Jerusalem

Strengths

Important ports – Tyre and Acre, crucial trading posts on silk road

Lots of produce from Damascus, Baghdad, China

Access to the Red Sea

Weaknesses

Close to Cairo and Fatimids in South

Largely coastal so prone to raiding by Fatimid navy

Fatimids keep Ascalon until 1153

Naval base within Jerusalem

No natural boundary to the East

No natural boundary to the South

Dead sea and sea of Galilee

Perfect territory for Muslim way of fighting – horse archers for broad open spaces

Primacy

Powerful patriarch approved by Pascal II

Possessed a fragment of the true cross and relics

Key sites of Pilgrimage – money and power

Larger territory than others

Crowned king by the Patriarch Daimbert, papally approved

Migration into Outremer

Franks always in the minority

Many early settlers on main crusade

Numbers uncertain throughout

Most from France, but also significant Italian settlements, 1/3 of Tyre a Venetian settlement

In rural areas, Franks tended to live alongside Orthodox Christians, cities had more diversity, Acre, Tripoli, Antioch

Key ports

Acre – silk road

Tyre – silk road

Jaffa – trade and defence

Ascalon owned by Fatimids until 1153

Aqaba – Red sea, India, Haj

Threatened by

Damascus - east

Cairo - land and naval, south