Morphia of Melitene

He wished to marry her off to one of the crusade leaders who were carving out states in the Levant, and eventually chose Count Baldwin II of Edessa.

According to historian Bernard Hamilton, her religious practices left a lasting mark on the status of Orthodox Christians in the crusader kingdom.

Morphia was the daughter of Gabriel, an Armenian prince who ruled the city of Melitene (Malatya) in the northern Syria region.

Key leaders of these settlers, called Latins or Franks, sought to marry into Armenian nobility, the region's indigenous Christians who occupied frontier cities between the encroaching Byzantine and Seljuk empires.

[1] The alliance with Morphia's father was valuable to Baldwin, who had just acquired the nearby County of Edessa, another newly established crusader polity.

There was no queen in the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the time: Baldwin I had sent away his last wife, Adelaide del Vasto, just as he had done with Arda,[1] and Morphia stayed with her daughters in Edessa.

[12] In 1119, the king travelled to Edessa to install his cousin Joscelin of Courtenay as the new count and to bring his wife and their daughters to Jerusalem.

[16] Though otherwise a passive queen, Morphia showed her ability to take charge of political affairs in 1123 when Baldwin II and his ally Joscelin were captured by the Muslim Turk leader Belek Ghazi and taken to the Harpoot Castle.

[12][17] The queen hired a band of fifty Armenian soldiers[17][12] who, posing as monks and merchants and in other disguises, entered the castle under the pretense of seeking an audience with its governor.

[12] Hamilton proposes 1127 or 1128, noting that her husband, King Baldwin, granted land to the Church of Our Lady of Josaphat "for the repose of her soul" in early 1129.

[22] In that year the widowed king, left without an immediate prospect of a son, started settling his succession through a series of arrangements providing for his and Morphia's daughters.

[16] The Melisende Psalter, which combines Western and Byzantine styles, is an example of artistic hybridization in the crusader states that resulted from the contact and intermarriage between native Christians and European newcomers.