CHAPTER VIII

THE EARLY CRUSADES AND THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM (1095–1187)[10]

Early Pilgrimages to Palestine—The Turkish Conquest—Causes of the Crusades—Urban II. and the Council of Clermont—Leaders of the First Crusade—Alexius and the Crusaders—Results of the Crusade—Organisation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and its dependent States—The Military Orders—Rise of the Atabeks—Fall of Edessa—The Second Crusade—Decline of the Kingdom of Jerusalem—Power of Saladin—Fall of Jerusalem.

[Sidenote: Early Pilgrimages to Palestine.]

The piety of the Middle Ages, ever wont to express its spiritual emotions in concrete shape, had long found in pilgrimages to holy places a favourite method of kindling its religious zeal and atoning for past misdeeds. Of all pilgrimages, the most meritorious was that to the sacred spots where Christ had lived His earthly life and where the Christian faith first arose. From the days of St. Jerome, Jerusalem was the chief centre of holy travel; and from the days of Helena, the mother of Constantine, faithful Christians had sought to identify and consecrate the exact places of the Lord’s birth, suffering, and resurrection. A great Christian Basilica, built by Helena’s pious care, marked the site of the Holy Sepulchre, and men believed that divine agency had led to the discovery of the True Cross on which Jesus had suffered. As long as the Roman Empire remained in its integrity, pilgrimages to the Holy Land were safe and easy. Even the conquest of Syria by the Caliph Omar did not make them impossible. A noble mosque—the mosque of Omar—was built on the site of the Jewish Temple, but the custody of the Holy Sepulchre and the other sacred spots remained in Christian hands, and the places themselves were treated with respect and reverence by the tolerant Arabs, to whom Jerusalem was a city as venerable as to the Jew or Christian. All through the early Middle Ages the swarm of pilgrims continued. The risks of the journey through the lands of Islam increased the merit of the act. But with the break-up of the great Caliphate, the holy places became for the first time dangerous to the Christian wayfarer. In the second third of the tenth century Jerusalem was ruled by the fanatical Ikshidites (934–969), but in 969 the Fatimite Caliphs of Cairoan conquered Egypt and Syria, and for a time pilgrimages again became easy. The Fatimites were Shiites, and their dissensions from the orthodox Sunnites made them perforce tolerant of other creeds. Only the mad Caliph El Hakim (996–1021), who contemplated the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, stayed for a time the influx of the faithful. The religious revival that flowed from Cluny, and the greater peacefulness of western Europe, led to a vast throng of pilgrims during the seventy years that succeeded El Hakim’s death. The fierce Fulk the Black of Anjou thrice visited the holy places. Robert, Duke of Normandy, abandoned his son William to go on pilgrimage in 1035. In 1064 Archbishop Siegfried of Mainz headed a band of 7000 penitents to Jerusalem. The conversion of the Hungarians under St. Stephen again opened up the land route through the Danube valley and the Greek Empire, which men preferred to the stormy sea swarming with Saracen pirates.

[Sidenote: The Turkish Conquest of Palestine.]

The growth of the Seljukian power again stopped the flow of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. Here as elsewhere the Turkish period of conquest marked the beginning of the worst of evils for the once Christian lands of the East. Asia Minor, the centre of the East Roman Empire, became a desolate waste ruled by Turkish plunderers. In 1076 the expulsion of the Fatimites from Jerusalem left the custody of the holy city to the Turks. The legend of Peter the Hermit expresses the indignation of western Europe when the few wanderers who got back told terrible tales of wrongs suffered and blasphemies witnessed from the infidel lords of the Sepulchre of Christ. [Sidenote: Causes of the First Crusade.] But the stories of pilgrims, though they did much to kindle the indignation of Europe against Turkish rule in Palestine, did not of themselves account for the movement to redeem it. The preaching of Peter the Hermit, fruitful though it was, is not in authentic history the cause of the First Crusade. The Crusades were the work of the Popes at the instigation of the Eastern Emperor.

[Sidenote: The East and the West at the end of the eleventh century.]

Though, after the death of Malek Shah, the Seljukian monarchy split up into many rival powers, the danger of Turkish advance was still great. The direct rule of the Seljuks was henceforth limited to Persia, while Sultans of Seljukian blood established themselves lords of Kerman, Syria, and Roum. The Seljuks of Syria now ruled the Holy Sepulchre. The descendants of Suleiman, the conqueror of Nicæa, carved out a separate power in the inland parts of Asia Minor, called the kingdom of Roum [_i.e._ Rome], whose capital Nicæa was not one hundred miles from Constantinople, and whose limits extended to the waters of the Sea of Marmora. Some fragments of the Armenian race profited by this break-up to re-establish their freedom in the mountains of the Taurus. But Kilidj Arslan, the Sultan of Roum, was almost as threatening to Alexius as Alp Arslan had been to earlier Emperors. Fear of the lords of Nicæa, rather than a zeal for the holy places, led Alexius to apply for help to the West, and rouse the Westerns to defend the Greek Empire, by dwelling on the desolation of Jerusalem.

There was no strong political power in western Europe to which Alexius could appeal. The Empire was drifting asunder under the rule of Henry IV., and France was hopelessly broken up into a mass of feudal states, hardly recognising the authority of Philip I. The Roman Church alone was sufficiently vigorous and representative to help him. Already Michael VII. had sent similar requests to Gregory VII., who had caught eagerly at the prospects of a holy war against the Turks, but the expulsion of Islam was so united in his mind with the necessity of ending the Greek and Armenian schisms, that it was not an unmixed evil to the Eastern Empire that the Pope was too much occupied at home to embark seriously upon the undertaking. Yet it is a fact of no small significance that Gregory, who created the mediæval Papacy, was also the first Western to whom a Crusade seemed a practicable thing. His ally, Robert Guiscard, shared his eastern projects, but the campaign at Durazzo showed how little the fierce Norman distinguished between the schismatic and the infidel.

[Sidenote: Urban II. and the Council of Clermont, 1095.]

Alexius’ envoys appeared before Urban II. at the Council of Piacenza, and at Clermont a few months later the active French Pope preached with extraordinary force and fervour a holy war against the infidel. The vast crowd received the Pope with unmeasured enthusiasm. ‘It is the will of God,’ resounded from churchman and layman alike the answer to Urban’s appeal. Thousands pledged themselves to fight against Islam, and Urban himself distributed the crosses which the armed pilgrims were to bear as their special badge, and which gave the holy wars the name of Crusades. Preachers, like Peter the Hermit, stirred up the passion of the multitude, and before the lords and knights were ready, huge swarms of poor pilgrims gathered together in northern France and the Rhineland, under the leadership of Peter himself and of a French knight called Walter the Penniless. These disorganised hordes either perished on the long land journey through Hungary and Greece, or fell easy victims to the first encounter with the Turks of Roum, but their misordered zeal showed how the movement had touched the heart of Europe.

[Sidenote: The leaders of the First Crusade.]

The great kings of the West took no part in the First Crusade. The Emperor and the King of France had incurred the papal anathema, the King of England was a profligate blasphemer, and the Kings of Spain had enough crusading work at their own gates. The highest class that was affected by the Pope’s preaching was that of the feudal magnates of the second rank, and especially the barons of France and the adjacent French-speaking Lotharingia and Burgundy. These were the lands which had been the chief home of the Cluniac movement, and this was the class to which the Pope looked for allies in his struggle against the mighty kings of the earth. The most dignified potentate to take the cross was Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse and Marquis of Provence, the greatest of the lords of southern France. Of the north French magnates, Hugh, Count of Vermandois, King Philip’s brother, was the highest in rank and position. After him came Stephen, Count of Blois and Chartres, the son-in-law of William the Conqueror, and the father of an English king and of a line of Counts of Champagne and Blois. Robert, Duke of Normandy, left the care of his dominions to his more astute brother, and accompanied his brother-in-law. His cousin, Count Robert II. of Flanders, the son of an old pilgrim to Jerusalem, followed in his father’s footsteps. Of the princes of the Empire the most important was Godfrey, Duke of Lower Lorraine, the son of the Count of Boulogne, and Ida, sister of the Duke Godfrey of Lower Lorraine who had so zealously supported the cause of Henry IV. In 1089 the Emperor had granted Godfrey his uncle’s duchy, yet he is better known as Godfrey of Boulogne, and still oftener, through a curious misnomer, as Godfrey of Bouillon. His brothers Eustace and Baldwin, and his nephew Baldwin the younger, followed him to the Crusade. But the strongest of the Crusaders was Bohemund, the Italian Norman, the old enemy of Alexius Comnenus, who, after his father Robert Guiscard’s death, being only possessed of the little lordship of Otranto, hoped to win eastern lands for himself. Other Crusaders besides Bohemund had an eye on possible principalities to be conquered from the infidel. But with him went his nephew Tancred, a more chivalrous character. No great number of the higher clergy went on the Crusade. Conspicuous among them was the Pope’s legate, Adhemar of Monteil, Bishop of Le Puy en Velay.

[Sidenote: Alexius Comnenus and the Crusaders.]

The Crusaders levied their followers in their own way, and went at different times and in different directions to Constantinople, which Bishop Adhemar had indicated as their meeting-place. As swarm after swarm of mail-clad warriors marched through his dominions to his capital, Alexius Comnenus became very anxious as to their attitude to the Greek Empire. His hope had been to get an auxiliary Western force of knights, but the vast throng of Frankish chivalry, that had obeyed Pope Urban, alarmed him excessively, especially when he found his old enemy Bohemund among them. There was real danger lest the Crusaders should turn their arms against Constantinople instead of Nicæa and Antioch, and realise by force Hildebrand’s ideal of a union of the churches, before the attack was made on the infidel. Greed and religious zeal combined to inspire them to turn against the opulent and schismatic capital. But the craft and ingenuity of Alexius served him in good stead, and in the end he persuaded all the leaders to take oaths of fealty to him, hoping thus to retain the overlordship of any districts they might conquer from the Turks. He then gave them facilities for crossing into Asia.

The Crusaders now entered into infidel ground. Nicæa, the capital of Kilidj Arslan, was taken in June 1097, and next month the army of the Sultan was defeated at Dorylæum. These successes secured Asia Minor. After a long and painful march the Taurus was crossed, and in June 1098 Antioch was forced to surrender. [Sidenote: The march through Asia, and the conquest of Jerusalem, 1097–1099.] Even after that the Christians were in a sorry plight from famine, and were almost blockaded in their new conquest by the army of Corbogha, Ameer of Mosul. The Bishop of Le Puy died, and after his moderating influence was removed, disputes broke out, especially between the Normans and the south French. Many of the Crusaders, chief among whom was Stephen of Blois, went home in despair. But the fancied discovery of the Holy Lance, with which the Roman soldier had pierced the side of Christ, revived the fainting energies of the Crusaders, though at first the Normans declared that the ‘invention’ was a fraud of a chaplain of Raymond of Toulouse. Corbogha was defeated in a great battle, and at last the Christians entered the Holy Land. The divisions of Islam facilitated their progress. A month after the capture of Antioch, the Fatimites of Egypt had conquered Jerusalem, which nevertheless resisted vigorously. Finally, on 15th July 1099, Jerusalem was stormed and, amidst hideous scenes of carnage, the remnant of the crusading army attained its goal. A new victory at Ascalon in August secured southern Palestine from Egyptian assault.

[Sidenote: Results of the Crusade.]

The whole fate of the East seemed changed by the First Crusade. The Sultanate of Roum was hemmed up in the central and eastern parts of Asia Minor, while Nicæa and perhaps a third of Asia Minor went back to the rule of Alexius. The little Armenian lordships of the Taurus grew into a new Armenian kingdom in Cilicia, strong enough to keep Turks and Saracens at bay. The Christians predominated in Syria, whence they soon threatened both the Fatimites of Egypt and the Seljukian dynasty in Persia. The Latin lordship of Edessa crossed the Euphrates, and formed in the upper valley of that river a permanent check to the lords of Mosul. Despite national jealousies, and the still deeper ill-will of Catholic and Orthodox, Christianity had acted with wonderful unity of purpose, while Islam could not forget its petty feuds even in the face of the enemy. The exploits of Leo the Isaurian and Nicephorus Phocas were more than outdone by Alexius and his Western allies. Never since the days of Heraclius had the old limits of Rome’s power in the East been so nearly maintained.

[Sidenote: The early difficulties of the Frankish conquerors.]

It remained to provide for the government of the conquered provinces. All Syria was portioned among the victorious Latins. Godfrey of Boulogne accepted the government of Jerusalem; but he refused to wear a crown of gold in the city where Christ had worn a crown of thorns, and contented himself with the modest title of Baron and Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre. Bohemund, the Norman, ruled northern Syria as Prince of Antioch, and Baldwin, brother of Godfrey, became Count of Edessa. But these chieftains had at first so few followers that they held little more than the cities and castles that they garrisoned. Up to Godfrey’s death in 1100, the hold of the Christians on southern Syria was very slight. Jaffa was their only port, and the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem was beset with Saracen brigands, and marked by ruined villages and unburied bodies. At Antioch, Bohemund was in even worse straits. In 1100 he was taken prisoner by the Turks, who next year besieged Antioch, where Tancred with difficulty defended the Christian cause. Meanwhile a new crusade, mostly from Aquitaine, Germany, and Italy, had been almost annihilated in Asia Minor by long marches, thirst, hunger, and the arms of the Turks. With the remnants, Raymond of Toulouse conquered Tripoli, and established himself in middle Syria. Meanwhile Bohemund was released, on an Armenian prince paying his ransom. He then joined with Baldwin of Edessa on a distant expedition against Harran, but was badly beaten and forced in despair to return to Europe, where he again attacked his old enemy the Greek Emperor. Failing at a new siege of Durazzo, Bohemund was forced to become the vassal of the Eastern Basileus for Antioch. Baldwin of Edessa, a prisoner since the battle of Harran, made terms with the Ameer of Mosul, and joined with him in waging war against the Normans of Antioch. Yet, if the Crusaders were divided, the infidels were equally at cross-purposes. A constant stream of fresh pilgrims reinforced the scanty armies of the Latins, and their military superiority, both in pitched battles and in building and defending castles, stood them in good stead. Financial help came from the keen-witted Italian traders of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, who found in the Latin conquests new outlets for their commerce, and who were now winning the trade of the Levant from the Greeks. Baldwin of Edessa, called after Godfrey’s death to succeed him at Jerusalem, did not share his scruple against bearing the title of king, and showed such skill, both as warrior and statesman, that he became in a very real sense the founder of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Bit by bit the Saracens were expelled from the open country, and within the generation succeeding the First Crusade, an ordered political system was set up among the Latin principalities of Syria.

Under Baldwin I. (1100–1118) the crusading state attained its limits and its organisation. His nephew and successor, Baldwin II. (1118–1130), called like his uncle from Edessa to Jerusalem, was also a man of courage and character. Dying without sons, his daughter Millicent’s husband, Fulk, Count of Anjou (1130–1143), became the next king. Under him the Latin state reached its zenith, and gave him no reason to repent his preference for his Eastern kingdom rather than his Western county. After him, his son by his first wife, Geoffrey (the father of our Henry II.), became Count of Anjou, while, unluckily for Jerusalem, his two sons by Millicent, Baldwin and Amalric, were mere children. With them the decline begins.

The crusading lords, accustomed only to the forms of government that prevailed at home, reproduced in the Latin states of Syria the strict feudalism of western Europe. Feudalism required a nominal head, and the King of Jerusalem stood to the Latin princes as the King of early Capetian France stood to his vassals, having outside his own dominions nothing more than a vague supremacy over three great feudatories ruling over substantially independent states. [Sidenote: Organisation of the kingdom of Jerusalem and its dependent states.] The Prince of Antioch and the Counts of Tripoli and Edessa thought they had made a great concession in acknowledging his superiority at all, and were constantly at war with each other and with their suzerain. But each of the four Frankish princes had, like their Western counterparts, by no means unrestricted authority, even within their own peculiar territories. All four states were divided into fiefs, whose holders exercised the regalian rights that seemed proper to a baron. Within the kingdom of Jerusalem proper there were twelve such lordships, four of which were the ‘great baronies’ of Jaffa-Ascalon, Kerak-Montreal, Galilee, and Sidon. These in turn had their feudatories, and the powerful lordship of Ibelin, though but a mesne tenancy, overshadowed the double county of Jaffa and Ascalon. Beyond the royal domain, which centred round the capital and the towns of Tyre and Acre, the Kings of Jerusalem had little real authority. For the administration of their realm a customary code grew up, which, in days when the Latin lordships had waned almost to nothing, was embodied in the Assizes of Jerusalem, more valuable as an ideal picture of a perfect feudal state than as a description of what really prevailed at any one time in Syria. Being an artificial creation, the Latin state was more fully feudal than the kingdoms of the West, where the system had grown up naturally, and where there were still survivals of older forms of polity. Each lord held by the tenure of constant military service, and every effort was made to prevent the accumulation of fiefs in the same hands lest it should diminish the military forces of the kingdom. There were the usual feudal officers of state, seneschal, constable, marshal, chamberlain, chancellor, and the rest. There were the great feudal Council of the Realm, and local courts presided over by hereditary viscounts. But the Franks were ever a small minority of warriors, rulers, priests, and, in the towns, traders. The priests and barons were practically all French or French-speaking, and the tongue of northern France became the ordinary language of the Latin East, while ‘Frank’ became the commonest name by which Greeks and Arabs, Turks and Armenians, alike designated the Western settlers. It was a proof of the commercial importance of the land that customs duties became from the beginning a chief source of revenue. The only non-French element was the Italian commercial colony, which lived in separate quarters in the towns under governors and laws of its own. Venetians settled largely in the kingdom of Jerusalem, where the Marseilles merchants had exceptionally an enclosed factory of their own in the capital. Genoese mainly occupied the fiefs of Antioch and Tripoli. Pisa was already rather crowded out by her younger rivals. Through Italian hands the commerce between West and East almost exclusively passed. In the country, Syrian peasants, mainly of the Orthodox faith, tilled the lands of their Latin and Catholic masters, and like the Mohammedans and Jews, paid taxes from which the Franks were exempt. The paucity of numbers of the Franks led to extreme care being devoted to building castles and fortifying towns. The feudal stronghold became bigger, harder to take, and more elaborate than ever it had been in the West, and to this day there remain ruins of eastern castles that rival in dignity and strength Coucy, Carnarvon, or Caerphilly. Even in the desert beyond Jordan, the remnants of a vast fortress like Kerak shows how real and solid was the crusading state. Side by side with the Latin state went the Latin Church. Catholic bishops and priests were brought in everywhere, and the various sects of Oriental Christians—Greeks, Armenians, Nestorians, and the rest—shared in a common condemnation as schismatics, though at first common interests and common enemies kept the churches better together than might have been expected. Churches and monasteries grew up beside the new castles. The Holy Sepulchre was soon enclosed in a newer and grander sanctuary. The mediæval ideal—half martial, half ascetic—never had so fair a chance of development as in this land of Christians, forced to fight for their lives against Islam. It found its most characteristic expression in the martial monasticism of the military orders. For the present all looked well. Besides the constant crowd of pilgrims, there was a permanent population growing attached to its new home, which with strange quickness of sympathy, was adopting the conditions of Eastern life, and not seldom intermarrying with Syrians, Armenians, and Greeks. ‘God has poured the West into the East,’ boasted the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres. ‘We who were Westerns are now Easterns. We have forgotten our native land.’

[Sidenote: The Military Orders.]

When the Latin kingdom was still young, a knight from Burgundy, named Hugh de Payens, made the journey to Jerusalem. Seeing that poor pilgrims were still exposed to great hardships and dangers, he formed a society, with eight knights like-minded with himself, devoted to the protection of distressed wayfarers. [Sidenote: The Templars.] The grant of a house near Solomon’s Temple led to the brethren being called the Knights of the Temple, and so successful did the new movement become that St. Bernard, then omnipotent in the Latin world, interested himself in it, and drew up a rule for it, which, in 1128, was authorised by Honorius II. It was a new departure in the history both of war and of religion. The knights took the threefold monastic vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience; and in time of peace ruled their life after the fashion of the canons regular, that were becoming so popular in the West [see pp. 204–207]. Their main business of protecting pilgrims soon grew into a general duty of war against the infidel. Ascetic, austere, living the lives of monks, taught to regard hunting, games, and personal adornment as frivolous and worldly, they were, as their panegyrist says, ‘lions in war, lambs in the house.’ To Christians they were monks, to Islam they were soldiers. ‘They bear before them a banner, half-white, half-black: this they call Beauséant, because they are fair and friendly to the friends of Christ, to His enemies stern and black.’

[Sidenote: The Knights of St. John.]

The needs of poor pilgrims had led the citizens of Amalfi to set up a hospital at Jerusalem for their refreshment, in the days when Palestine was still ruled by the Fatimite Caliphs. This institution, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, was revived and reorganised by its master Gerard after the Latin conquest. Gerards successor, Raymond of Le Puy, struck by the success of the Templars, obtained about 1130 the Pope’s permission to convert this charitable foundation into a military brotherhood like that of Hugh de Payens. Before long the Hospitallers, or Knights of St. John, vied with the Templars in their numbers, wealth, and importance. At later times other military orders were founded, such as the Teutonic Order [founded in 1197], the struggling little English community of the Knights of St. Thomas of Acre [1231], and the three famous military orders of Spain. But in the Holy Land no other order ever took the position that was soon attained by the Templars and the Knights of St. John. Enormous estates gradually accrued to them in every country in Europe, and their houses in the West became recruiting stations, whence a regular supply of knights and servitors, vowed to a perpetual crusade, kept alive the forces of the Latin kingdom. A papal grant of 1162 exempted the Templars from all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, save that of the Grand Master and the Pope. Like Cluny or Cîteaux, each order formed an organised unity, ruled in the last instance by General Chapters, whose power controlled even that of the Master of each order. In the East each order formed a new little state, with castles, soldiers, revenues, and government of its own. Often in conflict with the kings and each other, the two chief orders nevertheless formed the most permanent and indestructible element in the Latin kingdom. It was due to their well-drilled enthusiasm that the Latin East could still hold its own against the Saracen and Turk.

[Sidenote: Rise of the Atabeks.]

The organisation of the Latin East was hardly completed when the period of decline set in. Much of the success of the First Crusade had been due to the antagonism of Turk and Arab, and the break-up of the Seljukian kingdom. In the generation following, a new danger arose in the growth of a consolidated Mohammedan state in Syria. Imad-ed-din Zangi was a Turk whose father had been a trusted follower of Malek Shah, and who, after a stormy youth, had been, in 1127, made governor, or Atabek, of Mosul. In the course of the next fifteen years Zangi destroyed all the rival Mohammedan powers in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, and then turned his arms against Edessa, the remote crusading county that encroached upon his territories and threatened his capital. Jocelin of Courtenay, who ruled Edessa after Baldwin became King of Jerusalem, opposed him by a vigorous resistance, but Jocelin’s son, Jocelin II., was a cowardly voluptuary, who left Edessa almost undefended. [Sidenote: Fall of Edessa, 1144.] In 1144 Zangi conquered Edessa, and put the Frankish garrison to the sword. The whole county was speedily overrun, and the Latin East experienced its first great disaster.

[Sidenote: St. Bernard and the Second Crusade.]

The fall of Edessa filled Europe with alarm, and St. Bernard, then in the plenitude of his influence, preached a new crusade with extraordinary fervour, and won over the two foremost princes in Christendom. Louis VII., King of France, had already taken the Crusader’s vow to expiate an early crime of violence [see page 284], but his barons, and his minister Suger, urgently dissuaded him. At Easter, 1146, St. Bernard appeared before a great gathering at Vézelai, and amidst scenes that recalled the first enthusiasm at Clermont, all ranks took the cross from the hands of the great Cistercian. After preaching the crusade over northern France, Bernard went to Germany, and at Christmas, in the cathedral at Speyer, overcame by his eloquence the hesitation of Conrad III.

[Sidenote: Crusade of Conrad III.]

Two large armies were now equipped. Conrad and his Germans were first on the march, and travelling by way of Hungary and Bulgaria, were well received by the Greek Emperor, Manuel Comnenus, whose wife, Bertha of Sulzbach, was Conrad’s sister-in-law. Unwilling to wait for the arrival of the French, Conrad started at once to march by way of Nicæa and Iconium to Syria, a route that led him through the heart of the kingdom of Roum, where the light-armed Turkish horsemen perpetually assailed his ill-disciplined and unwieldy squadrons, who were overwhelmed by the same fate that befel the Crusaders of 1101 [September 1147]. A mere remnant escaped with Conrad to Nicæa, where the French, under Louis VII., had at last assembled. [Sidenote: Crusade of Louis VII.] To avoid the dangers of the upland plateau, the French proceeded southward along the coast of Asia Minor as far as Ephesus, whence they ascended the valley of the Maeander into the interior, in order to avoid the rugged shores of Caria and Lycia. They were at once exposed to constant Turkish attacks. Conrad, who started with them on a second attempt, soon lost heart, and returned to Constantinople. When the wearied army at last reached the little port of Attalia in Pamphylia [February 1148], the leaders resolved to borrow ships from the Greeks, and effect the rest of their journey by sea. But so small a number of ships was forthcoming, that only the knights were enabled to embark. The rest of the army was forced to resume its dangerous land march, and few indeed ever reached their destination.

In March 1148 Louis VII. and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, landed at Antioch with the little band of knights, that now alone represented the two greatest military powers of Christendom. He hurried at once to the south, where he was joined by Conrad III., who had now reached Acre by sea. It was unwisely resolved to march against Damascus, though its ruler was the chief enemy of Noureddin, Zangi’s son and successor, and would have willingly stood aside had the attack been concentrated on the conquerors of Edessa. As it was, Mosul and Damascus made common cause, and the attack on the latter city proved an utter failure. Conrad at once went home, and Louis followed him a year later. The result of the Second Crusade was to promote the unity of Islam, and to divert the enemy from the north to Jerusalem, where the Christian position was weakest.

The thirty years succeeding the Second Crusade were a period of fair but somewhat stationary prosperity for the Latin East. The long minority of Baldwin III. (1143–1163) was a great calamity in itself, but his mother, Millicent, was a capable regent, and Baldwin, when he grew up, proved a vigorous warrior both against the Egyptians and Noureddin, while his affability, generosity, and bright ready wit made him the most popular of all his line. By his marriage with Theodora, daughter of the Emperor Manuel, Baldwin III. did something to promote active co-operation between the Greeks and the Latins against Islam, and his death in 1163 was a great loss to the Latin kingdom. [Sidenote: The Kingdom of Jerusalem between the Second and the Third Crusades.] Amalric I., his brother (1163–1174), also married a Byzantine wife, and even visited Constantinople. But with all his policy he failed to unite effectively the Christian forces, or to check seriously the growth of the power of Noureddin, and with his death the decline of the kingdom rapidly set in. His son and successor, Baldwin IV. (1174–1185), began to reign as a boy of twelve, and as he grew up proved a hopeless leper. On his death another child, Baldwin V. (1185–1186), his sister Sibyl’s son by her first husband, succeeded, but he died the next year. The crown was now disputed between Guy of Lusignan, Sibyl’s second husband, and Raymond, Count of Tripoli, who had acted as regent for the leper king. In the short but sharp civil war that followed, the last hopes of the kingdom perished.

A state ruled in turn by a leper, a child, and an intriguing woman was in no fit state to carry on a perpetual struggle for existence, and the disorders of the royal house were only typical of the disorganisation of the realm. There was always a corrupt element among the Crusaders. A momentary religious enthusiasm could not change the nature of the criminals and desperadoes, who had sought a refuge in the East from the errors they had committed in the West. But even the descendants of the warrior saints lamentably degenerated under the fierce sun of Syria, and the luxury and moral corruption of Oriental life. The best and bravest perished in the ceaseless wars against the infidel, and the crusading lordships were constantly diminishing in numbers, and too often a single heiress, an imbecile or a minor, represented a great aggregation of fiefs, formerly owned by many warriors able to make head personally against the Turks. Things were almost worse with the Franks in the towns, whose frequent intermarriage with native women led to a mixed race called ‘Pullani,’ with Eastern habits and ways of thought. Under these circumstances the military orders became indispensable. Their castles were always commanded by grown men accustomed to affairs, and from their numerous commanderies throughout Christendom came a succession of warriors, whose strength had not been sapped by an almost tropical climate.

The physical and moral decline of the Latins was made more fatal by their divisions. The princes of Antioch and their Armenian neighbours stood apart from the states of southern Syria, and the Greek Empire was increasingly hostile. While Roger of Sicily repeated the policy of Robert Guiscard and Bohemund, and the Italian allies of the Crusaders robbed the Empire of its trade, real co-operation against Islam was impossible. Within the crusading realm there was constant strife. The Templars quarrelled with the Hospitallers, the French with the Provençals, English, and Germans, and the Genoese with the Pisans and Venetians. The new-comers from the West quarrelled with the older settlers. Among the baronial houses hereditary feuds arose, as in every feudal country. The purely feudal organisation of the kingdom made a strong central power impossible, and nothing but a vigorous despotism, like that of Henry II. in England, could have long kept the motley state together. As time went on, the relations between the Franks and their Eastern subjects grew worse, and neither the unwarlike Armenian nor the slavish Syrian was of any avail to supplement their armies. It speaks well for the energy of such parts of the polity as remained sound, that a century was still to elapse before the crusading kingdoms entirely disappeared.

The growth of a great Moslem monarchy in Syria was the last and worst of the many misfortunes of the Latin Christians. After Zangi’s death in 1146, Noureddin had carried the power of the Atabeks to much loftier heights. [Sidenote: Growth of the power of Saladin.] He captured Damascus, and pushed his dominions to the sea-coast, thus isolating Antioch from Tripoli and Jerusalem. In 1171 his general, Saladin, conquered Egypt, and practically put an end to the schismatic Caliphate of the Fatimites. Noureddin died in 1174, recognised even by the Christians as a ‘just man, wise and religious, so far as the traditions of his race allowed.’ His sons were quite unable to hold their own against Saladin. Hence in a few years the lord of Cairo and Alexandria soon became also the lord of Aleppo and Damascus. The Latins were enclosed by a single united Moslem state, ruled by a generous soldier and a crafty statesman.

After Guy’s coronation, most of the Frankish barons accepted him as king, though Raymond of Tripoli, indignant at his usurpation, intrigued with Saladin. Next year the pillage of a Mussulman convoy by the lord of Kerak gave Saladin a pretext for proclaiming a holy war against the Christians, and invading the kingdom of Jerusalem. [Sidenote: The Battle of Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem, 1187.] On 4th July 1187 a great battle was fought at Hattin, in which Saladin won a complete victory, King Guy was taken prisoner, and the True Cross fell into the infidels’ hands. On 2nd October Jerusalem fell, and Tyre, Tripoli, and Antioch alone succeeded in driving Saladin from their walls. Thus the great kingdom of the Franks of Syria was reduced to a few towns near the sea-coast, and a few sorely beleaguered castles. ‘The Latins of the East,’ said William of Tyre, ‘had forsaken God, and God now forsook them.’ Unless Europe made another such effort as Urban II. had made, the crusading state would soon disappear altogether.

GENEALOGY OF THE EARLY KINGS OF JERUSALEM.

A

Godfrey the Bearded, Duke of Lower Lorraine, _d._ 1069, _m._ 1. Doda; 2. Beatrice, mother of Countess Matilda | +-------------+-----------+ | | Godfrey the Hunchback, Ida, Duke of Lower Lorraine, _m._ Eustace II., _d._ 1076 Count of Boulogne | +-----------------------+-----+-----------+ | | | GODFREY OF BOULOGNE, Eustace III. BALDWIN I., Duke of Lower Lorraine, and of Boulogne Count of Edessa and Baron of the Holy Sepulchre, King of Jerusalem _d._ 1100 (1100–1118)

B

BALDWIN II., Cousin of Baldwin I. (1118–1130) | MILLICENT, _m._ FULK OF ANJOU (1130–1143) | +------------+------------+ | | BALDWIN III. AMALRIC I. (1143–1163) (1163–1174) | +----------------------+-----------------+---------------+ | | | BALDWIN IV. Sibyl, Isabella, (1174–1185) _m._ 1. William of Montferrat _m._ 2. CONRAD OF MONTFERRAT 2. GUY OF LUSIGNAN (1192) (1186–1192) 3. HENRY OF CHAMPAGNE | (1192–1197) | 4. AMALRIC II. OF CYPRUS | (1197–1205) (1) | BALDWIN V. | (1185–1186) | | (2) (4) | +-------------------------+---------------+ | | Mary, AMALRIC III. _m._ JOHN OF BRIENNE (_d._ 1206) (1210–1222) | Iolande, _m._ EMPEROR FREDERICK II. (_d._ 1250)