A little earlier in 1113, Pope Paschal II granted the area just south of the Holy Sepulchre to another new order, the Hospitallers, who later became a holy army even richer than the Templars. At first they wore black tunics with white crosses; later the pope granted them the red surcoat with a white cross. They built their own quarter including a hostel with a thousand beds and the huge Hospital, where four doctors inspected the sick twice a day, checked their urine and let their blood. New mothers each received a cot. But there were limits to its comforts, so each patient received a sheepskin coat and boots to wear to the latrine. Jerusalem echoed with many languages including French, German and Italian – Baldwin granted the Venetians trading privileges – but it was still a Christian reserve: he allowed Muslim traders into the city, but they were not permitted to spend the night in Christ’s capital.
Soon afterwards, Il-Ghazi, once ruler of Jerusalem, now master of Aleppo, attacked Antioch and killed its prince. King Baldwin raced north, bearing the True Cross* with his army, and defeated him. But in 1123 the king was captured by Il-Ghazi’s nephew Balak.
While Baldwin remained a prisoner of the Ortuq family and the Crusader armies besieged Tyre, the Egyptians advanced from Ashkelon hoping to seize a Jerusalem bereft of king and defenders.3
THE GOLDEN AGE OF OUTREMER
1131–42
MELISENDE AND FULK: A ROYAL WEDDING
The Jerusalemites, commanded by the constable, Eustace of Grenier, twice saw off the Egyptians. To universal joy, Baldwin was ransomed: on 2 April 1125, the entire city turned out to welcome the king home. Baldwin’s imprisonment had concentrated his mind on the succession. His heiress was his daughter Melisende, whom he now married to the capable and experienced Fulk, Count of Anjou, descendant of the depraved serial-pilgrim Fulk the Black and son of the delightfully named Fulk the Repulsive, and himself already a veteran Crusader.
In 1131, Baldwin fell ill in Jerusalem, and, withdrawing to die in the Patriarch’s Palace as a humble supplicant, he abdicated in favour of Fulk, Melisende and their baby son, the future Baldwin III. Jerusalem had evolved its own coronation ritual. Assembling at the Temple of Solomon, wearing embroidered dalmatics, stoles and the crown jewels, Fulk and Melisende mounted gorgeously caparisoned horses. Led by the chamberlain brandishing the king’s sword, followed by the seneschal with the sceptre and the constable with the royal standard, they rode through the cheering city – the first Jerusalemite monarchs to be crowned in the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre, already being rebuilt.
The patriarch administered the royal oath then asked the congregation thrice to confirm that these were the lawful heirs: Oill! Yes! shouted the crowd.* The two crowns were borne towards the altar. The royal couple were anointed from a horn of oil before Fulk was given the ring of loyalty, the orb of dominion and the sceptre for punishment of sinners, and girded with the sword of war and justice. They were then both crowned and kissed by the patriarch. Outside the Sepulchre, the marshal helped King Fulk mount his horse and they rode back to the Temple Mount. At the banquet in Templum Domini, the king offered to return the crown and then retrieved it, a tradition based on the story of Jesus’ circumcision when it was said that Mary brought him to the Temple, offered him to God and bought him back for a lamb or two pigeons. Finally the burgesses brought the food and wine, served to the royals by the seneschal and chamberlain as the marshal held the banner over them. After much singing, music and dancing, the constable escorted the king and queen to their suite.
Melisende was the queen regnant but at first Fulk expected to rule in his own name. He was a squat forty-year-old soldier with red hair, ‘like King David’ as William of Tyre put it, and a poor memory, always a flaw in kings. Accustomed to ruling his own realm, he found it hard to manage, let alone charm, his imperious queen. Melisende, slim, dark and intelligent, was soon spending too much time with her handsome cousin and childhood playmate Count Hugh of Jaffa, the richest magnate in Jerusalem. Fulk accused them of having an affair.
QUEEN MELISENDE: THE SCANDAL
Melisende’s flirtation started as gossip but rapidly became a political crisis. As queen she was unlikely to be punished; but, by Frankish law, if a couple were found guilty of adultery, the woman suffered rhinotomy (nose-slitting), the man castration. One way to prove innocence was single combat: now a knight challenged Count Hugh to prove his innocence by duel. But Hugh fled to Egyptian territory, where he stayed until the Church negotiated a compromise by which he would go into exile for three years.
On his return to Jerusalem, Hugh was sitting playing dice in a tavern on Furriers Street one day when a Breton knight stabbed him. Somehow he survived, but Jerusalem was ‘shaken at the outrage; a great crowd assembled’ and the rumour spread that Fulk had ordered his rival’s murder. Now it was the king who needed to prove his innocence: the Breton was tried and sentenced to be dismembered and have his tongue cut out. But Fulk ordered that his tongue remain intact to show he was not being silenced. Even when the Breton had been totally dismembered with only head, torso (and tongue) left, he still asserted Fulk’s innocence.
It is not surprising that the evident sleaziness of Outremer politics became notorious in Europe. Ruling Jerusalem was a challenge: the kings were really first among equals, contending with Crusader princelings, ambitious magnates, thuggish adventurers, ignorant new arrivals from Europe, independent military-religious orders of knights and intriguing churchmen, before they were even able to face their Islamic enemies.
The royal marriage became extremely frosty, but if Melisende had lost her love, she had regained her power. To thaw the queen, Fulk gave her a special present – the sumptuous Psalter that bears her name.* But as the kingdom enjoyed its golden age, Islam was mobilizing.
ZANGI THE BLOODY: THE FALCON PRINCE
In 1137, Zangi, Atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo (in today’s Iraq and Syria), attacked first the Crusader city of Antioch and then Muslim Damascus: the fall of either of these cities would be a blow for Jerusalem. For nearly four decades, the loss of Jerusalem had made surprisingly little impression on the divided and distracted Islamic world. As so often in Jerusalem’s history, religious fervour was inspired by political necessity. Zangi now started to harness a rising fury, religious and political, at Jerusalem’s loss, calling himself ‘Fighter of Jihad, tamer of atheists, destroyer of heretics’.
The caliph awarded this Turkish atabeg the title ‘King of Amirs’ for restoring Islamic pride. For the Arabs he called himself the Pillar of the Faith; for fellow-Turks, the Falcon Prince. Poets, vital ornaments for every ruler in that poetry-loving society, flocked to his court to sing of his glories, but the feral Zangi was a harsh master. He skinned and scalped important enemies, hanged minor ones, and crucified any of his troops who trampled on crops. He castrated his boy lovers to preserve their beauty. When he exiled his generals, he reminded them of his power by castrating their sons. Demented with drink, he divorced one of his wives and then had her gang-raped by his grooms in the stables – while he watched. If one of his soldiers deserted, remembered one of his officers, Usamah bin Munqidh, Zangi would order the two neighbouring men to be cut in half. His cruelties are recorded by Muslim sources. As for the Crusaders, they (in a pun worthy of a tabloid-newspaper headline) nicknamed him Zangi the Sanguine.