County of Tripoli

A county before a city

Drafted from Barber, The Crusader States (2012)formation

Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles, count of Toulouse, was the richest and most senior of the leaders of the First Crusade and the one who came out of it with nothing. Bohemond had Antioch. Baldwin had Edessa and then Jerusalem. Godfrey had been chosen at Jerusalem over Raymond's own candidacy. In 1102 he set about manufacturing a principality for himself out of the one stretch of the Syrian coast nobody else had claimed.

Tripoli was a wealthy Fatimid port on a peninsula with a fleet able to supply it from the sea, and it did not fall to sieges. Raymond's answer was to build a castle on the hill overlooking the city — Mount Pilgrim, which the Arabic sources call Qal'at Sanjil after him, and which is still standing — and to sit in it, taking the county's countryside and cutting the city's landward revenue while he waited. He waited three years and died in 1105. The city held out four more.

So the county begins in 1102 and not in 1109. For seven years there was a lordship with a fortress, a territory, a revenue and a succession dispute of its own, and no capital. The state existed before it contained the city it is named after.

Tripoli fell in July 1109 to a Genoese fleet and an army brought north by Baldwin I of Jerusalem, and the king then did the thing that defines this county. Raymond's son Bertrand and his cousin William-Jordan were both claiming the inheritance; Baldwin arbitrated between them, divided the conquest, and took their homage for it. The county got a capital and an overlord in the same week, and the second is the more consequential.

The one that admitted a superior

Drafted from Barber, The Crusader States (2012)expansion

The four Frankish states in the Levant are usually described as a system with Jerusalem at its head. In law they were nothing of the kind. Antioch held that it owed homage to nobody and spent sixty years arguing that with the Byzantine emperors rather than with the Franks; Edessa was ruled by men who kept leaving to become kings of Jerusalem, which is a connection of personnel and not of tenure. Jerusalem's primacy over either was a matter of prestige and of who had troops to lend.

Tripoli is the exception. It was the one Frankish state in Syria that admitted a Frankish superior.

The homage taken in 1109 was not ceremonial. Kings of Jerusalem arbitrated Tripoli's succession disputes, and counts of Tripoli served in the kingdom's armies and its politics as members of it. Raymond III, the county's greatest ruler, was twice regent of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and in 1187 he was the man who argued in council against marching out to relieve Tiberias — the advice that, had it been taken, would have kept the field army in being. He was overruled, rode with the army anyway, cut his way out of the encirclement at Hattin and died within months.

The county itself was narrow: a hundred and eighty kilometres of coast with the Lebanon mountains immediately behind it, and its inland frontier was never far from the sea. What that country did contain was castles, and two of them belonged to the military orders — Krak des Chevaliers to the Hospitallers, Tortosa to the Templars. The county fought, like the kingdom, with a feudal levy and a standing professional force it did not command. In a county this small, orders holding the two strongest fortresses in it were not a supplement to the count's power. For much of the thirteenth century they were more of it than he was.

A third of the Biqa'

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)peak

Tripoli fell in July 1109. Within a year the county had done something that says more about how the Frankish states actually functioned than any battle does.

Ibn al-Qalanisi records it from the other side. Having finished with Tripoli and put the city and its districts in order, the Franks marched on Rafaniya. The ruler of Damascus moved out to protect it and camped at Homs facing them. The Franks could not invest the town.

So they wrote to each other.

The treaty

The correspondence produced a settlement, and the terms are worth reading in full because they are so unlike a holy war.

The Franks were to receive one third of the produce of the Biqa' — the great valley between the Lebanon ranges, which neither side could hold outright and both could raid. Two castles were to be handed over to them. In exchange they were to stop plundering and ravaging in the provinces, and both parties were to settle the boundaries of their respective territories and keep the peace.

A third of a harvest is not a frontier. It is a shared revenue over shared ground, agreed in writing between a Muslim ruler and a Frankish one ten years into the crusades, because the alternative — an annual campaign to decide who got the crop — cost both of them more than the crop was worth.

What a condominium implies

Arrangements of this kind are all over Qalanisi's chronicle and almost absent from the Latin ones, which is itself informative about who wrote what down.

They imply a great deal. Somebody had to assess the harvest and divide it. Somebody had to collect the Frankish third and hand it over. There had to be people who could move between the two jurisdictions, count sacks, argue about weights and be trusted enough by both sides to do it. None of those people appear in the chronicles of either side, and the whole structure of coexistence in twelfth-century Syria depended on them.

It also implies that a county of a hundred and eighty kilometres of coast, with a Latin population that could be counted in thousands, was never going to live by conquest. Tripoli's actual strategy for most of its existence was to hold its castles, keep the ports open, take a share of what the interior produced, and avoid provoking Damascus into a serious campaign.

That worked for a hundred and eighty-seven years, which is longer than the county of Edessa managed by fighting and longer than Antioch managed by being the strongest of the four.

The count who knew Saladin

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

Raymond III of Tripoli spent the 1180s trying to keep the Latin East alive by negotiating with the man who was going to destroy it, and the reason he failed had nothing to do with Saladin.

Taken, and released

He first appears in Lane-Poole's narrative as a prisoner. At Marj Uyun in June 1179 Saladin beat the king of Jerusalem and took seventy knights, and the list of them is the whole leadership of the crusader states: the masters of the Temple and the Hospital, Balian and Baldwin of Ibelin, Hugh of Tiberias — and Raymond of Tripoli.

Captivity in this world was a negotiation rather than an ending. Men were ransomed, and while they waited they talked. Whatever Raymond learned in those months, he came out of it as the one Frankish magnate who dealt with Saladin as a person rather than as a condition of the weather.

The regent's truce

By the mid-1180s Raymond was regent of the kingdom of Jerusalem for the infant Baldwin V, which made the count of Tripoli the effective head of the Latin East.

He used the position to make a four-year peace with Saladin — and Lane-Poole's phrasing about why he could is the important part: Raymond was personally on terms of friendship if not actual alliance with him.

That is an extraordinary thing to be able to write about a crusader prince, and it was the county's best asset. Tripoli was a long thin coastal strip with the Assassins and the Muslim interior behind it and no strategic depth at all. A negotiated frontier was not a compromise for such a state; it was the only version of it that could exist.

Why it did not hold

Lane-Poole is clear that the truce was hollow from the start, and the reasons had nothing to do with either signatory.

All Europe was arming. Knights from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees were taking the cross. The two military orders were burning to strike a blow for the faith as ardently as Saladin was. A settlement that suited the people who lived in Syria was intolerable to the people who kept arriving in it.

And there was Reynald of Châtillon at Kerak, who had already sent ships into the Red Sea to seize pilgrim vessels and had gone into Arabia with the declared intention of destroying the Prophet's tomb at Medina and the Kaaba at Mecca. That expedition was cut to pieces by the Egyptian fleet. Saladin twice besieged his fortress and twice failed to take it.

Then, for the third time and in open breach of the treaty Raymond had negotiated, Reynald fell on a peaceful merchant caravan passing his stronghold — rich, and rumoured to include one of Saladin's sisters.

Lane-Poole's verdict on that is four words: the provocation was ample.

What it cost the county

The war that followed took Jerusalem and broke the field army of the Latin East at Hattin, and Raymond was in that battle too.

Tripoli survived it, because coastal cities with harbours could be relieved by sea and inland kingdoms could not. But what survived was the strip and not the state. The county kept its ports and lost the argument that had kept it alive: that a small Frankish power could deal with its Muslim neighbours as neighbours.

For the hundred years remaining to it, Tripoli would go on making treaties. It would never again have a count who could make one because the other man trusted him.

What Qalawun did to the city

Drafted from Barber, The Crusader States (2012)end

After Antioch fell in 1268 the northern Frankish position was one county, held by the man who had been prince of Antioch, with Latakia as an outlying remnant until 1287 and the Mamluk state to the south deciding when to finish it.

The county spent those years quarrelling with itself. Bohemond VII fought a war against the Templars and against the commune of Tripoli, a body of townsmen and Italian merchants who at one point ran the city in defiance of him. When he died in 1287 without children the succession went to his sister Lucia, who was in Apulia, and the commune preferred a republic under Genoese protection. The dispute was still live when the Mamluk army arrived.

Qalawun besieged Tripoli in March 1289 and took it after a month. What happened then is the part to be exact about. The city was not occupied. It was destroyed — the population killed or enslaved, the buildings pulled down, and the peninsula on which the old city stood abandoned. A new Tripoli was built inland at the foot of Raymond's castle, and that is where the city is today. Removing a port from the map is a deliberate policy and the Mamluks applied it along that coast: a harbour the Franks could not use was a harbour no crusade could land in.

Antioch 1268, Tripoli 1289, Acre 1291. The Frankish states of the Levant had been there a hundred and ninety-one years when that sequence began, and twenty-three years later there were none, and the same state did all three.

The county's end closes the northern half of that story two years before the southern half. The last count of Tripoli died a hundred kilometres away in Cyprus, and what remained of the four states — the titles, the law books, the surviving families, the crown of Jerusalem itself — went to the island and stayed there.

What continued from Cyprus was a kingdom and a claim. The county of Tripoli made no claim to anything, and nothing continued from it at all.

The death of a signatory

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

The Mamluk sultans did not break their treaties with the Frankish states so much as read them narrowly.

Lane-Poole's summary of Qalawun's method is blunt: his treaties were valid only so long as he found them convenient, and his oath was no more sacred than Baybars'. The mechanics were tidier than that makes them sound, and worse.

In 1285 he fell on the Hospitallers' great fortress of Marqab, in spite of a ten-year engagement with them, and took it because it was unprepared. The count of Tripoli was then made to surrender Maraqiya on the coast, a place whose position made it proof against a siege from the land. The lady of Tyre bought ten years of paper peace by handing over half her revenues and undertaking never to repair her fortifications. Armenia bought a truce with a million dirhams a year, the release of every Muslim prisoner, and a promise to abandon its own defences.

Then Latakia was seized in 1287 in open defiance of the standing treaty with Tripoli.

The doctrine

And then Bohemond VII died, and the legal position changed, because the death of a signatory was held at that point to void a treaty.

That is the sentence to sit with. The agreement protecting a state did not survive the man who signed it; a ruler's death cancelled his country's peace. Any Frankish lord in Syria in the 1280s was therefore governing a place whose security expired with him, negotiating with a power that would honour the terms exactly as long as it wanted to and had a legal theory ready for when it did not.

In 1289 Tripoli was besieged, sapped and stormed. The men were put to the sword, the women and children enslaved, and the city burnt.

What was actually destroyed

The peninsula the old city stood on was abandoned and never rebuilt. Tripoli today is inland, at the foot of the castle Raymond of Saint-Gilles built to besiege it in 1103.

The destruction was policy rather than fury. A fortified harbour on that coast was somewhere a European fleet could land and hold, so the Mamluks were removing the harbours — theirs as much as anyone's. They gave up the Levantine ports on purpose, and the coast stayed poor for centuries as a result.

Two years later the same thing was done at Acre, and the Frankish century in Syria was finished.

The county had lasted a hundred and eighty-seven years, longer than any of the others, on castles, sea trade and a share of somebody else's harvest. It ended in a month because the man whose name was on the paper had died.