Part 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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