Kingdom of Jerusalem

The advocate

Drafted from Barber, The Crusader States (2012)formation

Jerusalem was stormed on 15 July 1099 and the question of what to do with it was open for a week. The city had been taken by an army with no head of state in it, under a papal legate who had died at Antioch, on behalf of a movement whose declared purpose had been reached and which had no constitutional theory for what came next.

The compromise was Godfrey of Bouillon, and the interest of it is the title. He refused to be crowned king in the city where Christ had worn a crown of thorns and took instead the style Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre — a term borrowed from the lay protectors of European monasteries, which made the state's principal a guardian of the church rather than a monarch over a territory. He died within a year. His brother Baldwin, who had spent that year making himself count of Edessa and had no such scruples, came south and was crowned king at Bethlehem on Christmas Day 1100.

The kingdom's claim rested on two separate assertions made together: that it had taken the country by force, and that the force had been sanctioned. The Franks went on making both, continuously, for two centuries.

It is worth noticing that the states on the other side of the frontier were arguing from the same premise in an incompatible vocabulary. The caliphate a few hundred kilometres away was an office held to be divinely constituted, and every ruler in Syria who mattered held his province by a grant from it. Two systems of sanctified authority were being asserted over the same ground in the same decades, and neither had any language in which to recognise the other.

What the kingdom actually consisted of took another twenty-five years to assemble. Jerusalem in 1099 was a city and a road to the coast. The ports came one at a time, mostly with Italian fleets that were paid for their help in quarters and trading privileges inside the towns they helped capture: Haifa, Arsuf, Caesarea, Acre in 1104, Tripoli, Beirut and Sidon by 1110, Tyre in 1124, Ascalon not until 1153. Those grants are the origin of the Venetian, Genoese and Pisan quarters that later ran the kingdom's economy and answered to nobody in it.

An army the king could not command

Drafted from Barber, The Crusader States (2012)expansion

The kingdom fought with two armies that had nothing in common except the enemy, and the second of them was an institution nobody had built before.

The first half is ordinary. Fiefs were held of the crown, knights owed service, and the kingdom's Latin manpower was permanently and dangerously small — a few hundred knights and a few thousand sergeants for a frontier of five hundred kilometres.

The second half is the Templars and the Hospitallers. They began as a guard for pilgrims and a hospital, and within fifty years they were something the medieval world had not previously produced: permanently embodied professional forces, recruited by vocation rather than by tenure, holding the great castles, and funded by estates spread across the whole of Latin Europe. They were the only troops in the kingdom who were always there, always trained and never went home when a campaigning season ended.

They also did not answer to the king. Both orders were exempt, reporting to the pope, and their masters sat in the Haute Cour as powers rather than as vassals. By the thirteenth century the crown could not fight without them and could not order them, and the record is full of the consequences — orders taking opposite sides in the kingdom's succession disputes, and in one case the Templars and Hospitallers supporting rival claimants in a civil war.

It is a mechanism the Islamic states around them knew intimately, having arrived at it from the opposite direction. A state that cannot raise enough soldiers through the ordinary structure of obligation builds a force outside it; the force turns out to be the only reliable army it has; and within a generation the force is an independent political actor its nominal masters cannot overrule. Samarra did it with purchased Turkish slaves, Ghazna and Cairo after it.

The Franks got there with free volunteers under religious vows, which is about as different a starting point as could be arranged, and ended in the same place.

The Templars apologise

Drafted from Munqidh, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades (Kitab al-I'tibar) (1929)peak

Usama ibn Munqidh was a Syrian nobleman of Shayzar who spent a long life among the Franks — fighting them, hunting with them, negotiating with them, visiting their cities — and wrote his memoirs in old age. He is the closest thing there is to an ordinary Muslim account of what the kingdom of Jerusalem was like to be in.

His general rule is worth stating first, because everything else follows from it: anyone freshly arrived from the Frankish lands is ruder in character than those who have become acclimatised and have had long association with the Muslims.

In the Aqsa

Whenever he was in Jerusalem, Usama went to pray at the Aqsa mosque. Next to it stood a smaller mosque the Franks had converted into a church. The Aqsa itself was occupied by the Templars, who were, he says, his friends, and who would clear the little adjoining mosque so that he could pray in it.

One day he went in, said the opening Allahu akbar, and stood to pray. A Frank rushed at him, seized him and turned his face east: this is the way thou shouldst pray. A group of Templars hurried over, took hold of the man and pulled him off. Usama started again. The same man, while the Templars were busy with something else, rushed at him a second time and turned his face east again with the same words. The Templars came back and threw him out, and then apologised: this is a stranger, newly arrived from the land of the Franks, who has never seen anyone pray except towards the east.

Usama's response is the most human sentence in his book. Thereupon I said to myself: I have had enough prayer. And he went out, and remained astonished ever afterwards at the man's face and his trembling and his fury at the sight of somebody praying towards Mecca.

What that scene contains

Read it slowly, because a great deal of the kingdom is in it.

An enemy nobleman walks into the third holiest site in Islam, then a Templar headquarters, expecting to pray there. The knights of a military order founded to kill men like him keep a mosque cleared for his use, and physically restrain a fellow Christian for interfering. They apologise, and they explain, and their explanation is that the offender has not been in the country long enough to know better.

None of that is tolerance in the modern sense and none of it is friendship between religions. It is what happens when two societies occupy the same ground for two generations: the people at the front stop being able to afford the purity of the people who have just arrived, and the newcomers become the problem. That is the mechanism the kingdom actually ran on, and it is invisible in the chronicles, which are written by and for the people who have just arrived.

The doctors

Usama's other famous story cuts the other way, and he tells it as comedy.

His uncle sent a Christian physician named Thabit to treat some sick people for a Frankish lord. Thabit was back in ten days. He had put a poultice on a knight's abscessed leg until it opened and healed, and put a woman with a nervous complaint on a diet to restore her humours. Then a Frankish physician arrived, said the man knew nothing, and asked the knight whether he would rather live with one leg or die with two. A strong knight was fetched with a sharp axe, the leg was laid on a block, and it took two blows; the marrow ran out and the patient died on the spot. The physician then diagnosed a devil in the woman's head, had it shaved, made a cruciform incision down to the skull and rubbed the bone with salt. She died instantly. Thabit asked whether his services were still required, was told they were not, and went home having learned of their medicine what he had not known before.

Then Usama does the thing that makes him a source and not a joke book. I have, however, witnessed a case of their medicine which was quite different from that — and he goes on to describe one that worked.

He is not writing propaganda. He is writing down what happened, including the parts that spoil the story, which is why he can be believed about the Templars.

One day in July

Drafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)contraction

On 3 and 4 July 1187 the kingdom marched its entire field army — every knight that could be raised, garrisons stripped from the castles, the treasure sent from England spent on hiring more — across a waterless plateau in high summer towards Tiberias, and Saladin destroyed it at the Horns of Hattin.

The disaster is not that a battle was lost. It is that there was nothing behind it. The army at Hattin was the kingdom, in the literal sense that the men holding every fortified place in the country were standing in it, and when it was gone the castles had nobody in them. Acre surrendered in four days. Jaffa, Sidon, Beirut, Ascalon, Nablus, Ramla followed. Jerusalem, defended by a population swollen with refugees and almost no soldiers, surrendered on 2 October after twelve days. By the end of the year the kingdom consisted of Tyre, which held only because Conrad of Montferrat happened to arrive by sea in the week it would otherwise have fallen.

Eighty-eight years of state-building ended inside five months. The kingdom did not.

What reassembled itself on the coast after the Third Crusade kept the name, kept the Assizes and the Haute Cour, kept the dynasty through Isabella and her successive husbands, and was recognised by everyone as the same kingdom in law. Historians commonly distinguish the first kingdom from the second, and the distinction is real: different capital, different territory, different economy, and a different balance of power between the crown, the military orders and the Italian communes. It is a distinction between two periods of one state, not between two states, and it is worth insisting on, because the kingdom of Jerusalem spent longer not holding Jerusalem than holding it.

Saladin's problem after 1187 was the mirror image. Saladin's problem after 1187 was that he had won the country and could not finish the Franks on the coast, because the sea was not his, and every crusade after his death arrived on it.

The treaty nobody wanted

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)contraction

Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187 and the kingdom did not end. It moved to the coast, held Acre for another century, and got the city back once — in 1229, by treaty, without a battle, under an emperor the pope had excommunicated.

A crusade with no army worth the name

Frederick II's crusade was unique in all its circumstances, Lane-Poole writes, and the list of what was wrong with it is long.

His forces were too weak to risk an engagement with the Saracen armies. His contemptuous treatment of John of Brienne had alienated the settled Christians of Syria. His quarrel with Rome cost him the churchmen. The Templars and Hospitallers sullenly refused to follow a leader under the curse of the Holy See. And, in a sentence worth pausing on, nobody in Syria seemed to care very much about recovering Jerusalem.

What he had instead was a diplomatic position, and it had been offered to him.

Why Cairo made the offer

Al-Kamil, sultan of Egypt, had a problem inside his own family: his brother al-Mu'azzam in Damascus, suspected of using the exhaustion after Damietta and his own war record to shake off Egyptian authority over Saladin's empire.

Alarmed at this, al-Kamil sent an embassy to Frederick — approaching him specifically as the sovereign of the Muslims of Sicily — offering him the kingdom of Jerusalem in exchange for his support. The bishop of Palermo went to Cairo in return and costly presents were exchanged.

Frederick was on unusually good terms with Muslims, and it was noticed. The pope called him a follower of Muhammad. His published correspondence with the philosopher Ibn Sab'in, and the metaphysical arguments he liked to draw al-Kamil's envoys into after he arrived, point to what Lane-Poole calls emancipated views — the kind of views that took less distinguished men to the stake. An Arab historian's verdict is quoted directly: the emperor was the most excellent among the kings of the Franks, devoted to science, philosophy and medicine, and well-disposed towards Muslims. Twenty years later Joinville found that being Frederick's kinsman was the best passport a Frank could carry among the Mamluks.

Then al-Mu'azzam died in the winter of 1227 and the danger that had prompted the offer largely went away. That Frederick still got the treaty is the measure of the diplomacy.

The terms

Signed 11 February 1229 and sworn a week later. Lane-Poole calls it the most remarkable agreement ever signed between a Christian and a Muslim power before the European treaties with the Ottomans.

Egypt surrendered Jerusalem — not to be fortified — with Bethlehem, Nazareth and the pilgrim road to Jaffa and on to Acre, into the emperor's absolute possession, reserving the haram with the Dome of the Rock for the exclusive use of unarmed Muslims. All Christian prisoners were released, including survivors of the Children's Crusade.

In return Frederick undertook to defend the sultan against all enemies, even Christians — and guaranteed that Antioch, Tripoli and the other northern Syrian principalities would receive no assistance from any outside power.

The Latin states of the north were signed away, by a Christian emperor, as consideration in a contract with Cairo. Ten and a half years.

Everybody's objection

Both sets of zealots were appalled, and the papal party's complaint was precise: Frederick had bargained with the infidels instead of killing them. The prince of Antioch and the military orders holding castles in the north bitterly resented the clause cutting them off from Europe, and read it — plausibly — as revenge for having refused to follow him. Muslims regarded the whole transaction as a shameful betrayal of Islam.

Frederick entered Jerusalem within the month, enthroned himself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and put the crown on his own head, because no churchman would.

The next day the archbishop of Caesarea placed the Holy City under interdict. Pilgrims who had walked across the world to reach it stood in the streets saying that the place where Jesus suffered and was buried had been banned by a pope, and then hurried after the emperor to Acre.

What it says about the kingdom

The recovery held for fifteen years and Jerusalem was lost again in 1244, this time for good.

But the manner of the recovery is the real information. By the thirteenth century the kingdom was not a conquest state and could not act like one. It was a coastal polity with a legal claim, embedded in a Levantine system where the decisive resources were treaties, dynastic quarrels in Cairo and Damascus, and the ability to guarantee somebody else's frontier.

Frederick understood that and got the city. It cost him the support of every constituency he had, and it cost the northern principalities their access to Europe. The kingdom of Jerusalem spent its last century being defended by exactly these means, and finally lost because there was nobody left in Cairo who needed anything from it.

The kingdom at Acre

Drafted from Barber, The Crusader States (2012)end

For a century after 1191 the kingdom of Jerusalem was a coastal strip governed from Acre, and it did not much resemble the thing it was named after.

Its money was trade. The Italian communes — Venetian, Genoese, Pisan — held quarters in the ports with their own courts, consuls, weights and fleets, and the customs of Acre were worth more to the crown than the agricultural revenue of what territory remained. It also meant the kingdom contained three sovereign commercial powers whose wars with each other it could not stop: the War of Saint Sabas in the 1250s was fought inside Acre between Venice and Genoa, with the military orders taking sides, while the Mamluks were consolidating Egypt.

Its kings were increasingly absent. The crown passed to the Hohenstaufen and then, by the Haute Cour's own judgement, to the Lusignans of Cyprus, and by the last decades the king of Jerusalem was normally to be found on Cyprus. And the rule for who inherited is genuinely hard to state. The crown was hereditary; it passed four times through women to their husbands; and every one of those transfers had to be accepted by an assembly of barons who argued the law of it at length and in public. Jerusalem produced the most elaborate constitutional literature of any Frankish state precisely because its succession was never settled enough to stop being argued about.

Jerusalem itself was held again from 1229 to 1244 — obtained by Frederick II from al-Kamil by treaty, undefended and demilitarised, in a settlement so unwelcome to both sides' clergy that the emperor crowned himself in an excommunicate's silence and the city fell to Khwarazmian mercenaries fifteen years later without a real siege. The court never moved back.

The end came in 1291. Al-Ashraf Khalil brought siege artillery from Damascus and Baalbek and took Acre in six weeks; Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Tortosa were abandoned within weeks, most without being attacked. Nothing succeeded the kingdom and nothing had preceded it: it was founded by an expedition from outside the region altogether, inherited by nobody, and ended by the state next door.

The title outlived the state by six hundred years, carried by the Lusignan kings of Cyprus and afterwards claimed by the houses of Savoy, Naples, Lorraine and Habsburg — down to the twentieth century, long after anyone believed it meant a country. What those claims were worth is a question about heraldry rather than about states, and the answer changes depending on which century is asking.

The debate of the world

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)afterlife

The king had already left. He had got away to Cyprus in the early days of the siege of Acre, and the grand master of the Hospital and a crowd of other fugitives followed him.

Sixty thousand Christians were still in the city when it fell, and their choices were slavery or the sword. The Templars and the people who had taken refuge with them made the best end: they held out in their fortress until it was undermined, and went down in the ruins along with a large number of the men storming it.

The demolition

What followed was not a conquest of the coast but its dismantling.

Acre was stormed, sacked and burnt, its towers thrown down and its fortifications levelled. A town rose on the site later; the Acre of the crusading century was gone. Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and the rest were taken or surrendered within weeks, mostly without a fight, and all of them except Beirut were demolished and their inhabitants killed or enslaved.

The reasoning was strategic and entirely deliberate. A fortified port on that coast was a place a European fleet could land at and hold, and the Mamluk state had decided there would not be any. It cost them the Levantine harbours as well, which is a large price paid on purpose.

Lane-Poole's phrase for what ended is worth keeping: the debate of the world was closed.

The victor's procession

Khalil entered Damascus with a crowd of captives and a display of Christian skulls on his spearheads.

Then he did something that says more about the period than the skulls do. He had the old Abbasid caliph brought out of his quiet retreat in the citadel of Cairo and made him preach the holy war in the mosque three times, and held a service at his own father's tomb. He announced that he would conquer Asia and the land of the Romans until his rule ran from sunrise to sunset, and went home.

The caliph in that sentence is the powerless one of Cairo, kept for exactly this: a man with no soldiers, produced in public to say that what had happened was lawful.

What survived

The title survived, and nothing else did.

The kings of Jerusalem went on being kings of Jerusalem from Cyprus, and after the Lusignans the claim was picked up by the houses of Savoy, Naples, Lorraine and Habsburg, and was still being included in royal styles in the twentieth century, when it had been six hundred years since anyone holding it had governed so much as a village in Palestine.

The kingdom itself had existed for a hundred and ninety-two years, held its capital for eighty-eight of them, and spent the remaining hundred and four being named after a city it did not have.