Raymond of Toulouse went first to Constantinople, where Alexis received him with honour, and gave him the principality of Laodicea. Eustace of Boulogne went back to his patrimony, leaving his brothers in Palestine. Robert of Flanders went home to be drowned in the Marne. Robert of Normandy, to eat out his heart in Cardiff Castle. Bohemond, Tancred, and Baldwin, with Raymond, remained in the East.
The miserably small army left with King Godfrey would have ill-sufficed to defend the city, had it not been for the continual relays of pilgrims who arrived daily. These could all, at a pinch, be turned into fighting men, and when their pilgrimage was finished there were many who would remain and enter permanently into the service of the king. And this seems to have been the principal way in which the army was recruited. It was nearly always engaged in fighting or making ready for fighting, and without constant reinforcements must speedily have come to an end. A great many Christians settled in the country by degrees, and, marrying either with native Christians or others, produced a race of semi-Asiatics, called pullani,[[55]] who seem to have united the vices of both sides of their descent, and to have inherited none of the virtues.
[55]. Perhaps fulání, anybodies. So in modern Arabic the greatest insult you can offer a man is to call him, fulán ibn fulán, so and so, the son of so and so—i.e., a foundling or bastard.
As for the people—not the Saracens, who, it must be remembered, were always the conquerors, but not always the settlers—we have little information about them. The hand of the Arab was against every man, and every man’s against his. When the pilgrims, it will be remembered, killed the sheikh at Ramleh, the Emir expressed his gratitude at being rid of his worst enemy. But, as to the villagers, the people who tilled the ground, the occupants of the soil, we know nothing of what race they were. It was four hundred years since the country had ceased to be Christian—it is hardly to be expected that the villagers were anything but Mohammedan. William of Tyre expressly calls them infidels, or Saracens, and they were certainly hostile. No Christian could travel across the country unless as one of a formidable party; and the labourers refused to cultivate the ground, in hopes of starving the Christians out: even in the towns, the walls were all so ruinous, and the defenders so few, that thieves and murderers entered by night, and no one lay down to sleep in safety. The country had been too quickly overrun, and places which had surrendered in a panic, seeing the paucity of the numbers opposed to them, began now to think how the yoke was to be shaken off.
It was at Christmas, 1099, that Baldwin of Edessa, Bohemond, and Dagobert, or Daimbert, Archbishop of Pisa, came to Jerusalem with upwards of twenty thousand pilgrims. These had suffered from cold and the attacks of Arabs, but had received relief and help from Tancred in Tiberias, and were welcomed by the king at the head of all his people, before the gates of the city. Arrived there, they chose a patriarch, electing Dagobert; and Arnold, who had never been legally elected, was deposed. They stayed during the winter, and gave the king their counsels as to the future constitution of his realm.
Godfrey employed the first six months of the year 1100 in regulating ecclesiastical affairs, the clergy being, as usual, almost incredibly greedy, and in concluding treaties with the governors of Ascalon, Acre, Cæsarea, Damascus, and Aleppo. He was showing himself as skilful in administration as he had been in war, and the Christian kingdom would doubtless have been put upon a solid and permanent footing, but for his sudden and premature death, which took place on July the 18th, 1100. His end was caused by an intermittent fever; finding that there was little hope, he caused himself to be transported from Jaffa to Jerusalem, where he breathed his last. He was buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where his epitaph might have been read up to the year 1808, when the church was destroyed by fire.
“Hic jacet inclitus dux Godefridus de Bouillon, qui totam istam terram acquisivit cultui Christiano, cujus anima regnet cum Christo.” And here, too, were laid up his sword, more trenchant than Excalibur, and the knightly spurs with which he had won more honour than King Arthur.
The Assises de Jerusalem, that most curious and instructive code of feudal law, does not belong properly to the reign of Godfrey. As it now exists it was drawn up in the fourteenth century. But it embodies, although it contains many additions and interpolations, the code which Godfrey first began, and the following kings finished. And it is based upon the idea which ruled Godfrey and his peers. It may therefore fairly be considered in this place.
It was highly necessary to have strict and clearly defined laws for this new kingdom. Its subjects were either pious and fanatic pilgrims, or unscrupulous and ambitious adventurers. Bishops and vassals, among whom the conquered lands were freely distributed, were disposed to set their suzerain at defiance, and to exalt themselves into petty kings. The pilgrims were many of them criminals of the worst kind, ready enough, when the old score was wiped out by so many prayers at sacred places, to begin a new one. They were of all countries, and spoke all languages. Their presence, useful enough when the Egyptian army had to be defeated, was a source of the greatest danger in time of peace. It is true that the time of peace was never more than a few months in duration.
The duties and rights of king, baron, and bourgeois were therefore strictly and carefully laid down in Godfrey’s Assises. Every law was written on parchment, in great letters, the first being illuminated in gold, and all the others in vermilion; on every sheet was the seal of the king; the whole was deposited in a great box in the sacred church, and called the “Letters of the Sepulchre.”