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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. .
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