Chapter XX: Baldwin I., King of Jerusalem

In strange contrast with Godfrey was his brother Baldwin, the Prince of Edessa, whom the necessities of the infant kingdom, rather than his own merits, now called to the vacant throne. Baldwin had already shown himself as unscrupulous as he was alert, and as covetous as he was bold. With undoubted adroitness and courage, he had acquired and held his principality of Edessa. Here he reigned with Oriental pomp, wore long robes and flowing beard, sat cross-legged on rugs, and compelled all suppliants for his favor to approach with the salaam of profoundest homage. This ostentation was apparently more from policy among a people familiar with such customs than from love of display or any despotic instinct.

Dagobert, the papal legate, opposed the suggestion of Baldwin’s kingship of Jerusalem, and claimed that honor for himself. He might have obtained it had not Garnier, the agent of Baldwin, seized upon the tower of David and the other fortresses in the name of his absent master. The baffled prelate called upon Bohemond, now Prince of Antioch, to come and avenge this insult offered to the Holy Father in the person of his legate; but the Turks, by capturing Bohemond, interfered with this plan. The activity shown by the common enemy decided the popular voice for Baldwin as king. The dangers which threatened forbade that the government of Jerusalem should be left in the hands of a priest untrained in war. The soldier seemed pointed out by Providence for the kingship, although the hand of the Pope was stretched out to anoint another.

Baldwin, learning of the death of Godfrey, immediately turned over the government of Edessa to his cousin, Baldwin du Bourg, and with fourteen hundred men marched for Jerusalem. On the way he gave new proof of his puissance by first outwitting and then utterly routing vastly superior numbers, with which the emirs of Damascus and Emesa endeavored to block his way. Pausing at the sacred city only long enough to assure himself of the applause of the entire population, he gave another exhibition of his merit of the crown before wearing it. With a sudden swoop he devastated the enemy’s country from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and, laden with booty, demanded and received from the hands of the unwilling prelate the crown and blessing in the name of the Pope. Quickly following the coronation services at Bethlehem, he captured Arsuf and Cæsarea. An Egyptian army had advanced as far as Ramleh, but Baldwin, with a white kerchief tied to his lance’s point as his oriflamme, led his braves again and again through this host, until they were routed, leaving five thousand dead on the field. Amid the shrieks of the dying the king caught the subdued cry of a woman. She was the wife of a Moslem, who had accompanied her husband to the war, and had been taken with the pains of childbirth. By the conqueror’s order she was tenderly cared for, placed upon the rug from his own tent, covered with his own mantle, and later conducted with her new-born babe to the arms of her husband. His compassion soon received its reward. The rallying Mussulmans surrounded his band not only with swords, but with fire, having ignited the long, dried grass. With difficulty the king escaped to Ramleh, which the enemy completely invested. During the night, while anticipating the fateful assault of the morrow, he was secretly approached by a Moslem officer. This man proved to be the husband of the woman whom Baldwin had befriended. Led by his gratitude, he had put his own life in jeopardy in order to reveal to his benefactor a secret path to safety. The Moslem assault carried the town; they put to death all Christians found within it. In Jerusalem the great bell tolled, while the people crowded the churches or marched in procession, mourning the supposed death of their king, when suddenly came the news of Baldwin’s safety. In the rhetoric of the chronicle, it was “like the morning star out of the night’s blackness.”

The capture of Ramleh by the enemy endangered Jaffa, the real port of Jerusalem, at which the kingdom was in touch with Europe. Baldwin made his way in disguise to Arsuf. Embarking with Godric, an English pirate, he sailed straight through the Egyptian galleys that guarded the harbor of Jaffa. In June, 1102, with forces augmented from an English fleet under Harding, he assailed the enemy. The Patriarch of Jerusalem carried the wood of the True Cross. With the cry, “Christus regnat! Vincet! Imperat!” which subsequently appeared as the legend on the gold coins of France, the besieged became the victors. But the joy of the triumph when the king returned to Jerusalem was marred by the memory of the many slain; Stephen of Blois and Stephen of Burgundy, with a great number of the bravest knights, had fallen.

The Greek emperor, Alexius, while sending congratulation to the Christians, could not repress his jealousy of their victories. He prepared to assail Antioch; he negotiated with the captors of Bohemond for his ransom, that he might secure from his gratitude the title to the city which that chieftain held. Bohemond, however, ransomed himself by pledges to the emir who held him, and, after having endured a captivity of four years, defended his city in battles by sea and land from the treachery of the Greeks. At the same time, with other chieftains, he carried arms into Mesopotamia. At Charan he barely escaped in company with Tancred, while their companions, Josselin de Courtenay and Baldwin du Bourg, were dungeoned at Mosul.

In view of his exhausted resources, Bohemond attempted a vast and romantic scheme for their recuperation. Having floated a report of his death, he concealed himself in a coffin and passed through the watchful fleet of the Greeks, who cursed his imagined corpse. Arriving in Italy, he secured a new commission from the Pope. In France he so ingratiated himself with King Philip I. as to secure that monarch’s daughter, the Princess Constance, to wife. He then raised a new army of crusaders. In Spain and Italy he augmented this force, and embarking at Bari, he attempted to take a bitter retaliation on the empire of the Greeks. His expedition against Durazzo failed of success. Bohemond, at the moment when his ambition was at the point of its extremest satisfaction, returned to die in his own Italian dominion of Taranto.

The kingdom of Jerusalem was reduced to all sorts of expedients to raise the means of its support and extension. King Baldwin recouped his treasury by marriage with Adela, widow of Count Roger of Sicily. Her vast wealth was heralded by the vessel in which she sailed, whose mast was incased in gold and whose hold was laden with gems and coin. A thousand trained warriors followed, at her expense. Either the drain upon her purse or the incompatibility of her relations with the king led her to leave him after three years and return to Italy.

With the assistance of Genoese fleets, Ptolemaïs was captured. The mutual jealousies between the Turks and the Egyptians enabled the Christians to secure the southern coast of Palestine. Raymond having died before the walls of Tripoli, his son Bertrand captured that city, which from that time became the titular possession of his family. An immense library of Persian, Arabic, and Egyptian manuscripts was by the illiterate Christians given to the flames. Biblus and Beirut also fell before the standard of the cross. With the aid of a fleet and ten thousand men, under Sigur of Norway, Sidon was quickly acquired.

But in the midst of these triumphs came an irreparable loss. Tancred, the ideal of knighthood, died (December 12, 1112). His genius and sword had conquered widely in northern Syria. His memory has been embalmed, while his real virtues, which needed no untruthful praises, have been exaggerated in poetry and romance since Chaucer sang of him as “a very parfite, gentil knight.”

The loss of Tancred was felt especially in the north, where the Christians soon after met a fearful defeat at Mount Tabor. In extremity they made alliance with the Saracens of Damascus and Mesopotamia, under the Sultan of Bagdad.

The jealousy among the Moslems giving him seeming security from attack on the north, King Baldwin planned the invasion of Egypt. He crossed the desert and appeared within three days’ journey of Cairo. While returning from a raid, laden with spoil and flushed with the anticipation of soon adding the land of the Nile to his possessions, the king fell sick. Nominating Baldwin du Bourg for his successor, he died at the edge of the desert (1118). His body was brought, in obedience to his dying request, and deposited beside that of Godfrey, near to the Holy Sepulchre.