ABSTRACT
The conquest of most of the kingdom by Saladin in 1187 and its final overthrow by the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt in 1291 meant that the royal archives, almost all the baronial archives and many of the ecclesiastical archives were lost; the few documents which have survived from Baldwin II’s reign were preserved by a small number of institutions, notably the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem, and the abbey of St Mary of Jehosaphat. The preamble to the decrees of the assembly describes calamities which had befallen the kingdom of Jerusalem, namely a plague of locusts and continuing Saracen attacks, concluding that these had been brought about through the sinfulness of its people. Probably in 1119, a knight named Hugh of Payns and a group of like-minded companions took vows to protect the main pilgrim routes from the coast to Jerusalem.
