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.”