Godfrey of Bouillon

Godfrey of Bouillon, a nobleman from the borderlands between France and the Holy Roman Empire, was one of the leaders of the First Crusade and the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem after its capture in 1099. He governed the new state for only a year, refusing the title of king, but later legend turned him into the model Christian knight.

Godfrey was born around 1060, probably at Boulogne, the second son of Count Eustace II of Boulogne and Ida of Lorraine. His childless maternal uncle, Duke Godfrey the Hunchback of Lower Lorraine, named him heir, but when the uncle was murdered in 1076 the German king Henry IV kept the duchy and gave Godfrey only Bouillon and the march of Antwerp. For the next decade Godfrey defended his lands against rival claimants, among them Matilda of Tuscany and Count Albert III of Namur. He stayed loyal to Henry during the emperor's quarrel with Pope Gregory VII, fighting for him in Germany and Italy, and was rewarded with the duchy of Lower Lorraine in 1087.

After Pope Urban II called for a crusade in 1095 to aid the Byzantine Empire against the Seljuks and to win back Jerusalem, Godfrey sold or pledged most of his estates to raise an army. With his brothers Eustace and Baldwin he left in August 1096 at the head of a force from Lorraine, said to number 40,000, and reached Constantinople in November. There he took a modified oath to the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, promising to return some former Byzantine lands.

In 1097 the crusaders besieged Nicaea, which surrendered to the Byzantines rather than to them, and at Dorylaeum Godfrey helped relieve the vanguard under attack from Kilij Arslan's Turks. He then took part in the long siege of Antioch, from October 1097 to June 1098, during which the army nearly starved. Afterwards Bohemond kept Antioch and Baldwin stayed at Edessa, while Godfrey joined Raymond of Toulouse in the march south.

The crusaders reached Jerusalem, by then held by the Fatimids, in June 1099. In the decisive assault of 14–15 July, Godfrey and his knights were among the first over the walls. The capture was followed by the killing of thousands of the city's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. On 22 July, after Raymond declined to rule, Godfrey accepted the leadership but took the title Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre rather than king. Chroniclers disagree about how he styled himself.

In August 1099 Godfrey defeated a Fatimid army at Ascalon, ending the crusade, though rivalry with Raymond left Ascalon itself in Muslim hands. In 1100 he made Acre, Jaffa, Arsuf, Caesarea and Ascalon pay him tribute, while quarrelling with the new patriarch, Dagobert of Pisa. According to Christian chroniclers he fell ill at Caesarea and died in Jerusalem on 18 July 1100, probably of a disease such as typhoid; some Muslim sources say an arrow killed him at Acre. He never married, and his brother Baldwin became the first crowned king of Jerusalem.

Later writers portrayed Godfrey as the crusade's supreme commander and the lawgiver of Jerusalem, neither of which he was. By the 14th century he was counted among the Nine Worthies, and he became the hero of the epic poem Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso. An equestrian statue of him, unveiled in 1848, stands in Brussels, in today's Belgium.

Our 1100 map shows the Levant shortly after the First Crusade, with the new crusader states carved out of Fatimid and Seljuk territory.