de Clari, La Prise de Constantinople (in Hopf’s Chroniques gréco-romaines); Ernoul, Chronique (ed. Mas Latrie, Paris, 1871); Nicetas (ed. Bonn, 1835); George Acropolites, vol. i. (ed. Heisenberg, Leipzig, 1903); Documents in Tafel and Thomas, Urkunden zur älteren Handels- und Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig (Vienna, 1856).
Modern Works.—Ducange, Histoire de l'empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs français (Paris, 1657); Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. vi. (ed. Bury, 1898); G. Finlay, History of Greece, vol. iv. (Oxford, 1877); Pears, The Fall of Constantinople (London, 1885); Hopf, “Griechische Geschichte,” in Ersch and Gruber’s Encyklopädie, vol. lxxxv. (Leipzig, 1870); Gerland, Geschichte des lateinischen Kaiserreiches von Konstantinopel, part i. (Homburg v. d. Höhe, 1905). (J. B. B.)
BALDWIN II. (1217–1273), emperor of Romania, was a younger son of Yolande, sister of Baldwin I. Her husband, Peter of Courtenay, was third emperor of Romania, and had been followed by his son Robert, on whose death in 1228 the succession passed to Baldwin, a boy of eleven years old. The barons chose John of Brienne (titular king of Jerusalem) as emperor-regent for life; Baldwin was to rule the Asiatic possessions of the empire when he reached the age of twenty, was to marry John’s daughter Mary, and on John’s death to enjoy the full imperial sovereignty. The marriage contract was carried out in 1234. Since the death of the emperor Henry in 1216, the Latin empire had declined and the Greek power advanced; and the hopes that John of Brienne might restore it were disappointed. He died in 1237. The realm which Baldwin governed was little more than Constantinople. His financial situation was desperate, and his life was chiefly occupied in begging at European courts. He went to the West in 1236, visited Rome, France and Flanders, trying to raise money and men to recover the lost territory of his realm. His efforts met with success, and in 1240 he returned to Constantinople (through Germany and Hungary) at the head of a considerable army. Circumstances hindered him from accomplishing anything with this help, and in 1245 he travelled again to the West, first to Italy and then to France, where he spent two years. The empress Maria and Philip of Toucy governed during his absence. He was happy to be able to get money from King Louis IX. in exchange for relics. In 1249 he was with King Louis at Damietta. The extremity of his financial straits reduced him soon afterwards to handing over his only son Philip to merchants as a pledge for loans of money. Louis IX. redeemed the hostage. The rest of his inglorious reign was spent by Baldwin in mendicant tours in western Europe. In 1261 Constantinople was captured by Michael Palaeologus, and Baldwin’s rule came to an end. He escaped in a Venetian galley to Negropont, and then proceeded to Athens, thence to Apulia, finally to France. As titular emperor, his rôle was still the same, to beg help from the western powers. In 1267 he went to Italy; his hopes were centred in Charles of Anjou. Charles seriously entertained the idea of conquering Constantinople, though various complications hindered him from realizing it. He made a definite treaty with Baldwin to this intent (May 1267). During the next year Baldwin and his son Philip lived on pensions from Charles. In October 1273 Philip married Beatrice, daughter of Charles, at Foggia. A few days later Baldwin died.
See authorities for Baldwin I. above; also Norden, Das Papsttum und Byzanz (Berlin 1903). (J. B. B.)
BALDWIN I., prince of Edessa (1098–1100), and first king of Jerusalem (1100–1118), was the brother of Godfrey of Bouillon (q.v.). He was originally a clerk in orders, and held several prebends; but in 1096 he joined the first crusade, and accompanied his brother Godfrey as far as Heraclea in Asia Minor. When Tancred left the main body of the crusaders at Heraclea, and marched into Cilicia, Baldwin followed, partly in jealousy, partly from the same political motives which animated Tancred. He wrested Tarsus from Tancred’s grip (September 1097), and left there a garrison of his own. After rejoining the main army at Marash, he received an invitation from an Armenian named Pakrad, and moved eastwards towards the Euphrates, where he occupied Tell-bashir. Another invitation followed from Thoros of Edessa; and to Edessa Baldwin came, first as protector, and then, when Thoros was assassinated, as his successor (March 1098). For two years he ruled in Edessa (1098–1100), marrying an Armenian wife, and acting generally as the intermediary between the crusaders and the Armenians. During these two years he was successful in maintaining his ground, both against the Mahommedan powers by which he was surrounded, and from which he won Samosata and Seruj (Sarorgia), and against a conspiracy of his own subjects in 1098. At the end of 1099 he visited Jerusalem along with Bohemund I.; but he returned to Edessa in January 1100. On the death of Godfrey he was summoned by a party in Jerusalem to succeed to his brother. A lay reaction against the theocratic pretensions of Dagobert, who was counting on Norman support, was responsible for the summons; and in the strength of that reaction Baldwin was able to become the first king of Jerusalem. He was crowned on Christmas Day, 1100, by the patriarch himself; but the struggle of church and state was not yet over, and in the spring of 1101 Baldwin had Dagobert suspended by a papal legate, while later in the year the two disagreed on the question of the contribution to be made by the patriarch towards the defence of the Holy Land. The struggle ended in the deposition of Dagobert and the triumph of Baldwin (1102).
As Baldwin had secured the supremacy of the lay power in Jerusalem, so he extended into a compact kingdom the poor and straggling territories to which he had succeeded. This he did by an alliance with the Italian trading towns, especially Genoa, which supplied in return for the concession of a quarter in the conquered towns, the instruments and the skill for a war of sieges, in which the coast towns of Palestine were successively reduced. Arsuf and Caesarea were captured in 1101; Acre in 1104; Beirut and Sidon in 1110 (the latter with the aid of the Venetians and Norwegians). Meanwhile Baldwin repelled in successive years the attacks of the Egyptians (1102, 1103, 1105), and in the latter years of his reign (1115–1118) he even pushed southward at the expense of Egypt, penetrating as far as the Red Sea, and planting an outpost at Monreal. In the north he had to compose the dissensions of the Christian princes in Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa (1109–1110), and to help them to maintain their ground against the Mahommedan princes of N.E. Syria, especially Maudud and Aksunk-ur, amirs of Mosul. In this way Baldwin was able to make himself into practical suzerain of the three Christian principalities of the north, though the suzerainty was, and always continued to be, somewhat nominal. In 1118 he died, after an expedition to Egypt, during which he captured Farama, and, as old Fuller says, “caught many fish, and his death in eating them.”
Baldwin was one of the “adventurer princes” of the first crusade, and as such he stands alongside of Bohemund, Tancred and Raymund. On the whole he was the most successful of his class. By his defence of the lay power against a nascent theocracy, and by his alliance with the Italian towns, he was the real founder of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Events worked for him: he might never have come to the throne, unless Bohemund had fallen into the hands of Danishmend; and the dissensions among the Mahommedans alone made possible the subsequent consolidation of his kingdom. But he had virtù as well as fortuna; and on his tombstone it was written that he was “a second Judas Maccabaeus, whom Kedar and Egypt, Dan and Damascus dreaded.” As king, he still retained something of the clerk in the habit of his dress; but he was at the same time a warrior so impetuous, as to be sometimes foolhardy, and his policy was on the whole anti-clerical. He may be accused of greed: his life was not chaste; and the two defects met in his rejection of his Armenian wife and his marriage to the rich Sicilian widow Adelaide (1113). But “on the holiest soil of history, he gave his people a fatherland”; and Fulcher of Chartres, his chaplain, who paints at the beginning of Baldwin’s reign the terrors of the lonely band of Christians in the midst of their foes, can celebrate at the end the formation of a new nation in the East (qui fuimus occidentales, nunc facti sumus orientales)—an achievement which, so far as it was the work of any one man, was the work of Baldwin I.
