Kingdom of Jerusalem

Politics and institutions

The Kingdom of Jerusalem was founded in 1099, when the First Crusade took the city and Godfrey of Bouillon refused a royal title to rule as Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre; his brother Baldwin took the crown in 1100. The kingdom was a feudal state on the Levantine shore: baronies, a High Court that elected and deposed kings, and the Assises of Jerusalem codifying its law in the thirteenth century. Its succession ran through crises — the joint rule of Melisende and Fulk, Baldwin IV the leper king, Sibylla and Guy of Lusignan — and after Hattin in 1187 the state survived as the Second Kingdom, the Kingdom of Acre, its capital a port and its politics dominated by baronial factions, the Italian communes and rival claimants until the crown passed, in law, to the kings of Cyprus.

Economy and finance

The kingdom's wealth came through its ports. Acre, Tyre, Jaffa and Caesarea imported the Mediterranean's goods and exported sugar, glass and the traffic of pilgrims; Venice, Genoa and Pisa held fortified quarters with their own courts, wharves and warehouses, and their fleets — and their quarrels — shaped the kingdom's wars. Sugar refining and irrigation were learned from local practice and became the coast's great industry. The royal domain shrank with each crisis and donation; by the thirteenth century the kings of Jerusalem were poor and the communes rich, and Acre's position as the entrepôt of the eastern trade made the merchant republics, more than the crown, the real sovereigns of the rump kingdom.

Society and culture

The kingdom was a French-speaking elite over an Eastern population. Settlers from Lorraine, Flanders and Normandy built castles, parish churches and the rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the Eastern Christians and Muslims of the land lived under their own courts and customs, and intermarriage produced a creole aristocracy that Arabic writers described as a people of mixed tongue. The military orders — Temple and Hospital — held great estates, built the frontier fortresses and grew into powers the crown could not discipline. The kingdom's chronicles, above all William of Tyre's history, and the legal memory of the Assises gave this small state a literary and institutional afterlife far larger than its years.

Military and frontiers

The kingdom lived by the sword and died by it. Its knights and light turcopole cavalry fought Fatimid Egypt to a standstill in the early twelfth century, took Tyre in 1124 after the disaster of Ager Sanguinis in the north, and raided toward Damascus and Egypt. Saladin's union of Egypt and Syria ended the balance: on 4 July 1187 he destroyed the field army at Hattin, and Jerusalem surrendered on 2 October. The Third Crusade restored Acre in 1191 and a treaty coast; Frederick II's crusade of 1229 recovered Jerusalem by diplomacy until the Khwarezmians stormed it in 1244; Louis IX's failure at Mansura in 1250 closed the age of great crusades. In May 1291 the Mamluks stormed Acre, and the kingdom's last defenders took ship.

Foreign relations

Jerusalem's diplomacy was survival among stronger states. It was tied to the three northern crusader states — Edessa, Antioch and Tripoli — by marriage and by shared war; it negotiated truce after truce with Fatimid and then Ayyubid Egypt; it looked to Byzantium as a Christian ally and to the papacy, whose summoned crusades both saved and endangered the kingdom. Venice and Genoa traded privileges for fleets; the Mongols of Hulagu sent envoys in 1260 seeking an alliance against the Mamluks, and the barons hesitated as the two great powers fought over the Levant. The kingdom's weakest diplomacy was the one that mattered most: against the Mamluks of Cairo, who ended it in 1291.

Legacy and influence

Two hundred years of the Kingdom of Jerusalem left more than ruins. The Jerusalem cross spread through European heraldry; the Lusignans ruled Cyprus under the kingdom's title for centuries; the Assises of Jerusalem became a classic of feudal law studied long after the coast was lost. The fall of Acre in 1291 closed the crusader Levant and pushed crusading toward the Mediterranean's other wars. In memory the kingdom became Europe's mirror — chivalric in Tasso's epic, colonial in later historiography — while the Eastern Christian and Muslim societies it touched kept their own accounts. Modern scholarship reads it as a frontier state that worked: a French-speaking elite governing a multi-confessional shore for generations before the desert and the sea closed over it.