The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

  One key feature of this collaboration was the management and cultivation of the cult associated with the Jerusalemite relic of the True Cross discovered by the First Crusaders in 1099. In the first years of the twelfth century the Cross became a totem of Latin power in the Levant. Borne by either the patriarch or one of his leading clergymen into a succession of battles against Islam, it quickly acquired a reputation for miraculous intervention; soon it was said that, in the presence of the Lord’s Cross, the Franks were invincible. 53

  Creating a kingdom

  Having secured his accession, Baldwin I was confronted by one overwhelming difficulty. In reality, the kingdom over which he now ruled was little more than a loose network of dispersed outposts. The Franks held Jerusalem alongside the likes of Bethlehem, Ramla and Tiberias, but in 1100 these were still just isolated pockets of Latin settlement. Even here, the ruling Franks were vastly outnumbered by the indigenous Muslim population and by eastern Christian and Jewish communities. The bulk of Palestine remained unconquered and in the hands of semi-autonomous Islamic potentates. Worse still, the Latins had barely begun to assert control over the Levantine coastline, controlling only Jaffa and Haifa, neither of which offered an ideal natural harbour. Only by subjugating Palestine’s ports could Baldwin hope to secure lines of communication with western Europe, open his kingdom to Christian pilgrims and settlers, and tap into a potentially bounteous conduit of trade between East and West. Internal security and the need for territorial consolidation, therefore, were paramount.

  A Latin eyewitness, Fulcher of Chartres, reflected upon this situation:

  In the beginning of his reign Baldwin as yet possessed few cities and people…Up to that time the land route [to Palestine] was completely blocked to our pilgrims [and those Franks who could] came very timidly in single ships, or in squadrons of three or four, through the midst of hostile pirates and past the ports of the Saracens…Some remained in the Holy Land, and others went back to their native countries. For this reason the land of Jerusalem remained depopulated [and] we did not have more than 300 knights and as many footmen to defend [the kingdom].

  The perils associated with these problems were reflected in the testimony of early Christian pilgrims who did reach the Near East. Saewulf, a pilgrim (most likely from Britain) who documented his journey to Jerusalem at the very start of the twelfth century, described the prevailing lawlessness of the Judean hills in disturbing detail. The road between Jaffa and the Holy City, he noted, ‘was very dangerous…because the Saracens are continually plotting an ambush…day and night always keeping a lookout for someone to attack’. En route he saw ‘countless corpses’ left to rot or to be ‘torn up by wild beasts’ because no one would risk stopping to organise proper burials. Things had improved somewhat by around 1107, when another pilgrim, a Russian known as Daniel the Abbot, visited the Holy Land, but he still complained bitterly that it was impossible to travel through Galilee without the protection of soldiers.

  Perhaps the most striking demonstration that the Holy Land had yet to be truly conquered came in the summer of 1103 when, during a routine hunting trip near Caesarea, Baldwin I was attacked by a small Fatimid raiding party that had seemingly marched into Latin territory at will. Caught in the thick of the fighting, the king was struck by an enemy lance, and, although the precise nature of his injuries is unclear–one account had him stabbed ‘in the back near the heart’, another ‘pierced through the thigh and kidneys’–they were certainly grave. A Latin contemporary described how ‘at once streams of blood gushed ominously from this wound…his face began to grow pale [and] at length he fell from his horse to the ground as if dead’. Thanks to the careful ministrations of his physician, after a protracted convalescence Baldwin recovered, but he continued to be troubled by this injury for the remainder of his life.54

  Ultimately, Baldwin I was forced to dedicate much of the first decade of the twelfth century to the consolidation of his hold over Palestine, employing a mixture of pragmatic flexibility and icy resolve in his dealings with the Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land. He received an early boost when a Genoese fleet arrived in Jaffa, possibly alongside ships from Pisa, just before Easter 1101. These sailors had come east probably with a mind to aid in the consolidation and defence of the Levant and to explore new avenues for commerce. They brought a much-needed naval element to Baldwin’s campaign of conquest and, in return, he offered them generous terms: a third share of any booty taken and a semi-independent trading enclave, to be held ‘by perpetual and hereditary right’, within any settlement taken with Italian aid. With the deal struck, Baldwin was ready to go on the offensive.

  His first target, Arsuf, had staunchly resisted a land-based assault from Godfrey of Bouillon in December 1099. Now Baldwin was able to enforce a siege from the sea and, after just three days, its Muslim populace sued for peace on 29 April 1101. The king was magnanimous, granting them safe conduct, bearing any goods they could carry, as far as Ascalon. Success had been achieved without loss of Christian life.

  Baldwin then turned his attention to Caesarea, twenty-odd miles to the north. This once bustling Greco-Roman settlement had faded over centuries of Muslim rule; its aged walls still stood, but the city’s celebrated port had long since been destroyed and all that remained was a small, shallow harbour. Baldwin sent a legation to the emir of Caesarea, urging him to capitulate or face a merciless siege; but, holding out hope of Fatimid reinforcement, the town’s Muslim inhabitants stoutly rejected any notion of a negotiated surrender. At Arsuf, the Latin king had shown clemency to a submissive foe; here, in the face of such brazen obstinacy, he sought to make a brutal demonstration. Moving in around 2 May 1101, he began bombarding Caesarea with mangonels. Its garrison put up stern resistance for fifteen days, but Frankish troops eventually managed to storm the city’s buckling defences with the aid of scaling ladders. Baldwin now allowed the full wanton fury of his troops to be unleashed on Caesarea’s terrified populace. Christian troops scoured the city, street by street, house by house, giving no quarter, butchering most of the male population, enslaving the women and children and plundering every shred of loot they could find. One Latin observer wrote:

  How much property of various kinds was found there it is impossible to say, but many of our men who had been poor became rich. I saw a great many of the Saracens who were killed there put in a pile and burned. The fetid odour of their bodies bothered us greatly. These wretches were burned for the sake of finding the gold coins which some had swallowed.

  Not since the sack of the Holy City itself in 1099 had the Levant witnessed such avaricious barbarity. The wealth seized was substantial–the Genoese alone, upon receiving their allotted third, were able to distribute forty-eight solidi of Poitou and two pounds of valuable spices to each of 8,000 men–and the spoils must also have done much to restock the royal treasury. In addition, the Italians were given an emerald-green bowl, the Sacro Catino, once believed to be the Holy Grail, which remains in Genoa’s Cathedral of San Lorenzo to this day. Baldwin I, meanwhile, made a point of sparing the emir and qadi (judge) of Caesarea in order to secure a hefty ransom. A cleric also named Baldwin, notorious for having branded a cross on his forehead at the start of the First Crusade, was then appointed as the new Latin archbishop of Caesarea.55

  This conquest sent a stark message to the remaining Muslim settlements in Palestine: resistance would bring annihilation. Before long this notion smoothed the way to the most significant conquest of Baldwin’s early reign. In April 1104 he laid siege to the port of Acre, some twelve miles north of Haifa, home to Palestine’s largest and most sheltered harbour. Fighting alongside a seventy-ship-strong Genoese fleet, the king began an assault siege, and the Muslim garrison, isolated from any possible Fatimid reinforcement, soon capitulated, requesting the same terms of surrender given at Arsuf. Baldwin readily acquiesced; indeed, he even allowed Muslim citizens to remain in Acre in return for payment of a form of poll tax. With limited loss of life, he had acquired a valuable prize�
��a port offering relatively secure anchorage, whatever the season, that could act as a vital channel for maritime communication and commerce with western Europe.56 Before long, Acre became the Latin kingdom’s trading capital.

  In the years that followed, Baldwin continued gradually to extend and consolidate his control over the Mediterranean seaboard. Beirut was captured in May 1110, this time with the aid of Genoese and Pisan ships. Later that year Baldwin targeted Sidon, which for some time had been bribing the Frankish king with lavish tributes of gold to secure immunity. With the able support of a large contingent of recently arrived Norwegian crusader-pilgrims, under their young king Sigurd, Baldwin laid siege to Sidon in October and forced its surrender by early December, once again on terms of safe conduct and a provision to allow some members of the Muslim population to remain in peace, working the land under Latin rule.

  In the course of this first decade, Baldwin I brought a real measure of territorial security to his nascent kingdom and forged a crucial lifeline back to the Christian west. Nonetheless, two cities remained beyond his grasp. To the north, the strongly fortified port of Tyre stood as a stubborn Muslim outpost, separating Acre from Sidon and Beirut; it survived a concerted Frankish siege in 1111 largely because its emir switched allegiance from Egypt to Damascus, securing valuable reinforcement. Unable to achieve its capture, Baldwin isolated Tyre by building fortresses inland at Toron and south along the coast at a narrow cliff pass known as Scandelion.

  To the south, Ascalon likewise slipped through Baldwin’s fingers. In the spring of 1111 he threatened to besiege the city, frightening its latest emir, Shams al-Khilafa, into adopting a remarkable policy of political realignment. The emir first bought peace with the promise of a tribute of 7,000 dinars. With al-Afdal, the Fatimid vizier of Egypt, rumbling his objections back in Cairo, al-Khilafa decided that his best hope of political survival lay in a dramatic switch of allegiance. Breaking with the Fatimid caliphate, he travelled to Jerusalem to broker a new deal with Baldwin I and, having pledged his loyalty to the Latin kingdom, was left in power as a semi-independent client ruler. Soon afterwards a Christian garrison of 300 troops was installed in Ascalon, and for some months it seemed that Baldwin’s pragmatism had finally closed the doorway between Egypt and Palestine. The unfortunate Shams al-Khilafa did not live long beyond that summer. A group of Ascalonite Berbers, still loyal to the Fatimids, attacked him while he was out riding. Badly wounded, he fled to his house, but was hunted down and butchered. Before King Baldwin could come to its aid, the Christian garrison was similarly dispatched. Having been sent al-Khilafa’s head, al-Afdal swiftly reimposed Fatimid control over Ascalon.57

  Servants to the crown

  Baldwin I demonstrated a gift for forceful governance in his role as king of an expanding realm. Throughout the first phase of his reign he took great care to ensure that the balance of power in Latin Palestine lay with the crown and not with the nobility. In this he had a particular advantage over fellow monarchs back in the West in that he was, in relative terms at least, beginning with a clean slate. Not having to deal with an imbedded aristocracy, enmeshed within centuries-old systems of lordship and landholding, Baldwin could shape the new kingdom of Jerusalem to his advantage.

  A central feature of his approach was the maintenance of a powerful royal domain–the territory owned and directly administered by the crown. Kings in Europe might inherit realms in which many of the richest and most powerful territories had long since been parcelled out to nobles, to be governed as fiefs in the name of the crown but ruled in semi-autonomous fashion. Baldwin I kept many of Palestine’s most important settlements within his domain, including Jerusalem, Jaffa and Acre, creating very few new lordships. Frequently whittled away by the high mortality rate of the warfare-strewn Levant, the aristocracy also had little opportunity to assert hereditary claims to the fiefs that were available. The king also made frequent use of money fiefs, rewarding service with cash rather than land.

  The early history of two lordships–Haifa and Tiberias–is particularly illustrative of Baldwin’s management of, and attitude to, his leading vassals. Once Tancred left for Antioch in 1101, Baldwin divided the overpowerful principality of Galilee in two. Geldemar Carpinel, a southern French crusader who had been in Godfrey of Bouillon’s service, was given Haifa in March 1101, perhaps in return for his support of Baldwin’s claim to the throne. Geldemar was killed in battle just six months later and, over the next fifteen years, the lordship of Haifa passed through the hands of three further men, none of whom were related. In this way, authority over the port consistently reverted to the crown, and on each occasion Baldwin was able to redistribute the reward of this fief as he chose.

  Tiberias, meanwhile, was given to one of the king’s closest followers, Hugh of Falchenberg, the knight from Flanders who had probably joined Baldwin during the First Crusade. Hugh served the kingdom well, but soon fell foul of the region’s military insecurity and was killed by an arrow during an ambush in 1106. Tiberias then passed to a northern Frenchman, Gervase of Bazoches, who became one of Baldwin’s favourites and was appointed as royal seneschal (in charge of financial administration and the judiciary). Within two years, however, Gervase was captured by Damascene troops during a Muslim raid on Galilee.

  Of course, not all of Baldwin I’s vassals met with precipitous or gruesome deaths. Along the northern coast of Palestine, on the border with Lebanon and far from the immediate reach of Jerusalem, the king created some new lordships. One of these, Sidon, he gave to the great rising star of his reign, Eustace Garnier. A knight, probably of Norman origin, Eustace had likely served Baldwin while still in Edessa, and certainly fought for him against the Egyptians in 1105. From relative obscurity, Eustace quickly amassed a potent clutch of lordships, including Caesarea and, through marriage to Emma (the well-connected daughter of Patriarch Arnulf of Chocques), the town of Jericho. Eustace was, however, an exception. On the whole, Baldwin seems to have created a loyal and effective noble class that was, as yet, largely subservient to the crown.58

  FACING ISLAM

  Of course, in the early years of his reign Baldwin I could ill afford to focus simply upon the consolidation of his hold over Palestine; one watchful eye remained trained upon his Muslim neighbours, most notably the Shi‘ite Fatimids of Egypt. Their vizier al-Afdal had been humbled by the First Crusaders, but with the port of Ascalon–the stepping stone between Palestine and Egypt–still in Fatimid hands, the door stood open for a counter-attack on the kingdom of Jerusalem.

  The Battles of Ramla

  In May 1101, soon after Baldwin’s violent subjugation of Caesarea, news arrived of an Egyptian invasion. Al-Afdal had dispatched a large force that was now advancing on the Holy City under the command of one of his leading generals, the former governor of Beirut, Sa‘ad al-Daulah. Baldwin rushed south, but rather than seek open battle he elected to hold his ground amid the relative security of Ramla and wait for the Fatimids’ next move. For the next three months a tense stalemate held, with Sa‘ad waiting at Ascalon for the right moment to pounce and Baldwin nervously patrolling the region between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Finally, in the first week of September, with the fighting season drawing to a close, the Egyptians began a definitive advance.

  Eschewing a reactive policy of defence, Baldwin decided to confront the enemy head-on, ordering an immediate mobilisation at Jaffa. This was a brave decision given the worrying paucity of warriors at his disposal. Even after summoning troops from across the kingdom and ordering that every eligible squire be knighted, he was left with just 260 knights and 900 footmen. Latin estimates of Muslim manpower at this point vary widely–from 31,000 to 200,000–and seem grossly inflated. No reliable Arabic testimony survives, but it is likely that the Franks were heavily outnumbered that autumn. Marching out of Jaffa on 6 September to intercept the Fatimids on the plains south of Ramla, the Christians seem to have been possessed by a sense of desperate determination. Among them was the king’s chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, who la
ter wrote that ‘we earnestly prepared to die for the love of [Christ]’, taking solace from the presence of the relic of the True Cross carried in their midst.

  The atmosphere at dawn the following day was laden with echoes of the First Crusade. With Sa‘ad al-Daulah’s forces spotted ‘from a distance…shimmering in the plain’, the king apparently fell to his knees before the True Cross, confessed his sins and received mass. Fulcher recalled the rousing battle speech his monarch then delivered:

  Come then, soldiers of Christ, be of good cheer and fear nothing, [but] fight, I beseech you, for the salvation of your souls…If you should be slain here, you will surely be among the blessed. Already the gate of the kingdom of Heaven is open to you. If you survive as victors you will shine in glory among the Christians. If, however, you wish to flee, remember that France is indeed a long distance away.

  With that the Franks began advancing at speed, taking the fight to the Egyptians, arrayed in five or six divisions. Baldwin, astride his fleet-footed mount fittingly named Gazelle, led a reserve force, ready to attack once the shape of the fracas became clear. Riding close to his king throughout, Fulcher of Chartres later evoked the chaotic horror of the battle that followed, writing that ‘the number of the foe was so great and they swarmed over us so quickly that hardly anyone could see or recognise anyone else’. The Latin vanguard was soon decimated, with Geldemar Carpinel among the slain, and the whole army was quickly encircled.

  With the Christians on the brink of defeat, Baldwin committed his reserve, riding alongside the True Cross. At the force of his attack rank upon rank of Fatimid troops buckled. Fulcher watched as the king himself skewered a leading Egyptian emir in the belly with his lance, and a large portion of the Muslim force turned in flight. It was probably in this shock assault that Sa‘ad al-Daulah was killed. One Latin contemporary believed that victory was assured by a miracle associated with the True Cross in which a Muslim commander was choked to death just as he was about to attack the bishop carrying the relic. This story seems to have circulated through the army, and certainly contributed to the burgeoning cult surrounding the Cross, but in reality the whole encounter was close run and inconclusive. Fulcher testified that the field was cloaked with weapons, armour and the bodies of both Muslim and Christian dead, estimating the enemy’s losses at 5,000, but conceding that eighty Frankish knights and a larger number of infantry were killed. And while Baldwin was able to retain control of the plain and of the run-down sections of the Fatimid force that had routed in the direction of Ascalon, terrified survivors of the Latin vanguard were, at the same time, streaming back towards Jaffa, hotly pursued by Muslim troops who believed they had carried the day.