The Crusades: The World's Debate by Hilaire Belloc

Author:Hilaire Belloc [Belloc, Hilaire]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780991560639
Amazon: 0991560639
Publisher: Cavalier Books
Published: 2014-04-04T22:00:00+00:00

VIII

THE THREE KINGS

The situation of the Crusade after the capture of Jerusalem was fantastic. There was no occupation of territory; there were no lines of communication; if you had set down upon a map those parts of Syria which were effectively controlled by armed Western Christians you would have had the county of Edessa in the north, the county of Antioch (which is no more than the somewhat empty territory surrounding the great town), and then, hundreds of miles away to the south, the town of Jerusalem itself, with the neighbouring town of Bethlehem; with Joppa and Ramleh on the road from Joppa to Jerusalem. The rest was just anything; principally Moslem in the scattered farms, a mixture of Moslem and Christian in the towns, and these governed either by independent Moslem chiefs or chiefs appointed (in the south at least) by the Fatimite Caliphs of Cairo. And even that word “appointed” is misleading. On the seacoast you had local governors. Inland any local man powerful enough to be regarded as the head person of the town or big village (who might or might not give allegiance to Cairo) was the virtual sovereign of it.

Obviously that situation could not last. Jerusalem could not be held as an exception in the middle of a chaotic and half Moslem population. If the Crusading effort were to survive there must be a military occupation. But with what could it be accomplished? The numbers were already reduced in the south to a few thousand, they would be reduced still further by at least two thirds of their total when the knights and some of their greatest lords sailed back again for Europe.

There was not only the lack of numbers, there was also the lack of cohesion inevitable in a feudal society. What saved the situation and led to the gradual occupation, of the maritime strip at least, by the French, the Western Christians, was a combination of two things: first, the manifest personal superiority of the Western fighting men over the Oriental; and second, the continued anarchy of the Moslem world—to which may be added a third element, the impotence of the heretical Moslem government in Cairo—the Fatimites. They had indeed garrisoned but lost Jerusalem itself, and they were to prove themselves incapable of withstanding the Christians in the field. The Egyptian blood was not warlike. The local strain there tended, as it always does, to absorb the new blood of its conquerors. The fighting Arab who had established himself in the valley of the Nile and had gradually changed the religion of its population was no longer the material from which the armies coming out of Egypt were recruited.

The institution of Monarchy was difficult to build up in Palestine. The Crusaders had come as feudal chiefs, great and small. In their native lands they admitted a certain tie, not very strong, between themselves and the King of France; or (in the case of the southern Italians and their Norman chiefs) the Norman King of Sicily.

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