ABSTRACT
When the armies of the First Crusade reached Palestine in the early summer of 1099, they were entering a landscape that had been considered as sacred by Christians for centuries. In religious as well as political and military terms, the crusader conquest was revolutionary since it brought about a Christian domination of the Holy Land for the first time since it had been overrun by the Muslim Arabs in the fourth decade of the seventh century. These events raise important questions about what attitudes and policies the rulers of the new Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem would adopt concerning its sacred space. This chapter explores how the political and religious history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was affected on the one hand by the occupation and veneration of sacred space by the Frankish conquerors, and on the other by the military requirements of the defence of sacred space against their Muslim enemies.
