County of Edessa

The County of Edessa was the first-born of the Crusader states, founded in Upper Mesopotamia in 1098 when Baldwin of Boulogne, once Count of Verdun under his brother, broke off from the march to Jerusalem after the siege of Antioch, then east to Edessa, where he convinced Thoros to adopt him as son and heir and married Arda, Jerusalem's first queen. Its seat stood at Edessa, the old Syriac school-city of intellectual life, where Greek philosophy had been turned into Syriac as a stepping stone for the Arabs to come, with Turbessel guarding the Euphrates west bank and the Tigris claimed as its eastern march. Baldwin left to be Jerusalem's first king, and Joscelin held Turbessel for his cousins in a landlocked county, remote, poor-friended with Antioch, half east of the river and always open to the east. Edessa fell in 1144, the first great setback of Outremer provoking the Second Crusade, closing the fifty-two year county.