On 17 July 1099, two days after the reconquest of Jerusalem, the Crusader barons met to choose a leader. This was against the wishes of the Tafurs, who hourly awaited the Second Coming and wanted no government at all. The favourite choice among the barons would have beenAdhemar, bishop of Le Puy, but he had died of illness a year earlier at Antioch. In his stead, the crown was offered to Raymond of Toulouse; his age, wealth, experience and his closeness to both Adhemar and the Byzantine Emperor Alexius made him the almost necessary choice. But Raymond knew he was unpopular, and his own soldiers wanted to return home, so reluctantly he refused. Of the other candidates, Bohemond had already made himself prince of Antioch after leading the attack on that city; Tancred was regarded as merely an appendage of his uncle; and Robert of Normandy had let it be known that he wanted to return to Europe. And so on 22 July the crown was offered to Godfrey of Bouillon, who delicately replied that he would wear no crown where Jesus had worn the crown of thorns, nor would he presume to bear the title of King in Christ’s holy city, but he would accept kingly powers under the title oiAdvocatus Sancti Sepulchri, the Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.
There were some, and perhaps Godfrey was among them, who wanted Jerusalem to be governed as a theocracy under a patriarch appointed by the Pope in Rome. But within a year Godfrey was dead and the crown passed to his brother, who had no qualms about ruling over a secular Kingdom of Jerusalem as Baldwin I. For his palace he used the al-Aqsa mosque, which was assumed to stand on the site of Solomon’s Temple, while the Dome of the Rock, which does occupy that site, became a Christian church, the Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord, surmounted by a cross, and served also as the residence of the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem.
World History
