THE EARLY CRUSADES AND THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM (1095–1187)[10]
Early Pilgrimages to Palestine—The Turkish Conquest—Causes of the
Crusades—Urban II. and the Council of Clermont—Leaders of the
First Crusade—Alexius and the Crusaders—Results of the
Crusade—Organisation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and its dependent
States—The Military Orders—Rise of the Atabeks—Fall of Edessa—The
Second Crusade—Decline of the Kingdom of Jerusalem—Power of
Saladin—Fall of Jerusalem.
[Sidenote: Early Pilgrimages to Palestine.]
The piety of the Middle Ages, ever wont to express its spiritual
emotions in concrete shape, had long found in pilgrimages to holy places
a favourite method of kindling its religious zeal and atoning for past
misdeeds. Of all pilgrimages, the most meritorious was that to the
sacred spots where Christ had lived His earthly life and where the
Christian faith first arose. From the days of St. Jerome, Jerusalem was
the chief centre of holy travel; and from the days of Helena, the mother
of Constantine, faithful Christians had sought to identify and
consecrate the exact places of the Lord’s birth, suffering, and
resurrection. A great Christian Basilica, built by Helena’s pious care,
marked the site of the Holy Sepulchre, and men believed that divine
agency had led to the discovery of the True Cross on which Jesus had
suffered. As long as the Roman Empire remained in its integrity,
pilgrimages to the Holy Land were safe and easy. Even the conquest of
Syria by the Caliph Omar did not make them impossible. A noble
mosque—the mosque of Omar—was built on the site of the Jewish Temple,
but the custody of the Holy Sepulchre and the other sacred spots
remained in Christian hands, and the places themselves were treated with
respect and reverence by the tolerant Arabs, to whom Jerusalem was a
city as venerable as to the Jew or Christian. All through the early
Middle Ages the swarm of pilgrims continued. The risks of the journey
through the lands of Islam increased the merit of the act. But with the
break-up of the great Caliphate, the holy places became for the first
time dangerous to the Christian wayfarer. In the second third of the
tenth century Jerusalem was ruled by the fanatical Ikshidites (934–969),
but in 969 the Fatimite Caliphs of Cairoan conquered Egypt and Syria,
and for a time pilgrimages again became easy. The Fatimites were
Shiites, and their dissensions from the orthodox Sunnites made them
perforce tolerant of other creeds. Only the mad Caliph El Hakim
(996–1021), who contemplated the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre,
stayed for a time the influx of the faithful. The religious revival that
flowed from Cluny, and the greater peacefulness of western Europe, led
to a vast throng of pilgrims during the seventy years that succeeded El
Hakim’s death. The fierce Fulk the Black of Anjou thrice visited the
holy places. Robert, Duke of Normandy, abandoned his son William to go
on pilgrimage in 1035. In 1064 Archbishop Siegfried of Mainz headed a
band of 7000 penitents to Jerusalem. The conversion of the Hungarians
under St. Stephen again opened up the land route through the Danube
valley and the Greek Empire, which men preferred to the stormy sea
swarming with Saracen pirates.
[Sidenote: The Turkish Conquest of Palestine.]
The growth of the Seljukian power again stopped the flow of Christian
pilgrims to Jerusalem. Here as elsewhere the Turkish period of conquest
marked the beginning of the worst of evils for the once Christian lands
of the East. Asia Minor, the centre of the East Roman Empire, became a
desolate waste ruled by Turkish plunderers. In 1076 the expulsion of the
Fatimites from Jerusalem left the custody of the holy city to the Turks.
The legend of Peter the Hermit expresses the indignation of western
Europe when the few wanderers who got back told terrible tales of wrongs
suffered and blasphemies witnessed from the infidel lords of the
Sepulchre of Christ. [Sidenote: Causes of the First Crusade.] But the
stories of pilgrims, though they did much to kindle the indignation of
Europe against Turkish rule in Palestine, did not of themselves account
for the movement to redeem it. The preaching of Peter the Hermit,
fruitful though it was, is not in authentic history the cause of the
First Crusade. The Crusades were the work of the Popes at the
instigation of the Eastern Emperor.
[Sidenote: The East and the West at the end of the eleventh century.]
Though, after the death of Malek Shah, the Seljukian monarchy split up
into many rival powers, the danger of Turkish advance was still great.
The direct rule of the Seljuks was henceforth limited to Persia, while
Sultans of Seljukian blood established themselves lords of Kerman,
Syria, and Roum. The Seljuks of Syria now ruled the Holy Sepulchre. The
descendants of Suleiman, the conqueror of Nicæa, carved out a separate
power in the inland parts of Asia Minor, called the kingdom of Roum
[_i.e._ Rome], whose capital Nicæa was not one hundred miles from
Constantinople, and whose limits extended to the waters of the Sea of
Marmora. Some fragments of the Armenian race profited by this break-up
to re-establish their freedom in the mountains of the Taurus. But Kilidj
Arslan, the Sultan of Roum, was almost as threatening to Alexius as Alp
Arslan had been to earlier Emperors. Fear of the lords of Nicæa, rather
than a zeal for the holy places, led Alexius to apply for help to the
West, and rouse the Westerns to defend the Greek Empire, by dwelling on
the desolation of Jerusalem.
There was no strong political power in western Europe to which Alexius
could appeal. The Empire was drifting asunder under the rule of Henry
IV., and France was hopelessly broken up into a mass of feudal states,
hardly recognising the authority of Philip I. The Roman Church alone was
sufficiently vigorous and representative to help him. Already Michael
VII. had sent similar requests to Gregory VII., who had caught eagerly
at the prospects of a holy war against the Turks, but the expulsion of
Islam was so united in his mind with the necessity of ending the Greek
and Armenian schisms, that it was not an unmixed evil to the Eastern
Empire that the Pope was too much occupied at home to embark seriously
upon the undertaking. Yet it is a fact of no small significance that
Gregory, who created the mediæval Papacy, was also the first Western to
whom a Crusade seemed a practicable thing. His ally, Robert Guiscard,
shared his eastern projects, but the campaign at Durazzo showed how
little the fierce Norman distinguished between the schismatic and the
infidel.
[Sidenote: Urban II. and the Council of Clermont, 1095.]
Alexius’ envoys appeared before Urban II. at the Council of Piacenza,
and at Clermont a few months later the active French Pope preached with
extraordinary force and fervour a holy war against the infidel. The vast
crowd received the Pope with unmeasured enthusiasm. ‘It is the will of
God,’ resounded from churchman and layman alike the answer to Urban’s
appeal. Thousands pledged themselves to fight against Islam, and Urban
himself distributed the crosses which the armed pilgrims were to bear as
their special badge, and which gave the holy wars the name of Crusades.
Preachers, like Peter the Hermit, stirred up the passion of the
multitude, and before the lords and knights were ready, huge swarms of
poor pilgrims gathered together in northern France and the Rhineland,
under the leadership of Peter himself and of a French knight called
Walter the Penniless. These disorganised hordes either perished on the
long land journey through Hungary and Greece, or fell easy victims to
the first encounter with the Turks of Roum, but their misordered zeal
showed how the movement had touched the heart of Europe.
[Sidenote: The leaders of the First Crusade.]
The great kings of the West took no part in the First Crusade. The
Emperor and the King of France had incurred the papal anathema, the King
of England was a profligate blasphemer, and the Kings of Spain had
enough crusading work at their own gates. The highest class that was
affected by the Pope’s preaching was that of the feudal magnates of the
second rank, and especially the barons of France and the adjacent
French-speaking Lotharingia and Burgundy. These were the lands which had
been the chief home of the Cluniac movement, and this was the class to
which the Pope looked for allies in his struggle against the mighty
kings of the earth. The most dignified potentate to take the cross was
Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse and Marquis of Provence, the
greatest of the lords of southern France. Of the north French magnates,
Hugh, Count of Vermandois, King Philip’s brother, was the highest in
rank and position. After him came Stephen, Count of Blois and Chartres,
the son-in-law of William the Conqueror, and the father of an English
king and of a line of Counts of Champagne and Blois. Robert, Duke of
Normandy, left the care of his dominions to his more astute brother, and
accompanied his brother-in-law. His cousin, Count Robert II. of
Flanders, the son of an old pilgrim to Jerusalem, followed in his
father’s footsteps. Of the princes of the Empire the most important was
Godfrey, Duke of Lower Lorraine, the son of the Count of Boulogne, and
Ida, sister of the Duke Godfrey of Lower Lorraine who had so zealously
supported the cause of Henry IV. In 1089 the Emperor had granted Godfrey
his uncle’s duchy, yet he is better known as Godfrey of Boulogne, and
still oftener, through a curious misnomer, as Godfrey of Bouillon. His
brothers Eustace and Baldwin, and his nephew Baldwin the younger,
followed him to the Crusade. But the strongest of the Crusaders was
Bohemund, the Italian Norman, the old enemy of Alexius Comnenus, who,
after his father Robert Guiscard’s death, being only possessed of the
little lordship of Otranto, hoped to win eastern lands for himself.
Other Crusaders besides Bohemund had an eye on possible principalities
to be conquered from the infidel. But with him went his nephew Tancred,
a more chivalrous character. No great number of the higher clergy went
on the Crusade. Conspicuous among them was the Pope’s legate, Adhemar of
Monteil, Bishop of Le Puy en Velay.
[Sidenote: Alexius Comnenus and the Crusaders.]
The Crusaders levied their followers in their own way, and went at
different times and in different directions to Constantinople, which
Bishop Adhemar had indicated as their meeting-place. As swarm after
swarm of mail-clad warriors marched through his dominions to his
capital, Alexius Comnenus became very anxious as to their attitude to
the Greek Empire. His hope had been to get an auxiliary Western force of
knights, but the vast throng of Frankish chivalry, that had obeyed Pope
Urban, alarmed him excessively, especially when he found his old enemy
Bohemund among them. There was real danger lest the Crusaders should
turn their arms against Constantinople instead of Nicæa and Antioch, and
realise by force Hildebrand’s ideal of a union of the churches, before
the attack was made on the infidel. Greed and religious zeal combined to
inspire them to turn against the opulent and schismatic capital. But the
craft and ingenuity of Alexius served him in good stead, and in the end
he persuaded all the leaders to take oaths of fealty to him, hoping thus
to retain the overlordship of any districts they might conquer from the
Turks. He then gave them facilities for crossing into Asia.
The Crusaders now entered into infidel ground. Nicæa, the capital of
Kilidj Arslan, was taken in June 1097, and next month the army of the
Sultan was defeated at Dorylæum. These successes secured Asia Minor.
After a long and painful march the Taurus was crossed, and in June 1098
Antioch was forced to surrender. [Sidenote: The march through Asia, and
the conquest of Jerusalem, 1097–1099.] Even after that the Christians
were in a sorry plight from famine, and were almost blockaded in their
new conquest by the army of Corbogha, Ameer of Mosul. The Bishop of Le
Puy died, and after his moderating influence was removed, disputes broke
out, especially between the Normans and the south French. Many of the
Crusaders, chief among whom was Stephen of Blois, went home in despair.
But the fancied discovery of the Holy Lance, with which the Roman
soldier had pierced the side of Christ, revived the fainting energies of
the Crusaders, though at first the Normans declared that the ‘invention’
was a fraud of a chaplain of Raymond of Toulouse. Corbogha was defeated
in a great battle, and at last the Christians entered the Holy Land. The
divisions of Islam facilitated their progress. A month after the capture
of Antioch, the Fatimites of Egypt had conquered Jerusalem, which
nevertheless resisted vigorously. Finally, on 15th July 1099, Jerusalem
was stormed and, amidst hideous scenes of carnage, the remnant of the
crusading army attained its goal. A new victory at Ascalon in August
secured southern Palestine from Egyptian assault.
[Sidenote: Results of the Crusade.]
The whole fate of the East seemed changed by the First Crusade. The
Sultanate of Roum was hemmed up in the central and eastern parts of Asia
Minor, while Nicæa and perhaps a third of Asia Minor went back to the
rule of Alexius. The little Armenian lordships of the Taurus grew into a
new Armenian kingdom in Cilicia, strong enough to keep Turks and
Saracens at bay. The Christians predominated in Syria, whence they soon
threatened both the Fatimites of Egypt and the Seljukian dynasty in
Persia. The Latin lordship of Edessa crossed the Euphrates, and formed
in the upper valley of that river a permanent check to the lords of
Mosul. Despite national jealousies, and the still deeper ill-will of
Catholic and Orthodox, Christianity had acted with wonderful unity of
purpose, while Islam could not forget its petty feuds even in the face
of the enemy. The exploits of Leo the Isaurian and Nicephorus Phocas
were more than outdone by Alexius and his Western allies. Never since
the days of Heraclius had the old limits of Rome’s power in the East
been so nearly maintained.
[Sidenote: The early difficulties of the Frankish conquerors.]
It remained to provide for the government of the conquered provinces.
All Syria was portioned among the victorious Latins. Godfrey of Boulogne
accepted the government of Jerusalem; but he refused to wear a crown of
gold in the city where Christ had worn a crown of thorns, and contented
himself with the modest title of Baron and Advocate of the Holy
Sepulchre. Bohemund, the Norman, ruled northern Syria as Prince of
Antioch, and Baldwin, brother of Godfrey, became Count of Edessa. But
these chieftains had at first so few followers that they held little
more than the cities and castles that they garrisoned. Up to Godfrey’s
death in 1100, the hold of the Christians on southern Syria was very
slight. Jaffa was their only port, and the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem
was beset with Saracen brigands, and marked by ruined villages and
unburied bodies. At Antioch, Bohemund was in even worse straits. In 1100
he was taken prisoner by the Turks, who next year besieged Antioch,
where Tancred with difficulty defended the Christian cause. Meanwhile a
new crusade, mostly from Aquitaine, Germany, and Italy, had been almost
annihilated in Asia Minor by long marches, thirst, hunger, and the arms
of the Turks. With the remnants, Raymond of Toulouse conquered Tripoli,
and established himself in middle Syria. Meanwhile Bohemund was
released, on an Armenian prince paying his ransom. He then joined with
Baldwin of Edessa on a distant expedition against Harran, but was badly
beaten and forced in despair to return to Europe, where he again
attacked his old enemy the Greek Emperor. Failing at a new siege of
Durazzo, Bohemund was forced to become the vassal of the Eastern
Basileus for Antioch. Baldwin of Edessa, a prisoner since the battle of
Harran, made terms with the Ameer of Mosul, and joined with him in
waging war against the Normans of Antioch. Yet, if the Crusaders were
divided, the infidels were equally at cross-purposes. A constant stream
of fresh pilgrims reinforced the scanty armies of the Latins, and their
military superiority, both in pitched battles and in building and
defending castles, stood them in good stead. Financial help came from
the keen-witted Italian traders of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, who found in
the Latin conquests new outlets for their commerce, and who were now
winning the trade of the Levant from the Greeks. Baldwin of Edessa,
called after Godfrey’s death to succeed him at Jerusalem, did not share
his scruple against bearing the title of king, and showed such skill,
both as warrior and statesman, that he became in a very real sense the
founder of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Bit by bit the Saracens were
expelled from the open country, and within the generation succeeding the
First Crusade, an ordered political system was set up among the Latin
principalities of Syria.
Under Baldwin I. (1100–1118) the crusading state attained its limits and
its organisation. His nephew and successor, Baldwin II. (1118–1130),
called like his uncle from Edessa to Jerusalem, was also a man of
courage and character. Dying without sons, his daughter Millicent’s
husband, Fulk, Count of Anjou (1130–1143), became the next king. Under
him the Latin state reached its zenith, and gave him no reason to repent
his preference for his Eastern kingdom rather than his Western county.
After him, his son by his first wife, Geoffrey (the father of our Henry
II.), became Count of Anjou, while, unluckily for Jerusalem, his two
sons by Millicent, Baldwin and Amalric, were mere children. With them
the decline begins.
[Illustration: THE CRUSADING STATES in SYRIA DURING THE TWELFTH CENTURY]
The crusading lords, accustomed only to the forms of government that
prevailed at home, reproduced in the Latin states of Syria the strict
feudalism of western Europe. Feudalism required a nominal head, and the
King of Jerusalem stood to the Latin princes as the King of early
Capetian France stood to his vassals, having outside his own dominions
nothing more than a vague supremacy over three great feudatories ruling
over substantially independent states. [Sidenote: Organisation of the
kingdom of Jerusalem and its dependent states.] The Prince of Antioch
and the Counts of Tripoli and Edessa thought they had made a great
concession in acknowledging his superiority at all, and were constantly
at war with each other and with their suzerain. But each of the four
Frankish princes had, like their Western counterparts, by no means
unrestricted authority, even within their own peculiar territories. All
four states were divided into fiefs, whose holders exercised the
regalian rights that seemed proper to a baron. Within the kingdom of
Jerusalem proper there were twelve such lordships, four of which were
the ‘great baronies’ of Jaffa-Ascalon, Kerak-Montreal, Galilee, and
Sidon. These in turn had their feudatories, and the powerful lordship of
Ibelin, though but a mesne tenancy, overshadowed the double county of
Jaffa and Ascalon. Beyond the royal domain, which centred round the
capital and the towns of Tyre and Acre, the Kings of Jerusalem had
little real authority. For the administration of their realm a customary
code grew up, which, in days when the Latin lordships had waned almost
to nothing, was embodied in the Assizes of Jerusalem, more valuable as
an ideal picture of a perfect feudal state than as a description of what
really prevailed at any one time in Syria. Being an artificial creation,
the Latin state was more fully feudal than the kingdoms of the West,
where the system had grown up naturally, and where there were still
survivals of older forms of polity. Each lord held by the tenure of
constant military service, and every effort was made to prevent the
accumulation of fiefs in the same hands lest it should diminish the
military forces of the kingdom. There were the usual feudal officers of
state, seneschal, constable, marshal, chamberlain, chancellor, and the
rest. There were the great feudal Council of the Realm, and local courts
presided over by hereditary viscounts. But the Franks were ever a small
minority of warriors, rulers, priests, and, in the towns, traders. The
priests and barons were practically all French or French-speaking, and
the tongue of northern France became the ordinary language of the Latin
East, while ‘Frank’ became the commonest name by which Greeks and Arabs,
Turks and Armenians, alike designated the Western settlers. It was a
proof of the commercial importance of the land that customs duties
became from the beginning a chief source of revenue. The only non-French
element was the Italian commercial colony, which lived in separate
quarters in the towns under governors and laws of its own. Venetians
settled largely in the kingdom of Jerusalem, where the Marseilles
merchants had exceptionally an enclosed factory of their own in the
capital. Genoese mainly occupied the fiefs of Antioch and Tripoli. Pisa
was already rather crowded out by her younger rivals. Through Italian
hands the commerce between West and East almost exclusively passed. In
the country, Syrian peasants, mainly of the Orthodox faith, tilled the
lands of their Latin and Catholic masters, and like the Mohammedans and
Jews, paid taxes from which the Franks were exempt. The paucity of
numbers of the Franks led to extreme care being devoted to building
castles and fortifying towns. The feudal stronghold became bigger,
harder to take, and more elaborate than ever it had been in the West,
and to this day there remain ruins of eastern castles that rival in
dignity and strength Coucy, Carnarvon, or Caerphilly. Even in the desert
beyond Jordan, the remnants of a vast fortress like Kerak shows how real
and solid was the crusading state. Side by side with the Latin state
went the Latin Church. Catholic bishops and priests were brought in
everywhere, and the various sects of Oriental Christians—Greeks,
Armenians, Nestorians, and the rest—shared in a common condemnation as
schismatics, though at first common interests and common enemies kept
the churches better together than might have been expected. Churches and
monasteries grew up beside the new castles. The Holy Sepulchre was soon
enclosed in a newer and grander sanctuary. The mediæval ideal—half
martial, half ascetic—never had so fair a chance of development as in
this land of Christians, forced to fight for their lives against Islam.
It found its most characteristic expression in the martial monasticism
of the military orders. For the present all looked well. Besides the
constant crowd of pilgrims, there was a permanent population growing
attached to its new home, which with strange quickness of sympathy, was
adopting the conditions of Eastern life, and not seldom intermarrying
with Syrians, Armenians, and Greeks. ‘God has poured the West into the
East,’ boasted the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres. ‘We who were Westerns
are now Easterns. We have forgotten our native land.’
[Sidenote: The Military Orders.]
When the Latin kingdom was still young, a knight from Burgundy, named
Hugh de Payens, made the journey to Jerusalem. Seeing that poor pilgrims
were still exposed to great hardships and dangers, he formed a society,
with eight knights like-minded with himself, devoted to the protection
of distressed wayfarers. [Sidenote: The Templars.] The grant of a house
near Solomon’s Temple led to the brethren being called the Knights of
the Temple, and so successful did the new movement become that St.
Bernard, then omnipotent in the Latin world, interested himself in it,
and drew up a rule for it, which, in 1128, was authorised by Honorius
II. It was a new departure in the history both of war and of religion.
The knights took the threefold monastic vow of poverty, chastity, and
obedience; and in time of peace ruled their life after the fashion of
the canons regular, that were becoming so popular in the West [see pp.
204–207]. Their main business of protecting pilgrims soon grew into a
general duty of war against the infidel. Ascetic, austere, living the
lives of monks, taught to regard hunting, games, and personal adornment
as frivolous and worldly, they were, as their panegyrist says, ‘lions in
war, lambs in the house.’ To Christians they were monks, to Islam they
were soldiers. ‘They bear before them a banner, half-white, half-black:
this they call Beauséant, because they are fair and friendly to the
friends of Christ, to His enemies stern and black.’
[Sidenote: The Knights of St. John.]
The needs of poor pilgrims had led the citizens of Amalfi to set up a
hospital at Jerusalem for their refreshment, in the days when Palestine
was still ruled by the Fatimite Caliphs. This institution, dedicated to
St. John the Baptist, was revived and reorganised by its master Gerard
after the Latin conquest. Gerards successor, Raymond of Le Puy, struck
by the success of the Templars, obtained about 1130 the Pope’s
permission to convert this charitable foundation into a military
brotherhood like that of Hugh de Payens. Before long the Hospitallers,
or Knights of St. John, vied with the Templars in their numbers, wealth,
and importance. At later times other military orders were founded, such
as the Teutonic Order [founded in 1197], the struggling little English
community of the Knights of St. Thomas of Acre [1231], and the three
famous military orders of Spain. But in the Holy Land no other order
ever took the position that was soon attained by the Templars and the
Knights of St. John. Enormous estates gradually accrued to them in every
country in Europe, and their houses in the West became recruiting
stations, whence a regular supply of knights and servitors, vowed to a
perpetual crusade, kept alive the forces of the Latin kingdom. A papal
grant of 1162 exempted the Templars from all ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, save that of the Grand Master and the Pope. Like Cluny or
Cîteaux, each order formed an organised unity, ruled in the last
instance by General Chapters, whose power controlled even that of the
Master of each order. In the East each order formed a new little state,
with castles, soldiers, revenues, and government of its own. Often in
conflict with the kings and each other, the two chief orders
nevertheless formed the most permanent and indestructible element in the
Latin kingdom. It was due to their well-drilled enthusiasm that the
Latin East could still hold its own against the Saracen and Turk.
[Sidenote: Rise of the Atabeks.]
The organisation of the Latin East was hardly completed when the period
of decline set in. Much of the success of the First Crusade had been due
to the antagonism of Turk and Arab, and the break-up of the Seljukian
kingdom. In the generation following, a new danger arose in the growth
of a consolidated Mohammedan state in Syria. Imad-ed-din Zangi was a
Turk whose father had been a trusted follower of Malek Shah, and who,
after a stormy youth, had been, in 1127, made governor, or Atabek, of
Mosul. In the course of the next fifteen years Zangi destroyed all the
rival Mohammedan powers in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, and then
turned his arms against Edessa, the remote crusading county that
encroached upon his territories and threatened his capital. Jocelin of
Courtenay, who ruled Edessa after Baldwin became King of Jerusalem,
opposed him by a vigorous resistance, but Jocelin’s son, Jocelin II.,
was a cowardly voluptuary, who left Edessa almost undefended. [Sidenote:
Fall of Edessa, 1144.] In 1144 Zangi conquered Edessa, and put the
Frankish garrison to the sword. The whole county was speedily overrun,
and the Latin East experienced its first great disaster.
[Sidenote: St. Bernard and the Second Crusade.]
The fall of Edessa filled Europe with alarm, and St. Bernard, then in
the plenitude of his influence, preached a new crusade with
extraordinary fervour, and won over the two foremost princes in
Christendom. Louis VII., King of France, had already taken the
Crusader’s vow to expiate an early crime of violence [see page 284], but
his barons, and his minister Suger, urgently dissuaded him. At Easter,
1146, St. Bernard appeared before a great gathering at Vézelai, and
amidst scenes that recalled the first enthusiasm at Clermont, all ranks
took the cross from the hands of the great Cistercian. After preaching
the crusade over northern France, Bernard went to Germany, and at
Christmas, in the cathedral at Speyer, overcame by his eloquence the
hesitation of Conrad III.
[Sidenote: Crusade of Conrad III.]
Two large armies were now equipped. Conrad and his Germans were first on
the march, and travelling by way of Hungary and Bulgaria, were well
received by the Greek Emperor, Manuel Comnenus, whose wife, Bertha of
Sulzbach, was Conrad’s sister-in-law. Unwilling to wait for the arrival
of the French, Conrad started at once to march by way of Nicæa and
Iconium to Syria, a route that led him through the heart of the kingdom
of Roum, where the light-armed Turkish horsemen perpetually assailed his
ill-disciplined and unwieldy squadrons, who were overwhelmed by the same
fate that befel the Crusaders of 1101 [September 1147]. A mere remnant
escaped with Conrad to Nicæa, where the French, under Louis VII., had at
last assembled. [Sidenote: Crusade of Louis VII.] To avoid the dangers
of the upland plateau, the French proceeded southward along the coast of
Asia Minor as far as Ephesus, whence they ascended the valley of the
Maeander into the interior, in order to avoid the rugged shores of Caria
and Lycia. They were at once exposed to constant Turkish attacks.
Conrad, who started with them on a second attempt, soon lost heart, and
returned to Constantinople. When the wearied army at last reached the
little port of Attalia in Pamphylia [February 1148], the leaders
resolved to borrow ships from the Greeks, and effect the rest of their
journey by sea. But so small a number of ships was forthcoming, that
only the knights were enabled to embark. The rest of the army was forced
to resume its dangerous land march, and few indeed ever reached their
destination.
In March 1148 Louis VII. and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, landed at
Antioch with the little band of knights, that now alone represented the
two greatest military powers of Christendom. He hurried at once to the
south, where he was joined by Conrad III., who had now reached Acre by
sea. It was unwisely resolved to march against Damascus, though its
ruler was the chief enemy of Noureddin, Zangi’s son and successor, and
would have willingly stood aside had the attack been concentrated on the
conquerors of Edessa. As it was, Mosul and Damascus made common cause,
and the attack on the latter city proved an utter failure. Conrad at
once went home, and Louis followed him a year later. The result of the
Second Crusade was to promote the unity of Islam, and to divert the
enemy from the north to Jerusalem, where the Christian position was
weakest.
The thirty years succeeding the Second Crusade were a period of fair but
somewhat stationary prosperity for the Latin East. The long minority of
Baldwin III. (1143–1163) was a great calamity in itself, but his mother,
Millicent, was a capable regent, and Baldwin, when he grew up, proved a
vigorous warrior both against the Egyptians and Noureddin, while his
affability, generosity, and bright ready wit made him the most popular
of all his line. By his marriage with Theodora, daughter of the Emperor
Manuel, Baldwin III. did something to promote active co-operation
between the Greeks and the Latins against Islam, and his death in 1163
was a great loss to the Latin kingdom. [Sidenote: The Kingdom of
Jerusalem between the Second and the Third Crusades.] Amalric I., his
brother (1163–1174), also married a Byzantine wife, and even visited
Constantinople. But with all his policy he failed to unite effectively
the Christian forces, or to check seriously the growth of the power of
Noureddin, and with his death the decline of the kingdom rapidly set in.
His son and successor, Baldwin IV. (1174–1185), began to reign as a boy
of twelve, and as he grew up proved a hopeless leper. On his death
another child, Baldwin V. (1185–1186), his sister Sibyl’s son by her
first husband, succeeded, but he died the next year. The crown was now
disputed between Guy of Lusignan, Sibyl’s second husband, and Raymond,
Count of Tripoli, who had acted as regent for the leper king. In the
short but sharp civil war that followed, the last hopes of the kingdom
perished.
A state ruled in turn by a leper, a child, and an intriguing woman was
in no fit state to carry on a perpetual struggle for existence, and the
disorders of the royal house were only typical of the disorganisation of
the realm. There was always a corrupt element among the Crusaders. A
momentary religious enthusiasm could not change the nature of the
criminals and desperadoes, who had sought a refuge in the East from the
errors they had committed in the West. But even the descendants of the
warrior saints lamentably degenerated under the fierce sun of Syria, and
the luxury and moral corruption of Oriental life. The best and bravest
perished in the ceaseless wars against the infidel, and the crusading
lordships were constantly diminishing in numbers, and too often a single
heiress, an imbecile or a minor, represented a great aggregation of
fiefs, formerly owned by many warriors able to make head personally
against the Turks. Things were almost worse with the Franks in the
towns, whose frequent intermarriage with native women led to a mixed
race called ‘Pullani,’ with Eastern habits and ways of thought. Under
these circumstances the military orders became indispensable. Their
castles were always commanded by grown men accustomed to affairs, and
from their numerous commanderies throughout Christendom came a
succession of warriors, whose strength had not been sapped by an almost
tropical climate.
The physical and moral decline of the Latins was made more fatal by
their divisions. The princes of Antioch and their Armenian neighbours
stood apart from the states of southern Syria, and the Greek Empire was
increasingly hostile. While Roger of Sicily repeated the policy of
Robert Guiscard and Bohemund, and the Italian allies of the Crusaders
robbed the Empire of its trade, real co-operation against Islam was
impossible. Within the crusading realm there was constant strife. The
Templars quarrelled with the Hospitallers, the French with the
Provençals, English, and Germans, and the Genoese with the Pisans and
Venetians. The new-comers from the West quarrelled with the older
settlers. Among the baronial houses hereditary feuds arose, as in every
feudal country. The purely feudal organisation of the kingdom made a
strong central power impossible, and nothing but a vigorous despotism,
like that of Henry II. in England, could have long kept the motley state
together. As time went on, the relations between the Franks and their
Eastern subjects grew worse, and neither the unwarlike Armenian nor the
slavish Syrian was of any avail to supplement their armies. It speaks
well for the energy of such parts of the polity as remained sound, that
a century was still to elapse before the crusading kingdoms entirely
disappeared.
The growth of a great Moslem monarchy in Syria was the last and worst of
the many misfortunes of the Latin Christians. After Zangi’s death in
1146, Noureddin had carried the power of the Atabeks to much loftier
heights. [Sidenote: Growth of the power of Saladin.] He captured
Damascus, and pushed his dominions to the sea-coast, thus isolating
Antioch from Tripoli and Jerusalem. In 1171 his general, Saladin,
conquered Egypt, and practically put an end to the schismatic Caliphate
of the Fatimites. Noureddin died in 1174, recognised even by the
Christians as a ‘just man, wise and religious, so far as the traditions
of his race allowed.’ His sons were quite unable to hold their own
against Saladin. Hence in a few years the lord of Cairo and Alexandria
soon became also the lord of Aleppo and Damascus. The Latins were
enclosed by a single united Moslem state, ruled by a generous soldier
and a crafty statesman.
After Guy’s coronation, most of the Frankish barons accepted him as
king, though Raymond of Tripoli, indignant at his usurpation, intrigued
with Saladin. Next year the pillage of a Mussulman convoy by the lord of
Kerak gave Saladin a pretext for proclaiming a holy war against the
Christians, and invading the kingdom of Jerusalem. [Sidenote: The Battle
of Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem, 1187.] On 4th July 1187 a great
battle was fought at Hattin, in which Saladin won a complete victory,
King Guy was taken prisoner, and the True Cross fell into the infidels’
hands. On 2nd October Jerusalem fell, and Tyre, Tripoli, and Antioch
alone succeeded in driving Saladin from their walls. Thus the great
kingdom of the Franks of Syria was reduced to a few towns near the
sea-coast, and a few sorely beleaguered castles. ‘The Latins of the
East,’ said William of Tyre, ‘had forsaken God, and God now forsook
them.’ Unless Europe made another such effort as Urban II. had made, the
crusading state would soon disappear altogether.
[Illustration: DOMINIONS of SALADIN at his death in 1193]
GENEALOGY OF THE EARLY KINGS OF JERUSALEM.
A
Godfrey the Bearded,
Duke of Lower Lorraine, _d._ 1069,
_m._ 1. Doda; 2. Beatrice, mother of Countess Matilda
|
+-------------+-----------+
| |
Godfrey the Hunchback, Ida,
Duke of Lower Lorraine, _m._ Eustace II.,
_d._ 1076 Count of Boulogne
|
+-----------------------+-----+-----------+
| | |
GODFREY OF BOULOGNE, Eustace III. BALDWIN I.,
Duke of Lower Lorraine, and of Boulogne Count of Edessa and
Baron of the Holy Sepulchre, King of Jerusalem
_d._ 1100 (1100–1118)
B
BALDWIN II.,
Cousin of Baldwin I.
(1118–1130)
|
MILLICENT,
_m._ FULK OF ANJOU
(1130–1143)
|
+------------+------------+
| |
BALDWIN III. AMALRIC I.
(1143–1163) (1163–1174)
|
+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+
| | |
BALDWIN IV. Sibyl, Isabella,
(1174–1185) _m._ 1. William of Montferrat _m._ 2. CONRAD OF MONTFERRAT
2. GUY OF LUSIGNAN (1192)
(1186–1192) 3. HENRY OF CHAMPAGNE
| (1192–1197)
| 4. AMALRIC II. OF CYPRUS
| (1197–1205)
(1) |
BALDWIN V. |
(1185–1186) |
|
(2) (4) |
+-------------------------+---------------+
| |
Mary, AMALRIC III.
_m._ JOHN OF BRIENNE (_d._ 1206)
(1210–1222)
|
Iolande,
_m._ EMPEROR FREDERICK II.
(_d._ 1250)