The Kingdom of Jerusalem, officially known as the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, was a Crusader state that was established in the Levant immediately after the First Crusade. It lasted for almost two hundred years, from the accession of Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099 until the siege of Acre in 1291. Its history is divided into two periods with a brief interruption in its existence, beginning with its collapse after the siege of Jerusalem in 1187 and its restoration after the Third Crusade in 1192.
Year 1099 (MXCIX) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar.
Year 1123 (MCXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar.
Year 1110 (MCX) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar.
Baldwin I, also known as Baldwin of Boulogne, was the first count of Edessa from 1098 to 1100, and king of Jerusalem from 1100 to his death in 1118. He was the youngest son of Eustace II, Count of Boulogne, and Ida of Lorraine and married a Norman noblewoman, Godehilde of Tosny. He received the County of Verdun in 1096, but he soon joined the crusader army of his brother Godfrey of Bouillon and became one of the most successful commanders of the First Crusade.
The Battle of Hattin took place on 4 July 1187, between the Crusader states of the Levant and the forces of the Ayyubid sultan Saladin. It is also known as the Battle of the Horns of Hattin, due to the shape of the nearby extinct volcano of that name.
Raymond III was count of Tripoli from 1152 to 1187. He was a minor when Nizari Assassins murdered his father, Raymond II of Tripoli. Baldwin III of Jerusalem, who was staying in Tripoli, made Raymond's mother, Hodierna of Jerusalem, regent. Raymond spent the following years at the royal court in Jerusalem. He participated in a series of military campaigns against Nur ad-Din, the Zengid ruler of Damascus, after he reached the age of majority in 1155. Raymond hired pirates in 1161 to pillage the Byzantine coastline and islands to take vengeance on Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, who had refused to marry his sister Melisende. Captured in the Battle of Harim by Nur ad-Din's troops on 10 August 1164, he was imprisoned in Aleppo for almost ten years. During his captivity, Amalric I of Jerusalem administered the county of Tripoli on his behalf.
The siege of Acre was the first significant counterattack by Guy of Jerusalem against Saladin, leader of the Muslims in Syria and Egypt. This pivotal siege formed part of what later became known as the Third Crusade. The siege lasted from August 1189 until July 1191, in which time the city's coastal position meant the attacking Latin force were unable to fully invest the city and Saladin was unable to fully relieve it with both sides receiving supplies and resources by sea. Finally, it was a key victory for the Crusaders and a serious setback for Saladin's ambition to destroy the Crusader states.
Sigurd Magnusson, also known as Sigurd the Crusader, was King of Norway from 1103 to 1130. His rule, together with his half-brother Øystein, has been regarded by historians as a golden age for the medieval Kingdom of Norway. He is otherwise famous for leading the Norwegian Crusade (1107–1110), earning the eponym "the Crusader", and was the first European king to personally participate in a crusade.
The siege of Jerusalem was waged by European forces of the First Crusade, resulting in the capture of the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Muslim Fatimid Caliphate, and laying the foundation for the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted almost two centuries. The capture of Jerusalem was the final major battle of the first of the Crusades to occupy the Holy Land begun in 1095. A number of eyewitness accounts of the siege were recorded, the most quoted being that from the anonymous Gesta Francorum.
The siege of Jerusalem lasted from 20 September to 2 October 1187, when Balian of Ibelin surrendered the city to Saladin. Earlier that summer, Saladin had defeated the kingdom's army and conquered several cities. Balian was charged with organizing a defense. The city was full of refugees but had few soldiers. Despite this fact the defenders managed to repulse several attempts by Saladin's army to take the city by storm. Balian bargained with Saladin to buy safe passage for many, and the city was peacefully surrendered with limited bloodshed. Though Jerusalem fell, it was not the end of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, as the capital shifted first to Tyre and later to Acre after the Third Crusade. Latin Christians responded in 1189 by launching the Third Crusade led by Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus, and Frederick Barbarossa separately. In Jerusalem, Saladin restored Muslim holy sites and generally showed tolerance towards Christians; he allowed Orthodox and Eastern Christian pilgrims to visit the holy sites freely—though Frankish pilgrims were required to pay a fee for entry. The control of Christian affairs in the city was handed over to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
The siege of Ascalon took place in 1153, resulting in the capture of that Egyptian fortress by the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The Complete History, is a classic Islamic history book written by Ali ibn al-Athir. Composed in ca. 1231AD/628AH, it is one of the most important Islamic historical works. Ibn al-Athir was a contemporary and member of the retinue of Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt who captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders and massively reduced European holdings in the Levant, leaving the Principality of Antioch and County of Tripoli much reduced and only a few cities on the coast to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Christian Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these military expeditions are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to conquer Jerusalem and its surrounding area from Muslim rule. Beginning with the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of military campaigns were organised, providing a focal point of European history for centuries. Crusading declined rapidly after the 15th century.
The Norwegian Crusade, led by Norwegian King Sigurd I, was a crusade or a pilgrimage that lasted from 1107 to 1111, in the aftermath of the First Crusade. The Norwegian Crusade marks the first time a European king personally went to the Holy Land.
The siege of Tyre took place from 12 November 1187 to 1 January 1188. An army commanded by Saladin made an amphibious assault on the city, defended by Conrad of Montferrat. After two months of continuous struggle, Saladin dismissed his army and retreated to Acre.
The navy of the Fatimid Caliphate was one of the most developed early Muslim navies and a major military force in the central and eastern Mediterranean in the 10th–12th centuries. As with the dynasty it served, its history can be distinguished into two phases. The first period, from c. 909 to 969, when the Fatimids were based in Ifriqiya, and the second period, lasting until the end of the dynasty in 1171, when the Fatimids were based in Egypt. During the first period, the navy was employed mainly in the constant warfare with the Byzantine Empire in Sicily and southern Italy, where the Fatimids enjoyed mixed success, as well as in the initially unsuccessful attempts to conquer Egypt from the Abbasids and the brief clashes with the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba.
The timeline of the Kingdom of Jerusalem presents important events in the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem—a Crusader state in modern day Israel and Jordan—in chronological order. The kingdom was established after the First Crusade in 1099. Its first ruler Godfrey of Bouillon did not take the title of king and swore fealty to the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Daimbert. Godfrey's brother and successor Baldwin I was crowned the first king of Jerusalem without doing homage to the patriarch in 1100. By 1153, Baldwin I and his successors captured all towns on the Palestinian coast with the support of Pisan, Genoese and Venetian fleets and also took control of the caravan routes between Egypt and Syria. The kings regularly administered other crusader states—the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch—on behalf of their absent or underage rulers.
The siege of Acre took place in May 1104. It was of great importance for the consolidation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been founded only a few years earlier. With the help of a Genoese fleet, King Baldwin I forced the surrender of the important port city after a siege that lasted only twenty days. Although all defenders and residents wishing to leave the city had been assured by the king that they would be free to leave, taking their chattels with them, many of them had been massacred by the Genoese as they left the city. Moreover, the attackers had also sacked the city itself.
The siege of Beirut was an event in the aftermath of the First Crusade. The coastal city of Beirut was captured from the Fatimids by the forces of Baldwin I of Jerusalem on 13 May 1110, with the assistance of Bertrand of Toulouse and a Genoese fleet.
Fatimid Caliphate 
