God's War: A New History of the Crusades Page 25

  Internally, the non-Latin Christian communities presented not dissimilar problems and opportunities. Unlike further south in Outremer, the Muslim peasantry under Antiochene rule was probably in a minority. Greek influence was strong in language, custom, identity and religion, especially in the city of Antioch itself. However, accommodation between Latins and Greeks was complicated by the Byzantine claim to overlordship, which may have precipitated the departure of the Greek patriarch of Antioch, John IV the Oxite, in 1100. The Latin ecclesiastical hierarchy in the principality acted as a central institution of Frankish authority, led by the formidable former chaplain of Adhemar of Le Puy, Bernard of Valence (patriarch 1100–1135) and his successor Aimery of Limoges (1140–93), both of whom supplied political as well as spiritual leadership at moments of crisis, such as 1119, 1123, 1130, 1149 and 1161. Division between the secular and ecclesiastical powers weakened each, as during the turbulent patriciate of Ralph of Domfront (1135–40) or when Prince Reynald turned on Patriarch Aimery in a dispute over exactions from the church to pay for the prince’s wars. Aimery, a scholar of international repute, fluent in Greek as in Latin, translator of parts of the Bible into Castilian (the first such translation into any Romance language), was beaten up by Reynald’s thugs and left chained out in the sun for a whole day, his bleeding head smeared with honey for the enjoyment of local insects. Unsurprisingly, on being released, Aimery left Antioch for the less barbarous surroundings of Jerusalem, only returning when Reynald had been captured by Nur al-Din in 1161.15 Such internal squabbles aside, the imposition of a Latin hierarchy in northern Syria followed political conquest and matched the subordination and exploitation of the native Greek-speaking population. The political as well as economic dimension of this subjugation are clearly indicated by the contrastingly less hostile relations the Latin church enjoyed with the Jacobite and Armenian churches, both of which represented no political threat.16

  The hostility towards the Greeks reflected Antioch’s delicate international position. Although Alexius I failed to make good his claim to the city, it was over a decade before Lattakiah was finally wrested from his grasp, before which he had formally extracted recognition of his rights in Antioch from Bohemund under the treaty of Devol in 1108. Bohemund’s campaign against Byzantium in 1107–8 in the Balkans, despite widespread support mainly in France, papal authority, indulgences and the declared object of assisting Jerusalem, proved a very damp squib. A long, costly, futile siege of Durazzo ended in a negotiated agreement under which Bohemund accepted tenure of a severely truncated Antioch as Alexius’s vassal for life, without the prospect of hereditary reversion, the Norman being compensated with some vague promise of hereditary lands further east. The patriarch of Antioch was to be a Greek Orthodox. To rub salt into the wound, among the witnesses on behalf of the emperor were Italian Normans in Byzantine service, including relatives of Bohemund and veterans of the First Crusade.17 In fact, the treaty was a dead letter. Bohemund’s refusal to return east and Tancred’s rejection of the treaty were matched by Byzantine inertia. Apart from tentative moves towards establishing a dynastic alliance in 1119, until the late 1130s Greek action concentrated in Cilicia, although in 1135 the dowager princess of Antioch, the ambitious and meddlesome Alice of Jerusalem, unavailingly proposed another Greek marriage between her daughter, the heiress, and the emperor’s son as a means of preserving her own power. Only when the emperors turned their attention and armies towards northern Syria, John II in 1137–8 and 1142 and Manuel I in 1158–9, did Byzantine sovereignty aspire to practical politics, compelling Prince Raymond to perform homage in 1137 and 1145 and Prince Reynald in 1159.18 For the princes of Antioch, the Greek claim provided an irksome context for their actions; for Outremer possibly a missed opportunity. The running tension over Antioch’s disputed status, as well as the internal discrimination against Greeks and the Orthodox church within the principality, inhibited the Latin rulers further south from taking advantage of what remained the most potent twelfth-century Christian power in the eastern Mediterranean. This only changed with the diplomatic rapprochement of the 1160s signalled by the splendid theatre and political insignificance of Manuel I’s entry into Antioch in 1159 and his marriage to Bohemund III’s sister, Maria of Antioch, in 1161. Where Alexius I and John II sought active control over Antioch, Manuel, worried lest aggression lose him allies in the west, contented himself with acceptance of a distant, benevolent, essentially impotent overlordship. Perhaps he was making a virtue of necessity.

  The Byzantines were not alone in their concern with Antioch. Repeated dynastic dislocation inevitably attracted the gaze of other western powers. After Prince Roger’s death in 1119, the regency of Baldwin II of Jerusalem secured the succession for Bohemund II, then being brought up in Apulia. On arrival in 1126, Bohemund was married to Baldwin’s daughter Alice in a deliberate attempt to consolidate Jerusalem’s influence. After Bohemund’s death in battle in 1130, apart from his infant child Constance, the nearest Hauteville relative was Roger II of Sicily, first cousin of Bohemund I and a persistent enemy to the Byzantine emperors, who feared Antioch becoming a hostile Sicilian outpost. The new king of Jerusalem, Fulk of Anjou, assumed the traditional role of regent, ensuring neither a Greek nor a Sicilian succession by choosing a Frenchman, Raymond of Poitiers, son of the former crusader William IX of Aquitaine, to marry the Antioch heiress Constance in 1136. Raymond’s western affiliations lay with Henry I of England, whose daughter Matilda was married to Fulk of Jerusalem’s son Geoffrey. Roger II of Sicily tried to prevent Raymond reaching the east by closing the southern Italian ports to him, the future prince having to resort to disguise and subterfuge to evade capture.19 Raymond’s vigorous rule marked the end of the Norman period in Antioch’s rule and effectively the end of direct western interest in the Antioch succession.

  Although administratively and tenurially autonomous, Antioch’s survival repeatedly depended on interventions by the kings of Jerusalem to prevent the principality succumbing to internecine chaos or Muslim conquest. Baldwin I (in 1109–10, 1111 and 1115), Baldwin II (in 1119–26 and 1130–31), Fulk (in 1131–2 and 1133) and Baldwin III (in 1149, 1150, 1152, 1157, 1158 and 1161) ruled or installed rulers. Formal jurisdictional ties between Antioch and Jerusalem remained confused, complicated by relations of both with Byzantium. However, a presumption of Jerusalem overlordship informed the arbitrations of northern affairs by Baldwin I in 1109 and Baldwin III in 1150, as did the consistent policy of fraternal aid, which, while serving the interests of both parties, revealed a central feature of Outremer’s political mentality. The pages of the Antioch chronicler Walter the Chancellor early in the twelfth century and the great Jerusalem writer William of Tyre towards the end of it were alike shot through with the sense of one shared Christian political community stretching from the Cilician mountains to the deserts of Arabia. The importance of Antioch within that community received backhanded recognition in 1130 when Bohemund II’s embalmed head was sent by the Danishmend emir as a present to the caliph in Baghdad, a macabre precedent repeated when Nur al-Din delivered Prince Raymond’s head and severed arm to the caliph after the battle of Inab in 1149.20 Antioch was by no means the sick man of the Levant. Each prince conducted vigorous and often successful policies of expansion. Despite its grisly conclusion, Raymond’s aggression was continued in the 1150s by his widow’s second husband, the adventurer Reynald of Châtillon, who took on both Muslims and, in raiding Cyprus in 1156, Greeks. Yet each prince met an untimely end. Tancred died relatively young. Roger, Bohemund II and Raymond were killed in battles of their own choosing. Reynald’s opportunism led to sixteen years in an Aleppan prison. Their fates and the survival of their principality unconquered for another century serve as a paradigm for Christian rule in Outremer, at once fragile and tenacious.

  TRIPOLI

  The existence of the county of Tripoli owed everything to the determination and tenacity of Raymond of Toulouse; its continued identity to the interests of the kings of Jerusalem, the wid
er strategic needs of Outremer and the ambitions of Raymond’s squabbling Provençal heirs. Having been forced out of Antioch (1098–9), Jerusalem (1099) and Lattakiah (1102), Raymond, accompanied by veterans of the 1101 crusades, looked further south, capturing Tortosa in 1102. From 1103, he focused on Tripoli, then the major port for Damascus, as the centre of a new lordship, laying siege to the city. Raymond built a large castle on a ridge a couple of miles from the port called Mount Pilgrim, known in Arabic to this day as Qal’at Sanjil, the castle of St Gilles. Raymond of St Gilles, count of Toulouse, so often thwarted by his contemporaries, might have been content with this demotic accolade of posterity. His castle of Mount Pilgrim was to stay in Christian hands continuously from 1103 to 1289, longer than any other in mainland Outremer.21

  When Raymond died in 1105, Tripoli still uncaptured, his followers chose as their lord his cousin, William-Jordan count of Cerdagne, despite the presence at Mount Pilgrim of the count’s infant son, Alfonso-Jordan, and the existence of a bastard son, Bertrand, who had been ruling Toulouse for a decade on his father’s behalf. William-Jordan’s succession reflected a common problem in Outremer, where presence and possession perforce constituted the law. In Jerusalem in the early days after the conquest, absence or occupation determined ownership (the so-called assise de l’an et jour). Just as absentee landlords were useless to settlement and defence, so too were absent rulers, a powerful incentive to ignore strict rules of inheritance (if any existed), in Tripoli in 1105 as in Jerusalem in 1118 or Antioch in 1111 (on Bohemund’s death in the west) and 1112 (the death of Tancred). Habits in the west were less cavalier. Alfonso-Jordan and his mother departed for Toulouse, which they reached in 1108, posing an awkward problem for Bertrand, whom the church regarded as illegitimate. The same year, Bertrand left his half-brother in nominal charge of the family Provençal lands to try his fortune in the east. It is notable that no twelfth-century ruler contemplated combining eastern and western lordships to form a cross-Mediterranean empire. Although some, like Bohemund and Raymond of Toulouse, retained their old titles, others, such as Fulk V of Anjou and then king of Jerusalem, did not. This wholly pragmatic principle seems also to have applied to settler barons and seigneurs of less exalted status.

  Bertrand’s arrival in Outremer provoked an acrid succession contest. While William-Jordan sought the help of the dominant figure in Christian northern Syria, Tancred of Antioch, Bertrand, backed by a substantial army and a large Genoese fleet, offered homage to the equally acquisitive Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who used his royal prestige and military clout to impose a partition on the county in 1109. Shortly afterwards William-Jordan died amid rumours of murder. Meanwhile, Tripoli itself surrendered to Bertrand, Baldwin and the Genoese. The Muslim garrison was spared, but the city was plundered, its renowned library destroyed: ‘the books… exceeded all computation’ lamented Ibn al-Qalanisi from Damascus.22

  Bertrand (d. 1112) controlled the coast from Maraclea in the north to the Dog river above Beirut in the south. At its height, the county stretched inland to Crac des Chevaliers and the Orontes valley towards Homs and northwards to Montferrand (Ba ‘rin) on the road to Hamah. Although the count owed homage and fealty to the king of Jerusalem, who in times of crisis, such as the assassination of Raymond II (1152) or the captivity of Raymond III (1164), acted as guardian or regent, the county of Tripoli, unlike the not dissimilar-sized and resourced lordship of Galilee, remained outside the kingdom. The king of Jerusalem held no direct tenurial, legal or patronage rights over the count’s vassals or fiefs within the county. Its ecclesiastical hierarchy maintained, against papal instructions, its allegiance to the patriarchate of Antioch, not Jerusalem, in part a result of the close political relations established between the county and principality by Bertrand’s son Count Pons (1112–37). The county was divided into separate lordships based on ports such as Jubail and Tortosa and castles in the interior, with the count holding as his own domain the coastal strip around Tripoli and the eastern frontier region around Montferrand, whose loss in 1137 reduced comital resources. The vulnerability of the county led to devolution of power. In 1144, partly to counter the Assassins newly established in the Nosairi mountains and partly as defence against Homs, Raymond II granted the Hospitallers large tracts of the east of the county, including much of the Buqai’ah plain, the area towards Montferrand and the fortress of Hisn al-Akrad. In the 1150s, the Templars acquired Tortosa. Both military orders proceeded to construct major castles, the Templars at Tortosa, the Hospitallers at Hisn al-Akrad or, as it was now called, Crac des Chevaliers. The Genoese role in the county’s foundation was rewarded with a quarter of Tripoli and, among other properties, the port of Jubail, which Count Bertrand gave to the Genoese admiral Guglielmo Embriaco. His descendants became vassals of the count as lords of Jubail in their own right until the last years of the thirteenth century, when, embittered by their treatment at the hands of the count of Tripoli, they briefly held Jubail as vassals of the sultan of Egypt.23 In devolving power and responsibility, the counts of Tripoli revealed a structural weakness in their county and their resources. When Raymond III exerted influence and authority outside Tripoli, acting as regent of Jerusalem in the 1170s and 1180s, this depended not on his position as count but on his family relationship, as a great-grandson of Baldwin II and grandson of Queen Melisende, and on his marriage to the richest heiress within the kingdom, Eschiva of Galilee.

  This weakness was exacerbated by rumbling succession problems, murder and captivity. During the Second Crusade (1146–8) Alfonso-Jordan of Toulouse, Raymond I’s son, born at Mount Pilgrim, arrived in the east clearly possessed of a stronger formal claim than the incumbent, Raymond II, grandson of Raymond I’s bastard. While Alfonso-Jordan died suddenly in Palestine in 1148, to the usual accompaniment of rumours of foul play, his own illegitimate son, Bertrand, backed by Toulousain troops, challenged Raymond’s authority in 1149 by seizing the fortress of Arimah on the road to Tortosa and Homs. According to Arabic sources, Raymond dealt with this unwelcome threat by inviting Nur al-Din and Unur of Damascus, enemies only a year before during the crusaders’ siege of Damascus, to dispose of his troublesome relative. Arimah was taken, razed to the ground and returned to Raymond. Bertrand was led captive to Aleppo, where he languished for the next ten years, his fate a fine tribute to the political eclecticism of Outremer politics.24

  Another was the murder of Raymond II by Assassins in 1152. The Assassins derived from an Isma’ili sect known as the New Preaching founded in north-western Iran in the late eleventh century. Isma’ilis differed from Shi’ites in recognizing the succession of seven instead of twelve imams, heads of the Islamic community, descended from Caliph Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet, murdered in 661. An offshoot of the Persian Isma’ilis based at Alamut near the Caspian Sea, after a blood-chequered career in Aleppo and Damascus, from 1132 the Syrian Assassins established bases in the Nosairi mountains near Tortosa, at once a religious and political community. From 1169 to 1193 they were ruled by Sheikh Rashid al-Din Sinan, known as ‘the Old Man of the Mountains’. The Assassins distinguished themselves from other Islamic sects and religio-political groups by their use of murder as a political weapon, largely to compensate for their lack of military strength. Fear, extortion and impregnable strongholds in the hills secured for the Assassins notoriety and, in the thirteenth century, some political respectability. Although occasionally available to perform others’ dirty work, the Assassins possessed their own idealism, the restoration of radical Isma’ili rule over Islam. Thus their targets tended to be orthodox Sunni Muslims. Their invariable weapon was the dagger. Their nickname, common to Arabic and western sources, derived from the hashish the killers allegedly took before committing what they viewed as a pious act, seeing themselves as religious devotees prepared to face martyrdom for their faith. Raymond II was their first recorded non-Muslim victim, the reasons for his murder unknown. The consequences were severe, leading to another regency, by Raymond’s widow, Hodierna, sister of Queen Melisende and
aunt of Baldwin III. The immediate reaction to Raymond’s murder exposed a latent racism in the Franks, who massacred the eastern indigenous population of Tripoli regardless of religion. ‘In this way it was hoped that the perpetrators of the foul deed might be found.’ They were not.25

  Despite the success of Nur al-Din of Aleppo in uniting Muslim Syria in the quarter-century before his death in 1174, and Raymond III’s decade in captivity (1164–74), the county maintained its precarious hold on the coast. Yet, unlike Antioch and Jerusalem, it is hard to detect much of a coherent, distinctive political culture. The very existence of the county of Tripoli, by the 1150s a loose association of semi-independent lordships, pointed to the haphazard political structure of Outremer. The creation of four separate principalities, while reflecting their respective histories and local geography, indicated a lack of strategic understanding by most of the western invaders, at least until the successes of Nur al-Din and Saladin concentrated minds. The habit of seeking immediate gratification of ambition, opportunity or claims appeared impervious even to the warnings of events and observers in the 1170s and 1180s. The pattern of building castles augmented the impression of myopia, the emphasis being on individual seigneurial administration rather than frontier defence. Perhaps only the military orders, with possessions in all principalities and fealty to none, acquired the perspective to introduce some strategic planning to their castles and campaigns. Otherwise, unity in Outremer flowed usually from the kings of Jerusalem: Baldwin I imposing a settlement in northern Syria in 1109–11; Baldwin II using the marriages of his daughters – Alice to Bohemund II of Antioch and Hodierna to Raymond II of Tripoli. Dynasticism prevailed. The childless Raymond III was succeeded as count of Tripoli by Bohemund IV of Antioch, Raymond’s mother’s great-great-nephew.