Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/365

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 343 supported by the discord of the Turks and Saracens ; and both the Fatimite caliphs and the sultans of Damascus Avere tempted to sacrifice the cause of their religion to the meaner considera- tions of private and present advantage. But the powers of Egypt, Syria, and Arabia were now united by an hero, whom nature and fortune had armed against the Christians. All with- out now bore the most threatening aspect ; and all was feeble and hollow in the internal state of Jerusalem.^^ After the two first Baldwins, the brother and cousin of Godfrey of Bouillon, [Baldwin i. the sceptre devolved by female succession to Melisenda, daughter Baldwin n. ' 1 J n»AD 1118-311 of the second Baldwin, and her husband Fulk, Count of Anjou, [Fuik, usi-is] the father, by a former marriage, of our English Plantagenets. Their two sons, Baldwin the Third and Amaury, waged a strenu- t^awwin m. ous and not unsuccessfid war against the infidels ; but the son ^^^=' of Amauiy, Baldwin the Fourth, was deprived by the leprosy, a ^^^^ ^■ gift of the crusades, of the faculties both of mind and body. His ]^|'^^° v- sister, Sybilla, the mother of Baldwin the Fifth, was his natural heiress. After the suspicious death of her child, she crowned her second husband, Guy of Lusignan, a prince of a handsome [Guy, U86-92] person, but of such base renown that his brother Jeffrey was heard to exclaim, " Since they have made liim a king, surely they would have made me a god ! " The choice was generally blamed ; and the most powerful vassal, Raymond, count of Tri- poli, who had been excluded from the succession and regency, entertained an implacable hatred against the king, and exposed his honour and conscience to the temptations of the sultan. Such ^ [Some instructive observations have been made on the degeneracy of the race of the western settlers in Palestine, as a cause of the decline of the kingdom, by Bishop Stubbs (Itin. Regis. Ricardi, Introd. p. xcv. sqq.). " There were eleven kings of Jerusalem in the twelfth century ; under the first four, who were all of European birth, the state was acquired and strengthened ; under the second four, who were born in Palestine, the effects of the climate and the infection of Oriental habits were sadly apparent ; of these four three were minors at the time of their accession, and one was a leper. The noble families which were not recruited, as the royal family was, with fresh members from Europe, fell more early into weak- ness and corruption. . . . The moral degradation of the Franks need not have entailed destruction from enemies not less degraded ; and their inferiority in num- bers would have been more than compensated by the successions of pilgrims. . . . But the shortness and precariousness of life was an evil without remedy and in its effects irreparable. Of these the most noticeable was perhaps one which would have arisen under any system, the difficulty of carrying on a fixed policy whilst the administrators were perpetually changing ; but scarcely second to this was the influence in successions which was thrown into the hands of women. The European women were less exposed than the men to the injurious climate or to the fatigues of military service ; and many of them having been born in Palestine were in a measure acclimatized. The feudal rights and burdens of heiress-ship, marriage, and dower, were strictly observed ; consequently most of the heiresses lived to have two or three husbands and two or three families."]