Alan V. Murray

Baldwin of Bourcq: Count of Edessa and King of Jerusalem, 1100-1131

(London: Routledge, 2022), 280 pp. $128.00

The new offering from the Routledge Rulers of the Latin East series makes for a superb addition to the canon of crusader biographical studies, providing thorough and unprecedented, widely relevant engagement with the life and reign of the second king of Latin Jerusalem. Arranged in twelve chronological chapters, the volume addresses each period of Baldwin II’s life in detail, while also reaching out broadly to issues concerning the establishment of the kingdom, its neighbours, and its nobility.

A member of the extensive Rethel kin group in the Ardennes, Baldwin of Bourcq was a relative (consanguineus) of Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I. A veteran of the First Crusade, wounded during the siege of Jerusalem, Baldwin of Bourcq was given rule of the county of Edessa when Baldwin I became king. For eighteen years, Baldwin worked on establishing the county, taking over the Armenian powers on the ground (his wife, Morphia, was also an Armenian noblewoman), and fighting his Muslim neighbours. Baldwin entertained a complex and changing relationship with the neighbouring principality of Antioch, first during Tancred’s influential tenure (1105-1112 in full control), which both expanded the principality to its maximum extension and caused substantial disruption for its Christian neighbours, and later during Roger of Salerno’s reign (1112-1119) with whom instead Baldwin had a felicitous relationship, and to whom he gave his sister Cecilia in marriage. Ascending to the throne in 1118, Baldwin was stood in good stead by his experience in Edessa, as he first had to take on the demanding regency of Antioch at Roger’s death at the Field of Blood (1119-1126) and then had to fight his own nobility, less than keen on his continuous border campaigns. Baldwin suffered imprisonment twice, first during his time as count (1104-1108) and then during his tenure as king (1123-1124). The second time, his noblemen attempted to replace him, offering the crown to Charles of Flanders. Once free, and now more cautious in his campaigns, at the head of an expanded kingdom now allied with Venice (with whose help the noblemen had conquered Tyre during his captivity), he spent his final years weathering further crises: first the complex brokering of the marriage between his firstborn Melisende and Fulk of Anjou, then a new crisis in Antioch, with Bohemond II’s sudden death and the bid for power by his widow, Baldwin’s own daughter Alice. The book then accompanies Baldwin to the end of his life, piously, in monastic habit, in the patriarch’s residence near the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Murray draws a convincing portrait of Baldwin as a ‘survivor,’ whose long life and influential tenure was decisive for the establishment of the kingdom, and ended in sheer weariness after thirty-four years of relentless campaigning. The volume shades the rule of a capable if sometimes over-bold military commander, one highly conscious of the importance of the marcher principalities to the centre. It is in this continuous knitting of the border with the heart of the kingdom that lies the most powerful achievement of the monograph. For twenty-seven years (most of his life, if indeed, as Murray convincingly argues, he died in his early to mid-fifties) Baldwin was in charge of either Edessa or Antioch, and, as the volume shows in detail, he was the one to lay the foundations of the county of Edessa in a durable and stable manner. While his noblemen chafed at his continuous campaigns in the North (seven over his thirteen-year reign) Baldwin, first and foremost a lord of the borders, remained consciously aware of the fundamental importance of the two polities to the strategic and long-term viability of the Kingdom, however unwelcome the wearying military service needed may have been to the noblemen outside of Northern Syria. In this, Murray’s previous writing on Antioch is fundamental: he brings to Baldwin’s practice as king his expertise as someone already well-acquainted with his time as count, bringing the periphery to the centre and uniting effectively two often separate strands in scholarship on Outremer, for a rounded perspective on Baldwin’s longstanding rule.

Besides its persuasive treatment of the military politics of the kingdom, the book offers several incisive interventions on our knowledge of the networks and chronology of some of Outremer’s chief families. Murray’s substantial contributions to the prosopography of the crusader polities (his previous monograph on this period, The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Dynastic History, 1099-1125 from 2000, looked closely at the Bouillon-Ardennes kin group) are here built on, as the biography first effectively and clearly tackles the far-reaching extensions of the Bouillon-Ardennes kin group, on which the power of Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin I and Baldwin II would be built. Unfortunately, the author confirms what has been long suspected: we simply cannot establish what degree of consanguinity tied the first two to the third, and even well-informed writers of the kingdom such as Fulcher of Chartres and William of Tyre probably did not know. But, Murray shows, this uncertainty in itself shows the extensiveness and the usefulness of the kin group, on which Baldwin of Bourcq drew throughout his career, for vassals like Joscelin of Edessa, or patriarchs like the ambitious Stephen of Chartres. Complex familial games of inheritance and reciprocal obligations also underpinned the layered negotiations for Fulk’s marriage to Melisende: Murray disentangles a complex web of reciprocal claims, of Baldwin on Rethel, of his Rethel relatives on Jerusalem, of his daughters’ precedence in succession to the throne, and the dowry of Melisende herself, showing the multiple strands which still bound Outremer to France in his time. Later in the book, by reviewing the available evidence on Alice’s controversial tenure in Antioch, Murray both builds on Thomas Asbridge and Andrew Buck’s contributions on the subject (2003 and 2020) and makes another fundamental addition to crusader prosopography, by redating her husband Bohemond II’s death. Through a close examination of Arabic calendars, Murray convincingly moves Bohemond’s death in battle from February to September 1130, tightening the timeline for Baldwin’s final expedition in Northern Syria, and clarifying the orders of events in which it was contextualised.

The volume is as attentive to the Muslim players on the Syrian and Palestinian scene as it is to the Christian ones. Murray fully lays out the complex interplay of Muslim powers against which Baldwin fought, and with which sometimes he allied himself, throughout his life: the competing dynasties of Aleppo and Damascus, and the fading Fatimid power, whose own alternative fortunes were so crucial to the development and expansion of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Rightfully, we come to know Muslim warriors and rulers such as Ridwan, Balak, Timurtash and al-Bursuqi as closely as their Christian counterparts, fully experiencing Baldwin’s rise as that of a warlord among other warlords (of both faiths) on the Syrian theatre. Murray’s contribution is here crucial: the reframing of the reign fully in the perspective of the Northern marches, centring the border, completely dissipates the issues which might come from privileging the perspective of Jerusalem itself as centre of power. Baldwin, a man closely acquainted with the conditions which power-building in this area required, built on his experience to establish the kingdom more securely, while refusing to give in to his lords’ demand (sometimes at risk to his own power, but ultimately successfully). The same pragmatic approach contextualises the treatment of Baldwin’s piety: the book engages with his insistent display of the relic of the True Cross, and his acts of patronage throughout his life. While here the volume could perhaps discuss more closely this specific side of Baldwin’s tenure, the overall effect is highly convincing, in shading out the portrait of Baldwin as a professional, lifelong commander and ruler, whose engagement with the crusader context in which he moved was both deep and contextual.

Alan Murray’s treatment of the life of Baldwin of Bourcq’s comes as a timely, highly readable, but also relevant and sophisticated addition to the bibliography of the early history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, whose bringing together of the centre and border perspective, numerous prosopographical insights, and convincing framing of its subject’s career within the larger perspective of the Latin kingdom and its neighbours will make it an enduringly relevant contribution to the field.

Francesca Petrizzo
Institute for Medieval Studies
University of Leeds