What the Crusader States were
After the First Crusade, a handful of Western European leaders and their followers stayed on in the Near East and set up their own rule over captured cities and the land around them. Historians call these territories the Crusader States, or the Latin East, because their ruling class was Latin Christian (Catholic, with Latin as the church language). There were four main ones: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
They were never a single country. Each had its own ruler, and each was surrounded by Muslim-ruled neighbors and, to the north-west, by the Byzantine Empire, which had its own claims on some of the same territory. Most of their people were not Western Europeans at all, but local Christians, Muslims and Jews.
Founding, 1098 to 1109
The expedition had been called in 1095, and the longer story of the origins of the crusades is told elsewhere. What matters here is the sequence on the ground.
- Edessa came first, around 1098. Baldwin of Boulogne, a leader of the expedition, took power in this city in the north, far from the coast, with the support of its largely Armenian population.
- Antioch was captured in 1098 after a long siege. Bohemond of Taranto kept it for himself, despite earlier promises to hand it to the Byzantine emperor, which started a quarrel that lasted for generations.
- Jerusalem fell in July 1099. The crusaders slaughtered many of the inhabitants, an episode that left a lasting memory among Muslims and Jews. The first ruler, Godfrey of Bouillon, reportedly avoided the title of king. His brother Baldwin, from Edessa, took the crown in 1100.
- Tripoli took longest. Raymond of Toulouse began a siege nearby, and the city itself was captured only in 1109, after his death, by his heirs and allies with help from Genoese ships.
By around 1110 the pattern was set: a chain of states along the Mediterranean coast and a little inland, with the king of Jerusalem usually regarded as first among equals.
Growth and the first blow
The early twelfth century was a period of consolidation. Coastal ports such as Acre and Tyre came under Latin rule, often with the help of Italian fleets, and the kingdom spread south and east into present-day Jordan. Muslim rulers in the region were divided, which helped the settlers survive.
That changed as strong regional rulers emerged. In 1144 Zengi, who ruled Mosul and Aleppo, captured the city of Edessa. Part of the county lingered on for a few years, but the state was effectively finished. The loss prompted the Second Crusade (1147 to 1149), which ended in a failed attack on Damascus and did nothing to restore Edessa.
Hattin and the Third Crusade
Zengi’s successors built a larger Muslim bloc, and by the 1170s it was led by Sultan Saladin, who held Egypt and then Syria. The Latin kingdom, meanwhile, was split by court rivalries. In July 1187 Saladin’s army destroyed the Latin field army at the Battle of Hattin, and Jerusalem surrendered in October. Most of the kingdom’s cities fell within months; Tyre held out.
The Third Crusade (1189 to 1192) followed. Its most visible success was the long siege of Acre, which the crusaders retook in 1191. Richard the Lionheart then campaigned along the coast, and a truce in 1192 left the Latins with a coastal strip and no Jerusalem. Acre became the main city, and the kingdom is sometimes called the “Kingdom of Acre” for this period.
The long thirteenth century
The thirteenth century saw many expeditions, but the territory shrank in a pattern of gains and losses.
- Jerusalem returned to Christian hands in 1229 through a negotiated agreement with the Egyptian sultan, rather than a battle, but it was lost again in 1244 and not regained.
- Antioch and Tripoli continued as separate states, and their rulers were sometimes the same person. They were drawn into the politics of Armenian Cilicia and, from the mid-century, into the shockwaves of the Mongol conquests, which at times offered an uneasy opening for alliance and at times simply added another danger.
- The military orders, above all the Knights Templar, took on larger roles in defending territory as local resources fell short.
The decisive threat came from the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, who took a more systematic approach. Antioch fell in 1268 and Tripoli in 1289. Acre was besieged and captured in 1291, and the remaining coastal outposts were abandoned soon after. Crusading continued in other forms, and the island of Cyprus remained under Latin kings, but the mainland states were gone.
Why they ended
Historians point to several factors rather than a single cause: small numbers of settlers, dependence on reinforcements from Europe, rivalry between the states and with the Italian trading cities, and the rise of better-organized Muslim powers. Opinions differ about how much weight each deserves.