ABSTRACT
On 3 February 1112, Count Bertrand of Tripoli died of a sudden illness. There is no reason to doubt that Pons was Bertrand's biological son, but the identity of his mother is disputed. In their attempts to establish Pons's parentage, William of Malmesbury's modern editors have assumed that Pons must have been of a relatively advanced age in order to inherit Tripoli from his father. The minting of gold coins at Tyre may well have been a pragmatic response to the changed political circumstances since Tripoli's conquest in 1109. With Tancred's grant of lands north of 'Arqa to Pons in fief in 1112, only three years after the council of Tripoli in 1109, the crusader-settlers were again redrawing the map of the emergent Latin East. The most recent scholarship on the Genoese in the Latin East suggests that the Embriaci of Jubayl remained aloof from the other permanent crusader-settlers until the mid-twelfth century.
