Council of Nablus

January 16, 1120

Baldwin II convened the lay and clerical lords of his Crusader kingdom and issued twenty-five canons: penalties for sodomy, adultery, and sexual relations with Muslims, along with a formal endorsement of the fledgling Templar order. It was the Latin East's first written law code, and its provisions reveal a frontier society obsessed with maintaining boundaries between conquerors and conquered in a land where daily coexistence made those boundaries porous.