This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Godfrey of Bouillon, a Frankish nobleman and Duke of Lower Lotharingia, mortgaged much of his own patrimony to finance his departure on the First Crusade, a financial sacrifice that placed him among the expedition's principal leaders from its outset. Historians favor Boulogne sur Mer, in the county of Boulogne, as his birthplace, though a thirteenth century chronicle instead names Baisy, in Brabant, an uncertainty that persists even about a man whose later actions in the East are unusually well documented.
Godfrey commanded troops through three of the crusade's defining engagements, the sieges of Nicaea, Antioch and finally Jerusalem itself. His role across that whole campaign, from the opening siege in Anatolia to the culminating assault on the holy city, placed him among the handful of nobles whose military leadership carried the expedition to its stated goal, a campaign that spanned several years and thousands of miles from Lotharingia to the walls of Jerusalem.
After Jerusalem fell to the crusaders on 15 July 1099, the leadership that remained in the city chose Godfrey to rule the newly conquered territory, a recognition of the standing his sustained command through the campaign's hardest fighting had earned him among his fellow crusade leaders, several of whom, including Bohemond of Taranto, had by then already claimed territories of their own along the crusade's route.