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Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.
The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning.
Such as did bear rule in their Kingdoms, men renowned for their power.
Ecclesiasticus 44:1–15
Baldwin of Boulogne’s seizure of Edessa in February 1098 was significant in several ways. It was an important city, not just for its Biblical association with the prophet Abraham, but also for its economy based on the wool trade and its location. Armenia had long held a tenuous position in the region, squeezed as it was between Byzantium and the Muslim Empire on either side. The chaos of the Saljuq civil war had played hard on the Armenian cities of the region and when Baldwin and Tancred, Bohemond’s nephew, broke away from the Crusade’s main army with their followers they found themselves welcomed as protectors in Tarsus, Adana and other petty princedoms. Baldwin went one step further after being invited by Prince Toros of Edessa first to act as military muscle for the prince and to marry his daughter, and then to become his adopted son. It was not long before Toros was murdered, shot down with arrows by his own people while trying to climb down a rope to escape from the city, following a coup possibly instigated by his new son in-law.
Baldwin sent both horses and coin to the Crusade which was struggling beneath the walls of Antioch, and his largess to his brother Godfrey of Bouillon and the lands and cities he granted him within the County of Edessa were influential in the subsequent growth in Godfrey’s following among the knights, and possibly his later election to the throne of Jerusalem.
It was also the first significant ‘land grab’ by a Crusader. It breached the oaths made to Alexius and also showed that many of the knights and lords such as Godfrey, Tancred and Bohemond, whose holdings were either tenuous or of poor value in Europe, would look to settle and rule in the East. Tancred would even go as far as to style himself as the Grand Emir Tancredi and to dress in silks and slippers.
The orientalisation of many of the Crusaders who stayed on in the Holy Land was, however, never so complete as to allow them to overcome the religious and racial intolerance that was inherent in the very nature of their venture, and there was never any large-scale unqualified embracing of the Crusade by local Christians. A letter sent to the Pope by the Crusaders shows the Franks’ general attitude to non-Catholics; ‘the heretics, Greeks, Armenians, Syrians and Jacobites we have not been able to overcome …’
This inability to accept, and to integrate with, the local Christians would later leave the Crusaders in the same position as the Saljuq Turks were in 1098 – isolated and unpopular rulers with little local support to draw on when they were under pressure.