Jerusalem Becomes a Kingdom

  Barely a year after the capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, the man elected by the crusade leadership to remain behind and defend it was dead. Godfrey was succeeded by his elder brother, Baldwin of Boulogne, a man of a decidedly different character -- but not without his virtues as his record would show.

 

Baldwin, for a start, was not prepared to be a mere ‘Protector of the Holy Sepulcher;’ he wanted a crown — of gold. On Christmas Day 1100, Daimbert crowned Baldwin King of Jerusalem in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and with this act the Kingdom of Jerusalem came into being. Baldwin’s new kingdom, however, still consisted only of Jerusalem and its hinterland, including Bethlehem, along with a narrow, insecure corridor to the coast at Jaffa. It also still had only about 300 knights and at most 2,000 Frankish soldiers to defend it.

When Baldwin I died eighteen years later, he bequeathed a kingdom that stretched across the Jordan and from Beirut to Gaza, with only Tyre and Ascalon still in Muslim hands. In the north it bordered not a Muslim state, but the newly established crusader county of Tripoli. Much of this expansion was made possible by the support of the Italian maritime powers, who repeatedly sent fleets to the Eastern Mediterranean which aided in the capture of the coastal cities in exchange for receiving trading privileges in the newly acquired territories. 

The Kingdom of Jerusalem captured Arsuf and Caesarea in 1101 and Tortosa and Jubail in 1102, all with Genoese support. Two years later the Genoese enabled Baldwin to take the vitally important coastal city of Acre. The following year the siege of Tripoli commenced with Genoese and Provencal maritime support; the city fell four years later (1109). Both the Pisans and Genoese assisted in the capture of Beirut in 1110, while Sidon fell to King Baldwin I aided by a Norwegian fleet under the command of King Sigurd. Notably, at Arsuf, Acre, and Tripoli, the cities surrendered on terms and the Saracen inhabitants were allowed to withdraw unmolested. Meanwhile, Galilee and Samaria were conquered and occupied by the Franks, pushing the borders of Frankish control across the River Jordan and south along the western shore of the Dead Sea.

Just as important as these offensive victories, however, were King Baldwin’s successful defense of his kingdom from tenacious attempts by Saracen powers to destroy it. The Egyptians sent a second army to regain Jerusalem in September 1101. At Ramla on 7 September, despite mustering only 260 knights and less than 1,000 infantry, Baldwin was able to put the Egyptians to flight — at the cost of eighty knights and many more infantry. The following year Baldwin again defeated the Egyptians, this time at Jaffa in May. Almost simultaneously, on 14 April, the Count of Toulouse routed a Seljuk army from Homs and Damascus near Tortosa, while tenaciously seeking to establish what would become the County of Tripoli. When in 1105 the Fatimids sent a fourth army to drive the Franks out of Jerusalem, Baldwin was able to meet them with a force of 500 knights and 2,000 infantry supported for the first time by mounted archers (i.e. native cavalry) in unspecified numbers. With this force, Baldwin decisively defeated the Egyptians on 27 August 1105 in what became known as the 2^nd Battle of Ramla. A Frankish defeat at any of these battles would almost certainly have ended in the obliteration of the still nascent Kingdom of Jerusalem.

How then were these victories and the related expansion possible? Where did the replacement for the dead of the First Battle of Ramla come from? How could Baldwin field almost twice as many knights in 1105 as in 1101?

The key was settlement. Baldwin actively encouraged Christian settlement in any territory he could wrest from Muslim control. Significantly, this included inviting Syrian Christians to relocate from Muslim-controlled to Christian-controlled territory as well as welcoming Christian settlers from Western Europe. Vitally important to the viability of the kingdom, Baldwin established baronies which could be parceled out as fiefs to maintain a feudal army of knights and sergeants. Even lands granted to, for example the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, were fiefs owing sergeants to the army of the king. What this means is that the land was tilled by free tenants who owed feudal service as sergeants, while the profits of the agricultural activity was split between the tenant and the ecclesiastical landlord.

It was also during Baldwin I’s reign that both the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller were established in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1118, both institutions were still too tiny to play a significant role in the defense of the realm, but seeds had been planted that would soon bear extremely valuable military fruit.

Baldwin I died on 2 April 1118 without issue. He left behind a kingdom, not just a city, that was economically viable due to the conquest of both coastal ports and inland areas. It was a kingdom with sufficient land to create fiefs and to assure fundamental self-sufficiency in foodstuffs such as grains, wine and oil. Nevertheless, the situation was still precarious. Letters to the West from this period stress that civilians (particularly unarmed clerics) were afraid to travel between cities without an escort. Many pilgrims still fell victim to Saracen ambushes. This was the background against which the Knights Templar were founded as a band of knights dedicated to the protection of pilgrims. The Israeli historian Ronnie Ellenblum characterizes this as a period in which the ‘threat was continuous,’ adding the crucial point ‘and mutual.’[i] The crusader kingdom-in-the-making was both vulnerable and aggressive. The smaller, Saracen coastal city-states and inland garrisons felt as threatened and unsettled by Frankish presence as the Franks felt about the larger Muslim powers in Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo.

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[i] Ellenblum, Ronnie. Crusader Castles and Modern Histories. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007] 151.

This entry is an excerpt from Dr. Schrader's comprehensive study of the crusader states.

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The Creation of "Outremer"

 With the capture of Jerusalem, the crusaders' mission was accomplished -- and most wanted nothing more than to return home. Yet, while the immediate threat had been eliminated, Jerusalem remained surrounded by enemies. If the sacrifices of the three-year campaign across two thousand miles were not to be in vain, Christian control of Jerusalem needed to be institutionalized. Yet none of the men who had fought their way to Jerusalem by their own strength on their own resources and watched four out of every five of their comrades die were prepared to hand the Holy City over to the Byzantine Emperor. Thus was born the idea of an independent state — not yet called a kingdom — that would defend Jerusalem for Christendom. It was to be a part of the Latin Christian world yet beyond the sea and so it became known as "Outremer."

The bulk of the men who survived the First Crusade returned whence they had come, their vows absolved by the restoration of Jerusalem to Christian rule. Contemporaries claim that the surrounding cities had more Saracen troops in their garrison individually than the Franks had altogether. Fulcher of Chartes, chaplain to Baldwin of Boulogne and a witness of both the crusade and the early years of the crusader states, claims that in 1101 the Kingdom of Jerusalem could muster just 300 knights and an equal number of foot soldiers. If these numbers are correct, only six per cent of the knights who joined the First Crusade and less than one third of those who had survived to capture Jerusalem were still living in the East at the start of the twelfth century.

On the other hand, land grants to Western settlers in twenty-one villages north of Jerusalem in 1099 suggests that substantially more commoners remained in the East. Since the poor were more likely to lack the resources to return home, this is not surprising. An estimated 2,000 common crusaders, or roughly four per cent of all those who set out but fully twenty per cent of those who made it to Jerusalem, settled in the Levant at the end of the First Crusade.

Clearly, 300 knights and 2,000 foot-soldiers did not constitute a military force adequate for the defence of Jerusalem against an enemy assault or siege. However, the situation of these remaining Franks was far less precarious than it may seem. Data mining and archaeological surveys conducted at the end of the twentieth century have demonstrated that Jerusalem’s hinterland was overwhelmingly Christian. Thus, these few Franks were not trying to rule over a population of resentful Muslims, but rather surrounded and supported by the native population, a pattern that was recorded across Armenia and in Bethlehem.

Control of Jerusalem and its surrounding countryside, on the other hand, was insufficient to secure the Holy City for Christendom in the long run. Jerusalem needed at least one secure port through which pilgrims and reinforcements could pass, and it needed sufficient fighting men to withstand a determined attack by the Fatimids or Seljuks. The fact that a second wave of crusaders, nearly as numerous as the First Crusade, disintegrated after various defeats while crossing Asia Minor 1100-1101 underlined the severe difficulty of reinforcing the Frankish outpost in Jerusalem by land. If Jerusalem were to remain under Frankish control, it had to have troops of its own. Yet backbone of Christian armies in the early twelfth century consisted of vassals who gave military service in exchange for land — and land was exactly what the Frankish leadership in Jerusalem at the start of the twelfth-century did not have.

Furthermore, the raison d’être of the new political entity was the defense of the most important shrines of Christendom. This was reflected in the fact that Godfrey de Bouillon refused the title of ‘king’ on the grounds that it would be inappropriate for a mere man to ‘wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn a crown of thorns.’ Godfrey chose instead the title ‘Protector of the Holy Sepulchre.’  Yet while the Holy Sepulchre was without doubt the most important of Christian shrines, it was not the only significant religious site in the region. Because Christ had be born, lived and died in the region, almost every town in Palestine, starting with Bethlehem and Nazareth, could claim a connection to some event in the New Testament. For this reason, the entire region was known to Christians simply as ‘the Holy Land.’

This posed four major problems for the few Franks left in possession of this sacred legacy. First, many of the important sites were still under Muslim control and were ‘crying out’ — at least in the eyes of the crusaders — for liberation. Second, even those now in the hands of the Franks had been neglected if not actively damaged during the long years of Muslim rule. Many churches and monasteries were in ruins or in desperate need of repairs and renovation. These sites needed massive investment to ensure both physical and spiritual integrity, the latter in the form of clerical manpower. Yet neither money nor clergy was available in 1100. Third, pilgrims from across Christendom could be expected to flood to these sites and the few Franks remaining had to create the infrastructure and secure the environment to receive them. Last but not least, Jerusalem was so holy that many churchmen believed it should not be subject to any secular authority, but rather remain an ecclesiastical state.

The last issue proved the most pressing. Had the respected papal legate Adhemar still been alive at the capture of Jerusalem, he might have succeeded in asserting church authority over the inchoate political entity then in the making. Certainly, when in late 1099 a new legate, Daimbert Archbishop of Pisa, arrived to take Ademar’s place, he attempted to assert church authority, including obtaining promises from Godfrey about a position of dominance in the future. Godfrey’s untimely death on 18 July 1100, however, dramatically altered the political situation. Godfrey’s knights seized control of the most important fortification in Jerusalem, the Tower of David, and held it in the name of Godfrey’s younger brother Baldwin de Boulogne until the later could arrive. Their action foiled Daimbert’s attempt to establish himself as the ruler of the emerging state — and underlined the brutal reality that Jerusalem belonged not to the holy but to those best able to defend it.

This entry is an excerpt from Dr. Schrader's comprehensive study of the crusader states.

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The Sack of Jerusalem 1099 Revisited

 On July 15, 1099, after a month long siege, the crusaders successfully broke through the defenses of the Egyptian garrison, crossed over the walls of Jerusalem and entered the Holy City. What followed has gone down in history as an atrocity of biblical proportions. Allegedly, it  besmirched the name of Christendom for all eternity. It is used to this day as a shorthand for all things vile and unjustified. It is cited as an excuse for centuries of jihad. It has been called a justification for the attacks of 9/11, and is even trotted out as evidence that Christianity itself is not a religion of peace.

Let's look at what happened -- and put it in context.

After two years of marching and fighting across 2,000 miles, only one in five of the men who had set out on a great armed pilgrimage to liberate Jerusalem from Saracen occupation reached Jerusalem. That is, four out of five crusaders had already given their lives through disease, starvation, cold, wounds or in combat. These roughly 10,000 survivors, of whom roughly 1,200 were knights, were insufficient to surround the city and cut it off from reinforcement and supply. In short, a siege which forced the city to surrender on terms, was virtually impossible.

Furthermore, a large Egyptian relief army was already on the way -- and the Egyptian garrison in Jerusalem knew about it. They had, therefore, no incentive to negotiate terms. They were not short of water, food or other supplies. Reinforcements were already on the way. All they had to do was wait two or three months, and then they could help obliterate the pathetic force camped outside the walls.

The only option available to the crusaders was to assault the city and hope to take it before the Egyptian field army fell on them. A first attempt on June 13 failed miserably with high casualties due to lack of ladders and siege engines. By a stroke of luck, shortly afterwards six Genoese and English vessels arrived in Jaffa carrying building materials. These and the ships themselves were used to construct siege engines outside Jerusalem. With great difficulty and in the face of fierce opposition, the siege engines were rolled into position against the walls of Jerusalem on July 14, 1099, but it was not until the following morning that troops under the leadership of Godfrey de Bouillon gained a foothold on the northern wall. His men then fought their way into the city and opened one of the gates from the inside, allowing the rest of the crusaders to flood in.

According to exultant Christian accounts, a massacre followed. The Gesta Francorum speaks, for example, of a slaughter so great that "our men waded in blood up to their ankles." Raymond of Aguilers is even more over the top writing: "men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins."

Yet the very absurdity of such a claim -- a claim ludicrous in its impossibility -- ought to alert even the most gullible reader that the account is not factual. Medieval readers, unlike modern readers, recognized that the image is taken directly from the biblical account of the apocalypse and was not intended to be taken literally. In short, the Christian accounts of the sack of Jerusalem do not even attempt to be factual.

On the one hand, these accounts, mostly written by clerics who had accompanied the crusaders, were written to make their patrons (the crusade's leaders) the heroes of the decisive conflict of their age. They were consciously reinforcing the self-image of men who saw themselves as the soldiers of God delivering victory over the forces of evil. In short, they eulogies of the victors -- a medieval literary form that had little relationship to reality in any context. On the other hand, the Christian accounts of the capture of Jerusalem were also intended to be symbolic. Their purpose was to conjure up images of Armageddon and suggest that the Saracens had met their Armageddon at Jerusalem on July 15, 1099.

In other words, the Christian sources are next to worthless in attempting to discover what really happened in Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. So let's turn to the Muslim sources. The most striking thing about these is that none of these are contemporaneous, or even nearly contemporaneous, with the event. That is, an assault and sack was was allegedly exceptionally, horrifically, unfathomably dreadful, unusual and unprecedented, didn't even rate a mention. There were appeals to the Caliph and other Muslim leaders to assist in reconquering Jerusalem, but these stressed the fact that Jerusalem had changed hands, that it was now controlled by "infidels" and "non-believers." The fact that Jerusalem was lost excited outrage, but not the manner in which it fell. Not a word was wasted on that.

The first Muslim accounts devoted to any kind of comprehensive treatment of the crusades were not written until half a century later and, like their Christian counterparts, are more religious tracts than histories. Nial Christie in his excellent study Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity's Wars in the Middle East 1095-1382, From the Islamic Sources concludes: "...later writers, many of whom were religious scholars, used their works as a means by which to teach moral lessons....[I]t is difficult to tell to what extent facts have been skewed to fit the writer's agenda...." (1)

In consequence, modern scholars of the crusades have looked beyond the chronicles of both the crusaders and their enemies to find other clues to what happened. For example, Jewish records from Alexandria provide proof that Jews from Jerusalem were ransomed. Dead men are not ransomed, so all allegations that the entire Jewish population of Jerusalem was massacred by the crusaders are false. There are also records of ransom negotiations for Muslim prisoners. So ends the legend that "all Muslims" were slaughtered by the crusaders. As for native Christians, these were expelled from Jerusalem before the crusaders even invested the city because the Fatimid garrison feared the native Christians might aid the crusaders. Based on the fragmentary evidence of these other sources, serious crusades scholars nowadays estimate that between 3,000 and 5,000 people (including the Egyptian garrison, i.e. troops) were slaughtered by the crusaders in their initial assault.(2)

The slaughter of three to five thousand people certainly qualifies as a massacre and an atrocity in the twenty-first century. Yet before we let our outrage carry us away, it is useful to put things into perspective. First, the right of a victorious army to put the inhabitants of a city taken by storm "to the sword" is as old as the Iliad -- if not older. Second, this was hardly the first time the Holy City of Jerusalem had been subjected to such a fate. In 614, for example, the Persians captured Jerusalem from the Byzantines after a 21 day siege and then massacred 26,500 men and enslaved 35,000 women and children.  In 1077, the emir Atsiz ibn Uvaq slaughtered "the entire population" of Jerusalem as punishment for an insurrection. Furthermore, in the thirty years before the crusaders' arrival, Jerusalem changed hands violently four times between Seljuks and Fatimids.

Other points of comparison are the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. This was characterized not only by slaughter and plunder, but by the wanton destruction of priceless cultural monuments and treasures including mosques, palaces, hospitals and no less than thirty-six libraries. The Mongols are said to have turned books into shoes. The number of civilians slaughtered is estimated at 100,000 -- and possibly twice that -- leaving the city shattered and depopulated for generations.

Likewise, the savage sack of Antioch by Baybars provides perspective on the crusader assault on Jerusalem in 1099. In 1268, the Mamluk general ordered the gates of the city closed while his troops slaughtered every living thing inside -- and then he sent a letter bragging about his brutality to the Prince of Antioch, who had not been present. Below an excerpt:

The churches themselves were razed from the face of the earth, every house met with disaster, the dead were piled up on the seashore like islands of corpses…You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves…your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money… your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars…your palace lying unrecognizable…. (3)

The scale of destruction shocked the world, including the Muslim world, and was recognized at the time as the worst massacre in crusading history. It too destroyed the economic prosperity of the city, turning it into a ghost-town for generations to come. To this day it has not recovered its prominence as a cultural, intellectual, political and economic center. 

The slaughter of the garrison and civilians during the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 besmirches the reputation of crusaders, but it was not unprecedented, exceptional or extraordinary either in its scale or violence.

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(1) Niall Christie, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity's Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, From the Isalmic Sources [New York: Routledge, 2014] 21.

(2) Thomas F. Madden, The Concise History of the Crusades [New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014] 32. Also Andrew Jotischky, Crusading and the Crusader States [New York: Pearson Longman, 2004] 60.

(3) Baybars letter translated by Francesco Gabrieli in Arab Historians of the Crusades [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957] 311.

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