ABSTRACT
In the one thousand two hundred and twentieth year since the Incarnation of our Lord, as a consequence of our sins, the territory of Jerusalem is being ravaged by many hardships, its crops have been devoured by locusts and mice for four years now, and it is being made desolate by incessant attacks and ambushes by the Saracens, with very many pilgrims and citizens killed. This is why the Patriarch Garmund, a man of dove-like simplicity, and Baldwin, the second king of the Latin community of Jerusalem, a disciple of humility and son of good fortune, attempting through their pious prayers and just deeds to confront the danger threatening the citizenry, and driven by divine inspiration, went into conclave in Nablus, a city of Samaria, in the second year of Baldwin’s reign and of Garmund’s patriarchate, together with the dignitaries of the church and the leading men of the kingdom, to settle the legal basis for that church and the territory, and in face of so pressing a national crisis they established the decrees which we have set out below to discipline a people out of control. For since at that particular time the people of the aforementioned territory were indulging every form of decadent desire, and in consequence were endangered by the damaging effects of daily misfortunes, there seemed to them to be only one means of escape; to call upon God’s mercy and to impose some legal curbs on the sins of this decadent population, so that with sinful behaviour coming to an end, divine retribution would [likewise] come to an end, as we read happened in the case of the Israelites, and the mercy of God, who seeks not the death but the correction of the sinner, would snatch His repentant sons from the dangerous threat posed by their enemies. The fact is that these enemies, that is to say the Saracens, had, alas, during the summer of the previous year, killed Roger, prince of Antioch and virtually all the Christians in the principality of Antioch whom they had crushed in war, and were making incursions more frequently than usual into the territory of Jerusalem. So much for these matters.
