A History of the Islamic World, 600-1800: Empire, Dynastic Formations, and Heterogeneities in Pre-Modern Islamic West-Asia by Jo van Steenbergen

Author:Jo van Steenbergen [Steenbergen, Jo van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Asia, India & South Asia, Middle East, World, Europe, Medieval, Modern, 17th Century, 18th Century, 16th Century, Civilization, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Religion, Islam, Social Science, Islamic Studies
ISBN: 9781000093070
Google: cWLyDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0415660327
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-08-11T05:00:00+00:00

1.2 Latin lordships between West-Asian integration and confrontation

Around 1100, after this and a few more victories (especially at Ascalon, on 12 August 1099, against a Fatimid relief force from Egypt), about 300 Latin knights and their entourages are reported to have remained in the coastal lands of southwestern Syria to consolidate their hold of Jerusalem and its hinterland. Ultimately, four new Latin-Christian feudal lordships emerged in the regions between southeastern Anatolia and the Egyptian Sinai, often rather anachronistically referred to in modern scholarship as ‘the crusader states’. These were led by the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1187 /1291), briefly ruled by the aforementioned Godfrey of Bouillon (d. 1100) and then by his brother Baldwin of Boulogne (d. 1118). The other lordships were the Principality of Antioch (1098–1268), the County of Tripoli (1102–1289), and the County of Edessa (1098–1144). Their ‘Frankish’ elites, mostly composed of Latin nobles and citizens, ruled various local populations who were active in trade and agriculture and consisted of eastern Christians and Jews as well as Muslims.

These Latin lordships soon became integral participants in the highly complex, unstable, and competitive Syro-Iraqi landscape of Seljuk and post-Seljuk leaderships. For many decades, they actually continued to appear as active local and regional partners as well as occasional opponents and rivals for trans-regional pre-eminence amid the complex webs of Syro-Iraqi relationships of power.8 The latter was especially the case in the reigns of the kings Baldwin III (r. 1143–1162) and his brother Amalric of Jerusalem (r. 1162–1174), both born in the kingdom during the reign of their parents, king Fulc (r. 1131–1143) and queen Melisende (r. 1131–1161), herself the product of the mixed marriage of king Baldwin II (r. 1118–1131) with a local Greek-Armenian princess.

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