the Genoese promised their assistance, in return for a third of all booty, a quarter in each town captured, and a grant of freedom from tolls. In this way Baldwin I. was able to take Arsuf and Caesarea in 1101 and Acre in 1104. But Genoese aid was given to others beside Baldwin (it enabled Raymund to capture Byblus in 1104, and his successor, William, to win Tripoli in 1109); while, on the other hand, Baldwin enjoyed other aid besides that of the Genoese. In 1110, for example, he was enabled to capture Sidon by the aid of Sigurd of Norway, the Jorsalafari, who came to the Holy Land with a fleet of 55 ships, starting in 1107, and in a three years' "wandering," after the old Norse fashion, fighting the Moors in Spain, and fraternizing with the Normans in Sicily. At a later date, in the reign of Baldwin II., Venice also gave her aid to the kings of Jerusalem. Irritated by the concessions made by Alexius to the Pisans in 1111, and furious at the revocation of her own privileges by John Comnenus in 1118, the republic naturally sought a new outlet in the Holy Land. A Venetian fleet of 120 sail came in 1123, and after aiding in the repulse of an attack, which the Egyptians had taken advantage of Baldwin II.'s captivity to deliver, they helped the regent Eustace to capture Tyre (1124), in return for considerable privileges--freedom from toils throughout the kingdom, a quarter in Jerusalem, baths and ovens in Acre, and in Tyre one-third of the city and its suburbs, with their own court of justice and their own church. After thus gaining a new footing in Tyre, the Venetians could afford to attack the islands of the Aegean as they returned, in revenge for the loss of their privileges in Constantinople; but the hostility between Venice and the Eastern empire was soon afterwards appeased, when John Comnenus restored the old privileges of the Venetians. The Venetians, however, maintained their position in Palestine; and their quarters remained, along with those of the Genoese, as privileged commercial franchises in an otherwise feudal state.

In this way the kingdom of Jerusalem expanded until it came to embrace a territory stretching along the coast from Beirut (captured in 1110[17]) to el-Arish on the confines of Egypt--a territory whose strength lay not in Judaea, like the ancient kingdom of David, but, somewhat paradoxically (though commercial motives explain the paradox), in Phoenicia and the land of the Philistines. With all its length, the territory had but little breadth: towards the north it was bounded by the amirate of Damascus; in the centre, it spread little, if at all, beyond the Jordan; and it was only in the south that it had any real extension. Here there were two considerable annexes. To the south of the Dead Sea stretched a tongue of land, reaching to Aila, at the head of the eastern arm of the Red Sea. This had been won by Baldwin I., by way of revenge for the attacks of the Egyptians on his kingdom; and here, as early as 1116, he had built the fort of Monreal, half way between Aila and the Dead Sea. To the east of the Dead Sea, again, lay a second strip of territory, in which the great fortress was Krak (Kerak) of the Desert, planted somewhere about 1140 by the royal butler, Paganus, in the reign of Fulk of Jerusalem. These extensions in the south and east had also, it is easy to see, a commercial motive. They gave the kingdom a connexion of its own with the Red Sea and its shipping; and they enabled the Franks to control the routes of the caravans, especially the route from Damascus to Egypt and the Red Sea. Thus, it would appear, the whole of the expansion of the Latin kingdom (which may be said to have attained its height in 1131, at the death of Baldwin II.) may be shown to have been dictated, at any rate in large part, by economic motives; and thus, too, it would seem that two of the most powerful motives which sway the mind of man--the religious motive and the desire for gain--conspired to elevate the kingdom of Jerusalem (at once the country of Christ, and a natural centre of trade) to a position of supremacy in Latin Syria. During this process of growth the kingdom stood in relation to two sects of powers--the three Frankish principalities in northern Syria, and the Mahommedan powers both of the Euphrates and the Nile--whose action affected its growth and character.

Of the three Frankish principalities, Edessa, founded in 1098 by Baldwin I. himself, was a natural fief of Jerusalem. Baldwin de Burgh, the future Baldwin II., ruled in Edessa as the vassal of Baldwin I. from 1100 to 1118; and thereafter the county was held in succession by the two Joscelins of Tell-bashir until the conquest of Edessa by Zengi in 1144. Lying to the east of the Euphrates, at once in close contact with the Armenians, and in near proximity to the great route of trade which came up the Euphrates to Rakka, and thence diverged to Antioch and Damascus, the county of Edessa had an eventful if brief life. The county of Tripoli, the second of these principalities, had also come under the aegis of Jerusalem at an early date. Founded by Raymund of Toulouse, between 1102 and 1105, with the favour of Alexius and the alliance of the Genoese, it did not acquire its capital of Tripoli till 1109. Even before the conquest of Tripoli, there had been dissensions between William, the nephew and successor of Raymund, and Bertrand, Raymund's eldest son, which it had needed the interference of Baldwin I. to compose; and it was only by the aid of the king that the town of Tripoli had been taken. At an early date therefore the county of Tripoli had already come under the influence of the kingdom. Meanwhile the principality of Antioch, ruled by Tancred, after the departure of Bohemund (1104-1112), and then by Roger his kinsman (1112-1119), was, during the reign of Baldwin I., busily engaged in disputes both with its Christian neighbours at Edessa and Tripoli, and with the Mahommedan princes of Mardin and Mosul. On the death of Roger in 1119, the principality came under the regency of Baldwin II. of Jerusalem, until 1126, when Bohemund II. came of age. Bohemund had married a daughter of Baldwin; and on his death in 1130 Baldwin II. had once more become the guardian of Antioch. From his reign therefore Antioch may be regarded as a dependency of Jerusalem; and thus the end of Baldwin's reign (1131) may be said to mark the time when the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem stands complete, with its own boundaries stretching from Beirut in the north to el-Arish and Aila in the south, and with the three Frankish powers of the north admitting its suzerainty.

The Latin power thus established and organized in the East had to face in the north a number of Mahommedan amirs, in the south the caliph of Egypt. The disunion between the Mahommedans of northern Syria and the Fatimites of Egypt, and the political disintegration of the former, were both favourable to the success of the Franks; but they had nevertheless to maintain their ground vigorously both in the north and the south against almost incessant attacks. The hostility of the decadent caliphate of Cairo was the less dangerous; and though Baldwin I. had at the beginning of his reign to meet annual attacks from Egypt, by the end he had pushed his power to the Red Sea, and in the very year of his death (1118) he had penetrated along the north coast of Egypt as far as Farama (Pelusium). The plan of conquering Egypt had indeed presented itself to the Franks from the first, as it continued to attract them to the end; and it is significant that Godfrey himself, in 1100, promised Jerusalem to the patriarch, "as soon as he should have conquered some other great city, and especially Cairo." But the real menace to the Latin kingdom lay in northern Syria; and here a power was eventually destined to rise, which outstripped the kings of Jerusalem in the race for Cairo, and then--with the northern and southern boundaries of Jerusalem in its control--was able to crush the kingdom as it were between the two arms of a vice. Until 1127, however, the Mahommedans of northern Syria were disunited among themselves. The beginning of the 12th century was the age of the atabegs (regents or stadtholders). The atabegs formed a number of dynasties, which displaced the descendants of the Seljukian amirs in their various principalities. These dynasties were founded by emancipated mamelukes, who had held high office at court and in camp under powerful amirs, and who, on their death, first became stadtholders for their descendants, and then usurped the throne of their masters. There was an atabeg dynasty in Damascus founded by Tughtigin (1103-1128): there was another to the N.E., that of the Ortokids, represented by Sokman, who established himself at Kaifa in Diarbekr about 1101, and by his brother Ilghazi, who received Mardin from Sokman about 1108, and added to it Aleppo in 1117.[18] But the greatest of the atabegs were those of Mosul on the Tigris--Maudud, who died in 1113; Aksunkur, his successor; and finally, greatest of all, Zengi himself, who ruled in Mosul from 1127 onwards.

Before the accession of Zengi, there had been constant fighting, which had led, however, to no definite result, between the various Mahommedan princes and the Franks of northern Syria. The constant pressure of Tancred of Antioch and Baldwin de Burgh of Edessa led to a series of retaliations between 1110 and 1115; Edessa was attacked in 1110, 1111, 1112 and 1114; and in 1113 Maudud of Mosul had even penetrated as far as the vicinity of Acre and Jerusalem.[19] But the dissensions of the Mahommedans made their attacks unavailing; in 1115, for instance, we find Antioch actually aided by Ilghazi and Tughtigin against Aksunkur of Mosul. Again, in the reign of Baldwin II., there was steady fighting in the north; Roger of Antioch was defeated by Ilghazi at Balat in 1119, and Baldwin II. himself was captured by Balak, the successor of Ilghazi, in 1123, but on the whole the Franks held the upper hand. Baldwin conquered part of the territory of Aleppo (in 1121 and the following years), and extorted a tribute from Damascus (1126). But when Zengi established himself in Mosul in 1127, the tide gradually began to turn. He created for himself a great and united principality, comprising not only Mosul, but also Aleppo,[20] Harran, Nisibin and other districts; and in 1130, Alice, the widow of Bohemund II., sought his alliance in order to maintain herself in power at Antioch. In the beginning of the reign of Fulk of Jerusalem (1131-1143) the progress of Zengi was steady. He conquered in 1135 several fortresses in the east of the principality of Antioch, and in this year and the next pressed the count of Tripoli hard; while in 1137 he defeated Fulk at Barin, and forced the king to capitulate and surrender the town. If Fulk had been left alone to wage the struggle against Zengi, and if Zengi had enjoyed a clear field against the Franks, the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem might have come far sooner than it did.[21] But there were two powers which aided Fulk, and impeded the progress of Zengi--the amirate of Damascus and the emperors of Constantinople. The position of Damascus is a position of crucial importance from 1130 to 1154. Lying between Mosul and Jerusalem, and important both strategically and from its position on the great route of commerce from the Euphrates to Egypt, Damascus became the arbiter of Syrian politics. During the greater part of the period between 1130 and 1154 the policy of Damascus was guided by the vizier Muin-eddin Anar, who ruled on behalf of the descendants of the atabeg Tughtigin. He saw the importance of finding an ally against the ambition of Zengi, who had already attacked Damascus in 1130. The natural ally was Jerusalem. As early as 1133 the alliance of the two powers had been concluded; and in 1140 the alliance was solemnly renewed between Fulk and the vizier. Henceforth this alliance was a dominant factor in politics. One of the great mistakes made by the Franks was the breach of the alliance in 1147--a breach which was widened by the attack directed against Damascus during the Second Crusade; and the conquest of Damascus by Nureddin in 1154 was ultimately fatal to the Latin kingdom, removing as it did the one possible ally of the Franks, and opening the way to Egypt for the atabegs of Mosul.

The alliance of the emperors of Constantinople was of far more dubious value to the kings of Jerusalem. We have already seen that it was the theory of the Eastern emperors--a theory which logically followed from the homage of the crusaders to Alexius--that the conquests of the crusaders belonged to their empire, and were held by the crusading princes as fiefs. We have seen that the action of Bohemund at Antioch was the negation of this theory, and that Alexius in consequence helped Raymund to establish himself in Tripoli as a thorn in the side of Bohemund, and sent an army and a fleet which wrested from the Normans the towns of Cilicia (1104). The defeat of Bohemund at Durazzo in 1108 had resulted in a treaty, which made Antioch a fief of Alexius; but Tancred (who in 1107 had recovered Cilicia from the Greeks) refused to fulfil the terms of the treaty, and Alexius (who attempted--but in vain--to induce Baldwin I. to join an alliance against Tancred in 1112) was forced to leave Antioch independent. Thus, although Alexius had been able, in the wake of the crusading armies, to recover a large belt of land round the whole coast of Asia Minor,--the interior remaining subject to the sultans of Konia (Iconium) and the princes of Sivas,--he left the territories to the east of the western boundary of Cilicia in the hands of the Latins when he died in 1118. Not for 20 years after his death did the Eastern empire make any attempt to gain Cilicia or wrest homage from Antioch. But in 1137 John Comnenus appeared, instigated by the opportunity of dissensions in Antioch, and received its long-denied homage, as well as that of Tripoli; while in the following year he entered into hostilities with Zengi, without, however, achieving any considerable result. In 1142 he returned again, anxious to create a principality in Cilicia and Antioch for his younger son Manuel. The people of Antioch refused to submit; a projected visit to Jerusalem, during which John was to unite with Fulk in a great alliance against the Moslem, fell through; and in the spring of 1143 the emperor died in Cilicia, with nothing accomplished. On the whole, the interference of the Comneni, if it checked Zengi for the moment in 1138, may be said to have ultimately weakened and distracted the Franks, and to have helped to cause the loss of Edessa (1144), which marks the turning-point in the history of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

5. _Organization of the Kingdom._--Before we turn to describe the Second Crusade, which the loss of Edessa provoked, and to trace the fall of the kingdom, which the Second Crusade rather hastened than hindered, we may pause at this point to consider the organization of the Frankish colonies in Syria. The first question which arises is that of the relation of the kingdom of Jerusalem to the three counties or principalities of Antioch, Tripoli and Edessa, which acknowledged their dependence upon it. The degree of this dependence was always a matter of dispute. The rights of the king of Jerusalem chiefly appear when there is a vacancy or a minority in one of the principalities, or when there is dissension either inside one of the principalities or between two of the princes. On the death of one of the princes without heirs of full age, the kings of Jerusalem were entitled to act as regents, as Baldwin II. did twice at Antioch, in 1119 and 1130; but the kings regarded this right of regency as a burden rather than a privilege, and it is indeed characteristic of the relation of the king to the three princes, that it imposes upon him duties without any corresponding rights. It is his duty to act as regent; it is his duty to compose the dissensions in the principality of Antioch, and to repress the violences of the prince towards his patriarch (1154); it is his duty to reconcile Antioch with Edessa, when the two fall to fighting. The princes on their side acted independently: if they joined the king with their armies, it was as equals doing a favour; and they sometimes refused to join until they were coerced. They made their own treaties with the Mahommedans, or attacked them in spite of the king's treaties; they dated their documents by the year of their own reign, and they had each their separate laws or assizes. There was, in a word, co-ordination rather than subordination; nor did the kings ever attempt to embark on a policy of centralization.

The relation of the king to his own barons within his immediate kingdom of Jerusalem is not unlike the relation of the king to the three princes. In Norman England the king insisted on his rights; in Frankish Jerusalem the barons insisted on his duties. The circumstances of the foundation of the kingdom explain its characteristics. As the crusaders advanced to Jerusalem, says Raymund of Agiles (c. xxxiii.), it was their rule that the first-comer had the right to each castle or town, provided that he hoisted his standard and planted a garrison there. The feudal nobility was thus the first to establish itself, and the king only came after its institution--the reverse of Norman England, where the king first conquered the country, and then plotted it out among his nobles. The predominance of the nobility in this way became as characteristic of feudalism in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem as the supremacy of the crown was of contemporary feudalism in England; and that predominance expressed itself in the position and powers of the high court, in which the ultimate sovereignty resided. The kingdom of Jerusalem consisted of a society of peers, in which the king might be _primus_, but in which he was none the less subject to a punctilious law, regulating his position equally with that of every member of the society. In such a society the election of the head by the members may seem natural; and in the case of Godfrey and the first two Baldwins this was the case. But the conception of the equality of the king and his peers in the long run led to hereditary monarchy; for if the king held his kingdom as a fief, like other nobles, the laws of descent which applied to a fief applied to the kingdom, and those laws demanded heredity. Yet the high court, which decided all problems of descent, would naturally intervene if a problem of descent arose, as it frequently did, in the kingdom; and thus the barons had the right of deciding between different claimants, and also of formally "approving" each new successor to the throne. The conception of the kingdom as a fief not only subjected it to the jurisdiction of the high court; it involved the more disastrous result that the kingdom, like other fiefs, might be carried by an heiress to her husband; and the proximate causes of the collapse of the kingdom in 1187 depend on this fact and the dissensions which it occasioned.

Thus conceived as the holder of a great fief, the king had only the rights of _suzerain_ over the four great baronies and the twelve minor fiefs of his kingdom. He had not those rights of sovereign which the Norman kings of England inherited from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors, or the Capetian kings of France from the Carolings; nor was he able therefore to come into direct touch with each of his subjects, which William I., in virtue of his sovereign rights, was able to attain by the Salisbury oath of 1086. Amalric I. indeed, by his _assise sur la ligece_, attempted to reach the vassals of his vassals; he admitted arriere-vassaux to the _haute cour_, and encouraged them to carry their cases to it in the first instance. But this is the only attempt at that policy of _immediatisation_ which in contemporary England was carried to far greater lengths; and even this attempt was unsuccessful. No alliance was actually formed between the king and the mesne nobility against the immediate baronage. The body of the tenants-in-chief continued to limit the power of the crown: their consent was necessary to legislation, and grants of fiefs could not be made without their permission. Nor was the crown only limited in this way. The _duties_ of the king towards his tenants are prominent in the _assises_. The king's oath to his men binds him to respect and maintain their rights, which are as prominent as are his duties; and if the men feel that the royal oath has not been kept, they may lawfully refuse military service (_gager le roi_), and may even rise in authorized and legal rebellion. The system of military service and the organization of justice corresponded to the part which the monarchy was thus constrained to play. The vassal was bound to pay military service, not, as in western Europe, for a limited period of forty days, but for the whole year--the Holy Land being, as it were, in a perpetual state of siege. On the other hand, the vassal was not bound to render service, unless he were _paid_ for his service; and it was only famine, or Saracen devastation, which freed the king from the obligation of paying his men. The king was also bound to insure the horses of his men by a system called the _restor_: if a vassal lost his horse otherwise than by his own fault, it must be replaced by the treasury (which was termed, as it also was in Norman Sicily, the _secretum_).[22] But the king had another force in addition to the feudal levy--a paid force of _soudoyers_,[23] holding fiefs, not of land, but of pay (_fiefs de soudee_). Along with this paid cavalry went another branch of the army, the Turcopuli, a body of light cavalry, recruited from the Syrians and Mahommedans, and using the tactics of the Arabs; while an infantry was found among the Armenians, the best soldiers of the East, and the Maronites, who furnished the kingdom with archers. To all these various forces must be added the knights and native levies of the great orders, whose masters were practically independent sovereigns like the princes of Antioch and Tripoli;[24] and with these the total levy of the kingdom may be reckoned at some 25,000 men. But the strength of the kingdom lay less perhaps in the army than in the magnificent fortresses which the nobility, and especially the two orders, had built; and the most visible relic of the crusades to-day is the towering ruins of a fortress like Krak (Kerak) des Chevaliers, the fortress of the Knights of St John in the principality of Tripoli. These fortresses, garrisoned not by the king, as in Norman England, but by their possessors, would only strengthen the power of the feudatories, and help to dissipate the kingdom into a number of local units.

In the organization of its system of justice the kingdom showed its most characteristic features. Two great central courts sat in Jerusalem to do justice--the high court of the nobles, and the court of burgesses for the rest of the Franks. (1) The high court was the supreme source of justice for the military class; and in its composition and procedure the same limitation of the crown, which appears in regard to military service, is again evident. The high court is not a _curia regis_, but a _curia baronum_, in which the theory of _judicium parium_ is fully realized. If the king presides in the court, the motive of its action is none the less the preservation of the rights of the nobles, and not, as in England, the extension of the rights of the crown. It is a court of the king's peers: it tries cases of dispute between the king and his peers--with regard, for instance, to military service--and it settles the descent of the title of king. (2) The court of burgesses was almost equally sovereign within its sphere. While the body of the noblesse formed the high court, the court of the burgesses was composed of twelve legists (probably named by the king) under the presidency of the _vicomte_--a knight also named by the king, who was a great financial as well as a judicial officer. The province of the court included all acts and contracts between burgesses, and extended to criminal cases in which burgesses were involved. Like the high court, the court of burgesses had also its assizes[25]--a body of unwritten legal custom. The independent position of the burgesses, who thus assumed a position of equality by the side of the feudal class, is one of the peculiarities of the kingdom of Jerusalem. It may be explained by reference to the peculiar conditions of the kingdom. Burgesses and nobles, however different in status, were both of the same Frankish stock, and both occupied the same superior position with regard to the native Syrians. The commercial motive, again, had been one of the great motives of the crusade; and the class which was impelled by that motive would be both large and, in view of the quality of the Eastern goods in which it dealt, exceptionally prosperous. Finally, when one remembers how, during the First Crusade, the _pedites_ had marched side by side with the _principes_, and how, from the beginning of 1099, they had practically risen in revolt against the selfish ambitions of princes like Count Raymund, it becomes easy to understand the independent position which the burgesses assumed in the organization of the kingdom. Burgesses could buy and possess property in towns, which knights were forbidden to acquire; and though they could not intermarry with the feudal classes, it was easy and regular for a burgess to thrive to knighthood. Like the nobles, again, the burgesses had the right of confirming royal grants and of taking part in legislation; and they may be said to have formed--socially, politically and judicially--an independent and powerful estate. Yet (with the exception of Antioch, Tripoli and Acre in the course of the 13th century) the Frankish towns never developed a communal government: the domain of their development was private law and commercial life.

Locally, the consideration of the system of justice administered in the kingdom involves some account of three things--the organization of the fiefs, the position of the Italian traders in their quarters, and the privileges of the Church. Each fief was organized like the kingdom. In each there was a court for the noblesse, and a court (or courts) for the bourgeoisie. There were some thirty-seven _cours de bourgeoisie_ (several of the fiefs having more than one), each of which was under the presidency of a _vicomte_, while all were independent of the court of burgesses at Jerusalem. Of the feudal courts there were some twenty-two. Each of these followed the procedure and the law of the high court; but each was independent of the high court, and formed a sovereign court without any appeal. On the other hand, the revolution wrought by Amalric I. in the status of the _arriere-vassaux_, which made them members of the high court, allowed them to carry their cases to Jerusalem in the first instance, if they desired. Apart from this, the characteristic of seignorial justice is its independence and its freedom from the central court; though, when we reflect that the central court is a court of seigneurs, this characteristic is seen to be the logical result of the whole system. Midway between the seignorial _cours de bourgeoisie_ and the privileged jurisdictions of the Italian quarter, there were two kinds of courts of a commercial character--the _cours de la fonde_ in towns where trade was busy, and the _cours de la chaine_ in the sea-ports. The former courts, under their bailiffs, gradually absorbed the separate courts which the Syrians had at first been permitted to enjoy under their own _reis_; and the bailiff with his 6 assessors (4 Syrians and 2 Franks) thus came to judge both commercial cases and cases in which Syrians were involved. The _cours de la chaine_, whose institution is assigned to Amalric I. (1162-1174), had a civil jurisdiction in admiralty cases, and, like the _cours de la fonde_, they were composed of a bailiff and his assessors. Distinct from all these courts, if similar in its sphere, is the court which the Italian quarter generally enjoyed in each town under its own consuls--a court privileged to try all but the graver cases, like murder, theft and forgery. The court was part of the general immunity which made these quarters _imperia in imperio_: their exemptions from tolls and from financial contributions is parallel to their judicial privileges. Regulated by their mother-town, both in their trade and their government, these Italian quarters outlasted the collapse of the kingdom, and continued to exist under Mahommedan rulers. The Church had its separate courts, as in the West; but their province was perhaps greater than elsewhere. The church courts could not indeed decide cases of perjury; but, on the other hand, they tried all matters in which clerical property was concerned, and all cases of dispute between husband and wife. In other spheres the immunities and exemptions of the Church offered a far more serious problem, and especially in the sphere of finance. Perhaps the supreme defect of the kingdom of Jerusalem was its want of any financial basis. It is true that the king had a revenue, collected by the vicomte and paid into the _secretum_ or treasury--a revenue composed of tolls on the caravans and customs from the ports, of the profits of monopolies and the proceeds of justice, of poll-taxes on Jews and Mahommedans, and of the tributes paid by Mahommedan powers. But his expenditure was large: he had to pay his feudatories; and he had to provide fiefs in money and kind to those who had not fiefs of land. The contributions sent to the Holy Land by the monarchs of western Europe, as commutations in lieu of personal participation in crusades, might help; the fatal policy of razzias against the neighbouring Mahommedan powers might procure temporary resources; but what was really necessary was a wide measure of native taxation, such as was once, and once only, attempted in 1183. To any such measure the privileges of the Italian quarters, and still more those of the Church, were inimical. In spite of provisions somewhat parallel to those of the English statute of mortmain, the clergy continued to acquire fresh lands at the same time that they refused to contribute to the defence of the kingdom, and rigorously exacted the full quota of tithe from every source which they could tap, and even from booty captured in war. The richest proprietor in the Holy Land,[26] but practically immune from any charges on its property, the Church helped, unconsciously, to ruin the kingdom which it should have supported above all others. It refused to throw its weight into the scale, and to strengthen the hands of the king against an over-mighty nobility. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the Church did not, after the first struggle between Dagobert and Baldwin I., actively oppose by any hierarchical pretensions the authority of the crown. The assizes may speak of patriarch and king as conjoint seigneurs in Jerusalem; but as a matter of fact the king could secure the nomination of his own patriarch, and after Dagobert the patriarchs are, with the temporary exception of Stephen in 1128, the confidants and supporters of the kings. It was the two great orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers which were, in reality, most dangerous to the kingdom. Honeycombed as it was by immunities--of seigneurs, of Italian quarters, of the clergy--the kingdom was most seriously impaired by these overweening immunists, who, half-lay and half-clerical, took advantage of their ambiguous position to escape from the duties of either character. They built up great estates, especially in the principality of Tripoli; they quarrelled with one another, until their dissensions prevented any vigorous action; they struggled against the claims of the clergy to tithes and to rights of jurisdiction; they negotiated with the Mahommedans as separate powers; they conducted themselves towards the kings as independent sovereigns. Yet their aid was as necessary as their influence was noxious. Continually recruited from the West, they retained the vigour which the native Franks of Palestine gradually lost; and their corporate strength gave a weight to their arms which made them indispensable.

In describing the organization of the kingdom, we have also been describing the causes of its fall. It fell because it had not the financial or political strength to survive. "Les vices du gouvernement avaient ete plus puissants que les vertus des gouvernants." But the vices were not only vices of the government: they were also vices, partly inevitable, partly moral, in the governing race itself. The climate was no doubt responsible for much. The Franks of northern Europe attempted to live a life that suited a northern climate under a southern sun. They rode incessantly to battle over burning sands, in full armour--chain mail, long shield and heavy casque--as if they were on their native French soil. The ruling population was already spread too thin for the work which it had to do; and exhausted by its efforts, it gradually became extinct. A constant immigration from the West, bringing new blood and recruiting the stock, could alone have maintained its vigour; and such immigration never came. Little driblets of men might indeed be added to the numbers of the Franks; but the great bodies of crusaders either perished in Asia Minor, as in 1101 and 1147, or found themselves thwarted and distrusted by the native Franks. It was indeed one of the misfortunes of the kingdom that its inhabitants could never welcome the reinforcements which came to their aid.[27] The barons suspected the crusaders of ulterior motives, and of designing to get new principalities for themselves. In any case the native Frank, accustomed to commercial intercourse and diplomatic negotiations with the Mahommedans, could hardly share the unreasoning passion to make a dash for the "infidel." As with the barons, so with the burgesses: they profited too much by their intercourse with the Mahommedans to abandon readily the way of peaceful commerce, and they were far more ready to hinder than to help any martial enterprise. Left to itself, the native population lost physical and moral vigour. The barons alternated between the extravagances of Western chivalry and the attractions of Eastern luxury: they returned from the field to divans with frescoed walls and floors of mosaic, Persian rugs and embroidered silk hangings. Their houses, at any rate those in the towns, had thus the characteristics of Moorish villas; and in them they lived a Moorish life. Their sideboards were covered with the copper and silver work of Eastern smiths and the confectioneries of Damascus. They dressed in flowing robes of silk, and their women wore oriental gauzes covered with sequins. Into these divans where figures of this kind moved to the music of Saracen instruments, there entered an inevitable voluptuousness and corruption of manners. The hardships of war and the excesses of peace shortened the lives of the men; the kingdom of Jerusalem had eleven kings within a century. While the men died, the women, living in comparative indolence, lived longer lives. They became regents to their young children; and the experience of all medieval minorities reiterates the lesson--woe to the land where the king is a child and the regent a woman. Still worse was the frequent remarriage of widowed princesses and heiresses. By the assizes of the high court, the widow, on the death of her husband, took half of the estate for herself, and half in guardianship for her children. _Liberae ire cum terra_, widows carried their estates or titles to three or four husbands; and as in 15th-century England, the influence of the heiress was fatal to the peace of the country. At Antioch, for instance, after the death of Bohemund II. in 1130, his widow Alice headed a party in favour of the marriage of the heiress Constance to Manuel of Constantinople, and did not scruple to enter into negotiations with Zengi of Mosul. Her policy failed; and Constance successively married Raymund of Antioch and Raynald of Chatillon. The result was the renewed enmity of the Greek empire, while the French adventurers who won the prize ruined the prospects of the Franks by their conduct. In the kingdom matters were almost worse. There was hardly any regular succession to the throne; and Jerusalem, as Stubbs writes, "suffered from the weakness of hereditary right and the jealousies of the elective system" at one and the same time. With the frequent remarriages of the heiresses of the kingdom, relationships grew confused and family quarrels frequent; and when Sibylla carried the crown to Guy de Lusignan, a newcomer disliked by all the relatives of the crown, she sealed the fate of the kingdom.

It may be doubted--though it seems a harsh verdict to pass on a kingdom founded by religious zeal on holy soil--whether the kingdom possessed that moral basis which alone can give a right of survival to any institution or organization. The crusading states had been founded by adventurers who thirsted for gain; and the primitive appetite did not lose its edge with the progress of time. We cannot be certain, indeed, how far the Frankish lords oppressed their Syrian tenants: the stories of such oppression have been discredited; while if we may trust the evidence of a Mahommedan traveller, Ibn Jubair, the lot of the Mahommedan who lived on Frankish manors was better than it had been under their native lords.[28] But the habits of the Franks were none the less habits of lawless greed: they swooped down from their castles, as Raynald of Chatillon did from Krak of the Desert, to capture Saracens and hold them to ransom or to plunder caravans. The lust of unlawful gain had infected the Frankish blood, as it seems to have infected England during the Hundred Years' War; and in either case nemesis infallibly came. The Moslems might have endured a state of "infidels"; they could not endure a state of brigands.

6. _The History of the Kingdom and the Crusades from the Loss of Edessa in 1144 to the Fall of Jerusalem in 1187._--The years 1143-1144 are in many ways the turning point in the history of the Latin East. In 1143 began the reign of the first native king;[29] and about this date may be placed the final organization of the kingdom, witnessed by the completion of its body of customary law. At the same date, however, the decline of the kingdom also begins; the fall of Edessa is the beginning of the end. In 1143 John Comnenus and Fulk had just died, and Zengi, seeing his way clear, threw himself on the great Christian outpost, against which the tides of Mahommedan attack had so often vainly surged, and finally entered on Christmas Day 1144. Two years later Zengi died; but he left an able successor in his son, Nureddin, and an attempt to recover Edessa was successfully repelled in November 1146. Not only so, but in the spring of 1147 the Franks were unwise enough to allow the hope of gaining two small towns to induce them to break the vital alliance with Damascus. Thus, in itself, the position of affairs in the Holy Land in 1147 was certainly ominous; and the kingdom might well seem dependent for its safety on such aid as it might receive from the West.