Crusader states

The Crusader States, also known as Outremer, were four Catholic realms in the Middle East that lasted from 1098 to 1291. These feudal polities were created by the Latin Catholic leaders of the First Crusade through conquest and political intrigue. The four states were the County of Edessa (10981150), the Principality of Antioch (10981287), the County of Tripoli (11021289), and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (10991291). The Kingdom of Jerusalem covered what is now Israel and Palestine, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and adjacent areas. The other northern states covered what are now Syria, south-eastern Turkey, and Lebanon. The description "Crusader states" can be misleading, as from 1130 very few of the Frankish population were crusaders. The term Outremer, used by medieval and modern writers as a synonym, is derived from the French for ''overseas''.

In 1098, the armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem passed through Syria. The crusader Baldwin of Boulogne replaced the Greek Orthodox ruler of Edessa after a coup d'état, and Bohemond of Taranto remained as the ruling prince in the captured city of Antioch. In 1099, Jerusalem was taken after a siege. Territorial consolidation followed, including the taking of Tripoli. At the states' largest extent, their territory covered the coastal areas of southern modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine. Edessa fell to a Turkish warlord in 1144, but the other realms endured into the 13thcentury before falling to the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. Antioch was captured in 1268 and Tripoli in 1289. When Acre, the capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem, fell in 1291, the last territories were quickly lost, with the survivors fleeing to the Kingdom of Cyprus (established after the Third Crusade).

The study of the crusader states in their own right, as opposed to being a sub-topic of the Crusades, began in 19th-century France as an analogy to the French colonial experience in the Levant. 20th-century historians rejected this. Their consensus view was that the Franks, as the western Europeans were known, lived as a minority society that was largely urban, isolated from the indigenous peoples, with separate legal and religious systems. The indigenous peoples were from Christian and Islamic traditions speaking Arabic, Greek, and Syriac.

Outremer

The terms Crusader states and Outremer () describe the four feudal states established after the First Crusade in the Levant in around 1100: (from north to south) the county of Edessa, the principality of Antioch, the county of Tripoli, and the kingdom of Jerusalem. The term Outremer is of medieval origin, whilst modern historians use Crusader states, and the term Franks for the European incomers. However, relatively few of the incoming Europeans took a crusader oath. The Latin chronicles of the First Crusade, written in the early 11th century, called the Western Christians who came from Europe irrespective of their ethnicity. Byzantine Greek sources use and Arabic . Alternatively, the chronicles used , or Latins. These medieval ethnonyms reflect that the settlers could be differentiated from the indigenous population by language and faith. The Franks were mainly French-speaking Roman Catholics, while the natives were mostly Arabic- or Greek-speaking Muslims, Christians of other denominations, and Jews.

The kingdom of Jerusalem extended over historical Palestine and at its greatest extent included some territory east of the Jordan River. The northern states covered what is now part of Syria, south-eastern Turkey, and Lebanon. These areas were historically called Syria (known to the Arabs as ''al-Sham'') and Upper Mesopotamia. Edessa extended east beyond the Euphrates. In the Middle Ages the Crusader States were also called or . From around 1115, the ruler of Jerusalem was styled 'king of the Latins in Jerusalem'. Historian Hans Eberhard Mayer believes this reflected that only Latins held complete political and legal rights in the kingdom, and that the major division in the society was not between the nobility and the common people but between the Franks and the indigenous peoples. Despite sometimes receiving homage from, and acting as regent for, the rulers of the other states; the king held no formalised overlord status, and those states remained legally outside the kingdom.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims respected Palestine, known as the Holy Land, as an exceptionally sacred place. They all associated the region with the lives of the prophets of the Old Testament. The New Testament presented Palestine as the venue of the acts of Jesus and his Apostles. Islamic tradition described the region's principal city, Jerusalem, as the site of Muhammad's miraculous night travel and ascension to Heaven. Places associated with holy people developed into shrines, visited by pilgrims coming from faraway lands, often as an act of penance. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built to commemorate Christ's crucifixion and resurrection in Jerusalem. The Church of the Nativity was thought to enclose his birthplace in Bethlehem. The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque commemorated Muhammad's night journey. Although the most sacred places of devotion were in Palestine, neighbouring Syria was also studded with popular shrines. As a borderland of the Muslim world, Syria was an important theatre of ''jihad'', or Islamic holy war, though enthusiasm for pursuing it had faded by the end of the 11thcentury. In contrast, the Roman Catholic ideology of holy wars quickly developed, culminating in the idea of crusades for lands claimed for Christianity.

Background

Catholic Europe

Most crusades came from what had been the Carolingian Empire around 800. The empire had disintegrated, and two loosely unified successor states had taken its place: the Holy Roman Empire, which encompassed Germany, northern Italy, and the neighbouring lands; and France. Germany was divided into duchies, such as Lower Lorraine and Saxony, and their dukes did not always obey the emperors. The western successor state, France, was even less united. The French kings only controlled a small central region directly. Counts and dukes ruled other regions, and some of them were remarkably wealthy and powerful—in particular, the dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy, and the counts of Anjou, Champagne, Flanders, and Toulouse. Germany and France were surrounded by independent realms, each ruled by a king, among them the most centralised western European monarchy, England.

Western Christians and Muslims interacted mainly through warring or commerce. During the 8th and 9th centuries, the Muslims were on the offensive, and commercial contacts primarily enriched the Islamic world. Europe was rural and underdeveloped, offering little more than raw materials and slaves in return for spices, cloth, and other luxuries from the Middle East. Climate change during the Medieval Warm Period affected the Middle East and western Europe differently. In the east, it caused droughts, while in the west, it improved conditions for agriculture. Higher agricultural yields led to population growth and the expansion of commerce, and to the development of prosperous new military and mercantile elites.

In Catholic Europe, state and society were organised along feudal lines. Landed estates were customarily granted in fief—that is, in return for services that the grantee, or vassal, was to perform for the grantor, or lord. A vassal owed fealty to the lord and was expected to provide military aid and advice to him. Violence was endemic, and a new class of mounted warriors, the knights, emerged. Many built castles, and their feuds brought much suffering to the unarmed population. The development of the knightly class coincided with the subjection of the formerly free peasantry into serfdom, but the connection between the two processes is unclear. As feudal lordships could be established by the acquiring land, western aristocrats willingly launched offensive military campaigns, even against faraway territories. Catholic Europe's expansion in the Mediterranean began in the second half of the 11th century. Norman warlords conquered southern Italy from the Byzantines and ousted the Muslim rulers from Sicily; French aristocrats hastened to the Iberian peninsula to fight the Moors of Al-Andalus; and Italian fleets launched pillaging raids against the north African ports. This shift of power especially benefited merchants from the Italian city-states of Amalfi, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. They replaced the Muslim and Jewish middlemen in the lucrative trans-Mediterranean commerce, and their fleets became the dominant naval forces in the region.

On the eve of the Crusades, after a thousand years of reputedly uninterrupted succession of popes, the Papacy was Catholic Europe's oldest institution. The popes were seen as the Apostle Saint Peter's successors, and their prestige was high. In the west, the Gregorian Reform reduced lay influence on church life and strengthened papal authority over the clergy. Eastern Christians continued to consider the popes as no more than one of the five highest ranking church leaders, titled patriarchs, and rejected the idea of papal supremacy. This opposition, together with differences in theology and liturgy, caused acrimonious disputes which escalated when a papal legate excommunicated the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054. The patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem sided with the Ecumenical Patriarch against the Papacy, but the East–West Schism was not yet inevitable, and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches remained in full communion. The Gregorian Reform enhanced the popes' influence on secular matters. To achieve political goals, popes excommunicated their opponents, placed entire realms under interdict and promised spiritual rewards to those who took up arms for their cause. In 1074 Pope Gregory VII even considered leading a military campaign against the Turks who had attacked Byzantine territories in Anatolia.

Levant

Turkic migration permeated the Middle East from the 9thcentury. Muslim border raiders captured unconverted Turkic nomads in the Central Asian borderlands and sold them to Islamic leaders who used them as slave soldiers. These were known as or and were emancipated when converted to Islam. were valued primarily because the link of their prospects to a single master generated extreme loyalty. In the context of Middle Eastern politics this made them more trustworthy than relatives. Eventually, some descendants climbed the Muslim hierarchy to become king makers or even dynastic founders.

In the mid-11thcentury, a minor clan of Oghuz Turks named Seljuks, after the warlord Saljūq from Transoxiana, had expanded through Khurasan, Iran, and on to Baghdad. There, Saljūq's grandson Tughril was granted the title —'power' in Arabic—by the Abbasid Caliph. The caliphs kept their legitimacy and prestige, but the held political power. Seljuk success was achieved by extreme violence. It brought disruptive nomadism to the sedentary society of the Levant, and set a pattern followed by other nomadic Turkic clans such as the Danishmendids and the Artuqids. The Great Seljuk Empire was decentralised, polyglot, and multi-national. A junior Seljuk ruling a province as an appanage was titled , Arabic for king.

military commanders acting as tutors and guardians for young Seljuk princes held the position of ('father-commander'). If his ward held a province in appanage, the ruled it as regent for the underage . On occasion, the kept power after his ward reached the age of majority or died. The Seljuks adopted and strengthened the traditional system of the administration of state revenues. This system secured the payment of military commanders through granting them the right to collect the land tax in a well-defined territory, but it exposed the taxpayers to an absent lord's greed and to his officials' arbitrary actions. Although the Seljuk state worked when family ties and personal loyalty overlapped the leaders' personal ambitions, the lavish grants combined with rivalries between , , and military commanders could lead to disintegration in critical moments.

The region's ethnic and religious diversity led to alienation among the ruled populations. In Syria, the Seljuk Sunnis ruled indigenous Shias. In Cilicia and northern Syria, the Byzantines, Arabs, and Turks squeezed populations of Armenians. The Seljuks contested control of southern Palestine with Egypt, where Shia rulers ruled a majority Sunni populace through powerful viziers who were mainly Turkic or Armenian, rather than Egyptian or Arab. The Seljuks and the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt hated each other, as the Seljuk saw themselves as defenders of the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate and Fatimid Egypt was the chief Shi'ite power in Islam. The root of this was beyond cultural and racial conflict but originated in the splits within Islam following Muhammad's death. Sunnis supported a caliphal succession that began with one of his associates, Abu Bakr, while Shi'ites supported an alternative succession from his cousin and son-in-law, Ali.

Islamic law granted the status of , or protected peoples, to the People of the Book, like Christians and Jews. The were second-class citizens, obliged to pay a special poll tax, the , but they could practise their religion and maintain their own law courts. Theological, liturgical, and cultural differences had given rise to the development of competing Christian denominations in the Levant before the 7th-century Muslim conquest. The Greek Orthodox natives, or Melkites, remained in full communion with the Byzantine imperial church, and their religious leaders often came from the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. In the 5thcentury, the Nestorians, and the Monophysite Jacobites, Armenians, and Copts, broke with the Byzantine state church. The Maronites' separate church organisation emerged under Muslim rule.

During the late 10th and early 11thcenturies, the Byzantine Empire had been on the offensive, recapturing Antioch in 969, after three centuries of Arab rule, and invading Syria. Turkic brigands and their Byzantine, also often ethnically Turkic, counterparts called indulged in cross-border raiding. In 1071, while securing his northern borders during a break in his campaigns against the Fatimid Caliphate, Sultan Alp Arslan defeated Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at Manzikert. Romanos' capture and Byzantine factionalism that followed broke Byzantine border control. This enabled large numbers of Turkic warbands and nomadic herders to enter Anatolia. Alp Arslan's cousin Suleiman ibn Qutulmish seized Cilicia and entered Antioch in 1084. Two years later, he was killed in a conflict with the Great Seljuk Empire. Between 1092 and 1094, Nizam al-Mulk, the Sultan Malik-Shah, the Fatimid Caliph, Al-Mustansir Billah and the vizier Badr al-Jamali all died. Malik-Shah's brother Tutush and the of Aleppo and Edessa were killed in the succession conflict, and Suleiman's son Kilij Arslan I revived his father's Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia. The Egyptian succession resulted in a split in the Ismā'īlist branch of Shia Islam. The Persian missionary Hassan-i Sabbah led a breakaway group, creating the Nizari branch of Isma'ilism. This was known as the New Preaching in Syria and the Order of Assassins in western historiography. The Order used targeted murder to compensate for their lack of military power.

The Seljuk invasions, the subsequent eclipse of the Byzantines and Fatimids, and the disintegration of the Seljuk Empire revived the old Levantine system of city-states. The region had always been highly urbanised, and the local societies were organised into networks of interdependent settlements, each centred around a city or a major town. These networks developed into autonomous lordships under the rule of a Turkic, Arab or Armenian warlord or town magistrate in the late 11thcentury. The local took control of Tyre and Tripoli, the Arab Banu Munqidh seized Shaizar, and Tutush's sons Duqaq and Ridwan succeeded in Damascus and Aleppo respectively, but their , Janah ad-Dawla and Toghtekin were in control. Ridwan's retainer Sokman ben Artuq held Jerusalem; Ridwan's father-in-law, Yağısıyan, ruled Antioch; and a warlord representing Byzantine interests, called Thoros, seized Edessa. During this period the old Islamic conflict between Sunni and Shia made the Muslim peoples more likely to wage war on each other than on Christians.

History

Foundation

The Byzantines augmented their armies with mercenaries from the Turks and Europe. This compensated for a shortfall caused by lost territory, especially in Anatolia. In 1095 at the Council of Piacenza, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos requested support from Pope Urban II against the Seljuk threat. What the Emperor probably had in mind was a relatively modest force, and Urban far exceeded his expectations by calling for the First Crusade at the later Council of Clermont. He developed a doctrine of ''bellum sacrum'' (Christian holy war) and, based mainly on Old Testament passages in which God leads the Hebrews to victory in war, reconciled this with Church teachings. Urban's call for an armed pilgrimage for the liberation of the Eastern Christians and the recovery of the Holy Land aroused unprecedented enthusiasm in Catholic Europe. Within a year, tens of thousands of people, both commoners and aristocrats, departed for the military campaign. Individual crusaders' motivations to join the crusade varied, but some of them probably left Europe to make a new permanent home in the Levant.

Alexios cautiously welcomed the feudal armies commanded by western nobles. By dazzling them with wealth and charming them with flattery, Alexios extracted oaths of fealty from most of the Crusader commanders. As his vassals, Godfrey of Bouillon, nominally duke of Lower Lorraine; the Italo-Norman Bohemond of Taranto; Bohemond's nephew Tancred of Hauteville; and Godfrey's brother Baldwin of Bologne all swore that any territory gained which the Roman Empire had previously held, would be handed to Alexios' Byzantine representatives. Only Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse refused this oath, instead promising non-aggression towards Alexios.

The Byzantine Tatikios guided the crusade on the arduous three-month march to besiege Antioch, during which the Franks made alliances with local Armenians. Before reaching Antioch, Baldwin and his men left the main army and headed to the Euphrates river, engaging in local politics and seizing the fortifications of Turbessel and Rawandan, where the Armenian populace welcomed him. Thoros, then ruler of this territory, could barely control or defend Edessa, so he tried to hire the Franks as mercenaries. Later, he went further and adopted Baldwin as his son in a power-share arrangement. In March 1098, a month after Baldwin's arrival, a Christian mob killed Thoros and acclaimed Baldwin as , the Byzantine title Thoros had used. Baldwin's position was personal rather than institutional, and the Armenian governance of the city remained in place. Baldwin's nascent County of Edessa consisted of pockets separated from his other holdings of Turbessel, Rawandan and Samosata

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