County of Edessa

The first crusader state founded and the first destroyed, whose fall launched the Second Crusade. Baldwin of Boulogne left the main crusading army in 1097, went east into Armenian Christian territory, was adopted as heir by the local ruler Thoros, and took over when Thoros was killed by a mob - so the county was established in 1098 before Jerusalem was even taken. It lay well beyond the other Latin states, inland across the Euphrates, surrounded by Muslim powers and dependent on an Armenian and Syriac Christian population that its Frankish rulers governed as a small minority. Edessa itself was an ancient city, one of the earliest Christian centres, and held relics of enormous prestige. Its exposure made it indefensible in the long run: Zengi of Mosul took the city in December 1144 while its count was away, and the shock in Europe produced the Second Crusade, which achieved nothing. A failed attempt to retake it in 1146 ended with the population massacred or enslaved. The county was extinguished by 1150. The city is now Sanliurfa in Turkey. The county lay across what is now southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. It was the largest of the crusader states in area and the most thinly held. Edessa had been the capital of the kingdom of Osroene and claimed a correspondence with Jesus himself. Its Christian population was mostly Armenian and Syriac Orthodox rather than Latin. Baldwin left it to become the first king of Jerusalem. Its fall is conventionally the end of the crusader high-water mark.

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