Count of Edessa

The Count of Edessa was one of the Crusader lords in the 12th century, based around Edessa, a city with an ancient history and an early tradition of Christianity.

The Byzantine Empire soon recovered Edessa, but the resident made himself independent. Thoros of Edessa applied for help to Baldwin, brother and successor of Godfrey of Bouillon in the First Crusade, who in 1098 took possession of the town and made it the capital of the County of Edessa which included Samosata and Mazraeh-ye Saru, and was for half a century the eastern bulwark of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The local Armenian historian, however, Matthew of Edessa, tells of oppression, decrease of population, ruin of churches, neglect of agriculture.

With the campaign of Maudud in 1110 fortune began to favour the Moslems. Edessa had to endure siege after siege. Finally, in 1144 it was stormed, Matthew being among the slain, by Imad ad-Din Zengi, ruler of Mosul, under Joscelin II, an achievement celebrated as " the conquest of conquests," for laying the responsibility of which not on God but on the absence of the Frankish troops, an Edessan monk, John, bishop of Harran (d. 1165), brought down upon himself the whole bench of bishops. Edessa suffered still more in 1146 after an attempt to recover it. Churches were now turned into mosques. The consternation produced in Europe by the news of its fate led to "the Second Crusade." In 1182 it fell to Saladin, whose nephew recovered it when it had temporarily passed (1234) to the sultan of Rum; but the " Eye of Mesopotamia " never recovered the brilliance of earlier days.