The discovery of the Counts of Tripoli (and their connection to the Counts of Toulouse) has astonished me. The idea of a bunch of French nobles battling their way to the Holy Land and setting themselves up as Count of Tripoli, Prince of Galilee and King of Jerusalem boggles my mind. It is equal parts tragic, comical, exotic and astonishing, this imposition of feudal structures on the exotic middle East.
I've been looking at it a little more today:
Here's a brief history of the Counts of Tripoli:
Raymond IV of Toulouse becomes Raymond I, Count of Tripoli (1042–1105); he is the one, you may remember, who usurped the lands and titles of the Count of Toulouse from his niece, Phiippa. He left on the first crusade in 1096, and among other things he raised the seige of Tripoli before his death in 1105. He is considered the first Count of Tripoli.
His oldest son, Bertrand, Count of Toulouse, (d.1112), became Count of Tripoli in 1108 . He's the one who duked it out sovereignity of Toulouse with his cousin, Philippa. He left for the Holy Land in 1108 and was styled Count of Tripoli after the death of his father.
The son of Bertrand, Pons, (1098 - 1137), became Count of Tripoli when Bertrand died in 1112 and reigned until 1137. He must have been born in France and travelled with his father to the Holy Land. He married Marie, a daughter of the King of France, who was the widow of Tancred of Galilee, (AKA Tancred of Hautville in Normandy) a marriage which reconciled the Norman and Provençal knights. Pons, count or not, was taken prisoner when Tripoli was invaded by the sultan of Damascus in 1137, and later executed with most of the other Frankish prisoners.
Raymond II, Count of Tripoli, (c. 1115 – 1152), son of Pons and Marie of France, was Count of Tripoli from 1137 - 1152. The date of his birth suggests that he was born in the Holy Land. His wife was Hodierna of Rethel, daughter of the King of Jerusalem (a title which Raymond IV had evidently refused so it went to a Norman knight instead.) Pons established the Knight's Hospitallier as a force in Tripoli and was assassinated outside the gates of Tripoli in 1152.
Raymond III (1140 – September/October 1187) was Count of Tripoli from 1152-1187. This Count died without heirs, and the County of Tripoli passed from the descendents of the Counts of Toulouse to the family of the Princes of Antioch. (Interestingly, the character of Raymond III has a role today in some popular video games and was played by Jeremy Irons in the film, "Kingdom of Heaven.")
Over the next 100 years, the Catholics of Antioch and Tripoli had to fight with the Mongols, slaughtering in from the northeast, the Mamluks of Egypt plus a trade war between the Embriacos of Genoa and the Venetians.(I kid you not.) Tripoli was the longest to survive.
The end of the Catholic county of Tripoli finally came in 1289 when the Mamluks conquered Tripoli--evidently encouraged by the Genoese--razed it to the ground and enslaved its remaining inhabitants. The last Count of Tripoli, Bohemond VII, died without heirs in 1287. His sister, Lucia, became titular Countess of Tripoli and vanished from wikipedia. Somehow, the title of Count of Tripoli was passed to the Kings of Cyprus, possibly through the marriage of Lucia's granddaughter, Marguerite. Anyhow, bizarre!
The 200-year fascination with the Holy Land, the Crusades, is dated to the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, by the way.
image 1: shows the map of the Holy Land between the first and second crusade.
image 2: the seal of Raymond II, count of Tripoli. Some 40 years after this branch of the house of Toulouse settled down in the Holy Land, the count still uses recognizable insignia.
image 3: The seal of Raymond VI, last independent Count of Toulouse, dating to 1228.
image 4: Another seal. Note the profile on the left of the seal. That's the Chateau Narbonnais. Compare this to the seal of Raymond III.
image 5: Lucia, titular Countess of Tripoli, serves tea to the a clergyman (is that her kinsman, the Pope?) during the siege of Tripoli.