A History of the Crusades-Vol 2 (29 page)

South of Ibelin the direct road from Ascalon to
Jerusalem was guarded by the castle of Blanchegarde, on the hill called by the
Arabs Tel as-Safiya, the shining mound. Its custodian, Arnulf, became one of
the richest and most powerful barons of the realm.
The third castle
was built at Bethgibelin at the village that the Crusaders wrongly identified
with Beersheba. It commanded the road from Ascalon to Hebron; and its maintenance
was entrusted to the Hospitallers. These fortifications were not complete
enough to prevent all raids from Ascalon. In 1141 the Egyptians broke through
and defeated a small Crusader force on the plain of Sharon. But they could hold
up any serious attack from the south on Jerusalem, and were centres for local
administration.

At the same time Fulk took steps to bring the
country east and south of the Dead Sea under stricter control. The seigneurie
of Montreal, with its castle in an oasis in the Idumaean hills, had given to
the Franks a loose command of the caravan-routes leading from Egypt to Arabia
and to Syria; but Moslem caravans still passed unscathed along the roads, and
raiders from the desert were still able to break through into Judaea. At the
time of Fulk’s accession the lord of Montreal and Oultrejourdain had been Roman
of Le Puy, whom Baldwin I had enfeoffed about the year 1115. But Roman had
supported Hugh of Le Puiset against the King, who therefore, in about 1132,
dispossessed and disinherited his son, and gave the fief to Pagan the Butler,
one of the high officials of his Court. Pagan was a vigorous administrator who
tried to establish a tighter control over the large area that he governed. He
seems to have succeeded in policing the country to the south of the Dead Sea;
but in 1139, when Fulk was engaged in Gilead, a band of Moslems managed to
cross the Jordan close to its junction with the Dead Sea and to raid Judaea,
where they lured to its destruction by the tactics of a feigned retreat a
company of Templar knights sent against them. It was probably to control the
north as well as the south end of the Dead Sea that Pagan moved his
headquarters from Montreal in Idumaea to Moab. There, in 1142, on a hill called
by the chroniclers Petra Deserti, the Stone of the Desert, he built with the
King’s approval a great fortress known as Kerak of Moab. It was superbly
situated for dominating the only practicable roads from Egypt and western
Arabia into Syria, and it was not too far from the fords of the lower Jordan.
Baldwin I had already established a look-out post down on the shore of the Gulf
of Akaba, at Elyn or Aila. Pagan installed a stronger garrison there and at the
Fort of the Valley of Moses, by the ancient Petra. These castles, with Montreal
and Kerak, gave the lord of Oultrejourdain the mastery of the lands of Idumaea
and Moab, and their rich cornfields and the saltpans by the Dead Sea, though
there was no serious Frankish colonization there and the Bedouin tribes
continued their old nomad life in the barren districts, merely paying
occasional tribute to the Franks.

1143: Queen
Melisende’s Foundations

The internal security of the realm improved
during Fulk’s reign. At the time of his accession the road between Jaffa and
Jerusalem was still unsafe because of the bandits who not only molested
pilgrims but also interrupted the food-supply to the capital. In 1133, while
the King was absent in the north, the Patriarch William organized a campaign
against the bandits and constructed a castle called Chastel Ernaut, near Beit
Nuba, where the road from Lydda climbs into the hills. Its erection made it
easier for the authorities to police the road; and after the fortification of
the Egyptian frontier travellers seldom met with trouble on their journey from
the coast.

Of the government of the kingdom during Fulk’s
later years we hear little. Once Hugh of Le Puiset’s revolt had been crushed
and the Queen’s desire for vengeance had been allayed, the barons supported the
Crown with perfect loyalty. With the Church of Jerusalem Fulk’s relations were
consistently good. The Patriarch William of Messines, who had crowned him and
who was to survive him, remained a faithful and deferential friend. As she grew
older, Queen Melisende took to pious works, though her chief foundation was
intended for the greater glory of her family. She was devoted to her sisters.
Alice became Princess of Antioch; Hodierna was now Countess of Tripoli; but for
the youngest, Joveta, who had spent a year of her childhood as a hostage with
the Moslems, there was no suitable husband to be found. She had entered
religion and became a nun at the Convent of St Anne in Jerusalem. The Queen in
1143 bought from the Holy Sepulchre, in exchange for estates near Hebron, the
village of Bethany; and there she built a convent in honour of Saint Lazarus
and his sisters Martha and Mary, endowing it with Jericho and all its orchards
and surrounding farms, and fortifying it with a tower. Lest her motive should
be too clearly apparent she appointed as its first abbess an excellent but
elderly and moribund nun, who tactfully died a few months later. The convent
then dutifully elected the twenty-four-year-old Joveta as Abbess. Joveta in her
dual role as princess of the blood royal and abbess of Palestine’s richest
convent occupied a distinguished and venerable position for the rest of her
long life.

This was the most lavish of Melisende’s
charitable endowments; but she persuaded her husband to make several grants of
land to the Holy Sepulchre, and she continued to found religious houses on a
generous scale throughout her widowhood. She was also responsible for improving
relations with the Jacobite and Armenian Churches. Before the Crusaders’
capture of Jerusalem the Jacobites had fled in a body to Egypt. When they
returned they found that the estates of their church in Palestine had been
given to a Frankish knight, Gauffier. In 1103 Gauffier was captured by the
Egyptians, and the Jacobites recovered their lands. But in 1137 Gauffier, whom
everyone thought dead, returned from his captivity and claimed his property.
Owing to the direct intervention of the Queen, the Jacobites were allowed to
remain in possession, after paying Gauffier three hundred besants as a
compensation. In 1140 we find the Armenian Catholicus attending a synod of the
Latin Church there. Melisende also gave endowments to the Orthodox Abbey of St
Sabas.

1143:
Death
of King Fulk

Fulk’s commercial policy was a continuation of
his predecessors’. He honoured his obligations to the Italian cities, who now
controlled the export trade of the country. But he refused to give any one the
monopoly; and in 1136 he made a treaty with the merchants of Marseilles,
promising to give four hundred besants a year, drawn from the revenues of
Jaffa, for the maintenance of their establishment there.

In the autumn of 1143 the Court was at Acre,
enjoying the lull that Zengi’s retreat from Damascus had afforded. On 7
November the Queen desired to go for a picnic. As the royal party rode out into
the country a hare was flushed, and the King galloped off in pursuit of it.
Suddenly his horse stumbled and Fulk was thrown off; and his heavy saddle
struck him on the head. They carried him back unconscious and with ghastly
head-wounds to Acre. There, three days later, he died. He had been a good king
for the realm of Jerusalem, but not a great king nor a leader of the Franks in
the East.

Queen Melisende’s vocal grief, much as it moved
all the Court, did not distract her from taking over the kingdom. Of the
children that she had born to Fulk two sons survived, Baldwin, who was aged
thirteen, and Amalric, aged seven. Fulk had possessed the throne as her
husband; and her rights as heiress were fully recognized. But the idea of a
sole Queen-regnant was unthought of by the barons. She therefore appointed her
son Baldwin as her colleague and herself assumed the government. Her action was
regarded as perfectly constitutional and was endorsed by the council of the
realm when she and Baldwin were crowned together by the Patriarch William on
Christmas Day.
Melisende was a capable woman who in happier times
might have reigned with success. She took as her adviser her first cousin, the
Constable Manasses of Hierges, son of a Walloon lord who had married Baldwin II’s
sister, Hodierna of Rethel. Manasses had come out as a young man to his uncle’s
court, where his abilities and his royal connections secured him steady
advancement. When Balian the Old of Ibelin died, soon after King Fulk’s death,
Manasses married his widow Helvis, heiress of Ramleh, who in her own right and
her sons’ controlled the whole Philistian plain. The barons were in time to
resent Manasses’s power, for the Queen and he inclined towards autocracy; but
for the moment there was no opposition to the Queen.

Her accession brought one serious disadvantage.
Under Fulk the King of Jerusalem’s position as overlord of the Crusading states
had been growing theoretical rather than practical; and it was unlikely that
the princes of the north would pay greater attention to the suzerainty of a
woman and a child. When quarrels broke out between the Prince of Antioch and
the Count of Edessa, a strong king of Jerusalem, such as Baldwin II, would have
marched north and forcibly composed the differences. Neither a queen nor a
boy-king could do so; and no one else had the overriding authority.

1144:
Siege
of Edessa

Since the Emperor John’s death and Zengi’s
check before Damascus, Raymond of Antioch’s self-confidence had revived. He
sent at once to the new Emperor, Manuel, to demand the return of Cilicia to his
principality, and when Manuel refused he invaded the province. Manuel himself
was obliged during the first months of his reign to remain at Constantinople;
but he sent a land and sea expedition under the Contostephanus brothers and the
converted Turk Bursuk and the admiral Demetrius Branas, which not only drove
Raymond out of Cilicia but followed his troops to the walls of Antioch. A few
months previously Raymond had added Aleppan territory as far as Biza’a while
Joscelin of Edessa advanced to the Euphrates to meet him. But Joscelin suddenly
made a truce with Sawar, governor of Aleppo, which ruined Raymond’s schemes.
Relations between Raymond and Joscelin were worsening. It seems that since
about 1140 Joscelin had been obliged to accept Raymond as his overlord; but
there was never any cordiality between them. Joscelin had irritated Raymond by
his intervention in favour of the Patriarch Radulph; and this truce brought
them almost to an open rupture.

Zengi was watching these quarrels. The death of
the Emperor had freed him of his most dangerous potential enemy. The Damascenes
would take no action against him without Frankish help; and the Kingdom of
Jerusalem was unlikely now to embark on adventures. The opportunity must not be
missed. In the autumn of 1144 Zengi attacked Kara Arslan, the Ortoqid prince of
Diarbekir, who had recently made an alliance with Joscelin. In support of the
alliance Joscelin marched out of Edessa with the bulk of his army down to the
Euphrates, apparently to cut off Zengi’s communications with Aleppo. Zengi was
informed by Moslem observers at Harran of Joscelin’s movements. He sent at once
a detachment under Yaghi-Siyani of Hama to surprise the city. But Yaghi-Siyani
lost his way in the darkness of the rainy November night, and reached Edessa no
sooner than Zengi with the main army, on 28 November. By now the Edessenes had
been warned and the defences had been manned.

The siege of Edessa lasted for four weeks.
Joscelin had taken with him all his leading soldiers. The defence was therefore
entrusted to the Latin archbishop, Hugh II. The Armenian bishop John and the
Jacobite bishop Basil loyally supported him. Any hope that Zengi may have had
of seducing the native Christians from their Frankish allegiance was
disappointed. Basil the Jacobite suggested asking for a truce, but public
opinion was against him. But the defenders, well though they fought, were few
in numbers. Joscelin himself retired to Turbessel. The historian William of
Tyre cruelly criticizes him for sloth and cowardice in refusing to go to his
capital’s rescue. But his army was not strong enough to risk a battle with
Zengi’s. He had confidence that the great fortifications of Edessa could hold
out for some time. At Turbessel he could interrupt any reinforcements that
Zengi might summon from Aleppo; and he counted on help from his Frankish
neighbours. He had sent at once to Antioch and to Jerusalem. At Jerusalem Queen
Melisende held a Council and was authorized to gather an army, which she
dispatched under Manasses the Constable, Philip of Nablus and Elinand of Bures,
prince of Galilee. But at Antioch Raymond would do nothing. All Joscelin’s
appeals to him as his overlord were in vain. Without his help Joscelin dared
not attack Zengi. He waited at Turbessel for the arrival of the Queen’s army.

It came too late. Zengi’s army was swelled by
Kurds and Turcomans from the upper Tigris; and he had good siege-engines. The
clerics and merchants who formed the bulk of the garrison were inexpert in
warfare. Their counter-attacks and counter-minings were unsuccessful.
Archbishop Hugh was thought to be holding back the treasure that he had
amassed, badly though it was needed for the defence. On Christmas Eve a wall
collapsed near the Gate of the Hours; and the Moslems poured in through the
breach. The inhabitants fled in panic to the citadel, to find the gates closed
against them by order of the Archbishop, who himself stayed outside in a vain
attempt to restore order. Thousands were trampled to death in the confusion;
and Zengi’s troops, hard on their heels, slew thousands more, including the
bishop. At last Zengi himself rode up and ordered the massacre to cease. The
native Christians were spared; but all the Franks were rounded up and done to
death, and their women sold into slavery. Two days later a Jacobite priest,
Barsauma, who had taken over command of the citadel, surrendered to Zengi.