| #### 4. THE LATIN EAST, 1100-1151 |

| #### #### The success of the crusading armies in 1098-1099 was, in no small measure, due to the fact that they delivered their assault at a moment when the Moslem world was rent with bitter internal strife. The subsequent history of the Catholic hold on Syria and Palestine was to be the history of a long defensive war against the dispossessed Mohammedan, with the defenders even less united than had been the Moslem in the hour when they overcame him. To understand the quasi-inevitableness of the Mohammedan recovery it is essential to know something of the way in which the Crusaders organised their conquest. #### The war had been a holy war at whose origin the Church had officially presided. The motive was the delivery of Christians from infidel tyranny, and the spirit in which this was achieved was, in theory, that of sinners working out satisfaction for their misdeeds by an heroic act of fraternal charity. The logic of the situation would have placed what conquests were made at the discretion of the Church. More even than over his own city of Rome, might the pope expect to preside over the destinies of the lands which the faithful, at his bidding and with his blessing, had wrested, for the love of God, from the infidel. The result was, however, far different. #### Bohemond retained his hold on Antioch, Raymund of Provence on Tripoli, Baldwin of Flanders on Edessa; and an assembly of the nobles in August, 1099 elected Godfrey de Bouillon to be ruler of Jerusalem. His humility forbade him to call himself king. He would be simply the Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. But his brother Baldwin of Edessa, who succeeded him a year later, had no such scruples and was crowned first King of Jerusalem on Christmas Day, 110 (), in the basilica at Bethlehem. #### The new states were a curious transplantation of Western feudalism to an Eastern soil. They were very French, and they were necessarily. from the beginning, in very close contact with the papacy, to which at every crisis they must turn as the source through which assistance would chiefly, would indeed wholly, come. Politically the founders of the new states -- which soon came to be related, the rest to Jerusalem, as vassals to their suzerain -- were the nobles. It was the nobles who elected the King of Jerusalem and the king's actions were wholly controlled by them. He was little more than a primus inter pares. The kingdom was doomed from its beginnings, and it needed only the shock of a united foe to bring it down. From an ecclesiastical point of view, too, the result of the Crusade was a transplantation of the West to the East. The victors continued to be Latin in their Catholicism. A Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem was set up, with four metropolitans and seven suffragan bishops depending from it. This Church was well endowed and became exceedingly wealthy, the greatest of all the landed proprietors. The patriarch was almost the king's equal, and the occasional struggles between kings and patriarchs were one of the many hindrances- to the growth of real unity. #### The weakness of the State was reflected in its military organisation. As in every other feudally-organised State, the army was made up of the contingents brought in by the different nobles, and the contingent's first loyalty was, often, to its own immediate leader. Each castle was in some sense a little state, perpetually striving to escape the control of the king. Again, many of the fighting men were Armenian and Syrian mercenaries. The loyalty of this cosmopolitan feudal army to the ideals of 1095 could not but be uncertain. #### To meet the situation one of the most characteristic of medieval institutions was created -- the religious order vowed to arms for the defence of the Holy Places. The first of these, the Order of the Knights Hospitallers, grew out of a work of charity whose object was the care of sick pilgrims. It was already a highly successful institution, supported from Europe by a well-organised system of begging when, in 1113, Gerard du Puy transformed it to meet the new problem of military defence. Five years later a second order began, called, from the site of its first home, the Order of the Temple. These new orders were made up of knights, all of noble birth, of serjeants, and of clerics for their spiritual service. All took the three religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But the knights and serjeants were forbidden fasting and such corporal austerities as would lessen their fighting efficiency. For habit they wore, over their armour, a cloak Or distinctive character -- with, for the Hospitallers, a black cross and, for the Templars, a red cross. The new orders found no difficulty in recruiting their numbers. Fiefs, in Europe no less than in the East, were liberally conveyed to them, and while France and England were soon covered with the houses which served them as recruiting centres, in the new states of the East they rapidly became the leading military power. The orders were autonomous. The grand-master of each was, like the chief superior of every other religious order, subject only to the pope. But the constitution within a kingdom already too little centralised, of these powerful, but independent, supporters was to prove ultimately a very great weakness. King, patriarch, barons, the nulitary orders, so many forces acknowledging no subordination -- it would have required a marvellous religious spirit, an almost miraculous devotion to the ideah, to combine them a11 in any harmonious effort. It is matter of history how far from that ideal the Latin Catholics of Syria came to live. The climate, and the new luxuries and refinements of the Mohammedan civilisation were, only too often, as powerfully destructive of their morale as they had been, time and again, with their fellows who fought the Moor in Spain. #### For the new Catholic settlements -- and such these kingdoms and principalities really were -- the war was never to end. The gains of the campaigns of 1098 and 1099 had to be supported by yet other gains; and then the ceaseless raids of the Mohammedans, from the north and south, must be beaten off and these in their turn raided. Egypt was weak, and for years not a serious danger. The states of the north, and the Emirs of Damascus, Kaifa and Mosul -- though stronger and more aggressive -- were mutually hostile. Then in 1127, Zengi, the ruler of Mosul, succeeded in creating a new unity that had only Damascus for a rival. The years 1131-1143 were for him a period of uninterrupted success against Antioch, Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem too. Luckily for the kingdom, Damascus to some extent held off. Zengi, and, finding Jerusalem useful, its emir concluded a formal alliance with the kings which lasted until 1147. #### But while the Catholics, strengthened by the reinforcements which never ceased to come, more or less numerous and well- provided, from Europe, thus maintained their hold against the Turks. they had to wage another kind of war, on another front, against the Greek emperor at Constantinople. For the Greeks, these several Latin states were so many imperial fiefs, owing the emperor homage. More than one of the princes had, in circumstances of difficulty, promised and even done homage to them as to his suzerain. None of the princes, however, willingly endured such a regime. Hence a readiness on the part of Constantinople to support any one of the Latins against the rest. So it was that the emperor Alexis Comnenus (1081-1118) aided Raymund to establish Tripoli as a counterweight to Bohemond at Antioch. Later still his son John (1118-1143) and his grandson Manuel (1143-1180) found much richer opportunities for intervention. Raymund, prince of Antioch, was compelled in h 1137, by the appearance of an imperial army to do homage to John; and although the pope, Innocent II, in the following March, forbade alliances between the Latins and the Greek emperor to the detriment of other crusading states, the troubles began again in 1142. This time it was the people of Antioch who called in the emperor against Raymund. In 1143 the emperor, John, was murdered, and Raymund seized the opportunity to invade the Byzantine possessions. John's successor, Manuel, replied vigorously, sending an army and fleet to Antioch, and Raymund was obliged to do homage once more, this time at Constantinople, and even to accept as patriarch at Antioch, a priest chosen by the emperor from the schismatic clergy of his capital. This marked the highwater mark of the Byzantine success, the nearest it arrived to what Alexis Comnenus had promised himself when the crusades began in 1095. The empire had secured Asia Minor and the Latin states had made a beginning of doing homage. #### In that same year 1144 a much greater disaster befell them. On Christmas Day Zengi captured Edessa. He was murdered shortly afterwards, but in his son, Nureddin, the crusaders had to face a still more dangerous enemy, for to his father's political ability and military skill he joined an unspoiled religious enthusiasm which transformed the whole character of the campaigns. They became a renewal of the Holy War, not a mere anti-crusade. #### When the news reached the pope that one of the Christian states had fallen to the Saracens, it was to the King of France, Louis VII, that he turned. Louis enlisted the aid of St. Bernard and, at a great assembly at Vezelay (March 31, 1046), along with hundreds of his nobles, knights and lesser subjects the king took the cross. St. Bernard conceived the grandiose plan of a crusade in which all Christendom should at the same time attack all its enemies, the Saracens in the east, the Moors in Spain and the still pagan tribes to the east of the Elbe. He himself led the campaign of preaching and, on Christmas Day, 1146, the emperor, Conrad III, after some resistance, followed the French king's example. By sermons, by writings, by personal exhortation St. Bernard gradually roused the West from its apathy, and soon both the emperor and the King of France had at their disposal armies of some 70,000 men. #### For all its promise, however, this first crusade to enlist the personal support of the powerful kings was destined to fail. It had failed, indeed, before it set out. The Greeks, as always, made it a condition of their assistance that all conquests should be held as fiefs of Constantinople. There were disputes as to the route, which masked a more fundamental dispute, namely whether to support the Greeks or Roger of Sicily who was on the verge of war with them. Finally, the attempt to realise St. Bernard's plan had no other result than to disperse the strength-of the movement or to delay its concentration. Many of the Germans went off to fight the Wends. The English and Brabancon contingent, travelling by the sea-route, halted to take Lisbon from the Moors. #### The main armies reached Constantinople by the land-route through Hungary and Thrace, the French in good order, the Germans pillaging so badly that the Greek emperor had to send an army to protect his own people. At Adrianople the Greeks fought and defeated the crusaders. Conrad III refused point blank to do homage to Manuel Comnenus; whereupon the Greek refused even to see him, and the crusaders were hurried across the Bosphorus with all possible speed. The French had a more favourable reception from the emperor, but, even so, relations between the two forces were severely strained and some of Louis VII's advisers were eager to inaugurate the crusade by taking Constantinople. After a succession of disasters, their armies very much smaller, the king and the emperor at last reached Jerusalem in the spring of 1148. To regain Edessa was more than they could hope. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, proposed instead that they should assist him -- and his Mohammedan ally, the Emir of Basra -- to take Damascus. In July, 1148, the expedition marched. The Viceroy of Damascus managed, however, to break up the coalition. The crusaders won one battle, failed in another, and, raising the siege, retired. #### This was the end of the wretched affair. Conrad and Louis returned to Europe, and their armies with them, to spread, as widely as the area whence they had been recruited, the tale of the great disaster. The damage done to the very idea of the crusade was huge, and the one definite change in the situation was the destruction of the alliance between Jerusalem and Damascus, the disappearance of the one force that stood between the kingdom and the aggressive Nureddin. #### In 1150 St. Bernard endeavoured to reorganise the affair, but he found no one to listen to him. Kings and lords alike, for that generation, had had their fill. . ####  |