Baldwin I of Jerusalem

He was originally a clerk in orders, and held several prebends; but in 1096 he joined the first crusade, and accompanied his brother Godfrey as far as Heraclea[?] in Asia Minor. When Tancred left the main body of the crusaders at Heraclea, and marched into Cilicia, Baldwin followed, partly in jealousy, partly from the same political motives which animated Tancred. He wrested Tarsus from Tancred's grip (September 1097), and left there a garrison of his own. After rejoining the main army at Marash[?], he received an invitation from an Armenian named Pakrad, and moved eastwards towards the Euphrates, where he occupied Tell-bashir[?]. Another invitation followed from Thoros of Edessa[?]; and to Edessa Baldwin came, first as protector, and then, when Thoros was assassinated, as his successor (March 1098). For two years he ruled in the County of Edessa (1098—1100), marrying an Armenian wife, and acting generally as the intermediary between the crusaders and the Armenians.

During these two years he was successful in maintaining his ground, both against the Muslim powers by which he was surrounded, and from which he won Samosata[?] and Seruj[?] (Sarorgia[?]), and against a conspiracy of his own subjects in 1098. At the end of 1099 he visited Jerusalem along with Bohemund I of Antioch; but he returned to Edessa in January 1100. On the death of Godfrey he was summoned by a party in Jerusalem to succeed to his brother. He was crowned the first king of Jerusalem on Christmas Day, 1100, by the Patriarch himself; but the struggle of church and state was not yet over, and in the spring of 1101 Baldwin had Dagobert[?] suspended by a papal legate, while later in the year the two disagreed on the question of the contribution to be made by the patriarch towards the defence of the Holy Land. The struggle ended in the deposition of Dagobert and the triumph of Baldwin (1102).

As Baldwin had secured the supremacy of the lay power in Jerusalem, so he extended into a compact kingdom the poor and straggling territories to which he had succeeded. This he did by an alliance with the Italian trading towns, especially Genoa, which supplied in return for the concession of a quarter in the conquered towns, the instruments and the skill for a war of sieges, in which the coast towns of Palestine were successively reduced. Arsuf[?] and Caesarea were captured in 1101; Acre in 1104; Beirut and Sidon in 1110 (the latter with the aid of the Venetians and Norwegians).

Meanwhile Baldwin repelled in successive years the attacks of the Egyptians (1102, 1103, 1105), and in the latter years of his reign (1115—1118) he even pushed southward at the expense of Egypt, penetrating as far as the Red Sea, and planting an outpost at Monreal[?]. In the north he had to compose the dissensions of the Christian princes in Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa (1109—1110), and to help them to maintain their ground against the Muslin princes of northeastern Syria, especially Mawdud[?] and Aksunk-ur, emirs of Mosul. In this way Baldwin was able to make himself into practical suzerain of the three Christian principalities of the north, though the suzerainty was, and always continued to be, somewhat nominal. In 1118 he died, after an expedition to Egypt, during which he captured Farama[?], and, as old Fuller says, "caught many fish, and his death in eating them."

Literature

The Historia Hierosolymitana of Fulcher, who had accompanied Baldwin as chaplain to Edessa, and had lived in Jerusalem during his reign, is the primary authority for Baldwin's career. There is a monograph on Baldwin by Wolff (König Baldwin I von Jerusalem), and his reign is sketched in R. Rohricht’s Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem (Innsbruck, 1898) C. i.-iv.