Jerusalem: The Biography

1100–1131

BALDWIN THE BIG: THE F IRST KING

Two days later, Baldwin was acclaimed king and Daimbert was forced to recognize his accession. Almost at once Baldwin set off to raid Egypt. On his return, he was crowned ‘King of the Latins in Jerusalem’ in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by Patriarch Daimbert.

The first King of Jerusalem was not as saintly as his brother but he was far more able. Baldwin had an aquiline nose, light skin, dark beard and hair, a prominent upper lip and a slightly receding chin. He had studied for holy orders as a boy and never lost the contemplative air of a clergyman, always wearing a clerical cloak around his shoulders. He married out of political necessity, risking bigamy for the sake of expediency, left no children and may not have consummated any of his marriages. However, he ‘struggled in vain against the lustful sins of the flesh yet so circumspectly did he conduct himself in the indulgence of these vices’ that he offended no one. Some have claimed he was gay, but the nature of his peccadilloes remains mysterious.

Relentless war was his urgent duty and true passion. His chaplain called him ‘the arm of his people, the terror of his enemies’. This wily warrior of almost superhuman energy devoted himself to securing and expanding the kingdom, repeatedly fighting the Egyptians outside Ramallah. Once they defeated him, but he escaped on his horse, Gazala, to the coast and, hitching a lift with a passing English pirate, sailed to Jaffa where he landed, mustered his knights and vanquished the Egyptians again. His forces were so small, probably no more than 1,000 knights and 5,000 infantry, that he recruited local auxiliaries (some possibly Muslim) who were known as Turcopoles. A flexible diplomat, he played on the rivalries of the Muslim chieftains, and allied himself with Genoese, Venetian and English fleets to conquer the Palestinian coast from Caesarea to Acre and Beirut.

In Jerusalem, Baldwin managed to depose the overmighty Daimbert as patriarch, defeating the main challenge to his authority. The Crusaders had destroyed the people of Jerusalem but mercifully they commandeered the sacred places of al-Quds rather than razing them – probably because they believed they were the biblical originals. Baldwin fortified the Citadel, long known to Christians as the Tower of David, which became palace, treasury, prison, and garrison: its Crusader arches are still visible. When in 1110 and again in 1113 Egyptian raids threatened the city, the trumpets blared from the Tower of David to call the citizens to arms. In 1104, Baldwin made al-Aqsa Mosque into the royal palace.

Many Crusaders believed that the Dome and al-Aqsa really had been built by King Solomon or at least by Constantine the Great, though some knew perfectly well that they were Islamic. A cross was placed atop the Dome of the Rock which was now known as Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. Like every conqueror of Jerusalem, the Franks used the spolia of other builders to create their own monuments: Baldwin stripped the lead roof of his Aqsa palace to refit the Holy Sepulchre.

In 1110, Sigurd, the teenage King of Norway, who had fought his way around the Mediterranean massacring infidels, landed at Acre with his 60-ship fleet. Baldwin escorted Sigurd, the first king to visit, into what the Norsemen called Jorsalaborg on roads covered with carpets and palms. Baldwin offered Sigurd a splinter of the True Cross if he would help him storm Sidon with his fleet. Sidon fell – and the Norwegians spent the winter in Jerusalem.

Baldwin repelled invasions by the atabegs of Damascus and Mosul: it was a life of unending warfare and wheeler-dealing for which this king was well suited. Early in the Crusade, he had married Arda, daughter of an Armenian potentate, an alliance that had helped him seize Edessa as his own county. But Arda was excess to requirements in Jerusalem. He confined her to St Anne’s monastery just north of the Temple Mount, unchivalrously claiming that she had seduced (or been raped by) Arab pirates on the way to Antioch. She decamped to Constantinople, where her subsequent pleasures suggest it was the former rather than the latter that was the true account.

Baldwin negotiated a profitable marriage with the rich Adelaide, widow of the Norman Count of Sicily: she arrived at Acre accompanied by three triremes of elegant courtiers, Arab bodyguards – and treasure. Outremer had never seen anything as magnificent as her cavalcade. The streets were bannered and carpeted as Baldwin escorted this ageing Cleopatra into a rejoicing Jerusalem. However, her haughtiness proved inconvenient, her charm insufficient and her wealth all too exhaustible. She disliked provincial Jerusalem, missing the luxuries of Palermo. When Baldwin fell dangerously ill, his bigamy began to trouble him and he despatched the Queen back to Sicily.

Meanwhile the king found a solution to the emptiness of Jerusalem. In 1115, he raided across the Jordan, building castles there but also encountering the poverty-stricken Syrian and Armenian Christians, whom he invited to settle in Jerusalem, ancestors of today’s Palestinian Christians.

The Crusaders of Jerusalem faced a strategic dilemma: should they expand northwards into Syria and Iraq or southwards into the fraying caliphate of Egypt? To secure the kingdom, Baldwin and his successors knew they had to conquer one of these territories. Their strategic nightmare was a union of Syria and Egypt. So in 1118 Baldwin raided Egypt, but, halting to catch fish in the Nile, he fell ill again. Carried back in a litter, he died at the border town of El-Arish, where the Bardawil lagoons are named after him. He was a gifted adventurer who had become a Levantine king, now surprisingly mourned by ‘Franks, Syrians and even the Saracens’.

On Palm Sunday, the Jerusalemites were solemnly parading their palms in the Kidron Valley when they were heartened to see from the north the arrival of the Count of Edessa. Only then did they observe, approaching from the south, the catafalque of their dead king, weaving closely through the Judaean hills guarded by his mourning army.²

BALDWIN II THE LITTLE

Once Baldwin was laid in the Church, the barons reviewed the candidates for the throne. But one faction simply elected the Count of Edessa and seized Jerusalem. The kingdom was fortunate in its choice. Baldwin II, the dead king’s cousin, known as the Little, in contrast to his lanky predecessor, had ruled Edessa through eighteen years of constant warfare and even survived four years of prison after being captured by the Turks. Wearing a long beard down to his chest, blond now streaked with silver, he was wholesomely married to an Armenian heiress, Morphia, with four daughters, and was so saintly that his knees were calloused from prayer. Baldwin was, even more than his predecessor, a Levantine as well as a Frankish king: he was at home in the Middle East, holding court in robes, seated cross-legged on cushions. The Muslims regarded him as ‘rich in experience’ with ‘good sense and the gift of kingship’ – high praise for an infidel.

In Jerusalem, Baldwin the Little lent his Temple of Solomon to a new military order of ‘God-fearing’ knights, ‘professing the wish to live perpetually in poverty, chastity and obedience’, who would take their name from their new home. The Templars started as nine guardians of the pilgrim route from Jaffa but grew into a crack military-religious order of 300 knights, wearing the red cross, granted them by the pope, and commanding hundreds of sergeants and thousands of infantry. The Templars converted the Islamic Haram al-Sharif into a Christian complex of shrine, arsenal and accommodation:^* al-Aqsa was already divided up into rooms and apartments but they added a capacious Templar Hall (of which traces still exist) around the south wall. Near the Rock, the Dome of the Chain became St James’s Chapel. The underground Mosque of Jesus’ Cradle became the Christian St Mary’s. Herod’s subterranean halls, which they called the Stables of Solomon, housed the Order’s 2,000 horses and 1,500 pack camels, accessed through a new single gate in the southern wall, all this protected to the south by a fortified barbican. North of the Dome, they built a canons’ cloister, their own bathhouse and a crafts workshop. On top of al-Aqsa, they created, says the German monk Theodorich who visited in 1172, ‘an abundance of gardens, courtyards, antechambers, vestibules and rain-water cisterns’.

A little earlier in 1113, Pope Paschal II granted the area just south of the Holy Sepulchre to another new order, the Hospitallers, who later became a holy army even richer than the Templars. At first they wore black tunics with white crosses; later the pope granted them the red surcoat with a white cross. They built their own quarter including a hostel with a thousand beds and the huge Hospital, where four doctors inspected the sick twice a day, checked their urine and let their blood. New mothers each received a cot. But there were limits to its comforts, so each patient received a sheepskin coat and boots to wear to the latrine. Jerusalem echoed with many languages including French, German and Italian – Baldwin granted the Venetians trading privileges – but it was still a Christian reserve: he allowed Muslim traders into the city, but they were not permitted to spend the night in Christ’s capital.

Soon afterwards, Il-Ghazi, once ruler of Jerusalem, now master of Aleppo, attacked Antioch and killed its prince. King Baldwin raced north, bearing the True Cross^* with his army, and defeated him. But in 1123 the king was captured by Il-Ghazi’s nephew Balak.

While Baldwin remained a prisoner of the Ortuq family and the Crusader armies besieged Tyre, the Egyptians advanced from Ashkelon hoping to seize a Jerusalem bereft of king and defenders.³