God's War: A New History of the Crusades

rates of families in the direct male line, widely interpreted. Nonetheless the crown retained considerable authority. The cohesion of the kingdom survived Baldwin II’s captivity in Aleppo (1123–4), affairs being conducted by his constable and the patriarch, including the important capture of Tyre. More generally, moves towards seigneurial hereditary succession were to be expected in the generation after the initial conquest: England after 1066 and Sicily after 1092 provided parallels. Confiscations continued for contumacious malcontents. At no time before the fall of the kingdom in 1187 were kings unable to interfere in the composition and structure of fiefs or in the disposition of unmarried heiresses. So far from consolidating territorial or jurisdictional power, many of the chief vassals – perhaps fewer that a dozen families – subdivided their fiefs or granted stretches of them to religious houses or military orders. Legally, Baldwin II managed to insist on the penalty of confiscation for prescribed offences against his rights and position both as feudal overlord and king (the Establissment dou roi Baudoin), although it is uncertain whether conviction and punishment lay with the king or trial in the Haute Cour. In practice, it probably made little difference as no monarch could proceed without the support of his barons. In 1133/4 Hugh count of Jaffa rebelled against King Fulk. By refusing to appear to answer in court charges and then inviting armed help from the Muslim garrison at Ascalon, Hugh’s treason was not in doubt, even to his own vassals. Yet, instead of having his fiefs confiscated, he was exiled for three years with the promise of subsequent restoration of his property. Politics, in this case Fulk’s unpopularity and baronial sympathy for Hugh, prevailed over law.³⁵

The case of Hugh of Jaffa arose as a consequence of the personal and dynastic, not constitutional, consequences of kingship. The main weakness of the regime created by Baldwin I lay in the chance circumstances of succession, which would have undermined any Latin monarchy of the time. Baldwin I left no children. He had repudiated his second wife, possibly on the spurious grounds of her having been raped by a Muslim. His bigamous marriage to Adelisa of Sicily (1113–16), which had offered the prospect of a Sicilian succession, ended in divorce and a promise from Baldwin to his barons not to remarry. On his death in 1118, a powerful faction in his household invited Baldwin’s elder brother, Eustace of Boulogne, to succeed but, by the time he reached Italy, news came that a rival group had installed Baldwin of Le Bourcq as king. Even so, Baldwin II’s position was only formally recognized in 1119 by coronation at Bethlehem. Pons of Tripoli had to be forced to acknowledge his overlordship in 1122. During Baldwin II’s captivity (1123–4), supporters of the house of Boulogne toyed with replacing him with Charles count of Flanders. As late as 1128, the pope had to declare Baldwin’s legitimacy.³⁶

Happily married, Baldwin II fathered only daughters. To secure his dynasty, he arranged for the eldest, Melisende, to marry Fulk V count of Anjou. A veteran pilgrim from 1120, Fulk arrived in Jerusalem in 1129 possessed of very grand western connections. In 1128, he had arranged the marriage of his son Geoffrey to Matilda, only surviving legitimate child and heiress of Henry I of England and his Anglo-French dominions. Henry’s interest in the east was further demonstrated when a member of his household, Raymond of Poitiers, was recruited as prince of Antioch in 1133 (although he only reached Syria in 1136). As with Henry I’s dispositions for his throne, Baldwin insisted on the rights of his daughter to the succession. However, Fulk expected to become king. In 1131, on his deathbed, Baldwin II complicated matters further by associating his infant grandson, later Baldwin III, as well as Melisende and Fulk in the succession, again echoing Henry I’s insistence on the ultimate inheritance by his grandson, the future Henry II. As in 1118, dynastic interests created political feuds, the rights of Melisende becoming identified with those of the existing baronage resentful of the parvenu Fulk. Relations cannot have been eased by Fulk’s genuine or affected amnesia for people’s names or faces, even among his household and proteges, a distinctly unsettling trait, deliberate or not, in a political universe revolving round personal contact and favour.³⁷

Given the lack of male heirs, the dynastic issue mattered. In 1118, a western stranger was almost imposed on Jerusalem. It occurred in Tripoli in 1109 and Antioch in 1136. In 1131, the Angevin connection in Jerusalem proved double-edged. While securing immediate stability, potentially it provided claims for Fulk’s European heirs, who also happened to be the ruling dynasty of the greatest empire in western Europe. The circumstances of 1118 and 1131 in fact left a number of other western ruling families – such as Boulogne, Blois and Flanders – with dynastic interests in the east, especially as Melisende’s succession had confirmed the cognatic principle of inheritance (the rights of any relative, male or female, to inherit, not just males in the male line). The protection of Baldwin’s dynasty exerted a powerful influence. It was of practical as well as symbolic importance that, as was later reported, Melisende was crowned and consecrated beside Fulk in 1131, now in the church of the Holy Sepulchre not, as previously, in Bethlehem.³⁸ Patronage was at stake as much as who ruled. Baldwin II’s accession in 1118 and his regime can be seen as depending on a close family nexus of his own kin, whose power the invitation to Fulk was designed to protect by excluding existing rivals. Fulk’s subsequent confrontation with Hugh of Jaffa, prominent in Baldwin II’s own Rethel/Montlhery family mafia, reflected his desire for independence and his own men, thereby challenging the vested interests of Hugh and Melisende’s other relatives.³⁹ Despite exiling Hugh, Fulk was forced to share authority with Melisende, as Baldwin II intended.

Although this ensured a smooth inheritance for Baldwin III on his father’s death in 1143, another victim of the medieval nobleman’s obsession with hunting, Melisende’s autonomous power created further tensions. In contrast with the unconsecrated Matilda of England, who relinquished her claims on her son’s majority, Queen Melisende continued to insist on her rights long after Baldwin III was old enough to wield power. His mother built up her own administration and support, including her cousin Manasses of Hierges, constable since 1143, and her second son Amalric. It took Baldwin’s victory in a civil war in 1152 to save the integrity of the kingdom.

Factional instability, punctuated by political assassination, continued. Baldwin III died young, without children, in 1163. His brother Amalric succeeded only after putting aside a possibly bigamous marriage. His descendants loaded the rules of inheritance to breaking. Baldwin IV was a leper; his nephew Baldwin V a sickly child of nine; his sister Sybil married an unpopular foreigner, Guy of Lusignan, whom she spatchcocked into the kingship in a manner wholly unlike Baldwin II’s careful arrangements. Only in extremis, in 1184–5, with the leper king dying, his child-heir weak, his sister and brother-in-law in disgrace and his more distant eastern relatives eyeing up the royal prize lasciviously, did some in Jerusalem appear willing to contemplate a change of dynasty.⁴⁰ The tenacity with which the ailing royal line of Jerusalem clung to power and respect owed much to the baronage. In 1163, while forcing Amalric to annul his marriage to Agnes of Courtenay, publicly on the grounds of consanguinity but probably because she was a bigamist, the barons and prelates illogically confirmed their children as legitimate. The alternatives – the European Angevin sons of Henry II of England, the count of Flanders, great-nephew of Baldwin I and Godfrey of Bouillon, or, more credibly, the descendants of Queen Melisende’s sisters, Raymond III of Tripoli or Bohemund III of Antioch – offered greater prospects of untoward intrusion into the familiar political round. After all, the Jerusalem barons could describe Amalric, a former count of Jaffa-Ascalon, as ‘one of us’.

The sleaziness of Jerusalem politics was not new, with leading politicians subject to accusations of sexual impropriety and risking the murderer’s knife; Hugh of Jaffa survived in 1134; the unscrupulous Miles of Plancy, accused of usurping power in the early days of the minor Baldwin IV, was not so lucky in 1174. To support this crumbling edifice, a redeeming myth of the special moral virtue of the dynasty appeared. The 1180s Historia of William of Tyre, Jerusalem-born, protege of Amalric I, tutor to Baldwin IV, who may well have seen King Fulk in person, promoted an image of an almost sacred dynasty descended from the saintly Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin I and Baldwin II, the unimpeachable veterans of the First Crusade.⁴¹ By a sleight of literary skill, William argued for the legitimacy of Baldwin II’s succession even while admitting it breached immutable laws of inheritance. Their descent from Baldwin II was central to William’s portrayal of the later kings. Melisende, who transmitted Baldwin’s blood to her successors, assumed a pivotal position. Instead of the disruptive, ambitious and, some might argue, graspingly selfish, unsuccessful political menace of history, Melisende emerged from William’s obituary of her as ruling wisely with her husband and son, a fount of active wisdom. As a dynastic progenitor, Fulk receded into oblivion, along with his awkwardly powerful (and healthy) western relatives. Fittingly, the carved ivory cover of the famous psalter probably written for Melisende in Jerusalem c.1135 shows scenes of the life of King David, the model of divinely inspired monarchy and of kings in the Holy City.⁴²

All political systems require defining ideas to provide identity and purpose, whether related to reality or not. The ideology of kingship in Jerusalem centred on the person of the king, as the monarchy had been an almost parthenogenic creation. In practice the result of political opportunism and military conquest, in description the consequence of especial divine favour, the Jerusalem kingship existed without any prior tradition or contemporary