Raymond IV Count of Toulouse, Leader of the First Crusade - Crusades History

Raymond IV, byname Raymond of Saint-Gilles, French Raimond de Saint-Gilles, (born 1041 or 1042, Toulouse, county of Toulouse, France—died February 28, 1105, near Tripoli [now in Lebanon]), count of Toulouse (1093–1105) and marquis of Provence (1066–1105), the first—and one of the most effective—of the western European rulers who joined the First Crusade. He is reckoned as Raymond I of Tripoli, a county in the Latin East which he began to conquer from 1102 to 1105.

In the early years of his countship, Raymond was a pious lay leader of the papacy’s reform movement. Before preaching the First Crusade (1095), Pope Urban II probably secured assurance of Raymond’s participation. Although he initially disliked the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus, Raymond became the most faithful partisan of the emperor’s territorial interest in the Crusade, sometimes to his own disadvantage.

After helping to capture Antioch from the Turks (June 3, 1098), Raymond unsuccessfully tried to induce Bohemond I, Frankish Crusader prince of the city, to restore it to Alexius. He then organized a march on Jerusalem and took part in its capture (July 15, 1099). Apparently, he refused the Crusaders’ crown of Jerusalem, which was then given to Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine. Although he quarreled with Godfrey, together they repulsed an attack on Jerusalem by the Egyptian Fāṭimids. From 1100 Raymond, on behalf of Alexius, blocked the southward expansion of Bohemond’s principality of Antioch. He built near Tripoli the castle of Mons Peregrinus (Mont-Pèlerin), in which he died.

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