were probably only 300 knights and some 1,200 serjeants, and the legislation of the kingdom (assises) tried to remedy this by allowing women and any other descendants to inherit land (and thus provide the military service due on it); by forbidding knights who already held one fief to acquire another and by allowing those who had moved in to cultivate the lands of those who had returned to Europe to keep the land if the former owner had not returned within a year and a day. The Holy Land also saw the development of a new kind of knighthood: the brethren of the Military Orders. Whilst the origin of the Knights of St John the Baptist (the Hospitallers) can probably be traced back to those who had taken care of the pilgrims visiting Jerusalem before the crusade, and the Hospitallers of St Lazarus concerned themselves with the care of lepers, the Templars and the later orders, such as the Teutonic Knights and the Knights of Our Lady of Montjoie were fighting brotherhoods, subject to monastic vows and discipline, but devoted to the active defence of the Holy Land. Churchmen as influential as St Bernard saw nothing incongruous in monks taking up arms; it was as 'soldiers of Christ' that they fought. The Military Orders garrisoned the great castles of the Holy Land and their experience of eastern warfare made them an indispensable, if sometimes self-willed, part of the kingdom's defences.

Many of the difficulties of maintaining Latin power in Outremer stemmed from the fact that few Franks lived in the countryside. Their settlement was almost entirely urban--the castle garrisons being one of the few exceptions. To maintain their power entailed continual campaigning, more and more difficult after 1144 when the city of Edessa fell to Arab forces and the Muslim armies united under the great generals, Nur alDin, Zangi, and Saladin. The kingdom had few ships of its own. It relied on the sea power provided by the Italian communes first to conquer the coastal cities, then to protect trade and the pilgrim traffic from the powerful Egyptian fleet and, as we shall see, had to grant privileges in return. Whilst their naval assistance was, on many occasions indispensable, their profitable trade with Muslim powers meant that there was

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