The Franks’ investment of Outremer followed strategic necessity. Antioch sought to annex the Upper Orontes valley and Cilicia and threaten Aleppo; Edessa to establish strongholds across the Upper Euphrates valley; and Tripoli to conquer the Biqa valley and the Homs gap that led from the sea through the Lebanese mountains to the Syrian interior. Each pursued immediate political advantage, willing, if convenient, to ally with Armenians, Arabs or Turks. This did not obscure a religious dimension. Antiochene coins showed the head of St Peter. The priorities for the Jerusalem Franks were more constrained by their role as defenders of the Holy Places, emphasised on coins that depicted key sites in the Holy City (e.g. the Tower of David or the Holy Sepulchre).15 The chief religious sites were quickly secured: Jerusalem itself, where non-Christian residence was symbolically outlawed, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron (supposed site of the tombs of the Old Testament patriarchs), and the rest of the Biblical Holy Land from the Jordan to the sea, Banyas and the Dog River in the north to Ascalon and Beersheba in the south. However, the settlement remained vulnerable. Egyptian attacks in 1101, 1102 and 1105 on occasion penetrated to within twenty-five miles of Jerusalem. Invasions by Mawdud of Mosul between 1110 and his assassination in 1113, and a further attack from Mosul in 1115, devastated parts of the county of Edessa and, in 1113, threatened Galilee. The Franks were helped by the fragmented politics of their Syrian neighbours, who were equally dismayed by the prospect of dominance from Iraq as by the presence of the Franks. The febrile relations between Aleppo, Damascus, Mosul and Baghdad offered the Franks opportunities for alliances regardless of religious scruples. The Franks of Antioch occasionally allied with the Turkish ruler of Damascus against Aleppo and even, some sources suggested, against fellow Franks at Edessa.16 Diplomatic alliances, such as between Damascus and Jerusalem, were commonplace during the first half-century of Frankish occupation and temporary truces were frequent throughout. The Outremer lordships took their places among the competing city states and regional principalities jostling for survival and ascendency. Their existence demanded a high degree of non-confessional political flexibility and ingenuity (see ‘Coins in Outremer’, p. 120).
Politics
The kingdom of Jerusalem became the leading polity of the Frankish settlement in charisma and resources. The early kings managed to subordinate the territorial ambitions of their acquisitive nobles to fashion a coherent political system in which precedence was afforded the royal High Court; land and money fiefs were held from the monarch; and military obligations to the king’s summons were accepted and performed. This was achieved by mutual recognition of rights. Territorial lords were autonomous in their own lands, such as the great fiefs of Jaffa, Ascalon, Transjordan or Galilee, but in cases of rebellion or other conflict, royal jurisdiction was accepted by them and their Frankish subjects. By the reign of King Amalric (1163–74), under a legal procedure known as the assise sur la ligece, subtenants were to swear allegiance directly to the king and thus, in theory, were given the right to sue in the High Court, even against their own lords (although none is known to have actually done so). The king exercised the right to summon to arms his tenants and popular militias; to call assemblies to discuss matters of common interest, such as an emergency tax in 1183; and to make church appointments. This last flew in the face of the very principles of church autonomy that underpinned the policies of the papal reformers who had conceived of the idea of the Jerusalem war. Despite the impression retrospectively given by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century law books, the kingdom was governed by pragmatism not legalism. Survival depended on cooperation and mutual self-interest between king and nobles, with the crown holding the most lucrative parts of the kingdom based on Jerusalem, Acre, Tyre and the region north of the capital around Nablus, and, although lacking an extensive or sophisticated bureaucracy, dispensing lucrative preferment and protection.
This accommodation became especially important as the kingdom’s stability was threatened by a sequence of dynastic and political crises. Succession to the crown was openly disputed in 1100, 1118, 1163 and 1186. Civil war threatened in 1133–4, 1152 and 1186. The chief minister was assassinated in 1174. Baldwin II (1118–31) spent a year in Turkish captivity (1123–4), a fate similarly suffered by significant numbers of Frankish nobles throughout the period. The marriages of two kings, Baldwin I and Amalric, were successfully challenged as bigamous or uncanonical. Only twice in eighty-eight years did a son succeed father (in 1143, a child; and 1174, a leprous child). Minors inherited in 1143, 1184 and 1186. Baldwin I may have been homosexual; Baldwin IV (1174–85) was a leper. Of the eight kings between 1100 and 1188, Fulk (1131–43) died as a result of a hunting accident, his sons Baldwin III (1143–63) and Amalric died in their thirties, Baldwin IV in his twenties and Baldwin V (1185–6) succumbed as a child of nine. However, dynastic misfortune and complexity were not the unique preserves of Jerusalem. With the exception of France, orderly royal succession was rare throughout twelfth-century Christendom. Muslim Syria and Egypt also shared confused successions, rule of minors and political assassination. Similarly disrupted inheritance among the Frankish nobility allowed kings to exploit the lack of adult male heirs that also attracted ambitious nobles from the west eager to enhance status, most famously Raynald of Châtillon, younger son of a minor lord from central France who rose, through two successive marriages, to become Prince of Antioch (1153–61) and lord of Transjordan (1177–87). Such figures relied on royal patronage or approval, as did church appointments where a colonial dimension was most marked. Almost all episcopal appointments went to western immigrants, often second- or third-raters who stood little chance of similar preferment in the increasingly competitive home ecclesiastical job market.
COINS IN OUTREMER
The coinage of the Frankish Levantine conquests revealed the extent of the conquerors’ reliance on the region’s economic and commercial system. Unlike in western Europe, where currency was silver-based, gold provided the high-value coins in the eastern Mediterranean. In general the Levantine economy was far more monetised than in the west, despite a marked increase in the amount of bullion and coin in circulation and use in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Initially, the Outremer Franks operated a hybrid system that included silver coins from western Europe, mainly northern Italian and southern French; copper coins based on local Arabic or Byzantine designs with modest Frankish iconographic modifications; and local silver and gold coins, dirhams and dinars. Under Count Bertrand (1109–12), Tripoli issued silver pennies of Toulousain design. In the early years, Antioch used Seljuk coins. The gold coins minted in Tripoli and, after 1124, in the kingdom of Jerusalem (bezants), were simply copies of Fatimid dinars, complete with Arabic Koranic inscriptions, a habit that lasted until banned in the 1250s by an outraged visiting papal legate. Even then the new Christianised designs were in Arabic. Only in the 1130s and 1140s did Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem begin to mint their own silver coins, billon (i.e. debased silver) pennies. In Jerusalem the initial reform under Baldwin III by the 1140s was superseded by a lasting new issue under Amalric in the 1160s. The chief mints were located in Antioch, Tripoli, Tyre, Acre and Jerusalem. Re-coinages appear to have been irregular. Some local lords minted their own silver and copper coins, as at Jaffa, Beirut and Sidon, while others produced, presumably for immediately local consumption, lead tokens, perhaps as small change, or to pay labourers and tradesmen, or even for use in gambling. In addition, Turkish coppers seem to have been in common use across Outremer, as small change.
39. A Tripoli imitation of a Fatimid bezant.
This heterogeneous eclectic coinage reflected Outremer society and its commercial needs. Inevitable economic exchange between the different communities required a degree of currency synergy between Frankish and neighbouring currencies as well as coins that would be familiar across social, religious and linguistic divides within Outremer. The Franks were never in an imperial position to impose a wholly exclusive financial system on the indigenous population.
Equally, the high-value bezants’ aping of Egyptian currency acknowledged the mutual dependence between Frankish rulers and Syrian and Egyptian traders and merchants. Although lighter, and of less fine gold, than the dinar, the Frankish bezant could act almost as a proxy common currency. It formed part of the Franks’ rapid assimilation into the regional gold-based monetary system; the great Jerusalem tax of 1183 was calculated and paid in bezants as were land values and wages.17 On the other hand, the introduction of a distinctive Frankish silver penny across Outremer at roughly the same time in the 1130s and 1140s suggests an advance of government administration and political reach, as well as possibly an increased Frankish demographic footprint.
40. A denier of King Amalric of Jerusalem showing the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre.
The collapse and limited reconstruction of Outremer after 1187 left its mark on minting and coins in circulation. The Third Crusade, and probably the Fifth as well, saw an immense influx of western coins, mainly silver pennies, a trend that continued into the thirteenth century. There appears to have been no systematic attempt to re-mint these coins into local currency, suggesting they circulated within ports where multiple currencies operated, while pointing to the new limits to the power of the local Frankish rulers. These continued to mint coins as before, still on an ad hoc and perhaps restricted basis. The needs for bezants remained in the prosperous commercial centres such as Acre. Local lords in Tyre, Beirut and Sidon continued to issue their own silver pennies and coppers. This is hardly surprising as, proportionately, incomes increasingly came from trade not land. However, the production of copies of Ayyubid drachmas after 1251 mirrors shrinking Frankish dominion and underlined the constant reality of Outremer’s integration within the wider economy and commerce of the eastern Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent.18
The political history of Frankish Jerusalem is commonly divided into three broad periods: expansion with a focus on northern Syria to the 1140s; competition with Nur al-Din of Aleppo in Syria and then Egypt from the mid-1140s to late 1160s, encompassing the failure of the Second Crusade and Amalric’s abortive attempt to control the Nile; and subsequent decay and defence in the face of Saladin’s ascendancy in uniting Egypt and Syria in the 1170s and early 1180s, culminating in the disastrous defeat of the Jerusalem army at Hattin in 1187 and the subsequent loss of most of the kingdom. This conceals continuities, such as the unstable intimacy of the domestic political scene, dominated by a handful of nobles jostling for access to or control over the wealth at the king’s disposal. There was no clear trajectory of stability or decadence. The early conquests of 1099–1124 were punctuated by serious defeats, in 1102 or 1123 when Baldwin II was captured. Despite setbacks in 1129 and 1148 at Damascus; the near civil wars, in 1134 between the Angevin King Fulk and the local baronage, and in 1152 between Baldwin III and his mother Queen Melisende; and the rise of Nur al-Din to dominate Syria in the 1150s, Baldwin III was still able to broker power in Antioch and Tripoli and extract tribute from Egypt. Comparably, Antioch suffered repeated defeats and the death or capture of its leaders, in 1100, 1104, 1119, 1130, 1149 and 1161, and disruptive power struggles within the ruling family in the 1130s, yet survived as a Frankish city state until 1268. Tripoli managed to assert and maintain its separate identity from the 1120s despite limited territory, a series of succession disputes down to the 1140s, the assassination of one count (Raymond II in 1152) and the long captivity of another (Raymond III 1164–74; his first cousin Amalric of Jerusalem acting as regent). The kings of Jerusalem regularly intervened to rescue the other principalities during such crises, an involvement that assumed a dynastic dimension after two of Baldwin II’s younger daughters married into the ruling houses of Antioch and Tripoli.
The paradox of vulnerable strength persisted. In the 1160s, despite the loss of Banyas in northern Galilee, Amalric of Jerusalem was able to compete vigorously for control of Egypt. In 1176–7 an assault on Saladin in Egypt, with help from a large Byzantine fleet and western arrivals, remained possible. From mid-century, the increasing use of the new Military Orders of Templars and Hospitallers to garrison strategic castles showed both an awareness of the mounting threat from Muslim Syria and a policy to deal with it, while simultaneously signalling a lack of royal resources forcing kings into dependence on the Military Orders (see Chapter 4). At the same time, increased fortification of strong-points deep within the kingdom, even near Jerusalem itself, spoke of resources and resilience as well as the heightened reality of danger. Land for sale around the Holy City remained at a premium in the 1160s.19 Between the 1120s and 1170s most of the kingdom of Jerusalem was free from attack. The power vacuum of a leper king between 1174 and 1185 exacerbated internal divisions but did not prevent military victory over Saladin at Montgisard in 1177 or raids to the Red Sea and Arabian coast under the auspices of Raynald of Châtillon in 1183. In the same year, the levy of a general tax following a fiscal survey of the realm and the consultation of a representative assembly spoke of financial strain yet robust political institutions.20 Saladin’s own serious illness in 1185–6 threatened the unity of his empire. His death would have destabilised it, letting the Franks off the hook, if only temporarily.
On such a narrow stage damaging factionalism could not be avoided. In 1100 a group of Boulogne loyalists ensured the succession of Godfrey of Bouillon’s brother Baldwin in the face of opposition from the legate Daimbert and the ambition of Tancred of Lecce. A coup in 1118 led to the accession of Baldwin II to the exclusion of the legitimist heir Eustace of Boulogne, Baldwin I’s elder brother. The deal brokered by Baldwin II for Count Fulk V of Anjou to marry his eldest daughter Melisende and for them, after his death, to rule jointly, in association with their son, the future Baldwin III, almost came unstuck twice. In 1133–4 local nobles, under Count Hugh of Jaffa (himself an incomer who spent his youth in the west), a cousin of Baldwin II, rebelled against what they may have seen as an Angevin takeover of power and the marginalisation of the rights of Queen Melisende. The rebels even called in help from the Fatimid garrison at Ascalon. Fulk survived but Angevin influence was reined in. In 1152 the now adult Baldwin III had to use force to prise power from his mother and her protégés. In 1163, before allowing his coronation, baronial opposition forced Amalric to repudiate his first wife, Agnes of Courtney, possibly on the grounds of bigamy, certainly to prevent Agnes wielding patronage. In 1174 the chief minister, Miles of Plancy, another westerner, was murdered during a baronial struggle to control the new leper king. From 1174 to 1186 the political vacuum caused by Baldwin IV’s illness and his nephew Baldwin V’s infancy removed the safety net of royal arbitration as different factions near the throne scrapped for control of patronage and policy. On Baldwin V’s death in 1186 these rivalries almost spilled into open civil war in a move orchestrated by the disruptively ambitious Raymond III of Tripoli, by marriage lord of Galilee. The dead child king’s first cousin twice removed, Raymond, tried to deny the crown to Baldwin’s mother Sybil, elder daughter of King Amalric, and her second husband, Guy of Lusignan. When his counter-putsch failed, Raymond seceded from obedience and allied with Saladin, treason only repudiated when the whole kingdom was threatened with invasion the following year.21
The hindsight of the catastrophic defeats of 1187–8, when Outremer was almost completely overrun by Saladin after his devastating victory over the Franks at the battle of Hattin, frames a seemingly dismal picture. Yet such teleology misleads, masking a more uneven narrative of opportunity and accident. Factional feuding, succession crises, rebellion and civil war were as rife in twelfth-century England as in Jerusalem. The rise and the ultimate fall of the kingdom were far from determined or inevitable. Attacks on Damascus in 1129 and 1148, Aleppo in 1124–5 or Shayzar in 1111, 1138 and 1157 could have expanded Frankish rule into the Syrian interior and annexed major centres of power. The losses of the strategically important northern Galilean strongpoints of Banyas in 1164 or Jacob’s Ford in 1179 were exceptional; they were neither preordained nor were their consequ
ences inevitable (see ‘A Day at Jacob’s Ford’, p. 128).
Baldwin III had imposed tribute on the rulers of the decayed Fatimid caliphate of Egypt and the full conquest, planned by him and pursued by his brother Amalric in the 1160s, came close at least to military success. The effectiveness and adaptability of Frankish arms should not be underestimated. Diplomatic alliances with Byzantium in the 1150s and 1170s, with the marriages of Baldwin III and Amalric to Greek princesses, potentially offered much. Famous defeats such as the Antiochene disasters at the Field of Blood (1119) or Inab (1149) were avoidable, as was the disaster at Hattin in 1187, a battle as notable for how nearly the Franks won it as for the annihilating scale of Saladin’s victory.22
The World of the Crusades Page 15