Thus conceived as the holder of a great fief, the king had only the rights of suzerain over the four great baronies and the twelve minor fiefs of his kingdom. He had not those rights of sovereign which the Norman kings of England inherited from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors, or the Capetian kings of France from the Carolings; nor was he able therefore to come into direct touch with each of his subjects, which William I., in virtue of his sovereign rights, was able to attain by the Salisbury oath of 1086. Amalric I. indeed, by his assise sur la ligèce, attempted to reach the vassals of his vassals; he admitted arrière-vassaux to the haute cour, and encouraged them to carry their cases to it in the first instance. But this is the only attempt at that policy of immédiatisation which in contemporary England was carried to far greater lengths; and even this attempt was unsuccessful. No alliance was actually formed between the king and the mesne nobility against the immediate baronage. The body of the tenants-in-chief continued to limit the power of the crown: their consent was necessary to legislation, and grants of fiefs could not be made without their permission. Nor was the crown only limited in this way. The duties of the king towards his tenants are prominent in the assises. The king’s oath to his men binds him to respect and maintain their rights, which are as prominent as are his duties; and if the men feel that the royal oath has not been kept, they may lawfully refuse military service (gager le roi), and may even rise in authorized and legal rebellion. The system of military service and the organization of justice corresponded to the part which the monarchy was thus constrained to play. The vassal was bound to pay military service, not, as in western Europe, for a limited period of forty days, but for the whole year—the Holy Land being, as it were, in a perpetual state of siege. On the other hand, the vassal was not bound to render service, unless he were paid for his service; and it was only famine, or Saracen devastation, which freed the king from the obligation of paying his men. The king was also bound to insure the horses of his men by a system called the restor: if a vassal lost his horse otherwise than by his own fault, it must be replaced by the treasury (which was termed, as it also was in Norman Sicily, the secretum).[22] But the king had another force in addition to the feudal levy—a paid force of soudoyers,[23] holding fiefs, not of land, but of pay (fiefs de soudée). Along with this paid cavalry went another branch of the army, the Turcopuli, a body of light cavalry, recruited from the Syrians and Mahommedans, and using the tactics of the Arabs; while an infantry was found among the Armenians, the best soldiers of the East, and the Maronites, who furnished the kingdom with archers. To all these various forces must be added the knights and native levies of the great orders, whose masters were practically independent sovereigns like the princes of Antioch and Tripoli;[24] and with these the total levy of the kingdom may be reckoned at some 25,000 men. But the strength of the kingdom lay less perhaps in the army than in the magnificent fortresses which the nobility, and especially the two orders, had built; and the most visible relic of the crusades to-day is the towering ruins of a fortress like Krak (Kerak) des Chevaliers, the fortress of the Knights of St John in the principality of Tripoli. These fortresses, garrisoned not by the king, as in Norman England, but by their possessors, would only strengthen the power of the feudatories, and help to dissipate the kingdom into a number of local units.
In the organization of its system of justice the kingdom showed its most characteristic features. Two great central courts sat in Jerusalem to do justice—the high court of the nobles, and the court of burgesses for the rest of the Franks. (1) The high court was the supreme source of justice for the military class; and in its composition and procedure the same limitation of the crown, which appears in regard to military service, is again evident. The high court is not a curia regis, but a curia baronum, in which the theory of judicium parium is fully realized. If the king presides in the court, the motive of its action is none the less the preservation of the rights of the nobles, and not, as in England, the extension of the rights of the crown. It is a court of the king’s peers: it tries cases of dispute between the king and his peers—with regard, for instance, to military service—and it settles the descent of the title of king. (2) The court of burgesses was almost equally sovereign within its sphere. While the body of the noblesse formed the high court, the court of the burgesses was composed of twelve legists (probably named by the king) under the presidency of the vicomte—a knight also named by the king, who was a great financial as well as a judicial officer. The province of the court included all acts and contracts between burgesses, and extended to criminal cases in which burgesses were involved. Like the high court, the court of burgesses had also its assizes[25]—a body of unwritten legal custom. The independent position of the burgesses, who thus assumed a position of equality by the side of the feudal class, is one of the peculiarities of the kingdom of Jerusalem. It may be explained by reference to the peculiar conditions of the kingdom. Burgesses and nobles, however different in status, were both of the same Frankish stock, and both occupied the same superior position with regard to the native Syrians. The commercial motive, again, had been one of the great motives of the crusade; and the class which was impelled by that motive would be both large and, in view of the quality of the Eastern goods in which it dealt, exceptionally prosperous. Finally, when one remembers how, during the First Crusade, the pedites had marched side by side with the principes, and how, from the beginning of 1099, they had practically risen in revolt against the selfish ambitions of princes like Count Raymund, it becomes easy to understand the independent position which the burgesses assumed in the organization of the kingdom. Burgesses could buy and possess property in towns, which knights were forbidden to acquire; and though they could not intermarry with the feudal classes, it was easy and regular for a burgess to thrive to knighthood. Like the nobles, again, the burgesses had the right of confirming royal grants and of taking part in legislation; and they may be said to have formed—socially, politically and judicially—an independent and powerful estate. Yet (with the exception of Antioch, Tripoli and Acre in the course of the 13th century) the Frankish towns never developed a communal government: the domain of their development was private law and commercial life.
Locally, the consideration of the system of justice administered in the kingdom involves some account of three things—the organization of the fiefs, the position of the Italian traders in their quarters, and the privileges of the Church. Each fief was organized like the kingdom. In each there was a court for the noblesse, and a court (or courts) for the bourgeoisie. There were some thirty-seven cours de bourgeoisie (several of the fiefs having more than one), each of which was under the presidency of a vicomte, while all were independent of the court of burgesses at Jerusalem. Of the feudal courts there were some twenty-two. Each of these followed the procedure and the law of the high court; but each was independent of the high court, and formed a sovereign court without any appeal. On the other hand, the revolution wrought by Amalric I. in the status of the arrière-vassaux, which made them members of the high court, allowed them to carry their cases to Jerusalem in the first instance, if they desired. Apart from this, the characteristic of seignorial justice is its independence and its freedom from the central court; though, when we reflect that the central court is a court of seigneurs, this characteristic is seen to be the logical result of the whole system. Midway between the seignorial cours de bourgeoisie and the privileged jurisdictions of the Italian quarter, there were two kinds of courts of a commercial character—the cours de la fonde in towns where trade was busy, and the cours de la chaîne in the sea-ports. The former courts, under their bailiffs, gradually absorbed the separate courts which the Syrians had at first been permitted to enjoy under their own reïs; and the bailiff with his 6 assessors (4 Syrians and 2 Franks) thus came to judge both commercial cases and cases in which Syrians were involved. The cours de la chaîne, whose institution is assigned to Amalric I. (1162-1174), had a civil jurisdiction in admiralty cases, and, like the cours de la fonde, they were composed of a bailiff and his assessors. Distinct from all these courts, if similar in its sphere, is the court which the Italian quarter generally enjoyed in each town under its own consuls—a court privileged to try all but the graver cases, like murder, theft and forgery. The court was part of the general immunity which made these quarters imperia in imperio: their exemptions from tolls and from financial contributions is parallel to their judicial privileges. Regulated by their mother-town, both in their trade and their government, these Italian quarters outlasted the collapse of the kingdom, and continued to exist under Mahommedan rulers. The Church had its separate courts, as in the West; but their province was perhaps greater than elsewhere. The church courts could not indeed decide cases of perjury; but, on the other hand, they tried all matters in which clerical property was concerned, and all cases of dispute between husband and wife. In other spheres the immunities and exemptions of the Church offered a far more serious problem, and especially in the sphere of finance. Perhaps the supreme defect of the kingdom of Jerusalem was its want of any financial basis. It is true that the king had a revenue, collected by the vicomte and paid into the secretum or treasury—a revenue composed of tolls on the caravans and customs from the ports, of the profits of monopolies and the proceeds of justice, of poll-taxes on Jews and Mahommedans, and of the tributes paid by Mahommedan powers. But his expenditure was large: he had to pay his feudatories; and he had to provide fiefs in money and kind to those who had not fiefs of land. The contributions sent to the Holy Land by the monarchs of western Europe, as commutations in lieu of personal participation in crusades, might help; the fatal policy of razzias against the neighbouring Mahommedan powers might procure temporary resources; but what was really necessary was a wide measure of native taxation, such as was once, and once only, attempted in 1183. To any such measure the privileges of the Italian quarters, and still more those of the Church, were inimical. In spite of provisions somewhat parallel to those of the English statute of mortmain, the clergy continued to acquire fresh lands at the same time that they refused to contribute to the defence of the kingdom, and rigorously exacted the full quota of tithe from every source which they could tap, and even from booty captured in war. The richest proprietor in the Holy Land,[26] but practically immune from any charges on its property, the Church helped, unconsciously, to ruin the kingdom which it should have supported above all others. It refused to throw its weight into the scale, and to strengthen the hands of the king against an over-mighty nobility. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the Church did not, after the first struggle between Dagobert and Baldwin I., actively oppose by any hierarchical pretensions the authority of the crown. The assizes may speak of patriarch and king as conjoint seigneurs in Jerusalem; but as a matter of fact the king could secure the nomination of his own patriarch, and after Dagobert the patriarchs are, with the temporary exception of Stephen in 1128, the confidants and supporters of the kings. It was the two great orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers which were, in reality, most dangerous to the kingdom. Honeycombed as it was by immunities—of seigneurs, of Italian quarters, of the clergy—the kingdom was most seriously impaired by these overweening immunists, who, half-lay and half-clerical, took advantage of their ambiguous position to escape from the duties of either character. They built up great estates, especially in the principality of Tripoli; they quarrelled with one another, until their dissensions prevented any vigorous action; they struggled against the claims of the clergy to tithes and to rights of jurisdiction; they negotiated with the Mahommedans as separate powers; they conducted themselves towards the kings as independent sovereigns. Yet their aid was as necessary as their influence was noxious. Continually recruited from the West, they retained the vigour which the native Franks of Palestine gradually lost; and their corporate strength gave a weight to their arms which made them indispensable.
In describing the organization of the kingdom, we have also been describing the causes of its fall. It fell because it had not the financial or political strength to survive. “Les vices du gouvernement avaient été plus puissants que les vertus des gouvernants.” But the vices were not only vices of the government: they were also vices, partly inevitable, partly moral, in the governing race itself. The climate was no doubt responsible for much. The Franks of northern Europe attempted to live a life that suited a northern climate under a southern sun. They rode incessantly to battle over burning sands, in full armour—chain mail, long shield and heavy casque—as if they were on their native French soil. The ruling population was already spread too thin for the work which it had to do; and exhausted by its efforts, it gradually became extinct. A constant immigration from the West, bringing new blood and recruiting the stock, could alone have maintained its vigour; and such immigration never came. Little driblets of men might indeed be added to the numbers of the Franks; but the great bodies of crusaders either perished in Asia Minor, as in 1101 and 1147, or found themselves thwarted and distrusted by the native Franks. It was indeed one of the misfortunes of the kingdom that its inhabitants could never welcome the reinforcements which came to their aid.[27] The barons suspected the crusaders of ulterior motives, and of designing to get new principalities for themselves. In any case the native Frank, accustomed to commercial intercourse and diplomatic negotiations with the Mahommedans, could hardly share the unreasoning passion to make a dash for the “infidel.” As with the barons, so with the burgesses: they profited too much by their intercourse with the Mahommedans to abandon readily the way of peaceful commerce, and they were far more ready to hinder than to help any martial enterprise. Left to itself, the native population lost physical and moral vigour. The barons alternated between the extravagances of Western chivalry and the attractions of Eastern luxury: they returned from the field to divans with frescoed walls and floors of mosaic, Persian rugs and embroidered silk hangings. Their houses, at any rate those in the towns, had thus the characteristics of Moorish villas; and in them they lived a Moorish life. Their sideboards were covered with the copper and silver work of Eastern smiths and the confectioneries of Damascus. They dressed in flowing robes of silk, and their women wore oriental gauzes covered with sequins. Into these divans where figures of this kind moved to the music of Saracen instruments, there entered an inevitable voluptuousness and corruption of manners. The hardships of war and the excesses of peace shortened the lives of the men; the kingdom of Jerusalem had eleven kings within a century. While the men died, the women, living in comparative indolence, lived longer lives. They became regents to their young children; and the experience of all medieval minorities reiterates the lesson—woe to the land where the king is a child and the regent a woman. Still worse was the frequent remarriage of widowed princesses and heiresses. By the assizes of the high court, the widow, on the death of her husband, took half of the estate for herself, and half in guardianship for her children. Liberae ire cum terra, widows carried their estates or titles to three or four husbands; and as in 15th-century England, the influence of the heiress was fatal to the peace of the country. At Antioch, for instance, after the death of Bohemund II. in 1130, his widow Alice headed a party in favour of the marriage of the heiress Constance to Manuel of Constantinople, and did not scruple to enter into negotiations with Zengi of Mosul. Her policy failed; and Constance successively married Raymund of Antioch and Raynald of Chatillon. The result was the renewed enmity of the Greek empire, while the French adventurers who won the prize ruined the prospects of the Franks by their conduct. In the kingdom matters were almost worse. There was hardly any regular succession to the throne; and Jerusalem, as Stubbs writes, “suffered from the weakness of hereditary right and the jealousies of the elective system” at one and the same time. With the frequent remarriages of the heiresses of the kingdom, relationships grew confused and family quarrels frequent; and when Sibylla carried the crown to Guy de Lusignan, a newcomer disliked by all the relatives of the crown, she sealed the fate of the kingdom.
It may be doubted—though it seems a harsh verdict to pass on a kingdom founded by religious zeal on holy soil—whether the kingdom possessed that moral basis which alone can give a right of survival to any institution or organization. The crusading states had been founded by adventurers who thirsted for gain; and the primitive appetite did not lose its edge with the progress of time. We cannot be certain, indeed, how far the Frankish lords oppressed their Syrian tenants: the stories of such oppression have been discredited; while if we may trust the evidence of a Mahommedan traveller, Ibn Jubair, the lot of the Mahommedan who lived on Frankish manors was better than it had been under their native lords.[28] But the habits of the Franks were none the less habits of lawless greed: they swooped down from their castles, as Raynald of Chatillon did from Krak of the Desert, to capture Saracens and hold them to ransom or to plunder caravans. The lust of unlawful gain had infected the Frankish blood, as it seems to have infected England during the Hundred Years’ War; and in either case nemesis infallibly came. The Moslems might have endured a state of “infidels”; they could not endure a state of brigands.
6. The History of the Kingdom and the Crusades from the Loss of Edessa in 1144 to the Fall of Jerusalem in 1187.—The years 1143-1144 are in many ways the turning point in the history of the Latin East. In 1143 began the reign of the first native king;[29] and about this date may be placed the final organization of the kingdom, witnessed by the completion of its body of customary law. At the same date, however, the decline of the kingdom also begins; the fall of Edessa is the beginning of the end. In 1143 John Comnenus and Fulk had just died, and Zengi, seeing his way clear, threw himself on the great Christian outpost, against which the tides of Mahommedan attack had so often vainly surged, and finally entered on Christmas Day 1144. Two years later Zengi died; but he left an able successor in his son, Nureddin, and an attempt to recover Edessa was successfully repelled in November 1146. Not only so, but in the spring of 1147 the Franks were unwise enough to allow the hope of gaining two small towns to induce them to break the vital alliance with Damascus. Thus, in itself, the position of affairs in the Holy Land in 1147 was certainly ominous; and the kingdom might well seem dependent for its safety on such aid as it might receive from the West.
Early in 1145 news had come from Antioch to Eugenius III. of the fall of Edessa, and at the end of the year he had sent an encyclical to France—the natural soil, as we have seen, of crusading zeal. The response was instantaneous: the king of France himself, who bore on his conscience the burden of an unpunished massacre by his troops at Vitry in 1142,[30] took the crusading vow on the Christmas day of 1145. But the greatest success was attained when St Bernard—no great believer in pilgrimages, and naturally disposed to doubt the policy of a second Crusade—was induced by the pope to become the preacher of the new movement. To the crusading king of France St Bernard added the king of Germany, when, in Christmas week of 1146, he induced Conrad III. to take the vow by his sermon in the cathedral of Spires. Thus was begun the Second Crusade,[31] under auspices still more favourable than those which attended the beginning of the First, seeing that kings now took the place of knights, while the new crusaders would no longer be penetrating into the wilds, but would find a friendly basis of operations ready to their hands in Frankish Syria. But the more favourable the auspices, the greater proved the failure. Already at the final meeting at Étampes, in 1147, difficulties arose. Manuel Comnenus demanded that all conquests made by the crusaders should be his fiefs; and the question was debated whether the crusaders should follow the land route through Hungary, along the old road of Charlemagne, or should go by sea to the Holy Land. In this question the envoys of Manuel and of Roger of Sicily, who were engaged in hostilities with one another, took opposite sides. Conrad, related by marriage to Manuel, decided in favour of the land route, which Manuel desired because it brought the Crusade more under his direction, and because, if the route by sea were followed, Roger of Sicily might be able to divert the crusading ships against Constantinople. As it was, a struggle raged between Roger and Manuel during the whole progress of the Crusade, which greatly contributed towards its failure, preventing, as it did, any assistance from the Eastern empire. Nor was there any real unity among the crusaders themselves. The crusaders of northern Germany never went to the Holy Land at all; they were allowed the crusaders’ privileges for attacking the Wends to the east of the Elbe—a fact which at once attests the cleavage between northern and southern Germany (intensified of late years by the war of investitures), and anticipates the age of the Teutonic knights and their long Crusade on the Baltic. The crusaders of the Low Countries and of England took the sea route, and attacked and captured Lisbon on their way, thus helping to found the kingdom of Portugal, and achieving the one real success which was gained by the Second Crusade.[32] Among the great army of crusaders who actually marched to Jerusalem there was little real unity. Conrad and Louis VII. started separately, and at different times, in order to avoid dissensions between their armies; and when they reached Asia Minor (after encountering some difficulties in Greek territory) they still acted separately. Eager to win the first spoils, the German crusaders, who were in advance of the French, attempted a raid into the sultanate of Iconium; but after a stern fight at Dorylaeum they were forced to retreat (October 1147), and for the most part perished by the way. Louis VII., who now appeared, was induced by this failure to take the long and circuitous route by the west coast of Asia Minor; but even so he had lost the majority of his troops when he reached the Holy Land in 1148. Here he joined Conrad (who had come by sea from Constantinople) and Baldwin III., and after some deliberation the three sovereigns resolved to attack Damascus. The attack was impolitic: Damascus was the one ally which could help the Franks to stem the advance of Nureddin. It proved as futile as it was impolitic; for the vizier of Damascus, Muin-eddin-Anar, was able to sow dissension between the native Franks and the crusaders; and by bribes and promises of tribute he succeeded in inducing the former to make the siege an absolute failure, at the end of only four days (July 28th, 1148). The Second Crusade now collapsed. Conrad returned to Constantinople in the autumn of 1148, and Louis VII. returned by sea to France in the spring of 1149. The only effects of this great movement were effects prejudicial to the ends towards which it was directed. The position of the Franks in the Holy Land was not improved by the attack on Damascus; while the ignominious failure of a Crusade led by two kings brought the whole crusading movement into discredit in western Europe, and it was utterly in vain that Suger and St Bernard attempted to gather a fresh Crusade in 1150.
The result of the failure of the Second Crusade was the renewal of Nureddin’s attacks. The rest of the county of Edessa, including Tell-bashir on the west, was now conquered (1150); while Raymund of Antioch was defeated and killed (in 1149), and several towns in the east of his principality were captured. Baldwin III. attempted to make head against these troubles, partly by renewing the old alliance with Damascus, partly by drawing closer to Manuel of Constantinople. For the next twenty years, during the reigns of Baldwin and his brother Amalric I., there is indeed a close connexion between the kingdom of Jerusalem and the East Roman empire. Baldwin and Amalric both married into the Comnenian house, while Manuel married Mary of Antioch, the daughter of Raymund. In the north Manuel enjoyed the homage of Antioch, which his father had gained in 1137, and the nominal possession of Tell-bashir, which had been ceded to him by Baldwin III.: in the south he joined with Amalric I. in the attempt to acquire Egypt (1168-1171). In this way he acquired a certain ascendancy over the Latin kings: Baldwin III. rode behind him at Antioch in 1159 without any of the insignia of royalty, and in an inscription at Bethlehem of 1172 Amalric I. had the name of the emperor written above his own.[33] The patronage of Constantinople, to which Jerusalem was thus practically surrendered, contributed to some slight extent in maintaining the kingdom against Nureddin. But there were dissensions within, both between Baldwin and his mother, Melisinda, who sought to protract her regency unduly, and between contending parties in Antioch, where the hand of Constance, Raymund’s widow, was a desirable prize[34]; while from without the horns of the crescent were slowly closing in on the kingdom. Nureddin pursued in his policy the tactics which the Mahommedans used against the Franks in battle: he sought to envelop their territories on every side. In 1154 fell Damascus, and the crescent closed perceptibly in the north: the most valuable ally of the kingdom was lost, and the way seemed clear from Aleppo (the peculiar seat of Nureddin’s power) into Egypt. On the other hand, in 1153 Baldwin III. had taken Ascalon, which for fifty years had mocked the efforts of successive kings, and by this stroke he might appear to have closed for Nureddin the route to Egypt, and to have opened a path for its conquest by the Franks. For the future, events hinged on the situation of affairs in Egypt, and in Egypt the fate of the kingdom of Jerusalem was finally decided (see [Egypt]: History, “Mahommedan Period”). There was a race for the possession of the country between Nureddin’s lieutenant Shīrgūh or Shīrkūh and Amalric I., the brother and successor of Baldwin III.; and in the race Shīrkūh proved the winner.
Since the days of Godfrey and Baldwin I., Egypt had been a goal of Latin ambition, and the capture of Ascalon must obviously have given form and strength to the projects for its conquest. Plans of attack were sketched: routes were traced: distances were measured; and finally in 1163 there came the impulse from within which turned these plans into action. The Shiite caliphs of Egypt were by this time the playthings of contending viziers, as the Sunnite caliphs of Bagdad had long been the puppets of Turkish sultans or amirs; and in 1164 Amalric I. and Nureddin were fighting in Egypt in support of two rival viziers, Dirgham and Shawar. For Nureddin the fight meant the acquisition of an heretical country for the true faith of the Sunnite, and the final enveloping of the Latin kingdom:[35] for Amalric it meant the escape from Nureddin’s net, and a more direct and lucrative contact with Eastern trade. Into the vicissitudes of the fight it is not necessary here to enter; but in the issue Nureddin won, in spite of the support which Manuel gave to Amalric. Nureddin’s Kurdish lieutenant, Shīrgūh, succeeded in establishing in power the vizier whom he favoured, and finally in becoming vizier himself (January 1169); and when he died, his nephew Saladin (Sala-ed-din) succeeded to his position (March 1169), and made himself, on the death of the caliph in 1171, sole ruler in Egypt. Thus the Shiite caliphate became extinct: in the mosques of Cairo the name of the caliph of Bagdad was now used; and the long-disunited Mahommedans at last faced the Christians as a solid body. But nevertheless the kingdom of Jerusalem continued almost unmenaced, and practically undiminished, for the next sixteen years. If a religious union had been effected between Egypt and northern Syria, political disunion still remained; and the Franks were safe as long as it lasted. Saladin acted as the peer of Nureddin rather than as his subject; and the jealousy between the two kept both inactive till the death of Nureddin in 1174. Nureddin only left a minor in his place: Amalric, who died in the same year, left a son (Baldwin IV.) who was not only a minor but also a leper; and thus the stage seemed cleared for Saladin. He was confronted, however, by Raymund, count of Tripoli, the one man of ability among the decadent Franks, who acted as guardian of the kingdom; while he was also occupied in trying to win for himself the Syrian possessions of Nureddin. The task engaged his attention for nine years. Damascus he acquired as early as 1174; but Raymund supported the heir of Nureddin in his capital at Aleppo, and it was not until 1183 that Saladin entered the city, and finally brought Egypt and northern Syria under a single rule.
The hour of peril for the Latin kingdom had now at last struck. It had done little to prepare itself for that hour. Repeated appeals had been sent to the West from the beginning of the Egyptian affair (1163) onwards; while in 1184-1185 a great mission, on which the patriarch of Jerusalem and the masters of the Templars and the Hospitallers were all present, came to France and England, and offered the crown of Jerusalem to Philip Augustus and Henry II. in turn, in order to secure their presence in the Holy Land.[36] The only result of these appeals was the rise of a regular system of taxation in France and England, ad sustentationem Jerosolimitanae terrae, which starts about 1185 (though there had already been isolated taxes in 1147 and 1166), and which has been described as the beginning of modern taxation. In the East itself, with the exception of the tax of 1183,[37] nothing was done that was good, and two things were done which were evil. Sibylla married her second husband, Guy de Lusignan, in 1180—a marriage destined to be the cause of many dissensions; for Sibylla, the eldest daughter of Amalric I., carried to her husband—a French adventurer—a presumptive title to the crown, which would never be admitted without dispute. In 1186 Guy eventually became king, after the death of Baldwin V. (Sibylla’s son by her first marriage); but his coronation was in violation of the promise given to Raymund of Tripoli (that in the event of the death of Baldwin V. without issue the succession should be determined by the pope, the emperor and the kings of France and England), and Guy, with a weak title, was unable to exercise any real control over the kingdom. At this point another French adventurer, who had already made himself somewhat of a name in Antioch, gave the final blow to the kingdom. Raynald of Chatillon, the second husband of Constance of Antioch, after languishing in captivity from 1159 to 1176, had been granted the seignory of Krak, to the east and south of the Dead Sea. From this point of vantage he began depredations on the Red Sea (1182), building a fleet, and seeking to attack Medina and Mecca—a policy which may be interpreted either as mere buccaneering, or as a calculated attempt to deal a blow at Mahommedanism in its very centre. Driven from the Red Sea by Saladin, he turned from buccaneering to brigandage, and infested the great trade-route from Damascus to Egypt, which passed close by his seignory. In 1186 he attacked a caravan in which the sister of Saladin was travelling, thus violating a four years’ truce, which, after some two years’ skirmishing, Saladin and Raymund of Tripoli had made in the previous year owing to the general prevalence of famine.[38] The coronation of one French adventurer and the conduct of another, whom the first was unable to control, meant the ruin of the kingdom; and Saladin at last delivered in full force his long-deferred attack. The Crusade was now at last answered by the counter-Crusade—the jihad; for though for many years past Saladin had, in his attempt to acquire all the inheritance of Nureddin, left Palestine unmenaced and intact, his ultimate aim was always the holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem. The acquisition of Aleppo could only make that supreme object more readily attainable; and so Saladin had spent his time in acquiring Aleppo, but only in order that he might ultimately “attain the goal of his desires, and set the mosque of Asha free, to which Allah once led in the night his servant Mahomet.” Thus it was on a kingdom of crusaders who had lost the crusading spirit that a new Crusade swept down; and Saladin’s army in 1187 had the spirit and the fire of the Latin crusaders of 1099. The tables were turned; and fighting on their own soil for the recovery of what was to them too a holy place, the Mahommedans easily carried the day. At Tiberias a little squadron of the brethren of the two Orders went down before Saladin’s cavalry in May; at Hattin the levy en masse of the kingdom, some 20,000 strong, foolishly marching over a sandy plain under the heat of a July sun, was utterly defeated; and after a fortnight’s siege Jerusalem capitulated (October 2nd, 1187). In the kingdom itself nothing was left to the Latins by the end of 1189 except the city of Tyre; and to the north of the kingdom they only held Antioch and Tripoli, with the Hospitallers’ fortress at Margat. The fingers of the clock had been pushed back; once more things were as they had been at the time of the First Crusade; once more the West must arm itself for the holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem—but now it must face a united Mahommedan world, where in 1096 it had found political and religious dissension, and it must attempt its vastly heavier task without the morning freshness of a new religious impulse, and with something of the weariness of a hundred years of struggle upon its shoulders.