Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

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.