God's War: A New History of the Crusades

times for worldly advancement, once bigamously, he was probably homosexual, one of his more exotic intimates being a converted Muslim who later tried to betray him during the siege of Sidon in 1110. Apparently they were inseparable, even while the king relieved himself.³¹ Failing to secure a niche in the lucrative Anglo- Norman nobility through his first marriage to Godechilde of Tosni, who died at Marasch in 1097, Baldwin used the First Crusade to better his status. He matched boldness with a single-minded concentration on personal advancement, in Cilicia in 1097, where he enlisted Muslim assistance to get the better of Tancred, and at Edessa in 1098, when he showed no compunction in sacrificing his patron Thoros. His second marriage, to the Armenian Arda, served a similar function to his first, providing Baldwin with a political stake of his own. Summoned to rule Jerusalem, he proved an outstanding military leader and, unlike his somewhat supine brother Godfrey, a cunning, clear-headed politician. Constant aggression towards his neighbours, a policy of strategic conquest, and the firm imposition of royal authority over his lay and ecclesiastical vassals formed the basis of successful kingship. Not even his own chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, claimed Baldwin was pious, nor did his later eulogists. Instead Baldwin was his people’s ‘shield, strength and support; their right arm; the terror of his enemies’.³²

The early years of the reign saw the conquest of the coastal ports interrupted by some desperate defence against Egyptian invasions in 1101 and 1105, on which the survival of the kingdom depended. Damascus, the army of which Baldwin had defeated on his way south in 1100, stood aloof, not wishing to assist a Fatimid reconquest of Palestine. However, as Frankish success increasingly denied them free access to the coast, the Damascenes contested the fortification of Galilee by Baldwin’s vassals and sought allies from Iraq. Between 1109 and 1115, Baldwin’s attention was regularly occupied in the north, in 1109 settling the squabbles between Antioch, Edessa and Tripoli and thereafter providing military assistance against repeated attacks from Mosul. In 1113 Mawdud of Mosul, in alliance with Damascus, attacked Palestine, defeating Baldwin at es-Sinnabra in Galilee but failing to capture any towns or fortresses. Mawdud’s murder by Assassins the same year produced a diplomatic rapprochement with Tughtegin of Damascus, who, as fearful of Seljuk domination as of Fatimid, reckoned the Franks served a useful purpose in balancing power in the region. With northern pressure reduced, Baldwin realized that his kingdom’s security would be enhanced by extending his influence over the Bedouin and the desert trade routes between Egypt and Syria. Twice reconnotring the region south of the Dead Sea in 1100 and 1107, in 1115 and 1116 he imposed Frankish authority east of the Wadi Araba, penetrating to Petra and south to the Gulf of Aqaba. Two castles were built, at Montreal (Shawbak) in Edom and Li Vaux Moise, near Petra, although in the 1140s the centre of what became known as the lordship of Oultrejourdain was transferred north to Kerak in Moab, closer to the eastern shore of the Dead Sea and, on a clear day, within sight of the Mount of Olives. These forts allowed the Franks to tax commerce and the pilgrim traffic on the road from Syria to Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz and to impede hostile militiary activity. However, aggression from Egypt via Ascalon persisted, threatening Jerusalem (in 1113) and Jaffa (in 1115). To counter this, Baldwin led a raid in the Nile in 1118, presumably hoping to coerce the Fatimids into peace. Instead, he fell mortally ill, dying on the return journey at el-Arish on 2 April 1118.

Baldwin I’s achievements were startling. He established a stable kingdom with defined and defensible borders from Beirut to Beersheba and beyond, controlled by a new, coherent political community whose power rested on exploiting existing resources of rural and commercial wealth. If he relied on force of personality and circumstance rather than law or constitutions, his idiom of authority was understood by his followers and clients. However, his career was hardly unique. From the chaos of late eleventh-century Syria, Iraq, Anatolia and Egypt, Baldwin was not alone in carving out a kingdom that survived its creator. Similar events and aptitude plotted the careers of fellow Latins Bohemund and Tancred, the Seljuk Kilij Arslan, the Mosul atabeg Zengi and his son Nur al- Din of Aleppo, and, later, the Kurdish mercenary Saladin. For each, legitimacy derived not from long inheritance or tradition but from military force, the leadership of loyal warbands and the wealth generated by employment, plunder and tribute. They all shared the justification of religion.

In the Near East, determined use of violence, diplomacy and patronage allowed small, often tiny groups, no larger than an extended military household of a few score or hundreds of warriors, to assert authority over large, settled civilian populations largely through control of the economically and politically dominant cities. The structure of Near Eastern society rested on myriad communities, variously defined by religion, culture and ethnicity in town and country. Rural wealth was exploited by absentee landlords who also controlled the commerce that flowed though urban centres. Cities and towns dominated the rural population; military warlords dominated the cities and towns. The Franks were unusual in massacring or expelling urban populations, a habit that ceased after the capture of Sidon in 1110. Yet the importance of cities to the political economy was well understood. Baldwin I and II made strenuous efforts to attract local Christians to Jerusalem. Frankish authorities tolerated racial and religious diversity in the great ports of Acre, Tyre or Tripoli. Baldwin I’s kingdom, like those of Tughtegin at Damascus or Kerbogha at Mosul, revolved around personal loyalty of a well-rewarded inner circle into whose hands power and wealth were bestowed; successful war and diplomacy; and the ready exploitation of the economy of the indigenous population. A characteristic feature of Muslim Near Eastern patronage was the grant of an iqta, an assignment of revenues from designated land, not its ownership. In Latin Palestine the equivalents were grants of rents and money-fiefs. While Baldwin’s conquest of Palestine found parallels in Robert Guiscard’s in southern Italy, Rodrigo Diaz’s in Valencia or even William the Bastard’s in England, it chiefly mirrored local conditions. While inevitably employing western language, customs and mentalities, Baldwin acted as a Levantine potentate. The contrast found visible expression in the mourners following his funeral bier as it wound its way up the Valley of Josaphat to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday 1118. Grieving beside Baldwin’s shocked protege, the corrupt old stager Patriarch Arnulf, and the Latin community were Syrian Christians and passing Muslims.³³

The main legacies bequeathed by Baldwin I to his cousin Baldwin II included tight control over the disposal of lordships and fiefs; mastery of the church of a sort frowned upon in fashionable circles in the west; an understanding of the importance of maintaining the diplomatic balance between Aleppo, Damascus and Egypt; and practical over-lordship and protection over the northern territories. Military generalship remained fundamental to a royal power that rested at the heart of the legal and political structure. Modified over time and reduced by dynastic failure and faction, the essence of Baldwin I’s system of royal hegemony survived until 1187.

Behind the territorial conquests, the king created fiefs for his leading vassals, including the lordships of Caesarea, Arsur, Sidon, Jaffa, Hebron and Oultrejourdain. Fealty and homage were insisted on from the princes of Galilee after Tancred’s show of independence under Duke Godfrey. Jerusalem was one frontier where private enterprise operated only within a clear hierarchical system centred on the crown, which retained its ability to manipulate the structure and disposition of the major fiefs in the kingdom.³⁴ The kings kept as their domain Judea and Samaria (with the centres of Jerusalem and Nablus) and the vastly lucrative lordships of Acre (1104) and Tyre (1124). In their domain, as the great lords in theirs, the king exercised jurisdiction through viscounts and collected or farmed taxes on trade and industry (e.g. sugar production), as well as the poll tax on Muslims. Formal relations with his tenants-in-chief, major vassals holding lands directly from the king, were conducted in the High Court (Haute Cour) attended also by leading ecclesiastics, including the heads of the military orders, and the occasional grand visiting crusader. By the reign of Amalric, the assise sur la ligece provided for rear-vassals (i.e. vassals of the king’s vassals) to swear oaths of direct liege- homage to the king, thus, in theory, opening access to the Haute Cour to them and their litigation. Amalric also claimed the right to oaths of fealty from freemen. The desire for direct relations between the crown and free tenants finds an echo in the contemporary legal reforms of Amalric’s nephew, Henry II of England. However, effective legal authority, in England or Jerusalem, depended on material wealth. Apart from income derived from his domain, the king enjoyed the profits of coining, customs and tolls in his ports, tribute from the Bedouin, highway dues, and the right of wreck. Special taxes for war and defence were agreed by the Haute Cour or wider assemblies in 1167 and 1183, perhaps a sign that ordinary revenues were being over-stretched, a phenomenon that may explain why, increasingly, secular lords passed lands to the church and the military orders. Baldwin I’s successors, despite concessions agreed at the Council of Nablus in 1120s, asserted a de facto control over appointments to the episcopacy and the masterships of the military orders.

However, royal power was neither autocratic nor absolute. Baldwin I’s pious but equally energetic successor, Baldwin II, sustained his authority at a price. Formal complaints about his regency in Antioch in 1119 were voiced by the Jerusalem nobility. At the Council of Nablus in 1120, the king and secular lords relinquished control over ecclesiastical tithes and accepted a range of penalties for breaches of the law, sexual misconduct and miscegenation. By the end of his reign, the royal habit of disposing of the inheritance of fiefs at will rather than by customary rules had begun to give way to a presumption of hereditary succession, often, given the rapid extinction