Accounts of Baldwin I of Jerusalem's narrow survival after escaping the Battle of Ramla note that he commandeered an English Pirate ship to get to the besieged city of Jaffa. Is it unusual for an Anglo-Saxon pirate vessel to be so deep in the Eastern Mediterranean in the early 1100s?

by Rholles
WelfOnTheShelf

It’s actually not too unusual in context, since this was right after the First Crusade. Conventionally we say the First Crusade ended with the Battle of Ascalon in August 1099, but at the time, no one called it the “First Crusade” and as far as they were concerned, it was just an ongoing thing. There were several other large crusading movements in 1101, and there was pretty much a continuous stream of pilgrims and crusaders, and merchants arriving to help out for many years after 1099. There were especially lots of vessels from England and Germany and Frisia and elsewhere in the North Sea area that helped out with the siege of Jaffa, and the other campaigns to conquer the cities along the Mediterranean coast. Merchants from the North Sea and from the Italian city-states also began to arrive, taking advantage of the new commercial opportunities now that there was a Christian kingdom there.

There was, apparently, an English fleet in the Mediterranean that helped out with the siege of Antioch in 1097-1098. Sometimes it's said that that fleet was headed by Edgar Atheling, the last heir to the English throne, who sort of wandered around having adventures after the Normans conquered England. But he was actually in Scotland then, so that probably wasn’t him. He was also supposedly a member of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. But he did go on pilgrimage around the time of the siege of Jaffa in 1101-1102, so he was probably part of the fleet that Baldwin ran into. Another member of that fleet was, again supposedly, Godric of Finchale. Godric was a wealthy merchant who gave up his earthly goods and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but the only evidence linking him to Baldwin is that the crusader chronicler Albert of Aachen says the king met up with "Godric, a pirate from the kingdom of England". (As Susan Edgington notes, "The boundary between pirates and merchants seems to have been quite permeable".)

Another English pilgrim in the Mediterranean around this time was Saewulf, who left an interesting account of his voyage to Jerusalem a bit later in 1103-1104. There were pilgrims from as far away as Russia and Iceland, and in 1110 the king of Norway also brought a fleet to Jerusalem. So it was not unusual at all to see ships and fleets from all over Europe in the years after the crusade!

Sources:

Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Susan B. Edgington, Baldwin I of Jerusalem, 1100-1118 (Routledge, 2019)

Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana, ed. and trans. Susan B. Edgington (Oxford: Oxford Medieval Texts, 2007)

The Pilgrimage of Saewulf to Jerusalem, in The Library of the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, vol. IV (London, 1896, repr. AMS Press, 1971)