[25] As was noticed above, there were apparently separate assizes for the three principalities, in addition to the assizes of the kingdom. The assizes of Antioch have been discovered and published. The assizes of the kingdom itself are twofold—the assizes of the high court and the assizes of the court of burgesses. (1) The assizes of the high court are preserved for us in works by legists—John of Ibelin, Philip of Novara and Geoffrey of Tort—composed in the 13th century. We possess, in other words, law-books (like Bracton’s treatise De legibus), but not laws—and law-books made after the loss of the kingdom to which the laws belonged. There are two vexed questions with regard to these law-books. (a) The first concerns the origin and character of the laws which the law-books profess to expound. According to the story of the legists who wrote these books—e.g. John of Ibelin—the laws of the kingdom were laid down by Godfrey, who is thus regarded as the great νομοθέτης of the kingdom. These laws (progressively modified, it is admitted) were kept in Jerusalem, under the name of “Letters of the Sepulchre,” until 1187. In that year they were lost; and the legists tell us that they are attempting to reconstruct par oir dire the gist of the lost archetype. The story of the legists is now generally rejected. Godfrey never legislated: the customs of the kingdom gradually grew, and were gradually defined, especially under kings like Baldwin III. and Amalric I. If there was thus only a customary and unwritten law (and William of Tyre definitely speaks of a jus consuetudinarium under Baldwin III., quo regnum regebatur), then the “Letters of the Sepulchre” are a myth—or rather, if they ever existed, they existed not as a code of written law, but, perhaps, as a register of fiefs, like the Sicilian Defetarii. Thus the story of the legists shrinks down to the regular myth of the primitive legislator, used to give an air of respectability to law-books, which really record an unwritten custom. The fact is that until the 13th century the Franks lived consuetudinibus antiquis et jure non scripto. They preferred an unwritten law, as Prutz suggests, partly because it suited the barristers (who often belonged to the baronage, for the Frankish nobles were “great pleaders in court and out of court”), and partly because the high court was left unbound so long as there was no written code. In the 13th century it became necessary for the legists to codify, as it were, the unwritten law, because the upheavals of the times necessitated the fixing of some rules in writing, and especially because it was necessary to oppose a definite custom of the kingdom to Frederick II., who sought, as king of Jerusalem, to take advantage of the want of a written law, to substitute his own conceptions of law in the teeth of the high court. (b) The second difficulty concerns the text of the law-books themselves. The text of Ibelin became a textus receptus—but it also became overlaid by glosses, for it was used as authoritative in the kingdom of Cyprus after the loss of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and it needed expounding. Recensions and revisions were twice made, in 1368 and 1531; but how far the true Ibelin was recovered, and what additions or alterations were made at these two dates, we cannot tell. We can only say that we have the text of Ibelin which was used in Cyprus in the later middle ages. At the same time, if our text is thus late, it must be remembered that its content gives us the earliest and purest exposition of French feudalism, and describes for us the organization of a kingdom, where all rights and duties were connected with the fief, and the monarch was only a suzerain of feudatories. (2) The assizes of the court of burgesses became the basis of a treatise at an earlier date than the assizes of the high court. The date of the redaction (which was probably made by some learned burgess) may well have been the reign of Baldwin III., as Kugler suggests: he was the first native king, and a king learned in the law; but Beugnot would refer the assizes to the years immediately preceding Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem. These assizes do not, of course, appear in Ibelin, who was only concerned with the feudal law of the high court. They were used, like the assizes of the high court, in Cyprus; and, like the other assizes, they were made the subject of investigation in 1531, with the object of discovering a good text. The law which is expounded in these assizes is a mixture of Frankish law with the Graeco-Roman law of the Eastern empire which prevailed among the native population of Syria.
In regard to both assizes, it is most important to bear in mind that we possess not laws, but law-books or custumals—records made by lawyers for their fellows of what they conceived to be the law, and supported by legal arguments and citations of cases. But, as Prutz remarks, Philip of Novara lehrt nicht die Wissenschaft des Rechts, sondern die des Unrechts: he does not explain the law so much as the ways of getting round it.
[26] For instance, the abbey of Mount Sion had large possessions, not only in the Holy Land (at Ascalon, Jaffa, Acre, Tyre, Caesarea and Tarsus), but also in Sicily, Calabria, Lombardy, Spain and France (at Orleans, Bourges and Poitiers).
[27] One must remember that these reinforcements would often consist of desperate characters. It was one of the misfortunes of Palestine that it served as a Botany Bay, to which the criminals of the West were transported for penance. The natives, already prone to the immorality which must infect a mixed population living under a hot sun, the immorality which still infects a place like Aden, were not improved by the addition of convicts.
[28] The manorial system in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was a continuation of the village system as it had existed under the Arabs. In each village (casale) the rustici were grouped in families (foci): the tenants paid from ¼ to 1⁄3 of the crop, besides a poll-tax and labour-dues. The villages were mostly inhabited by Syrians: it was rarely that Franks settled down as tillers of the soil. Prutz regards the manorial system as oppressive. Absentee landlords, he thinks, rack-rented the soil (p. 167), while the “inhuman severity” of their treatment of villeins led to a progressive decay of agriculture, destroyed the economic basis of the Latin kingdom, and led the natives to welcome the invasion of Saladin (pp. 327-331).
The French writers Rey and Dodu are more kind to the Franks; and the testimony of contemporary Arabic writers, who seem favourably impressed by the treatment of their subjects by the Franks, bears out their view, while the tone of the assizes is admittedly favourable to the Syrians. One must not forget that there was a brisk native manufacture of carpets, pottery, ironwork, gold-work and soap; or that the Syrians of the towns had a definite legal position.
[29] After 1143 one may therefore speak of the period of the Epigoni—the native Franks, ready to view the Moslems as joint occupants of Syria, and to imitate the dress and habits of their neighbours.
[30] Doubt has been cast on the view that a troubled conscience drove Louis to take the cross; and his action has been ascribed to simple religious zeal (cf. Lavisse, Histoire de France, iii. 12).
[31] We speak of First, Second and Third Crusades, but, more exactly, the Crusades were one continuous process. Scarcely a year passed in which new bands did not come to the Holy Land. We have already noticed the great if disastrous Crusade of 1100-1101, and the Venetian Crusade of 1123-1124; and we may also refer to the Crusade of Henry the Lion in 1172, and to that of Edward I. in 1271-1272—all famous Crusades, which are not reckoned in the usual numbering. Crusades appear to have been dignified by numbers when they followed some crushing disaster—the loss of Edessa in 1144, or the fall of Jerusalem in 1187—and were led by kings and emperors; or when, like the Fourth and Fifth Crusades, they achieved some conspicuous success or failure. But it is important to bear in mind the continuity of the Crusades—the constant flow of new forces eastward and back again westward; for this alone explains why the Crusades formed a great epoch in civilization, familiarizing, as they did, the West with the East.
[32] This body of crusaders ultimately reached the Holy Land, where it joined Conrad (who had lost his own original forces), and helped in the fruitless siege of Damascus. The services which it rendered to Portugal were repeated by later crusaders. Crusaders from the Low Countries, England and the Scandinavian north took the coast route round western Europe; and it was natural that, landing for provisions and water, they should be asked, and should consent, to lend their aid to the natives against the Moors. Such aid is recorded to have been given on the Third and the Fifth Crusades.