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Description
After Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. It is said that before the Prophet Muhammad, Jerusalem was the Arabs' original qibla (the geographical direction of prayer now centered on the Kaaba), which makes some sense. This city is the bedrock of the Abrahamic faiths. It was the throne of David, the pulpit of Jesus, and the point of ascension for the Prophet Muhammad. This millennia-old sacred site was wretched out of the incompetent hands of the Roman Empire by the emergent Rashidun Caliphate in 637 CE, and while this was a PR nightmare for the Byzantines, it was a massive boon for the people who'd just been trying to mind their own damned business there. The Jews were allowed to return and worship as they pleased in the city of their ancestors, allowing them to contribute their wisdom to the scholastic playground that was the Islamic Golden Age. Like the Christians, they had to pay the jizya tax, but this was affordable and allotted them legal protection from the Caliphate as fellow Peoples of the Book. There was an awkward phase when the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah got a little too high off his own fumes and infidel blood, but he was the exception, not the rule. Christian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem also often got caught in the crossfire of Seljuk infighting, but this was not by the approval of the Fatimids controlling the Holy City herself. They saw the Sunni Turks as just as much of a nuisance as the Christians did. All of that in mind, these past four hundred years were some of the most stable and prosperous times the three faiths have shared with one another in all of history.

And then the French showed up and ruined everything, like they always do.

The year is 1195, and Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos trusts literally no one because he's a Byzantine Emperor and those don't have a particularly long shelf life. Unfortunately, he's got all these Seljuk Turks that his predecessors used to throw at their rivals refusing to leave Anatolia, so he's gotta find someone willing to help him out. Swallowing his Orthodox pride, Alexios reached out to his real mortal enemy, the Pope, offering to reconcile the 1054 schism in the church if Urban II would please just send some dudes with swords to kick the Muslims out. While I'm sure Urban was creaming his pants over having the Byzantine Emperor lick his boot, Urban had to redress the proposal in order to convince a bunch of Frenchmen and Germans they should give half a rat’s ass about the dying husk of the Roman Empire over on the other side of the world. No no, he said at the Council of Clermont, we're not just giving Asia Minor back to the Romans, we're going the extra mile and retaking Jerusalem! Deus vult!

The Pope's rousing speech was so successful that it persuaded more than just the noblemen to take up the cross. A homeless guy named Peter decided that Deus had vulted him to lead an army of random peasants completely untrained for combat into the Holy Land before anyone with actual experience could even prepare to march. Since no town along the way to Byzantium had expected to feed tens of thousands of unexpected visitors, they had to turn the People's Crusade away, and that went about as well as you'd expect shooing off a bunch of starving armed peasants would go. By the time the actual knights had gotten on their feet in 1096, they found a trail of destruction and desperation leading all the way to Constantinople. The People's Crusade had reached the Holy Land ahead of everyone else, but once they came into contact with an actual enemy army with proper weapons and training, they were cut down where they stood, as literally everyone expected. Alexios sure as hell knew he wasn't going to be able to stop them, so he just kinda pointed and said “sure. Go get ‘em slugger”, and immediately turned his attention back to the actual Crusader army all while Peter got his shit kicked in.

The knights made much swifter work of the Muslim states than the People's Crusade ever could. They stood at the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, obliterating first any implications the Fatimids may have held that they shared a common enemy, and then the walls. Realizing how well-defended Jerusalem was, the knights basically shotgun blasted the fortifications with everything they had all at once until something broke and they could pour in like locusts. The carnage that ensued was an atrocity against humanity and God Himself. On the exact same soil where their Christ had commanded his acolytes drop their swords against their persecutors, the Crusaders rounded up the Holy City's citizens and committed unspeakable war crimes: mass beheadings, human bonfires, indiscriminate slaughter of women and children, the works. A group of Muslims had sought shelter on the Temple Mount, and one of the Crusader leaders, Tancred, appalled by the savagery, gave these refugees his banner to signal that they were under his protection. The Crusader army, however, broke through that sacred barrier too, and offered no parlay. The Crusaders went so far as to cut open the stomachs of corpses just to get at the precious gems and coins people had swallowed trying to protect their savings. How very Christian of them.

With the streets of the holiest city on Earth drenched in blood and stinking of corpses, the Crusaders got straight to work trying to decide who was going to be the leader of the city. Like okay sure, they were supposed to return any recaptured Byzantine territory to Alexios, but lmao fuck that guy, amirite fellas? The bishops also made a big stink about how the only true King of Jerusalem is Jesus Christ and bla bla bla, so when Godfrey de Bouillon was finally elected ruler, he instead took the title “Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri” to have the plausible deniability to say oh no guys I'm totally not king yeah go Jesus woo. This compromise lasted all of one year before Godfrey got sick and died, and the nobles coaxed his brother Baldwin out his throne at Edessa in exchange for an unmistakably shiny crown in Jerusalem. So now it was Baldwin's turn to brace himself against all the warring polities on any given side of the Kingdom of Jerusalem who really wanted their shit back, which means now I have to summarize the absolute clusterfuck that was the Outremer. Uuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhh…

Okay, the extremely abridged version is that while Emperor Alexios was busy harassing the other Crusader states to the north, Baldwin was primarily occupied with keeping the Muslim states to the south at bay. The Crusaders and the Fatimids kept bashing their heads against each other around the city of Ramla until the Muslims were decisively defeated in 1105. While vizier Al-Afdal would continue to send raiding parties into the Kingdom's territory, he ultimately decided the Holy City could be taken after he went and dealt with those meddlesome Seljuks. One of those meddling Seljuks was the commander of Mosul, Mawdud, who took advantage of a succession crisis in Edessa in order to gather his forces and try to retake the territory starting in 1110. Mawdud was immensely charismatic and successful, uniting the bickering Crusaders under a common enemy only to get them all in one place to wipe them off the map. He may well have succeeded and retaken the Holy City for Islam… if the emir of Aleppo, Rizwan, hadn't sent the Nizari Assassins to stab him to death in Damascus in 1113 over his own petty disputes. Unsurprisingly, the populace of Aleppo and Damascus revolted and kicked the Assassins out for this major PR miscalculation. Baldwin was therefore free to live relatively peacefully until a re-opened battle wound killed him in 1118, at which point the throne passed to his cousin, Baldwin II, the man who had been put in charge of Edessa after Baldwin I took the throne of Jerusalem in the first place.

Ironically, the Assassins’ slaying of Mawdud is what gave Baldwin the opportunity to surround himself with new bodyguards, specifically the Templar Order, established circa 1120 to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land (by which I mean their wallets). He'd also helped get the freshly militarized Knights Hospitaller on their feet, and begged the Venetians to pull the Byzantine-shaped stick out of their ass because he'd only just barely avenged his ass-whipping from the Battle of Ager Sanguinis with a pyrrhic victory at Hab, and he could really really use some help guys. While he waited for the Venetians to get their shit together, Baldwin launched a mission to rescue Joscelin, the man he'd assigned as Count of Edessa, following the count’s capture by the Seljuks, but this just resulted in Baldwin himself getting captured and locked in the same prison by 1123. I can only imagine a scene where the Venetians finally show up and orchestrate their release in 1124, and when they open the dungeon they find Joscelin has just been staring intensely and silently at Baldwin this whole time in utter disappointment. He may have saved face at the Battle of Azaz, but he must've spent the rest of his days with the tart words “Worst. Rescue. Ever” echoing in his brain.

The last of those days was in 1131, dying of illness the same year that Joscelin was killed during a siege. Having only daughters, the throne passed to his eldest, Melisende, but since women weren't allowed to be cool back then, the actual crown was given to her husband, Fulk. Don't worry, she'd get her husband back by having what William of Tyre describes as “too familiar” a relationship with his rival, Hugh II of Jaffa. Like okay, it's possible this was just a rumor perpetuated by Fulk himself to disenfranchise his wife, but the couple still definitely hated each other, and Hugh himself revolted circa 1134. Fulk put this revolt down just in time to point his swords in the direction of a new Muslim superpower rising out of Mosul: Imad al-Din Zengi. Zengi’s influence was such a juggernaut that the Crusader states actually allied with the Muslims of Damascus in 1140 to try and slow his advance. While the Crusaders successfully kept the city out of Zengid hands, the death of King Fulk in 1143 opened the door for Zengi to conquer the County of Edessa in 1144. Melisende and her underage son were therefore left to hold down the fort against a newly unified Muslim front until the forces summoned by the Pope's call for a Second Crusade could arrive to protect what remained of the Holy Land.

Now this period was extremely awkward for several reasons. One: the Second Crusade arrived in 1147, one year after Zengi had already died and passed his goal of reunification to his son Nur ad-Din. Two: the Second Crusade decided Edessa wasn't worth liberating and instead besieged their allies in Damascus because… ah hell idk man. I'm no military gal, but even I can tell you how astronomically stupid that move is. And yeah, it didn't work, and just left the people of Damascus swaying closer to Nur ad-Din's side. Way to go, guys. Three: Baldwin III was an angsty teenager who cared more about booting his mother out of the picture than actually protecting the Holy Land, which by 1152 resulted in a civil war which gave Nur ad-Din more than enough breathing room to just keep doing what he was doing. Once he finally grew out of puberty, Baldwin reconciled with his mother and got back to work playing ping-pong against the Muslims until his death in 1163. His brother and successor, Almaric, decided he'd hedge his bets on conquering Fatimid Egypt, but shat the bed, and his failure opened the way for the Zengids to send in an army of their own in 1169. This much more successful army was led by a Kurdish commander named Shirkuh, who was vizier for all of two months before he died of quinsy and passed the position to the nephew who'd been trailing behind him the whole way: an an up-and-coming spud named Salah ad-Din, or “Saladin” as the French would call him. You may have heard of him.

Both Nur ad-Din and Baldwin III died in 1174, which meant that the king's son Baldwin IV now had to contend with a Saladin who not only controlled the beating heart of the Nile, but now also filled the power vacuum left behind in the remaining Muslim territories. To top it all off, Baldwin IV was barely hitting puberty and he'd already been ravaged by leprosy, so no one expected this kid would be able to accomplish anything. Credit where it's due, though, the Leper King actually proved himself to be a surprisingly capable military commander, delivering Saladin a crushing blow at Montgisard in 1177. While Saladin was hardly out for the count, it did force the sultan into a peace treaty which… was constantly broken by Baldwin's lap dog Raynald of Châtillon, who was, to use a scholarly term, a total piece of shit and a dirtbag pirate who indiscriminately butchered anyone he came across just for a little extra coin. Raynald's actions kept Baldwin struggling to reestablish the truce with Saladin until the Leper King finally succumbed to his illness in 1185.

Baldwin had a nephew through his sister Sibylla who succeeded him as Baldwin V, but that Baldwin didn't even make it to puberty. Now, by this point basically none of the Crusaders trusted one another, so in order to avoid hitting the self-destruct button again, they decided you know what, we'll let women be cool just this once and elect Sibylla as sole monarch of Jerusalem. Sibylla then proceeded to hit the self-destruct button anyway by elevating her husband, Guy de Lusignan, to the position of king. The infighting that followed is exactly what Saladin needed to spring his trap at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 and liberate Jerusalem herself from the Crusaders shortly thereafter. Guy was himself captured at Hattin, and Saladin honored him as his prisoner for a couple years before releasing him on the condition that Guy pinky promise to never ever take up arms against Saladin again. Saladin may have been an extremely generous and charismatic leader, but he wasn't exactly a great military strategist. This naive move allowed Guy to go hunting for a base to retake his kingdom, which by this point had been reduced to just the fortress of Tyre. Naturally, Guy strolled up to Tyre calling for aid restoring the true King of Jerusalem, but unfortunately for him, Tyre was garrisoned by some Italian punk named Conrad of Montferrat, who'd decided that actually loser, he was the true King of Jerusalem, and refused to let Guy in. A pissed off Guy stormed off to find somewhere else to crash, ultimately deciding to besiege Acre in 1189, only to find himself besieged by Saladin until King Richard the Lionheart showed up to break the tie in 1191.

Now, unfortunately for Guy, Sibylla and their daughters had all died during an epidemic that ravaged the Crusader camp at Acre, and since his claim to the throne had only been through his marriage to Sibylla, he'd basically been screwed out of ever becoming king again. Sibylla did have a sister, Isabella, who became the next Queen of Jerusalem, but she was already happily married, and what was Guy gonna do? Kidnap her, forcibly annul her marriage, and then slip in to take the crown like a total homewrecker? Of course not, that was what Conrad did! Despite being universally regarded as a dick move even by sources that liked Conrad, this scheme did win the son of a bitch the throne. Not the crown, though. It was a mere four days before his coronation in April 1192 that Conrad was stabbed to death in the street by two disguised Nizari Assassins, more likely than not orchestrated by a very exhausted King Richard who just wanted to tidy things up and go home after signing a peace treaty with Saladin. Completely dicking over his buddy Guy, Richard got his nephew Henry married off to Isabella and crowned King of Jerusalem. Don't worry, he gave Guy the freshly conquered island of Cyprus as a consolation prize, because hey Guy really needed a win. Henry, incidentally, made sure to visit the Assassins headquartered at Al-Kahf in 1194 to tell them what an awesome job they were doing. Keep up the good work, guys.

For a man who dealt so closely with political intrigue and Assassins, Henry went out like a little bitch, falling out of a window in 1197. My girl Isabella just couldn't catch a fucking break, being remarried again, this time to Guy's brother and successor, Aimery of Cyprus. Despite this, when the couple died in April 1205, it was Isabella's daughter through Conrad, Maria, who became the next monarch. Maria, only a teenager, died of complications in childbirth in 1212, and that infant daughter became Isabella II of Jerusalem under the regency of her father, John of Brienne. It's during this period that the Pope called for another crusade, this time taking King Richard’s advice and attacking the main artery of the Ayyubid Sultanate, Egypt, to force a concession. The invasion was launched in 1217, and was actually incredibly successful. They'd gotten Sultan Al-Kamil (Saladin’s nephew) to agree to some extremely generous peace terms, including the return of the city of Jerusalem. However, for reasons which are just clearly beyond the understanding of our feeble mortal minds, the diplomat representing the Crusaders at the talks, Pelagius Galvani, said… “nah”. So, following that shocked blink meme and a chorus of “uhmm… er… okay?” the Ayyubids just kinda shrugged and wiped the Crusaders out of Egypt in 1221. Fuck you, Pelagius.

If Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had shown up like he promised he would, things might’ve gone different, but he'd kept bitching about being too sick to go until the Pope finally arranged to have him hitched to Isabella in 1225. Now checking King of Jerusalem off his bucket list, Frederick initiated the Sixth Crusade in 1228, which is my favorite out of the whole bunch, because it involved almost no fighting. Both the Christians and Muslims were so bogged down by dynastic disputes that Al-Kamil basically just handed Jerusalem over to Frederick like “dude… just take it. It's your problem now”. Except it wasn't his problem really, cause he fucked right off back to Europe once that business was concluded, taking Isabella with him. Tragically, Isabella was an even younger teenager than her own mother had been, and died from complications giving birth to her son and successor, Conrad II… who would never set foot in Jerusalem. The actual kingdom was therefore left to be squabbled over between the nobles Frederick at posted there until 1243, when they called in Alice, daughter of Henry and Isabella and Conrad's closest relative who actually lived in the Holy Land, to serve as regent.

That utter clusterfuck is not the position you want to find yourselves in when the Ayyubids point a bunch of Khwarazmian Turks at you and tell them they'll be given protection from Genghis Khan if only they do the small favor of retaking Jerusalem from the Crusaders. With absolutely no finesse, the desperate Khwarazmians did as they were asked in 1244, sacking the Holy City and wrenching it out of Christian hands for the final time in human history. King Louis IX of France launched the Seventh Crusade to try and get it back, but he got his ass handed to him by the Ayyubids’ slave soldiers, the Mamluks, at the Battle of Mansurah, and went home empty-handed by 1254, the same year King Conrad died and left that cobweb-ridden throne to his son Conradin. Conradin, like his father, never set foot in the Holy Land. That kid was infinitely more preoccupied with dicking around in Italy, which ultimately got him beheaded at the age of 16 in 1268.

By this point, the regency over the Kingdom of Jerusalem had been given to Hugh III of Cyprus, the great-grandson of Alice. Yet another long and convoluted civil war had ravaged the kingdom over the exact line of succession, and in the end everyone just decided it'd be a hell of a lot easier to make Hugh king upon Conradin’s death, finally giving the restless ghost of Guy de Lusignan some slack by uniting the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus under one crown. Now that there was finally an ass physically sitting in that throne, the kingdom could finally point their sharp objects at someone other than themselves. The biggest threat on the scene this time around was the Mamluk sultan Baybars, the man who'd done the impossible and gave the Mongols a thrashing at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. Since he obviously had balls of adamantium, Baybars was pretty damn confident he had what it took to finally kick these gross French people out of his Holy Land. He captured Jaffa and Antioch in 1268, prompting the Pope to call Louis IX back in to deal with this in 1270. Louis died of dysentery before the fighting could even really begin, though, effectively nerfing the Eighth Crusade.

Following that pitiful whimper, future king of England Edward Longshanks decided to shoot his shot, but after narrowly dodging becoming one of the last historical victims of the Assassins in 1272, he decided he wasn't gonna get much out of this and fucked off back home. It didn't help that he'd also gotten sick of the unresolvable infighting among the nobles in Hugh's court, and I don't blame him. I'm sick of it too, and so was Hugh apparently, because he'd packed up his court and stormed off in a big huff back to Cyprus in 1276. When he died in 1284, the crown passed to his son John, who lasted all of one year before keeling over and passing the throne to his brother Henry. Henry was in Acre in April 1291 when the Mamluks rolled up and besieged the city, and once he saw the writing on the wall, he made his escape back to Cyprus, abandoning this last remaining territory to the Muslims. Though Henry and his successors continued to rule in Cyprus and tack “King of Jerusalem” onto their list of titles until the Venetians took over the island in 1489, for all intents and purposes, the Crusader states had finally been put out of their misery, which means I can finally go take some aspirin after having to sort through this nightmare.

Design notes, originally I wasn't going to make this sheet. I couldn't find any concise answer as to whether the Kingdom of Jerusalem had a standing army of its own or not, and my lazy ass figured I could get away with just drawing the Capetian and knightly orders sheets and just consult those if I ever depict a battle from this time period. The more I sat on it, though, the more that decision just felt kinda wrong. Like yes I drew French soldiers but these types of sheets are always more about polities or factions than ethnicity, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem was certainly its own separate thing from the French throne. Part of me just kept nagging that it would be unfair to keep referencing pieces of the state's history in other blurbs and not have one specifically dedicated to a proper summary. Eventually I started peeking at some reference images and the inspiration was enough to kick me into gear. The colors were what really hooked me. These gold accents on white or light blue backgrounds are just a lovely palette to play with. That did however get me snagged on a rabbit hole for a bit. A lot of modern artists trying to depict a standing army for Jerusalem do draw their soldiers in this striking shade of blue, but there's not actually any historical basis for this. Apparently this aesthetic ultimately derives from the 2005 Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, which dresses their actors in blue armor simply as a creative liberty to make the protagonists stand out against the other armies. Deriving inspiration from something so modern is usually something I try to avoid, but after some very pedantic internal debates, I decided that it is a very historically appropriate color scheme for Jerusalem anyway, and it's not like Ridley Scott owns the color blue. I figured if everyone else is doing it, I can get away with it too. The whole point of the design notes section is to explain myself, afterall, and the whole point of comment sections is for people to get mad at me, so feel free to have at it. I'm a big girl, I can take it.

Description
After Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. It is said that before the Prophet Muhammad, Jerusalem was the Arabs' original qibla (the geographical direction of prayer now centered on the Kaaba), which makes some sense. This city is the bedrock of the Abrahamic faiths. It was the throne of David, the pulpit of Jesus, and the point of ascension for the Prophet Muhammad. This millennia-old sacred site was wretched out of the incompetent hands of the Roman Empire by the emergent Rashidun Caliphate in 637 CE, and while this was a PR nightmare for the Byzantines, it was a massive boon for the people who'd just been trying to mind their own damned business there. The Jews were allowed to return and worship as they pleased in the city of their ancestors, allowing them to contribute their wisdom to the scholastic playground that was the Islamic Golden Age. Like the Christians, they had to pay the jizya tax, but this was affordable and allotted them legal protection from the Caliphate as fellow Peoples of the Book. There was an awkward phase when the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah got a little too high off his own fumes and infidel blood, but he was the exception, not the rule. Christian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem also often got caught in the crossfire of Seljuk infighting, but this was not by the approval of the Fatimids controlling the Holy City herself. They saw the Sunni Turks as just as much of a nuisance as the Christians did. All of that in mind, these past four hundred years were some of the most stable and prosperous times the three faiths have shared with one another in all of history.

And then the French showed up and ruined everything, like they always do.

The year is 1195, and Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos trusts literally no one because he's a Byzantine Emperor and those don't have a particularly long shelf life. Unfortunately, he's got all these Seljuk Turks that his predecessors used to throw at their rivals refusing to leave Anatolia, so he's gotta find someone willing to help him out. Swallowing his Orthodox pride, Alexios reached out to his real mortal enemy, the Pope, offering to reconcile the 1054 schism in the church if Urban II would please just send some dudes with swords to kick the Muslims out. While I'm sure Urban was creaming his pants over having the Byzantine Emperor lick his boot, Urban had to redress the proposal in order to convince a bunch of Frenchmen and Germans they should give half a rat’s ass about the dying husk of the Roman Empire over on the other side of the world. No no, he said at the Council of Clermont, we're not just giving Asia Minor back to the Romans, we're going the extra mile and retaking Jerusalem! Deus vult!

The Pope's rousing speech was so successful that it persuaded more than just the noblemen to take up the cross. A homeless guy named Peter decided that Deus had vulted him to lead an army of random peasants completely untrained for combat into the Holy Land before anyone with actual experience could even prepare to march. Since no town along the way to Byzantium had expected to feed tens of thousands of unexpected visitors, they had to turn the People's Crusade away, and that went about as well as you'd expect shooing off a bunch of starving armed peasants would go. By the time the actual knights had gotten on their feet in 1096, they found a trail of destruction and desperation leading all the way to Constantinople. The People's Crusade had reached the Holy Land ahead of everyone else, but once they came into contact with an actual enemy army with proper weapons and training, they were cut down where they stood, as literally everyone expected. Alexios sure as hell knew he wasn't going to be able to stop them, so he just kinda pointed and said “sure. Go get ‘em slugger”, and immediately turned his attention back to the actual Crusader army all while Peter got his shit kicked in.

The knights made much swifter work of the Muslim states than the People's Crusade ever could. They stood at the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, obliterating first any implications the Fatimids may have held that they shared a common enemy, and then the walls. Realizing how well-defended Jerusalem was, the knights basically shotgun blasted the fortifications with everything they had all at once until something broke and they could pour in like locusts. The carnage that ensued was an atrocity against humanity and God Himself. On the exact same soil where their Christ had commanded his acolytes drop their swords against their persecutors, the Crusaders rounded up the Holy City's citizens and committed unspeakable war crimes: mass beheadings, human bonfires, indiscriminate slaughter of women and children, the works. A group of Muslims had sought shelter on the Temple Mount, and one of the Crusader leaders, Tancred, appalled by the savagery, gave these refugees his banner to signal that they were under his protection. The Crusader army, however, broke through that sacred barrier too, and offered no parlay. The Crusaders went so far as to cut open the stomachs of corpses just to get at the precious gems and coins people had swallowed trying to protect their savings. How very Christian of them.

With the streets of the holiest city on Earth drenched in blood and stinking of corpses, the Crusaders got straight to work trying to decide who was going to be the leader of the city. Like okay sure, they were supposed to return any recaptured Byzantine territory to Alexios, but lmao fuck that guy, amirite fellas? The bishops also made a big stink about how the only true King of Jerusalem is Jesus Christ and bla bla bla, so when Godfrey de Bouillon was finally elected ruler, he instead took the title “Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri” to have the plausible deniability to say oh no guys I'm totally not king yeah go Jesus woo. This compromise lasted all of one year before Godfrey got sick and died, and the nobles coaxed his brother Baldwin out his throne at Edessa in exchange for an unmistakably shiny crown in Jerusalem. So now it was Baldwin's turn to brace himself against all the warring polities on any given side of the Kingdom of Jerusalem who really wanted their shit back, which means now I have to summarize the absolute clusterfuck that was the Outremer. Uuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhh…

Okay, the extremely abridged version is that while Emperor Alexios was busy harassing the other Crusader states to the north, Baldwin was primarily occupied with keeping the Muslim states to the south at bay. The Crusaders and the Fatimids kept bashing their heads against each other around the city of Ramla until the Muslims were decisively defeated in 1105. While vizier Al-Afdal would continue to send raiding parties into the Kingdom's territory, he ultimately decided the Holy City could be taken after he went and dealt with those meddlesome Seljuks. One of those meddling Seljuks was the commander of Mosul, Mawdud, who took advantage of a succession crisis in Edessa in order to gather his forces and try to retake the territory starting in 1110. Mawdud was immensely charismatic and successful, uniting the bickering Crusaders under a common enemy only to get them all in one place to wipe them off the map. He may well have succeeded and retaken the Holy City for Islam… if the emir of Aleppo, Rizwan, hadn't sent the Nizari Assassins to stab him to death in Damascus in 1113 over his own petty disputes. Unsurprisingly, the populace of Aleppo and Damascus revolted and kicked the Assassins out for this major PR miscalculation. Baldwin was therefore free to live relatively peacefully until a re-opened battle wound killed him in 1118, at which point the throne passed to his cousin, Baldwin II, the man who had been put in charge of Edessa after Baldwin I took the throne of Jerusalem in the first place.

Ironically, the Assassins’ slaying of Mawdud is what gave Baldwin the opportunity to surround himself with new bodyguards, specifically the Templar Order, established circa 1120 to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land (by which I mean their wallets). He'd also helped get the freshly militarized Knights Hospitaller on their feet, and begged the Venetians to pull the Byzantine-shaped stick out of their ass because he'd only just barely avenged his ass-whipping from the Battle of Ager Sanguinis with a pyrrhic victory at Hab, and he could really really use some help guys. While he waited for the Venetians to get their shit together, Baldwin launched a mission to rescue Joscelin, the man he'd assigned as Count of Edessa, following the count’s capture by the Seljuks, but this just resulted in Baldwin himself getting captured and locked in the same prison by 1123. I can only imagine a scene where the Venetians finally show up and orchestrate their release in 1124, and when they open the dungeon they find Joscelin has just been staring intensely and silently at Baldwin this whole time in utter disappointment. He may have saved face at the Battle of Azaz, but he must've spent the rest of his days with the tart words “Worst. Rescue. Ever” echoing in his brain.

The last of those days was in 1131, dying of illness the same year that Joscelin was killed during a siege. Having only daughters, the throne passed to his eldest, Melisende, but since women weren't allowed to be cool back then, the actual crown was given to her husband, Fulk. Don't worry, she'd get her husband back by having what William of Tyre describes as “too familiar” a relationship with his rival, Hugh II of Jaffa. Like okay, it's possible this was just a rumor perpetuated by Fulk himself to disenfranchise his wife, but the couple still definitely hated each other, and Hugh himself revolted circa 1134. Fulk put this revolt down just in time to point his swords in the direction of a new Muslim superpower rising out of Mosul: Imad al-Din Zengi. Zengi’s influence was such a juggernaut that the Crusader states actually allied with the Muslims of Damascus in 1140 to try and slow his advance. While the Crusaders successfully kept the city out of Zengid hands, the death of King Fulk in 1143 opened the door for Zengi to conquer the County of Edessa in 1144. Melisende and her underage son were therefore left to hold down the fort against a newly unified Muslim front until the forces summoned by the Pope's call for a Second Crusade could arrive to protect what remained of the Holy Land.

Now this period was extremely awkward for several reasons. One: the Second Crusade arrived in 1147, one year after Zengi had already died and passed his goal of reunification to his son Nur ad-Din. Two: the Second Crusade decided Edessa wasn't worth liberating and instead besieged their allies in Damascus because… ah hell idk man. I'm no military gal, but even I can tell you how astronomically stupid that move is. And yeah, it didn't work, and just left the people of Damascus swaying closer to Nur ad-Din's side. Way to go, guys. Three: Baldwin III was an angsty teenager who cared more about booting his mother out of the picture than actually protecting the Holy Land, which by 1152 resulted in a civil war which gave Nur ad-Din more than enough breathing room to just keep doing what he was doing. Once he finally grew out of puberty, Baldwin reconciled with his mother and got back to work playing ping-pong against the Muslims until his death in 1163. His brother and successor, Almaric, decided he'd hedge his bets on conquering Fatimid Egypt, but shat the bed, and his failure opened the way for the Zengids to send in an army of their own in 1169. This much more successful army was led by a Kurdish commander named Shirkuh, who was vizier for all of two months before he died of quinsy and passed the position to the nephew who'd been trailing behind him the whole way: an an up-and-coming spud named Salah ad-Din, or “Saladin” as the French would call him. You may have heard of him.

Both Nur ad-Din and Baldwin III died in 1174, which meant that the king's son Baldwin IV now had to contend with a Saladin who not only controlled the beating heart of the Nile, but now also filled the power vacuum left behind in the remaining Muslim territories. To top it all off, Baldwin IV was barely hitting puberty and he'd already been ravaged by leprosy, so no one expected this kid would be able to accomplish anything. Credit where it's due, though, the Leper King actually proved himself to be a surprisingly capable military commander, delivering Saladin a crushing blow at Montgisard in 1177. While Saladin was hardly out for the count, it did force the sultan into a peace treaty which… was constantly broken by Baldwin's lap dog Raynald of Châtillon, who was, to use a scholarly term, a total piece of shit and a dirtbag pirate who indiscriminately butchered anyone he came across just for a little extra coin. Raynald's actions kept Baldwin struggling to reestablish the truce with Saladin until the Leper King finally succumbed to his illness in 1185.

Baldwin had a nephew through his sister Sibylla who succeeded him as Baldwin V, but that Baldwin didn't even make it to puberty. Now, by this point basically none of the Crusaders trusted one another, so in order to avoid hitting the self-destruct button again, they decided you know what, we'll let women be cool just this once and elect Sibylla as sole monarch of Jerusalem. Sibylla then proceeded to hit the self-destruct button anyway by elevating her husband, Guy de Lusignan, to the position of king. The infighting that followed is exactly what Saladin needed to spring his trap at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 and liberate Jerusalem herself from the Crusaders shortly thereafter. Guy was himself captured at Hattin, and Saladin honored him as his prisoner for a couple years before releasing him on the condition that Guy pinky promise to never ever take up arms against Saladin again. Saladin may have been an extremely generous and charismatic leader, but he wasn't exactly a great military strategist. This naive move allowed Guy to go hunting for a base to retake his kingdom, which by this point had been reduced to just the fortress of Tyre. Naturally, Guy strolled up to Tyre calling for aid restoring the true King of Jerusalem, but unfortunately for him, Tyre was garrisoned by some Italian punk named Conrad of Montferrat, who'd decided that actually loser, he was the true King of Jerusalem, and refused to let Guy in. A pissed off Guy stormed off to find somewhere else to crash, ultimately deciding to besiege Acre in 1189, only to find himself besieged by Saladin until King Richard the Lionheart showed up to break the tie in 1191.

Now, unfortunately for Guy, Sibylla and their daughters had all died during an epidemic that ravaged the Crusader camp at Acre, and since his claim to the throne had only been through his marriage to Sibylla, he'd basically been screwed out of ever becoming king again. Sibylla did have a sister, Isabella, who became the next Queen of Jerusalem, but she was already happily married, and what was Guy gonna do? Kidnap her, forcibly annul her marriage, and then slip in to take the crown like a total homewrecker? Of course not, that was what Conrad did! Despite being universally regarded as a dick move even by sources that liked Conrad, this scheme did win the son of a bitch the throne. Not the crown, though. It was a mere four days before his coronation in April 1192 that Conrad was stabbed to death in the street by two disguised Nizari Assassins, more likely than not orchestrated by a very exhausted King Richard who just wanted to tidy things up and go home after signing a peace treaty with Saladin. Completely dicking over his buddy Guy, Richard got his nephew Henry married off to Isabella and crowned King of Jerusalem. Don't worry, he gave Guy the freshly conquered island of Cyprus as a consolation prize, because hey Guy really needed a win. Henry, incidentally, made sure to visit the Assassins headquartered at Al-Kahf in 1194 to tell them what an awesome job they were doing. Keep up the good work, guys.

For a man who dealt so closely with political intrigue and Assassins, Henry went out like a little bitch, falling out of a window in 1197. My girl Isabella just couldn't catch a fucking break, being remarried again, this time to Guy's brother and successor, Aimery of Cyprus. Despite this, when the couple died in April 1205, it was Isabella's daughter through Conrad, Maria, who became the next monarch. Maria, only a teenager, died of complications in childbirth in 1212, and that infant daughter became Isabella II of Jerusalem under the regency of her father, John of Brienne. It's during this period that the Pope called for another crusade, this time taking King Richard’s advice and attacking the main artery of the Ayyubid Sultanate, Egypt, to force a concession. The invasion was launched in 1217, and was actually incredibly successful. They'd gotten Sultan Al-Kamil (Saladin’s nephew) to agree to some extremely generous peace terms, including the return of the city of Jerusalem. However, for reasons which are just clearly beyond the understanding of our feeble mortal minds, the diplomat representing the Crusaders at the talks, Pelagius Galvani, said… “nah”. So, following that shocked blink meme and a chorus of “uhmm… er… okay?” the Ayyubids just kinda shrugged and wiped the Crusaders out of Egypt in 1221. Fuck you, Pelagius.

If Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had shown up like he promised he would, things might’ve gone different, but he'd kept bitching about being too sick to go until the Pope finally arranged to have him hitched to Isabella in 1225. Now checking King of Jerusalem off his bucket list, Frederick initiated the Sixth Crusade in 1228, which is my favorite out of the whole bunch, because it involved almost no fighting. Both the Christians and Muslims were so bogged down by dynastic disputes that Al-Kamil basically just handed Jerusalem over to Frederick like “dude… just take it. It's your problem now”. Except it wasn't his problem really, cause he fucked right off back to Europe once that business was concluded, taking Isabella with him. Tragically, Isabella was an even younger teenager than her own mother had been, and died from complications giving birth to her son and successor, Conrad II… who would never set foot in Jerusalem. The actual kingdom was therefore left to be squabbled over between the nobles Frederick at posted there until 1243, when they called in Alice, daughter of Henry and Isabella and Conrad's closest relative who actually lived in the Holy Land, to serve as regent.

That utter clusterfuck is not the position you want to find yourselves in when the Ayyubids point a bunch of Khwarazmian Turks at you and tell them they'll be given protection from Genghis Khan if only they do the small favor of retaking Jerusalem from the Crusaders. With absolutely no finesse, the desperate Khwarazmians did as they were asked in 1244, sacking the Holy City and wrenching it out of Christian hands for the final time in human history. King Louis IX of France launched the Seventh Crusade to try and get it back, but he got his ass handed to him by the Ayyubids’ slave soldiers, the Mamluks, at the Battle of Mansurah, and went home empty-handed by 1254, the same year King Conrad died and left that cobweb-ridden throne to his son Conradin. Conradin, like his father, never set foot in the Holy Land. That kid was infinitely more preoccupied with dicking around in Italy, which ultimately got him beheaded at the age of 16 in 1268.

By this point, the regency over the Kingdom of Jerusalem had been given to Hugh III of Cyprus, the great-grandson of Alice. Yet another long and convoluted civil war had ravaged the kingdom over the exact line of succession, and in the end everyone just decided it'd be a hell of a lot easier to make Hugh king upon Conradin’s death, finally giving the restless ghost of Guy de Lusignan some slack by uniting the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus under one crown. Now that there was finally an ass physically sitting in that throne, the kingdom could finally point their sharp objects at someone other than themselves. The biggest threat on the scene this time around was the Mamluk sultan Baybars, the man who'd done the impossible and gave the Mongols a thrashing at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. Since he obviously had balls of adamantium, Baybars was pretty damn confident he had what it took to finally kick these gross French people out of his Holy Land. He captured Jaffa and Antioch in 1268, prompting the Pope to call Louis IX back in to deal with this in 1270. Louis died of dysentery before the fighting could even really begin, though, effectively nerfing the Eighth Crusade.

Following that pitiful whimper, future king of England Edward Longshanks decided to shoot his shot, but after narrowly dodging becoming one of the last historical victims of the Assassins in 1272, he decided he wasn't gonna get much out of this and fucked off back home. It didn't help that he'd also gotten sick of the unresolvable infighting among the nobles in Hugh's court, and I don't blame him. I'm sick of it too, and so was Hugh apparently, because he'd packed up his court and stormed off in a big huff back to Cyprus in 1276. When he died in 1284, the crown passed to his son John, who lasted all of one year before keeling over and passing the throne to his brother Henry. Henry was in Acre in April 1291 when the Mamluks rolled up and besieged the city, and once he saw the writing on the wall, he made his escape back to Cyprus, abandoning this last remaining territory to the Muslims. Though Henry and his successors continued to rule in Cyprus and tack “King of Jerusalem” onto their list of titles until the Venetians took over the island in 1489, for all intents and purposes, the Crusader states had finally been put out of their misery, which means I can finally go take some aspirin after having to sort through this nightmare.

Design notes, originally I wasn't going to make this sheet. I couldn't find any concise answer as to whether the Kingdom of Jerusalem had a standing army of its own or not, and my lazy ass figured I could get away with just drawing the Capetian and knightly orders sheets and just consult those if I ever depict a battle from this time period. The more I sat on it, though, the more that decision just felt kinda wrong. Like yes I drew French soldiers but these types of sheets are always more about polities or factions than ethnicity, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem was certainly its own separate thing from the French throne. Part of me just kept nagging that it would be unfair to keep referencing pieces of the state's history in other blurbs and not have one specifically dedicated to a proper summary. Eventually I started peeking at some reference images and the inspiration was enough to kick me into gear. The colors were what really hooked me. These gold accents on white or light blue backgrounds are just a lovely palette to play with. That did however get me snagged on a rabbit hole for a bit. A lot of modern artists trying to depict a standing army for Jerusalem do draw their soldiers in this striking shade of blue, but there's not actually any historical basis for this. Apparently this aesthetic ultimately derives from the 2005 Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, which dresses their actors in blue armor simply as a creative liberty to make the protagonists stand out against the other armies. Deriving inspiration from something so modern is usually something I try to avoid, but after some very pedantic internal debates, I decided that it is a very historically appropriate color scheme for Jerusalem anyway, and it's not like Ridley Scott owns the color blue. I figured if everyone else is doing it, I can get away with it too. The whole point of the design notes section is to explain myself, afterall, and the whole point of comment sections is for people to get mad at me, so feel free to have at it. I'm a big girl, I can take it.