years of age. During this period (1131-1144 A.D.) the prosperity of the Franks in Syria reached its zenith.

Baldwin III., the eldest son of King Fulk, was a gallant youth of eighteen when he acceded. His reign was also troubled by the interference of his mother, Milicent, in affairs of state, and by the quarrels between the Church and the military orders. Moreover, in the first year of this reign Edessa fell before Zanghi: a great province was lost, and the bulwark which protected the principality of Antioch from the Turkish Sultans of Mosul was broken down. Nevertheless Ascalon, the last fortress held by the Egyptians in the south, was taken nine years later, and the last five years of this reign of eighteen were peaceful. Baldwin III. married a Greek princess with a rich dowry, but had no heir, and his moody and unpopular brother succeeded.

The strength of the Latin kingdom lay in its frontier defended by impregnable strongholds, and in the mutual hatred of the Sunnee Moslems of the north under Turkish sultans, and of the Egyptians in the South under the Shi'ah khalifs, who claimed descent from Fatimah, the Prophet's daughter. Its weakness lay in its position between two Moslem forces, which might-and finally did-unite against the Christians, and in its dependence on the fleets which brought pilgrims, crusaders, and traders from Europe; but the chroniclers say that the Franks in Syria enjoyed greater peace and prosperity than they had ever known in their native lands, and probably of few European towns could it be said, as of Jerusalem about this time, that its walls were crumbling with age, no enemy having appeared to besiege the city for nearly ninety years. The policy of the first five kings had usually been to remain on the defensive as regarded Egypt, and to concentrate their forces against the Turks on the north. King Amaury changed this policy, and the result was the union of the two Moslem States against his kingdom, and its final ruin twenty-five years later. The wiser counsellors-William of Tyre and the Templars were opposed to the ambitious project of conquering Egypt, and the enterprise was found impracticable by all the various European princes who attempted it during the century that followed Amaury's accession.

O blind cupidity of men!' says the great chronicler William, Archbishop of Tyre, there was no foe for us in the south; the Egyptians brought their merchandise and spent their gold in our country. And now all is changed . . . the avarice of one man has

done this his cupidity has clouded the clear bright sky which the goodness of the Lord had given us.'

King Amaury was young and ambitious, but very different in character from his ancestors. He was neither loved nor respected, and, though tall and handsome, was corpulent and inactive. He was morose and silent, but dissolute in morals, suspected of religious scepticism, faithless to his allies, and very avaricious. His attack on Egypt finally failed, and meantime the great genius of Islam-Saladin the Kurd- 1 was slowly attaining to influence and power, and Nur ed Din, his master, was steadily encroaching on the Latin territory. When Amaury died of dysentery in 1173 A.D., he was succeeded by a leper-Baldwin IV.-who was a child of thirteen. The decay of justice, which began to be remarkable after the death of King Fulk, and the dissensions of the barons, the patriarchs, the Templars, and Knights of St. John, were sure tokens of the coming disaster. When the last Fatemite khalif died in Cairo, and Nur ed Din in Damascus, Saladin found himself without a rival, and united all Islam against the crumbling Syrian States. In 1186 A.D. the leper king also died, and Guy of Lusignan, husband of his sister Sybil-a leader whom the barons were very unwilling to accept-became the next king of a rebellious kingdom. An English chronicler says of this unfortunate monarch:

*

'There was not another king to be found of more royal habits or character than he, but . . . he was simple-minded and unversed in political intrigue; instead of being esteemed the more on this account, as he should have been, he was considered the more contemptible. . . . Ought then the simplicity of his character to have injured him in obtaining his rights?"

But this was written by a strong partisan, and there is no doubt that King Guy was weak and easily led, and unfit to guide the affairs of the State in a time of utmost peril.

The loss of the kingdom was due to a military blunder, which was justly charged against the Templars, whose advice Guy of Lusignan followed. Saladin's army had gained the heights above Tiberias, where the country was well watered. The Christian host had gathered at Sepphoris, north-west of Nazareth, where also there was plenty of water. The two forces were separated by a day's march through a waterless plain. Contrary to the decision of his council, King Guy ordered an attack, and on the 4th of July,

1187 A.D., the Christians were cut to pieces at Hattin, falling victims to heat and thirst rather than to the Moslem onslaught. So complete was the disaster, and so rapid were Saladin's movements after his victory, that, with the exception of Tyre, all the kingdom was overrun and reduced by the Moslems before any attempt to aid the Christian cause could be made from the West; and the first army that advanced, under Frederick Barbarossa, was destroyed in Asia Minor and never reached Palestine at all.

Under these circumstances the success of King Richard Lion Heart, though not complete, was all the more remarkable. When he landed at Acre in 1191 he already had in his gift a kingdom nearly as large as that which King Guy had lost the island of Cyprus, conquered by English soldiers sailing in an English fleet, which the Latins had never before attempted to take from its so-called ' emperor,' Isaac Comnenos. It had the same strategical value then that it still possesses, as a place of arms '-to use a military technical phrase-or base for attack on Asia. The reconquest of Palestine, in face of a united Islam under a victorious leader, who was respected for his austere religious conduct, and trusted on account of his skill and genius, was no easy task; but it was necessary for the prosperity of the great Italian trade, and demanded by the public opinion of Europe. The French and English were enemies at home, and their friendship in the East was hollow. With such unwilling allies, and in face of forces from Egypt and Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia, King Richard succeeded in wresting from Saladin half of his conquests in Palestine, and in restoring to the Templars and Hospitallers all the lands and castles which they had lost in the plains. His treaty, made after the French had deserted, when he himself had won a great battle, had taken Acre by assault, and had chased the Moslems out of all Sharon and Philistia to Gaza, brought about a condition of affairs which endured for a century after. Cyprus represented an addition to the Latin possessions equal in extent, and superior in fertility, to the lands which by this treaty Saladin retained; and though the jealousy and envy of French and Germans led to King Richard's two years' captivity, at a time when his presence was sorely needed in England, he was recognised as the champion of Christendom, who alone of all the leaders of the time had shown himself equal to Saladin; and he became a popular hero in Europe and among the Moslems as well.

✓

The crusade of St. Louis in 1248 A.D. was due to the invasion of Palestine by the Kharezmian Tartars. It resulted in a disastrous defeat in Egypt, and it added nothing to the territory won by King Richard. The seaside fortresses were rebuilt, and a truce for ten years was established, after five years of struggle; but the subsequent tenure of the western part of Palestine was mainly due to the dissensions of the Moslems, and to the long contest between Egypt and the Tartars. The last crusader was also an English prince, who returned to become our Edward I., and who in 1272, after defeating the Egyptians, obtained terms for the Christians which delayed the fall of Acre by twenty years.

Such, briefly sketched, were the leading events of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Syria. A kingdom won by the sword endured as a strong feudal State, with everincreasing prosperity, during sixty years, and it was not till eighty-eight had passed away that it was lost by a single error in strategy. A new conquest of its western half created a Christian possession defended by the great orders, who were the chief landowners in the plains; and this condition lasted for another century, with the additional ownership of Cyprus. Seven generations of Franks lived and died in Syria before the weakness of Europe became the opportunity of Bibars and Kelaun; and Cyprus was still in possession of the Venetians when it was taken by Selim II. three centuries later.

Turning then to consider the organisation of the Latin kingdom and the character of its civilisation, we may glance at its division into fiefs and vassal provinces, at its communes established by treaty with the great cities of Italy, at its laws, its trade, its manufactures and agriculture, at the constitution of its churches, at education, and at the relations existing between Christians and Moslems. The causes which led to the final destruction of this curious semiFrank, semi-Oriental State must be considered, and especially the merits of the two opposite policies of the Popes and of the Emperors. The most interesting question is, however, the last-namely, the results of the Crusades upon the culture and the education of Europe. For it was Europe rather than Asia that profited by this return to the old home of the earliest civilisations of the world.

From extant documents, including papal bulls, cartularies of churches, and of the Teutonic and Hospitaller orders (that of the Templars is unfortunately lost), together with agree

ments and lists of properties, it becomes possible to draw in minute detail the borders of the various fiefs and baronies of the kingdom of Jerusalem. The names given by the Crusaders to some seven hundred places in Palestine are for the most part easily discovered on the English survey, and an almost equal number are mentioned in North Syria and the county of Edessa, the more important of which have been fixed. Hence it is known that the Syrian mountains west of the River Orontes, and as far south as the stream north of Tortosa, belonged to the Prince of Antioch, while the southern Lebanon nearly to Beirut formed the county of Tripoli. The regions to the east, including the plain of Baalbek, were recognised by treaty as belonging to the Turkish Sultan of Aleppo. Beirut and its vicinity formed the small seigneurie of Barut, and from this region southwards to the Leontes River the shore and the mountains were parts of the seigneurie of Sajette or Sidon.

Galilee was divided into nine fiefs, the most important being that of the Prince of Galilee, including the plain of Esdraelon, the Nazareth hills, the plateau west of the Lake of Tiberias, and the Safed mountains to the north. Beyond Jordan, the Land of Soethe,' also belonging to the Prince of Galilee, was that western part of Bashan now known as the Jaulân plateau. The rest of Bashan was never conquered, and was ruled by the Sultan of Damascus. The shore lands from the Leontes to the Ladder of Tyre, with the lower hills to the east, belonged to Tyre; and south of this to Carmel belonged to Acre. Upper Galilee towards the east was the fief of Maron, and on the watershed was the long narrow fief of Toron, with the smaller seigneurie of St. George on its south-west, and that of Montfort to its west. Carmel belonged to the seigneur of Haifa, with a small fief of Caymont to the east. The seigneurie of Bessan was in the Jordan valley east of Jezreel.

The plain of Sharon formed the seigneurie of Cæsarea, with the smaller one of Arsuf, and the county of Jaffa began at the River Rochetaillie. To this county belonged the lands of Ascalon-that is to say, all Philistia as far as Gaza. The Samaritan mountains formed the seigneurie of Nablus, reaching nearly to Bethel, and the Jerusalem hills were the royal domain directly under the crown. The seigneur of St. Abraham had all the Hebron mountains, and the seigneur of Kerak ruled 'Oultre Jourdain'-that is to say, Gilead and Moab; and to him also belonged the Sinaitic desert.