![]() ![]() Godfrey’s first priorities were to expand the Latin foothold in the Holy Land and to secure maritime communications with the West. Possessing only meagre resources in terms of military manpower, with most of Palestine as yet unconquered and the forces of both Abbasid and Fatimid Islam cowed but far from broken, his initial prospects were bleak. ![]() ![]() This problem was immediately apparent to Godfrey of Bouillon, the first Frankish ruler of Jerusalem. In 1100 the future of the crusader states seemed desperately uncertain, and all the bloody triumphs of the crusade stood to be erased. The first generation of Frankish settlers in Outremer thus inherited a disjointed patchwork of poorly resourced towns and cities, and their fragile ‘new world’ teetered on the brink of extinction. That expedition had achieved the impossible–the recapture of the Holy City–but amid the exultant drive towards that singular goal the crusaders had largely ignored the need for systematic conquest. With the benefit of hindsight, it is all too easy to forget that the basic survival of the crusader states hung in the balance in the years that followed the First Crusade. 49Īt its core, the crusading movement, for centuries to come, would be dominated by the need to defend these isolated territories, this island of western Christendom in the East. ![]() In the Middle Ages, this region was sometimes referred to as ‘Outremer’, the land beyond the sea, while today the four major settlements that emerged in the first decades of the twelfth century–the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli–are frequently described as the ‘crusader states’. In the wake of these astounding achievements, a new outpost of the western European world was born in the Near East, as the Franks expanded and consolidated their hold over the Levant. The First Crusade brought Latin Christendom control of Jerusalem and of two great Syrian cities, Antioch and Edessa. ![]()
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