Control even of this modest expanse proved strenuous to conquer and maintain. It took the Franks half a century to establish complete command over the coast. In the north, the city state of Antioch failed to secure stable frontiers either in Cilicia or towards Aleppo, which remained conspicuously beyond its grasp. While an important strategic buffer for the rest of northern Outremer, the county of Edessa proved ephemeral, lacking wealth, administration and settlement, reliant on constant military activity to manipulate local rivalries between Muslim and Armenian lordships. Its demolition between 1144 and 1151 proved impossible to resist. In the south, the expansion of the kingdom of Jerusalem to cover, at its height, not only the Biblical Holy Land but large tracts of land beyond the Jordan and Dead Sea and in the desert towards the Red Sea, never secured it from invasion from Syria or Egypt. The absence of permanent regional allies rendered Outremer vulnerable if its neighbours united against it, as happened in the 1180s, a fragility seemingly confirmed when it was all but annihilated in 1187–8 by the sultan of Egypt and Syria, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn-Ayyub (i.e. ‘the Righteousness of the Faith Joseph son of Job’), known to westerners then and now as Saladin (1137/8–93).
Hindsight imposes a teleological pattern of transience and decay. The obstacles to permanent settlement were formidable: the alien, hostile physical, cultural and political environment; the failure to reach the natural frontiers of mountains to the north and desert to the south or to annex major cities of the interior; the untamed and untapped economic, demographic and strategic power of Egypt. Limited settlement by westerners disguised the inadequacy of material resources within the Frankish territories necessary to support the numbers of immigrants that might have secured a more lasting presence. As it was, the Franks were too few to dominate and too many to integrate. Except in politics and superficial domestic manners, unlike other foreign invaders of the region, the Franks could not conform to indigenous linguistic and religious culture: the Frankish kings of Jerusalem revealingly called themselves ‘king of the Latins’, namely the Franks, those who followed the Latin rites of the western Catholic Church. Arabic presented a barrier to accommodation even where, as with Syrian and Palestinian Christians, religion did not. The Franks lacked the resources to compete numerically with the continuing influx of Islamicised steppe nomads into the Near East or prevent the rise of Turkish and Kurdish warlords to regional political domination. Demography denied Outremer’s survival. However, the impression of a doomed venture obscures the social reality of the Frankish experience. By the 1180s, Outremer had become home to three or four generations of Franks, tens of thousands of people who, however conscious of their special status in ethnicity, language, law and religion, no longer could see themselves or, except in Muslim polemic, be regarded as intruders. For them, Outremer, as its greatest twelfth-century spokesman, the Jerusalem-born scholar, prelate, royal servant and chronicler William, archbishop of Tyre (c. 1130–86), insisted, was their patria, for the love of which ‘if the needs of the time demand, a man of loyal instincts is bound to lay down his life’.2
35. Farming in the Nile valley, the economic dynamo of the eastern Mediterranean.
WILLIAM OF TYRE
William, archbishop of Tyre, intellectual, tutor, administrator, diplomat and pre-eminent historian of the Latin settlements in twelfth-century Syria and Palestine, was born c. 1130, probably in Jerusalem, into a local Frankish non-noble burgess family. After his early education most likely at the school run by the canons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, c. 1146–65 William received first-class academic training in the liberal arts, theology and civil law at Paris, Orléans and Bologna. On his return to the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1165, he soon garnered elite church preferment, first at Acre then as archdeacon of Tyre. Entering royal service as a diplomat to Byzantium (1168) and Rome (1169–70), in 1170 he was appointed tutor to King Amalric’s son and heir the future Baldwin IV. In his own account, it was William who first discovered Baldwin’s leprosy; tutor and pupil seemed to have continued on good terms into the 1180s. Through the good offices of the regent Raymond III of Tripoli, with whom William forged a lasting political affinity, he became the new King Baldwin’s chancellor in 1174 and in 1175 archbishop of Tyre, the second-ranking cleric in the kingdom. Although his active political and secular administrative roles are unclear, his duties as chancellor (1174–84/5) frequently if not permanently delegated and his patron Raymond regularly out of favour, William’s civil -law skills were used in diplomacy. He led a delegation to the Third Lateran Council (1178–9) and negotiated at home and abroad with Byzantium (1168, 1177, 1179–80). As archbishop of Tyre (1175–84/6), he proved himself a vigilant diocesan.
36. William of Tyre.
However, his most distinctive activities were literary. He built up the library at Tyre and wrote an account of the decrees of the Third Lateran Council as well as two major historical works: the Gesta orientalium principum, a history of the Muslim world from the Prophet to the 1180s; and the Historia Ierosolymitana (or Chronicon), a detailed account of the First Crusade and the Latin east, beginning with the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius’s return of the True Cross to Jerusalem (629/30) and ending with events recorded contemporaneously in 1184. Only the Historia survives, although the Gesta had a limited circulation in western Europe in the thirteenth century. William had begun collecting historical material soon after returning to Palestine in the 1160s, attracting early support from King Amalric. The Historia, composed between 1170 and 1184, was explicitly conceived as an account of the foundation and fortunes of William’s patria, although after his attendance at the Lateran Council in 1178–9 he began to revise and recast the work more as an apologia for the Latins of Outremer and, increasingly, a description of their growing travails in the face of resurgent Muslim neighbours, his analysis of the material rise of Saladin remaining a classic. While too cumbersome (almost 1,000 pages in the modern edition)3 for simple propaganda for a new crusade, the Historia invites understanding and sympathy for the plight of the heirs of the First Crusaders, while not concealing William’s partisan reflections on the immediate, and to him all too depressing, politics of his own time. It was later alleged that William had been disappointed not to have been elevated to the Patriarchate of Jerusalem in 1180 and had later fallen victim to the malice of the successful candidate, Patriarch Heraclius. Alternatively, William’s vivid depictions of Jerusalemite factional rivalries may have been those of a close observer not political player, even if the gloom that pervades the later passages of the book at times conveys an almost existential despair. William’s Historia stands as a monument to its author’s erudition, human sympathy and literary mastery in its coherent expression of themes, clarity of style, breadth of learning, control of detail and range of material. Deploying extensive scriptural, classical and Christian allusions, motifs and models, William, who died before October 1186, combines sustained analytical synthesis, and vivid delineations of people, character and events, with an engaging individual voice. Extensively copied, continued and translated over the following centuries, it stands as one of the greatest historical works of the Middle Ages.
While it is impossible to calculate the raw numbers of Frankish inhabitants or their proportion in the total population, their presence in cities and certain rural areas was significant. By the 1180s, the Frankish community in the kingdom of Jerusalem possibly generated an armed force of around 20,000 including lightly armed auxiliaries known as Turcopoles, comprising local Syrians and some Franks.4 Unlike the nomadic Turks, the Franks were accustomed to sedentary agricultural society, as lords, farmers and peasants, and to cities, as merchants, shopkeepers and artisans. Many immigrants were already familiar with a Mediterranean economy of cereals, olives and wine. The chief agricultural novelty most settlers would have encountered was sugar cane, only grown in the west by 1100 in parts of Sicily and Spain, yet integral to Outremer’s prosperity, with centres of production at Acre, Sidon and Tyre, Galilee and the Jordan valley.5 Rural settlement was
patchy, clustered in areas of existing Syrian Christian occupation in southern Samaria, north of Jerusalem; western Galilee in the hinterland of Acre; and on the royal demesne around Nablus. Rulers, landlords and estate-owning religious corporations actively encouraged rural settlers in a deliberate policy of rural colonisation. As Franks, they were ipso facto free from the sort of restrictive or servile tenancy burdens familiar in the west. While in Antioch and Tripoli, Frankish settlement was largely restricted to towns and cities, and in parts of the kingdom of Jerusalem local peasant occupation could be significant. By the 1160s, the new Frankish village of al-Bira (Magna Mahomeria) near Jerusalem may have housed between 500 and 600, with a new settlement, Qubeida (Parva Mahomeria), being established nearby in mid-century, dedicated to producing olive oil. In 1170, al-Bira sent at least sixty-five troops to the defence of Gaza. As the villages’ names suggest, the Franks probably replaced Muslim inhabitants, indicating some process of ethnic cleansing to match that in the city of Jerusalem.6
Al-Bira and Qubeida were two of a number of planned villages. Lists of settlers suggest that the bulk of rural immigrants came from other Mediterranean regions, especially southern France, but also northern Italy and Spain. Others came from Burgundy and the Ile de France. Although it may reflect more plentiful surviving evidence, settlers in cities appeared to come from a slightly wider international background, including most parts of France as well as Italy and Spain. Mention too is made of Scots, English, Germans, Bohemians, Bulgars and Hungarians.7 Some towns and cities had been evacuated during the First Crusade and those conquered before 1110 had their inhabitants massacred or expelled. Thereafter, most contained mixed populations of Syrians and Franks. In cities many of the immigrants were clerics or associated with ecclesiastical institutions. The cities also harboured transient populations of visiting pilgrims, warriors, clergy and traders. The new Orientals (nunc orientales), as they were optimistically described by one of their number,8 if non-noble, pursued a wide range of skilled and unskilled occupations: catering to elites as servants, coiners, goldsmiths and furriers; skilled artisans; carpenters, masons, cobblers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, grain and wine growers, and traders; humbler shopkeepers, gardeners, drovers and herdsmen. In ports such as Acre, Tripoli and Tyre, Italians from maritime communes enjoyed privileged quarters as did members of religious orders, monks and canons, and of the Military Orders drawn from across Europe. Rural landscapes were marked with castles, estate towers, manor houses, new villages, mills, oil-presses, vineyards and pigs. Urban centres were reconfigured to suit Frankish social, commercial and religious requirements, what the German pilgrim John of Würzburg called in the late 1160s ‘new Holy Places, newly built’.9 The motives of emigrants from Europe are hidden, but, like the Mormons trekking westwards in nineteenth-century North America, incentives of piety and material opportunity plausibly combined. Some arrived with succeeding waves of crusade armies, but others, perhaps a majority, such as Constantine, a cobbler from Châlons, or John, a Vendôme mason, did not.10
37. Map of thirteenth-century Acre, showing the different Pisan, Venetian and Genoese quarters.
38. Frankish-built entrance to the Cenacle, the supposed Upper Room of the Last Supper story, Mount Sion, Jerusalem.
Creating Outremer
The early years saw precarious garrisons become distinct principalities. In Antioch, Bohemund’s military entourage proved sufficiently large and robust to maintain control even after their leader was captured by Danishmend Turks in August 1100. In Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon’s small garrison force of perhaps 300 knights and 2,000 infantry, having secured the Holy City, a handful of Judean towns and villages, and a narrow strip of land leading down to the coast and the port of Jaffa, began to assert Frankish power in the coastal plain, Judea and Galilee. A generation of Turkish-Egyptian contest had left no united local opposition to Frankish expansion. At Antioch and Edessa, the unstable political mosaic of the region offered the Franks greater opportunities for local alliances, as did the larger proportion of non-Muslims in the population. Taking advantage of a society where small committed companies of well-trained, heavily armed troops could impose themselves on people and resources across wide swathes of territory, Frankish rule in Palestine began more as a form of banditry and coercion than administration. Local resistance was feeble, as Muslim elites fled as refugees or were killed in the massacres that attended early Frankish conquests of the coastal cities. The major threats to Frankish success came from outside: Iraq, the Jazira and Egypt.
5. Political map of Outremer in the twelfth century.
Systems of governing the conquests emerged from events not prior planning. In Jerusalem, in 1100 the new papal legate Archbishop Daimbert of Pisa unsuccessfully sought to install a theocracy, perhaps in line with Urban’s liberation policy.11 Material constraints imposed extemporised solutions. Each of the Latin principalities established after the First Crusade, while never entirely obliterating existing or traditional regional political structures, was perforce self-created. Antioch sought, not always successfully, an independent path between repeated reliance on the Franks of Jerusalem and the occasionally enforced claims of the Byzantine emperor. The county of Edessa existed alternately as a coalition with local Armenian interests and an adjunct to Antioch. The status of the county of Tripoli emerged only slowly as a semi-autonomous lordship in the orbit first of Jerusalem and then, from the 1180s, of Antioch. Jerusalem, a self-proclaimed kingdom after 1100, exerted some de facto responsibility over the other Frankish areas but its own status remained equivocal, from grudging acceptance by the papal legate in 1100 to prudentially recognising some general Byzantine overlordship in the 1150s and 1170s. Collapse of the male line of the Jerusalem royal dynasty in the 1180s even prompted the idea of asking the rulers of western Europe to arbitrate in choosing a ruler. However, Outremer’s claims to legitimacy lay elsewhere. While each principality was the result of military and political expediency, ideologically, their legitimacy sprang from the pious heroism of the First Crusaders and the explicit favour of God, the autonomous justification presented by William of Tyre in his great narrative account of Outremer written in the 1180s.12
In Jerusalem, the immediate strategy secured access to the coast and pacified the interior. In the first decade and a half after 1099, Fatimid attacks from the south and those from the north-east sponsored by the Seljuks in Baghdad were undermined by Seljuk and Fatimid rivalry. This did not remove a lasting asymmetry in the Franks’ predicament. Outnumbered and culturally alien, the Jerusalem Franks were always only one major military defeat away from a potentially fatal crisis while their opponents could always regroup, sustained respectively by the resources of the Syrian interior, the Jazira, Iraq, Egypt and the steppes. Nonetheless, Baldwin of Edessa’s reign in Jerusalem after the death of his brother Godfrey in 1100 as King Baldwin I (1100–18), during which he extended Frankish control east across the Jordan, southwards towards Egypt, and along the Palestinian coast, demonstrated how much could be achieved through energetic use of limited military resources, aided by regular modest reinforcements from the west.
The coastal ports became the most urgent targets. Between 1099 and 1124 the Franks captured all the ports of the Syrian and Palestinian coast except Ascalon, which held out until 1153. Each success was achieved with the assistance of western fleets: Jaffa in 1099 (Pisans); Haifa 1100 (Venetians); Arsuf and Caesarea 1101 (Genoese); Tortosa and Jubail 1102 (Genoese); Latakia 1103 (Genoese); Acre 1104 (Genoese); Tripoli 1109 (Genoese and Provençal); Beirut 1110 (Genoese and Pisan); Sidon 1110 (Norwegian); Tyre 1124 (Venetian). Without a fleet, as at Tyre in 1111, or where a fleet failed to impose a complete blockade, as at Sidon in 1108, sieges failed. At Ascalon in 1153, reinforcements from the bi-annual passage of fleets from the west helped the Frankish fleet tip the balance after months of failed naval blockade. The dual role of Italian maritime cities as military allies and commercial entrepreneurs was recognised by grants of extensive lucrative trading immunitie
s and privileges to the Genoese at Antioch, Jubail, Acre and Jerusalem, and the Venetians’ reward of a third of the city of Tyre after its capture in 1124. Such commercial encouragement directly benefited rulers through tolls on trade and the thousands of pilgrims the Italian shippers transported each year.
Beyond pious tourism, imports to Outremer included leather, fur, timber, warm textiles such as wool and some culturally specific foodstuffs, including bacon. The Franks’ taste for pork remained undimmed, as excavated rubbish dumps and middens testify, some of it probably supplied by local Christian communities. Apart from a booming trade in relics, the most high-value exports were cane sugar, luxury textiles and spices. The rulers of Outremer took advantage of shifting trade routes across western Asia which, with the growing dominance of western shippers in the Levant, increased the volume of trade through the ports controlled by the Franks. Acre emerged as a major entrepôt, with links to the west, to the Asian interior via Damascus and to Egypt. The importance of cosmopolitan commerce was recognised by Baldwin III (king of Jerusalem 1143–63), who granted a safe conduct to a Muslim merchant from Tyre, a copy of which found its way into a storeroom at the great mosque in Damascus. Commercial success depended on a contradiction noticed by a Spanish Muslim visitor in 1183, the Franks giving free access to their ports from the Turkish-held interior, even during times of war.13 Other sources of income for the new rulers came chiefly from minting coinage; exploitation of inland caravan routes in the desert and semi-desert beyond the Dead Sea and Judean hills; and control of the agrarian economy as rent-collecting landlords. The distribution of castles and stone towers across the interior of the kingdom of Jerusalem shows that oversight of rural estates was as important as frontier protection and defence.14
The World of the Crusades Page 14