Explain How Outremer Preserved For So Long. Was Its Fall Inevitable?

Explain How Outremer Preserved For So Long. Was Its Fall Inevitable?

Outremer

Outremer was the mediaeval name for the Frankish Levant and its cosmopolitan states established by the First Crusade (1096-9). They began with a northern group comprising the Norman Principality of Antioch (1098), the County of Edessa (1098) inland of it, and that of Tripoli (1109) to the south. These were at first separated from the southern Kingdom of Jerusalem by coastal Moslem emirates. Jerusalem was stormed in July 1099, and Godfrey of Bouillon elected Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. He died in 1100. His successor, Baldwin I (r. 1100-18), Count of Edessa, took the title of King and was succeeded by Baldwin II (r. 1118-31). He was followed by Fulk of Anjou (r. 1131-43) (q.v.).

The King had preeminence over the northern rulers and in a crisis took charge, but otherwise he and they lived of their own. By 1165 the intrusive emirates had been pinched out and the Kingdom proper stretched along the coast from the Tripolitan frontier just north of Beirut to Daron just south of Gaza. The landward frontiers ran thence to Aqaba, made a sweep 20 miles east of the Dead Sea back to the middle Jordan, up-river to its source and on again to the Tripolitan frontier.

The King was not master of his country. The rich Church was independent of him. The four great feudatories, Jaffa, Galilee, Sidon and Oultrejourdain (Fr: beyond the Jordan) owed him service altogether of 360 knights (say 1800 men). At all times there was a shortage, even a dearth of Frankish manpower, only partly made up by visitors from the perenially interested west. Visitors together with the military orders of St. John, the Temple and the Teutonic Knights supplied the balance of troops from barracks and castles all over the Kingdom and in Europe. Of the 17 main towns of Outremer only Jerusalem, Nablus, Daron and Acre belonged to the King. The Venetians and the Genoese each had a street in Jerusalem. Genoa had autonomous trading quarters in 11 other towns, Venice in seven, Pisa in six, Marseilles in four, Amalfi in two and Barcelona in one. Only Nablus and Daron were wholly the King's. Acre, the chief southern port, was a patchwork of foreign jurisdictions. The foreign and entrepôt trade was in the hands of these socially unintegrated communities which spoke their own tongue and were backed by their quarrelling home states. If the trade brought considerable local benefits, Knights, visitors, traders and the Church all had outside allegiances and often incompatible objectives. Self interest in a military crisis would induce them to co-operate with the King, but as allies never wholly under command.

These weak and chaotic states also made enemies of the Byzantines whom they should have cultivated. They at first survived because of moslem disunity, especially as between the rich but effete Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt and its fragmented rival at Baghdad, and between the various local Turkoman ...