Kingdom of Jerusalem

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of Jerusalem was born on a specific summer day: the 15th of July, 1099, when Crusader armies stormed the holy city after a weeks-long siege. Within a week, a council convened in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to choose a ruler for a state that had never existed before. Two men were front-runners. One was richer, one was more popular. The choice they made that day set in motion nearly two centuries of conquest, survival, civil war, and slow collapse. How did a kingdom founded in a single city manage to hold on for almost 200 years? How did it survive the military genius of Saladin, the scheming of Holy Roman Emperors, the commercial warfare of rival Italian merchant fleets, and waves of nomadic invaders from central Asia? And why, in the end, could it not be saved?

• 2. Foundation and Its Founders

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  Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse, was the wealthier and more powerful of the two men who stood before the council on the 22nd of July, 1099. He refused the crown, reportedly to demonstrate piety, perhaps calculating that the other nobles would insist on his election. They did not. Godfrey of Bouillon accepted the position without hesitation. According to the chronicler William of Tyre, writing when Godfrey had become a legendary figure, Godfrey refused to wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn a crown of thorns. He took instead the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, defender of the Holy Sepulchre, though some sources suggest he used the more ambiguous term princeps.

  The new kingdom needed to prove itself immediately. The Egyptian army under vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah marched to reclaim what the Fatimid Caliphate had recently taken from the Artuqids, only to lose it to the Crusaders. On the 12th of August, Godfrey's forces defeated them at the Battle of Ascalon. But the personal rivalry between Godfrey and Raymond prevented the Crusaders from actually capturing Ascalon, a fortress that would haunt the kingdom's southern frontier for decades.

  Godfrey's reign was short. He died of illness in 1100, having expanded the kingdom's borders by capturing Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, and other cities, and having laid the groundwork for feudal governance by establishing the Principality of Galilee and the County of Jaffa. It was left to his brother Baldwin of Boulogne to outmanoeuvre the papal legate Daimbert of Pisa, who had hoped to turn Jerusalem into a theocratic state under Rome. Baldwin claimed Jerusalem for himself as King of the Latins, settling for a coronation in Bethlehem rather than Jerusalem itself. The path toward a secular monarchy was open.

• 3. Who Lived in the Kingdom

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  The traveller Benjamin of Tudela passed through the kingdom around 1170 and recorded what he saw: 1,000 Samaritans in Nablus, 200 in Caesarea, 300 in Ascalon. His figures set a lower bound of 1,500 Samaritans, since the contemporary Samaritan chronicle Tolidah mentioned additional communities in Gaza and Acre. His estimate for the total Jewish population across 14 cities in the kingdom came to 1,200 people, making the Samaritan population larger than the Jewish at that moment in history, perhaps uniquely so.

  The Crusaders themselves were a minority elite, drawn overwhelmingly from the Kingdom of France. French was the language of the ruling class; Greek and Arabic were spoken by the native Christians and Muslims who made up the majority of the population. Native Christians included Greek and Syriac Orthodox communities, both of whom maintained their own hierarchies even as the Latin patriarch was installed above them. The Catholics considered Eastern Christians schismatics; the feeling was mutual.

  Sunni and Shi'a Muslims lived under Crusader rule as a marginalized lower class, alongside small numbers of Jews and Samaritans. Over time, the Crusader elite absorbed local customs and developed what their contemporaries sometimes described as an "oriental" quality, distinct from the Europeans who periodically arrived from the West and found their cousins in the East uncomfortably at home in a foreign land.

• 4. The Kingdom's Fragile Alliances

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  Historian Thomas Madden credited Baldwin I with transforming a tenuous arrangement into a solid feudal state. Baldwin I built the kingdom's port access by capturing Acre in 1104, Beirut in 1110, and Sidon in 1111, aided by the Italian city-states and adventurers including King Sigurd I of Norway. His marriages tell a parallel story of strategic necessity and its costs. He married an Armenian noblewoman, traditionally called Arda, to secure political support in Edessa. When he no longer needed that support in Jerusalem, he set her aside. He then bigamously married Adelaide del Vasto, regent of Sicily, in 1113, securing Sicilian naval backing. When he was convinced to divorce her in 1117, her son Roger II of Sicily never forgave him and withheld Sicilian naval support from Jerusalem for decades.

  Baldwin II, who came to power in 1118, concluded the first commercial treaty with Venice, the Pactum Warmundi, in 1124. The Venetian naval support that followed helped capture Tyre that same year. His reign also saw the Council of Nablus in 1120, which produced the earliest surviving written laws of the kingdom, and the founding of the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar, the military orders that would become central to the kingdom's defence.

  The Byzantines were partners of a different kind. Baldwin III formalized the relationship by marrying Theodora Comnena, a niece of Emperor Manuel I Comnenus. William of Tyre recorded the hope that Manuel would be able to relieve from his own abundance the distress under which the realm was suffering. When Manuel died in 1180, the kingdom lost what one account called its most powerful ally. Three years later, the new ruler Andronikos Comnenus instigated a massacre of Italian merchants in Constantinople that permanently soured Western relations with Byzantium, severing what had been one of the kingdom's most important connections.

• 5. Baldwin IV, Saladin, and the Leper King

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  In October 1174, a regent named Miles of Plancy was assassinated. It is highly probable, as the sources suggest, that Count Raymond III of Tripoli or his supporters arranged the killing. Raymond then took the regency for the young king Baldwin IV, who suffered from leprosy. Despite his illness, Baldwin reached his majority in 1176 and no longer needed a regent. He defeated Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard in September 1177, though he was greatly outnumbered and had to rely on a levee-en-masse. The direct military decisions that day were made by Raynald of Chatillon, but Baldwin's presence despite his condition was described as inspirational.

  The kingdom was increasingly absorbed by a dynastic struggle. On one side stood Baldwin's mother Agnes of Courtenay and recent European arrivals who favoured aggressive war with Saladin. On the other stood Raymond III and the kingdom's established nobility, who preferred cautious co-existence. Historians including Marshall W. Baldwin, Steven Runciman, and Hans E. Mayer championed this framework. Peter W. Edbury later argued the division was not between native barons and newcomers but between the king's maternal and paternal kin.

  Raynald of Chatillon's raids complicated everything. He raided Arabia in the direction of Medina at the end of 1181. In December 1182, he launched a naval expedition on the Red Sea that reached as far south as Rabigh before being defeated. Two of his men were taken to Mecca to be publicly executed. Bernard Hamilton has argued that these expeditions were shrewd strategy aimed at damaging Saladin's prestige, but they also kept breaking the truces that gave the kingdom breathing room.

  In 1183, an unprecedented general tax was levied across the kingdom, one of the first of its kind in medieval Europe, to pay for larger armies. Baldwin was by then blind and crippled, carried on a litter. Yet he rallied to relieve the siege of Kerak when Saladin attacked during Isabella's wedding in October 1183, and the siege was lifted by December. He died in May 1185. He had held his kingdom together under conditions that would have broken most rulers.

• 6. Hattin and the Fall

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  On the 4th of July 1187, the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed at the Battle of Hattin. Raynald of Chatillon was executed by Saladin personally. Guy of Lusignan was imprisoned in Damascus. Raymond of Tripoli, Balian of Ibelin, and Reginald of Sidon escaped. Within months, Saladin had overrun the entire kingdom.

  Only the port of Tyre held out, defended by Conrad of Montferrat, who had arrived from Constantinople almost by coincidence just in time. The population of the fallen kingdom, swollen with refugees, was allowed to flee to Tyre, Tripoli, or Egypt. Those who could not pay for their freedom were sold into slavery. Those who could pay were often robbed by Christians and Muslims alike on the road into exile.

  The Third Crusade arrived in 1189, led by Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned before reaching the Holy Land. Guy of Lusignan, refused entry to Tyre by Conrad, began besieging Acre in 1189. During the two-year siege, Patriarch Heraclius, Queen Sibylla, and her daughters all died of disease. With Sibylla dead in 1190, Guy had no legal claim to the throne, and the succession fell to her half-sister Isabella.

  Richard defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf and the Battle of Jaffa in 1191, recovering most of the coast, but Jerusalem itself remained out of reach. Conrad of Montferrat was unanimously elected king in April 1192 and was murdered by the Hashshashin only days later. Eight days after that, the pregnant Isabella was married to Henry II of Champagne. The crusade ended with the Treaty of Ramla in 1192, under which Saladin permitted Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem, and the crusaders sailed home. The first Kingdom of Jerusalem was over. Its successor, based in Acre, would endure for nearly another century.

• 7. Frederick II and the Diplomacy of the Sixth Crusade

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  In September 1228, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II arrived in the East on the Sixth Crusade, excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX before he even set sail. He claimed the regency of the kingdom in the name of his infant son Conrad IV and immediately clashed with the native nobility of Outremer. At Limassol, he demanded that John of Ibelin surrender the regency of Cyprus and his lordship of Beirut. John argued Frederick had no legal authority for either demand and refused. Frederick imprisoned John's sons as hostages.

  Frederick's diplomatic achievement was nonetheless remarkable. Without any significant military campaign, he negotiated a ten-year truce with the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil that restored Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and several surrounding castles to Christian control in February 1229. The terms also guaranteed freedom of worship for Jerusalem's Muslim inhabitants. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, Gerald of Lausanne, placed the city under interdict in response. In March, Frederick crowned himself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, though because of his excommunication and the interdict, Jerusalem was never truly reincorporated into the kingdom, which continued to be governed from Acre.

  When Frederick left the Holy Land in 1229, the citizens of Acre pelted him with offal. Back in Italy, Pope Gregory IX had used his excommunication as a pretext to invade his Italian territories, with Frederick's own former father-in-law John of Brienne commanding the papal army. The civil war that Frederick's presence had triggered in the kingdom, known as the War of the Lombards, continued for years after his departure, pitting the Ibelin family and their Genoese allies against Frederick's representative Richard Filangieri.

• 8. The Final Century and the Fall of Acre

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  After the Treaty of Ramla, the Kingdom of Jerusalem spent its last century clinging to the Syrian coastline, controlling a thin strip of port cities including Jaffa, Arsuf, Caesarea, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut. It was repeatedly rocked by internal warfare, most spectacularly the War of Saint Sabas, which began in 1256 as a commercial dispute between Venetian and Genoese merchant colonies over possession of the monastery of Saint Sabas in Acre. The naval battle in June 1258 was won by Venice, and the Genoese fled to Tyre. The war spread to Tripoli and Antioch as well.

  The Mongols arrived in the Near East during the same period. They sacked Baghdad in 1258 and destroyed Aleppo and Damascus in 1260, eliminating both the Abbasid caliphate and the last remnants of the Ayyubid dynasty. Some Mongol commanders were Nestorian Christians, including the general Kitbuqa. The nobles of Acre refused to submit regardless. When the forces of Julian of Sidon killed Kitbuqa's nephew, Kitbuqa sacked Sidon in retaliation. The Mamluks of Egypt, having secured permission to advance through Frankish territory, defeated the Mongols and went on to become the dominant power in the region.

  The Mamluk sultans Baibars, who reigned from 1260 to 1277, and al-Ashraf Khalil, who reigned from 1290 to 1293, then systematically reconquered what remained. When Acre fell in 1291, the Kingdom of Jerusalem ended. The Italian maritime republics, whose naval power and financial resources had sustained the kingdom for generations, could not prevent it. Khalil's destruction of Acre closed the chapter on what had been, for nearly two centuries, one of the most contested pieces of land in the medieval world.