The political problem of the new state, in the days after the capture of Jerusalem, was a constitutional one. Was the kingdom a fief of the papacy (Adhémar of Le Puy had died at Antioch; his successor, the patriarch Daimbert, would press the papal claim)? A successor to the Byzantine governorship of Palestine that the conquering army had just superseded? A new kingdom in its own right? Should its ruler be styled king of Jerusalem (which would invite the accusation that he was usurping the title of Christ, who was the proper king of the city), or by some lesser title? The princes who remained in the East after most of the army had returned home — Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, Tancred, Eustace of Boulogne — settled on a compromise. Godfrey was elected ruler on the 22nd of July 1099, with the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, "Protector of the Holy Sepulchre," which dodged the king-of-Jerusalem question. The kingdom was, however, treated by all observers as a sovereign state from the start.
Godfrey and Baldwin I
Godfrey of Bouillon's reign lasted barely a year. He died of natural causes (possibly typhoid) at Jerusalem on the 18th of July 1100, having spent his year extending Crusader control along the coast to Caesarea and dealing with a serious Egyptian counter-attack at Ascalon in August 1099. His brother Baldwin, who had been ruling the County of Edessa (the easternmost crusader state, taken in March 1098 before the rest of the army even reached Antioch), was offered the throne and arrived in Jerusalem in November 1100. He was crowned king of Jerusalem — the title-question definitively settled in favour of secular royalty — at Bethlehem on Christmas Day 1100. He was the first official king of Jerusalem.
Baldwin I (r. 1100–1118) is the kingdom's effective founder. His eighteen-year reign extended Crusader control along the entire coast of Palestine and Lebanon: Arsuf (1101), Caesarea (1101), Acre (1104), Beirut (1110), Sidon (1110), Tripoli (1109, by his cousin Bertrand). The capture of these coastal cities — which the inland Crusader principalities depended on for trade and reinforcement by sea — was the central strategic project of the founding generation, completed by the surrender of Tyre in 1124. The Italian maritime republics (chiefly Genoa, then Venice and Pisa) provided naval assistance in exchange for trading privileges and quarters in the captured cities; these Italian quarters in the Frankish ports would become, over the next century, the principal commercial and political institutions of the kingdom's urban life.
Baldwin also organised the political institutions of the kingdom on broadly Western European feudal lines, with substantial local adaptations. The kingdom's territory was divided into great vassal lordships (Galilee, Sidon, Caesarea, Jaffa-Ascalon, Oultrejourdain, and others), each held by a Frankish nobleman who held it in fief from the king and owed military service, court attendance, and counsel. The king's High Court (Haute Cour) — a council of his lay vassals plus the senior ecclesiastics — judged disputes between the great lords and advised the king on policy. A subordinate Court of Burgesses (Cour des Bourgeois) dealt with cases involving non-noble Frankish settlers in the towns. A separate court system, the Cour de la Fonde or Cour des Syriens, was retained for the indigenous Christian and Muslim populations on customary local lines. The arrangement is, on close examination, less a simple transplant of French feudalism than a synthesis with the late Byzantine and Fatimid administrative practices the Crusaders had inherited.
Baldwin died on the 2nd of April 1118 on campaign in Egypt, of an old wound that had reopened. He had no children. The succession passed, by the choice of the High Court, to his cousin Baldwin of Le Bourg, who had been ruling the County of Edessa.
Baldwin II
Baldwin II (r. 1118–1131) inherited a more developed state than his predecessor had taken over. His reign was militarily mixed (he was captured by the Turkish atabeg Balak of Aleppo in 1123 and held prisoner for sixteen months, returning to his kingdom in 1124 with no apparent ill effects), and the major territorial gain of the period was the long-delayed capture of Tyre on the 7th of July 1124 by a Venetian-Crusader naval and siege operation. With Tyre's fall, the entire coast from Antioch to Ascalon was in Crusader hands. Only Ascalon itself, the Fatimid Egyptian fortress on the southern coastal route, would remain in Muslim hands until 1153.
The most lasting institutional development of Baldwin II's reign, however, was the foundation of the two great military monastic orders that would, over the next century, become both the kingdom's principal field armies and major political actors in their own right. The Knights of the Hospital (Hospitallers) — founded as a hospital order before 1099 in Jerusalem — were transformed into a military fraternity during the 1120s, with the formal grant of military duties in the 1130s; their members served as both nurses and warriors, with the distinctive black habit and white cross. The Knights of the Temple (Templars), founded in 1119 by a small group of French knights under Hugues de Payens to protect pilgrim roads, received their official charter at the Council of Troyes in January 1129 and would become, over the next century, one of the largest landowners in western Europe (the source of the rumours that would attend their suppression by Philip IV of France in 1307-12). The Templars wore the white mantle with the red cross. Both orders held their major castles in the kingdom and the surrounding crusader states; both reported, in religious matters, directly to the Pope rather than to the local secular or ecclesiastical authorities. The military orders were the kingdom's standing professional army in everything but name.
Baldwin II also dealt, in 1129–1131, with the problem of his own succession. He had only daughters; the eldest, Melisende, was about twenty-five in 1129. He arranged her marriage to Fulk V of Anjou — a powerful French count, recently widowed, fifteen years older than his bride — who came east in 1129 and was groomed as co-monarch. Baldwin died on the 21st of August 1131, ordering on his deathbed that Melisende, Fulk, and their infant son Baldwin III should rule jointly. The arrangement was unusual and the relationship between Melisende and Fulk would be strained, but Baldwin II's choice ensured that the kingdom would, for the next three generations, remain a settled hereditary monarchy. The next chapter follows it through its high period.
End of Chapter II