Under Baldwin I. (1100–1118) the crusading state attained its limits and its organisation. His nephew and successor, Baldwin II. (1118–1130), called like his uncle from Edessa to Jerusalem, was also a man of courage and character. Dying without sons, his daughter Millicent’s husband, Fulk, Count of Anjou (1130–1143), became the next king. Under him the Latin state reached its zenith, and gave him no reason to repent his preference for his Eastern kingdom rather than his Western county. After him, his son by his first wife, Geoffrey (the father of our Henry II.), became Count of Anjou, while, unluckily for Jerusalem, his two sons by Millicent, Baldwin and Amalric, were mere children. With them the decline begins.
[Illustration: THE CRUSADING STATES in SYRIA DURING THE TWELFTH CENTURY]
The crusading lords, accustomed only to the forms of government that prevailed at home, reproduced in the Latin states of Syria the strict feudalism of western Europe. Feudalism required a nominal head, and the King of Jerusalem stood to the Latin princes as the King of early Capetian France stood to his vassals, having outside his own dominions nothing more than a vague supremacy over three great feudatories ruling over substantially independent states. [Sidenote: Organisation of the kingdom of Jerusalem and its dependent states.] The Prince of Antioch and the Counts of Tripoli and Edessa thought they had made a great concession in acknowledging his superiority at all, and were constantly at war with each other and with their suzerain. But each of the four Frankish princes had, like their Western counterparts, by no means unrestricted authority, even within their own peculiar territories. All four states were divided into fiefs, whose holders exercised the regalian rights that seemed proper to a baron. Within the kingdom of Jerusalem proper there were twelve such lordships, four of which were the ‘great baronies’ of Jaffa-Ascalon, Kerak-Montreal, Galilee, and Sidon. These in turn had their feudatories, and the powerful lordship of Ibelin, though but a mesne tenancy, overshadowed the double county of Jaffa and Ascalon. Beyond the royal domain, which centred round the capital and the towns of Tyre and Acre, the Kings of Jerusalem had little real authority. For the administration of their realm a customary code grew up, which, in days when the Latin lordships had waned almost to nothing, was embodied in the Assizes of Jerusalem, more valuable as an ideal picture of a perfect feudal state than as a description of what really prevailed at any one time in Syria. Being an artificial creation, the Latin state was more fully feudal than the kingdoms of the West, where the system had grown up naturally, and where there were still survivals of older forms of polity. Each lord held by the tenure of constant military service, and every effort was made to prevent the accumulation of fiefs in the same hands lest it should diminish the military forces of the kingdom. There were the usual feudal officers of state, seneschal, constable, marshal, chamberlain, chancellor, and the rest. There were the great feudal Council of the Realm, and local courts presided over by hereditary viscounts. But the Franks were ever a small minority of warriors, rulers, priests, and, in the towns, traders. The priests and barons were practically all French or French-speaking, and the tongue of northern France became the ordinary language of the Latin East, while ‘Frank’ became the commonest name by which Greeks and Arabs, Turks and Armenians, alike designated the Western settlers. It was a proof of the commercial importance of the land that customs duties became from the beginning a chief source of revenue. The only non-French element was the Italian commercial colony, which lived in separate quarters in the towns under governors and laws of its own. Venetians settled largely in the kingdom of Jerusalem, where the Marseilles merchants had exceptionally an enclosed factory of their own in the capital. Genoese mainly occupied the fiefs of Antioch and Tripoli. Pisa was already rather crowded out by her younger rivals. Through Italian hands the commerce between West and East almost exclusively passed. In the country, Syrian peasants, mainly of the Orthodox faith, tilled the lands of their Latin and Catholic masters, and like the Mohammedans and Jews, paid taxes from which the Franks were exempt. The paucity of numbers of the Franks led to extreme care being devoted to building castles and fortifying towns. The feudal stronghold became bigger, harder to take, and more elaborate than ever it had been in the West, and to this day there remain ruins of eastern castles that rival in dignity and strength Coucy, Carnarvon, or Caerphilly.