Download PDF | Jonathan Riley-Smith (auth.) - The Feudal Nobility and The Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1174–1277-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1974).
365 Pages
PREFACE
Tuts book is far from being a comprehensive history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. I wrote it because I wanted to investigate the constitutional ideas of certain learned and politically active Palestinian lords in the thirteenth century and to find out how they tried to put their theories into practice. But by limiting myself in one way I have been able to extend myself in another, because in order to understand my subject I have had to look closely at the feudatories themselves and the way they ran their estates and so I have been led step by step into a study of aspects of government and society in Latin Palestine.
There is little direct evidence for the legislation of the Kings of Jerusalem before 1187, but there survive seven law-books written in Palestine and Cyprus in the course of the thirteenth century.? Five of these, composed by members of the knightly class after 1250, described with remarkable consistency a feudal system that seemed to have ossified since its introduction in the late eleventh century at the time of the First Crusade. The milieu responsible for such a prolific output of legal treatises has its own interest, but the work of scholars in the last fifty years has given the law-books an even greater importance than was first supposed. The historians who took them at their face-value imagined the Kingdom of Jerusalem to have been an extraordinary example of pure feudalism in action, a state which throughout the two centuries of its existence continued to be run on archaic principles,? but in the 1920s a revolution in attitudes was made possible by the work of M. Grandclaude, who identified those laws referred to in the treatises that could definitely be attributed to the period between 1099 and 1187.3 Since the Second World War a group of historians led by Professors Jean Richard and Joshua Prawer have worked on the foundations laid by Grandclaude and have shown that, far from being the fainéant rulers of a static feudal state, the Kings of Jerusalem before 1187 were vigorous and aggressive, governing a kingdom the institutions of which were developing and changing like any other.‘ It is possible to wonder whether the pendulum has now swung too far in another direction and suggest that the twelfth-century monarchy was never as strong as it is sometimes said to have been, but one must also recognise that the picture drawn of it in the thirteenth-century law-books was a caricature.
It is in the nature of historical discoveries that they pose new ptoblems. If before 1187 the crown was comparatively strong, how was it possible for it to be described seventy years later as being weak? And if part of the answer is that the jurists were theorists as much as observers, what were the political ideas that conditioned their approach to the constitution ? It is obvious that answers to these questions can only be found in a study of the vassals in the kingdom, for the jurists were themselves lords or the dependants of lords. One of the leading historians of Latin Syria has seen the weakening of the monarchy, already apparent before 1187, as in some way linked to the growing power of the nobility: in the early years, he has argued, chronic warfare and continual waves of migration resulted in lordships quickly changing hands; stability and with it the growth of privilege came only after 1130 — with this, it will be seen, I disagree — and at the same time royal lands, always more extensive than those of the vassals, were reduced by the creation of new lordships.5 But neither he nor his colleagues have studied in depth the crucial period between 1170 and 1260: they have only turned to the thirteenth century to examine particular problems ® or in the large-scale narrative histories to describe the general course of events.’
It was the absence of any satisfactory description of the political ideas of the jurists or the constitutional crises in which they were involved that led me to this work. I could never claim that I have here dealt with all the facets of my subject, but I have tried to consider it in the context of economics and government in Latin Palestine, having some regard for the institutions which gave Palestinian society its own particular features. In many cases the mechanics of administration can be described and the legal status of individuals defined; and this approach is necessary not only because it is impossible to discuss a matter like the wealth of the lords without some knowledge of the means by which they raised revenues, but also, I believe, because it helps one to comprehend their motives and ideals. When making any decision, I myself will take into account certain assumptions that are based on my knowledge of my environment: that trains run on time, that ] am unlikely to be robbed in the streets, that I can rely on the telephone or electricity or stable governm that food will arrive in the shops or, conversely, that there is no guarantee that a letter posted today will reach its destination tomorrow. These assumptions will play a significant part in the conclusions I reach, although I may not even be conscious of them, and behind them is the machinery that makes it possible to live in an organised society. The institutional structure of a thirteenth-century state was simpler than is ours, but it was still complex and by studying it we draw nearer to those who lived in it.
I have tried to give this book a form suitable for an examination in depth of a small but by no means insignificant subject. I have studied the development of a school of jurists within the ranks of the Palestinian nobility and I have described their political ideas. I have tried to show how between 1174 and 1277 they developed in political action two themes, one the form they believed resistance should take to what in their eyes were unconstitutional acts by their rulers and the other their theories on the appointment and powers of regents. It is this, the second part of the book, that has determined its terminal dates: a coherent baronial movement only emerged in the 1170s, reached its apogee in two peaks, one political in 1229 and the other literary in about 1260, and had to accept a humiliating reversal in 1277. But the ideas and activities of the vassals can only be understood against the background provided in the first part of the book where I have tried to explain the system of feudal relationships in the Latin kingdom and to describe the structure of the greater fiefs which provided the nobles with the foundations of their power. I felt that here I could not be bound by the terminal dates of the constitutional narrative and I have used evidence provided by the material surviving from the two centuries of the western occupation of Palestine and also, where relevant, of the near-by Latin states of Antioch, Tripoli and Cyprus.
I am very conscious of the dangers inherent in the historical method I have used, for it has entailed the comparison of phrases and even words in documents often distantly separated from each other in space and time.§ I have noticed, for instance, that perhaps because of their position and past history there were important differences in the ways in which the ports of Acre, Tyre and Antioch were organised, but on other matters I may well have missed local variations and my conclusions may thus have become distorted. Some of the evidence moreover is so fragmentary that two phrases, occurring in documents that date from a century apart, may have been laid under contribution to support a finding which ignores developments that must have taken place. I have had of course to cope with documentary evidence that is very unsatisfactory.
The archives of the crown and the secular lords are now lost: only that relating to the fief of Joscelin of Courtenay remains in a more or less complete state. The surviving documents of Latin Palestine come in the main from the archives of churches, monasteries and religious orders or from those of merchant communities: from the institutions, in other words, with centres in the West to which they could retire after the Holy Land had fallen to the Muslims. Although their cartularies contain many charters issued to them by lay lords it will be understood that my study has been deprived of what would have been its foundations and for it I have had to use material relating primarily to others. If the absence of solid documentary evidence is the Scylla past which I must navigate, my Charybdis is provided by the narrative sources, the chronicles, annals and law-books, for with them I am faced by other kinds of difficulty. The standard edition of the lawbooks could hardly be worse
and the variant manuscripts present many problems which will not be resolved until they are subjected to a critical textual examination by a future editor. In the course of this some of my conclusions may become suspect. Most of these treatises moreover were written by members of the baronial movement; and one could scarcely avoid being struck by the chief defect of the main narrative sources, the Latin Chronicle of William of Tyre and a group of Old-French Continuations of it,1° the ‘Annales de Terre Sainte’ and a curious compilation called “Les Gestes des Chiprois’, containing an account by one of the leading jurists of his part in the civil wars in the 1230s and a chronicle of the later years of the thirteenth century written by a man who had been a page of a Lord of Tyre and was associated with the Order of the Knights Templar. William of Tyre was a fierce partisan of that group of men who can be considered as the founding fathers of the baronial party and his successors seem to have had the same political views." The picture presented by the authors of the narrative sources is very one-sided and while they provide important evidence for the ideas and aims of the lords, they cannot be treated as trustworthy witnesses. I have tried to look beneath their platitudes and apologetics, searching for inconsistencies that might lead me to the truth, and I have been careful not to take them on trust unless I have been able to find some supporting evidence for what they have said.
Three years hence I would still have been grappling with the intricacies of feudal law in the Latin East had it not been for the generosity of the Trustees of The Leverhulme Trust Fund, who granted me a Fellowship and therefore the time I needed to finish off this work. The head of the Department of Medieval History in St Andrews, Professor L. H. Butler, who has always encouraged my researches, generously supported my application for leave. I gladly acknowledge again my very great debt to Dr R. C. Smail, whose pupil I once was. He has always given me encouragement and advice and his criticisms of the typescript, which he read in the difficult final stages, were of the greatest value to me. So were the comments of Dr David Chambers on the typescript, part of which was also read by Miss Ann Kettle. I benefited a good deal from correspondence with Professor H. E. Mayer and Professor Joshua Prawer and from discussions over a long period with Dr M. C. Lyons of Cambridge, who sent me some valuable evidence from oriental sources, and Mr Meron Benvenisti of Jerusalem. My theories were first tried out on those students in St Andrews who attended my seminar on the Kingdom of Jerusalem and I alone know how much I learnt from their enthusiasm and the arguments that raged round my table; I owe the same debt to the challenging ideas on allied subjects of my research students, Dr Bruce Beebe, Miss Joyce McLellan and Mr Peter Edbury.
I had much help from the staffs of the libraries of the Universities of St Andrews and Cambridge, the Reading Room of the British Museum and the London Library; and I would like especially to thank Miss Cecily Baird of St Andrews who acquired books on loan and xerox-copies of printed documents which would not otherwise have been available to me. The manuscript was typed by Mrs Dunn, Mrs Davies, Mrs O’Connor and Mrs Starnes of that most valuable institution, the University Aunts of Cambridge — long may it flourish! Mr T. M. Farmiloe of Macmillan was again always ready to assist me and was prepated to accept a very different sort of book from that which he originally expected.
My father, as ever, gave me moral support. And I owe most to my wife. Those who are married to authors will know of the demands which have been made of her; and other authors will understand how much I have relied on her. Her self-sacrifice and support greatly eased the task of producing this book and it is therefore with very real gratitude as well as love that I dedicate it to her.
St Andrews J. S. C. RS. July 1972
FEUDALISM IN PALESTINE
IN one sense feudalism can be described as being a system in which, for the class of men to whom it applied, government, the possession of property and social status were based on personal ties. The king’s relations with the more important of his subjects were circumscribed by the terms of private contracts made with each of them individually; and a landowner’s relations with many of his own tenants were governed by similar compacts. The parties to a feudal contract, like those entering on any formal agreement, were bound by rights and duties and a feudal king or lord claimed certain services from his vassal, who enjoyed in return his protection and a grant of maintenance which, taking the form of land, rents or property, enabled him to live and fulfil his obligations. Since in all feudal societies the rights of both parties were widely interpreted, misdemeanours that in another kind of state might have been seen as offences against public order were regarded as breaches of the contract and as acts of personal disloyalty. And so jurisdiction came to mean for the most powerful section of the community decisions on alleged violations of contracts.
Just such a system of contractual relationships is described in the thirteenth-century law-books of Jerusalem, but it is an example of the way in which minds can be conditioned and sensibilities dulled that this no longer greatly surprises us. Feudal society had developed in the West because of the needs of rulers and subjects in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries when the old instruments of administration had rotted away; society had disintegrated to the point at which men had to rely on their private loyalties and rulers had a desperate need for services for which lands or upkeep in their households had become the only worthwhile rewards. The decline of feudalism in Europe naturally coincided with economic recovery: with the re-emergence of a monetary economy, the growth of the towns and the reappearance of a class of citizens who held property under conditions that had nothing to do with the feudal contract. These changes were only just beginning to have an effect at the time of the First Crusade, but Palestine, on which the crusaders superimposed a society organised on the lines they had known in the West, was an area with an already developed administration, flourishing cities and a monetary economy. Palestinian feudalism was in fact inappropriate, corrupt and characterised by a loose definition of terms, which may help to explain why the jurists re-created in the law-books an archaic, rarified system of contractual obligations: in a world so unlike their model they were self-consciously acting out parts based on cardboard exemplars of chivalry imported from Europe.
In Palestine as elsewhere the homage paid by a vassal to his lord was the visible sign of the making of the contract between them. From this in theory all else followed, including the services enjoyed by the lord and the fief held by the vassal, and it remained one of the foundations upon which were built the political theories of the feudatories. But by the thirteenth century the fief had in practice become the centre-piece, for which contracts were entered into and services performed. According to one of the greatest of the jurists, the promise of faith is contained . . . in homage and homage is made for the fief, so that if one can renounce a fief [he was speaking of those circumstances in which this could be done] one can indeed renounce the faith that is given in exchange for the fief.1
We shall see that only knights could hold those fiefs for which was owed service de chevalerie, but there may have been many sergeantries — in 1261 21 out of 27 fiefs in the lordship of Arsur? — although it is not possible to make any estimates for the kingdom as a whole. The existence of these sergeantries, often held by native-born tenants, highlights the curiously impractical way in which the feudal system had been imposed on Palestine. In the West they date from the time when money was scarce and it was easier to pay in land for the many different services required by a lord.* These conditions never existed in the East and it seems that sergeantries were created simply out of convention, although the fact that they were hereditary may have led to pressure for them from the vassals themselves.
Those of Arsur, which not unexpectedly were held as minor offices — by the lord’s carpenter, dragoman, viscount, scribanus and scribes, butler, cooks, chaplain and marshal — were mixed fiefs in money, land and kind for which payment could easily have been substituted and the same is true of the scribanages and dragomanates in the lordships of Caesarea and Jaffa and in the minor seigneuries in the royal domain near Acre.® There seem to have been few principles behind their creation: they were the same ‘hotch-potch of tenures that did not, for one reason or another, conveniently fit into the general scheme of social grouping’, as one historian has described them with reference to England,® and no rules governed their size or the kind of person who was granted them. The great offices of the crown were sergeantries and among them it is noteworthy that the marshal held his fief not immediately of the king but of the constable.’ Some sergeants performed military services and they perhaps included those who owed the services of turcopoles.® Sergeantries could of course be held by knights and they were subject to the same laws on sale and partition among heirs as other fiefs® and to the jurisdiction of seigneurial courts,)° although the jurists never regatded the simple sergeant as the equal of a knight.
There were many kinds of fief.1? A vassal might be given lands and villages, making up what was called a fié en terre or fié en casau:'8 at its greatest it was a barony or lordship and at the other end of the scale was an estate of only one or two villages. But prevalent in the thirteenth century — indeed it has been suggested that it was the norm! — was the fief in money or kind. This, the fief-rente, had in the West gradually become quite common in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, reaching the height of its popularity in the thirteenth and fourteenth. It could be confiscated on breach of contract more easily than a territorial fief and it could be given to a man who lived a long way from the domain of the grantor. To flourish it needed a society in which a strong feudal system was in balance with a monetary economy? and just such conditions existed in the East. There it took several forms. It could be paid in what were known as /vreisons or estoveirs: victuals and rations for men and horses that although granted both to knights and sergeants seem to have been given more commonly to the latter.1” Alternatively a man might enjoy a rent in kind, collecting corn, vegetables or oil from certain villages after the harvests or from his lord’s storehouses at specified times in the year;18 those fiefs known as fiés ex villains may have been similar, for villagers provided returns in kind, as we shall see.1
The money-fiefs proper, the /tés en besans, fell into three categories. First, a lord might commit himself simply to pay a vassal a fixed sum each year: it is possible that in 1198 many of the knights in Acte were enjoying this sort of maintenance, for King Aimery made them choose two of their number to help supervise the collection of revenues and the payment of the fiefs.2° Secondly, an annual payment might be assigned on the revenues of a village or a group of them;*! a man might also be given a rent from a monopoly within a village like the communal cistern or the tax-farm over a country district or even over encampments of Bedouins.” The most usual kind of money-fief, however, was assigned on the revenues collected in a town by one of the lord’s offices: one finds references to fiefs granted on the revenues from the markets for meat, fish, fruit, cloth, wine, oil and musical instruments; from mills, mints, tanneries, soap-works and dyeworks; from the exchanges where were the tables of the money-changers, the gates where entry and exit dues were levied, and the ‘loge’, presumably some sort of bazaar; but above all from the fondes, the groups of markets on some of which were centred the international spice trade, and the chaines ot custom houses.?® The departments involved were under the supervision of each lord’s central financial office, known in the royal domain as the secrefe. It is not surprising to find that proof of possession of a money-fief held of the king was made by consulting the records of the secrete, in which notes of payment were entered.
Many vassals held mixed fiefs, consisting partly of land and partly of rents in money or kind. Only one of the fiefs in the lordship of Arsur in 1261 was held entirely in land and only one other entirely in cash; the rest were held in various combinations in which were involved sums of money, produce, rations, land and the profits and perquisites of offices.5 To find an example of what a greater man might possess we have only to look at the properties accumulated by Joscelin of Courtenay in 1182 and 1183: rents of 500 besants in Acre and Tyre, a castle in northern Galilee with the villages around and three other fiefs, one of which he exchanged for a village and a rent of 1,000 besants, while another itself consisted of villages and a rent of 800 besants.?® It is probable that in the thirteenth century most of the great lords held in addition to their territories money-fiefs in the cities of the royal domain.
Fiefs-rentes could be used flexibly: they could be granted in all sorts of combinations and we will see that, like lands, rear-fiefs could be created or eleemosynary grants made out of them. Their popularity must have been one of the reasons why so many of the knights lived in the towns, near their sources of income. And the opportunities for creating money-fiefs grew with the prosperity of the cities in the first half of the thirteenth century, compensating in terms of military service for the lands alienated to the Military Orders?’ and conquered by the Muslims: it is clear that the feudal host was not reduced in proportion to the territories and therefore fiefs that were irretrievably lost to Saladin in 1187.78
One of the jurists defined a fief as being ‘anything which owes service’.2® And although another argued that the king could grant maintenance without the obligation of service in return if he so wished, it must be suspected that here he was putting forward a view of his own rather than accurately commenting upon custom, for he went on to write that the king could freely alienate land to the Church, a practice which certainly had not been given an. unqualified imprimatur in the earliest of the law-books.°° There certainly existed lay jfrés francs, some being the result of special grants and others being perhaps established in the period of uncertainty that immediately followed the conquest,*! but it was not in the interest of the lords to lose service, as they themselves knew well: we will see that its commutation for money payments was extremely rare; religious houses like the Military Orders, whose grants, when eleemosynary, exempted them from the usual services, were at times specifically made liable for them; * in one case the service due from lands given to an order was guaranteed by the donor; ** and sometimes seigneurs gave notice that they would only confirm gifts to the Church provided that they lost no service.
On rendering homage a vassal was above all bound to his lord by faith. I shall return to this ideal in a later chapter. Here it suffices to say that the authors of the earliest of the law-books, the ‘Livre au roi’, expressed a solemn principle when they stated that the king is held by faith to his liegeman and liegewoman as that liegeman is held to him; and also the king must guarantee and save and defend his liegemen against all those who would do them wrong, as the liegemen are held to guarantee and save him against all men.35
A vassal was committed to protect the body and honour of his lord not merely in the negative sense, for he should take active steps to oppose any plans to harm him of which he heard and was bound to make extraordinary efforts in times of need, such as when his lord was a prisoner of the enemy, contributing to the ransom by taxing his property at 1% or even selling his fief if it was of the kind that was not heritable.2® Upon correct summons? and provided he was aged between 15 and 6o years®8 he gave his lord services that are usually grouped under the headings of auxilinm and consilium. Those performed in person were commonly referred to as services de cors and were differentiated from the rest: when the Hospitallers took over the fief of Arsur in 1261 they promised to perform the services due, except for service de cors, which presumably their Master could not or would not fulfil.®® Service de cors was normally carried out only inside the kingdom perhaps defined in the thirteenth century as being west of the river Jordan*® — and the king could only ask for it beyond the frontiers in three matters: negotiations for his marriage or that of his children; the guarding of his faith and honour; and the apparent needs of his lordship or the common profit of the land. Around 1200 a man could only be called upon to serve as a messenger abroad for the last of these reasons, but no vassal need perform military service outside the kingdom unless the king himself was present and while in the army he would be provided with rations. *!
‘There are great advantages,’ wrote one of the jurists, ‘in the different kinds of service that the vavasour can pay.’4? The first of the auxilia was military service. A vassal answered the summons for it by going to the place of assembly with his arms and a given number of horses. Within the borders of the kingdom he remained with the feudal host for as long as had been specified in the summons up to one year, whether his king or lord was present or not.* He might also have to perform castle guard, garrison duties at his lord’s fortress: although there is no good evidence for its performance generally, it was owed by the knights of the fief of Margat in the Principality of Antioch and in the mid-thirteenth century one can find vassal-castellans of Arsur and Beirut.“ Great and lesser sergeants carried out the duties of their offices as auxilia. And a liege-woman, who could not of course render personal military aid, owed service de mariage which was treated in the same way as an auxilium: wpon summons she was bound to marry one of three candidates for her hand presented to her by her lord, provided they were her equals, so that her consort could perform the personal services due from her fief.45 Of more importance to this study were those services that can be collected under the second heading of consilium. This meant more than the giving of advice : it involved the vassal in judgements on the behaviour of his lord as well as his peers, since it bound him to take part in the seigneurial court in which were considered breaches of the feudal contract. Procedure in the courts will be discussed in a later chapter. Here it need only be said that when called upon a vassal had to participate in the decisions of the court, serve on inquiries into murders, homicides and the boundaries of fiefs, deliver summonses to service, act as a messenger for his lord and as counsel to pleaders and defendants before the court.*® We will see that this last duty, the service de consei/, was one of the main reasons for the appearance of a school of practising vassal-lawyers.
The tenants of many fiefs had to bring to the feudal host additional knights, sergeants-at-arms or even esquires.4” Many of these were of course rear-vassals, but another quite common form of auxilium, service des compaignons, was one by which a fief-holder raised mercenaries and guaranteed their wages, thus being absolved from the need to alienate his holding into a commensurate number of rear-fiefs.48 There survives an incomplete list of the knights’ service owed by fiefs, probably compiled in the decade before 1187,4® but there is some evidence that the figures for servitia debita were subject to reassessment and so did not remain constant. The fief of St George maintained a return of 10 knights over two decades,®® but Maron’s servitia seem to have increased from 3 to 4 knights in the 1180s ® and, although the services of the lordship of Arsur before 1187 are not known, the 6 knights and 21 sergeants owed in 1261 look like a very small burden in comparison with what similar fiefs had owed in the twelfth century.® In the first half of the thirteenth century the service of two knights was due for two villages near Tripoli. In 1254 the lord, the Order of St John, took one of the villages into its own hands in exchange for a remission of it, but laid down that on the death of the present tenant the service of both knights would be demanded in exchange for possession of only one of the villages. Although this was not put into effect,®® it suggests that rising land-values led lords to demand additional services from territorial fiefs.
At the same time there was inflation and one would expect to see money-fiefs inCreasing in size as the value of money declined. In the century 1165-1265 we can say that the service of one knight was never owed for less than 300 besants a year and never for more than 1,000 besants and that the smallest sergeantry known was one in which was combined a rent of 100 besants and 4 carrucates of land.*4 Around 1200 the writers of the ‘Livre au roi’ assumed that a rent of 300 besants a year was enough to provide for a knight, but by the 1260s the value of such a fee could in the eyes of the jurists stand at between 900 and 1,000 besants.55 We would perhaps not be far wrong in suggesting that the rising value of land meant that lords continually demanded more services from it, while inflation led the vassals to ask for larger fiefs-rentes to support their auxtiia. Inflation of course must be set against the rising revenues of the cities when we consider how far in the first half of the thirteenth century they compensated for the territorial losses of the twelfth. And after 1250, with a decline of commerce and the loss to the Muslims of many of the smaller ports, the numbers of knights serving in the feudal host must have fallen rapidly.
Most of the knights were Europeans, although there is quite good evidence for a number of the native-born among them. The best known of these was a knightly family, known as the Arrabi and clearly of native origins, who made their appearance in 1122 when Muisse Arrabi was in the entourage of Prince Hugh of Jaffa. Muisse had a brother called Baldwin and a son called George who in his turn had four children, Henry, Peter, John and Maria. Had the members of this family not chosen to use their distinctive cognomen, their Christian names would for us have merged all but Muisse himself into the mass of the Latin settlers.5¢ In the twelfth century non-European knights were also to be found in the royal domain round Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre and in the lordships of Oultrejourdain and Haifa;5’ in 1253 a man called Walter Qelbe Arab was a liegeman of Jerusalem; in 1282 a knight called Paul Elteffaha was a vassal of the Templars; and in Maronite sources were preserved grants to indigenous persons in 1255 and 1280 by Julian of Sidon and Humphrey of Beirut, the second of which seems to have been the gift of a fief.5® Whatever his origins, however, a knight had to be a Latin Christian: otherwise he could not give consilium, for only Latins could sit in a seigneurial court.
By the thirteenth century the liege-knights had become a caste, their privileged position confirmed by law ‘on account of the honour and highness that knights and chivalry have and ought to have over all other manner of men’.5® They could not be arrested for debt ®° and could not be appealed in court by anyone save a peer for any crime except that of murder. Only they were permitted to buy those fiefs owing knights’ service that were put up for sale; ®2 and although in Palestine there were many knights who wete landless mercenaries,®* by chevaliers the writers of the lawbooks usually meant fief-holders. The development of an ordo of chivalry was common in the feudal West, where it found expression in the elaboration of initiation ceremonies into knighthood. In thirteenth-century Palestine a knight had to be dubbed before enfeoffment, for otherwise he could not wear the armour proper to his station and essential to his auxilium.4 While any knight could dub another — the young Balian of Arsur was made a knight by St Louis in 1254 ® — it seems to have been regarded as usual for lords to perform the ceremony for their own men: in 1187 Balian of Nablus, who had taken charge of the defence of the city of Jerusalem against Saladin, dubbed many knights in order to increase the number of defenders, but he only did this after he had been received by the city as its lord and homage had been paid him.®* While it was by no means impossible for burgesses to be made knights — Balian of Nablus elevated some sons of burgesses in 1187 and at least one branch of the Antiaume family reached the ranks of knighthood early in the thirteenth century ®’ — only those legitimately descended from knightly families could normally expect the honour. ®
The position of the knights so far described was not markedly different from that of their cousins in the West, but it was affected by the working of certain special laws and customs. Some of these tended to weaken their standing. An early assise — the usual word for a law — had laid down that no knight already holding a fief could enter into possession of another coming to him by common rights of inheritance, but must renounce it in favour of a relative who was not already enfeoffed. The jurist Philip of Novara believed that this assise was a consequence of the purist feudal dictum that no one could perform service in person for two different fiefs, but doubtless it was made to prevent the accumulation of properties in the hands of a small number of vassals and to enlarge the class of knights.6® It was however modified later in the twelfth century by another assise which allowed a man to succeed to a second fief on condition that he provided for it the service of a salaried companion in place of his service de cors. No longer was a man to be hindered from acquiring several fiefs, so long as he guaranteed the services required from each of them.’°
The effects of this change in the law were moderated by the growth of a custom that upon the death of a man who held two or more fiefs these would have to be shared out among his descendants so that service in person could be performed for each of them.” In one court case relating to this a knight called Anjou of Malembec, who had inherited two fiefs from his father, was sued for one of them by his sister. Anjou at first defended the plea but at length agreed to grant her a money-fief of 400 saracen besants a year. On her death and that of her husband Thomas of St Bertin this fief escheated back to Anjou, but it was claimed by her son Walter, who brought an action for it in the High Court in Acre. The result of his plea is not known, but it and other cases gave rise to arguments among the feudal lawyers over whether daughters, who certainly had rights when there were no male heits, were to be treated in these circumstances as co-inheritors with sons. One view, held by the prestigious John of Beirut and Philip of Novara, was that the existence of a male heir cancelled the rights to inheritance of daughters, so that all the fiefs would pass even to an only son. Another opinion was expressed by the equally prestigious Balian of Sidon, who argued that, since daughters could inherit in those cases in which a male heir could not perform service de cors because of physical and mental disabilities, a plurality of fiefs should be shared out among sisters as well as brothers, for they were, he reminded his listeners, discussing fiefs for which a male heir could certainly not perform service in person.’2 John of Beirut’s view seems to have prevailed — it was one that suited the feudatories — but even the modified custom must have helped to prevent the concentration of properties in the hands of a small group of vassals and must have led to a scattering of fiefs among the cadets of the knightly families.
Another early assise forbade the tenant of a fief for which the service of several knights or sergeants was owed to sub-infeudate a greater proportion of it than he himself retained. By the middle of the thirteenth century the interpretation of this law had become the subject of an argument that was never resolved. Must the value of all the rear-fiefs combined amount to less than half the value of the whole fief, or should the lord merely keep in his own hands more than was held by each of his vassals? The second interpretation would have permitted far more sub-infeudation, but it is clear that either way the law was still being observed and it must have prevented the development of large private armies, although it would also have ensured that seigneurial domains could never be reduced by massive alienations.
On the other hand the feudal class was strengthened by the farreaching consequences of other laws. The Assise sur la ligece of c. 1166 will be considered in detail below, but one result of it was that all the feudatories, whether they held fiefs immediately of the crown or were rear-vassals, were in theory bound to make liegehomage to the king and so became peers, entitled, from the greatest baron to the smallest vavasour, to sit in the High Court at the apex of feudal jurisdiction. The concept of peerage, the idea that liege-homage to the crown bound the vassals not only to the king as their common lord but also to one another by reason of the ties they all shared, increased each man’s consciousness of belonging to a class. The words of the jurist Geoffrey Le Tor, if rather extreme, give us some idea of the thinking of a knight on the subject in the thirteenth century.
Because I have spoken of peers, [he wrote] so I wish to explain what peerage is. All liege-knights of the king in the High Court are peers, whoever they are, high or low, poor or rich, in so far as they protect one another in their rights and maintain one another in law and also as they are called upon to act as counsel, to give judgements and issue recorts. And the speech of one carries as much force as that of any of the others.”4
The knightly class was given further cohesion by particularly rigid laws of inheritance. The rights of heirs to a fief were affected by the means by which it had come into the hands of its last tenant ~— whether by inheritance or by acquisition — and by the terms laid down for inheritance in the original grant. Most fiefs were known as fiés d’escheete, for they had escheated through inheritance to their holders who could not dispossess their descendants by disposing of them, except in very special cases: perhaps an eleemosynary grant to a religious house — only possible with the permission of the lord, who would lose service, and of the heirs, if the property made returns they would never enjoy 75 — and certainly a sale to pay off debts. The jurists argued that such a sale, governed by a law known as the A.ssise des ventes, did not damage the position of heirs, because they would otherwise have inherited the debts; in Cyprus, at least, these heirs had the first chance to buy back the fief themselves.’® But the law relating to a sé de conquest, a fief that had first been granted to its present possessor, was carefully differentiated from that concerning the /ié d’escheete.
A fié de conquest could be renounced and the heirs thus dispossessed by the vassal who had acquired it; and a case in which the most famous of all the jurists had given up a fief he had held from the Count of Tripoli had aroused great interest early in the thirteenth century.’ The acquirer of a /ié de conquest moreover need not transmit it to the nearest of his heirs, but could bestow it as he wished, provided that the man chosen was among those permitted to inherit by the terms of the original grant: the jurists were insistent that if heirs could be disinherited by renunciation, it followed that the acquirer of a fief had a freedom of action with regard to his descendants that was denied to other vassals. But this was a very rare occurrence and of course once a /ié de conquest had passed to an heir by the common laws of inheritance it became a normal fé a’ escheete, subject to the usual entails. The charters granting /iés de conquest always seem to have specified as heirs the children of the beneficiary’s espoused wife and by the thirteenth century this was the normal way of defining the rights of succession to new fiefs. It was known, however, that the terms of older grants had given rights of inheritance to all relatives and this was regarded as being a characteristic of escheats in Palestine.78
Inheritance followed the doctrine of plus dreit heir aparant, so prevalent that it is to be found applying to all heirs from those to the monarchy down to those to a native sergeantry.”9 A plus dreit heir aparant was the nearest relative to the last in possession of a fief, being in such a relationship to him that he could legally inherit; he must be capable of performing the services due and he had to be resident in the East. The rules of primogeniture were usually followed in establishing relationship, but these could be overturned where there were no direct heirs, because the closeness of a claimant’s relationship to the last possessor of a fief was more important than the branch of the family to which he belonged.
According to John of Jaffa and Geoffrey Le Tor the elder of two men who were not sons of but were in the same degree of relationship to the last tenant would inherit, irrespective of whether he belonged to an elder or younger branch of the family, but we will see that this may have been a new custom established in the 1260s: it was not known to the authors of the ‘ Livre au roi’.8° An heir also had to be capable of performing the services required, which meant that a male had precedence over a female who was otherwise as closely related to the last possessor as he was,®! and he had to be resident in the East.®? Fiefs could not legally be partitioned among male heirs, but if a fief owed the service of more than one knight or sergeant it was possible to share it among the descendants, provided that the most rightful heir held the tenancy-in-chief and presumably the bulk of the property and the others became his rear-vassals: on his deathbed in 1236 John of Beirut granted some rear-fiefs to his younger sons.®° This practice was always followed when a tenant of a large fief was survived only by daughters. In the early years of the settlement the eldest of them had inherited and the thirteenth-century jurists ascribed the change in the law to the initiative of Stephen of Champagne, Count of Sancerre, who had paid a short and rather ill-tempered visit to Palestine in 1171 and had suggested that the fief of the recently dead Henry Le Buffle should be divided in this way among his three daughters, the eldest of whom was to owe homage and service de cors to the crown.*4
The doctrine of plus dreit heir aparant, with its emphasis on rights based on relationship to the last man physically in possession of an estate, could have curious results, especially to be seen in the application of a custom known as Fors de Turs tolt saisin. It was believed that when the continuous occupation of a fief was broken by Muslim conquest the man who would succeed to it once it came back into Christian hands must be that person closest in degrees of relationship to the last actually in possession. His rights overruled all claims by those who would normally have inherited by primogeniture. The great jurist John of Jaffa gave as an example of this custom at work what happened to Ibelin in southern Palestine, the fief from which his family took its name. Ibelin had been held by Balian of Nablus when it was lost in 1187 and it was not reoccupied by the Christians until 1241, by which time he and all his children save one daughter, Margaret of Caesarea, were dead. The fief, therefore, was inherited not by his heir by primogeniture, Balian of Beirut who was the eldest son of his eldest son, but by Margaret and it passed into the possession of the house of Caesarea.
Among the feudatories of Jerusalem there was a group called high men, rich men or barons. In the West the word baro first appeared in eighth-century dog-latin when it simply meant man as opposed to woman — in thirteenth-century Palestine an echo of this primitive meaning was to be found in its use also to denote a husband ®§ — but, although it was never adequately defined, in the course of time it came to describe a vassal and then a king’s vassal and in France could be used of a tenant-in-chief of the crown who exercised jurisdiction with High Justice, the ability to condemn a man to mutilation or death, as against a vavasour or simple knight who enjoyed no such right.®’ It is in this general sense that the word will be used throughout this book and it might be as well to state here that regarded as baronies will be the Principality of Galilee, the County of Jaffa and Ascalon and the Lordships of Beirut, Sidon, Tyre after 1246, Toron, Scandelion, Chastiau-dou-rei, Nazareth, Haifa, Caesarea, Bethsan, Arsur, Lydda, Blanchegarde and Oultrejourdain.
In the middle of the thirteenth century the greatest of the Palestinian jurists, John of Ibelin Count of Jaffa, gave the title a far narrower definition. He ranked as barons only the Count of Jaffa, the Prince of Galilee, the Lord of Sidon and the Count of Tripoli, although he admitted that there was doubt about the last of them, his position being challenged in the opinion of some by the Lord of Oultrejourdain. What for John distinguished these four from the rest of the lords were that each had the duty of rendering the king the service of 100 knights and the right of employing among his seigneurial officers both a constable and a marshal. And while the four could join with the other liegemen in the High Court in judgement on any knight,
the highness and the franchise that the four barons enjoy above all other vassals ...is...that none (of them) can by the assise or custom of this kingdom be judged on matters concerning his body, honour or fief — that is those things that appertain to his barony — save by his peers .. . the other barons, if he wishes to defend himself.
In what was clearly a reference to contemporary French law John was reluctant to give the high officers of the crown, the seneschal and the constable, parity with his barons,** to whom he gave the right to carry the crown and orb at a coronation.®® In one of the very rare instances where he was sure there had existed an assise — certainly it was similar to practice in western Europe — he argued that each of the four baronies was indivisible and so could not be partitioned by inheritance or dower. °°
This treatment of the baronage, giving a privileged position in law to a small group within the nobility, ran counter to that spirit of equality among the feudatories upon which, we will see, their methods of resisting the crown were based. One of the finest contemporary historians has concluded that it had little correspondence with reality, but was a proud fantasy of the higher nobles, perhaps under the influence of French law.*! One cannot disagree with this, but it should be pointed out that John of Jaffa’s approach to the subject was remarkably consistent: it permeated his long legal treatise in which, over and over again, baronies were carefully differentiated from lordships, barons from other ‘rich men’ and both barons and ‘rich men’ from the mass of the liegemen.®? It 1s clear from the words he used that there had taken place much discussion on the four baronies®? and some echoes of this can be found elsewhere. John’s contemporary Philip of Novara usually referred in his own law-book to the great fiefholders as rich men, but on at least one occasion he distinguished barons from them.** And although to the jurist James of Ibelin and to the compiler of the laws of the burgess court of Acre a baron was simply a great tenant-in-chief, while Geoffrey Le Tor seems to have been strongly opposed to the concept of the peerage of the four barons, a writer of one of the continuations of the chronicle of William of Tyre reported that to royal procurators before the Roman curia in the 1270s the judgement of cases concerning the crown of Jerusalem belonged to ‘the barons and peers of the kingdom’.®
It is worth investigating the use of baro before John of Jaffa defined it. Before 1188 one finds the title given not only to all those lords who enjoyed rights of High Justice, but also to humbler tenants of the crown;** as late as the 1160s lords were using it of their own vassals;®? and in 1187 among the ‘barons’ advising Conrad of Montferrat in Tyre there were the Viscounts of Nazareth and Legio, who were not even officers in the royal domain.®°® In one sense therefore a baron may have been any vassal called upon to give counsel to the crown or, before 1170, to his own lord. This definition may sometimes have been used in the thirteenth century: in 1231 the lieutenant of the regent, certifying the sale of a fief, announced that it had been catried out ‘in our presence and that of the other barons of the court’.
It is, however, clear that the word also had a stricter meaning, perhaps already in use in the first half of the twelfth century in the County of Tripoli, where certain charters appear to differentiate barons from other knights.19° In the Kingdom of Jerusalem itself the first sign of this is to be found in a charter of 1155, in which Hugh and Baldwin of Ibelin, later Lord of Ramle, Philip of Nablus, Guy Francigena, Henry Le Buffle, Humphrey of Toron, Hugh of Caesarea and John Gottman were ranked as barons, the last three being separated in the list of witnesses from the ‘men of the king’. What entitled these men to be called barons now escapes us, for Guy Francigena, Henry Le Buffle and John Gottman, although substantial fief-holders, had, as far as we know, none of the rights to jurisdiction enjoyed by the others.1% But clearly some differentiation was now being made between them and the other vassals, and this is confirmed elsewhere: the witness lists to a group of charters of 1160 were headed: ‘Of the barons and the men of the king’; 1°? William of Tyre at one of the very rare points in his chronicle when he wrote the word baro — interestingly in his treatment of the constitutional crisis in 1174 in which the baronial movement can first be discerned — used it of Humphrey of Toron, Reynald of Sidon, Baldwin of Ramle and his brother Balian, who was later to enjoy the royal apanage of Nablus;}% a royal proclamation of 1183, imposing a general tax on the kingdom, made reference both to barons and vavasours;!% a continuator of the chronicle of William of Tyre, relating the tragic annihilation of the Christian army at Hattin in 1187, wrote that one privilege of a baron was that he commanded the first squadron in battle, the vanguard in advance and the rear-guard in retreat, when the army of the kingdom was marching through his barony — this right was claimed by Raymond of Tripoli while the Christian forces were in the Principality of Galilee;1°5 between 1198 and 1205 the authors of the first of the law-books knew that barons, landholders and vassals all had different rights, although they nowhere defined them;!°6 in 1205 ‘the barons and knights’ were present at the appointment of John of Beirut as lieutenant and in 1207 it was ‘the barons and knights’ who swore to abide by the terms of the martiage pact between King Hugh of Cyprus and Alice, the elder daughter of Henry of Champagne.!©? There survives no explanation of the differences that were obviously known to exist, but if before 1225 men felt no need to make definitions, we may assume that the issue was not to them one of much practical importance. Certainly visitors to the kingdom seem to have felt no difficulties : on the eve of Saladin’s conquests in 1187 the anonymous writer of a tract on the Holy Land appears to have believed that all the greater lords ranked as barons and so some forty years later did James of Vitry, Bishop of Acre.1°
What is certain is that there was in the early thirteenth century no concept of the four baronies proposed by John of Jaffa. The very vagueness that surrounded the term would have been reason enough for the jurists to look for some definition of it and a sign that it had become a subject for discussion may be the sudden appearance or reappearance of constables and marshals among the officers of the fiefs John of Jaffa ranked as baronies: it will be remembered that he argued that the right to have both of these officers was a distinguishing mark of baron. The Principality of Galilee had constables from 1121 to 117919 and marshals from 1121 to 1170;19 after a long interval they reappeared in 12531 and 1234112 respectively. A constable of Jaffa, in fact the founder of the house of Ibelin, held office from before 1115 to 1126; the post is never to be found again in the surviving documents, but a marshal of Jaffa was in existence in 1256.14 There was a constable of Sidon in 1158,115 and this officer only reappeared in 12535146 while a marshal of Sidon is first to be found in 1228.7
It looks as though the lords of the great fiefs after 1228 were trying to reestablish what they believed to be their rights, and it may be no coincidence that in a charter issued by the Hospitallers in 1256 both John of Jaffa and Philip of Montfort, who as Lord of Toron was heir to the lost fief of Oultrejourdain, were referred to as barons; this title was again used of Philip in a treaty he made in 1264 with the Genoese," 8 although it is possible that this reflected a belief, almost certainly erroneous, that Philip had been made one of the twelve peers of France.!!® The concept of the four baronies, although unhistorical and never, it seems, entirely accepted, is one of many examples in this book of the thought of a remarkable group of men in a dominant position in the kingdom and it is to them that we must now turn.
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