The Crusader States

by Malcolm Barber

  Manuel's return to Constantinople did not, however, signal a retreat from the affairs of the crusader states. The emperor had no male heirs and the death of his wife, Irene, necessitated a new marriage. Links had already been established through Theodora, and it was now proposed that Manuel marry Melisende, sister of Raymond III of Tripoli. William of Tyre was still in the West at the time and could not have been fully conversant with the details, but it appears that, although the marriage was agreed, what the Latins saw as a series of obscure delays followed. An embassy to Constantinople returned with the reply that the emperor had changed his mind, and his envoys in Tripoli left in some haste, aware that the insult to both the king and the count might provoke retaliation. John Kinnamos says that Melisende had become very ill, blighting her appearance, and that there were rumours that she was illegitimate, which, if true, would not have made her an ideal wife for a man wanting an heir.73

  The capture of Reynald of Châtillon had changed the political landscape, offering new opportunities to consolidate the imperial grip on the principality, and soon after the king found Byzantine envoys in Antioch negotiating a marriage with Maria, the younger daughter of Constance. William of Tyre says that Baldwin was deeply offended, but concealed his anger out of consideration for Maria. In fact, there was little to be gained from opposing Manuel, whom William calls ‘the most powerful prince in the world’ and whose help in any future attack on Egypt might prove essential.74 Raymond of Tripoli, however, was unable to exercise Baldwin's restraint, sending ‘pirates and nefarious and vicious men’ to ravage any imperial lands within reach along the coast and on the islands. This reaction was little different from Reynald of Châtillon's attack on Cyprus, but William of Tyre, whose later narrative shows that he much approved of Raymond, offers no similar moral condemnation.75

  This situation did not encourage stable government in Antioch, for it left an unresolved tension between Constance and Patriarch Aimery. Moreover, the evident heir was Bohemond, the eldest of Constance's four children by Raymond of Poitiers, who was sixteen years old in 1161 and could not be expected to remain passive for long. A year or so later, in 1163, a coup by Antiochene nobles and Thoros, the anti-Byzantine ruler of Cilicia, removed his mother and Bohemond III took power.76

  Baldwin had made effective use of his position since overcoming his mother in 1152, but there are signs that she had not been completely excluded, despite her residence in her dower lands at Nablus. The losses of the rulers of Tripoli and Antioch meant that her sisters retained influence in the north and it is noticeable that Melisende appeared in Tripoli at the time of Baldwin's important meeting of the High Court there in the summer of 1152.77 In Baldwin's absence she seems to have acted on her own initiative: the recovery of the fortified cave of al-Habis beyond the Jordan late in 1157 is attributed by William of Tyre to her ‘zeal and diligence’, even though Baldwin of Lille had actually been left in charge of the kingdom.78 She certainly maintained her interest in ecclesiastical affairs and must have continued to exercise patronage in the way she had done in the past.79 When Patriarch Fulcher died on 20 November 1157, William of Tyre says that, despite an assembly of prelates gathered to chose a new patriarch, his successor, Amalric of Nesle, was chosen ‘against the rules of law’ through the intervention of Melisende, her sister Hodierna, and Sibylla of Flanders, the wife of Count Thierry.80

  There were limits to this independence. The rulers of the crusader states had adopted a position of neutrality in the papal schism that followed the death of Hadrian IV in September 1159, but the arrival in Gibelet of a legate sent by Alexander III forced them to confront the issue. This was far more than an internal matter, for Alexander's opponent, Cardinal Octavian, who took the name of Victor IV, was the candidate of Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, and any decision was certain to have repercussions for the kingdom of Jerusalem in the Latin West. The matter was discussed in a major assembly held sometime in 1160 at Nazareth, including both prelates and barons. The king, once more with an eye to the potential costs since a legate would inevitably burden the Church with what he described as expenses and extortions, wished to maintain neutrality by allowing the legate to visit only as a pilgrim. However, the legate was finally accepted, an action that committed the crusader states to the side of Alexander III.81 Later in the year, Amalric of Nesle wrote to Pope Alexander III, accepting the regularity of his election and condemning ‘the rash perversity and perverse rashness of Octavian’. ‘We have,’ says the patriarch, ‘unanimously and wholeheartedly chosen you and willingly received you as our temporal lord and spiritual father.’82

  Melisende's last public act was to join with Baldwin in assenting to a grant of her other son, Amalric, count of Jaffa and Ascalon, to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, dated 30 November 1160.83 At some point in the course of the following year she was taken ill, perhaps with a stroke, and confined to bed. Her sisters, Hodierna and Iveta, took care of her, allowing few people to see her. She died on 11 September 1161, probably in her early fifties.84

  During the last months of her illness she was unaware of the outside world and it was in this period that Baldwin took the opportunity to make an important change to the feudal map of the kingdom. The greatest of the lords who had supported Melisende in 1152 was Philip of Nablus and, on 31 July 1161, Baldwin exchanged his fief of Nablus for that of Transjordan, apparently in anticipation of his mother's death, since at that time Nablus and Samaria would revert to the royal demesne.85 The fief of Transjordan was over 170 miles long, extending from Amman in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and included the important castles of Montréal, Kerak, Amman and Ain Mousa. It straddled the routes between Egypt and Damascus which Baldwin had striven to control since the rebuilding of Gaza and the capture of Ascalon. In that sense it seems to have been an impressive acquisition for Philip of Nablus and, indeed, some historians have taken this view.86

  On the other hand, it does not seem to have generated the same income as Nablus, which, according to John of Ibelin's list of the 1260s, owed eighty-five knights, whereas Kerak and Montréal owed forty knights, and one of its potential sources of profit – that of tolls from Bedouins and caravans – was reserved for the Crown.87 Moreover, the responsibilities associated with Transjordan were daunting; Nablus, situated in the centre of the kingdom, might seem to be the easier option. This may have been the final reckoning with Melisende's supporters, achieved while she was incapable of opposing it.88 However, over the previous nine years Philip of Nablus had given no reason to believe that he was disloyal, and it is unlikely that Baldwin would have granted a fief like Transjordan to an untrustworthy man. Perhaps Baldwin's chief interest was in absorbing Nablus into the royal demesne, which, like so many of his actions, was driven by his financial needs.

  Baldwin himself barely outlived his mother, dying on 10 February 1163, less than eighteen months after Melisende. He was probably thirty-two years old; a premature death by any standards. William of Tyre believed that he had been poisoned by his eastern physicians, whom the archbishop, deeply imbued with the mores of the contemporary Latin intellectual world, instinctively mistrusted. However, William himself says that he was struck by dysentery while on a visit to Antioch in the autumn of 1162.89 As he realised his illness was becoming worse, he left Antioch for Tripoli and, finally, was carried from there to Beirut. Here he died and, over the next eight days, his body was carried in procession to Jerusalem, where he was buried in the church of the Holy Sepulchre with his predecessors.

  Baldwin III had been slow to assert himself and, even when he finally did, he reigned for a much shorter period than might have been expected. Nevertheless, in the last decade of his life he had had a distinct impact upon the crusader states, most obviously in his southern policy, first, against Ascalon, and then, at least in embryo, against Egypt itself, initiatives that both shaped the policies of his successor, Amalric, and had repercussions in Tripoli and Antioch, where the double threat of Byzantine claims and Nur al-Din's growing mi
litary strength closely circumscribed the policies of their rulers. Moreover, in a very overt demonstration of his authority, Baldwin made the first real attempt to take control of the currency, hitherto dominated by coins from Lucca and Valence. At some point in his reign, probably in the 1150s, the king called in all these coins and used the bullion for a large-scale recoining of deniers and oboles, estimated to be in the region of 11 to 12 million billon coins.90 It is probable that an établissement (law) forbidding vassals to mint their own coins is Baldwin III's, as it would be natural to assert the Crown monopoly at the same time.91

  By the time of his death the Franks had occupied the Levantine littoral for more than sixty years and in the city of Jerusalem especially the signs of that presence were now very evident. Ever since 1115, when Baldwin I had endeavoured to attract Syrian Christians to Jerusalem, the Franks had made a conscious attempt to repopulate, restore and rebuild the Holy City and the shrines in its immediate vicinity in a manner appropriate to the most important place in the Christian world.92 In fact, Jerusalem was a relatively modest size in comparison with many of the other great cities of the Middle East, but even so its repopulation had been an extended process, especially since Muslims and Jews were, at least theoretically, forbidden to live there.93 On the basis of a notional population density of 125 persons per hectare (just under 2.5 acres), the population of Antioch would have been about 40,500 and that of Edessa about 24,000, both of which, at 325 and 192 hectares respectively, were much larger than the Holy City. Jerusalem, which had no sprawling suburb like Montmusard at Acre in the thirteenth century, was only 82 hectares and on that basis would have had a population of no more than about 10,000 by the 1160s.94

  However, the nature of the city meant that large parts of it were not available as living space for permanent residents. It had never been significant as a trading emporium like Tyre or Acre, but it was hugely important as the emotional heart of the crusader states and as a powerful attraction to pilgrims from across the Christian world. The pilgrims themselves restricted the size of the local population, for in spring and summer the city was flooded with visitors, all of whom needed accommodation. This must have provided valuable income for burgesses with sufficient property to rent space to pilgrims, not only in Jerusalem, but in the port cities as well.95 Their arrival may easily have doubled the population, but most did not stay beyond the strict limits imposed by the autumn sailing season, a situation that must have left many unoccupied rooms during the winter months. The consequence of its role as a focus for government and pilgrimage was that, in the time of Baldwin III, Jerusalem contained a whole series of monumental buildings and complexes that housed far fewer people than would usually be accommodated in equivalent urban areas. Most importantly, it contained on the western side the Tower of David, the royal palace, and the Armenian cathedral of St James, in the centre the church of the Holy Sepulchre and the conventual buildings of the Augustinian canons, adjacent to which was the Hospitaller compound, and on the eastern side the Haram al-Sharif on which stood the Temple of the Lord (the Dome of the Rock), again with its own conventual buildings, and the headquarters of the Templars in the Temple of Solomon (the al-Aqsa mosque). As well as these, Denys Pringle has identified around sixty churches and chapels, the great majority of which would have existed in some form in the twelfth century.96

  The centrepiece was the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Around 1170, the visiting German pilgrim Theoderic copied part of an inscription painted in gold letters on a commemorative wall plate in the chapel of Golgotha. This recorded that the chapels above and around had been consecrated at dawn by Fulcher, patriarch of Jerusalem, on 15 July 1149, ‘the fiftieth anniversary of the taking of the city’.97 William of Tyre was in Chartres at this time and the crusaders in the great armies of the previous year had returned home, so there is no chronicle account of an event that must have been as impressive as the consecration of the rebuilt choir of the abbey church of Saint-Denis five years before. The events of 11 June 1144 are known in detail because Abbot Suger wanted them to be and he carefully recorded the presence of King Louis and Queen Eleanor, as well as that of seventeen archbishops and bishops, and what he described as countless numbers of seculars ranging from counts to ordinary knights.98 Fulcher was no Suger, but it must be assumed that the dedication in Jerusalem was attended by an equally distinguished gathering, including the monarchs, the episcopacy and the great barons.

  The church that Theoderic saw was the culmination of half a century of effort to restore, remodel and extend the buildings on the spot where Christ had been crucified, buried and resurrected. Most importantly, there seems to have been a series of intensive building campaigns during the 1140s – very much in keeping with similar developments in the West – which produced a pilgrimage church in the manner of those great edifices that had been built in France and northern Spain along the routes to Compostela in the earlier years of the century. The aim was, as William of Tyre later said, to enlarge the original church in such a way as to include within it all the holy places on that site.99 This was a hugely ambitious undertaking and planning may have begun as early as the patriarchate of Arnulf of Chocques, although most of the work was probably conceived under the patriarchs William of Messines (who died in 1145) and Fulcher (who died in 1157).

  This must therefore have been a very busy and complex site during the 1140s when several ateliers were working there simultaneously, requiring skills of all sorts and employing Latins, Greeks, Armenians and Arabs. The great Byzantine Rotunda was retained but its eastern wall was removed and the church extended by two bays to make a choir with an ambulatory and three radiating chapels, incorporating the holy sites previously situated in the triporticus, which now disappeared. Galleries linked up with those of the Rotunda. The western bay formed a crossing and was covered by a dome over the place that the pilgrims believed to be the centre of the world. South of the crossing was a transept that on the eastern side contained the tombs of the kings and the chapel of Golgotha, above which was the Calvary chapel. On the south façade was a double portal intended to facilitate the movement of pilgrims into and out of the church.100

  The whole building was embellished with mosaics, frescoes and sculpture, all of which contributed to a series of detailed programmes that were appropriate to the holy sites now enclosed under the new roof. Most strikingly, the Latins moved the Byzantine Anastasis mosaic from the now dismantled apse of the Rotunda and reassembled it on the ceiling of the central apse of the new choir. This depicted Christ's Harrowing of Hell, a key scene in the cycle of the Passion. ‘In his [Christ's] left hand,’ says Theoderic, ‘he carries the Cross and in his right hand Adam. He looks regally into heaven, and he is entering heaven with an enormous stride, his left foot raised and his right foot still on the ground. Surrounding him are these people: his Mother, Blessed John the Baptist, and all the Apostles.’101

  During the 1150s, a large bell tower was erected to the west of the south façade, while the façade itself was decorated with carved lintels, mosaics in the tympana over the portals, and a series of gadroons around the archivolts. This was an important space, for it would be the pilgrim's first sight of the church and it was where the patriarch, speaking from the Calvary chapel, customarily preached to the people.102 The contrasting lintels above the double portal showed, on the eastern (right-hand) door, a carving of a vine scroll within which could be seen humans and birds, which represented the Tree of Life, and, on the western (left-hand) door, a series of six narrative scenes, the first five of which followed the path of the Palm Sunday procession, beginning in Bethany and proceeding from there through the Golden Gate into Jerusalem. These sites, together with the sixth scene which illustrates the Last Supper, completed a sequence of events that preceded the Passion and Resurrection, and represented the route frequently followed by visiting pilgrims.103 Above the lintels the tympana were decorated with mosaics showing the Virgin and Child, probably above the western door, and, above the other door, Noli me
tangere, the scene where Christ meets Mary Magdalene in the garden after the Resurrection.104

  At the same time, both the king and the orders of the Hospital and the Temple were actively extending and developing their buildings. Just to the south of David's Gate by the western entrance to the city was the Tower of David and to the south of that the royal palace. Originally a Herodian structure, the tower seems to have housed the royal chapel as well as the main royal administration and it was from here that the viscount and the castellan could monitor entries to and exits from the city, as well as collecting tolls and other taxes. This too seems the most probable site for the mint since it is unlikely that the silversmiths in the centre of the city could have coped with recoining on the scale ordered by Baldwin III. The royal palace was fortified with a crenellated wall with, on its eastern side, a large square tower at its northern end and a round tower on the south, together with further defences in the form of ditches and barbicans. Theoderic says the palace had been ‘newly built’, although it is difficult to tell how much of this had already been completed under Baldwin III.105