ter 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
_virtu_ 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, w