A Latin term applied by chroniclers to the household of Godfrey of Bouillon during his reign as ruler of Jerusalem (1099-1100) after the First Crusade.
The household comprised officials (knights and clerics) who exercised important administrative, logistic, and military functions in Godfrey’s contingent on crusade, and it formed the basis of Godfrey’s machinery of government after his election as ruler of Jerusalem in July 1099. It consisted of a core of Lotharingians who had accompanied Godfrey from the West, augmented by Frenchmen, Normans, Germans, and others who had joined him in the course of the crusade. The household played a decisive role in the development of the kingdom of Jerusalem on the death of Godfrey (18 July 1100), when, under the leadership of the Lotharingian nobleman Warner of Grez, its members seized the citadel of Jerusalem and summoned Godfrey’s younger brother Baldwin I from Edessa to take up Godfrey’s inheritance, in defiance of the claims of the patriarch of Jerusalem, Daibert of Pisa.
-Alan V. Murray
Bibliography
Murray, Alan V., “Daimbert of Pisa, the Domus Godefridi and the Accession of Baldwin I of Jerusalem,” in From Clermont to Jerusalem: The Crusades and Crusader Societies, 1095-1500, ed. Alan V. Murray (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 81-102.
-, The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Dynastic
History, 1099-1125 (Oxford: Prosopographica et Genealogica, 2000), pp. 77-81.
World History
