Revised Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani (RRR) document number 356 details how Cecilia, Countess of Tripoli, relinquished her garden and fields to Galterio of Margat in 1137. This transaction, written in Latin and executed in Tripoli, is quite short – only three lines.[1] Cecilia (1097-1145), was the daughter of King Philip I of Francia (c. 1052-1108) and Bertrade de Montfort (c. 1070-1117). She was married to Tancred, Prince of Galilee (c. 1075-1112) in 1106.[2] On his deathbed, Tancred then betrothed her to Pons, Count of Tripoli, who ruled the county from 1112-1137.[3]
This document was included in Inventaire de pièces de Terre Sainte de l’Ordre de l’Hopital published in 1895 by Joseph-Marie Delaville Le Roulx.[4] According to Delaville Le Roulx, this document was originally maintained by the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, and as such, its transmission to the nineteenth century follows the story of the Hospitallers.[5] When the Kingdom of Jerusalem fell in 1291, the Hospitallers first transferred to Cyprus, then to Rhodes in 1310, and finally to Malta in 1530. In the early eighteenth century, one of the Order’s archivists, Jean Raybaud, put together a listing of three hundred seventy-eight charters which had originally come from the Holy Land called Inventaire des chartes de Syrie, which was held in the archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille.[6] It is unclear how these charters made their way to Marseille (as opposed to directly to Malta) or for how long they were there. The Order’s Grand Priory of Saint-Gilles was founded in the early twelfth century in Arles, which is about ninety kilometers northwest of Marseille. It is this priory in which Jean Raybaud was the archivist.[7] Marseille, situated on the coast, was a very significant port and waystation for any travel throughout the Mediterranean region. Thus, it would be easy to transport documents to and from Marseille. Unfortunately, it is unclear if the original of this transaction is extant today. The recording of this property highlights the activities of women in the Latin East, the significant relationship between the secular lords and the military orders, and the activities of those who belonged to the Hospitallers. It concretely demonstrates the ability of women to hold land in Tripoli as well as the exercise of agency by a countess in the twelfth century. After the death of her husband, she relinquished possession of her garden and a field to her chamberlain.[8] The wording of the document shows that the property was owned by Cecilia – not the count of Tripoli. The intended use of the property also sheds light into the relationship between the ruling house of Tripoli and the Hospitallers: “in quo milites usu lancearum exercentur.” The present tense of “exercentur” indicates that the soldiers were already using the property for this purpose thus demonstrating that the Hospitallers’ close relationship with the lords of Tripoli. We can also see from this document how the soldiers trained and their equipment. Clearly by giving the property, she believed that the garden and field were better served for the training of the military order. [1] Reinhold Röhricht, Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani (MXCVII-MCCXCI) Additamentum, vol. 2, 2 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), 13. Translation mine: Caecilia, vidua Pontii, comitis Tripolitani, et Raymundus II filius camerario G(alterio) de Margato hortum et campum, in quo milites usu lancearum exercentur, concedit. Cecilia, widow of Pons, count of Tripoli, and Raymond II, (her) son, relinquishes a garden and field, in which soldiers are trained in the use of lances, to Galterio of Margat. Latin was widely used as the language to record property transactions in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, there is no indication of witnesses or of the scribe who wrote this particular transaction. However, scribes from this period and location were usually clerics, who were trained in classical Latin. [2] Kevin James Lewis, The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century: Sons of Saint-Gilles (New York: Routledge, 2017), 82. Cecilia was quite connected in both Western Europe and the Latin East. As she was of Capetian royalty, she was the half-sister of King Louis VI and Constance, who was married to Bohemond I, Prince of Antioch. She was also the half-sister of King Fulk of Jerusalem and former Count of Anjou, through their mother. [3] William of Tyre and R. B. C. Huygens, Chronicon, 2 vols., Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 63-63A (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1986), vol. 1 p. 522. [4] Joseph-Marie Delaville Le Roulx, Inventaire de pièces de Terre Sainte de l’ordre de l’Hopital (Paris: Leroux, 1895), 13, no. 23. [5] The Hospitallers, as they were commonly called, started as a hospice caring for pilgrims in the Holy Land prior to the First Crusade in 1095 and eventually became a military order with a significant presence in the Latin East and Western Europe. For more on the Hospitallers refer to Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Knights Hopsitaller in the Levant, c. 1070-1309 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Additionally, the county of Tripoli increasingly relied on the Hospitallers to help defend its territory. In the 1140s, Raymond II (son of Cecilia) granted a significant amount of land to the order, including the fortress we know today as the Crac des Chevaliers. See Lewis, The Counts of Tripoli, 143-147. Given this relationship between the county of Tripoli and the Hospitallers, it would be reasonable that the Order maintained many of the documents relating to the county. [6] I was not able to find a digitized copy of this inventory in my search through the archives’ online platform (https://www.archives13.fr/). It is unclear whether this is still extant at this site or if it too has been lost since Delaville Le Roulx saw it in the late nineteenth century. [7] Delaville Le Roulx, Inventaire de pièces de Terre Sainte, 1-8. [8] This probably means that Galterio was someone close to her, in her service. Based on the description “de Margato,” he may have been from Margat (Marqab), which was situated in the southern edge of the Principality of Antioch, about 90 kilometers north of the city of Tripoli. Interestingly, the castle at Margat was captured by Tancred, Cecilia’s first husband, sometime after their marriage. Perhaps Galterio was in service to Cecilia since her time at Antioch. Margat castle was controlled by the Mazoirs, a baronial family, by the 1140s. The family then sold it to the Hospitallers in 1186. See Hugh Kennedy, Crusader Castles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) for more information on Margat castle. Written by Carmeliz Ramas-Fisk, MA student Medieval Studes, Fordham University
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The source of RRR #1610 is the eleventh volume in the Die Register series, an updated critical edition of the registers of Pope Innocent III.[1] The editors intended for the series to supplant the previous edition, Patrologia Latin by Jacques-Paul Migne, who used the edition by Étienne Baluze as a source.[2] Volume 11 contains the transcribed registers of the eleventh year of Pope Innocent III’s pontificate (1198-1216) and includes 271 letters from February 1208 through February 1209.[3] The papal chancery copied about 10-20 percent of letters that they sent in the name of Pope Innocent III, as well as some letters received, in manuscript volumes that now form Innocent’s Regesta in the Vatican Archives.[4] Innocent’s Regesta are the first papal registers to survive in near completeness, other than those of Pope Gregory VII (1073-85).[5]
Written on January 10, 1209 and sent to Acre in the pope’s name, this letter approves several requests of the Prior of St. Thomas the Martyr of Acre and St. George de Xisto (Sisto) and includes papal privileges.[6] The letter involves this prior, Pope Innocent III, and Pope Alexander III. The Order of St. Thomas of Acre was a charitable foundation that would join the Teutonic Order in the 1220s.[7] As a papal letter addressed to a prior, the document is written in Latin, and it begins by confirming the requests of the priory and guaranteeing papal protection over the Order.[8] The letter then specifies the right of the priory to possess the three churches of St. Mary, St. Peter and St. Nicholas de Campo Anglorum and the hospital of St. Thomas in Acre.[9] Finally, the letter reaffirms the privilege granted by Innocent’s predecessor, Pope Alexander III, to the Order to use the ring, pastoral staff and mitre at feasts. In return, the priory would pay the Holy See two besants per year.[10] The letter also implicitly involves Prior Simon of St. George de Sisto, who may have served in the Orthodox Church in Acre. Pope Alexander III had beforehand given the prior Simon of the otherwise opaque church St. George de Sisto the pontificals for the observance of mass.[11] At some point before 1209, the Order of St. Thomas in Acre had incorporated the older foundation of St. George de Sisto as a subsidiary, as shown in a later papal letter from October 1212.[12] In this letter, Pope Innocent III responded to the bishop of Acre, who had challenged the right of the prior of St. Thomas of Acre to use the pontificals of St. George de Sisto.[13] This 1212 letter confirms St. George’s subordinacy to St. Thomas of Acre and their shared administration by the same prior, raising the question of why Pope Alexander had given Prior Simon the privilege of using these pontificals.[14] Denys Pringle has suggested as an answer that St. George’s started as an Orthodox house, “and before 1187 its prior had been acting effectively as bishop to the Orthodox community in the city.”[15] If so, the prior Simon who the letter implicitly references held an important position in the Orthodox community of late twelfth-century Acre. The letter is further relevant to the history of the Latin East because it provides context for the contested origins of the Order of St. Thomas of Acre. Contemporary chroniclers such as Ralph of Diceto, Roger of Wendover, and Matthew Paris asserted that the Order began during the Third Crusade.[16] Tradition holds that Richard himself established the Order, though the true identity of the founder remains disputed.[17] While some “more recent” scholars have attempted to trace the roots of the Order to an earlier period,[18] the 1209 letter’s allusion to the absorption of the older foundation of St. George de Sisto provides the only connection between the Order and any time prior to the Third Crusade.[19] Thus, it seems likely that the Order indeed originated during the siege of Acre in a chapel and cemetery erected outside the city walls and relocated inside the city after it fell to the Latins in 1191.[20] Amidst the chaos, the foundation appears to have obtained several abandoned churches and other properties in Acre.[21] The letter written on January 10, 1209 in the pope’s name was intended to confirm the right of the Order to use these properties.[22] The document therefore corroborates that the Order of St. Thomas of Acre originated during the Third Crusade. Finally, the letter shows how minor religious institutions sought to establish themselves in the Levant and illustrates the reinforced ties between the papacy and the Latin East after the Third Crusade. The Order of St. Thomas of Acre provides an example of a minor religious foundation that focused on charitable works such as helping the poor, burying the dead, and ransoming captives.[23] While funding commonly posed an issue for new religious establishments, those in the Holy Land confronted this obstacle on a magnified scale; they could hope for limited patronage from the comparatively small Frankish society in the Latin East, but also remained relatively unknown in the West.[24] Other than a few potential donations from visitors who witnessed its charitable works in Acre, the Order could only obtain funding by dispatching representatives to the West, as it did in 1207.[25] The subsequent papal confirmation of the Order’s property in Acre demonstrates how minor religious institutions in the Latin East could try to establish themselves through patronage from the West. Funding issues such as these would ultimately constitute a reason for the Order turning into a military establishment.[26] In addition, Pope Innocent III’s attention to the affairs of the Order of St. Thomas of Acre is consistent with the amplified papal focus on the Latin Church in the Levant in the wake of the Third Crusade; in fact, Pope Innocent III engaged with religious matters in the East more than any of his predecessors .[27] The letter therefore enriches our understanding of minor religious institutions in the Latin East and the close papal focus on the Holy Land. Written by Jaclyn Mulé [1] Die Register Innocenz’ III.,11. Band, vol. 11, ed. by Othmar Hageneder and Andrea Sommerlechner with Christoph Egger, Rainer Murauer, Reinhard Seliger and Herwig Weigl (Vienna: Publishing House of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2010), 337-8. As cited in Die Register Innocenz’ III, the original source can be found in the Vatican Archives: The Vatican, Regesta 7A, f. 84r–84v (Nr. 209). [2] John W. Baldwin, “Review of Die Register Innocenz' III. Pontifikatsjahr, 1207/1208: Texte und Indices,” The Catholic Historical Review 96, no. 1 (2010): 110. [3] Damian J. Smith, “Die Register Innocenz’ III. 11 Band. 11. Pontifikatsjahr 1208/1209: Texte Und Indices,” The Catholic Historical Review 98, no. 3 (July 1, 2012): 547. [4] Baldwin, “Review of Die Register,” 110; Smith, “Die Register,” 547-8. [5] Smith, “Die Register,” 547-8. [6] Die Register Innocenz’ III, 337-8. [7] A. J. Forey, “The Military Order of St Thomas of Acre,” The English Historical Review 92, no. 364 (1977): 481. [8] Die Register Innocenz’ III, 337-8. [9] Die Register Innocenz’ III, 338. [10] Die Register Innocenz’ III, 337-8. [11] Die Register Innocenz’ III, 338. [12] Forey, “St Thomas of Acre,” 486; Pringle, “The Order of St. Thomas,” 77. [13] Denys Pringle, “The Order of St. Thomas of Canterbury in Acre,” in The Military Orders, vol. 5, ed. Peter W. Edbury (Abingdon: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group, 2016), 77. [14] Pringle, “The Order of St. Thomas,” 77-8. [15] Pringle, “The Order of St. Thomas,” 78. [16] Pringle, “The Order of St. Thomas,” 75. [17] Forey, “St Thomas of Acre,” 482. [18] Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ed. William Stubbs (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1864), p. cxii; Eric St. J. Brooks, “Irish Possessions of St. Thomas of Acre,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 58 (1956): 21; Gwynn, Aubrey and Hadcock, R. Neville, Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1970), p. 343; Knowles, David and Hadcock, R. Neville, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1971), p. 372; as cited by Forey on p. 482. [19] Forey, “St Thomas of Acre,” 482, 486. [20] Pringle, “The Order of St. Thomas,” 75. [21] Pringle, “The Order of St. Thomas,” 75-7. [22] Pringle, “The Order of St. Thomas,” 77. [23] Forey, “St Thomas of Acre,” 486. [24] Forey, “St Thomas of Acre,” 486. [25] Forey, “St Thomas of Acre,” 486. [26] Forey, “St. Thomas of Acre,” 487. [27] Andrew Jotischky, Crusading and the Crusader States, 2nd ed (Abingdon: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 146, 183. Revised Regesta Regni (RRR) document #1266 is a princely charter written in Tyre in April 1189, in which Prince Bohemond III of Tripoli granted the Genoese, in agreement with his mother Sibilla and his son Raymond, the privileges of having their own court (curia) and general legal autonomy (libertas) in Antioch, Latakia and Jabala, with the exception of cases concerning treason, homicide and theft, and with the exception of those specific Genoese citizens in Antioch,Latakia and Jabala whom the Prince did not allow to enjoy such privilege. In addition, if any Genoese citizen had suffered a shipwreck at sea, the Prince would cover the cost of salvaging and taking care of the person’s corpse and his belongings. He had conceded these privileges “in perpetual heredity” to all the consuls and the Genoese on account of the service and help they rendered to Antioch. Present at the occasion and serving as witness are Aimericus, bishop of Tripoli, Gervasius de Sarmania, seneschal of Antioch, Milo de Colovardino, Petrus de Ravandello, Iohannes Paschalis, Saxus de Tripoli. All parties involved were Franks speaking different Romance languages, and the charter was drafted in Latin by Radulf, a clerk under Albertus, who in turn was the cancellarius of the Prince of Antioch and Archbishop of Tarsus.[1]
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