The Kingdom of Jerusalem on the mainland ended in May 1291. The kingdom as a legal entity, however, did not end. It moved, with the surviving royal court, to the island of Cyprus, which had been acquired from the Byzantines by Richard I in 1191 and granted in 1192 to Guy of Lusignan as compensation for his deposed mainland throne. The Lusignan kings of Cyprus held the title "king of Jerusalem" continuously from 1268 (when Hugh III of Cyprus inherited the mainland crown by virtue of a complex dynastic claim) onward, even after the loss of the mainland; they referred to themselves in their chancery as kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem, in that order. Their court at Nicosia and (after 1291) at Famagusta continued to use the heraldry, legal traditions, and chancery formulae of the mainland kingdom — including the highly distinctive Jerusalem-cross arms (the five-cross design that had been the kingdom's emblem since the twelfth century).
The Lusignan dynasty of Cyprus and Jerusalem lasted until 1474, when the last Lusignan ruler James III died in childhood and the kingdom passed by his mother's marriage to the Venetian noblewoman Caterina Cornaro. Venice acquired the island formally in 1489 and ruled it until the Ottoman conquest of 1571. The title "king of Jerusalem" passed in the Lusignan male line to the Counts of Savoy by a marriage of the 1480s, and from the Savoyards it has descended into the modern Italian royal family. Other claimants — the Spanish Habsburgs (through marriage with Aragon, which had inherited the Lusignan claim through Naples), the Austrian Habsburgs (through inheritance from Spain), and the post-1815 Bourbons of the Two Sicilies — have used the title with varying degrees of seriousness. The Italian royal family in exile (the head of the House of Savoy) and the Spanish royal family both currently style themselves, in formal protocol, as kings of Jerusalem. The title is in no one's actual gift, but it has not been formally renounced for over five centuries.
The Frankish settler families
The Frankish settler population of the kingdom did not all leave at the end. Some perished in the final massacres; some were sold into slavery (Acre, 1291); some escaped to Cyprus, where the Cypriot court records show their descendants well into the sixteenth century; a few stayed in Lebanon and the coastal cities under Mamluk and then Ottoman rule, converting to Eastern Christianity (often the Maronite church, which had been formally affiliated with Rome since the 1180s through the Crusader-era ecumenical efforts of the patriarch Jeremias of Amshit) and absorbing into the local Christian population. Modern genetic studies (notably the work of Pierre Zalloua and colleagues at Lebanese University) on the Maronite Christian population of Mount Lebanon have shown a significantly higher proportion of western European Y-chromosomal haplogroups than would be expected from random pre-Crusader gene flow, consistent with descent from Frankish settlers. The proportion is perhaps five to eight percent. A small but real population of modern Lebanese Maronites and Greek Catholics are, in a directly traceable sense, descendants of the Crusader colonists.
The historiographical legacy
The Crusader states have been the subject of more historical revisionism than any other medieval polity. Western European Romantic historians of the nineteenth century (Joseph-François Michaud's Histoire des Croisades, 1812-22; Reinhold Röhricht in Germany; Sir Steven Runciman in Britain, whose three-volume History of the Crusades of 1951-54 was the dominant English-language treatment for half a century) tended to read the kingdom either as a romantic colonial adventure or as a tragic misadventure. The Israeli historian Joshua Prawer, working in Jerusalem from the 1950s through the 1990s, was the principal voice for a more critical reading of the kingdom as a colonial society. The American historian Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge, then St Andrews; the dominant figure in late-twentieth-century crusade studies) shifted the focus to the religious motivations of the crusaders themselves. The current generation of historians — Christopher Tyerman, Helen Nicholson, Ronnie Ellenblum, Jonathan Phillips, Thomas Asbridge — has worked on the kingdom's archaeology, on Muslim sources (where the Damascus chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi and the polymath Usama ibn Munqidh provide perspectives long under-used in Western treatments), and on the Frankish settler society itself. The current English-language standard for the period is, depending on focus, Riley-Smith's The Crusades: A History (2014), Tyerman's God's War (2006), or Asbridge's The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (2010).
In the Arabic-language historical tradition, by contrast, the Crusades occupied for centuries a relatively minor position; the great Mamluk-era chroniclers (al-Maqrizi, Ibn Khaldun) treated them as one regional struggle among many. Modern Arabic historiography of the Crusades, beginning in the late nineteenth century with the writings of Sayyid Ali al-Hariri and intensifying in the postcolonial period, has tended to read the Crusades as a precedent for modern Western colonialism in the Middle East — a framework whose accuracy depends on a parallel that is partly real and partly anachronistic. The two historiographies, Western and Arab, are slowly converging in the academic literature but remain quite distinct in public discourse.
Where the kingdom can still be found
The physical remains of the kingdom can still be visited in fifteen modern countries: Israel, the State of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza), Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey (the antikingdom of Cilician Armenia, an ally rather than a direct part), Greece (the islands and the Frankish duchies that emerged after 1204), Italy (the Crusader port cities and the headquarters of the orders), France (the home dioceses of most Crusaders and the surviving Templar commanderies), Spain (where the military orders held land), Germany (the Teutonic Order's home territory), Austria (where the Teutonic Order survives), Portugal (the order of Christ, the Templars' successor in Portugal, which Henry the Navigator commanded), and Malta (where the Hospitallers settled in 1530 and where their Maltese language descendants still hold ceremonial office). The travel pages of this volume describe twenty stops in the principal Crusader-state territories.
The Old City of Jerusalem is, with some difficulty, the principal site. The Holy Sepulchre is largely the rebuilding by Queen Melisende's masons in 1149; the Templum Domini (the Crusader name for the Dome of the Rock, which the kingdom used as a Christian church for eighty-eight years) and the Templum Salomonis (the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Crusader royal palace and Templar headquarters) are still there, returned to Muslim use after 1187 but with surviving Crusader-era graffiti and architectural elements. The Citadel of David at Jaffa Gate preserves Frankish work. The Cardo, the central north-south street uncovered in archaeological excavations in the 1970s, has Crusader paving overlying Roman. The four quarters of the medieval Jerusalem — Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Armenian — are an inheritance of the kingdom's spatial organisation, with the city now restored to its medieval pluralism after the modern interruptions.
The kingdom is, also, in a quiet sense, in the language. Modern English carries a number of Crusader-era loans from the period: "assassin" (from Arabic hashshashin, applied to the Nizari Ismaili order by the Crusaders), "admiral" (from Arabic amir al-bahr, "lord of the sea"), "sugar" (from Arabic sukkar; the kingdom was a major sugar producer), "alcove," "cotton," "lemon," "orange," "syrup." French preserves more such loans; Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese still more. The Levant entered the European vocabulary through Outremer, and has not entirely left it.
The Kingdom of Jerusalem was a small state for most of its existence and a very small state at the end. It was, in any honest assessment, a colonial enterprise founded on religious violence whose conduct varied between the chivalrously decent and the genocidal. It was also a unique experiment in cross-cultural settler society, an extraordinary architectural and military achievement, the institutional birthplace of the orders that became the Knights of Malta and the Teutonic Order of Prussia, the inspiration of much of the medieval Western political imagination, and the source of an unusual quantity of the historical romance still being read today. Its physical inheritance — twelve great castles, four great churches, dozens of smaller works — survives in a state of preservation unusual for any twelfth-century building anywhere. Its political tradition survives in the heraldry of half a dozen royal houses. Its cultural memory survives in the languages, the legal traditions, and the public imaginations of three continents. The kingdom ended on the 18th of May 1291. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, in everything but the territorial sense, has been outliving the date ever since.
"We were once westerners, but here we have become orientals." — Fulcher of Chartres, c. 1125
End of Chapter X · End of Volume XII