residence in Jerusalem a reason for the ultimate supremacy of the Lotharingian kings. Jerusalem attracted the flow of pilgrims from the West as Antioch never could; and though the great majority of the pilgrims were only birds of passage, there were always many who stayed in the East. There was thus a steady immigration into the kingdom, to strengthen its armies and recruit with new blood the vigour of its inhabitants. Still more important perhaps was the fact that the ports of the kingdom attracted the Italian towns; and it was therefore to the kingdom that they lent the strength of their armies and the skill of their siege-artillery—in return, it is true, for concessions of privileges so considerable as to weaken the resources of the kingdom they helped to create. While Jerusalem possessed these advantages, Antioch was not without its defects. It had to meet—or perhaps it would be more true to say, it brought upon itself—the hostility of strong Mahommedan powers in the vicinity. As early as 1100 Bohemund was captured in battle by Danishmend of Sivas; and it was his captivity, depriving the patriarch as it did of Norman assistance, which allowed the uncontested accession of Baldwin I. Again, in 1104, the Normans, while attempting to capture Harran, were badly defeated on the river Balikh, near Rakka; and this defeat may be said to have been fatal to the chance of a great Norman principality.[1] But the hostility of Alexius, aided and abetted by the jealousy of Raymund of Toulouse, was almost equally fatal. Alexius claimed Antioch; was it not the old possession of his empire, and had not Bohemund done him homage? Raymund was ready to defend the claims of Alexius; was not Bohemund a successful rival? Thus it came about that Alexius and Raymund became allies; and by the aid of Alexius Raymund established, from 1102 onwards, the principality which, with the capture of Tripoli in 1109, became the principality of Tripoli, and barred the advance of Antioch to the south. Meanwhile the armies of Alexius not only prevented any farther advance to the N.W., but conquered the Cilician towns (1104). No wonder that Bohemund flung himself in revenge on the Eastern empire in 1108—only, however, to meet with a humiliating defeat at Durazzo.
Thus it was that Baldwin waxed while Bohemund waned. The growth of Baldwin’s kingdom, as it was suggested above, owed more to the interests of Italian traders than it did to crusading zeal. In 1100, indeed, it might appear that a new Crusade from the West, which the capture of Antioch in 1098 had begun, and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 had finally set in motion, was destined to achieve great things for the nascent kingdom. Thousands had joined this new Crusade, which should deal the final blow to Mahommedanism: among the rest came the first of the troubadours, William IX., Count of Poitiers, to gather copy for his muse, and even some, like Stephen of Blois and Hugh of Vermandois, who had joined the First Crusade, but had failed to reach Jerusalem. The new crusaders cherished high plans; they would free Bohemund and capture Bagdad. But each of the three sections of their army was routed in turn in Asia Minor by the princes of Sivas, Aleppo and Harran, in the middle of 1101; and only a few escaped to report the crushing disaster. Baldwin I. had thus no assistance to expect from the West, save that of the Italian towns. From an early date Italian ships had followed the crusaders. There were Genoese ships in St Simeon’s harbour in the spring of 1098 and at Jaffa in 1099; in 1099 Dagobert, the archbishop of Pisa, led a fleet from his city to the Holy Land; and in 1100 there came to Jaffa a Venetian fleet of 200 sail, whose leaders promised Venetian assistance in return for freedom from tolls and a third of each town they helped to conquer. But it was the Genoese who helped Baldwin I. most. The Venetians already enjoyed, since 1080, a favoured position in Constantinople, and had the less reason to find a new emporium in the East; while Pisa connected itself, through Dagobert, with Antioch[2] rather than with Jerusalem, and was further, in 1111, invested by Alexius with privileges, which made an outlet in the Holy Land no longer necessary. But the Genoese, who had helped with provisions and siege-tackle in the capture of Antioch and of Jerusalem, had both a stronger claim on the crusaders, and a greater interest in acquiring an eastern emporium. An alliance was accordingly struck in 1101 (Fulcher II. c. vii.), by which the Genoese promised their assistance, in return for a third of all booty, a quarter in each town captured, and a grant of freedom from tolls. In this way Baldwin I. was able to take Arsuf and Caesarea in 1101 and Acre in 1104. But Genoese aid was given to others beside Baldwin (it enabled Raymund to capture Byblus in 1104, and his successor, William, to win Tripoli in 1109); while, on the other hand, Baldwin enjoyed other aid besides that of the Genoese. In 1110, for example, he was enabled to capture Sidon by the aid of Sigurd of Norway, the Jorsalafari, who came to the Holy Land with a fleet of 55 ships, starting in 1107, and in a three years’ “wandering,” after the old Norse fashion, fighting the Moors in Spain, and fraternizing with the Normans in Sicily. At a later date, in the reign of Baldwin II., Venice also gave her aid to the kings of Jerusalem. Irritated by the concessions made by Alexius to the Pisans in 1111, and furious at the revocation of her own privileges by John Comnenus in 1118, the republic naturally sought a new outlet in the Holy Land. A Venetian fleet of 120 sail came in 1123, and after aiding in the repulse of an attack, which the Egyptians had taken advantage of Baldwin II.’s captivity to deliver, they helped the regent Eustace to capture Tyre (1124), in return for considerable privileges—freedom from tolls throughout the kingdom, a quarter in Jerusalem, baths and ovens in Acre, and in Tyre one-third of the city and its suburbs, with their own court of justice and their own church. After thus gaining a new footing in Tyre, the Venetians could afford to attack the islands of the Aegean as they returned, in revenge for the loss of their privileges in Constantinople; but the hostility between Venice and the Eastern empire was soon afterwards appeased, when John Comnenus restored the old privileges of the Venetians. The Venetians, however, maintained their position in Palestine; and their quarters remained, along with those of the Genoese, as privileged commercial franchises in an otherwise feudal state.
In this way the kingdom of Jerusalem expanded until it came to embrace a territory stretching along the coast from Beirut (captured in 1110[3]) to el-Arish on the confines of Egypt—a territory whose strength lay not in Judaea, like the ancient kingdom of David, but, somewhat paradoxically (though commercial motives explain the paradox), in Phoenicia and the land of the Philistines. With all its length, the territory had but little breadth: towards the north it was bounded by the amirate of Damascus; in the centre, it spread little, if at all, beyond the Jordan; and it was only in the south that it had any real extension. Here there were two considerable annexes. To the south of the Dead Sea stretched a tongue of land, reaching to Aila, at the head of the eastern arm of the Red Sea. This had been won by Baldwin I., by way of revenge for the attacks of the Egyptians on his kingdom; and here, as early as 1116, he had built the fort of Monreal, half way between Aila and the Dead Sea. To the east of the Dead Sea, again, lay a second strip of territory, in which the great fortress was Krak (Kerak) of the Desert, planted somewhere about 1140 by the royal butler, Paganus, in the reign of Fulk of Jerusalem. These extensions in the south and east had also, it is easy to see, a commercial motive. They gave the kingdom a connexion of its own with the Red Sea and its shipping; and they enabled the Franks to
- ↑ Yet the north always continued to be more populous than the south; and the Latins maintained themselves in Antioch and Tripoli a century after the loss of Jerusalem. The land was richer in the north: it was protected by its connexion with Cyprus and Armenia: it was more remote from Egypt—the basis of Mahommedan power from the reign of Saladin onwards.
- ↑ Pisa naturally connected itself with Antioch, because Antioch was hostile to Constantinople, and Pisa cherished the same hostility, since Alexius I. had in 1080 given preferential treatment to Venice, the enemy of Pisa.
- ↑ This is the year in which the kingdom may be regarded as definitely founded. The period of conquest practically ends at this date, though isolated gains were afterwards made. The year 1110 is additionally important by reason of the accession of Maudud al Mosul, which marks the beginning of a Moslem reaction.
