Crusader states
The Crusader states were feudal polities created by the Latin Catholic leaders of the First Crusade through conquest and political subterfuge. Four states were established: the county of Edessa (1097–1150); the principality of Antioch (1098–1287), the county of Tripoli (1102–1289), and the kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291). The kingdom of Jerusalem covered what is now Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and adjacent areas. The other, northern, states covered what are now Syria, south-eastern Turkey, and Lebanon. The description "Crusader states" can be misleading, as from 1130 very few of the Frankish population were crusaders. Medieval and modern writers have also used the term Outremer (French: outre-mer, lit. 'overseas').
In 1098 the armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem passed through Syria. The crusader Baldwin of Boulogne took the place of the Greek Orthodox ruler of Edessa after a coup d'état, and Bohemond of Taranto remained as the ruling prince in the captured Antioch. In 1099, Jerusalem was taken after a siege. Territorial consolidation followed, including the taking of Tripoli. At the states' largest extent, their territory covered the coastal areas of southern modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Edessa fell to a Turkish warlord in 1144, but the other realms endured into the 13th century before falling to the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. Antioch was captured in 1268, Tripoli in 1289. When Acre, the capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem fell in 1291 the last territories were quickly lost, with the survivors fleeing to the Kingdom of Cyprus.
The study of the crusader states in their own right, as opposed to being a sub-topic of the Crusades, began in 19th century France as an analogy to the French colonial experience in the Levant. This was rejected by the 20th century historians whose consensus view was that the Franks, as the western Europeans were known, lived as a minority society that was largely urban, isolated from the indigenous peoples, with separate legal and religious systems. The indigenous peoples were from Christian and Islamic traditions speaking Arabic, Greek and Syriac.
Outremer
The terms "Crusader states" and "Outremer" (French: outre-mer, lit. 'overseas') can be used interchangeably to collectively describe the four feudal states, established by leaders of the First Crusade in the Levant around 1100: (from north to south) the county of Edessa, the principality of Antioch, the county of Tripoli, and the kingdom of Jerusalem. The term Outremer is of medieval origin. Modern historians commonly refer to the four states as "Crusader states" and use "Franks" for the European settlers including crusaders, other incomers, and their descendants. As a term, "Crusader states" can be deceptive as the vast majority of settlers coming from Europe seldom took a crusader oath.[1][2] The Latin chronicles of the First Crusade in the early 11th century, called the Western Christians that came from many countries of Europe Franci irrespective of their ethnicity. Byzantine Greek sources use Frangoi and Arabic al-Ifranj. Alternatively, the chronicles applied the collective designation Latini, or Latins. The medieval ethnonyms reflect the settlers' two characteristics that differentiated them from the indigenous population: their language and faith.[3] The Franks were predominantly French-speaking Roman Catholics while the natives were predominantly Arabic- or Greek-speaking Muslims, Christians of other denominations and Jews.[4][5]
The kingdom of Jerusalem extended over historical Palestine and included some territory east of the Jordan River at its greatest extent. The northern states covered what is now roughly Syria, south-eastern Turkey, and Lebanon. These areas known historically as Syria (known to the Arabs as al-Sham) and Upper Mesopotamia. Edessa extended east beyond the river Euphrates. In the Middle Ages the states were also often collectively known as Syria or Syrie.[6] From around 1115, the ruler of Jerusalem was styled "king of the Latins in Jerusalem". Historian Hans Eberhard Mayer believes that it reflected that in the kingdom only Latins held complete political and legal rights and that the major division in the society was not between the nobility and the common people but between the Franks and the indigenous peoples.[7] Despite sometimes receiving homage from, and acting as regent for, the rulers of the other states, the king held no formalized overlord status and those states remained legally outside the kingdom.[8]
Known as the Holy Land, Palestine was respected as an exceptionally sacred place by Jews, Christians and Muslims. They all associated the region with the lives of the prophets of the Old Testament. The New Testament presented it as the principal venue of the acts of Jesus and his Apostles. Islamic tradition described the region's main city Jerusalem as the site of Muhammad's miraculous night travel and ascension to Heaven. Places associated with a holy man or woman developed into shrines, visited by pilgrims coming from faraway lands often as an act of penance. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built to commemorate Christ's crucifixion and resurrection in Jerusalem. The Church of the Nativity was thought to enclose his birthplace in Bethlehem. The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque commemorated Muhammad's night journey.[9][10] Although the most sacred places of devotion were located in Palestine, the neighboring Syria was also studded with popular shrines.[11] As a borderland of the Muslim world, Syria was an important theater of the jihād, or Islamic holy war, though enthusiasm for pursuing it had faded by the end of the 11th century.[12] In contrast, the Roman Catholic ideology of holy wars quickly developed, culminating in the idea of crusades for lands claimed for Christianity.[11][13]
History
Levant prior the First Crusade
Turkic migration permeated the Middle East from the 9th century. Muslim border raiders captured unconverted Turkic nomads in the Central Asian borderlands and sold them to Islamic leaders who utilised them as slave soldiers. These were known as ghilman or mamluk and were emancipated when converted to Islam. Mamluks were valued primarily because the link of their prospects to a single master generated extreme loyalty. The vizier and effective ruler of the Great Seljuk Empire, Nizam al-Mulk, illustrated in verse within a princely Islamic manual that within the context of Middle Eastern politics this made them more trustworthy than familial relations. Eventually, some mamluk descendants climbed the Muslim hierarchy to become king makers or even dynastic founders.[14][15]
In the mid-11th century a minor clan of Oghuz Turks named Seljuks, after the warlord Saljūq, from Transoxania had expanded through Khurasan, Iran and onto Baghdad where Saljūq's grandson, Tughril, was granted the title sultan, "power" in Arabic by the Abbasid Caliph. The caliphs retained legitimacy and prestige, but the sultans held political power.[16][17] Seljuk success was achieved by extreme violence. It brought disruptive nomadism to the sedentary society of the Levant and set a pattern followed by other nomadic Turkic clans (like the Danishmendids and Artuqids). The Great Seljuk Empire was decentralised, polyglot and multi-national. A junior Seljuk ruling a province as an appanage was titled malik, the Arabic for king. Mamluk military commanders acting for young Seljuk princes as tutors and guardians held the position of atabeg ("father-commander"). If his ward held a province in appanage, the atabeg ruled it as regent for the underage malik. On occasions, the atabeg retained power after his ward reached the age of majority or died.[18][19] The Seljuks adopted and strengthened the traditional iqta' system of the administration of state revenues. The system secured the payment of military commanders through granting them the right to collect the land tax in a well-defined territory, but it made the peasantry vulnerable to an absent lord's greed and to his officials' arbitrary actions.[20][21] Although the Seljuk state effectively worked as far as family ties and personal loyalty overlapped the leaders' personal ambitions, the lavish iqta' grants combined with rivalries between maliks, atabegs and military commanders could lead to disintegration in critical moments.[22]
The regions' ethnic and religious diversity led to alienation among the ruled populations. In Syria, the Seljuk Sunnis ruled indigenous Shias. In Cilicia and northern Syria, the Byzantines, Arabs, and Turks squeezed populations of Armenians. The Seljuks contested control of southern Palestine with Egypt where Shia rulers ruled a majority Sunni populace through powerful viziers who were mainly Turkic or Armenian, rather than Egyptian or Arab.[23] The Seljuks and the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt hated each other, as the Seljuk saw themselves as defenders of the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate and Fatimid Egypt was the chief Shi'ite power in Islam.[24] The root of this was beyond cultural and racial conflict but originated in the splits within Islam following Muhammad's death. Sunnis supported a caliphal succession that began with one of his associates Abu Bakr, while Shi'ites supported an alternative succession from his cousin and son in law, Ali.[25][26] Islamic law granted the status of dhimmi, or protected peoples, to the People of the Book, like Christians and Jews. The dhimmi were second-class citizens, obliged to pay a special poll tax, the jizya, but they could practice their religion and maintain their own law courts.[27][28] Theological, liturgical and cultural differences gave rise to the development of competing Christian denominations in the Levant already before the 7th-century Muslim conquest. The Greek Orthodox natives, or Melkites, remained in full communion with the Byzantine imperial church and their religious leaders often came from the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. In the 5th century, the Nestorians, and the Monophysite Jacobites, Armenians and Copts broke with the Byzantine state church. The Maronites' separate church organisation emerged under Muslim rule.[29]
Between the late 10th and early 11th century the Byzantine Empire had been on the offensive, recapturing Antioch in 969, after three centuries of Arab rule, and invading Syria.[30][31] Turkic brigands and their Byzantine, also often ethnically Turkic, counterparts called akritai indulged in ephemeral cross border raiding. In 1071, while securing his northern borders during a break in his campaigns against the Fatimid Caliphate, Sultan Alp Arslan defeated Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at Manzikert. Romanos's capture and Byzantine factionalism that followed broke Byzantine border control. This enabled entry into Anatolia for large numbers of Turkic warbands and nomadic herders. Alp Arslan's cousin Suleiman ibn Qutulmish seized Cilicia and in 1084 entered Antioch. Two year later, he was killed in conflict with the Great Seljuk Empire.[32] Between 1092 and 1094, Nizam al-Mulk, the Sultan Malik-Shah, the Fatimid Caliph, Al-Mustansir Billah and the vizier Badr al-Jamali all died.[33][34] Malik-Shah's brother Tutush, the atabegs of Aleppo and Edessa were killed in the succession conflict and Suleiman's son Kilij Arslan I revived his father's Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia. The Egyptian succession resulted in a split in the Ismā'īlist branch of Shia Islam. The Persian missionary Hassan-i Sabbah led a breakaway group, creating the Nizari branch of Isma'ilism. This was known as the New Preaching in Syria and Order of Assassins in western historiography. Targeted murder was utilised to compensate for their lack of military power.[35]
The Seljuk invasions, the subsequent eclipse of the Byzantines' and Fatimids' power and the disintegration of the Seljuk Empire revived the old Levantine system of city-states.[36] The region had always been highly urbanized and the local societies were organized into networks of interdependent settlements, each centered around a city or a major town.[37] These networks developed into autonomous lordships under the rule of a Turkic, Arab or Armenian warlord or town magistrate in the late 11th century.[38] The local quadis took control of Tyre and Tripoli; the Arab Banu Munqidh seized Shaizar; Tutush's sons Duqaq and Ridwan succeeded in Damascus and Aleppo respectively, but their atabegs, Janah ad-Dawla and Toghtekin, were in control; Ridwan's retainer Sokman ben Artuq held Jerusalem; Ridwan's father-in-law, Yağısıyan ruled Antioch; and a warlord representing Byzantine interests, called Thoros, seized Edessa.[39]
Foundation
The Byzantines augmented their military manpower with recruitment of mercenaries from the Turks and from Europe. This compensated for a shortfall caused by lost territory, especially in Anatolia.[40] In 1095 at the Council of Piacenza, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos requested support against the Seljuk threat from Pope Urban II.[41] Urban responded by calling for the First Crusade at the later Council of Clermont. His call for an armed pilgrimage for the liberation of the Eastern Christians and the recovery of the Holy Land aroused unprecedented enthusiasm in Catholic Europe. Within a year, tens of thousands of people, both commoners and aristocrats, departed for the military campaign.[42] Individual crusaders' motivations to join the crusade varied, but some of them probably left Europe to make a new permanent home in the Levant.[43]
Alexios welcomed cautiously the feudal armies commanded by western nobles. Godfrey of Bouillon, nominally duke of Lower Lorraine, was one of the first to arrive at Constantinople. Alexios ensured that Godfrey promised solemnly that territory gained that had been previously held by the Roman Empire, would handed to his Byzantine representatives and made Godfrey his vassal. The Italo-Norman Bohemond of Taranto willingly took the oath when he arrived. Bohemond's nephew Tancred of Hauteville and Godfrey's brother Baldwin of Bologne were persuaded to submit after attempting to avoid the commitment by independently crossing the Bosphorus. Only Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse resisted, instead promising non-aggression towards Alexios.[44] The Byzantine Tatikios guided the crusade on the arduous three month march to besiege Antioch, during which the Franks made alliances with local Armenians.[45] Before reaching Antioch, Baldwin and his men left the main army and headed to the Euphrates river, engaging in local politics and seizing the fortifications of Turbessel and Rawandan, where he was welcomed by the Armenian populace.[46] Thoros could barely control or defend Edessa, so he tried to hire the Franks as mercenaries. Later, he went further and adopted Baldwin in a power-share arrangement. In March 1098, a month after Baldwin's arrival a Christian mob killed Thoros and acclaimed him as doux, the Byzantine title that Thoros had used.[47] Baldwin's position was personal rather than institutional and the Armenian governance of the city remained in place. Baldwin's nascent County of Edessa consisted of pockets separated from his other holdings of Turbessel, Rawandan and Samosata by the territory of Turkic and Armenian warlords and the Euphrates.[48]
As the crusaders were marching towards Antioch, Syrian Muslims approached Sultan Barkiyaruq for assistance, but he was otherwise engaged in a power struggle with his brother Muhammad Tapar.[49] At Antioch, Bohemond persuaded the other leaders that the city should be his if he could capture it and Alexius did not come to claim it. Alexios withdrew, rather than join the siege after the deserting Stephen, Count of Blois told him its defeat was imminent. In June 1098 Bohemond persuaded a renegade Armenian tower commander to enable the crusaders entry to the city, where they slaughtered the Muslim inhabitants and by mistake some local Christians.[50][51] The crusade leaders offered to return Antioch to Alexios as they had sworn to at Constantinople.[52] When they later learnt of Alexios's withdrawal Bohemond claimed the city and the other leaders agreed, apart from Raymond who supported the Byzantine alliance. The dispute resulted in the march stalling in north Syria. The crusaders became aware of the chaotic state of Muslim politics through surprisingly frequent diplomatic relations with the Muslim powers of north Syria and Egypt. Raymond indulged in a small expedition to increase his reputation and quieten despair of the delay in marching on Jerusalem. He bypassed Shaizar, avoiding hostility, but he laid siege to Arqa to enforce the payment of a tribute.[53] In his absence, Bohemond expelled Raymond's last troops from Antioch and consolidated his rule in the developing Principality of Antioch. Under pressure from the poor Franks, Godfrey and Robert II, Count of Flanders reluctantly joined the eventually unsuccessful siege of Arqa. Alexios requested the crusade delay the march to Jerusalem, so the Byzantines could assist. Raymond's support for this strategy increased division among the crusade leaders and damaged his reputation among ordinary crusaders.[54][55]
The crusaders marched along the Mediterranean coast to Jerusalem. On 15 July 1099 the city was taken after a siege barely longer than a month. Thousands of Muslims and Jews were killed, and the survivors were sold into slavery. Proposals to govern the city as an ecclesiastical state were rejected. Raymond refused the royal title claiming only Christ could wear a crown in Jerusalem. This may have been to dissuade the more popular Godfrey from assuming the throne, but Godfrey adopted the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri ("Defender of the Holy Sepulchre") when he was proclaimed the first Frankish ruler of Jerusalem.[56] In Western Europe at that time an advocatus was a layman responsible for the protection and administration of church estates.[57]
The foundation of the three crusader states did not modify the political situation in the Levant profoundly. Local warlords were replaced by Frankish rulers in the cities, but the regime change was not followed by large-scale colonization and the new conquerors did not alter the traditional organization of settlements and landed property in the countryside.[58] The Muslim leaders were massacred or forced into exile, and the natives, accustomed to the rule of well-organized warbands, offered little resistance to their new lords.[59] Western Christianity's canon law recognized that peace treaties and armistices between Christians and Muslims were valid. The Frankish knights regarded the Turkic mounted warlords as their peers with familiar moral values and this familiarity facilitated their negotiations with the Muslim leaders. The conquest of a city was often accompanied by a treaty with the neighboring Muslim rulers who were customarily forced to pay a tribute for the peace.[60] The crusader states had a special position in Western Christianity's consciousness: many Catholic aristocrats were ready to fight for the Holy Land, although in the decades following the destruction of the large Crusade of 1101 in Anatolia, only smaller groups of armed pilgrims departed for Outremer.[61]
Consolidation (1099 to 1130)
The Fatimids' feud with the Seljuks mostly hindered joint Muslim actions for more than a decade. Outnumbered by their enemies, the Franks remained in a vulnerable position, but they could enter into temporary alliances with their Armenian, Arab and Turkic neighbours. Each crusader state had its own strategic purpose during the first years of its existence. Jerusalem needed undisturbed access to the Mediterranean shores; Antioch wanted to seize Cilicia and the territory along the upper course of the Orontes River; and Edessa aspired to control the Upper Euphrates valley.[62] The most powerful Syrian Muslim ruler, Toghtekin of Damascus, adopted a practical approach when dealing with the Franks. His treaties establishing Damascene–Jerusalemite condominiums in debated territories created precedents for other Muslim leaders.[63][64]
In August 1099 Godfrey defeated Fatimid vizier, Al-Afdal Shahanshah at Ascalon. When Daimbert of Pisa, the papal legate, arrived in the Levant with 120 Pisan ships, Godfrey gained much needed naval support by backing him for the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, along with granting him parts of Jerusalem and the Pisans a section of the port of Jaffa. Daimbert revived the notion of creating an ecclesiastic principality and extorted oaths of fealty from Godfrey and Bohemond. When Godfrey died in 1100, his retainers occupied the Tower of David to secure his inheritance to his brother Baldwin. Daimbert and Tancred sought Bohemond's assistance against the Lotharingians, but Bohemond was captured by the Danishmends under Gazi Gümüshtigin while securing Antioch's northern marches. Before departing for Jerusalem, Baldwin ceded Edessa to his cousin, Baldwin of Bourcq. His arrival thwarted Daimbert who crowned Baldwin as Jerusalem's first Latin king on Christmas Day 1100. By performing the ceremony, the Patriarch abandoned his claim to rule the Holy Land.[65][66]
Tancred remained defiant to Baldwin until an Antiochene delegation offered him the regency in March 1101. He ceded his Principality of Galilee to the King, but reserved the right to reclaim it as a fief if he returned from Antioch within fifteen months. The next two years Tancred ruled Antioch and conquered Byzantine Cilicia and parts of Syria.[67] The Fatimid Caliphate repeatedly attacked Jerusalem in 1101, 1102 and 1105, on the last occasion in alliance with Toghtekin. Baldwin I repulsed these and with Genoese, Venetian and Norwegian fleets conquered the towns on the Palestinian coast except Tyre and Ascalon.[68] Raymond laid the foundations of the fourth crusader state, the County of Tripoli. He captured Tartus, Gibelet and besieged Tripoli. His cousin William II Jordan continued the siege after Raymond's death in 1105. It was completed in 1109 when Raymond's son Bertrand arrived. Baldwin brokered a deal sharing the territory between them until William Jordan's death united the county. Bertrand acknowledged Baldwin's suzerainty despite William Jordan having been Tancred's vassal.[69]
When Bohemond was released for a ransom in 1103, he compensated Tancred with lands and gifts. Baldwin of Bourcq and his cousin and vassal, Joscelin of Courtenay, were captured while attacking Ridwan of Aleppo at Harran with Bohemond. Tancred assumed the regency of Edessa. The Byzantines took advantage reconquering Cilicia and taking the port, but not the citadel, of Laodikeia. Bohemund returned to Italy to recruit allies and gather supplies, Tancred assumed leadership in Antioch and his cousin Richard of Salerno in Edessa. In 1107, Bohemond crossed the Adriatic Sea and failed in besieging Dyrrachion in the Balkan Peninsula. The resulting Treaty of Devol forced Bohemond to restore Laodikeia and Cilicia to Alexios, become his vassal, and reinstate the Greek patriarch of Antioch. Bohemond never returned East and died leaving an underage son Bohemond II. Tancred continued as regent of Antioch and ignored the treaty. Richard's son, Roger of Salerno succeeded as regent on Tancred's death in 1112.[70][71]
The fall of Tripoli prompted Sultan Muhammad Tapar to appoint the atabeg of Mosul Mawdud to wage jihād against the Franks. Between 1110 and 1113, Mawdud mounted four campaigns in Mesopotamia and Syria, but rivalry among his heterogeneous armies' commanders forced him to abandon the offensive on each occasion untimely.[72][73] As Edessa was Mosul's chief rival, Mawdud directed two campaigns against the city.[74] The campaigns caused much havoc and the county's eastern region could never recover.[75] The Syrian Muslim rulers saw the Sultan's intervention as a threat to their autonomy and collaborated with the Franks. After an assassin, likely a Nizari, murdered Mawdud, Muhammad Tapar dispatched two armies to Syria, but both campaigns failed.[76] As Aleppo remained vulnerable to Frankish attacks, the city leaders sought external protection. They allied with the adventurous Artuqid princes, Ilghazi and Balak, who inflicted crucial defeats on the Franks between 1119 and 1124, but could rarely prevent Frankish counter-invasions.[77][78]
In 1118 Baldwin of Bourcq succeeded Baldwin I in Jerusalem, naming Joscelin successor in Edessa. After Roger was killed at Ager Sanguinis ("Field of Blood"), Baldwin II assumed the regency of Antioch for the absent Bohemond II. Public opinion attributed a series of disasters affecting the Outremer—defeats by enemy forces and plagues of locusts—as punishments for the Franks' sins. To improve moral standards, the Jerusalemite ecclesiastic and secular leaders assembled to a council at Nablus and adopted decrees against adultery, sodomy, bigamy and sexual relations between Catholics and Muslims.[79] A proposal by a group of pious knights about a monastic order for deeply religious warriors was likely first discussed at the council of Nablus. The idea of armed monks was quickly espoused by church leaders, and within a decade two military orders, the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, were formed.[80] As the Fatimid Caliphate did no more pose a major threat to Jerusalem, but Antioch and Edessa were vulnerable to invasions, much of Baldwin II's time was taken defending the northern crusader states. His absence, its impact on government and the placing of relatives and their vassals in positions of power created opposition in Jerusalem. Baldwin's sixteen-month captivity led to a failed deposition attempt by some of the nobility, with the Flemish count, Charles the Good considered a possible replacement. Charles declined the offer.[75][81]
Baldwin had four daughters. In 1126, Bohemond reached the age of majority and married the second oldest, Alice, in Antioch.[82] Aleppo had plunged into anarchy, but Bohemond could not exploit it because of a conflict with Joscelin. Aleppo was seized by the new atabeg of Mosul Imad al-Din Zengi in 1128. The two major Muslim centers' union was especially dangerous for the neighboring Edessa,[83][84] but it also worried Damascus's new ruler, Taj al-Muluk Buri.[85] Baldwin's eldest daughter Melisende was his heir. He married her to Fulk of Anjou who had widespread western connections useful to the kingdom. After Fulk's arrival, Baldwin raised a large force for an attack on Damascus. This force included the leaders of the other crusader states, and a significant Angevin contingent provided by Fulk. The campaign was abandoned when the Franks' foraging parties were destroyed and bad weather made the roads impassable. In 1130 Bohemond was killed raiding in Cilicia leaving Alice with their infant daughter, Constance. Baldwin denied Alice control, instead resuming the regency up until his death in 1131.[86][87]
Muslim revival (1131 to 1174)
On his deathbed Baldwin named Fulk, Melisende and their infant son Baldwin III joint heirs. Fulk intended to revoke the arrangement, but his favoritism toward his compatriots roused strong discontent in the kingdom. In 1134 he repressed a revolt by Hugh II of Jaffa, a relative of Melisende, but was still compelled to accept the shared inheritance. He also thwarted frequent attempts by his sister-in-law Alice to assume the regency in Antioch, including alliances with Pons of Tripoli and Joscelin II of Edessa.[88] Taking advantage of Antioch's weakened position, a Cilician Armenian ruler Leo seized the Cilician plain.[89] In 1133, the Antiochene nobility asked Fulk to propose a husband for Constance and he selected Raymond of Poitiers, a younger son of William IX of Aquitaine. Raymond finally arrived in Antioch three years later and married Constance.[90] He reconquered parts of Cilicia from the Armenians.[91] In 1137 Pons was killed battling the Damascenes and Zengi invaded Tripoli. Fulk intervened, but Zengi's troops captured Pons's successor, Raymond II, and besieged Fulk in the border castle of Montferrand. Fulk surrendered the castle and paid Zengi 50,000 dinars in return for his and Raymond's freedom.[92] Emperor Alexios's son and successor John II Komnenos reasserted Byzantine claims to Cilicia and Antioch. His military campaign compelled Raymond of Poitiers to give homage and agree that he would surrender Antioch, if the Byzantines ever captured Aleppo, Homs and Shaizar for him by way of compensation.[93] Next year the Byzantines and Franks jointly besieged Aleppo and Shaizar, but could not take the towns. Zengi soon seized Homs from the Damascene, but a Damascene–Jerusalemite coalition prevented his southward expansion.[94]
Joscelin made an alliance with the Artuqid Kara Arslan who was Zengi's principal Muslim rival in Upper Mesopotamia. While Joscelin was staying west of the Euphrates at Turbessel, Zengi invaded the Frankish lands east of the river in late 1144. Before the end of the year, he captured the region, including the city of Edessa.[95][96] The loss of Edessa strategically threatened Antioch, thus also limiting opportunities for a Jerusalemite expansion in the south. In September 1146 Zengi was assassinated, possibly on orders from Damascus. His empire was divided between his two sons, with the younger Nur ad-Din succeeding him in Aleppo. A power vacuum in Edessa allowed Joscelin to return to the city, but he was unable to take the citadel. When Nur ad-Din arrived the Franks were trapped, Joscelin fled and the subsequent sack left the city deserted.[97]
The fall of Edessa shocked Western opinion, prompting the largest military response since the First Crusade. The new crusade consisted of two great armies led overland by Louis VIII of France and Conrad III of Germany, arriving in Acre in 1148. The arduous march had greatly reduced the two rulers' forces. At a leadership conference including the widowed Melisende and her son Baldwin III an attack on Damascus was agreed rather than the recovery of the distant Edessa. This ended in a humiliating defeat and retreat.[98] The unexpected failure was followed by scapegoating, with many westerners blaming the Franks, and fewer crusaders came from Europe to fight for the Holy Land in the next decades.[99] Raymond of Antioch joined forces with the Nizari, Joscelin with the Rum Seljuks against Aleppo. Nur ad-Din invaded Antioch and Raymond was defeated and killed at Inab in 1149.[100] The next year Joscelin was captured, tortured and later died. Beatrice of Saone, his wife, sold the remains of the County of Edessa to the Byzantines with Baldwin's consent. Already 21 and eager to rule alone, Baldwin forced Melisende's retirement in 1152. In Antioch, Constance resisted pressure to remarry, until 1153 when she chose the French nobleman Raynald of Châtillon as her second husband.[101]
From 1149 all Fatimid caliphs were children and military commanders were competing for power. Ascalon, the Fatimids' last Palestinian bridgehead, hindered Frankish raids against Egypt, but Baldwin captured the town in 1153. The Damascenes feared of further Frankish expansion and Nur ad-Din seized the city with ease a year later. He continued to remit the tribute that Damascus's former rulers had offered to the Jerusalemite kings. Baldwin extracted tribute from the Egyptians as well.[102][103] Raynald lacked financial resources. He tortured the Latin Patriarch of Antioch, Aimery of Limoges to appropriate his wealth and attacked the Cilician Armenians in Byzantine pay. When Emperor Manuel I Komnenos delayed the payment he had been promised, Raynald pillaged Byzantine Cyprus. Thierry, Count of Flanders brought military strength from the West, for campaigning. Thierry, Baldwin, Raynald and Raymond III of Tripoli attacked Shaizar. Baldwin offered the city to Thierry who refused Raynald's demands that he became his vassal, and the siege was abandoned.[104] After Nur ad-Din seized Shaizar in 1157, the Nizari remained the last independent Muslim power in Syria. As prospects for a new crusade from the West were poor, the Franks of Jerusalem sought a marriage alliance with the Byzantines. Baldwin married Manuel's niece,Theodora and received a significant dowry. With his consenst, Manuel forced Raynald into accepting Byzantine overlordship.[105][106]
The childless Baldwin III died in 1163. His younger brother Amalric had to repudiate his wife Agnes of Courtenay on grounds of consanguinity before his coronation, but the right of their two children, Baldwin and Sibylla, to inherit the kingdom was confirmed.[107] The Fatimid Caliphate had rival viziers, Shawar and Dirgham, both eager to seek external support. This gave Amalric and Nur ad-Din the opportunity to intervene. Amalric launched five invasions of Egypt between 1163 and 1169, on the last occasion cooperating with a Byzantine fleet, but he could not establish a bridgehead. Nur ad-Din appointed his Kurdish general Shirkuh to direct the military operations in Egypt. Weeks before Shirkuh died in 1169, the Fatimid caliph Al-Adid made him vizier.[108][109] Shirkuh was succeeded by his nephew Saladin who ended the Shi'ite caliphate when Al-Adid died in September 1171.[110][111] In March 1171, Amalric undertook a visit to Manuel in Constantinople with the aim that he would get Byzantine military support for yet another attack on Egypt. To this end, he swore fealty to the Emperor before his return to Jerusalem, but conflicts with Venice and Sicily prevented the Byzantines from campaigning in the Levant.[112][113] In theory, Saladin was Nur ad-Din's lieutenant, but mutual distrust hindered their cooperation against the crusader states. As Saladin remitted suspiciously small revenue payments to him, Nur ad-Din began gathering troops for an attack on Egypt, but he died in May 1174. He left an 11-year-old son, As-Salih Ismail al-Malik. Within two months, Amalric died. His son and successor, Baldwin IV, was 13 and a leper.[114][115]
Decline and survival (1174 to 1188)
The accession of underage rulers led to disunity both in Jerusalem and in Muslim Syria. In Jerusalem, the seneschal Miles of Plancy took control, but he was murdered by unknown assailants on the streets of Acre. With the baronage's consent, Amalric's cousin, Raymond III of Tripoli, assumed the regency for Baldwin IV as bailli. He became the most powerful baron by marrying the richest heiress of the kingdom, Eschiva of Bures, and gaining Galilee.[116][117] Nur ad-Din's empire quickly disintegrated. His eunuch confidant Gümüshtekin took As-Salih from Damascus to Aleppo. Gümüshtekin's rival Ibn al-Muqaddam seized Damascus, but soon surrendered it to Saladin. By 1176 Saladin reunited much of Muslim Syria through warring against Gümüshtekin and As-Salih's relatives, the Zengids.[118][119] The same year Emperor Manuel invaded the Sultanate of Rum to reopen the Anatolian pilgrimage route towards the Holy Land. His defeat at Myriokephalon weakened the Byzantines' hold of Cilicia.[120]
Upholding the balance of power in Syria was apparently Raymond's main concern during his regency. When Saladin besieged Aleppo in 1174, Raymond led a relieve army to the city; when next year a united Zengid army invaded Saladin's realm, he signed a truce with Saladin.[121] Gümüshtekin released Raynald of Châtillon and Baldwin's maternal uncle Joscelin III of Courtenay for a heavy ransom. They hastened to Jerusalem and Raynald seized Oultrejourdain by marrying Stephanie of Milly. As the leper Baldwin was not expected to father children, his sister's marriage was to be arranged before his unavoidably premature death. Raymond chose William of Montferrat for Sybilla's husband. William was the cousin of both Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Louis VII of France. In 1176 Baldwin reached the age of 15 and majority ending Raymond's regency. He revisited plans for an invasion of Egypt and renewed his father's pact with the Byzantines. Manuel dispatched a fleet of 70 galleys plus support ships to Outremer. As William had died and Baldwin's health was deterioriating, the Franks offered the regency and the Egyptian invasion's command to Baldwin's crusader cousin Philip I, Count of Flanders. He wanted to be free to return to Flanders and rejected both offers.[122][123] The plan for the invasion was abandoned and the Byzantine fleet sailed off to Constantinople.[124]
Baldwin negotiated a marriage between Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy and Sibylla but the succession crisis in France prevented him sailing. Tension between Baldwin's maternal and paternal kin grew. When Raymond and Bohemond, both related to him on his father's side, came to Jerusalem unexpectedly before Easter in 1180, Baldwin panicked fearing that they arrived to depose him and elevate Sibylla to the throne under their control. To thwart their coup, he sanctioned her marriage to Guy of Lusignan, a young aristocrat from Poitou. Guy's brother Aimery held the office of constable of Jerusalem and their family had close links to the House of Plantagenet. Baldwin's mother and her clique marginalised Raymond, Bohemond and the influential Ibelin family.[125][126] In preparation for a military campaign against the Seljuks of Rum, Saladin concluded a two-year truce first with Baldwin, then, after launching a short, but devastating campaign along the coast of Tripoli, with Raymond. For the first time in the history of Frankish–Muslim relations, the Franks could not set conditions for the peace.[127][128] Between 1180 and 1183, Saladin asserted his suzerainty over the Artuqids, concluded a peace treaty with the Rum Seljuks, seized Aleppo from the Zengids and re-established the Egyptian navy. Meanwhile, after the truce expired in 1182, Saladin demonstrated the strategic advantage he held by holding both Cairo and Damascus. While he faced Baldwin in Oultrejordain, his troops from Syria pillaged Galilee.[96][129] The Franks adopted a defensive tactic and strengthened their fortresses. In February 1183, a Jerusalemite assembly levied an extraordinary tax for defence funding. Raynald was the sole Frankish ruler to pursue an offensive policy. He attacked an Egyptian caravan and built a fleet for a naval raid into the Red Sea.[130]
Byzantine influence declined after Manuel died in 1180. Bohemond repulsed his Byzantine wife Theodora and married Sybil, an Antiochene noblewoman of bad reputation. Patriarch Aimery excommunicated him and the Antiochene nobles who opposed the marriage fled to the Cilician Armenian prince, Ruben III.[131][132] Saladin granted a truce to Bohemond and made preparations for an invasion of Jerusalem where Guy took command of the defence.[133] When Saladin invaded Galilee, the Franks responded with what William of Tyre described in his contemporaneous chronicle as their largest army in living memory but avoided to fight a battle. After days of fierce skirmishing Saladin withdrew towards Damascus. Baldwin dismissed Guy from his position as bailli apparently because Guy had proved unable to overcome factionalism in the army. In November 1183 Baldwin made Guy's 5-year-old stepson, also called Baldwin, co-ruler and had him crowned king while attempting to annul the marriage of Guy and Sibylla. Guy and Sibylla fled to Ascalon and his supporters vainly intervened on their behalf at a general council. An embassy to Europe was met with offers of money but not of military support. Already dying, Baldwin IV appointed Raymond bailli for 10 years, but charged Joscelin with the ailing Baldwin V's guardianship. As there was no consensus on what should happen if the boy king died, it would be for the pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, the kings of France and England to decide whether his mother Sibylla, or her half-sister Isabella had stronger claim to the throne. Bohemond was staying at Acre around this time, allegedly because Baldwin IV wanted to secure Bohemond's support for his decisions on the succession.[134][135] Back in Antioch, Bohemond kidnapped Ruben of Cilicia and forced him into becoming his vasal.[136]
Saladin signed a 4-year truce with Jerusalem and attacked Mosul. He could not capture the city but extracted an oath of fealty from Mosul's Zengid ruler Izz al-Din Mas'ud in March 1186. A few months later Baldwin V died and a power struggle began in Jerusalem. Raymond summoned the barons to Nablus to a general council. In his absence, Sybilla's supporters led by Joscelin and Raynald took full control of Jerusalem, Acre, and Beirut. She was crowned queen by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem and she appointed Guy her co-ruler. The barons assembling at Nablus offered the crown to Isabella's husband Humphrey IV of Toron, but he submitted to Sybilla to avoid a civil war. After his desertion, all barons but Baldwin of Ibelin and Raymond swore fealty to the royal couple. Baldwin went into exile and Raymond forged an alliance with Saladin. Raynald seized another caravan, which violated the truce and prompted Saladin to assemble his forces for the jihād. Raymond allowed Muslim troops to pass through Galilee to raid around Acre. His shock at the Frankish defeat in the resulting Battle of Cresson brought him to reconciliation with Guy.[137][138]
Guy now gathered a large force, committing all the available resources of his kingdom. The leadership divided on tactics. Raynald urged an offensive, while Raymond proposed defensive caution, although Saladin was besieging his castle of Tiberias. Guy decided to address the siege. The march towards Tiberias was arduous and Saladin's troops overwhelmed the exhausted Frankish army at the Horns of Hattin on 4 July 1187. Hattin was a massive defeat for the Franks. Nearly all the major Frankish leaders were taken prisoner, but only Raynald and the armed monks of the military orders were executed. Raymond was among the few Frankish leaders who escaped captivity. He fell seriously ill after reaching Tripoli. Within months after Hattin, Saladin conquered almost the entire kingdom. The city of Jerusalem surrendered on 2 October 1187. Nowhere was the conquest followed by a massacre, but tens of thousands of Franks were enslaved. Those who could negotiate a free passage or were ransomed swarmed to Tyre, Tripoli, or Antioch. Conrad of Montferrat commanded the defences of Tyre. He was William's brother and arrived only days after Hattin. The childless Raymond died and Bohemond's younger son, also called Bohemond, assumed power in Tripoli.[139] After news of the Franks' devastating defeat at Hattin reached Italy, Pope Gregory VIII called for a new crusade. Passionate sermons raised religious fervour and probably more people took crusader oath than during recruitment for the previous crusades.[140]
Bad weather and growing discontent among soldiery forced Saladin to abandon the siege of Tyre and allow his troops to return to Iraq, Syria, and Egypt early in 1188. In May Saladin turned his attention to Tripoli and Antioch. Tripoli was saved by the arrival of William II of Sicily's fleet. Saladin released Guy on condition that Guy went overseas and never bore arms against him.[141] Historian Thomas Asbridge proposes that Saladin likely anticipated that a power struggle between Guy and Conrad was inevitable and it could weaken the Franks. Indeed, Guy failed to depart for Europe.[142] In October Bohemond asked Saladin for a seven-month truce, offering to surrender the city of Antioch if help did not arrive. Saladin's biographer Ali ibn al-Athir wrote after the Frankish castles were starved into submission that "the Muslims acquired everything from as far as Ayla to the furthest districts of Beirut with only the interruption of Tyre and also all the dependencies of Antioch, apart from al-Qusayr".[143]
Recovery and civil war (1189 to 1243)
Guy of Lusignan, his brother Aimery and Gerard de Ridefort, grand master of the Templars, gathered about 600 knights in Antioch. They approached Tyre, but Conrad of Montferrat refused entry to them. He was convinced that Guy had forfeited his claim to rule when Saladin conquered his kingdom. Guy and his fellows knew that western crusaders would arrive soon and risked a token move on Acre in August 1189. They were joined by crusader groups coming from many parts of Europe. Their tactic surprised Saladin and prevented him resuming the invasion of Antioch.[144][145] Three major crusader armies departed for the Holy Land in 1189–1190. Frederick Barbarossa's crusade ended abruptly when he drowned in the Saleph River in Anatolia in June 1190. Only fragments of his army reached Outremer. Philip II of France landed at Acre in April 1191. Next month Richard I of England arrived. During his voyage, Richard had seized Cyprus from the island's self-declared emperor Isaac Komnenos.[146] Guy and Conrad had been reconciled, but their conflict revived when Sybilla of Jerusalem and her two daughters by Guy died. Conrad married the reluctant Isabella, Sybilla's half-sister and heir, despite her marriage to Humphrey of Toron and gossips about his two living wives.[147][148]
After an attritional siege the Muslim garrison surrendered Acre and Philip and most of the French army returned to Europe. Richard led the crusade to victory at Arsuf, captured Jaffa, Ascalon and Darum. Internal dissension forced Richard's abandonment of Guy and acceptance that of Conrad's kingship. Guy was compensated with possession of Cyprus. In April 1192, Conrad was murdered in Tyre by Assassins. Within a week the widowed Isabella was married to Henry, Count of Champagne.[149] Saladin did not risk a defeat in a pitched battle and Richard feared of an exhausting march across arid lands towards Jerusalem. As he fell ill and needed to return home to attend to manage his affairs, a three-year truce was agreed in September 1192. The Franks retained land between Tyre and Jaffa, but dismantled Ascalon, and Christian pilgrimages to Jerusalem were allowed. Frankish confidence in the truce was not high. In April 1193, Geoffroy de Donjon, head of the Knights Hospitaller wrote in a letter, "We know for certain that since the loss of the land the inheritance of Christ cannot easily be regained. The land held by the Christians during the truces remains virtually uninhabited."[150][151] The Franks' strategical position was not necessarily detrimental: they kept the coastal towns and their frontiers shortened. Their enclaves represented a minor threat to the Ayyubids' empire in comparison with the Artuqids, Zengids, Seljuks of Rum, Cilician Armenians or Georgians in the north. After Saladin died in March 1193, none of his sons could assume authority over his Ayyubid kinsmen and the dynastic feud lasted for almost a decade.[151][152] The Ayyubids agreed near constant truces with the Franks and offered territorial concessions to keep the peace.[153]
Bohemond III of Antioch did not include his recalcitrant Cilician Armenian vassal Leo in his truce with Saladin in 1192. Leo was Ruben III's brother. When Ruben died, Leo supplanted his daughter and heir, Alice. In 1191, Saladin abandoned a three-year occupation of the northern Syrian castle of Bagras and Leo seized it ignoring the Templars' and Bohemond's claims. In 1194, Bohemond accepted Leo's invitation to discuss its return, but Leo imprisoned him demanding Antioch for his release. The Greek population and the Italian community rejected the Armenians, forming a commune under Bohemond's eldest son, Raymond. Bohemond was released when he abandoned his claims on Cilicia, forfeiting Bagras and marrying Raymond to Alice. Any male heir of this marriage was expected to be the heir to both Antioch and Armenia. When Raymond died in 1197, Bohemond sent Alice and Raymond's posthumous son Raymond-Roupen to Cilicia. Raymond's younger brother Bohemond IV came to Antioch and the commune recognized him as their father's heir.[154] In September 1197, Henry of Champagne died falling out of a palace window in the kingdom's new capital Acre. The widowed Isabella married Aimery of Lusignan who had succeeded Guy in Cyprus.[155] Saladin's ambitious brother Al-Adil I reunited Egypt and Damascus under his rule by 1200. He expanded the truces with the Franks and enhanced commercial contacts with Venice and Pisa.[152] Bohemond III died in 1201. The commune of Antioch renewed its allegiance to Bohemond IV, although a number of the nobility felt compelled to support Raymond-Roupen and joined him in Cilicia. Leo of Cilicia launched a series of military campaigns to assert Raymond-Roupen's claim to Antioch. Bohemond made alliance with Saladin's son, Az-Zahir Ghazi of Aleppo and Suleiman II, the Sultan of Rum. As neither Bohemond nor Leo could muster enough troops to defend their Tripolitan or Cilician hinterland against enemy invasions or rebellious aristocrats and to garrison Antioch simultaneously, the War of the Antiochene Succession lasted for more than a decade.[156]
The Franks knew that they could not regain the Holy Land without conquering Egypt. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade planned an invasion of Egypt, but instead they sacked Constantinople.[157] Aimery and Isabella died in 1205. Isabella's daughter by Conrad, Maria of Montferrat, succeeded and Isabella's half-brother, John of Ibelin became regent. The regency ended on Maria's marriage to John of Brienne, a French aristocrat and experienced soldier, in 1210. After her death two years later, John ruled as regent for their infant daughter, Isabella II.[158] He participated in a military campaign against Cilicia, but it did not damage Leo's power. Leo and Raymond-Roupen had exhausted Antioch with destructive raids and in 1216 occupied the city. Raymond-Roupen was installed as prince and Leo restored Bagras to the Templars. Raymond-Roupen could not pay for the aristocrats' loyalty in his impoverished principality and Bohemond regained Antioch with local support in 1219.[159] The personal union between Antioch and Tripoli proved lasting, but in fact both crusader states disintegrated into small city-states.[160] Raymond-Roupen fled to Cilicia, seeking Leo's support and when Leo died in May attempting to gain the throne against Leo's infant daughter Isabella.[159]
John of Brienne was leader of a gathering crusade but Frederick II, the ruler of Germany and Sicily, was expected to assume control on his arrival and the papal legate, Cardinal Pelagius, controlled the finances from the west. The crusaders invaded Egypt and captured Damietta in November 1219. The new sultan of Egypt Al-Kamil offered repeatedly the return of Jerusalem and the Holy Land in exchange for a crusader withdrawal. His ability to implement his truce proposals was questionable for his brother Al-Mu'azzam Isa ruled the Holy Land. The crusaders knew that their hold of the territory would not be secure as far as the castles in Oultrejourdain remained in Muslim hand. Prophecies about their inevitable victory spread in their camp and Al-Adil's offer was rejected. After twenty-one months of stalemate the crusaders marched on Cairo before being trapped between the Nile floods and Egyptian army. Damietta was surrendered in return for safe conduct and the crusade ended.[161] While staying in Damietta, Cardinal Pelagius sent reinforcements to Raymond-Roupen to Cilicia, but Constantine of Baberon who was regent for the Cilician queen, acted quickly. He captured Raymond-Roupen, who then died in prison. She was married to Bohemond's son, Philip to cement an alliance between Cilicia and Antioch. A feud between the two nations broke out again after neglected Armenian aristocrats murdered Philip in late 1224. Bohemond attempts at revenge were foiled by an alliance between the Armenians and his former Ayyubid allies in Aleppo.[162]
Frederick renewed his crusader oath on his imperial coronation in Rome in 1220. He did not join the Egyptian crusade, but reopened the negotiations with Al-Adil over the city of Jerusalem. In 1225 Frederick married Isabella II and assumed the title of king of Jerusalem. Two years later Al-Adil promised to abandon all lands conquered by Saladin in return for Frankish support against Al-Mu'azzam. An epidemic prevented Frederick's departure for a crusade and Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him for repeatedly breaking his oath. In April 1228 Isabella died after giving birth to Conrad. Without seeking a reconciliation with the Pope, Frederick sailed for the crusade. His attempts to confiscate baronial fiefs brought him into conflict with the Frankish aristocrats. As Al-Mua'zzam had died, Frederick made the most of his diplomatic skills to achieve the partial implementation of Al-Adil's previous promise. They signed a truce for ten years, ten months and ten days (the maximum period for a peace treaty between Muslims and Christians, according to Muslim customs). It restored Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Sidon to the Franks while granting Temple Mount to the Muslims. The native Franks received the treaty without enthusiasm because the defensibility of the territory was questionable. Frederick left for Italy in May 1229, never to return.[163][164] He sent Richard Filangieri, with an army, to rule the kingdom of Jerusalem as his bailli. The Ibelins denied Frederick's right to appoint his lieutenant without consulting with the barons and Outremer plunged into a civil war, known as the War of the Lombards. Filangieri occupied Beirut and Tyre, but the Ibelins and their allies firmly kept Acre and established a commune to protect their interest.[165] Pope Gregory IX's called for a new crusade in preparation for the expiry of the truce. Between 1239 and 1241, wealthy French and English nobles such as Theobald I of Navarre and Richard of Cornwall led separate military campaigns to the Holy Land. They followed Frederick's tactics of forceful diplomacy and played rival factions off against each other in the succession disputes that followed Al-Kamil's death. Richard's treaty with Al-Kamil's son As-Salih Ayyub restored most land west of the Jordan to the Franks.[166][167] Conrad reached the age of majority in 1243, but failed to visit Outremer. Arguing that Conrad's heir presumptive was entitled to rule in his absence, the Jerusalemite barons elected his mother's maternal aunt, Alice of Champagne, as regent. The same year, they captured Tyre, the last centre of Frederick's authority in the kingdom.[165]
Destruction by the Mamluks (1244 to 1291)
The Mongol Empire's westward expansion reached the Middle East when the Mongols conquered the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia in 1227. Part of the Khwarazmian army fled to eastern Anatolia and these masterless Turkic soldiers offered their services to the neighbouring rulers for pay.[168] Western Christians regarded the Mongols as potential allies against the Muslims because some Mongol tribes adhered to Nestorian Christianity. In fact, most Mongols were pagans with a strong believe in their Great Khan's divine right to universal rule, and they demanded unconditional submission from both Christians and Muslims.[169] As-Salih Ayyub hired the Khwarazmians and garrisoned new mamluk troops in Egypt, alarming his uncle As-Salih Ismail, Emir of Damascus. Ismail bought the Franks' alliance by a promise to restore "all the lands that Saladin had reconquered". Catholic priests took possession of the Dom of the Rock, but in July 1244 Khwarazmians marching towards Egypt sacked Jerusalem unexpectedly. The Franks gathered all available troops and joined Ismail near Gaza, but the Khwarazmians with the Egyptians defeated the Frankish and Damascene coalition at La Forbie on 18 October. Few Franks escaped from the battlefield. As-Salah captured much of the crusaders' mainland territory restricting the Franks to a few coastal towns.[170][171] Louis IX of France launched a failed crusade against Egypt in 1249. He was captured near Damietta together with the remnants of his army. He was ransomed days after the Bahri Mamluks assumed power in Egypt through murdering As-Salih's son Al-Muazzam Turanshah in May 1250.[172] Louis spent four more years in Outremer. As the kingdom's effective ruler, he conducted negotiations with both the Syrian Ayyubids and the Egyptian Mamluks and refortified the coastal towns. He sent an embassy from Acre to the Great Khan Güyük, offering an anti-Muslim alliance to the Mongols.[173]
Feud between rival candidates to the regency and commercial conflicts between Venice and Genoa resulted in a new civil war known as the War of Saint Sabas in 1256. The pro-Venetian Bohemond VI's conflict with his Genoese vassals the Embriaci brought the war to Tripoli and Antioch.[174] In 1258 the Ilkhan Hulagu, younger brother of the Great Khan Möngke, sacked Baghdad and ended the Abbasid Caliphate. Two years later Hethum I of Cilicia and Bohemond VI joined forces with the Mongols in the sack of Aleppo, where Bohemond set fire to the Great Mosque of Aleppo himself, and in the conquest of northern Syria. For the Mongols emancipated the Christians from their dhimmi status, the local Christian population cooperated with the conquerors. Jerusalem remained neutral when the Mamluks of Egypt moved to confront the Mongols after Hulagu and much of his force moved east on the death of Möngke to address the Mongol succession. The Mamluks defeated the highly reduced Mongol army at Ain Jalut. On their return the Mamluk sultan Qutuz was assassinated and replaced by the general Baibars. Baibars revived Saladin's empire by uniting Egypt and Syria, and hold Hulagu in check through an alliance with the Mongols of the Golden Horde.[175][176] He reformed governance in Egypt giving power to the elite mamluks and the Franks did not have the military capability to resist this new threat. A Mongol garrison was stationed at Antioch, and individual Frankish barons concluded separate truces with Baibars. He was determined to conquer the crusader states. He captured Caesarea and Arsuf in 1265, Safed in 1266, and sacked Antioch in 1268. Jaffa surrendered and Baibers weakened the military orders by capturing the castles of Krak des Chevaliers and Montfort before returning his attention to the Mongols of the Ilkhanate for the remainder of his life. The Mamluk conquest was regularly followed by massacres of the Franks and native Christians.[177][178]
In 1268, the new Sicilian king Charles I of Anjou executed the titular king of Jerusalem, Conradin, in Naples after his victory at Tagliacozzo.[179] The succession was disputed between Isabella I's great grandson Hugh III of Cyprus, and her granddaughter Maria of Antioch. The barons preferred Hugh but in 1277 Maria sold her claim to Charles. He sent Roger of San Severino to act as bailli. With the support of the Templars he blocked Hugh's access to Acre forcing him to retreat to Cyprus again leaving the kingdom without a resident monarch.[180] The Mongols of the Ilkhanate sent embassies to Europe proposing anti-Mamluk alliances, but the major western rulers were reluctant to launch a new crusade for the Holy Land. The War of the Sicilian Vespers weakened Charles's position in the west. After his death in 1285, Henry II of Cyprus was acknowledged as Jerusalem's nominal king, but the rump kingdom was in fact a mosaic of autonomous lordships, some under Mamluk suzerainty.[181] In 1285 the death of the warlike Ilkhan Abaqa combined with the Pisan and Venetian wars with the Genoese gave the Mamluk sultan Al-Mansur Qalawun the opportunity to finally expel the Franks. In 1289 he destroyed Genoese held Tripoli, enslaving or killing the residents. In 1290 his truce with Jerusalem was broken by Italian crusaders killing Muslim traders in Acre. Qalawun's death did not hinder the successful Mamluk siege of the city in 1291. Those who could fled to Cyprus, those who could not were slaughtered or sold into slavery. Without hope of support from the west Tyre, Beirut and Sidon all surrendered without a fight. The Mamluks policy was to destroy all physical evidence of the Franks and the destruction of the ports and fortified towns ruptured the history of a littoral city civilisation rooted in antiquity.[182]
Monarchy
The king of Jerusalem's foremost role was leader of the feudal host during the near-constant warfare in the early decades of the 12th century. They rarely awarded land or lordships and those awarded frequently became vacant and reverted to the crown due to the high mortality rate. Their followers' loyalty was rewarded with city incomes. Through this the domain of the first five rulers was larger than the combined holdings of the nobility. These kings of Jerusalem had greater internal power than comparative western monarchs but there was not the necessary personnel and administrative systems for governance of such a large realm.[183]
In the second quarter of the century magnates such as Raynald of Châtillon, Lord of Oultrejordain, and Raymond III, Count of Tripoli, Prince of Galilee established of baronial dynasties and often acted as autonomous rulers. Royal powers were abrogated and governance was undertaken within the feudatories. The remaining central control was exercised at the High Court or Haute Cour, which was also known in Latin as Curia generalis and Curia regis, or in vernacular French as parlement. These meetings were between king and tenants in chief. The duty of the vassal to give counsel developed into a privilege and then the monarch's legitimacy was dependent on the court's agreement.[184] In practice, the High Court was the great barons and the king's direct vassals with a quorum of the king and three tenants in chief. The 1162 the assise sur la ligece expanded the court's membership to all 600 or more fief-holders. Those paying direct homage to the king became members of the Haute Cour. By the end of the 12th century they were joined by the leaders of the military orders and in the 13th century the Italian communes.[185] The leaders of the Third Crusade ignored the monarchy. The kings of England and France agreed on the division of future conquests as if there was no need to take into account the local nobility. Prawer considered that the weakness of the crown of Jerusalem was demonstrated by the rapid offering of the throne to Conrad of Montferrat in 1190 and then Henry II, Count of Champagne in 1192 although this was given legal effect by Baldwin IV's will stipulating if Baldwin V died a minor the succession would be decided by the pope, the kings of England and France, and the Holy Roman Emperor.[186][187]
Prior to the 1187 defeat at Hattin laws developed by the court were recorded as assises in Letters of the Holy Sepulchre.[188] All written law was lost in the fall of Jerusalem. The legal system was now largely based on custom and the memory of the lost legislation. The renowned jurist Philip of Novara lamented "We know [the laws] rather poorly, for they are known by hearsay and usage...and we think an assize is something we have seen as an assize...in the kingdom of Jerusalem [the barons] made much better use of the laws and acted on them more surely before the land was lost". An idyllic view of early 12th century legal system was created. The barons reinterpreted the assise sur la ligece, which Almalric I intended to strengthen the crown to instead constrain the monarch. Particularly regarding to the monarch's right to confiscate feudal fiefs without trial. The loss of the vast majority of rural fiefs evolved the baronage into an urban mercantile class where knowledge of the law was a valuable, well-regarded skill and a career path to higher status.[189]
After Hattin the Franks lost their cities, lands and churches. Barons fled to Cyprus and intermarried with leading new emigres from the Lusignan, Montbéliard, Brienne and Montfort families. This created a separate class the remnants of the old nobility that had a limited understanding of the Latin East. This included the king-consorts Guy, Conrad, Henry, Aimery, John and the absent Hohenstaufen that followed.[190] The barons of Jerusalem in the 13th century have been poorly regarded by both contemporary and modern commentators: James of Vitry was disgusted by their superficial rhetoric; Riley-Smith writes of their pedantry and the use of spurious legal justification for political action. The barons valued this ability to articulate the law.[191] This is evidenced by the elaborate and impressive treatises of the baronial jurists from the second half of the 13th century.[192]
From May 1229 when Frederick II left the Holy Land to defend his Italian and German lands, monarchs were absent. Conrad was titular king from 1225 until 1254 and his son Conradin until 1268 when he was executed by Charles of Anjou. The monarchy of Jerusalem had limited power in comparison with the West where rulers developed bureaucratic machinery for administration, jurisdiction and legislation through which they exercised control.[193] In 1242 the Barons prevailed and appointed a succession of Ibelin and Cypriot regents.[194] Centralised government collapsed in the face of independence exercised by the nobility, military orders and Italian communes. The three Cypriot Lusignan kings who succeeded lacked the resources to recover the lost territory. One claimant sold the title of king to Charles of Anjou. He gained power for a short while but never visited the kingdom. [195]
Military
John of Ibelin wrote that in 1170 the military force of the kingdom of Jerusalem was based on a feudal host of about 647 to 675 heavily armoured knights who would also provide their own armed retainers. Prelates and the towns were to provide 5,025 non-noble light cavalry and infantry known as serjants. This force would be augmented by hired soldiery called Turcopoles and in times of emergency a general muster of the Christian population.[196] Prawer estimated that the military orders could match the king's fighting strength giving a total military strength of approximately 1,200 knights and 10,000 serjants. This was enough for further territorial gains, but fewer than military domination required. Major field armies were a defensive problem requiring all able-bodied fighting men leaving castles and cities undefended in the case of a defeat, such as the Battle of Hattin. Muslim armies were incohesive and seldom campaigned outside the period between sowing and harvest. So, the crusaders adopted delaying tactics when faced with a superior invading Muslim force, avoiding direct confrontation, retreating to strongholds and waiting for the Muslim army to disperse. It was generations before the Muslims recognised that they could not conquer the Franks without destroying the Frankish fortresses. The Franks changed strategy from the tactics of gaining and holding territory to attempting the destruction of Egypt. This would have removed a constant regional challenge giving the Franks time to improve the kingdom's demographic weakness. Egypt was isolated from the other Islamic power centres, it would be easier to defend and was self-sufficient in food.[197]
The military orders were a form of religious order first established in the first quarter of the 12th century with a purpose of defending Christians while observing three monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. According to William of Tyre and Ernoul, the first foundation was the initiative of a group of knights with the assistance of the king or patriarch of Jerusalem. Possibly, it began as a knightly confraternity of a type common for the time. The differences between military confraternities and military orders were not always clear.[198]
The first military order was the Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Templars. It was founded in 1119 for the protection of pilgrims by knights attached to the Holy Sepulchre. The order was recognised at the council of Nablus. The name derives from Solomon's Temple, the Frankish name for the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount. In 1129 an embassy by leaders Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer to Europe gained recognition from the Latin Church at the Council of Troyes. Papal support, privileges and immunities followed along with donations of estates across Western Europe and the Levant. This enabled the order to provide the crusader states with troops, funding, loans and luxury accommodation for travellers.[199]
The success of the formula pioneered in gathering donations, manpower and political control of whole regions led to imitative local orders in the Iberian Peninsula in the fight with the Moors, on Christendom's frontiers around the Baltic against pagans, in southern France and Italy to fight heretics. In Outremer, the Order of Lazarus was founded in the 1130s predominantly leper knights. The Templars became a template for the Order of Teutonic Knights in 1198, based on a Hospitaller confraternity at the siege of Acre in 1190. The English Order of St Thomas of Acre was founded for canons around 1190 and militarised in 1228.[200]
The Knights Hospitaller or Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem began in the 1080s with an Amalfitano funded hospital in Jerusalem. The Frank's arrival brought significant local and western donations. By 1113 the order had transformed from a lay to a papally recognised religious organisation. It became an enormous concern. Extensive estates in Italy, Catalonia and Southern France provided funding for hundreds of beds serving patients from all religions and genders. In 1126 military members formed part of the army from Jerusalem that attacked Damascus.[201] During the 12th and 13th centuries these communities of warrior monks married the medieval ideals of monasticism and knighthood [202] They became Latin Christendom's first professional armies and supranational organisations with autonomous powers in the region.[203] The template presented by these two organisations led to the formation of further orders in the Iberian Peninsula and Christendom's northern borders. By 1180, the military orders the matched all other military resources available to Jerusalem in terms of castles controlled, 700 knights and a supporting infrastructure of sergeants, clerics, layman and servants.[204]
Demography and Society
Modern research indicate Muslims and indigenous Christian populations were less integrated than previously thought. Christians lived around Jerusalem and in an arc stretching from Jericho and the Jordan to Hebron in the south.[205] Comparisons of archaeological evidence of Byzantine churches built prior the Muslim conquest and 16th century Ottoman census records demonstrates some Greek Orthodox communities disappeared prior the crusades, but most continued during and for centuries after. Maronites were concentrated in Tripoli; Jacobites in Antioch and Edessa. Armenians were concentrated in the north, but communities existed in all major towns. Central areas had predominantly Sunni Muslim population, but Shi'ite communities existed in Galilee. Muslim Druze lived in the mountains of Tripoli. Jews resided in coastal towns and some Galilean villages.[206][207] Little research has been done on Islamic conversion but the available evidence led Ellenblum to believe that around Nablus and Jerusalem Christians remained a majority.[208]
The vast majority of the indigenous population were peasants living off the land. Charters from the early 12th century show evidence of the donation of local villeins to nobles and religious institutions. This may have been a method of denoting the revenues from these villeins or land where the boundaries were unclear. These are described as villanus, surianus for Christians or sarracenus for Muslims. The term servus was reserved for the numerous urban, domestic slaves the Franks held. The use of villanus is thought to reflect the higher status that villagers or serfs held in the near East or the indigenous men were considered to have servile land tenures rather than lacking personal freedom. Villeins’ status differed from Western serfs as they could marry outside their lords' domain, were not obliged to perform unpaid labour, could hold land and inherit property. However, Franks needed to maintain productivity, so the villagers were tied to the land. Charters evidence landholders agreeing to return any villeins from other landholders they found on their property. Peasants were required to pay the lord one quarter to a half of crop yields, the Muslim pilgrim Ibn Jubayr reported there was also a poll tax of one dinar and five qirat per head and a tax on produce from trees. 13th century charters indicate this increased after the loss of the first kingdom redressing the Franks’ lost income. Historian Christopher MacEvitt cites these as reasons that the term indentured peasant is a more accurate description for the villagers in the Latin East than serf.[209]
The Frankish population of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was concentrated in three major cities. By the 13th century the population of Acre probably exceeded 60,000, followed by Tyre with the capital having a smaller population of between 20,000 and 30,000.[210] At its zenith, the Latin population of the region reached c. 250,000 with the Kingdom of Jerusalem's population numbering c. 120,000 and the combined total in Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa being broadly comparable.[211] Frankish peasants are evident in 235 villages, out of a total of around 1,200 rural settlements.[212] Some were planned villages, established to encourage settlers from the West and some were shared with native Christians. The native population lived in casalia, or rural settlements of about 3-50 families.[213] In context, Josiah Russell estimates the population of what he calls "Islamic territory" as roughly 12.5 million in 1000—Anatolia 8 million, Syria 2 million, Egypt 1.5 million and North Africa 1 million — with the European areas that provided crusaders having a population of 23.7 million. He estimates that by 1200 that these figures had risen to 13.7 million in Islamic territory—Anatolia 7 million, Syria 2.7 million, Egypt 2.5 million and North Africa 1.5 million— while the crusaders' home countries' population was 35.6 million. Russell acknowledges that much of Anatolia was Christian or under the Byzantines and that some purportedly Islamic areas such as Mosul and Baghdad had significant Christian populations.[214]
Linguistic differences remained a key differentiator between the Franks lords and the local population. The Franks typically spoke Old French and wrote in Latin. While some learnt Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Hebrew this was unusual.[215] Society was politically and legally stratified. Ethnically-based communities were self-governing with relations between communities controlled by the Franks.[216] Research has focussed on the role of the ruʾasāʾ, Arabic for leader, chief or mayor. Riley-Smith divided these into the urban freemen and rural workers tied to the land. ruʾasāʾ administered the Frankish estates, governed the native communities and were often respected local landowners. If communities were segregated as indicated by the written evidence and identified by Riley-Smith and Prawer inter-communal conflict was avoided and interaction between the landed and the peasants limited. McEvitt identifies possible tension between competing groups. According to the 13th century jurists, in the towns the Rais presided over the Cour des Syriens and there is other evidence that on occasion they led local troops.[217] Civil disputes and minor criminality were administered courts of the indigenous communities, but more serious offences and cases involving Franks were dealt with by the Frankish cour des bourgeois. That is courts of the burgesses which is the name given to non-noble Franks.[218] The level of assimilation is difficult to identify, there little material evidence. The archaeology is culturally exclusive and written evidence indicates deep religious divisions. Some historians assume that the states' heterogeneity eroded formal apartheid.[219] The key differentiator in status and economic position was between urban and rural dwellers. Indigenous Christians could gain higher status and acquire wealth through commerce and industry in towns, but few Muslims lived in urban areas except those in servitude.[220]
Frankish royalty reflected the region's diversity. Queen Melisende was part Armenian and married Fulk from Anjou. Their son Amalric married a Frank from the Levant before marrying a Byzantine Greek. The nobility's use of Jewish, Syrian and Muslim physicians appalled William of Tyre. Antioch became a centre of cultural interchange through Greek and Arabic speaking Christians. The indigenous peoples showed the Frankish nobility traditional deference and in return Franks adopted their dress, food, housing and military techniques. However, Frankish society was not a cultural melting pot. Inter-communal relations were shallow, identities separate and the other communities considered alien.[221]
Economy
The crusader states were economic centres obstructing Muslim trade by sea with the west as well as by land with Mesopotamia, Syria and the urban economies of the Nile. Commerce continued with the coastal cities providing maritime outlets for the Islamic hinterland, and unprecedented volumes of eastern wares were exported to Europe. Byzantine-Muslim mercantile growth may have occurred anyway in the 12th and 13th centuries, but it is likely that the Crusades hastened this. Western European populations and economies were booming, creating a growing social class that wanted artisanal products and eastern imports. European fleets expanded with better ships, navigation improved, and fare-paying pilgrims subsidised voyages. Largely indigenous agricultural production flourished before the fall of the First Kingdom in 1187 but was negligible afterwards. Franks, Muslims, Jews, and indigenous Christians traded crafts in the souks, teeming oriental bazaars, of the cities.[222]
Olives, grapes, wheat, and barley were the important agricultural products before Saladin's conquests. Glass making and soap production were major industries in towns.[223] Italians, Provençals, and Catalans monopolised shipping, imports, exports, transportation, and banking.Taxes on trade, markets, pilgrims and industry combined with estate revenue to provide the Frankish nobles and church income.[224] Seigniorial monopolies, or bans, compelled the peasantry's use of landowners' mills, ovens and other facilities. The serfs' circumvention of monopolies is evidenced by the presence of hand-mills in most households.[225] The centres of production were Antioch, Tripoli, Tyre and Beirut. Textiles with silk particularly prized, glass, dyestuffs, olives, wine, sesame oil and sugar were exported; [226]
The Franks provided an import market for clothing and finished goods.[227] They adopted the more monetised indigenous economic system using a hybrid coinage of northern Italian and southern French silver European coins; Frankish copper coins minted in Arabic and Byzantine styles; and silver and gold dirhams and dinars. After 1124, the Franks copied Egyptian dinars creating Jerusalem's gold bezant. Following the collapse of the first kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187, trade replaced agriculture in the economy, and the circulation of western coins predominated. Although Tyre, Sidon and Beirut minted silver pennies and copper coins there is little evidence of systematic attempts to create a unified currency.[228]
The Italian maritime republics of Pisa, Venice and Genoa were enthusiastic crusaders whose commercial wealth provided the Franks with financial foundations and naval resources.[229] In return these cities, and others such as Amalfi, Barcelona and Marseilles, received commercial rights and access to Eastern markets. Over time this developed into colonial communities with property and jurisdiction.[230] Largely located in the ports of Acre, Tyre, Tripoli, and Sidon, communes of Italians, Provençals and Catalans had distinct cultures and exerted autonomous political power separate from the Franks. They remained intricately linked to their towns of origin giving them monopolies of foreign trade, banking, and shipping. Opportunities extending trade privileges were taken such as in 1124 the Venetians received one-third of Tyre and its territories with exemption from taxes in return for Venetian participation in the siege. These ports were unable to replace Alexandria and Constantinople as the major commercial centres of commerce but competed with monarchs and each other to maintain economic advantage. The communards' number never reached more than hundreds. Their power derived from the support of home cities. By the mid-13th century, the rulers of the communes barely recognised the authority of the Franks and divided Acre into several fortified miniature republics.[231][232]
Art and architecture
Prawer argued that no major Western cultural figure settled in the states, but that others were encouraged East by the expression of imagery in western poetry.[233] Historians consider military architecture demonstrates a synthesis of the European, Byzantine and Muslim traditions providing the original and impressive artistic achievement of the crusades. Castles were a symbol of the dominance of the Frankish minority over a largely hostile majority population that acted as administrative centres.[234] Modern historiography rejects the 19th-century consensus that Westerners learnt the basis of military architecture from the Near East. Europe had already experienced growth in defensive technology. Contact with Arab fortifications originally constructed by the Byzantines influenced developments in the east but there is little evidence for differentiation between design cultures and the constraints of situation. Castles included oriental design features such as large water reservoirs and the excluded occidental features like moats.[235] Church design was in the French Romanesque style seen in the 12th-century rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre. The Franks retained earlier Byzantine detail, but added northern French, Aquitanian and Provençal style arches and chapels. The column capitals of the south facade follow classical Syrian patterns but there is little evidence of indigenous influence in sculpture.[236]
Visual culture demonstrates the assimilated nature of the society. The influence of indigenous artists was demonstrated in the decoration of shrines, painting and the production of manuscripts. Frankish practitioners borrowed methods from Byzantine and indigenous artists in iconographical practice. Monumental and panel painting, mosaics and illuminations in manuscripts adopted an indigenous style leading to a cultural synthesis shown in the Church of the Nativity. Wall mosaics were unknown in the west but widespread in the crusader states. It is unknown whether this was by indigenous craftsmen or learnt by Frankish ones, but it shows the evolution of a distinctive and original artistic style.[237] Workshops housed Italian, French, English and indigenous craftsmen producing illustrated manuscripts demonstrating a cross-fertilisation of ideas and techniques. One example is the Melisende Psalter. This style either reflected or influenced the taste of patrons of the arts in increasingly stylised Byzantine-influenced content. Icons was previously unknown to the Franks. This continued, occasionally in a Frankish style and of western saints leading to Italian panel painting.[238] It is difficult to track illustration and castle and castle design to their sources. It is simpler for textual sources where translations made in Antioch are notable, but of secondary importance to the works from Muslim Spain and the hybrid culture of Sicily.[239]
Religion
There is no written evidence that the Franks or local Christians recognised significant religious differences until the 13th century when the jurists used phrases such as men not of the rule of Rome. [240] The crusaders filled Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical positions that became vacant, such as on the death of Simeon II when the Frank Arnulf of Chocques succeeded him as patriarch of Jerusalem. The appointment of Latin bishops had little effect on the Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians. The previous bishops were foreign Byzantine Greeks. Greeks were used as coadjutor bishops to administer indigenous populations without clergy and in Latin and Orthodox Christians often shared churches. In Antioch Greeks occasionally replaced Latin patriarchs. Toleration continued but there was an interventionist papist response from Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre. Armenians, Copts, Jacobites, Nestorians and Maronites had greater religious autonomy independently appointing bishops, as they were considered outside the Catholic Church.[241] The Franks had discriminatory laws against Jews and Muslims that prevented assimilation. They were prevented from inhabiting Jerusalem and the de jure punishment for sexual relations between Muslims and Christians was mutilation. Mosques were converted into Christian churches, but no forced conversion of Muslims as this would end peasants' servile status.[242]
Legacy
After Acre fell, the Hospitallers first relocated to Cyprus then conquered and ruled Rhodes (1309–1522) and Malta (1530–1798). The Sovereign Military Order of Malta survives to the present-day. Philip IV of France probably had financial and political reasons to oppose the Knights Templar. He exerted pressure on Pope Clement V who responded in 1312 by dissolving the order on alleged and probably false grounds of sodomy, magic and heresy.[243] The raising, transportation, and supply of armies led to flourishing trade between Europe and the crusader states. The Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice flourished through profitable trading communes.[244][245] Many historians argue that the interaction between the western Christian and Islamic cultures was a significant and ultimately positive influence in the development of European civilisation and the Renaissance.[246] Relations between Europeans and the Islamic world stretched across the length of the Mediterranean Sea making it difficult for historians to identify what proportion of cultural cross-fertilisation originated in the crusader states, Sicily and Spain.[239]
Historiography
Modern historians have developed a broad consensus on relationships between the Frankish and native communities in the crusader states. Joshua Prawer and others described an outnumbered Frankish elite dominating the coastal areas of southern modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. In this paradigm the Frankish elite is isolated from the majority population by discriminatory laws, conditions of serfdom and exclusion from positions of authority. Recently this position has been challenged by historians such as Ronnie Ellenblum, using archaeological research. These challenges have recognised weaknesses and no alternative model has been presented.[247] Christopher Tyerman points out the challenges are not a return to older theories, the sources remain the same and the archaeological materials are virtually unprovable. Denys Pringle, a specialist in Frankish architecture, notes that new architectural research does not contradict the segregationist view of Frankish society that earlier in the 20th century, Hans Eberhard Mayer had already written that the number of Franks living in rural settlements should not be underestimated.[248]
It was in the 19th century that subject of the crusader states, rather than just the crusades themselves, become a subject of study. This was particularly true among French historians. Joseph François Michaud's influential narratives had concentrated on topics of war, conquest and settlement. Later France's colonial ambitions in the Levant were explicitly linked with French-led crusading and the Frankish character of the states. Emmanuel Rey's Les colonies franques de Syrie aux XIIme et XIIIme siècles described Frankish settlements in the Levant as colonies in which Poulains, offspring of mixed marriages, adopted local traditions and values instead of those of their Frankish descent. The first American crusade historian, Dana Carleton Munro extended this analysis describing the care the Franks took to "win the goodwill of the natives". In the 20th century historians rejected this approach. R. C. Smail argued that Rey, and the like, had identified an integrated society which did not exist in order to justify French colonial regimes. The new consensus was that the society was segregated with limited social and cultural interchange. Prawer and Jonathan Riley-Smith focussed on the evidence of social, legal and political frameworks in the kingdom of Jerusalem to present a widely accepted view of a society that was largely urban, isolated from the indigenous peoples, with separate legal and religious systems. Prawer's 1972 work, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem:European Colonialism in the Middle Ages extended this analysis: the lack of integration was based on economics with the Franks' position depending on a subjugated, disenfranchised local population. In this arrangement the Franks' primary motivations were economic. Islamic historian Carole Hillenbrand identified that Islamic population responded with resentment, suspicion and rejection of the Franks.[249]
This model supports the idea that the crusader states were part of the wider expansion of Western Europe in places such as Ireland, eastern Europe and Spain: driven by religious reforms and the growth of papal power. However, historians now argue that were different in that there was no vigorous church reform in the East, or resulting persecution of Jews and heretics. Some historians consider it exceptional that the 1120 Council of Nablus regulated ecclesiastical tithes, outlawed bigamy and adultery, imposed the death penalty for sodomy and a penalty of castration and mutilation for any Frank engaging in sexual relations with a Muslim. Benjamin Z. Kedar considered that Nablus followed a Byzantine, rather than western reformist, precedent.[250] This has led historians such as Claude Cahen, Jean Richard and Christopher MacEvitt to argue that the history of the crusader states is distinct from the history of the crusades. This allows other analytical techniques to be applied placing the crusader states in the context of Near Eastern politics. These ideas are still in the process of articulation by modern historians.[251]
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- Köhler, Michael A. (2013). Alliances and Treaties between Frankish and Muslim Rulers in the Middle East: Cross-Cultural Diplomacy in the Period of the Crusades. Translated by Peter M. Holt. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-24857-1.
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- Murray, Alan V; Nicholson, Helen (2006). "Jerusalem, (Latin) Kingdom of". In Murray, Alan V. (ed.). The Crusades: An Encyclopedia. II:D-J. ABC-CLIO. pp. 662–672. ISBN 1-57607-862-0.
- Murray, Alan V (2006). "Outremer". In Murray, Alan V. (ed.). The Crusades: An Encyclopedia. III:K-P. ABC-CLIO. pp. 910–912. ISBN 1-57607-862-0.
- Murray, Alan V (2013). "Chapter 4: Franks and Indigenous Communities in Palestine and Syria (1099–1187): A Hierarchical Model of Social Interaction in the Principalities of Outremer". In Classen, Albrecht (ed.). East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. pp. 291–310. ISBN 978-3-11-032878-3.
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- Nicholson, Helen (2006). "Military Orders". In Murray, Alan V. (ed.). The Crusades: An Encyclopedia. III:K-P. ABC-CLIO. pp. 825–830. ISBN 1-57607-862-0.
- Prawer, Joshua (1972). The Crusaders' Kingdom. Phoenix Press. ISBN 978-1-84212-224-2.
- Riley-Smith, Jonathan (1971). "The Assise sur la Ligece and the Commune of Acre". Traditio. 27: 179–204. doi:10.1017/S0362152900005316. JSTOR 27830920.
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- Tyerman, Christopher (2007). God's War: A New History of the Crusades. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-141-90431-3.
- Tyerman, Christopher (2011). The Debate on the Crusades, 1099–2010. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-7320-5.
- Tyerman, Christopher (2019). The World of the Crusades. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21739-1.
Further reading
- Holt, Peter Malcolm (2004). The Crusader States and Their Neighbours, 1098-1291. Pearson Longman. ISBN 978-0-582-36931-3.
- Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Feudal Nobility and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1174–1277. The Macmillan Press, 1973.
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