Four “crusader states”—the principality of Antioch, the counties of Edessa and Tripoli, and the kingdom of Jerusalem—were established in Syria during the course and aftermath of the First Crusade (1095–1099). This quadripartite system was first described by the great twelfth-century historian of the Latin East, Archbishop William of Tyre, and has been adopted by modern scholarship. While there are a host of excellent books on the kingdom of Jerusalem, and the principality of Antioch and the county of Edessa have both been the focus of recent studies, it has now been more than seventy years since the publication of the last monograph on the county of Tripoli (although there have been numerous articles and edited volumes in the intervening period). Thus, Kevin James Lewis's The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century: Sons of Saint-Gilles, the first installment in a new series edited by Nicholas Morton and Jonathan Phillips on “Rulers of the Latin East,” is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the crusader states in Syria.

Drawing on both western-language and Arabic source material, Lewis analyzes the contested and fluid nature of the relationship between the county and the other crusader states. He argues that the four states as described by William of Tyre had not, in fact, been fully defined in the early decades of the twelfth century. Tripoli had not yet emerged as an independent state, and the lands that would ultimately comprise the county were as yet controlled by Antioch and Jerusalem. Moreover, Lewis argues that it was the unsung, oft-overlooked rulers between Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Toulouse (1103–1105) and Raymond III (1152–1187) who actually deserve the greatest credit for carving out an autonomous county of Tripoli.

Lewis takes a chronological approach and focuses on political history. In chapter 1 he argues that previous scholarship has assigned too much weight to the role of Raymond of Saint-Gilles, one of the leaders of the First Crusade, in setting the template for the institutions and politics of the county of Tripoli. Indeed, Raymond died years before the city of Tripoli fell to crusader forces in 1109. In contrast, the roles of William Jordan of Cerdanya and Bertrand of Toulouse—Raymond's nephew and son, respectively, both rival claimants to Raymond's Syrian conquests—have been given relatively short shrift in telling the story of the county of Tripoli. Moreover, Lewis argues it was only under Raymond's grandson, Pons (1112–1137), whose reign is the focus of chapter 2, that Tripoli came into being as a fully independent state: “In many ways, the county of Tripoli owed its very existence as an independent polity to Pons and the remarkable stability of his reign” (72–73).

Lewis proceeds in chapter 3 to narrate the fortunes of the county under Raymond II (1137–1152) amidst the first great wave of counter-crusading fervor in Syria, especially under ‘Imad al-Din Zenki, atabek of Mosul. Not coincidentally, this period of counter-crusading is when the Hospitallers and Templars, increasingly responsible for the defense of the Holy Land, first came to dominate the fortresses of the county. Pons made massive donations to the Hospitallers beginning in 1142 and then to the Templars starting in the 1150s—ever after they would have an outsized role in the county.

Chapters 4 and 5 tackle the career of Count Raymond III (1152–1187). A key player in the factional struggle that preceded the fall of the first Latin kingdom of Jerusalem to Saladin in the 1180s, he is the count of Tripoli who has received the most attention in previous scholarship. During the early part of his reign, Raymond III was imprisoned at Aleppo, having been captured in the Battle of Harim in 1164, and King Amalric I of Jerusalem acted as regent in the county. Raymond in turn acted twice as regent for the kingdom of Jerusalem—first during the minority of Baldwin IV, then during the minority of Baldwin V. In contrast to previous scholars, who have often followed the positive view of Raymond III laid out by William of Tyre, Lewis judges the count harshly: “Despite the high expectations of what the wealthy, ambitious and high-status Raymond might have achieved, the count's career reads as a veritable litany of inconsequential, misguided, or downright disastrous endeavors” (275). Indeed, along with his insights on the changing relationship of Tripoli to Jerusalem and his attention to the lesser-known counts, this judgment is one of Lewis's key revisions to existing scholarship.

Less effective than the chapters themselves are the book's two appendices. The first is a survey of sources that would have been better placed in the introduction. The second is a recapitulation of various troubadour poems discussed in chapter 5; devoting an appendix to them seems somewhat superfluous, as there are only a few, and they are discussed in just one chapter. Indeed, both the appendices feel like the residue of the project's first incarnation as Lewis's Oxford DPhil.

This minor criticism notwithstanding, this is a valuable book. It is by no means easy to provide new insights on the political history of the Latin East, but Lewis has shown himself up to the task. Lewis's focus on Tripoli fills an important gap in the scholarship, as does his extensive treatment of the counts between Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Raymond III. The dense narrative and impressive array of citations will be daunting for students and non-specialists, but the book is a reliable reference for scholars of the crusader states.