God's War: A New History of the Crusades (31 page)

Nowhere was this dependence on the west more obvious than in the conquest of the coast between 1099 and 1124, where the capture of ports relied on foreign maritime assistance as allies or mercenaries: Jaffa in 1099 (Pisa); Haifa in 1100 (Venice); Arsuf and Caesarea in 1101 (Genoa); Tortosa and Jubail in 1102 (Genoa); Lattakiah in 1103 (Genoa); Acre in 1104 (Genoa); Tripoli in 1109 (Genoa and Provence); Beirut in 1110 (Genoa and Pisa); Sidon in 1110 (Norwegian); Tyre in 1124 (Venice). Without a fleet, as at Tyre in 1111, or where a fleet was repulsed, as at Sidon in 1108, land attacks failed. The crucial importance of the maritime cities in the establishment of the Frankish principalities on the Levant coast was reflected in the privileges afforded them in the conquered cities, such as the Genoese at Antioch (1098), Jubail (1102) and Acre (1104) or the Venetians at Tyre in 1124, where they were rewarded with a third of the city and its territory. Along with the Pisans,
the Genoese and Venetians gained privileged access to ports and markets, received extensive property and rights of jurisdiction over their own nationals, which allowed them to create more or less immune quarters in chosen maritime cities in which visiting merchants could stay and from which they could trade. Such was the importance of the Genoese in the creation of the kingdom of Jerusalem under its first king, Baldwin I, that later in the century they were able to make good a spurious claim that their contributions had been commemorated by an inscription erected in the church of the Holy Sepulchre.
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The conquest of the coast did not immediately lead to the peaceful occupation of the hinterland; the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, the slopes of Mt Carmel and the Lebanon remained unsafe for a generation and more. Banditry, from both sides of the frontier, persisted, as did raids by neighbouring rulers. However, with the occupation of the coastal ports came security of the lifelines with the west and control of the main trade routes with the interior. Although until late in the century return on commerce probably disappointed the Italian investors, without such a hold the settlements could not have survived financially, economically or demographically. Strategically, each port gained reduced the scope of Egyptian fleets; the loss of Tyre prevented the Fatimids from threatening the trade and pilgrim routes between the Holy Land, Cyprus, Byzantium and western Europe.

It is often argued that the Italian involvement in the Holy Land venture reveals sordid materialism, even nascent capitalism at odds with devotion to the crusading ideal. This is nonsense. The typology of a conflict between ‘medieval’ faith and ‘modern’ commercialism is meaningless; faith is as much a feature of the modern world as materialism was of the medieval. At best such generalizations are literary conventions; at worst a form of condescending historical snobbery. Either way, such views belie the evidence. Writers such as the twelfth-century Genoese Caffaro suggest civic patriotism, but his
Liberation of the East
(
De Liberatione Civitatum Orientis
) and most of the other evidence available point to a mix of religious idealism and perceived self-interest familiar in many other crusaders.
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The Italian presence in the east predated 1095; there was an Amalfitan hospital in Jerusalem in the early 1070s. The involvement of the maritime cities formed part of a process whereby the eastern Mediterranean was opened to western interests, a process that embraced the military, colonial and pious as well, the Italian merchant
and the crusader playing complementary, related roles. The investment in fleets was great; the chance of disaster strong; the financial risks huge; the returns uncertain. With the resulting profits hardly matching expectations until late in the century, the Genoese privatized their holdings in Lattakiah, Jubail, Antioch and Acre to the Embriaco family, while the Venetians made over their rural possessions around Tyre to the Contarini.
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The accusation that the privileges granted the Italians constituted them as states within a state, apparent in the thirteenth century, cannot be sustained for periods of strong secular rule in the twelfth. The commitment of these cities and their citizens to the Holy Land was neither more nor less idealistic than their fellow Latin Christians. The idea that enthusiasm for the cross failed to penetrate these bastions of early capital is inherently unlikely, based on a flawed model of human behaviour and contradicted by the evidence.

The conquest of the coast formed part of an often desperate struggle to maintain the initial conquests in Syria and Palestine from a plethora of enemies: Byzantium; the Seljuks of Iraq; the Turks of Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus; and the Fatimids of Egypt. Well might one of the settlers, Baldwin I’s chaplain Fulcher of Chartres, recall in pious wonder: ‘why did they not, as innumerable locusts in a little field, so completely devour and destroy us?’, a vivid image from one who witnessed in his time in Jerusalem at least three serious plagues of locusts (1114, 1117, 1120).
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Across the political and religious divide, the issue appeared the same. While contemporary Muslim poets satisfied themselves with extravagant lamentations on the violence and devastation wreaked by the Franks in successive massacres of civilian populations in the cities captured from 1098 onwards, the Damascene lawyer al-Sulami, writing
c.
1105, shrewdly noted their weakness: ‘the small amount of cavalry and equipment they have at their disposal and the distance from which their reinforcements come’. He concluded that this presented ‘an opportunity which must be seized at once’.
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The Muslim rulers of Syria and Palestine needed little encouragement, less out of religious zeal promoted by the heightened rhetoric of fear and outrage, often generated by refugees from the conquered areas, than from motives of political and commercial self-interest. Although the Frankish policy of massacre and exclusion of Muslims from the cities they captured up to 1110 differed from customary behaviour, politically they were treated less
exceptionally. The impression left by the twelfth-century chronicle of Ibn al-Qalanisi of Damascus, a centre for Palestinian refugees, is of the Franks as one of many fractious groups in a region of competing princelings, each jockeying for advantage. Ironically, the western interlopers immediately offered an additional diplomatic and military option for many Muslim rulers eager for allies, especially in the chronic rivalries between Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus. The creation of Christian Outremer, therefore, revolved around military security, but not just its own.

6. Syria in the Twelfth Century

7. Palestine and Egypt in the Twelfth Century

6

The Latin States

The principalities created by the western invasion of Syria and Palestine shared characteristics of both east and west. The Near East was familiar with culturally and religiously alien elites indifferent or hostile to indigenous peoples, content to rule a heterogeneous society by means of absentee landownership, control of trade and military coercion. As exploiters, not proselytes or social engineers, Levantine rulers forged contacts across communal divisions from convenience, not conviction. The Latins, or Franks as they were more usually called by onlookers, were no different. Their new aristocracy and settlers could not ignore their neighbours; as one of them remarked in the 1120s, a
lingua franca
combining many languages soon emerged, at least in the cities.
¹
Yet the political idiom of Latin rule remained severely western, as did the laws they applied to themselves and the vocabulary of government. Consequently, the vision of Outremer is bifocal. Twelfth-century Latin accounts portray a political society apparently hermetically sealed from its immediate environment, a western drama played out in exotic surroundings, whereas contemporary Arabic chronicles emphasize the normality and familiarity of Latin behaviour, one parvenu military governing elite among many.

EDESSA

Nowhere was Christian dependence on the politics of Islamic neighbours more obvious than in the fortunes of the county of Edessa, the first Latin principality established in the Near East, by Baldwin of Boulogne in March 1098. Isolated far in the interior, the county relied upon possession of fortified towns such as Turbessel (Tell Bashir), Ravendan and
Edessa, from where the fertile countryside of the Euphrates basin could be exploited and the sensibilities of the Armenian lords influenced. As a bastion defending the eastern flank of Antioch and even a potential base for assaults into northern Iraq, the county assumed great strategic importance, which was also the source of its vulnerability. For warlords from Mosul or Mardin to the east or Aleppo to the south, Edessa presented a tempting target in itself as well as a staging post on any more concerted attack on the Christian holdings towards the coast. The county’s survival depended on unity among its Frankish nobility; cooperation with local Armenian lords, some of whom looked to Byzantium to guarantee their status and authority; alliances with Antioch and some, at least, of its Muslim neighbours; and, crucially, disunity among the rulers of northern Syria, the Jazira and Iraq.
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In 1100, when Baldwin of Boulogne succeeded his brother Godfrey as ruler of Jerusalem, Edessa devolved on to his cousin, Baldwin of Le Bourcq, who did homage to the new king for the county. After consolidating his position by marrying a local Armenian princess, Morphia of Melitene, in 1102, the new count was joined by another cousin, Joscelin of Courtenay, a veteran of the count of Nevers’s crusade of 1101, to whom he gave all the county west of the Euphrates around Turbessel as a fief, thus making him almost a partner. Over the next two years, while Mosul battled with Mardin after the death of Kerbogha and further internecine feuding distracted the Seljuks of Baghdad, Joscelin as much as Count Baldwin campaigned successfully to extend Frankish rule northwards towards Armenian Marasch and south in the direction of Aleppo. In 1104, this aggression was abruptly ended when Soqman of Mardin joined with his erstwhile enemies of Mosul to crush a substantial combined Edessan/Antiochene force attempting to capture Harran, south-east of Edessa. Both Count Baldwin and Joscelin were captured. The dangers of Muslim unity were starkly underlined.

During Count Baldwin’s captivity (1104–8), Edessa was ruled first by Tancred and then, after Bohemund’s departure for the west in 1105, another Hauteville relative, Richard of Salerno. Tancred, busily extending the principality of Antioch in his uncle’s absence, clearly hoped to annexe Edessa; it made strategic sense.
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Consequently, on Baldwin’s release, relations between Edessa and Antioch were strained beyond breaking, with Tancred trying to assert a spurious legal claim to over-lordship over the county. In 1108–9, both sides to the dispute probably
called on Muslim military aid, Baldwin from his former captors at Mosul, Tancred from Aleppo. Baldwin’s relations with the increasingly independent Joscelin of Courtenay also deteriorated. Joscelin was arrested and exiled, Baldwin I of Jerusalem characteristically promptly recruiting him to the lordship of Galilee. However, the major invasions by Mawdud of Mosul each year between 1110 and 1113 and Tancred’s death in 1112 engineered a reconciliation between Antioch and Edessa, sealed by the marriage of Count Baldwin’s sister to Tancred’s successor, Roger of Salerno. At the victory of Tell Danith over Bursuq of Hamadan in 1115, Count Baldwin fought side by side with the Antiochenes. Edessa’s position relative to Antioch improved further after the accession of Count Baldwin to the throne of Jerusalem in 1118, due partly to the intrigues of Joscelin of Courtenay who, despite his exile in 1113, was rewarded with the county of Edessa itself. After Roger of Antioch’s defeat and death at the battle known to westerners as the Field of Blood in 1119, when Baldwin II, as king, assumed the regency of Antioch, Joscelin emerged as the strongest Frankish leader in northern Syria, probably even on occasion acting as regent of Antioch himself. Although briefly held captive by Balak of Aleppo in 1123, Count Joscelin commanded a combined forced from all four Latin principalities in the same year in an attempt to free King Baldwin, who had suffered a similar fate shortly after the count. Until the king’s release in 1124, Joscelin cut the leading secular figure in Outremer. Thereafter he continued to play a prominent role, joining with Baldwin II in attacking Aleppo in 1124–5 and Damascus in 1129. This did not prevent him from asserting his rights against fellow Christians by force, if necessary, or, as in 1127 during a dispute with the new prince of Antioch, Bohemund II, with the assistance of the Turks. The story of Joscelin’s death in 1131 provided Outremer with one of its epic tales. Infuriated by his son’s cowardice in the face of an attack from Anatolia, Joscelin, seriously ill and bedridden, insisted on leading out his troops borne on a litter. Seeing this, the invaders hurriedly withdrew. On receiving the news, Joscelin, ordering his litter to be put down on the road, died giving thanks to God.
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