Download PDF | Jean Richard_ Janet Shirley - The Latin Kingdom Of Jerusalem. A-North-Holland Publishing Company (1979).
340 Pages
Author’s preface to the original edition
Historiography of the Latin East
The history of the crusades has attracted great attention ever since the Middle Ages. In the early twelfth century the interest felt in it by the West was expressed, both in French and in Provencal, in such chansons de geste as the Chanson d’Antioche and the Chanson de Jérusalem, epic poems which are the subject of studies by MM. Hatem and Glasenaer. Both Latin and vernacular medieval literature contain many works dealing with the Frankish colonies in Syria and Palestine — chronicles, pilgrim guides, songs and poems about the crusades. Nor did the collapse of the last Western states in the East put an end to the interest taken in their history.
The numerous schemes for recovery of the Holy Land that were drawn up in the fourteenth century often include chapters on the events that took place after the First Crusade; the most famous, that by Marino Sanudo, is a real chronicle of the East. Later on, the interest felt by Westerners of Froissart’s time in crusading history, rich as it was in the feats of arms they loved, is shown by the large number of fine manuscripts of William of Tyre that survive. In the sixteenth century too, the geographer Belleforest in his edition of the Cosmographie de Munster, in which he included a short account of the kingdom of Jerusalem, referred his readers to the archbishop of Tyre’s work, easily accessible, he said, in French translation. '
It was at that time that scholars began to take an interest in the Latin East. It had only just ceased to exist, for the kingdom of Cyprus, a Venetian colony since 1489, did not fall to the Ottomans till 1571. In 1611 Bongars collected the principal chronicles — William of Tyre, Albert of Aix, Fulcher of Chartres, Jacques de Vitry, Sanudo, and so on-—into his Gesta Dei per Francos. Both the Latin and the Byzantine East figure largely in the research of Du Cange, who prepared a work on Les familles d’Outre-mer. The jurist Thomas de la Thaumassiére studied the Assises de Jérusalem. The eighteenth century, however, was less interested in the crusades, which certain philosophers saw as large scale brigandage prompted by medieval fanaticism, although Voltaire did bring a remarkably misrepresented King Guy of Lusignan into his Zaire.
The nineteenth-century renaissance of historical studies saw a renewal of work on the Latin East. Michaud and Reynaud published the Bibliothéque des croisades, heralding the edition of narrative sources of the history of the crusades that was put in hand by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The Société de |’Orient Latin was founded, and such scholars as Count Riant, Louis de Mas-Latrie and E.G. Rey contributed numerous articles and other works. At the same time German scholars were embarking on similar research: Pertz’s Monumenta Germaniae took their place among texts concerned with the East; Hagenmeyer established the chronology of the First Crusade and the years that followed it.
More than anyone, the Austrian Reinhold Rohricht contributed to the progress of this subject. A long series of articles and books, of which the Regesta regni Hierosolymitana are perhaps the most precious, was crowned by the appearance of the monumental Geschichte des Konigreichs Jerusalem which made an inestimable contribution to our knowledge of the Latin East. Together with Rey’s Colonies franques en Syrie, it formed the first synthesis of the labours of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this large work is so compactly produced that it is not easy to use.
Interest in the study of the crusades did not lessen after Rohricht. In France, G. Schlumberger and Ferdinand Chalandon devoted part of their labours to it. In America a school of historians of the crusades formed around W.B. Stevenson, then around Dana C. Munro and then La Monte. For some years now contributions to this subject have been numerous and significant: Dussaud in his Topographie historique de la Syrie antique et médiévale has identified the sites mentioned in ancient texts, in spite of all the difficulties of sucha task; Paul Deschamps, taking up the topics studied by Rey and Camille Enlart, has made contributions based on the results of his excavations both to the military archaeology of the crusaders and to their history properly so called.
And René Grousset in the three large volumes of his Histoire des croisades et du royaume franc de Jérusalem published between 1934 and 1936 put his knowledge as an orientalist at the service of the Latin East; in a lively exposition he built upon Rohricht’s fundamental ideas, and made use of newly discovered texts, especially Arabic and Syriac ones, among which the Damascus chronicle of Ibn al-Qalanisi was the most important. Not long afterwards Claude Cahen after long research published a definitive and thought-provoking survey of La Syrie du nord a l’époque des croisades. Louis Bréhier’s older study, L’église et Lorient au Moyen Age: les croisades, clears up many points.
It may seem rash of us to try to add anything to this edifice. But we have made no attempt to compose a study of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem which might be comparable to these other works; besides, there could be no point in treating for a second time the subject already handled in so masterly a way by Grousset. All we have tried to do has been to set out a relatively brief account of the history of the kingdom of Jerusalem, as these authorities have established it, and to dwell particularly on its humbler aspects, on the life of the kingdom and its inhabitants, on its institutions, monarchical, feudal and ecclesiastical.
Studies of these aspects have indeed been published, but the old Histoire des institutions monarchiques du royaume latin de Jérusalem by Gaston Dodu, in any case now superseded as far as royal institutions are concerned by La Monte’s excellent Feudal monarchy in the kingdom of Jerusalem, seemed to us to be out of date on a number of points.
Without devoting an exhaustive work to these questions, we have therefore tried to correct some current notions on the working of Frankish institutions. In particular, we have tried to link juridical texts and diplomatic documents to narrative sources more closely than is often done. Our work is necessarily imperfect, but we hope that it will provide new knowledge of the Latin East, in spite of the restricted framework in which we have had to set this long and attractive story.
The geographical framework
The geographic boundaries of our study exclude the three great fiefs which depended more or less directly upon the crown of Jerusalem: the county of Edessa, the county of Tripoli and the principality of Antioch, which have all been the subject of recent research. We shall only seek to relate the history of the kingdom of Jerusalem itself, together with its secondary counties and small baronies, the kingdom as the Latins of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries understood it (witness, for example, Paragraph 58 of the Rule of the Templars), from the Red Sea and the Egyptian frontier as far as the ‘Pas du Chien’, the boundary of the county of Tripoli.
The kingdom did not form a geographic unity within these limits; it consisted of two quite distinct parts, Palestine and southern Syria, although in the Middle Ages people called the whole region of Syria and Palestine by the name of ‘Surie’, and the inhabitants of the kingdom are usually referred to as ‘Syrians’. So too, in a more restricted sense, were the indigenous Christians. Palestine, that 1s, Judaea, Samaria, Galilee and the Philistine coast, consists essentially of a limestone plateau, with altitudes of almost a thousand metres, which rests on an anticlinal elevation running roughly north and south. It descends towards the sea in a series of terraces of which only one, the Shefela region, is fertile, and dominates the coastal plain.
The eastern edges of this plain are comparatively rich, whereas to the west its sandstone outcrops, the tells (toron is the medieval word), are disappearing under sand dunes. Judaea, an arid plateau with little water and no humus, cut up into fortress-crowned islets by steep, narrow, cave-packed valleys, has but poor crops. Samaria, to the north, lower and not so dry, passes for a fertile land, while Galilee stretching further north again, with its volcanic mountains, looks green and fresh.
The Palestinian plateau ends abruptly at the sea with the Carmel promontory, and on the other side plunges, sometimes alarmingly, into the Jordan valley, the Ghor. The Dead Sea is 1,200 metres lower than Jerusalem, some twenty kilometres away. To the south the plateau merges into the Negev steppe and the limestone Tih desert. In the north of Palestine the lowland plain of Esdraelon or of Acre forms the natural route across Galilee between the coast, from the fine roadstead of Haifa, ancient Cayphas, the first shelter to be found after the inhospitable Philistine shores, to the interior of Damascene Syria. Southern Syria, consisting essentially of Mount Lebanon and its foothills, begins on the further side of the Esdraelon Plain. After the tangled folds of hills that stretch eastwards from Acre, Mount Lebanon rises sharply. It touches the sea at the Naqura cape, near the fortress of Scandelion, and from there on continues beside the sea except where occasionally it leaves enough room for a small coastal plain. Even this, though, is cut up by ravines and narrow places, admirably suited for ambushes, which later formed the natural boundaries dividing the lordships of Tyre, Sidon and Beirut from each other. From there onwards the coast is rich in inlets, headlands and the roadsteads sheltering the old Phoenician ports to which the crusaders gave new life. To the east Mount Lebanon towers over the lowlands of the Marj Ayun (the Litani valley) and the Bekaa (the Orontes valley), a country designed to be raided by Frankish lords in search of plunder.
Finally, to the east of Palestine and beyond the Ghor, the infertile Jordan valley, stretch the plateaux of ancient Moab, better watered than Judaea, with rich harvests, another land for raiding. The kingdom was not able to found any lasting settlements there, except in the Yarmuk valley (the Terre de Suéte) and in infertile Idumaea and its more productive continuation the Belqa (the Terre d’Outre-Jourdain), right down into the Sinai peninsula.
Within these limits was to develop the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, that remarkable creation which is one of the aspects of the early twelfth-century ‘rise of Europe’ so well described by Louis Halphen. We have tried in what follows to make clear some of the features peculiar to this Frankish, perhaps even French, state in the East, and to show something of the lives of the men who built it and ensured its survival.” Jean Richard, 1953
Author’s preface to the English translation
An author who sees his book receive the honour of a translation into English twenty-five years after its first appearance certainly has cause for reflection. In 1953, given the then state of historical writing, whose main outlines we have endeavoured to trace, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem responded to an undoubted need. Since that time there has been a renewal of interest in research into the history of the crusades and the Latin East.
Sir Steven Runciman, from a different point of view and in a less extensive form, has taken up the task of René Grousset; the young Israeli school, following Josuah Prawer, has published numerous works, which are much the richer for their authors’ remarkable knowledge of the country and their experience of a situation comparable in some ways, though certainly not in all, with that of the time of the crusades; in Germany, with Hans E. Mayer, historical and textual enquiry has been resumed with astonishing vigour and has opened up many new questions. And many other names, especially those of James Brundage, of John and Laurita Hill, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Francesco Cognasso, Aziz S. Atiya, Emir Maurice Chebab and very many others bear witness that this renewal of interest is worldwide. It has produced many good books and articles of great value.
As for the monumental History of the crusades begun by John L. La Monte and continued over the years by Kenneth M. Setton and his colleagues, this is a synthesis which, when complete, will definitively settle many points, uniting as it does an exposition of questions concerning the history of the Latin states and of the expeditions from which they sprang with an often profound study of the environment, Eastern, Christian, Moslem and Mongol, in which this history is set. Another important place must be given to the Histoire du royaume latin de Jerusalem by J. Prawer (1969, English translation 1972) which from now on will be a standard reference work for the kingdom itself. At numerous points we have been able to invite the reader to turn to it. It is especially notable for the conclusions it draws from archeological discovery and for its study of ethnic minorities.
But the author has found in teaching that students still value this little book, that good historians consider many of its points of view, new when it was first published, to be still valid, and that solutions suggested later have not always been more satisfactory than those put forward here. Taken as a whole, the book seems to have stood the test of time. Its purpose was to describe the life of this state founded by men of the medieval West in a land very distant from and different to those they came from, and to do this from the point of view of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Franks themselves; and further, to analyse the workings of the constitution and the way of life proper to this Latin kingdom, laying less stress on the world of which it formed part. In suggesting a new lease of life for this book, Professor Richard Vaughan has paid it a compliment which its author values highly. He wishes also to thank Janet Shirley for the remarkable work she has done in translating his text with such accuracy.
It was necessary to bring the book up to date, but it seemed best to leave it in the form in which it was published rather than embark on the discussion of fresh points of view, where these do not nullify our own. Such modifications as were needed have therefore been introduced into the text, without its having to be recast, and we have tried to give all the necessary bibliographical information in the notes to direct readers to the works published during the intervening quarter of a century.
May this book in its new career continue to be of use!
Jean Richard, May 1977
Introduction: Jerusalem, pilgrim kingdom
The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was established at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century along the Philistine and Phoenician coastline that stretches from ancient Gaza to the north of Beirut. To the east its hinterland extended over the plateaux of Galilee, Samaria and Judaea, including the whole of the depression in which lie the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea. Indeed, it extended beyond this depression along almost all its length, with two salients, one in the north towards the Hauran (the modern Jebel ed Druz) in the Terre de Suéte, and one in the south in ancient Moab. It was this, reaching as far as the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea, that was properly called Outre-Jourdain.
It was not the fertility nor even the commercial prosperity of this region that drew the crusaders to Palestine and kept them there. Apart from the Nablus plain in Samaria and the comparatively well developed resources of the coastal plain, where sugar cane did especially well, the plateaux are fairly arid. They can yield good crops of corn but are always liable to suffer from a dry year or from the arrival of a cloud of locusts or even an army of fieldmice, all events which had an effect on the policy of the kings of Jerusalem. The Bedouins’ flocks must have seemed very skinny to Western eyes. As for trade, although it was expanding vigorously in the towns of eleventh-century Syria, it was as nothing in comparison with what it would be in the thirteenth century.
The crusades and the new kingdom both derived from the same source. Urban II sent the Western barons to Jerusalem ‘‘to deliver Christ’s tomb’’ because the Seljuq Turkish invasion had put a stop to all pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre. The number who responded to his appeal, far greater than the number of knights who went in that same eleventh century from France to help the Spaniards win back their peninsula from the Moors — just as much a ‘holy war’, and not needing so long or so dangerous a journey — shows plainly that this embargo was deeply distressing to Christians in the West. Just as pilgrimages to Compostela led the Burgundians to found the county of Portugal, and pilgrimages to Monte Gargano led to the creation of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, so pilgrimages to Jerusalem were to cause the foundation and the continuance of what the historian William of Tyre called ‘‘the kingdom of the East’.
Pilgrimages and shrines
Devotion to the shrines of the East, to the very ground which Christ had trodden during his earthly life, to the places where Christianity had its origin, where the events described in the Old Testament and the Gospels had occurred, was not new in the Middle Ages.' The Société de l’Orient Latin has published a collection of Latin itineraries to the Holy Land; they begin in the earliest centuries of Christianity, and it was in the fourth century that St Jerome went to settle at Bethlehem. An Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem survives from the same period. The great invasions did not halt the movement, which was encouraged by the increasing cult of relics,’ and we possess narratives of journeys from Gascony, Burgundy and England which date from Merovingian times.
Not even the Arab invasions made the journey impossible. St Willibald did indeed encounter some difficulties on the way, but other narratives show that it was normally straightforward. Charlemagne was given a nominal protectorate of the Holy Places;’ and it may have been then that a thought-provoking account of Christianity in Palestine was drawn up. Bishops and monks continued to live in the Greek monasteries of Jerusalem and its neighbourhood, but henceforward the Holy Places of Palestine were under the control of the ‘Saracens’. After the Fatimid conquest, with its perhaps brief resurgence of fanaticism in Egypt and Palestine, the Caliph Hakim, founder of the Druze religion, had the Holy Sepulchre desecrated at the end of the tenth century. It was an isolated incident, without sequel, but it showed that the modus vivendi established in the East could come to an end. If similar events should occur at a time when Christendom had developed greater self-awareness, they would inevitably provoke reprisals.
In the eleventh century the pilgrimage to the Holy Land became even more popular; such references as survive from that period show this clearly.4 At the beginning of the century Viscount Guy of Limoges, Count Raymond III of Rouergue and Count William Taillefer II of Angouléme made the journey to Jerusalem, followed by Robert the Magnificent, duke of Normandy, who died on his way home in 1035. Hugh I, count of Chalon and bishop of Auxerre (died 1039), also embarked on this pilgrimage, one which Fulk Nerra, the terrible count of Anjou, made three times. Before the year 1085 Conrad count of Luxembourg died on this pilgrimage, and the great count of Flanders, Robert the Frisian, paid a visit to Alexius Comnenus on his way back from Jerusalem in 1090. Peter the Hermit, the popular preacher of the Crusade, was believed to have made journeys to Palestine, and so too was one of its heroes, Raymond of Saint-Gilles.°
And already there were armed pilgrimages. Not only were there Latin mercenaries like Roussel of Bailleul and Hervé the Francopol who supported the emperors of Byzantium against the Turks and established the lasting fame of Frankish mercenaries among the rulers of the East, there were also for instance three German bishops who travelled to Jerusalem in 1064 with a large body of men, dealing out wounds and contusions as they went. Once Urban II had crystallized the idea of the holy war, an idea which had already drawn warriors to Spain and had figured in William the Conqueror’s propaganda before he attacked England, the crusaders had only to take the road their fathers had taken before them.
Equally important, however, in the history of the Latin kingdom, is the fact that the success of the First Crusade provided a fresh stimulus for pilgrimages. Historians of the Crusade describe the emotions of the Western barons when they found themselves among the places made holy by Our Lord, Our Lady and the apostles. There were even miracles, and the accounts of all this given by returning travellers would make up the minds of those hesitating at home. Although not many of those who joined the later crusades in 1100 ever reached the East, more and more frequent shiploads of pilgrims eager to see the Holy Places disembarked on the Phoenician shore.
We cannot do better than look through the guidebooks they had with them; these are both interesting and at the same time attractively naive. What could be more delightful than the remark ‘‘This is a very good pilgrimage” noted down after the descriptions of such and such a shrine! Notes for tourists are added: the crocodiles at Caesarea are almost as well worth a detour as the chapel of Our Lady, ‘‘a very beautiful place and very holy”, near their pool. Indeed, enjoyment of the journey could not fail to reinforce the stimulus of devotion in bringing pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre.°
During the first years of the young kingdom’s existence Jaffa was the sole port of disembarkation, and it was also the nearest to Jerusalem. But it was soon superseded by Acre, which is the departure point the guidebooks recommend in their itineraries. The pilgrims’ way began by climbing Mount Carmel, due south, where they were shown the cave and hermitage of St Denis at Francheville, then the abbey of St Margaret of the Greeks, with a chapel recalling the sojourn of the prophet Elijah. Not far from there St Burchard had founded the abbey of Our Lady, where the Carmelite order originated. From Mount Carmel the route came down to the sea, and to the village of Anne, where, it was said, the nails of the Cross were forged, just as it was at Capernaum a little further on that the thirty pieces of silver for which Judas sold his master were struck. The nearby Greek monastery of St John at Tira was famous for the miracles that took place there.
Having visited the tomb of St Euphemia at Athlit (Chatel-Pelerin), the devout travellers would reach Caesarea, where they were shown the chapel of the centurion Cornelius, ‘“who succeeded St Peter as archbishop of Caesarea’, and the tombs of the daughters of Philip the Deacon. One recommended excursion led to Peine Perdue, not so much because of the chapel of Our Lady as for a marsh, “in which marsh there are many crocodiles, put there by a lord of Caesarea who had them brought from Egypt’.
Another guidebook elaborated on this legend: the ‘‘savage beasts’’ had been put there by ‘“‘a great man of Caesarea, and he had them fed because he meant to make them eat his brother, because of a dispute there had been between them’”’. But on the day that he was going to entice his brother to bathe in the pool, the brother “‘got him to go down first, and the beasts that he had cared for instantly dragged him down so deep that he was never afterwards found”’.’ Pliny the Elder records a similar legend about the crocodiles to be found in Syria, before one comes to Egypt, in the country around Caesarea, which resembles the Nile delta.
Next came the chapel where Mary Magdalene did her penance; then the route led through Arsuf to Jaffa, where was displayed the stone slab from which St James ‘of Galicia’ (of Compostela) leaped to Spain.
Jaffa was the departure point for the far-off monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, the centre of so many attractive legends like the monks, the very beasts of the desert ate nothing but the oil that came from the saint’s tomb and “the manna that falls on the mountain’. On the way travellers could revere at Gaza the memory of Sampson who took away the gates of this city of the Philistines on his shoulders. But above all, Jaffa was the port for Jerusalem, the Holy City. Two ways led to it:’ on one of them, the less safe, via Ramleh, pilgrims could visit the very ancient chapel of St Habakkuk; on the other, at Lydda, St Peter restored to life Tabitha, the servant of the apostles, ‘‘and that is a good pilgrimage because of the church which is very holy and because of the miracles St George works there”’.
Next would come the arrival at Jerusalem, where every step took the pilgrim to new shrines: the St Stephen Gate recalled the stoning of the first martyr, the Holy Sepulchre contained the Compass (the tomb) and the Circle, where Christ’s body lay before its entombment. There were Calvary, Golgotha and the pillar of the flagellation, the place where the True Cross had been found, the prison of Our Lord, the miraculous picture of the Virgin which ‘‘spoke to the Egyptian woman’, St Mary of the Latins, the place where the holy women wept, the Temple and the Sacred Rock where the ark of the covenant was and where Jesus was presented (the chapel of the Holy of Holies), the altar on which Abraham made sacrifice, the church of St James built on the spot where the first bishop of Jerusalem died martyred.
Then there was the altar where Zachariah son of Barachiah was slain, Our Lord and Our Lady’s bath, St Simeon’s grave, the Probatica Piscina, Mount Sion where the Virgin died, the place where Caiaphas’ tribunal met, the chapel of the Holy Ghost where the tongues of fire descended on the apostles, the Upper Room, the pool of Siloam, the field Akeldama, the brook Kedron where David picked up the stones with which he killed Goliath, Gethsemane, and the Mount of Olives, with Our Lord’s footprint, the chapel of St Pelagius where Our Lord composed the Lord’s Prayer, the place where the tree of the Cross grew, the valley of Jehosaphat with Our Lady’s grave, and many other places sanctified by the memories attached to them or by the miracles that occurred there.
Such a list could not fail to demonstrate the excellence of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and to draw towards the Holy City, in spite of the length and danger of the journey, crowds of pilgrims from the whole of Christendom. And yet the author of the guidebook took care to warn pilgrims against any disappointment they might feel at the size of a town which contained so many holy places: “‘yet the city is not at all large, but small’’.
Jerusalem might be an end in itself, but how could one not go as far as Bethany, or to Emmaus by way of the site of the Visitation and of the birth of St John the Baptist? How could anyone not go and see the Mount of the Forty Days where Jesus fasted, Abraham’s garden, and Jericho, with Jordan’s bank where the Saviour was baptized? And Bethlehem, with the Manger, and the memory of the adoration of the Magi, the well that their guiding star fell into, the tomb of the Innocents, and of St Jerome? South of Bethlehem, on the way to Sinai, lay Hebron, where could be seen the birthplace of Adam and Eve, next door to Cain and Abel’s house, and the tomb of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, explored in 1119 by the canons of the Latin monastery installed in that town, and restored by order of Baldwin II.'°
After Judaea, Galilee was another very busy pilgrim centre. It was reached through Samaria, by way of Nablus, where Jacob’s Well recalled the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, Sabastya, where St John the Baptist died and was buried, and Nain, at the foot of Mount Hermon, where pilgrims remembered the raising of the widow’s son. Now they came into Galilee, where Mount Tabor reminded them of the transfiguration; the large town of Tiberias stood by the lake of the miraculous draught of fishes.
There was Capernaum, famous for many miracles, the Table of Our Lord ‘‘at which it is said he ate with his disciples’, the mountain of the miracle of loaves and fishes, and the lake of Gennesaret. At Cana-in-Galilee they remembered the wedding where Christ turned the water into wine, and saw a hollow in the rocks where he hid from the Jews. Nazareth, a small town, could show the church of the Annunciation, the archangel Gabriel’s well, and the chapel which had been the home of St Zachariah and St Elizabeth. By way of Safran, birthplace of St James of Galicia, they would go back to Acre, and from there the most zealous would go north via Coquet, where Christ turned himself into a lamb, Tyre, where he proclaimed the beatitudes, Sarepta, famous for Elijah’s miracles, Sidon, where Christ healed the woman of Canaan, and as far as Beirut, where was revered a miraculous crucifix which had poured forth water and blood when a Jew pierced it with a lance.
Relics connected with the cult of this crucifix were sent to Italy, France and England. It goes without saying that every pilgrim did his best to take souvenirs home with him, and these were most frequently relics. Many of the texts issued by prelates of the Latin East are authentications, a kind of certificate of origin accompanying the reliquary.
Role of the pilgrimage
At a time when pilgrimage was one of the most highly regarded acts of devotion, it was evident that the mere existence of the kingdom of Jerusalem, guardian of the shrines of the Holy Land, rendered a general public service. An important part of this was the protection and policing of the roads; Deschamps has noted the proliferation of small forts along the pilgrim routes; the Order of Templars later came into existence to perform this task, the origin of all its greatness and power. By allowing pilgrimages to develop normally, the kingdom was able to depend partly on them for financial resources; so, too, with the Church, whose hospitals provided the pilgrims with a much needed service of public assistance.
We do not know much about these resources. A treaty agreed with Venice in 1124 shows that the king of Jerusalem had the right to one third of the price paid by the pilgrims for their passage. This price was not high: a tariff from Marseilles of 1268 lists twenty-five sous for the journey, fourth class, and sixty sous, first class. In 1248 the Saint Francois of Marseilles was carrying pilgrims for thirty-eight sous raymondins. But each boat could carry between 500 and 2,000 passengers, which represents a substantial sum due to the royal treasury." It is likely that tolls and other duties were payable as well, and furthermore the goods of pilgrims who died intestate, known as the échoite, fell to the crown.”
The kingdom’s economic life benefited from the pilgrims’ arrival and stay. Besides food, which the hospitals and monasteries often provided, there were the souvenirs, the sale of which must have enriched many a merchant. At Jerusalem especially it was customary to buy palms; near the Fish Market, by the Syrian goldsmiths’ stalls, says Ernoul, were sold ‘the palms that pilgrims bring from beyond the sea’. An odd story recorded by William of Tyre tells us that one family had the monopoly of the sale of these palms: during a persecution, a Saracen, it was said, falsely accused local Christians of committing sacrilege in a mosque. In order to save the community, a young Syrian is said to have taken this crime upon himself, asking that his family be recompensed by being granted the sale of palms, and this tradition was still observed, they said, after the crusaders came.
Pilgrims of every Christian sect-—Russians like Daniel the Hegumen (1113-1115), Greeks like John Phocas (1185), Abyssinians, Georgians, Nestorians, Armenians, even Jews and Samaritans,’? came and enriched the kingdom, but the Latin pilgrims had also an important share in the kingdom’s defence. The arrival each year of these reinforcements enabled the king of Jerusalem to hire knights and sergeants from amongst them to take part in the campaigns against the Moslems. It often happened, as it did in 1113 after the defeat of Sinn-al-Nabra, that the arrival of the first ships from the West saved the kingdom from possible invasion, or even after the Jerusalem army had suffered defeat. Medieval terminology does not distinguish between ‘crusades’ and ‘pilgrimages’.
For this reason years such as 1220 when no pilgrims or merchants came to the kingdom’s ports'* were considered disastrous. Treaties made with the Saracens during the thirteenth century tried to ensure free access for pilgrims to the shrines in Jerusalem and Nazareth, even when these districts were in Moslem hands. Whatever was done, the pilgrimages were bound to be hindered in various ways -increased taxes, annoyances such as being allowed to enter Jerusalem only through the St Lazarus postern, the closing of some shrines to the Latins —and the number of pilgrims could not but diminish.
The papacy reacted by recommending the defence of the Holy Land as a work of piety. When the kingdom was reduced almost to nothing after the middle of the thirteenth century, it was essential to go on attracting pilgrims to what was left. This is no doubt the reason for the existence of the curious text called the Pardons of Acre,'* which lists innumerable churches, each with many indulgences, in a town where earlier guidebooks had recommended nothing but St William’s cemetery, famous for many miracles.
One is tempted to see in this proliferation of churches with indulgences a device of the Syrian clergy and the poulains'® intended to keep as many pilgrims as possible on the traditional road to Jerusalem. Indeed, the continuing popularity of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land is shown by the fact that when the papacy was trying to establish a blockade of the Mamluk Empire early in the fourteenth century, it partly forbade these pious journeys in order to deprive the Moslems of the profit they brought them. But the flow of pilgrims was only checked and it picked up again quite quickly,” although it was never comparable to that which had ensured the existence of the kingdom of Jerusalem.
Without overlooking the part that economic forces played in the history of the kingdom, it is important to remember the essential role of pilgrimage to the Holy Land both in the creation of the regnum orientale and in the paradoxical survival, despite its remoteness, of this Latin state set down by the coasts of Syria and Palestine. People have been too ready to see nothing more in the existence of this Frankish colony in a hostile land, so different from the kingdom of Cyprus that followed it, than evidence that it was useful to the Italian merchant republics.
They forget how quickly these lost interest in it in the course of their rivalries and as a result of their political alliances with Moslem rulers. Jerusalem was first and foremost a pilgrim kingdom, more so than any other state founded in comparable conditions in the East or West during the Middle Ages.
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