ABSTRACT

It was, therefore, not so much the inhabitants of western Palestine who were to be feared after the position of the Crusaders had become consolidated, as the Turks and the ever restless Arabs of the desert. The gentle and heroic Godfrey of Bouillon, who had refused to be crowned where Christ had suffered death, had died himself; his brother Baldwin, who had' no such scruples, was crowned King of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem on Christmas Day, 1100, in Bethlehem itself. He was clever, brave and energetic; when he saw that danger threatened on the other side Jordan he set out in person to see about the defence of his western possessions and the possibilitY' of acquiring land in the east. As Guillaume de Tyr, the first systematic historian of those times, says in the charming thirteenthcentury French that has been reproduced in the present edition of his work : II Li rois desiroit mout a acroistre son roiaume et elargir en cele partie' '-cele partie being, of course, Crele-Syria, which the Franks called II la Syrie Sobale. "