God's War: A New History of the Crusades

authority outside the practical choices of worried men in Jerusalem in 1099 and 1100. Only subsequently did the papacy acknowledge its existence. The monarchy’s survival and flourishing supplied its own legitimacy, a unique status among the new Christian monarchies of the time, all the rest of which sought the imprimatur of popes or emperors, from Hungary and Poland in the tenth and eleventh centuries to Armenia and Cyprus in the twelfth. Politically, legally and militarily, the importance of the kingship, if only to legitimize the ambitions of the baronage, remained conspicuous.

The way Baldwin IV, who died in 1185 aged only twenty-four, was portrayed by his old tutor William of Tyre reinforces this image. William’s Baldwin overcame his leprosy to provide vigorous political and military leadership almost to the end of his life of a quality that would have been admirable in a ruler of maturity and health. William wrote of Baldwin’s effective dealings with his nobles and household and of his battlefield leadership, even when carried in a litter. The portrait was unashamedly and deliberately heroic, perhaps to counter the damaging conclusions of those who saw in the king’s leprosy, in Pope Alexander III’s pointed words, ‘a just judgement of God’.⁴³ Yet the truth was almost certainly less glamorous. Throughout the reign administration and military command were delegated. Baldwin undoubtedly appeared in council chamber and battle. Yet his disease prevented him from fighting, his experiences of horses bolting under him and being carried on a soldier’s back or in a litter suggesting his presence in council and war, though astonishingly courageous, physically humiliating and painful, was iconic rather than active. Even William of Tyre admitted that some of Baldwin’s most fateful decisions were due to the influence on a sick man of his mother, Agnes, and her brother, Joscelin III, titular count of Edessa and seneschal of Jerusalem.⁴⁴ The king was necessary to the cohesion of the political process. Repeatedly Baldwin’s attempts to retire failed as successive schemes for regents or replacements foundered. The king was indispensable even if only as a tragic figurehead.

The reign of Baldwin IV demonstrated how the polity of Latin Jerusalem had developed since the desperate pioneer days of 1099–1102. Kings were still expected to be great warriors. Guy of Lusignan’s failure to engage Saladin in 1183 cost him the regency.⁴⁵ However, by then the kingship no longer comprised the qualities of a bandit chief. Although politics not law determined relations between monarch and baron, these relations were increasingly described in legislative acts such as the assise sur la ligece. In common with the rest of western Christendom, royal, seigneurial and ecclesiastical administration adopted an increasingly bureaucratic mode, as in the use of written charters to record property transactions, even if the Jerusalem royal chancery remained relatively rudimentary, especially in comparison with contemporary western practices. The baronage of the kingdom assumed greater corporate identity whilst at the same time finding it harder to sustain its territorial power intact as fiefs were subdivided, partitioned, granted away or sold off. One excuse for the bitter court feuding of the 1170s and 1180s lay in the authority and patronage of the crown, not its decadence; there was something to fight for. The kingdom was not falling apart, even if a decline in resources forced the crown to appeal for a war tax in 1183. Yet this tax was granted by a national, representative assembly and conducted after a national census, indications of institutional sophistication.⁴⁶ Above all sat an ideology of rule forged from the regime’s definition of itself as a garrison state protecting the Holy Places, in trust for Christendom.

7

East is East and East is West: Outremer in the Twelfth Century

There is no more haunting passage in contemporary writing on the crusades than William of Tyre’s description of the young Baldwin IV, the blue-eyed (to hostile Arabic scrutiny) young prince of Jerusalem whose youthful promise turned into despair at the discovery of his leprosy. The pain of the account comes from personal involvement. William, then archdeacon of Tyre, was Baldwin’s tutor; it was in his household that the first symptoms appeared. William continued to chronicle the life of his pupil, who succeeded to the throne in 1174 aged thirteen and died in 1185, a ravaged, blind, crippled wreck only twenty-four. It was as a hero of Christendom, struggling and usually triumphing for the Faith against the enormous odds of the growing power of the infidel and his own disease that Baldwin was depicted. Yet this doomed child’s doctor, Abu Sulayman Da’ud, a native Syrian Christian born – like the Latin William of Tyre – in Jerusalem, had worked for the Fatimids in Egypt before being hired in the late 1160s by Baldwin’s father, Amalric I, an enthusiast for Arabic medicine, as was his predecessor Baldwin III. One of Abu Sulayman’s sons successfully taught Prince Baldwin to ride; another succeeded his father as Amalric’s physician. After 1187, the family enlisted in the service of Saladin, the enemy against whom Baldwin IV had expended so much of his wasting energy.¹

In common with other Levantine princelings, Baldwin grew up in a cosmopolitan court; his tutor steeped in Latin culture and learning, enhanced by a twenty-year stay in western Europe studying at Paris, Orleans and Bologna; his doctor and riding-instructor Syrians with experience of working for Muslim rulers; his stepmother, Amalric I’s second wife Maria Comnena, a Byzantine Greek. However, the image the regime wished to portray through its own rhetoric, one which received elaborate and forceful corroboration from the pen of William of Tyre himself, remained that of the frontier myth, the Latin rulers in Palestine and Syria as heirs of the legendary Christian heroes of the First Crusade, the defenders of the Faith in God’s own land, a myth excluding temporal realities, political compromises and social exchange. While demonstrating the nature of the Latin presence in Outremer as one of a number of communities at once cooperating, competing and coercing, William sought to explain past success and current weakness according to a two-dimensional myth of conquest and battle, not least because his audience in western Europe expected it and his eastern compatriots understood its place in such a constructed justification for their existence. Yet myth it was and remains. Much of the twelfth-century kingdom of Jerusalem for most of the time did not resemble a military frontier, nor did its social and economic and hence legal and political arrangements follow crudely racist or supremacist ideology. Despite closer frontiers with aggressive Turks, similar conditions prevailed in the northern enclaves. The Latins dominated the regions they had conquered, imposing a hierarchy of power with themselves at the apex. Yet their community was isolated neither in city nor countryside, the settlers not withdrawn from the means of their survival. The livelihood of the Latin settlers and rulers depended on using, not ignoring, their surroundings and neighbours. In the absence of overcrowding, after the military phase of conquest, exploitation of resources did not necessarily or sensibly entail systematic persecution or discrimination of other communities. Westerners came east to live for Christ just as enthusiastically as to die for Him. As the assises (laws) of Jerusalem noted with reference to market courts where both Latins and Syrians comprised the jurors, witnesses were permitted to swear oaths on their respective holy books, Christians on the Gospels, Jews and Samaritans on the Torah, and Muslims on the Koran, ‘because be they Syrians or Greeks or Jews or Samaritans or Nestorians or Saracens, they are also men like the Franks’.² The great hospital in Jerusalem run by the Order of St John, accommodating many hundreds of sick at any one time, was committed to treating anybody regardless of race or religion; only lepers were excluded, on obvious medical grounds.

This was not the picture the clerical opinion formers in the west or their colleagues in the east were prepared to accept. In the years after the First Crusade, Guibert of Nogent wishfully looked on the settlements in Jerusalem as ‘Holy Christendom’s new colony’ (novae coloniae). In the late 1130s, the Anglo- Norman historian Orderic Vitalis wrote of ‘the Christians who live in exile in the east for the sake of Christ’, especially potent imagery as the idea of exile was closely associated by contemporaries with monastic vocation as a metaphor for absolute commitment to Christ and a godly life. Messages from the east confirmed this idealistic vision. During the grim days of 1120, the patriarch of Jerusalem struck a similar vein of emotion in describing the perils besetting Outremer from all sides: Muslims, poor harvests, grasshoppers:

For the name of Jesus, before abandoning the holy city of Jerusalem, the cross of Our Lord and the most holy tomb of Christ, we are ready to die… Strive to come and join the army of Christ and bring us speedy aid… ³

The author, Patriarch Gromond, fond of such gloomy admonitory tones, came from Picquigny in northern France, drawn to the east by such attitudes. Yet even after the pacification of most of Outremer, the rhetoric of martial solidarity and emergency persisted in official correspondence, hardly surprising, as it tended to be aimed at securing western aid. It also provided the central drama in the growing body of epic vernacular literature inspired, but significantly not written, by the Latin conquerors in the east.

The settlers’ perspective scarcely matched the epic vision. Most of the castles, fortified settlements and towers were built not on exposed frontiers but in peaceful areas largely undisturbed for the central decades of the twelfth century, their function seigneurial rather than primarily military.⁴ All Latin societies of the