Yet, if the Crusaders were divided, the infidels were equally at cross-purposes. A constant stream of fresh pilgrims reinforced the scanty armies of the Latins, and their military superiority, both in pitched battles and in building and defending castles, stood them in good stead. Financial help came from the keen-witted Italian traders of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, who found in the Latin conquests new outlets for their commerce, and who were now winning the trade of the Levant from the Greeks. Baldwin of Edessa, called after Godfrey’s death to succeed him at Jerusalem, did not share his scruple against bearing the title of king, and showed such skill, both as warrior and statesman, that he became in a very real sense the founder of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Bit by bit the Saracens were expelled from the open country, and within the generation succeeding the First Crusade, an ordered political system was set up among the Latin principalities of Syria. Under Baldwin I. (1100–1118) the crusading state attained its limits and its organisation. His nephew and successor, Baldwin II. (1118–1130), called like his uncle from Edessa to Jerusalem, was also a man of courage and character. Dying without sons, his daughter Millicent’s husband, Fulk, Count of Anjou (1130–1143), became the next king. Under him the Latin state reached its zenith, and gave him no reason to repent his preference for his Eastern kingdom rather than his Western county. After him, his son by his first wife, Geoffrey (the father of our Henry II.), became Count of Anjou, while, unluckily for Jerusalem, his two sons by Millicent, Baldwin and Amalric, were mere children. With them the decline begins. [Illustration: THE CRUSADING STATES in SYRIA DURING THE TWELFTH CENTURY]