Crusades

CRUSADES, the name given to the series of wars for delivering the Holy Land from the Mahommedans, so-called from the cross worn as a badge by the crusaders. By analogy the term "crusade" is also given to any campaign undertaken in the same spirit.

1. The Meaning of the Crusades. - The Crusades may be regarded partly as the decumanus fluctus in the surge of religious revival, which had begun in western Europe during the loth, and had mounted high during the 11th century; partly as a chapter, and a most important chapter, in the history of the interaction of East and West. Contemporaries regarded them in the former of these two aspects, as "holy wars" and "pilgrims' progresses" towards Christ's Sepulchre; the reflective eye of history must perhaps regard them more exclusively from the latter point of view. Considered as holy wars the Crusades must be interpreted by the ideas of an age which was dominated by the spirit of otherworldliness, and accordingly ruled by the clerical power which represented the other world. They are a novum salutis genus - a new path to Heaven, to tread which counted "for full and complete satisfaction" pro omni poenitentia and gave "forgiveness of sins" (peccaminum remissio) 1; they are, again, the "foreign policy" of the papacy, directing its faithful subjects to the great war of Christianity against the infidel. As such a novum salutis genus, the Crusades connect themselves with the history of the penitentiary system; as the foreign policy of the Church they belong to that clerical purification and direction of feudal society and its instincts, which appears in the institution of "God's Truce" and in chivalry itself. The penitentiary system, according to which the priest enforced a code of moral law in the confessional by the sanction of penance - penance which must be performed as a condition of admission to the sacrament of the Eucharist - had been from early times a great instrument in the civilization of the raw Germanic races. Penance might consist in fasting; it might consist in flagellation; it might consist in pilgrimage. The penitentiary pilgrimage, which seems to have been practised as early as A.D. 700, was twice blessed; not only was it an act of atonement in itself, like fasting and flagellation; it also gained for the pilgrim the merit of having stood on holy ground. Under the influence of the Cluniac revival, which began in the 10th century, pilgrimages became increasingly frequent; and the goal of pilgrimage was often Jerusalem. Pilgrims who were travelling to Jerusalem joined themselves in companies for security, and marched under arms; the pilgrims of 1064, who were headed by the archbishop of Mainz, numbered some 7000 men. When the First Crusade finally came, what was it but a penitentiary pilgrimage under arms - with the one additional object of conquering the goal of pilgrimage ? That the Pilgrims' Progress should thus have turned into a Holy War is a fact readily explicable, when we turn to consider the attempts made by the Church, during the 11th century, to purify, or at any rate to direct, the feudal instinct for private war (Fehde). Since the close of the 10th century diocesan councils in France had been busily acting as legislatures, and enacting "forms of peace" for the maintenance of God's Peace or Truce (Pax Dei or Treuga Dei). In each diocese there had arisen a judicature (judices pacis) to decide when the form had been broken; and an executive, or communitas pacis, had been formed to enforce the decisions of the judicature. But it was an easier thing to consecrate the fighting instinct than to curb it; and the institution of chivalry represents such a clerical consecration, for ideal ends and noble purposes, of the martial impulses which the Church had hitherto endeavoured to check. In the same way the Crusades themselves may be regarded as a stage in the clerical reformation of the fighting laymen. As chivalry directed the layman to defend what was right, so the preaching of the Crusades directed him to attack what was wrong - the possession by "infidels" of the Sepulchre of Christ. The Crusades are the offensive side of chivalry: chivalry is their parent - as it is also their child. The knight who joined the Crusades might thus still indulge the bellicose side of his genius - under the aegis and at the bidding of the Church; and in so doing he would also attain what the spiritual side of his nature ardently sought - a perfect salvation and remission of sins. He might butcher all day, till he waded ankle-deep in blood, and then at nightfall kneel, sobbing for very joy, at the altar of the Sepulchre - for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord? One can readily understand the popularity of the Crusades, when one reflects that they permitted men to get to the other world by fighting hard on earth, and allowed them to gain the fruits of asceticism by the ways of hedonism. Nor was the Church merely able, through the Crusades, to direct the martial instincts of 1 Fulcher of Chartres, 1, i. For what follows, with regard to the Church's conversion of guerra into the Holy War, cf. especially the passage - "Procedant contra infideles ad pugnam jam incipi dignam qui abusive privatum certamen contra fideles consuescebant distendere quondam." a feudal society; it was also able to pursue the object of its own immediate policy, and to attempt the universal diffusion of Christianity, even at the edge of the sword, over the whole of the known world.

Thus was renewed, on a greater scale, that ancient feud of East and West, which has never died. For a thousand years, from the Hegira in 622 to the siege of Vienna in 1683, the peril of a Mahommedan conquest of Europe was almost continually present. From this point of view, the Crusades appear as a reaction of the West against the pressure of the East - a reaction which carried the West into the East, and founded a Latin and Christian kingdom on the shores of Asia. They protected Europe from the new revival of Mahommedanism under the Turks; they gave it a time of rest in which the Western civilization of the middle ages developed. But the relation of East and West during the Crusades was not merely hostile or negative. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was the meeting-place of two civilizations: on its soil the East learned from the West, and - perhaps still more - the West learned from the East. The culture developed in the West during the 13th century was not only permitted to develop by the protection of the Crusades, it grew upon materials which the Crusades enabled it to import from the East. Yet the debt of Europe to the Crusades in this last respect has perhaps been unduly emphasized. Sicily was still more the meeting-place of East and West than the kingdom of Jerusalem; and the Arabs of Spain gave more to the culture of Europe than the Arabs of Syria.

2. Historical Causes of the Crusades. - Within fifteen years of the Hegira Jerusalem fell before the arms of Omar (637), and it continued to remain in the hands of Mahommedan rulers till the end of the First Crusade. For centuries, however, a lively intercourse was maintained between the Latin Church in Jerusalem, which the clemency of the Arab conquerors tolerated, and the Christians of the West. Charlemagne in particular was closely connected with Jerusalem: the patriarch sent him the keys of the city and a standard in Boo; and in 807 Harun al-Rashid recognized this symbolical cession, and acknowledged Charlemagne as protector of Jerusalem and owner of the church of the Sepulchre. Charlemagne founded a hospital and a library in the Holy City; and later legend, when it made him the first of crusaders and the conqueror of the Holy Land, was not without some basis of fact. The connexion lasted during the 9th century; kings like Alfred of England and Louis of Germany sent contributions to Jerusalem, while the Church of Jerusalem acquired estates in the West. During the 10th century this intercourse still continued; but in the 11 th century interruptions began to come. The fanaticism of the caliph Hakim destroyed the church of the Sepulchre and ended the Frankish protectorate (Ioio); and the patronage of the Holy Places, a source of strife between the Greek and the Latin Churches as late as the beginning of the Crimean War, passed to the Byzantine empire in 1021. This latter change in itself made pilgrimages from the West increasingly difficult: the Byzantines, especially after the schism of 1054, did not seek to smooth the way of the pilgrim, and Victor II. had to complain to the empress Theodora of the exactions practised by her officials. But still worse for the Latins was the capture of Jerusalem by the Seljukian Turks in 1071. Without being intolerant, the Turks were a rougher and ruder race than the Arabs of Egypt whom they displaced; while the wars between the Fatimites of Egypt and the Abbasids of Bagdad, whose cause was represented by the Seljuks, made Syria (one of the natural battle-grounds of history) into a troubled and unquiet region. The native Christians suffered; the pilgrims of the West found their way made still more difficult, and that at a time when greater numbers than ever were thronging to the East. Western Christians could not but feel hampered and checked in their natural movement towards the fountainhead of their religion, and it was natural that they should ultimately endeavour to clear the way. In much the same way, at a later date and in a lesser sphere, the closing of the traderoutes by the advance of the Ottoman Turks led traders to endeavour to find new channels, and issued in the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of America. Nor, indeed, must it be forgotten that the search for new and more direct connexions with the routes of Oriental trade is one of the motives underlying the Crusades themselves, and leading to what may be called the 13th-century discovery of Asia.

It was thus natural, for these reasons, that the conquest of the Holy Land should gradually become an object for the ambition of Western Christianity - an object which the papacy, eager to realize its dream of a universal Church subject to its sway, would naturally cherish and attempt to advance. Two causes combined to make this object still more natural and more definite. On the one hand, the reconquest of lost territories from the Mahommedans by Christian powers had been proceeding steadily for more than a hundred years before the First Crusade; on the other hand, the position of the Eastern empire after 1071 was a clear and definite summons to the Christian West, and proved, in the event, the immediate occasion of the holy war. As early as 970 the recovery of the territories lost to Mahommedanism in the East had been begun by emperors like Nicephoras Phocas and John Zimisces: they had pushed their conquests, if only for a time, as far as Antioch and Edessa, and the temporary occupation of Jerusalem is attributed to the East Roman arms. At the opposite end of the Mediterranean, in Spain, the Omayyad caliphate was verging to its fall: the long Spanish crusade against the Moor had begun; and in 1018 Roger de Toeni was already leading Normans into Catalonia to the aid of the native Spaniard. In the centre of the Mediterranean the fight between Christian and Mahommedan had been long, but was finally inclining in favour of the Christian. The Arabs had begun the conquest of Sicily from the East Roman empire in 827, and they had attacked the mainland of Italy as early as 840. The popes had put themselves at the head of Italian resistance: in 848 Leo IV. is already promising a sure and certain hope of salvation to those who die in defence of the cross; and by 916, with the capture of the Arab fortress on the Garigliano, Italy was safe. Then came the reconquest of the Mediterranean islands near Italy. The Pisans conquered Sardinia at the instigation of Benedict VIII. about 1016; and, in a thirty years' war which lasted from 1060 to 1090, the Normans, under a banner blessed by Pope Alexander II., wrested Sicily from the Arabs. The Norman conquest of Sicily may with justice be called a crusade before the Crusades; and it cannot but have given some impulse to that later attempt to wrest Syria from the Mahommedans, in which the virtual leader was Bohemund, a scion of the same house which had conquered Sicily. But while the Christians of the West were thus winning fresh ground from the Mahommedans, in the course of the 11th century, the East Roman empire had now to bear the brunt of a Mahommedan revival under the Seljuksa revival which, while it crushed for a time the Greeks, only acted as a new incentive to the Latins to carry their arms to the East. The Seljukian Turks, first the mercenaries and then the masters of the caliph, had given new life to the decadent caliphate of Bagdad. Under the rule of their sultans, who assumed the role of mayors of the palace in Bagdad about the middle of the 11th century, they pushed westwards towards the caliphate of Egypt and the East Roman empire. While they wrested Jerusalem from the former (1071), in the same year they inflicted a crushing defeat on the Eastern emperor at Manzikert. The result of the defeat was the loss of almost the whole of Asia Minor; the dominions of the Turks extended to the sea of Marmora. An appeal for assn ance, such as was often to be heard again in succeeding centuries, was sent by Michael VII. of Constantinople to Gregory VII. in 1073. Gregory listened to the appeal; he projected - not, indeed, as has often been said, a crusade,' but a great expedition, which should recover ' Tradition credits a pope still earlier than Gregory VII. with the idea of a crusade. Silvester II. is said to have preached a general expedition for the recovery of Jerusalem; and the same preaching is attributed to Sergius IV. in tots. But the supposed letter of Silvester is a later forgery; and in moo the way of the Christian to Jerusalem was still free and open.

Asia Minor for the Eastern empire, in return for a union of the Eastern with the Western Church. In 1074 Gregory actually assembled a considerable army; but his disagreement with Robert Guiscard, followed by the outbreak of the war of investitures, hindered the realization of his plans, and the only result was a precedent and a suggestion for the events of 1095. The appeal of Michael VII. was re-echoed by Alexius Comnenus himself. Brave and sage as he was, he could hardly cope at one and the same time with the hostility of the Normans on the west, of the Petchenegs (Patzinaks) on the north, and of the Seljuks on the east and south. Already in 1087 and 1088 he had appealed to Baldwin of Flanders, verbally and by letter,' for troops; and Baldwin had answered the appeal. The same appeal was made, more than once, to Urban II.; and the answer was the First Crusade. The First Crusade was not, indeed, what Alexius had asked or expected to receive. He had appealed for reinforcements to recover Asia Minor; he received hundreds of thousands of troops, independent of him, and intending to conquer Jerusalem for themselves, though they might incidentally recover Asia Minor for the Eastern empire on their way. Alexius may almost be compared to a magician, who has uttered a charm to summon a ministering spirit, and is surrounded on the instant by legions of demons. In truth the appeal of Alexius had set free forces in the West which were independent of, and even ultimately hostile to, the interests of the Eastern empire.

The primary force, which thus transmuted an appeal for reinforcements into a holy war for the conquest of Palestine, was the Church. The creative thought of the middle ages is clerical thought. It is the Church which creates the Carolingian empire, because the clergy thinks in terms of empire. It is the Church which creates the First Crusade, because the clergy believes in penitentiary pilgrimages, and the war against the Seljuks can be turned into a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre; because, again, it wishes to direct the fighting instinct of the laity, and the consecrating name of Jerusalem provides an unimpeachable channel; above all, because the papacy desires a perfect and universal Church, and a perfect and universal Church must rule in the Holy Land. But it would be a mistake to regard the Crusades (as it would be a mistake to regard the Carolingian empire) as a pure creation of the Church, or as merely due to the policy of a theocracy directing men to the holy war which is the only war possible for a theocracy. It would be almost truer, though only half the truth, to say that the clergy gave the name of Crusade to sanctify interests and ambitions which, while set on other ends than those of the Church, happened to coincide in their choice of means. There was, for instance, the ambition of the adventurer prince, the younger son, eager to carve a principality in the far East, of whom Bohemund is the type; there was the interest of Italian towns, anxious to acquire the products of the East more directly and cheaply, by erecting their own emporia in the eastern Mediterranean. The former was the driving force which made the First Crusade successful, where later Crusades, without its stimulus, for the most part failed; the latter was the one staunch ally which alone enabled Baldwin I. and Baldwin II. to create the kingdom of Jerusalem. So far as the Crusades led to permanent material results in the East, they did so in virtue of these two forces. Unregulated enthusiasm might of itself have achieved little or nothing; enthusiasm caught and guided by the astute Norman, and the no less astute Venetian or Genoese, could not but achieve tangible results. The principality or the emporium, it is true, would supply motives to the prince and the merchant only; and it may be urged that to the mass of the crusaders the religious motive was all in all. In this way we may return to the view that the First Crusade, at any rate, was fait ecclesiastique. 1 The comte de Riant impugned the authenticity of Alexius' letter to the count of Flanders. It is very probable that the versions of this letter which we possess, and which are to be found only in later writings like Guibert de Nogent, are apocryphal; Alexius can hardly have held out the bait of the beauty of Greek women, or have written that he preferred to fall under the yoke of the Latins rather than that of the Turks. But it is also probable that these apocryphal versions are based on a genuine original.

It is indeed true that to thousands the hope of acquiring spiritual merit must have been a great motive; it is also true, as the records of crusading sermons show, that there was a strong element of "revivalism" in the Crusades, and that thousands were hurried into taking the cross by a gust of that uncontrollable enthusiasm which is excited by revivalist meetings to-day. But it must also be admitted that there were motives of this world to attract the masses to the Crusades. Famine and pestilence at home drove men to emigrate hopefully to the golden East. In 1094 there was pestilence from Flanders to Bohemia: in 1095 there was famine in Lorraine. Francigenis occidentalibus facile persuaderi poterat sua rura relinquere; nam Gallias per annos aliquot nunc seditio civilis, nunc fames, nunc mortalitas nimis afixerat. 2 No wonder that a stream of emigration set towards the East, such as would in modern times flow towards a newly discovered gold-field - a stream carrying in its turbid waters much refuse, tramps and bankrupts, camp-followers and hucksters, fugitive monks and escaped villeins, and marked by the same motley grouping, the same fever of life, the same alternations of affluence and beggary, which mark the rush for a gold-field to-day.

Such were the forces set in movement by Urban II., when, after holding a synod at Piacenza (March, 10 9 5), and receiving there fresh appeals from Alexius, he moved to Clermont, in the S.E. of France, and there on the 26th of November delivered the great speech which was followed by the First Crusade. In this speech he appealed, indeed, for help for the Greeks, auxilio. .. saepe acclamato indigis (Fulcher i. c. i.); but the gist of his speech was the need of Jerusalem. Let the truce of God be observed at home; and let the arms of Christians be directed to the winning of Jerusalem in an expedition which should count for full and complete penance. Like Gregory, Urban had thus sought for aid for the Eastern empire; unlike Gregory, who had only mentioned the Holy Sepulchre in a single letter, and then casually, he had struck the note of Jerusalem. The instant cries of Deus volt which answered the note showed that Urban had struck aright. Thousands at once took the cross; the first was Bishop Adhemar of Puy, whom Urban named his legate and made leader of the First Crusade (for the holy war, according to Urban's original conception, must needs be led by a clerk). Fixing the 15th of August 1096 as the time for the departure of the crusaders, and Constantinople as the general rendezvous, Urban returned from France to Italy. It is noticeable that it was on French soil that the seed had been sown.3 Preached on French soil by a pope of French descent, the Crusades began - and they continued - as essentially a French (or perhaps better Norman-French) enterprise; and the kingdom which they established in the East was essentially a French kingdom, in its speech and its customs, its virtues and its vices. It was natural that France should be the home of the Crusades. She was already the home of the Cluniac movement, the centre from which radiated the truce of God, the chosen place of chivalry; she could supply a host of feudal nobles, somewhat loosely tied to their place in society, and ready to break loose for a great enterprise; she had suffered from battle and murder, pestilence and famine, from which any escape was welcome. To the Normans particularly the Crusades had an intimate appeal. They appealed to the old Norse instinct for wandering - an instinct which, as it had long before sent the Norseman eastward to find his El Dorado of Micklegarth, could now find a natural outlet in the expedition to Jerusalem: they appealed to the Norman religiosity, which had made them a people of pilgrims, the allies of the papacy, and, in England and Sicily, crusaders before the Crusades: finally, they appealed to that desire to gain fresh territory, upon which Malaterra remarks as characteristic of Norman princes. 4 No wonder, then, that Ekkehard, Chronica, p. 213.

The Chanson de Roland, which cannot be posterior to the First Crusade - for the poem never alludes to it - already contains the idea of the Holy War against Islam. The idea of the crusade had thus already ripened in French poetry, before Urban preached his sermon.

4 Book i. c. iii. (in Muratori, S.R.I., v. 550).

the crusading armies were recruited in France, or that they were led by men of the stock of the d'Hautevilles. Meanwhile newly-conquered England had its own problems to solve; and Germany, torn by civil war, and not naturally quick to kindle, could only deride the "delirium" of the crusader.' 3. Course of the First Crusade. - The First Crusade falls naturally into two parts. One of these may be called the Crusade of the people: the other may be termed the Crusade of the princes. Of these the people's Crusade - prior in order of time, if only secondary in point of importance - may naturally be studied first. The sermon of Urban II. at Clermont became the staple for wandering preachers, among whom Peter the Hermit distinguished himself by his fiery zea1.2 Riding on an ass from place to place through France and along the Rhine, he carried away by his eloquence thousands of the poor. Some three or four months before the term fixed by Urban II., in April and May 1096, five divisions of pauperes had already collected. Three of these, led by Fulcher of Orleans, Gottschalk and William the Carpenter respectively, failed to reach even Constantinople. The armies of Fulcher and Gottschalk were destroyed by the Hungarians in just revenge for their excesses (June); the third, after joining in a wild Judenhetze in the towns of the valley of the Rhine, during which some io,000 Jews perished as the first-fruits of crusading zeal, was scattered to the winds in Hungary (August). Two other divisions, however, reached Constantinople in safety. The first of these, under Walter the Penniless, passed through Hungary in May, and reached Constantinople, where it halted to wait for the Hermit, in the middle of July. The second, led by Peter himself, passed safely through Hungary, but suffered severely in Bulgaria, and only attained Constantinople with sadly diminished numbers at the end of July. These two divisions (which in spite of good treatment by Alexius began to commit excesses against the Greeks) united and crossed the Bosporus in August, Peter himself remaining in Constantinople. By the end of October they had perished utterly at the hands of the Seljuks; a heap of whitening bones also remained to testify to the later crusaders, when they passed in the spring of 1097, of the fate of the people's Crusade.

Meanwhile the knights had already begun to assemble in March 1096. In small bands, and by divers ways, they streamed gradually southward and eastward, in a steady flow, throughout 1096. But three large divisions, under three considerable leaders, were pre-eminent among the rest. Godfrey of Bouillon, with his brother Baldwin, led the crusaders of Lorraine along "the road of Charles the Great," through Hungary, to Constantinople, where he arrived on the 23rd of December. Raymund of Toulouse (the first prince to join the crusading movement) along with Bishop Adhemar, the papal commissary, led the Proven9als down the coast of Illyria, and then due east to Constantinople, arriving towards the end of April 1097. Bohemund of Otranto, the destined leader of the Crusade, with his nephew Tancred, led a fine force of Normans by sea to Durazzo, and thence by land to Constantinople, which he reached about the same time as Raymund. To the same great rendezvous other leaders also gathered, some of higher rank than Godfrey or Raymund or Bohemund, but none destined to exercise an equal influence on the fate of the Crusade. Hugh of Vermandois, younger brother of Philip I. of France, had reached Constantinople in November 1096, in a species of honourable captivity, and had done Alexius homage; Robert of Normandy and Stephen of Blois, to whom Urban II. had given St Peter's banner at Lucca, only arrived - the last of the crusaders - in May 1097 (their original companion in arms, Count Robert of Flanders, having left them to winter at Bari, and crossed to Constantinople before the end of 1096).

Thus was gathered at Constantinople, in the spring of 1 Ekkehard, Chronica, 214.

2 Later legend ascribed the origin of the First Crusade to the preaching of Peter the Hermit. The legend has been followed by modern historians; but in point of fact Peter is a figure of secondary importance. (See Peter The Hermit.) 1097, a great host, which Fulcher computes at 600,000 men (I. c. iv.), Urban II. at 300,000, and which was probably some 150,000 strong.' Before we follow this host into Asia, we may pause to inquire into the various factors which would determine its course, or condition its activity. On the Western side, and among the crusaders themselves, there were two factors of importance, already mentioned above - the aims of the adventurer prince, and the interests of the Italian merchant; while on the Eastern side there are again two - the policy of the Greeks, and the condition of the Mahommedan East. We have already seen that among the princes who joined the First Crusade there were some who were rather politiques than devots, and who aimed at the acquisition of temporal profit as well as of spiritual merit. Of these the type - and, it may almost be said, the inspirer of the rest - was Bohemund. From the first he had an Eastern principality in his mind's eye; and if we may judge from the follower of Bohemund who wrote the Gesta Francorum, there had already been some talk at Constantinople of Antioch as the seat of this principality. Bohemund's policy seems to have inspired Baldwin, the brother of Godfrey of Bouillon to emulation; on the one hand he strove to thwart the endeavours of Tancred, the nephew of Bohemund, to begin the foundation of the Eastern principality for his uncle by conquering Cilicia, and, on the other, he founded a principality for himself in Edessa. Raymond of Provence, the third and last of the great politiques of the First Crusade, was, like Baldwin, envious of Bohemund; and jealousy drove him first to attempt to wrest Antioch from Bohemund, and then to found a principality of Tripoli to the south of Antioch, which would check the growth of his power. The political motives of these three princes, and the interaction of their different policies, was thus a great factor in determining the course and the results of the First Crusade. The influence of the Italian towns did not make itself greatly felt till after the end of the First Crusade, when it made possible the foundation of a kingdom in Jerusalem, in addition to the three principalities established by Bohemund, Baldwin and Raymond; but during the course of the Crusade itself the Italian ships which hugged the shores of Syria were able to supply the crusaders with provisions and munition of war, and to render help in the sieges of Antioch and Jerusalem.4 Sea-power had thus some influence in determining the victory of the crusaders.

In the East the conditions were, on the whole, favourable to the crusaders. The one difficulty - and it was serious - was the attitude adopted by Alexius. Confronted by crusaders where he had asked for auxiliaries, Alexius had two alternative policies presented to his choice. He might, in the first place, have frankly admitted that the crusaders were independent allies, and treating them as equals, he might have waged war in concert with them, and divided the conquests achieved in the war. A boundary line might have been drawn somewhere to the N.W. of Antioch; and the crusaders might have been left to acquire what they could to the south and east of that line. Unhappily, clinging to the conviction that all the lands which the crusaders would traverse were the "lost provinces" of his empire, he induced the crusaders to do him homage, so that, whatever they conquered, they would conquer in his name, and whatever they held, they would hold by his grant and as his vassals. Thus Hugh of Vermandois became the man of Alexius in November 1096; Godfrey of Bouillon was induced, not without difficulty, to do homage in January 1097; and in April and May the other leaders, including Bohemund and the obstinate Raymond himself, followed his example. The policy of Alexius was destined to produce evil results, both for the Eastern empire and for the crusading movement. The West had already its grievances against the East: the Greek emperors had taken advantage of their protectorate of the Holy Places to lay charges Godfrey's army numbered some 30,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry (Rohricht, Erst. Kreuzz. 61): Urban II. reckons Bohemund's knights as 7000 in number (ibid. 71, n. 7).

The Genoese had been invited by Urban II. in September 1096 "to go with their gallies to Eastern parts in order to set free the path to the Lord's Sepulchre." on the pilgrims, against which the Papacy had already been forced to remonstrate; nor were the Italian towns, with the exception of favoured Venice, disposed to be friendly to the great monopolist city of Constantinople. The old dissension of the Eastern and Western Churches had blazed out afresh in 1054; and the policy of Alexius only added new rancours to an old grudge, which culminated in the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204. On the other hand, the success of the crusading movement was imperilled, both now and afterwards, by the jealousy of the Comneni. Always hostile to the principality, which Bohemund established in spite of his oath, they helped by their hostility to cause the loss of Edessa in 1144, and thus to hasten the disintegration of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Yet one must remember, in justice to Alexius, the gravity of the problem by which he was confronted; nor was the conduct of the crusaders themselves such that he could readily make them his brethren in arms.

The condition of Asia Minor and Syria in 1097 was almost altogether such as to favour the success of the crusaders. The Seljukian sultans had only achieved a military occupation of the country which they had conquered. There were Seljukian garrisons in towns like Nicaea and Antioch, ready to offer an obstinate resistance to the crusaders; and here and there in the country there were Seljukian armies, either cantoned or nomadic. But the inhabitants of the towns were often hostile to the garrisons, and over wide tracts of country there were no forces at all. Accordingly, when the crusaders had captured the town at Nicaea, and defeated the Seljukian field-army at Dorylaeum their way lay clear before them through Asia Minor. Not only so, but they could count, at the very least, on a benevolent neutrality from the native population; while from the Armenian principalities in the S.E. of Asia Minor, which survived unsubdued in the general deluge of Seljukian conquest, they could expect active assistance (the hope of which will explain the north-easterly line of march which they followed after leaving Heraclea). But the purely military character of the Seljukian occupation helped the crusaders in yet another way. Strong generals were needed in the separate divisions of the empire, and these, as has always been the case in Eastern empires, made themselves independent in their spheres of command, because there was no organization to keep them together under a single control. On the death of Malik Shah, the last of the great Seljukian emperors (1092), the empire dissolved. A new sultan, Barkiyaroq or Barkiarok, ruled in Bagdad (1094-1104); but in Asia Minor Kilij Arslan held sway as the independent sultan of Konia (Iconium), while the whole of Syria was also practically independent. Not only was Syria thus weakened by being detached from the body of the Seljukian empire; it was divided by dissensions within, and assailed by the Fatimite caliph of Egypt from without. In 1095 two brothers, Ridwan and Dekak, ruled in Aleppo and Damascus respectively; but they were at war with one another, and Yagi-sian, the ruler of Antioch, was a party to their dissensions. Ridwan and Yagi-sian were only stopped in an attack on Damascus by news of the approach of the crusaders, which led the latter to throw himself hastily into Antioch, in the autumn of 1097. Meanwhile the Fatimites were not slow to take advantage of these dissensions. A great religious difference divided the Fatimite caliph of Cairo, the head of the Shiite sect, from the Abbasid caliph of Bagdad, who was the head of the Sunnites. The difference may be compared to the dissension between the Greek and the Latin Churches; but it had perhaps more of the nature of a political difference. In any case, it hampered the Mahommedans as much as the jealousy between Alexius and the Latins hampered the progress of the Crusade. The crusading princes were well enough aware of the gulf which divided the caliph of Cairo from the Sunnite princes of Syria; and they sought by envoys to put themselves into connexion with him, hoping by his aid to gain Jerusalem (which was then ruled for the Turks by Sokman, the son of the amir Ortok). 1 But the caliph preferred to act for 1 Thus already on the First Crusade the path of negotiation is attempted simultaneously with the Holy War. On the Third himself, and took advantage of the wars of the Syrian princes, and of the terror inspired by the advance of the crusaders to conquer Jerusalem (August 1098). But though the leaders of the First Crusade did not succeed in utilizing the dissensions of the Mahommedans as fully as they desired, it still remains true that these dissensions very largely explain their success. It was the disunion of the Syrian amirs, and the division between the Abbasids and the Fatimites, that made possible the conquest of the Holy City and the foundation of the kingdom of Jerusalem. When a power arose in Mosul, about 1130, which was able to unify Syria - when, again, in the hands of Saladin, unified Syria was in turn united to Egypt - the cause of Latin Christianity in the East was doomed.

We are now in a position to follow the history of the First Crusade. By the beginning of May 10 9 7 the crusaders were crossing the Bosporus, and entering the dominions of Kilij Arslan. Their first operation was the siege of Nicaea, defended by a Seljuk garrison, but eventually captured, with the aid of Alexius, after a month's siege (June 18). Alexius took possession of the town; and though he rewarded the crusading princes richly, some discontent was excited by his action. After the capture of Nicaea, the field-army of Kilij Arslan had to be met. In a long and obstinate encounter, it was defeated at Dorylaeum (July 1); and the crusaders marched unmolested in a southeasterly direction to Heraclea. Here Tancred, followed by Baldwin, turned into Cilicia, and began to take possession of the Cilician towns, and especially of Tarsus - thus beginning, it would seem, the creation of the Norman principality of Antioch. The main army turned to the N.E., in the direction of Caesarea (in order to bring itself into touch with the Armenian princes of this district), and then marched southward again to Antioch. At Marash, half way between Caesarea and Antioch, Baldwin, who had meanwhile wrested Tarsus from Tancred, rejoined the ranks; but he soon left the main body again, and struck eastward towards Edessa, to found a principality there. At the end of October the crusaders came into position before Antioch, which was held by Yagi-sian, and began the siege of the city, which lasted from October 21, 1097, to June 3, 1098. The great figure in the siege was naturally Bohemund (who had also been the hero of Dorylaeum). He repelled attempts at relief made by Dekak (Dec. 31, 1097) and Ridwan (Feb. 9, 1098); he put the besiegers in touch with the Genoese ships lying in the harbour of St Simeon, the port of Antioch (March 1098) - a move which at once served to remedy the want of provisions from which the crusaders suffered, and secured materials for the building of castles, with which Bohemund sought - in the Norman fashion - to overawe the besieged city. But it was finally by the treachery of one of Yagi-sian's commanders, the amir Firuz, that Bohemund was able to effect its capture. The other leaders had, however, to promise him possession of the city, before he would bring his negotiations with Firuz to a conclusion; and the matter was so long protracted that an army of relief under Kerbogha of Mosul was only at a distance of three days' march, when the city was taken (June 3, 1098). The besiegers were no sooner in the city, than they were besieged in their turn by Kerbogha; and the twenty-five days which followed were the worst period of stress and strain which the crusaders had to encounter. Under the pressure of this strain "spiritualistic" phenomena began to appear. It was in the ranks of the Provencals, where the religiosity of Count Raymund seems to have extended to his followers, that these phenomena appeared; and they culminated in the discovery of the Holy Lance, which had pierced the side of the Saviour. The excitement communicated itself to the whole army; and the nervous strength which it gave enabled the crusaders to meet and defeat Crusade, and above all on the - Sixth, this path was still more seriously attempted. It is interesting, too, to notice the part which the laity already plays in directing the course of the Crusade. From the first the Crusade, however clerical in its conception, was largely secular in its conduct; and thus, somewhat paradoxically, a religious enterprise aided the growth of the secular motive, and contributed to the escape of the laity from that tendency towards a papal theocracy, which was evident in the pontificate of Gregory VII.

Kerbogha in the open (June 28), but not before many of their number, including even Count Stephen of Blois, had deserted and fled.

With the discovery of the Lance, which became as it were a Provençal asset, Count Raymund assumes a new importance. Mingled with the religiosity of his nature there was much obstinacy and self-seeking; and when Kerbogha was finally repelled, he began to dispute the possession of Antioch with Bohemund, pleading in excuse his oath to Alexius. The struggle lasted for some months, and helped to delay the further progress of the crusaders. Raymund, indeed, left Antioch in November, and moved S.E. to Marra; but his men still held two positions in Antioch, from which they were not dislodged by Bohemund till January 1099. Expelled from Antioch, the obstinate Raymund endeavoured to recompense himself in the south (where indeed he subsequently created the county of Tripoli); and from February to May 1099 he occupied himself with the siege of Arca, to the N.E. of Tripoli. It was during the siege of Arca that Peter Bartholomew, to whom the vision of the Holy Lance had first appeared, was subjected, with no definite result, to the ordeal of fire - the hard-headed Normans doubting the genuine character of any Provencal vision, the more when, as in this case, it turned to the political advantage of the Provencals. The siege was long protracted; the mass of the pilgrims were anxious to proceed to Jerusalem, and, as the altered tone of the author of the Gesta sufficiently indicates, thoroughly weary of the obstinate political bickerings of Raymund_and Bohemund. Here Godfrey of Bouillon finally came to the front, and placing himself at the head of the discontented pilgrims, he forced Raymund to accept the offers of the amir of Tripoli, to desist from the siege, and to march to Jerusalem (in the middle of May 1099). Bohemund remained in Antioch: the other leaders pressed forward, and following the coast route, arrived before Jerusalem in the beginning of June. After a little more than a month's siege, the city was finally captured (July 15). The slaughter was terrible; the blood of the conquered ran down the streets, until men splashed in blood as they rode. At nightfall, "sobbing for excess of joy," the crusaders came to the Sepulchre from their treading of the winepress, and put their blood-stained hands together in prayer. So, on that day of July, the First Crusade came to an end.

It remained to determine the future government of Jerusalem; and here the eternal problem of the relations of Church and State emerged. It might seem natural that the Holy City, conquered in a holy war by an army of which the pope had made a churchman, Bishop Adhemar, the leader, should be left to the government of the Church. But Adhemar had died in August 1098 (whence, in large part, the confusion and bickerings which followed in the end of 1098 and the beginning of 1099) nor were there any churchmen left of sufficient dignity or weight to secure the triumph of the ecclesiastical cause. In the meeting of the crusaders on the 22nd of July, some few voices were raised in support of the view that a "spiritual vicar" should first be chosen in the place of the late patriarch of Jerusalem (who had just died in Cyprus), before the election of any lay ruler was taken in hand. But the voices were not heard; and the princes proceeded at once to elect a lay ruler. Raymund of Provence refused to accept their nomination, nominally on the pious ground that he did not wish to reign where Christ had suffered on the cross; though one may suspect that the establishment of a principality in Tripoli - in which he had been interrupted by the pressure of the pilgrims - was still the first object of his ambition. The refusal of Raymund meant the choice of Godfrey of Bouillon, who had, as we have seen, become prominent since the siege of Arca; and Godfrey accordingly became - not king, but "advocate of the Holy Sepulchre," while a few days afterwards Arnulf, the chaplain of Robert of Normandy, and one of the sceptics in the matter of the Holy Lance, became "vicar" of the vacant patriarchate. Godfrey's first business was to repel an Egyptian attack, which he accomplished successfully at Ascalon, with the aid of the other crusaders (August 12). At the end of August the other crusaders returned,' and Godfrey was left with a small army of 2000 men, and the support of Tancred, now prince of Galilee, to rule in some four isolated districts - Jaffa, Jerusalem, Ramlah and Haifa. At the end of the year came Bohemund and Godfrey's brother Baldwin (now count of Edessa) on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The result of Bohemund's visit was new trouble for Godfrey. Bohemund procured the election of Dagobert, the archbishop of Pisa, to the vacant patriarchate, disliking Arnulf, and perhaps hoping to find in the new patriarch a political supporter. Bohemund and Godfrey together became Dagobert's vassals; and in the spring Godfrey even seems to have entered into an agreement with the patriarch to cede Jerusalem and Jaffa into his hands, in the event of acquiring other lands or towns, especially Cairo, or dying without direct heirs. When Godfrey died in July 1100 (after successful forays against the Mahommedans which took him as far as Damascus), it might seem as if a theocracy were after all to be established in Jerusalem, in spite of the events of 1099.

4. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem under the First Three Kings, 2 1100-1143. - The theocracy, however, was not destined to be established. Godfrey had died without direct heirs; but in far Edessa there was his brother Baldwin, ready to take his place. Dagobert had at first consented to the dying Godfrey's wish that Baldwin should be his successor; but when Godfrey died he saw an opportunity too precious to be missed, and opposed Baldwin, counting on the support of Bohemund, to whom he sent an appeal for assistance. 3 But a party in Jerusalem, headed by the late "vicar" Arnulf, opposed itself to the hierarchical pretensions of Dagobert and the Norman influence by which they were backed; and this party, representing the Lotharingian laity, carried the day. Baldwin was summoned from Edessa; and when he arrived, towards the end of the year, he was crowned king by Dagobert himself. Thus was founded, on Christmas day 1 ioo, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem; and thus was the possibility of a theocracy finally annihilated. A feudal kingdom of Frankish seigneurs was to be planted on the soil of Palestine, instead of a dominium temporale of the patriarch like that of the pope in central Italy. Nor were any great difficulties with the Church to hamper the growth of this kingdom. For two years, indeed, a struggle raged between Baldwin I. and Dagobert: Baldwin accused the patriarch of treachery, and attempted to force him to contribute to the defence of the kingdom. But in 1102 the struggle ceased with the deposition of the patriarch and the victory of the king; and though it was renewed for a time by the patriarch Stephen in the reign of Baldwin II. (1128-1130), the new struggle was of short duration, and was soon ended by Stephen's death.

The establishment of a kingdom in Jerusalem in i ioo was a blow, not only to the Church but to the Normans of Antioch. At the end of 1099 any contemporary observer must have believed that the capital of Latin Christianity in the East was destined to be Antioch. Antioch lay in one of the most fertile regions of the East; Bohemund was almost, if not quite, the greatest genius of his generation; and when he visited Jerusalem at the end of 1099, he led an army of 25,000 men - and those men, at any rate in large part, Normans. What could Godfrey avail against such a force? Yet the principality of Godfrey was destined to higher things than that of Bohemund. Jerusalem, like Rome, had the shadow of a mighty name to lend prestige to its ruler; and as residence in Rome was one great reason of the strength of the medieval papacy, so was 1 Before he left, Raymund had played in Jerusalem the same part of dog in the manger which he had also played at Antioch, and had given Godfrey considerable trouble. See the articles, Godfrey Of Bouillon and Raymund Of Toulouse.

2 For an account of the kings of Jerusalem see the articles on the five Baldwins,On the two Amalrics,on Fulk and John Of Brienne and on the Lusignan (family).

The genuineness of the letter (on which, by the way, depends the story of Godfrey's agreement with Dagobert) has been impeached by Prutz and Kugler, and doubted by Rohricht. It is accepted by von Sybel and Hagenmeyer.

iesidence in Jerusalem a reason for the ultimate supremacy of the Lotharingian kings. Jerusalem attracted the flow of pilgrims from the West as Antioch never could; and though the great majority of the pilgrims were only birds of passage, there were always many who stayed in the East. There was thus a steady immigration into the kingdom, to strengthen its armies and recruit with new blood the vigour of its inhabitants. Still more important perhaps was the fact that the ports of the kingdom attracted the Italian towns; and it was therefore to the kingdom that they lent the strength of their armies and the skill of their siege-artillery - in return, it is true, for concessions of privileges so considerable as to weaken the resources of the kingdom they helped to create. While Jerusalem possessed these advantages, Antioch was not without its defects. It had to meet - or perhaps it would be more true to say, it brought upon itself - the hostility of strong Mahommedan powers in the vicinity. As early as 1100 Bohemund was captured in battle by Danishmend of Sivas; and it was his captivity, depriving the patriarch as it did of Norman assistance, which allowed the uncontested accession of Baldwin I. Again, in 1104, the Normans, while attempting to capture Harran, were badly defeated on the river Balikh, near Rakka; and this defeat may be said to have been fatal to the chance of a great Norman principality.' But the hostility of Alexius, aided and abetted by the jealousy of Raymund of Toulouse, was almost equally fatal. Alexius claimed Antioch; was it not the old possession of his empire, and had not Bohemund done him homage? Raymund was ready to defend the claims of Alexius; was not Bohemund a successful rival? Thus it came about that Alexius and Raymund became allies; and by the aid of Alexius Raymund established, from 1102 onwards, the principality which, with the capture of Tripoli in 1109, became the principality of Tripoli, and barred the advance of Antioch to the south. Meanwhile the armies of Alexius not only prevented any farther advance to the N.W., but conquered the Cilician towns (1104). No wonder that Bohemund flung himself in revenge on the Eastern empire in 1 1 08 - only, however, to meet with a humiliating defeat at Durazzo.

Thus it was that Baldwin waxed while Bohemund waned. The growth of Baldwin's kingdom, as it was suggested above, owed more to the interests of Italian traders than it did to crusading zeal. In 1100, indeed, it might appear that a new Crusade from the West, which the capture of Antioch in 1098 had begun, and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 had finally set in motion, was destined to achieve great things for the nascent kingdom. Thousands had joined this new Crusade, which should deal the final blow to Mahommedanism: among the rest came the first of the troubadours, William IX., Count of Poitiers, to gather copy for his muse, and even some, like Stephen of Blois and Hugh of Vermandois, who had joined the First Crusade, but had failed to reach Jerusalem. The new crusaders cherished high plans; they would free Bohemund and capture Bagdad. But each of the three sections of their army was routed in turn in Asia Minor by the princes of Sivas, Aleppo and Harran, in the middle of I ror; and only a few escaped to report the crushing disaster. Baldwin I. had thus no assistance to expect from the West, save that of the Italian towns. From an early date Italian ships had followed the crusaders. There were Genoese ships in St Simeon's harbour in the spring of 1098 and at Jaffa in 1099; in 1099 Dagobert, the archbishop of Pisa, led a fleet from his city to the Holy Land; and in i ioo there came to Jaffa a Venetian fleet of 200 sail, whose leaders promised Venetian assistance in return for freedom from tolls and a third of each town they helped to conquer. But it was the Genoese who helped Baldwin I. most. The Venetians already enjoyed, since 1080, a favoured position in Constantinople, and had the less reason to find a new emporium in the East; while Pisa connected 1 Yet the north always continued to be more populous than the south; and the Latins maintained themselves in Antioch and Tripoli a century after the loss of Jerusalem. The land was richer in the north: it was protected by its connexion with Cyprus and Armenia: it was more remote from Egypt - the basis of Mahommedan power from the reign of Saladin onwards.

itself, through Dagobert, with Antioch 2 rather than with Jerusalem, and was further, in IIII, invested by Alexius with privileges, which made an outlet in the Holy Land no longer necessary. But the Genoese, who had helped with provisions and siege-tackle in the capture of Antioch and of Jerusalem, had both a stronger claim on the crusaders, and a greater interest in acquiring an eastern emporium. An alliance was accordingly struck in iioi (Fulcher II. c. vii.), by which the Genoese promised their assistance, in return for a third of all booty, a quarter in each town captured, and a grant of freedom from tolls. In this way Baldwin I. was able to take Arsuf and Caesarea in 1101 and Acre in 1104. But Genoese aid was given to others beside Baldwin (it enabled Raymund to capture Byblus in 1104, and his successor, William, to win Tripoli in 1109); while, on the other hand, Baldwin enjoyed other aid besides that of the Genoese. In IIIo, for example, he was enabled to capture Sidon by the aid of Sigurd of Norway, the Jorsalafari, who came to the Holy Land with a fleet of 55 ships, starting in 1107, and in a three years' "wandering," after the old Norse fashion, fighting the Moors in Spain, and fraternizing with the Normans in Sicily. At a later date, in the reign of Baldwin II., Venice also gave her aid to the kings of Jerusalem. Irritated by the concessions made by Alexius to the Pisans in II II, and furious at the revocation of her own privileges by John Comnenus in 1118, the republic naturally sought a new outlet in the Holy Land. A Venetian fleet of 1 20 sail came in 1123, and after aiding in the repulse of an attack, which the Egyptians had taken advantage of Baldwin II.'s captivity to deliver, they helped the regent Eustace to capture Tyre (1124), in return for considerable privileges - freedom from toils throughout the kingdom, a quarter in Jerusalem, baths and ovens in Acre, and in Tyre onethird of the city and its suburbs, with their own court of justice and their own church. After thus gaining a new footing in Tyre, the Venetians could afford to attack the islands of the Aegean as they returned, in revenge for the loss of their privileges in Constantinople; but the hostility between Venice and the Eastern empire was soon afterwards appeased, when John Comnenus restored the old privileges of the Venetians. The Venetians, however, maintained their position in Palestine; and their quarters remained, along with those of the Genoese, as privileged commercial franchises in an otherwise feudal state.

In this way the kingdom of Jerusalem expanded until it came to embrace a territory stretching along the coast from Beirut (captured in IIIo 3) to el-Arish on the confines of Egypt - a territory whose strength lay not in Judaea, like the ancient kingdom of David, but, somewhat paradoxically (though commercial motives explain the paradox), in Phoenicia and the land of the Philistines. With all its length, the territory had but little breadth: towards the north it was bounded by the amirate of Damascus; in the centre, it spread little, if at all, beyond the Jordan; and it was only in the south that it had any real extension. Here there were two considerable annexes. To the south of the Dead Sea stretched a tongue of land, reaching to Aila, at the head of the eastern arm of the Red Sea. This had been won by Baldwin I., by way of revenge for the attacks of the Egyptians on his kingdom; and here, as early as 1116, he had built the fort of Monreal, half way between Aila and the Dead Sea. To the east of the Dead Sea, again, lay a second strip of territory, in which the great fortress was Krak (Kerak) of the Desert, planted somewhere about 1140 by the royal butler, Paganus, in the reign of Fulk of Jerusalem. These extensions in the south and east had also, it is easy to see, a commercial motive. They gave the kingdom a connexion of its own with the Red Sea and its shipping; and they enabled the Franks to 2 Pisa naturally connected itself with Antioch, because Antioch was hostile to Constantinople, and Pisa cherished the same hostility, since Alexius I. had in 1080 given preferential treatment to Venice, the enemy of Pisa.

' This is the year in which the kingdom may be regarded as definitely founded. The period of conquest practically ends at this date, though isolated gains were afterwards made. The year iIto is additionally important by reason of the accession of Maudud al Mosul, which marks the beginning of a Moslem reaction.

control the routes of the caravans, especially the route from Damascus to Egypt and the Red Sea. Thus, it would appear, the whole of the expansion of the Latin kingdom (which may be said to have attained its height in 1131, at the death of Baldwin II.) may be shown to have been dictated, at any rate in large part, by economic motives; and thus, too, it would seem that two of the most powerful motives which sway the mind of man - the religious motive and the desire for gain - conspired to elevate the kingdom of Jerusalem (at once the country of Christ, and a natural centre of trade) to a position of supremacy in Latin Syria. During this process of growth the kingdom stood in relation to two sects of powers - the three Frankish principalities in northern Syria, and the Mahommedan powers both of the Euphrates and the Nile - whose action affected its growth and character.

Of the three Frankish principalities, Edessa, founded in 1098 by Baldwin I. himself, was a natural fief of Jerusalem. Baldwin de Burgh, the future Baldwin II., ruled in Edessa as the vassal of Baldwin I. from 1100 to 1118; and thereafter the county was held in succession by the two Joscelins of Tell-bashir until the conquest of Edessa by Zengi in 1144. Lying to the east of the Euphrates, at once in close contact with the Armenians, and in near proximity to the great route of trade which came up the Euphrates to Rakka, and thence diverged to Antioch and Damascus, the county of Edessa had an eventful if brief life. The county of Tripoli, the second of these principalities, had also come under the aegis of Jerusalem at an early date. Founded by Raymund of Toulouse, between 1102 and 1105, with the favour of Alexius and the alliance of the Genoese, it did not acquire its capital of Tripoli till 1109. Even before the conquest of Tripoli, there had been dissensions between William, the nephew and successor of Raymund, and Bertrand, Raymund's eldest son, which it had needed the interference of Baldwin I. to compose; and it was only by the aid of the king that the town of Tripoli had been taken. At an early date therefore the county of Tripoli had already come under the influence of the kingdom. Meanwhile the principality of Antioch, ruled by Tancred, after the departure of Bohemund (1104-1112), and then by Roger his kinsman (1112-1119), was, during the reign of Baldwin I., busily engaged in disputes both with its Christian neighbours at Edessa and Tripoli, and with the Mahommedan princes of Mardin and Mosul. On the death of Roger in 1119, the principality came under the regency of Baldwin II. of Jerusalem, until 1126, when Bohemund II. came of age. Bohemund had married a daughter of Baldwin; and on his death in 1130 Baldwin II. had once more become the guardian of Antioch. From his reign therefore Antioch may be regarded as a dependency of Jerusalem; and thus the end of Baldwin's reign (1131) may be said to mark the time when the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem stands complete, with its own boundaries stretching from Beirut in the north to el-Arish and Aila in the south, and with the three Frankish powers of the north admitting its suzerainty.

The Latin power thus established and organized in the East had to face in the north a number of Mahommedan amirs, in the south the caliph of Egypt. The disunion between the Mahommedans of northern Syria and the Fatimites of Egypt, and the political disintegration of the former, were both favourable to the success of the Franks; but they had nevertheless to maintain their ground vigorously both in the north and the south against almost incessant attacks. The hostility of the decadent caliphate of Cairo was the less dangerous; and though Baldwin I. had at the beginning of his reign to meet annual attacks from Egypt, by the end he had pushed his power to the Red Sea, and in the very year of his death (1118) he had penetrated along the north coast of Egypt as far as Farama (Pelusium). The plan of conquering Egypt had indeed presented itself to the Franks from the first, as it continued to attract them to the end; and it is significant that Godfrey himself, in 1100, promised Jerusalem to the patriarch, "as soon as he should have conquered some other great city, and especially Cairo." But the real menace to the Latin kingdom lay in northern Syria; and here a power was eventually destined to rise, which outstripped the kings of Jerusalem in the race for Cairo, and then - with the northern and southern boundaries of Jerusalem in its control - was able to crush the kingdom as it were between the two arms of a vice. Until 1127, however, the Mahommedans of northern Syria were disunited among themselves. The beginning of the i 2th century was the age of the atabegs (regents or stadtholders). The atabegs formed a number of dynasties, which displaced the descendants of the Seljukian amirs in their various principalities. These dynasties were founded by emancipated mamelukes, who had held high office at court and in camp under powerful amirs, and who, on their death, first became stadtholders for their descendants, and then usurped the throne of their masters. There was an atabeg dynasty in Damascus founded by Tughtigin (1103-1128): there was another to the N.E., that of the Ortokids,, represented by Sokman, who established himself at Kaifa in Diarbekr about i 101, and by his brother Ilghazi, who received Mardin from Sokman about 1108, and added to it Aleppo in 1117.1 But the greatest of the atabegs were those of Mosul on the Tigris - Maudud, who died in 1113; Aksunkur, his successor; and finally, greatest of all, Zengi himself, who ruled in Mosul from 1127 onwards.

Before the accession of Zengi, there had been constant fighting, which had led, however, to no definite result, between the various Mahommedan princes and the Franks of northern Syria. The constant pressure of Tancred of Antioch and Baldwin de Burgh of Edessa led to a series of retaliations between 11 io and 1115; Edessa was attacked in 1110, 1111, 1112 and 1114; and in 1113 Maudud of Mosul had even penetrated as far as the vicinity of Acre and Jerusalem. 2 But the dissensions of the Mahommedans made their attacks unavailing; in 1115, for instance, we find Antioch actually aided by Ilghazi and Tughtigin against Aksunkur of Mosul. Again, in the reign of Baldwin II.,. there was steady fighting in the north; Roger of Antioch was defeated by Ilghazi at Balat in 1119, and Baldwin II. himself was captured by Balak, the successor of Ilghazi, in 1123, but on the whole the Franks held the upper hand. Baldwin conquered part of the territory of Aleppo (in 1121 and the following years), and extorted a tribute from Damascus (1126). But when Zengi established himself in Mosul in 1127, the tide gradually began to turn. He created for himself a great and united principality, comprising not only Mosul, but also Aleppo,3 Harran, Nisibin and other districts; and in 1130, Alice, the widow of Bohemund II., sought his alliance in order to maintain herself in power at Antioch. In the beginning of the reign of Fulk of Jerusalem (1131-1143) the progress of Zengi was steady. He conquered in 1135 several fortresses in the east of the principality of Antioch, and in this year and the next pressed the count of Tripoli hard; while in 1137 he defeated Fulk at Barin, and forced the king to capitulate and surrender the town. If Fulk had been left alone to wage the struggle against Zengi, and if Zengi had enjoyed a clear field against the Franks, the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem might have come far sooner than it did. 4 But there were two powers which aided Fulk, and impeded the progress of Zengi - the amirate of Damascus and the emperors of Constantinople. The position of Damascus is a position of crucial importance from 1130 to 1.154. Lying between Mosul and Jerusalem, and important both strategically 1 Ilghazi died in 1122. His successor was Balak, who ruled from 1122 to 1124, and succeeded in capturing in 1123 Baldwin II. of Jerusalem. The union of Mardin and Aleppo under the sway of these two amirs, connecting as it did Mesopotamia with Syria, marks an important stage in the revival of Mahommedan power (Stevenson, Crusades in the East, p. 109).

2 Maudud (the brother of the sultan Mahommed) may be regarded as the first to begin the jihad, or counter-crusade, and his attack expedition of 1113, which carried him so far into the heart of Palestine, may be considered as the first act of the jihad (Stevenson, op. cit. pp. 87, 96).

3 Aleppo had passed from the rule of Timurtash (son of Ilghazi. and successor of Balak) into the possession of Aksunkur, 1125.

4 Stevenson, however, believes that Zengi was not animated by the idea of recovering Jerusalem. He thinks that his principal aim was simply the formation of a compact Mahommedan state, which was, indeed, in the issue destined to be the instrument of the jihad,. but was not so intended by Zengi (op. cit. pp. 123-124).

and from its position on the great route of commerce from the Euphrates to Egypt, Damascus became the arbiter of Syrian politics. During the greater part of the period between 1130 and 11 54 the policy of Damascus was guided by the vizier Muin eddin Anar, who ruled on behalf of the descendants of the atabeg Tughtigin. He saw the importance of finding an ally against the ambition of Zengi, who had already attacked Damascus in 1130. The natural ally was Jerusalem. As early as 1133 the alliance of the two powers had been concluded; and in 1140 the alliance was solemnly renewed between Fulk and the vizier. Henceforth this alliance was a dominant factor in politics. One of the great mistakes made by the Franks was the breach of the alliance in 1147 - a breach which was widened by the attack directed against Damascus during the Second Crusade; and the conquest of Damascus by Nureddin in 1154 was ultimately fatal to the Latin kingdom, removing as it did the one possible ally of the Franks, and opening the way to Egypt for the atabegs of Mosul.

The alliance of the emperors of Constantinople was of far more dubious value to the kings of Jerusalem. We have already seen that it was the theory of the Eastern emperors - a theory which logically followed from the homage of the crusaders to Alexiusthat the conquests of the crusaders belonged to their empire, and were held by the crusading princes as fiefs. We have seen that the action of Bohemund at Antioch was the negation of this theory, and that Alexius in consequence helped Raymund to establish himself in Tripoli as a thorn in the side of Bohemund, and sent an army and a fleet which wrested from the Normans the towns of Cilicia (1104). The defeat of Bohemund at Durazzo in 1108 had resulted in a treaty, which made Antioch a fief of Alexius; but Tancred (who in 1107 had recovered Cilicia from the Greeks) refused to fulfil the terms of the treaty, and Alexius (who attempted - but in vain - to induce Baldwin I. to join an alliance against Tancred in 1112) was forced to leave Antioch independent. Thus, although Alexius had been able, in the wake of the crusading armies, to recover a large belt of land round the whole coast of Asia Minor, - the interior remaining subject to the sultans of Konia (Iconium) and the princes of Sivas, - he left the territories to the east of the western boundary of Cilicia in the hands of the Latins when he died in 1118. Not for 20 years after his death did the Eastern empire make any attempt to gain Cilicia or wrest homage from Antioch. But in 1137 John Comnenus appeared, instigated by the opportunity of dissensions in Antioch, and received its long-denied homage, as well as that of Tripoli; while in the following year he entered into hostilities with Zengi, without, however, achieving any considerable result. In 1142 he returned again, anxious to create a principality in Cilicia and Antioch for his younger son Manuel. The people of Antioch refused to submit; a projected visit to Jerusalem, during which John was to unite with Fulk in a great alliance against the Moslem, fell through; and in the spring of 1143 the emperor died in Cilicia, with nothing accomplished. On the whole, the interference of the Comneni, if it checked Zengi for the moment in 1138, may be said to have ultimately weakened and distracted the Franks, and to have helped to cause the loss of Edessa (1144), which marks the turning-point in the history of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

5. Organization of the Kingdom

Before we turn to describe the Second Crusade, which the loss of Edessa provoked, and to trace the fall of the kingdom, which the Second Crusade rather hastened than hindered, we may pause at this point to consider the organization of the Frankish colonies in Syria. The first question which arises is that of the relation of the kingdom of Jerusalem to the three counties or principalities of Antioch, Tripoli and Edessa, which acknowledged their dependence upon it. The degree of this dependence was always a matter of dispute. The rights of the king of Jerusalem chiefly appear when there is a vacancy or a minority in one of the principalities, or when there is dissension either inside one of the principalities or between two of the princes. On the death of one of the princes without heirs of full age, the kings of Jerusalem were entitled to act as regents, as Baldwin II. did twice at Antioch, in 1119 and 1130; but the kings regarded this right of regency as a burden rather than a privilege, and it is indeed characteristic of the relation of the king to the three princes, that it imposes upon him duties without any corresponding rights. It is his duty to act as regent; it is his duty to compose the dissensions in the principality of Antioch, and to repress the violences of the prince towards his patriarch (1154); it is his duty to reconcile Antioch with Edessa, when the two fall to fighting. The princes on their side acted independently: if they joined the king with their armies, it was as equals doing a favour; and they sometimes refused to join until they were coerced. They made their own treaties with the Mahommedans, or attacked them in spite of the king's treaties; they dated their documents by the year of their own reign, and they had each their separate laws or assizes. There was, in a word, co-ordination rather than subordination; nor did the kings ever attempt to embark on a policy of centralization.

The relation of the king to his own barons within his immediate kingdom of Jerusalem is not unlike the relation of the king to the three princes. In Norman England the king insisted on his rights; in Frankish Jerusalem the barons insisted on his duties. The circumstances of the foundation of the kingdom explain its characteristics. As the crusaders advanced to Jerusalem, says Raymund of Agiles (c. xxxiii.), it was their rule that the first-corner had the right to each castle or town, provided that he hoisted his standard and planted a garrison there. The feudal nobility was thus the first to establish itself, and the king only came after its institution - the reverse of Norman England, where the king first conquered the country, and then plotted it out among his nobles. The predominance of the nobility in this way became as characteristic of feudalism in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem as the supremacy of the crown was of contemporary feudalism in England; and that predominance expressed itself in the position and powers of the high court, in which the ultimate sovereignty resided. The kingdom of Jerusalem consisted of a society of peers, in which the king might be Primus, but in which he was none the less subject to a punctilious law, regulating his position equally with that of every member of the society. In such a society the election of the head by the members may seem natural; and in the case of Godfrey and the first two Baldwins this was the case. But the conception of the equality of the king and his peers in the long run led to hereditary monarchy; for if the king held his kingdom as a fief, like other nobles, the laws of descent which applied to a fief applied to the kingdom, and those laws demanded heredity. Yet the high court, which decided all problems of descent, would naturally intervene if a problem of descent arose, as it frequently did, in the kingdom; and thus the barons had the right of deciding between different claimants, and also of formally "approving" each new successor to the throne. The conception of the kingdom as a fief not only subjected it to the jurisdiction of the high court; it involved the more disastrous result that the kingdom, like other fiefs, might be carried by an heiress to her husband; and the proximate causes of the collapse of the kingdom in 1187 depend on this fact and the dissensions which it occasioned.

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 AngloSaxon 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 ligece, attempted to reach the vassals of his vassals; he admitted arriere-vassaux to the haute tour, and encouraged them to carry their cases to it in the first instance. But this is the only attempt at that policy of immediatisation 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).' But the king had another force in addition to the feudal levy - a paid force of soudoyers, 2 holding fiefs, not of land, but of pay (fiefs de soudee). 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; 3 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 1 There are certain connexions and analogies between the kingdom of Sicily and that of Jerusalem during the twelfth century. In either case there is an importation of Western feudalism into a country originally possessed of Byzantine institutions, but affected by an Arabic occupation. The subject deserves investigation.

2 The holders of fiefs (sodeers) both held fiefs of land and received pay; the paid force of soudoyers only received pay. An instance of the latter is furnished by John of Margat, a vassal of the seignory of Arsuf. He has 200 bezants, along with a quantity of wheat, barley, lentils and oil; and in return he must march with four horses (Rey, Les Colonies franques en Syrie, p. 24).

For the history of the orders see the articles on the Templars; ST John Of Jerusalem, Knights Of; Knights, and the Teutonic Order. The Templars were founded about the year 1118 by a Burgundian knight, Hugh de Paganis; the Hospitallers sprang from a foundation in Jerusalem erected by merchants of Amalfi before the First Crusade, and were reorganized under Gerard le Puy, master until 1120. The Teutonic knights date from the Third Crusade.

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 4 - a body of unwritten legal 4 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. (I) 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 vo. i oOEri c 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.

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 arrierevassaux, 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 chaine 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 refs; 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 chaine, 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,' 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 ete 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 1 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).

- 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 I ioi 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.' 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 1 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.

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.' 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; 3 and abdut 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, 4 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 I 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 4 to a of the crop, besides a po