Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

5. THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM, 1099-1291

No event of the late war was so dramatic, or has made such a powerful appeal to the imagination, as the liberation of Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, after a Moslem occupation of 673 years. While the name of Athens is full of meaning for the cultured alone, and many excellent citizens are not quite sure “whether the Greeks or the Romans came first,” that of Jerusalem is known in every peasant’s cottage of Christendom and represents the aspirations of an ancient race scattered all over the globe. But to us Anglo-Saxons the redemption of the Holy City has special significance, because a British general at the head of a force gathered from every part of the British Empire, and aided by our French and Italian allies, has repeated the achievement of Godfrey of Bouillon and the Crusaders, among them a brother of the King of England, and Edgar Etheling, the descendant of our Saxon line, in 1099, and has accomplished what even our lion-hearted monarch failed to do in 1192, and our soldierly Prince Edward in 1271. Thus the aspiration of the poet of Gerusalemme Liberata,

Sottrare i Cristiani al giogo indegno;

Fondando in Palestina un novo regno (I. 23),

has been realised by Britons from lands whose very existence was unknown at the time of the Crusades.

The present essay is not intended to be a drum-and-trumpet history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and its almost constant wars, but an account of the organisation and social life of the Crusading kingdom. First, as to its extent. The Kingdom of Jerusalem attained its zenith at the end of the reign of Baldwin II in 1131, when it stretched from the Egyptian frontier at El-ʿArîsh, “the river of Egypt” of the Book of Numbers, on the south-west, and from Aila, the modern ʿAkaba (on the gulf of the same name), the Eloth of the First Book of Kings, and the site of Solomon’s Red Sea naval station, on the south-east, to the stream now called Nahr Ibrahîm, which flows into the sea between Beirût and Giblet, the modern Jebeil—about 300 miles as the crow flies. To the east the kingdom rarely overstepped the Jordan except at the triangle of Banias, the ancient Cæsarea Philippi; indeed, in the north it was only thirteen miles broad, but in the Dead Sea region it attained a breadth of 100 miles. This did not, however, comprise the whole of the Latin territory. To the north of the above-mentioned stream stretched the county of Tripolis, of which the foundations were laid by Count Raymond of Toulouse in 1102, to the rivulet, now called Wâdi-Mehika, between Maraclée and Valénia (the modern Bâniyâs), which flowed at the foot of the castle of Margat—a further distance of about 100 miles. From that rivulet began the Principality of Antioch, whose first Prince was, in 1098, Bohemond of Taranto, and which at one time extended almost to Aleppo in the east and embraced a large slice of the Kingdom of Armenia almost as far west as Tarsus, but latterly extended no farther north than a little beyond Alexandretta. On the north-east it was bounded until 1144 by the County of Edessa, the modern Urfa, founded by Baldwin I in 1098, which began at the forest of Marris and extended eastward beyond the Euphrates; but, owing to the permanent state of war, in which the forty-six years of its existence were passed, it never had any fixed boundaries. Thus, a Syrian writer could truly say that, in 1129, “everything was subject to the Franks, from Mardîn and Schabachtana to El ʿArîsh,” far more than the “Dan to Beersheba” of the Israelites[930].

The first diminution of the Crusading States was the loss of the County of Edessa in 1144. In 1170, at the other extremity, they were cut off from the Red Sea by the capture of Aila. Jerusalem and most of the kingdom, except Tyre and a few fortresses, fell before Saladin in 1187, after the battle of Hattin, which the Crusaders identified with the site of the Sermon on the Mount, and the greater part of the Principality of Antioch and of the County of Tripolis in the next year. By the treaty of 1192, the Christians obtained the coast from Tyre to Jaffa; and Frederick II, by the so-called “bad peace” of 1229, recovered the Holy City, except two mosques, the two other towns—Bethlehem and Nazareth—most closely associated with the life of our Lord, and all the chief pilgrimage roads. Fifteen years later, however, the Kharezmians, a Turkish tribe, finally captured Jerusalem, murdered the Latin Christians, and desecrated the Holy Sepulchre and the tombs of the Latin Kings. Saladin, in 1187, had treated Jerusalem as an English gentleman would; the Kharezmians treated it in the German fashion.

The battle of Gaza completed the disaster of 1244. From that time the recovery of Jerusalem was manifestly impossible. The Crusade of the saintly Louis IX was a failure; that of our Prince Edward was weakly supported, ended in a separate peace, concluded by the people of Acre against his will, and was only remarkable for one of the most beautiful stories of conjugal devotion in English history. Meanwhile Antioch had fallen in 1268 before Beibars, the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt; and Jaffa had entered upon the long captivity from which our armies at last redeemed it on November 17, 1917. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was thenceforth a mere phantom of its former self. Kings of Cyprus were crowned Kings of Jerusalem at Tyre, with all the pomp and splendour of the Middle Ages; Acre continued to be, as it had been since its recapture by Cœur-de-Lion, the capital of Frankish Palestine, where even on the eve of its fall, as a traveller[931] tells us, dwelt “the richest merchants under Heaven, gathered from all nations, where resided the King of Jerusalem and many members of his family, the Princes of Galilee and Antioch, the lords of Tyre, Tiberias and Sidon, the Counts of Tripolis and Jaffa, all walking about the squares with their golden coronets on their heads.”

There, too, were the headquarters of the Military Orders, the Templars, the Knights of St John, the Brothers of the German House, and the Masters and Brothers of St Thomas of Canterbury. But the end of this carnival of Kings and Princes in exile was at hand. Since the second capture of Jerusalem, the kingdom had been slowly but surely dying, as its inhabitants knew full well. Signs and wonders foretold to the pious the coming catastrophe; shrewd business men hastened to sell their property in the doomed country. Tripolis followed the fate of Antioch in 1289; Acre, Tyre, Sidon and Beirût were taken by Melik-el-Aschraf, the Sultan of Egypt, in 1291; and, with the fall of the last two strongholds of the Templars, Tortosa and Château Pèlerin, ended the rule of the Franks in Palestine. In Gibbon’s phrase, “A mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with the world’s debate.”

Let us now see how Frankish Palestine was organised. At the head of the Latin Kingdom stood the King. During the first three reigns the monarchy was elective; and it was not till 1131 that it became hereditary, as Baldwin II was the first sovereign who left progeny. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, the election of their first ruler was by means of an examination, from which few of us would emerge unscathed. The electors questioned the servants of the various candidates about their masters’ morals and characters. Godfrey’s attendants stated that their master’s chief defect was, that he would linger on in church, after the service was over, asking questions about the images and pictures, and thereby making his household late for meals, “which thus lost all their relish[932].” But this interest in ecclesiastical archæology, which seemed such a drawback to the hungry men-at-arms, was counted as a recommendation by the pious electors, and Godfrey was elected. He declined, however, to take the title of King, preferring that of “Protector of the Holy Sepulchre,” and refusing to wear a golden crown in the city where Our Lord had worn a crown of thorns[933]. His modesty was also probably due to a tactful desire to disarm the opposition of the clergy, who had desired that Jerusalem should not have a lay ruler. He died, however, next year, and Baldwin I, Count of Edessa, his brother, who was elected his successor, then took the title of King, but salved his conscience by being crowned not in Jerusalem, but at Bethlehem. Baldwin II’s daughter, Mélisende, and her husband, Fulk, were the first to be crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, where was also the royal mausoleum. Adelaide, Baldwin I’s Queen, is buried at Patti. During the Moslem occupation of Jerusalem the King was crowned at Tyre; and, when the whole of the Holy Land was lost, the Kings of Cyprus, who were titular Kings of Jerusalem, assumed the former crown at Nicosia and the latter at Famagosta. From Queen Charlotte of Cyprus, in 1485, the title passed to Duke Charles of Savoy, and thus to the present Italian dynasty.

The Latin sovereigns of Jerusalem were mostly above the average in character and intelligence. Bravery and piety were essential to their position as chiefs of a crusading colony in the midst of a hostile country. Godfrey “excelled his contemporaries in the handling of arms and in all the exercises of chivalry”; Baldwin I was described in his epitaph as “a second Judas Maccabæus”—a comparison confirmed by his warlike achievements; of Baldwin II we are told, that “his memory was blessed by all, because of the excellence of his faith and the glorious deeds which ennobled his reign.” Baldwin III was also a lover of literature and a graceful speaker, of whom a Moslem rival said that “there was not such another king in the world.” His brother, Amaury I, prompted Archbishop William of Tyre to compose his valuable history, and both these sovereigns possessed considerable legal knowledge. The Archbishop’s pupil, Baldwin IV, was unfortunately a leper, and Baldwin V died in his boyhood. Fulk was generous and experienced in warfare, but signally lacked the common royal faculty of remembering faces. Queen Mélisende, who was the real ruler in her husband’s lifetime, was an excellent woman of business, of whom it was said that “she had in her bosom the heart of a man[934]”; indeed, so masterful was she, that on one occasion her son had to besiege her in the Tower of David. Unfortunately, Guy de Lusignan, who was King at the moment of Saladin’s fatal attack, was notoriously inferior to the task of saving his wife’s kingdom. Had he not been so good-looking and so irresistible to Princess Sibylla, the fall of Jerusalem might have been at least postponed.

Society was constructed by the crusaders on feudal lines. According to the thirteenth century edition of the Assises de la Haute Cour, by Jean d’Ibelin, Count of Jaffa, one of Godfrey’s first acts was to appoint a commission to enquire from men of various nationalities then in Jerusalem the usages of their respective countries. From the report of this commission were drawn up the usages and assizes of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, including a High Court, presided over by the King, for the nobility; a “Court de la Borgesie,” presided over by an officer styled the “Vicomte,” for the middle class; and a third court, under an official, called “rays,” for the Syrians. As time went on, these usages were modified; and, at the arrival of each large batch of new crusaders, the King used to assemble the Patriarch and other notables at Acre, and enquire from the newcomers about their laws, while occasionally special missions of investigation were sent abroad. The written original of the Assises was called the Letres dou Sepulcre, because it was deposited in a large chest in the Holy Sepulchre; and, whenever a moot point arose, this chest was opened in the presence of nine persons, including the King, or his deputy, and the Patriarch, or the Prior of the Holy Sepulchre[935]. The Assizes of Jerusalem, of which the Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois have also been preserved, are the most endurable monument of the Franks in Palestine, and not in Palestine alone; for they formed the basis of the Assizes of Cyprus, and of the feudal organisation of the Principality of Achaia.

William of Tyre expressly tells us[936] that the Counts of Tripolis were always lieges of the King of Jerusalem. But the Princes of Antioch (which had its own code) and the Counts of Edessa seem to have merely recognised him as primum inter pares by virtue of his possession of the Holy City, and the Princes of Antioch, beginning with Bohemond himself, were at times reluctantly forced to confess themselves vassals of the Greek Emperor. Thus, the existence of four practically independent states, instead of one centralised government, and the consequent lack of what the Italians would call a fronte unico against the Infidels, formed one cause of the collapse of Frankish rule, notably in the case of Edessa, sacrificed to the jealousy of the Prince of Antioch. Moreover, feudal regulations impeded the exercise of the royal power. Not only were the lieges not obliged to perform military service outside the realm; not only had the King to consult a great council of magnates on all important questions—for we hear of Parliaments held in the Patriarch’s palace at Jerusalem, in a church at Acre, and at Tyre, Nâbulus and Bethlehem—but Baldwin I was forced to revoke an ordinance for the cleaning of the streets of Jerusalem, because he had omitted to ask the consent of the citizens. Thus, Frankish Jerusalem was a limited monarchy, and its King really only the first of the barons—a system unsuited to a state of almost constant war.

The kingdom proper contained four great baronies—the County of Jaffa and Ascalon, which comprised the fertile plain of Sharon; the seigneurie of Krak and Montréal, which lay in the biblical land of Moab to the east and south-east of the Dead Sea, and dominated the caravan-route from Syria to Egypt; the Principality of Galilee, of which the capital was Tabarie (the Tiberias of St John); and the seigneurie of Sidon, or Sagette. Besides these great baronies, upon which in turn smaller tenures depended, it also included twelve lesser fiefs, likewise directly dependent on the Crown, of which the most curious was that of St Abraham, the mediæval name of Hebron, and the most important that of Toron, founded by a member of the great crusading family of St Omer, which succeeded Tancred in the Principality of Galilee, but played an even more conspicuous part in Frankish Greece than in Frankish Palestine. The romantic title of Prince of Galilee survived at the Cypriote Court after the loss of the Holy Land; and a Lusignan bearing that scriptural name intervened in the tortuous politics of the Morea in the fourteenth century. Nazareth was naturally included in the Principality of Galilee; it was the See of an Archbishop, and was governed by a “Viscount.”

As in Greece, the Latin barons erected castles over the country; and the remains of some of these, particularly Krak de Montréal and Krak des Chevaliers, are among the finest specimens extant of mediæval military architecture, while others, notably that of the famous family of d’Ibelin at Beirût, were decorated with paintings and mosaics by Syrian and Greek artists. We may infer from the description of the castle of St Omer at Thebes in the Chronicle of the Morea, that the subject of these paintings may sometimes have been the Frankish Conquest of the Holy Land, in which the baronial family had taken part.

Each great feudatory presided over the high court of justice of his fief; and the Assizes enumerate twenty of them, besides the King and the Archbishop of Nazareth, who possessed the right of coinage. M. Schlumberger has published a number of these coins, among them those of Jerusalem, bearing a representation of the Holy Sepulchre, the Tower of David, or the Cupola of the Temple. The inscriptions on the coins of Edessa and on some of those of Antioch are in Greek—a proof of the preponderance of the Greek population there. Ecclesiastically, the Latin states of Syria were organised under two Patriarchs—those of Jerusalem and Antioch; and the first Archbishop of the kingdom was he of Tyre, whose function it was to crown the King in the Patriarch’s absence.

The Salic law did not obtain in the Holy Land; and as, by some mysterious law of population, common also to Frankish Greece, many noble families consisted of daughters only, women played an important part in the crusading states. On two occasions, the election of the Patriarch of Jerusalem (Amaury in 1159 and Heraclius in 1180) was due to female influence, and, on the second occasion the personal predilection of the Queen-Mother Agnes prevailed (to the great detriment of Church and State alike) over the disinterested advice of William of Tyre, who urged the election of a candidate from beyond the sea, and recalled an old prophecy that, as the Emperor Heraclius had brought the true cross to Jerusalem, so in the time of another Heraclius would it be lost—a prophecy verified at the battle of Hattin[937]. This was the Patriarch who visited London in 1185 to seek aid from Henry II, and consecrated the Priory of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell, where a thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Holy City was recently held.

The competition for the hands of noble heiresses was another result of the extinction of families in the male line, and frequently caused serious political complications and encouraged penniless adventurers, like Guy de Lusignan, whose success aroused the jealousy of less fortunate rivals. Thus, the great disaster of Hattin, which led to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, was indirectly due to the revenge of an Englishman, Girard de Rideford, for his failure as a suitor. He had come to the Holy Land as a knight-errant to make his fortune; and Count Raymond II of Tripolis had promised him the hand of his ward, the wealthy heiress of Boutron. A rich Pisan, however, arrived with a weighing-machine, placed the lady (probably an opulent beauty) in one scale and his money-bags in the other, and gave the Count her weight in gold. The baffled Briton became a Templar and rose to be Seneschal and Master of the Order, but never forgot how he had been cheated[938], and persuaded the weak monarch to reject Raymond’s strategy on the eve of Hattin.

An even more romantic but equally fatal example was that of Renaud de Châtillon, who, coming to Palestine as a younger son to seek his fortune in the suite of Louis VII of France at the time of the second crusade, married the widowed Princess-Regent of Antioch, and governed the Principality for his stepson. Local gossips, and especially the Patriarch, criticised this mésalliance, whereupon the audacious Frenchman had the Patriarch stripped, smeared with honey, and exposed, a feast for the flies, during a long summer day. A born soldier of fortune, he put his sword at the disposal of the Greek Emperor for an attack on an Armenian baron, and when a little difference arose as to the payment of the costs of the expedition, paid himself by ravaging the then Greek province of Cyprus. We next find him begging the Emperor’s pardon in his shirt-sleeves, with a rope round his neck. Then he was captured by the Saracens in the course of a cattle-lifting expedition, and kept for fifteen years a prisoner at Aleppo. Finding, on his liberation, that his wife was dead and his stepson reigning at Antioch, he looked out for a second heiress, and found one in the widowed baroness of Montréal. There, in the land beyond Jordan, he was in his element. His next enterprise was, indeed, a bold one. He constructed a flotilla at Krak—“the stone of the Desert,” as it was picturesquely called—conveyed it on camel-back to the Gulf of ʿAkaba, and sailed down into the Red Sea with the object of plundering Mecca and Medina, and conquering the Hedjaz and the Yemen. For this daring attempt, and for intercepting, in time of peace, the Moslem caravan, Saladin swore twice to kill him with his own hand. The second of these acts provoked the invasion which led to the capture of Jerusalem, and in Saladin’s tent, as a captive after the battle of Hattin, the adventurous Frenchman, who declared that, to Princes, treaties were “scraps of paper,” was beheaded. His seal with the gateway of Krak upon it still survives as a memorial of his strange career. The love affairs of the nobles were also sometimes fatal to the interests of the state. Thus the charms of a beautiful Armenian were partly responsible for the loss of Edessa, and an attractive Italian widow was a prominent figure in the last days of Jerusalem.

The middle class was a far more important body than in either the England or the France of that day. Palestine during the Crusades was not visited exclusively for religious or military reasons. Besides being a goal of pilgrimage, it was also what California or Australia was in the middle of the last century—a place where shrewd men of business could make money rapidly. Long before the first Crusade, there had been an Italian colony from Amalfi at Jerusalem, in the capture of which a Genoese detachment had assisted; colonies from Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Marseilles followed; in the monastery of La Cava is a deed of Baldwin IV, granting the ships of the monks access to the Syrian coast; we even find an “English quarter” at Acre[939]. Owing to the small numbers of the nobility, and the constant need of recruiting its ranks after its losses in battle, it was easy for the wealthy members of the middle class to enter the aristocracy, while, from the nature of its occupations, it was thrown into much closer contact with the natives. Mixed marriages were consequently commoner among the bourgeoisie, although Baldwin I and II and Josselin I of Edessa married Armenians, and Baldwin III and Amaury I Greeks.

The issue of these mixed marriages was known as the Poulains[940]. These half-castes, who corresponded to the Γασμοῦλοι of Frankish Greece, are not depicted in flattering terms by contemporary writers. Jacques de Vitry[941], the Bishop of Acre, describes them as “nourished in delights, soft and effeminate, more accustomed to baths than to battles, given to uncleanliness and luxury, dressed in soft garments like women, slothful and idle, cowardly and timid, little esteemed by the Saracens,” with whom they were ready to make peace, and from whom they were prone to accept assistance against their fellow Christians in their internecine quarrels. They were, alike by nature and interest, opposed to the arrival of fresh bodies of Crusaders, because war interfered with their business and interrupted their commercial relations with the Moslems, whose family life they imitated, veiling their wives, shutting them up in Oriental seclusion, and allowing them to go out thrice a week to the baths, but only once a year to church. This undue preference of cleanliness to godliness had disastrous effects, for it led the ladies to intrigue all the more to get out.

The worthy Bishop, speaking doubtless from personal experience, adds that the Poulains swindled the ingenuous pilgrims by overcharges at inns, by exorbitant prices in shops, and by giving them poor exchange. Worse still, they despised these Christian “boxers” and exiles, calling them fatuous idiots for their pains—for to the Poulains the Holy Land had no halo. They wore flowing robes, as even the first King of Jerusalem had done, while a coin of Tancred of Antioch represents him with a turban; and their whole outlook was Oriental rather than European. Indeed, Foucher, Baldwin I’s chaplain, remarked quite early how soon the Westerner became an Easterner in Palestine, and how the Crusader who married an Armenian or a Syrian soon forgot the land of his birth, adopting the comfortable maxim—“ubi bene, ibi patria.” Hence the marked contrast between the Frankish residents, and still more the Poulains, and the newly-arrived Crusaders. Hence, too, the often far too harsh judgments passed by the latter, especially after the second crusade in 1148. Like the Philhellenes, who went to Greece in the War of Independence, expecting to find the Peloponnese peopled by the superhuman heroes of Plutarch, instead of by men like themselves, they did not realise that poor human nature, even under conditions far more favourable, could not have possibly shone resplendent in the tremendous setting of the Holy Land. Consequently, they were often disillusioned, whereas men like William of Tyre, born and living in the country, were far fairer in their judgments, because they measured the Holy Land by the standard of other and more prosaic lands and not by the unattainable perfection of the greatest figure in all history, with whom it must ever be associated.

Society in the Crusading States was, it must be remembered, even apart from the Poulains, an extraordinary mixture of races. Even an Austrian army did not contain so many nationalities as the Crusaders. The Franks, as they were generically called, included Normans (at first the dominant race), French (who ousted the Normans, and thenceforth maintained their influence, culture and language, as they did nearly two centuries later at the Court of Athens), English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, Flemings, Italians, Germans (these not very numerous), and Scandinavians. Jacques de Vitry considered the Italians as the most satisfactory. He describes them as “prudent, temperate in eating and drinking, ornate and prolix in speaking, but circumspect in counsel, diligent in managing their own public affairs, and a very necessary element in the country, not only in battle, but at sea and in business, especially in the import trade. Since they are sober in food and drink, they live longer than other Western nations in the East”; and “they would be very formidable to the Saracens, if they would cease fighting among themselves.” Unfortunately, the rivalries between Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans were even more serious than the feuds between the Normans and the French; and the possession of the Church of St Saba at Acra (two pillars of which are now outside St Mark’s Venice) led to an Italian colonial war, in which we may find one cause of the final loss of the Holy Land. These Italian colonies, indeed, formed practically an imperium in imperio. Their respective quarters in the Syrian towns were the property of their governments, which appointed their officials (called “Consuls” in the Genoese and Pisan colonies, “Bailies” in the Venetian), often from among the most celebrated families of the Venetian Republic. Venice had also what we should call a Consul-General, a “Bailie” for all Syria; and both she and Genoa received a large portion of the harbour dues at Tyre and Acre. The Italian colonies had their own tribunals, like the consular courts in Turkey in our own day. Thus, Italian interests in the Holy Land were considerable and mainly commercial. To Venice and Genoa foreign affairs were—the affairs of their merchants.

The French and the English settlers were “less composed and more impetuous, less circumspect in action and more full of superfluity in food and drink, more lavish in expense and less cautious in talk, hasty in counsel, but more fervent in almsgiving, and more vehement in battle, and most useful for the defence of the Holy Land, and very formidable to the Saracens.”

Besides these various elements among the Crusaders, Palestine contained a large variety of indigenous races. Of these the native Christians of Arab speech, collectively known as Syrians, were the most favoured. Baldwin I gave them marked privileges at Jerusalem, and they could give evidence on oath. But they were of little use in war, except as archers; and are accused by Jacques de Vitry of betraying the secrets of the Christians to the Saracens, whose customs they largely imitated. The Maronites of the Lebanon were, however, noted for their military prowess and for the help which they rendered to the Franks.

Next to the Syrians came the Armenians, reckoned the best fighters of the Orientals, who, from the proximity of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia to the County of Edessa, often assisted the Frank Counts, and copied their feudal arrangements. It is noticeable that the Assizes of Antioch have come to us through the Armenian, and that the Court of Sis, like that of Jerusalem, had its seneschal, its marshal, and its constable. The Greeks were regarded as opponents of the Latins; and, when Saladin took Jerusalem, he allowed them to remain. But we could scarcely expect them to view with sympathy the annexation of the Greek states of Edessa (still governed by a Greek official at the time of the Latin conquest) and Antioch, which only fourteen years before had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. And Anna Comnena describes her father’s alarm at the march of large armies of foreigners across his rich and peaceful dominions who might (and in 1204 did) say with the Roman centurion: Hic manebimus optime!

Historians of the Moslem Arabs admit that, except in war time, Christians and Moslems lived together in harmony. There are examples of friendship, and even of adopted brotherhood, between Frank barons and Moslem emirs, who used to grant each other mutual permits to hunt. Every reader of The Talisman knows of the mutual courtesies between Richard I and Saladin, who sent medical aid to a sick opponent, but even more curious was the action of Guy de Lusignan, whose first act, on exchanging the Kingdom of Jerusalem for that of Cyprus, was to ask his former captor how to keep the island. Many Franks spoke Arabic; and it was even found necessary for commercial purposes to coin money bearing in Arabic characters the name of Mohammed and the date of the Moslem era! The merchants of Tyre and Acre, where these heretical coins were minted, protested that “business is business”; but the Papal Legate, who accompanied Louis IX on the sixth crusade, was so scandalised that he reported the matter to Pope Innocent IV, who excommunicated all who coined them. The wily merchants, however, circumvented his prohibition by minting similar coins with Christian inscriptions and the year of our Lord, both in Arabic, and with a cross in the centre of the coin. Of this hybrid currency, which began in 1251, there are several specimens. Like Frederick II in Sicily, the later Princes of Antioch and Counts of Tripolis had Saracen guards; and, under the name of Turcoples, given originally to Turks born of Greek mothers, Moslems entered the Christian armies as light cavalry. Of actual Turks there were few, for they had overrun Syria too short a time before the Crusades to take root in Palestine. Like the Franks, and like the Turks in the Balkans, they were only a garrison.

Special interest attaches to the Jews, at this period only a small section of the population, and, as usual, exclusively urban. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Palestine about 1173, found two hundred Jews in the ghetto at Jerusalem beneath the Tower of David, where they had a monopoly of the dyeing trade, and twelve, all dyers, at Bethlehem. The largest Jewish colonies were, as was natural, in the great commercial towns, Tyre and Acre; and the total in the whole of the Latin states was only 7000 to 8000. They could not hold land, and were classed below the Moslems, but practised successfully as doctors and bankers, and had their own judges. Many had come from the south of France. A few Samaritans still survived at Nâbulus, the biblical Shechem, and at Cæsarea.

Below all these freemen came the slaves, including Christians, partly prisoners of war and partly imported. The Assizes of Jerusalem contain special regulations for the slave-trade (largely in Venetian and Genoese hands), but the legislators felt some scruples about allowing a Christian slave to be sold to a Moslem. There was one other very undesirable element in the population—persons who had left their country for their country’s good; for it was not unusual to pardon criminals on condition that they made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and never returned. The Bishop of Acre complains of this practice of making the Holy Land a convict station, just as some of our colonies did in the first half of the last century; and he quotes the Horatian tag, that people, who cross the sea, change the climate, but not their character. Nor does he approve of the tourist, who came from mere curiosity and not from devotion.

Among this heterogeneous mass the smallness of the Frankish forces makes us marvel that the Latin Kingdom lasted for 99 years at Jerusalem and for nearly 200 at Acre. The Assizes[942] inform us that the paper strength of the royal army was only 577 knights and 5025 foot-soldiers, to which we must add the contingents of the two great Military Orders and the Turcoples. At no time, in actual warfare, did the total armed forces of the four Crusading States much exceed 25,000; at Hattin—the Hastings of the Holy Land—Guy de Lusignan had only some 21,000 men under his command; Baldwin I crossed the Euphrates with only 80 knights to take Edessa; and some of the great battles of Tancred were fought by only 200 knights. William of Tyre[943], writing a few years before the catastrophe of 1187, explains the greater success of the Franks in the earlier years of the kingdom by their piety and courage as contrasted with the immorality and diminished martial spirit of his contemporaries. Other causes were the lack of military skill of the Moslems of that generation, and the disunion of their chiefs. When, however, Saladin united Syria and Egypt in his strong hand, the fate of the little Frankish colony was sealed. Disunion of allies neutralised the splendid courage of our Richard I in his attempt to restore what had been lost; Frederick II was a Crusader malgré lui; and in the thirteenth century many Franks, realising that the end was at hand, left for the Lusignan Kingdom of Cyprus, or for Armenia, leaving as the most important factors in the Latin population the Italian colonies and the Religious Orders.

The Knights of St John, who originally took their name from St John the Merciful[944], a Cypriote who became Patriarch of Alexandria, arose at the time of the conquest in connection with the hospital, founded at Jerusalem a generation earlier by a citizen of Amalfi. Their first aim was to tend and nourish the sick, then to guard pilgrims up from the coast, and next to fight against the Infidels. They never forgot their original object, and pilgrims were enthusiastic in their praise. Indeed, Saladin is said to have gained admission to their hospital at Acre as a patient to see whether all that he heard about their beneficence was true. Gradually, as the feudal barons found it harder to defend their castles, they handed them to the Knights, who specially chose difficult frontier positions. Margat, Krak des Chevaliers, Chastel-Rouge, Gibelin and Belvoir were their chief fortresses; and Mount Tabor was one of their possessions.

The Templars, founded in 1118 to protect the pilgrims on their way from the coast, enjoyed a less enviable reputation. William of Tyre[945] remarks, that “for a long time they maintained their original object, but subsequently forgot the duty of humility.” They were accused of greed and selfishness, and of being too anxious to stand well with Moslem Princes, with whom they sometimes made a separate peace, to the detriment of Christendom. Thus they warned a Moslem chief of an intended raid by our Prince Edward. Their treachery to the sect of the Assassins scandalised the Court of Jerusalem and immensely damaged Christian interests. The chief of that terrible community, the “Old Man,” as he was called, whose territory was separated from the County of Tripolis by boundary stones, marked on the Christian side with a cross, on that of the Assassins with a knife, had sent an envoy to King Amaury I, offering to embrace Christianity, on condition that the Templars consented to forego the tribute paid to them by the Assassins. All had been arranged, and the diplomatist was on his way home, when the Templars assassinated the Assassin[946].

The Templars’ vow of poverty contrasted ill with their immense wealth, which enabled them, in 1191, to buy Cyprus from Richard I, and to lend a large sum to our Henry III. They acted as bankers; and through their hands passed the money collected in the West for future crusades. They were suspected, too, of heretical opinions, and were accused of initiating their novices with pagan rites. They possessed eighteen fortresses, of which Tortosa was the most important; but the Order did not long survive the loss of the Holy Land, being abolished by Clement V in 1312.

Less important were the Teutonic Knights, the Brüder vom deutschen Hause of Freytag’s well-known historical novel—an off-shoot of the Hospitallers—because the Germans contributed little towards the foundation of the Frankish states, and their distinct Order was not founded till after the first capture of the Latin capital. Their principal sphere of activity was not in Palestine but in Prussia, where they laboured to civilise the barbarous Prussians—a task in which they do not appear to have been altogether successful. A lasting memorial of their activity is the former Prussian fortress of Thorn—a name said to be derived from the castle of Toron in the Holy Land, once their possession. To us a more interesting Order is that of the Hospital of “the Master and Brothers of St Thomas of Canterbury,” at Acre, founded in 1191, in which Edward I showed interest, and which was transferred after the fall of Acre to Cyprus, where it still existed in 1350. A hospital for poor British pilgrims was also founded at Acre in 1254[947].

Palestine was a fruitful land during the Frankish period, although we hear much of the plagues of locusts and field-mice. Contemporary visitors wrote enthusiastically about the gardens of Jericho and the fertile plains of Jezreel and Tripolis, with its vineyards, its olive-yards, and its sugar plantations, whence the cane was taken to the factory at Tyre. The wines of Engaddi were as noted as in the Song of Solomon; and the vintages of Bethlehem and Jerusalem were highly esteemed. Jericho produced grapes so huge that “a man could scarcely lift a bunch of them”—a statement which shows that the vines had not degenerated since the days when the spies of Moses “cut down” from the brook of Eschcol “one cluster of grapes, and bare it between two upon a staff.” Even the silent waters of the Dead Sea were then traversed by fruit barges; and in the so-called “Valley of Moses” to the south of it the olive-trees formed “a dense forest.” There was more wood than now, and consequently more water, but corn had to be imported, for the harvests of Moab, Hebron, Bethlehem (“the house of bread”), and Jericho did not suffice to feed the population. The Sea of Galilee was as full of fish as in the time of Our Lord, and boats plied upon its waters. But, owing to the general insecurity of the open country, few of the cultivators of the soil were Franks; and, where we find Latin peasants, they are usually not far from the shelter of fortified towns. Of manufactures the most important were those of silk at Tripolis, Tiberias, and Tyre, dyeing, and pottery; the glass of Tyre is specially praised by its Archbishop, and the goldsmiths had a street all to themselves at Jerusalem.

Civilisation, so far as comfort was concerned, had reached a high level. Every castle had its baths; and minstrels and dancers appeared at the entertainments of the barons, while we read of theatrical performances at a coronation. A considerable amount of gambling went on in royal circles. Baldwin III was devoted to dice; the Prince of Antioch and the Count of Edessa were so busy with their dice-boxes during a campaign, that they demoralised many of their officers; the Count of Jaffa was so deeply engrossed in a game of dice that he was playing in the street of the Tanners at Jerusalem, that he allowed himself to be assassinated. Hunting with the falcon, and, in Arab fashion, with the cat-like animal known as the carable, were favourite amusements. It seems strange that nothing was done to encourage horse-breeding; and, as the Moslems were loth to sell horses to be used against themselves, the Franks usually imported their steeds from Apulia. Every spring it was the custom of the Frankish chivalry to take their horses to feed on the rich grass at the foot of Mt Carmel; and there, by the brook Kishon, where Elijah slew the prophets of Baal, tournaments were held, in which Saracen chiefs sometimes took part, and after which the combatants refreshed themselves with sherbet, made from the snows of Lebanon.

We must not expect a military colony, always fighting for its existence, to be very productive of literature. But perhaps the best specimen of mediæval history, the great work of William of Tyre, was produced by a Frank born in the Holy Land. The author possessed the two greatest qualities for writing the history of his own times: personal acquaintance with the principal actors in the drama by reason of his high official position, and at the same time fearless love of truth. He tells us that he was well aware of the perils to which he thus exposed himself; and, if it be true that he was poisoned in Rome by order of a rival whom he had denounced, his forebodings were only too accurate. Having been a diplomatist, a prelate, a royal tutor, and chancellor of the kingdom, he possessed an unrivalled experience of men and affairs; and, as is usual with such persons, he was much more moderate in his judgments of human frailty than purely literary or monastic chroniclers. The abrupt close of his work in 1183 has been ascribed to the desire of powerful enemies to suppress the facts about the last years of Jerusalem—a further proof of his dreaded influence.

A lesser luminary was Renaud, baron of Sagette, who amazed the pundits of Saladin by his Oriental scholarship; and the cult of French novels was diffused among the nobles of the Holy Land, whose legal knowledge was considerable. Philip of Navarre[948], the celebrated pleader, who has left a treatise showing how to make the worse cause appear the better in the feudal courts, tells us that he owed his knowledge of legal practice to the accident of being appointed reader of romances to the Seneschal of Jerusalem, who in return taught him law. The pleader, who also composed a historical work, and a treatise on the four ages of man, and was an opponent of the higher education of women, is described by Florio Bustron, the Cypriote historian, as a “huomo universale.”

In estimating the architectural results of the Frankish rule, we must remember the short time available—so far as all but the coast towns were concerned. But a traveller, who visited the country in 1185, tells us that the Franks had done much for the mural decoration of their churches, of which, beginning with Tancred’s church on Mt Tabor in 1111, they erected a number down to the catastrophe of Hattin. William of Tyre specially mentions the munificence of Queen Mélisende in founding a church and convent at Bethany, of which her youngest sister was Superior, and her splendidly bound copy of the Gospels is in the British Museum. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the Cathedral and Castle of Tortosa, still linger traces of the Crusaders. It has been remarked that in their architecture more than in aught else the Franks of Palestine remained Westerners.

In conclusion we may ask how Frankish society in Palestine compares with Frankish society in Cyprus and in the Latin Principalities of the present Greek Kingdom. Very different from either Frankish Palestine or Frankish Greece was the condition of the Kingdom of Cyprus, created by a mere accident of the Crusades, which nominally continued the tradition of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. While the reason of the latter’s existence was war, Cyprus was essentially a commercial state, to which the loss of Acre was a blessing in disguise. So long as the Kings of Cyprus, in their capacity of Kings of Jerusalem, had territory on the opposite coast of Syria, they were necessarily involved in continental wars, and could not devote themselves to the development of their own island; as was the case of the Kings of England, so long as they held the damnosa hereditas of the Plantagenets in France. Cyprus was, like England, defended by the sea; like England, she became one of the marts of the world, in an age when the crusading spirit had died away, and trade was the attraction that led men to the East. The Popes, by prohibiting trade with the Saracens after the loss of the Holy Land, procured for Cyprus a monopoly; and Famagosta surpassed Constantinople, Venice and Alexandria. Moreover, warned by the example of Jerusalem, the Kings of Cyprus cut down the privileges of the nobles, who were denied the right of coinage and jurisdiction over the middle class. Consequently, the Cypriote monarchy was more independent, and continued to prosper until it allowed—and this should be to us a warning—foreign competitors, under the guise of commerce, to creep into its cities and ultimately to dictate its policy.

All the Latin states in the East, whether in Jerusalem, Cyprus, or Greece proper, presented examples of that difficult political experiment—the rule of a small alien minority over a large native majority of a different religion, an experiment worked most successfully in those states, like Lesbos under the Genoese Gattilusj, where the Latin rulers became assimilated with the ruled. But in Frankish Greece the feudal states were not commercial; and the Venetian and Genoese colonies were, except in Negroponte, quite distinct from them. The Frank conquerors of Greece did not go thither with the noble aims which led some of the leaders of the first Crusade to the Holy Land; on the contrary, they turned aside from the recovery of the Holy City to partition a Christian Empire. Yet the moral standard of the Franks in Greece was much higher than that of their predecessors in Palestine, or their contemporaries in Cyprus. Possibly, the reason was that they lived healthier lives, and had fewer temptations. Big maritime commercial towns, like Tyre and Acre, and Famagosta, did not exist, and country life was more developed. Certainly, the Chronicle of the Morea is more edifying reading than the Letters of Jacques de Vitry on the condition of Acre at the time of his appointment as its bishop in 1216. But in one respect Frankish Palestine and Frankish Greece present the same strange phenomenon—that union of antiquity with the Middle Ages, of the biblical and the classical with the romantic, which inspired the second part of Faust. To find the feudal system installed at Hebron and Athens, at Shechem and Sparta, at Tiberias and Thebes, to read of Princes of Galilee and of Princes of Achaia, causes surprise only surpassed by that which we should have felt in August, 1914, had we been told that before four Christmases had passed, Australians and New Zealanders would have shared in the taking of Jerusalem.

AUTHORITIES

1. Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Seventeen vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1841-1906.

2. Gesta Dei per Francos. Ed. J. Bongars. Two vols. Hanover, 1611.

3. Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, 1100-1291. Von R. Röhricht. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1898.

4. Regesta Regni Hierosolimitani, 1097-1291, and Additamentum. Von R. Röhricht. Œniponti: Lib. Acad. Wagneriana, 1893-1904.

5. Les Colonies franques de Syrie aux xiiᵐᵉ et xiiiᵐᵉ siècles. Par E. Rey. Paris: Picard, 1883.

6. Numismatique de l’Orient Latin, avec Supplément. Par G. Schlumberger. Paris: Leroux, 1878-82.

7. Renaud de Châtillon, prince d’Antioche. Par G. Schlumberger. Paris: Plon, 1898.

8. Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge. Von H. Prutz. Berlin: Siegfried, 1883.

9. Revue de l’Orient Latin. Eleven vols. Paris: Leroux, 1893-1908.