God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Montferrand and the fortress of Hisn al-Akrad. In the 1150s, the Templars acquired Tortosa. Both military orders proceeded to construct major castles, the Templars at Tortosa, the Hospitallers at Hisn al-Akrad or, as it was now called, Crac des Chevaliers. The Genoese role in the county’s foundation was rewarded with a quarter of Tripoli and, among other properties, the port of Jubail, which Count Bertrand gave to the Genoese admiral Guglielmo Embriaco. His descendants became vassals of the count as lords of Jubail in their own right until the last years of the thirteenth century, when, embittered by their treatment at the hands of the count of Tripoli, they briefly held Jubail as vassals of the sultan of Egypt.²³ In devolving power and responsibility, the counts of Tripoli revealed a structural weakness in their county and their resources. When Raymond III exerted influence and authority outside Tripoli, acting as regent of Jerusalem in the 1170s and 1180s, this depended not on his position as count but on his family relationship, as a great-grandson of Baldwin II and grandson of Queen Melisende, and on his marriage to the richest heiress within the kingdom, Eschiva of Galilee.

This weakness was exacerbated by rumbling succession problems, murder and captivity. During the Second Crusade (1146–8) Alfonso-Jordan of Toulouse, Raymond I’s son, born at Mount Pilgrim, arrived in the east clearly possessed of a stronger formal claim than the incumbent, Raymond II, grandson of Raymond I’s bastard. While Alfonso-Jordan died suddenly in Palestine in 1148, to the usual accompaniment of rumours of foul play, his own illegitimate son, Bertrand, backed by Toulousain troops, challenged Raymond’s authority in 1149 by seizing the fortress of Arimah on the road to Tortosa and Homs. According to Arabic sources, Raymond dealt with this unwelcome threat by inviting Nur al-Din and Unur of Damascus, enemies only a year before during the crusaders’ siege of Damascus, to dispose of his troublesome relative. Arimah was taken, razed to the ground and returned to Raymond. Bertrand was led captive to Aleppo, where he languished for the next ten years, his fate a fine tribute to the political eclecticism of Outremer politics.²⁴

Another was the murder of Raymond II by Assassins in 1152. The Assassins derived from an Isma’ili sect known as the New Preaching founded in north-western Iran in the late eleventh century. Isma’ilis differed from Shi’ites in recognizing the succession of seven instead of twelve imams, heads of the Islamic community, descended from Caliph Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet, murdered in 661. An offshoot of the Persian Isma’ilis based at Alamut near the Caspian Sea, after a blood-chequered career in Aleppo and Damascus, from 1132 the Syrian Assassins established bases in the Nosairi mountains near Tortosa, at once a religious and political community. From 1169 to 1193 they were ruled by Sheikh Rashid al-Din Sinan, known as ‘the Old Man of the Mountains’. The Assassins distinguished themselves from other Islamic sects and religio-political groups by their use of murder as a political weapon, largely to compensate for their lack of military strength. Fear, extortion and impregnable strongholds in the hills secured for the Assassins notoriety and, in the thirteenth century, some political respectability. Although occasionally available to perform others’ dirty work, the Assassins possessed their own idealism, the restoration of radical Isma’ili rule over Islam. Thus their targets tended to be orthodox Sunni Muslims. Their invariable weapon was the dagger. Their nickname, common to Arabic and western sources, derived from the hashish the killers allegedly took before committing what they viewed as a pious act, seeing themselves as religious devotees prepared to face martyrdom for their faith. Raymond II was their first recorded non-Muslim victim, the reasons for his murder unknown. The consequences were severe, leading to another regency, by Raymond’s widow, Hodierna, sister of Queen Melisende and aunt of Baldwin III. The immediate reaction to Raymond’s murder exposed a latent racism in the Franks, who massacred the eastern indigenous population of Tripoli regardless of religion. ‘In this way it was hoped that the perpetrators of the foul deed might be found.’ They were not.²⁵

Despite the success of Nur al-Din of Aleppo in uniting Muslim Syria in the quarter-century before his death in 1174, and Raymond III’s decade in captivity (1164–74), the county maintained its precarious hold on the coast. Yet, unlike Antioch and Jerusalem, it is hard to detect much of a coherent, distinctive political culture. The very existence of the county of Tripoli, by the 1150s a loose association of semi-independent lordships, pointed to the haphazard political structure of Outremer. The creation of four separate principalities, while reflecting their respective histories and local geography, indicated a lack of strategic understanding by most of the western invaders, at least until the successes of Nur al-Din and Saladin concentrated minds. The habit of seeking immediate gratification of ambition, opportunity or claims appeared impervious even to the warnings of events and observers in the 1170s and 1180s. The pattern of building castles augmented the impression of myopia, the emphasis being on individual seigneurial administration rather than frontier defence. Perhaps only the military orders, with possessions in all principalities and fealty to none, acquired the perspective to introduce some strategic planning to their castles and campaigns. Otherwise, unity in Outremer flowed usually from the kings of Jerusalem: Baldwin I imposing a settlement in northern Syria in 1109–11; Baldwin II using the marriages of his daughters – Alice to Bohemund II of Antioch and Hodierna to Raymond II of Tripoli. Dynasticism prevailed. The childless Raymond III was succeeded as count of Tripoli by Bohemund IV of Antioch, Raymond’s mother’s great-great-nephew.

JERUSALEM

For a kingdom whose adherents regarded it as founded by God, the kingdom of Jerusalem exhibited disappointing fragility and disunity. It was never entirely free from the menace of invasion; civil war erupted or was threatened in 1133–4, 1152, 1182 and 1186. Its rulers, including a bigamist homosexual and another who married a bigamous wife, conspicuously failed to produce healthy male heirs. The dynastic line faltered alarmingly and damagingly. Actively disputed in 1100, 1118, 1163 and 1186, no succession went entirely uncontested, although much the same could be said of twelfth-century England. Only twice in eighty-eight years did son succeed father, in 1143 and 1174. On both occasions the heir was a minor, on the second he proved to be a leper as well. Minors inherited on three occasions. Inevitably, factional jostling and feuding marked the regime, the intimacy of political action in and around the royal court compounded by the small geographical extent of the kingdom and the lack of economic or fiscal necessity for barons to spend time of their estates. Visiting western grandees found the local political scene poisonously rebarbative and introspective.²⁶ Jerusalemites gained a reputation in the west, certainly from the Second Crusade, for shiftiness and decadence, in contrast to Arabic contemporaries, who noted their bellicose nature and lack of personal hygiene. Yet Jerusalem in the twelfth century remained the emotional, political and strategic heart of Outremer. Its ideology infused by militant Christianity; its rulers thoroughly acculturated to the demands of the east, four of them – Baldwin I, II, III and Amalric – marrying Armenian or Greek princesses; its fate an issue for western rulers no less than churchmen, pilgrims, settlers and crusaders, its history was already a matter of epic and legend.²⁷ It says much for the material foundations of the kingdom that this was so.

When Godfrey of Bouillon died in Jerusalem on 18 July 1100, only quick action by his followers prevented the newly installed patriarch, the former papal legate Daimbert of Pisa, from asserting his claims to ecclesiastical rule over the tiny enclave in Judea.²⁸ Desperate for military aid, the previous December Godfrey had agreed to be invested with Jerusalem by Damibert, who had just arrived in the Holy City with his ally Bohemund and Baldwin of Edessa to fulfil their vows. Armed with the power of his Pisan entourage and wealth, Daimbert had subsequently forced Godfrey to concede to him ownership of Jerusalem and Jaffa, with the duke retaining only a life interest. The departure of the Pisan fleet and the arrival of a Venetian one strengthened Godfrey’s hand before he died. Afterwards, the fortuitous absence of Daimbert from Jerusalem allowed the duke’s military household to launch a coup d’etat, seizing the Citadel and sending urgent messages to Godfrey’s brother, Baldwin of Edessa, to assume the inheritance. On this news, Daimbert and Tancred, fresh from conquering Galilee and Haifa and long an enemy of Baldwin, looked to invite Bohemund to come south, but he had left Antioch to campaign in the north, where he was captured by the Danishmends in August. In the event, Baldwin had to secure Antioch before in October leaving Edessa in the hands of his cousin, Baldwin of Le Bourcq, to march south. Defeating a Damascene army at the Dog river, Baldwin reached Jerusalem in November. With Tancred withdrawing to Galilee, then assuming the regency of Antioch in the new year, Daimbert was compelled to submit. Whereas Godfrey merely continued with his own title of duke and allowed others to describe him as the Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, with Baldwin, an educated lapsed cleric himself, no equivocation over titles or authority was permitted. On Christmas Day 1100, tactfully perhaps, pointedly certainly, in the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem rather than in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, Baldwin was crowned by Daimbert as, in his later phrase, ‘king of the Latins in Jerusalem’.²⁹

Baldwin of Boulogne created the kingdom of Jerusalem. Always a man on the make, the youngest son of Eustace II of Boulogne, originally destined for the church, Baldwin abandoned the cloth in search of secular success, although all his life maintaining a slightly ecclesiastical air in dress and manner.³⁰ Married three