The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Society and Shared Space

  The internal development of Outremer society cannot be assessed solely in terms of a failed or doomed community. Despite impediments of religion, culture, geography and resources, the Franks secured their occupation and even thrived for generations. The elites governed themselves according to agreed structures of law, judicial procedure and convention. As in the west, rulers consulted their officials, great lords, clerics and others in deliberative councils, as at Nablus in 1120, which promulgated canons mainly concerning moral behaviour and relations with the Church, or in 1183 to agree a general tax in the kingdom of Jerusalem. Military contingency required constant informal as well as formal consultation. Politics and patronage sought validation in legal process, the ruler’s High Court providing a cockpit for factional contest as much as judicial settlement. This could be writ large, as at Tripoli in 1109, where Baldwin I presided over a council of all Outremer to settle outstanding territorial claims.

  While Frankish institutions were imported, elements of continuity survived in the configuration of lordships, partly a product of geography, as in the boundaries of the county of Tripoli. In Antioch and Edessa the presence of large indigenous Greek and Armenian Christian communities enforced a degree of institutional accommodation. In Antioch it seems the mainly Norman ruling elite adopted the local Greek title of dux (duke) for the leading civilian official.23 In general, Franks imposed their own officials to administer their military, judicial and administrative responsibilities while Frankish landlords relied on their own or local mediators with their indigenous subjects and tenants, Syrian dragomanni (literally interpreters) or a ra’is (headman).24 As elsewhere around the Mediterranean, internal self-determination allowed for separate communities to co-exist as neighbours. The Franks’ relations with the indigenous Syrian population within Outremer were primarily economic not social, as taxpayers, workers or slaves, not citizens.

  This produced a layered political and legal society, in which each community regulated itself, with relations between them – fiscal, commercial or criminal – ordered and scrutinised by ruling Franks, through law courts and lordships. Syrian Christians, Muslims and Jews held their own courts for civil disputes and petty crimes, as did the Franks, but serious offences and any involving Franks came before the Frankish cour des bourgeois, often presided over by Frankish officials called viscounts, operated by local Frankish lords according to western legal norms, such as trial by combat. Freedom was assumed for all Latin Christian settlers of whatever social or economic standing, in marked contrast to social systems in the west. Local Syrian Christians, Muslims and Jews were largely excluded from this ruling legal and political community. In ports, such as Acre or Tyre, inevitable inter-communal exchange was regulated by commercial courts dealing with judicial and fiscal responsibilities. Syrian Christians acted as port officials. In the market court (cour de la fronde), both Latins and Syrians could act as jurors while witnesses across the faith communities swore oaths on their respective holy books, ‘because be they Syrians or Greeks or Jews or Samaritans or Nestorians or Saracens, they are also men like Franks’ – necessary pragmatism not ecumenical tolerance.25

  A DAY AT JACOB’S FORD, 29 AUGUST 1179

  At dawn on 29 August 1179, following a siege of five days, troops led by Saladin launched a final assault on the Frankish castle of Le Chastellet overlooking a strategic crossing of the River Jordan on the main road from Acre to Damascus in Upper Galilee know as Vadum Iacob, or Jacob’s Ford, a site associated with the Patriarch Jacob and of scriptural and spiritual significance for both Muslims and Christians. The castle, commanded by Templar knights, was unfinished, having only been begun the previous October, which meant that its defenders, a substantial force perhaps numbering 1,500 men, included many civilian masons, carpenters and other building workers and Muslim captives as slave labour. The importance of the castle, only a day’s walk from Damascus, on the Ayyubid side of the porous frontier with the kingdom of Jerusalem, was recognised by the attendance of Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and his army from October 1178 to April 1179 to protect the early stages of construction and to prevent Saladin’s repeated attempts to stop the building by diplomacy or force, even by offering 100,000 dinars in compensation if the Franks withdrew. In late August, knowing a Frankish relief force would take time to assemble, Saladin, aware that time was of the essence, attacked in strength. Although his siege machine failed to effect a decisive breach, after five days, early on 29 August, sappers finally managed to bring down sections of the walls, the fire used in the process setting alight the Franks’ final makeshift wooden lines of defence. It was reported that the commander of the garrison deliberately leapt to his death in the flames. Saladin refused a negotiated surrender. Perhaps as many as 800 defenders were killed, with 700 captured, along with armour, weapons and animals. Some of the captured were converts from Islam who were summarily executed. The loss of Le Chastellet at Jacob’s Ford was both a tactical success for Saladin after his defeat in 1177 at Montgisard and a strategic one, as it left Galilee open to future attack. Some have seen this day as the beginning of the military process that ended at the battle of Hattin in 1187.

  41. Aerial view of Ateret Fortress showing the north-west wall of the castle.

  42. A horse killed during the siege.

  The site of the castle was left relatively undisturbed until excavations in the 1990s uncovered what was in effect a time capsule of both the siege and the elaborate building work at the castle. Construction was evidently interrupted by the Ayyubid attack, tools and materials being left where they lay. The unfinished nature of the project was clear, as was the nature of the fighting and of injuries suffered by the combatants. The defenders had been bombarded with intense volleys of arrows before the final assault, skeletons showing evidence of arrow wounds prior to death blows from close-quarter weapons, swords, spears or axes. As well as the remains of men and horses who fell that day, the site was littered with tools – axes, chisels, spades, hoes, spatulas for spreading plaster and mortar and picks – as well as sickles, knives, daggers, iron bowls, mace heads, arrow-heads, crossbow bolts, a wheelbarrow, a stone sundial and a board for marelles, or Nine Men’s Morris, a strategy board game permitted by the Templars. The castle was equipped with a cistern and a communal oven and apparently used its own lead coins to supplement royal gold bezants and silver pennies. Le Chastellet was planned on a grand scale, to house a large Templar community of knights, sergeants, servants and, probably, Muslim slaves. Its construction and loss show the scale of the Franks’ ambition, human and material resources, their technical skills and their vulnerability.26

  Community parallelism determined interfaith contacts and infra-Christian denominational relations. Limited religious syncretism did exist, in shared shrines, religious space, rituals (for example, Muslims receiving baptism as a curative superstition, not a sign of conversion) and objects of devotion, such as the Greek Orthodox shrine of the Virgin Mary at Saidnaya near Damascus, the icon of the Virgin at Tortosa, or the Tombs of the Prophets at Hebron, each venerated by Muslim as well as Christian pilgrims. Inter-faith association relied on linked folk beliefs, as in the generalised efficacy of baptism, not theological exchange, tolerance or ecumenism. Jews and Muslims were formally banned from living in Frankish Christian Jerusalem. In the twelfth century, few Franks mastered the literary Arabic to engage fully either with Islamic culture and beliefs or with local Christians, although many probably necessarily acquired a smattering of demotic oral Arabic.27 Muslims and non-Latin Christians lived beyond the pale of Frankish citizenship, like serfs in the west, although, like Frankish non-fief holders, they could be arraigned in the Frankish cour des bourgeois. Unable to plead in Frankish civil courts, technically they could hold neither office nor land. There were some exceptions, such as Hamdan ibn Abd al-Rahmin (c. 1071–1147/8), a local Muslim intellectual, whose medical services to the Frankish lord of Atharib, a town near the Antioch/Aleppo border, was rewarded with the fief of a
local village. A member of the Arab ruling family of Shayzar leased a village from a neighbouring Frankish knight. In Nablus, Muslims and Frankish Christians lived side by side, operating neighbouring businesses, even intermarrying.28 Obviously, the Franks exploited Muslim labour, including slaves, while encouraging Muslim entrepreneurs to use their ports. They also drew distinctions between the largely quiescent Muslim fellahin living within Outremer, the often-accommodating Bedouin on the frontiers and the hostile Turks across the borders with whom, nonetheless, diplomatic treaties of convenience or even active alliances could be entertained. The Franks’ mission to defend the Holy Land and Holy City did not preclude civil relations with Muslims of equal social standing on an individual basis, such as the Templars in Jerusalem providing space for Muslim visitors to pray towards Mecca.29 The great hospital in Jerusalem, run by the Order of St John, the Hospitallers, was open to all in need regardless of faith.

  Nonetheless, within Outremer, religion stood as an absolute barrier to integration, reinforced by civil and criminal laws that discriminated against Muslims. As slaves, labourers, taxpayers, skilled artisans, doctors and traders, Muslims were useful; otherwise, collectively, they existed socially as separate and invisible. Only conversion to Latin Christianity, for Muslims as well as Syrian Christians, secured full citizenship, and the Franks were notoriously negligent in proselytising. A similar picture emerges of Jews, who were left to arrange their own affairs, controlled by rabbinical courts, while contributing to the economy through agriculture in areas of settlement such as Galilee, and in particular, it seems, the dyeing business. At Nablus, the local Samaritan sect was allowed to hold its annual Passover festival, attracting the faithful from across the Near East, a unique example of tolerance of such a non-Christian religious event.30 Religious segregation operated in a two-way street. Although some Christian commentators, such as William of Tyre, noted the differences between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam, most Muslim observers largely ignored the complexity of Christian denominations, dismissing Christians as polytheists.31 Religious bigotry was not the unique preserve of the Franks.

  6. Jacob’s Ford.

  Language and culture also limited assimilation with local Christians. Two main Christian groups confronted the Franks in Outremer. The Orthodox Church shared belief in the Trinitarian doctrine agreed at the Council of Chalcedon (451). Strong in the kingdom of Jerusalem and Antioch, the Orthodox community divided between a Greek elite and the mass of Arabic speakers who used Arabic or Syriac in their services. On doctrinal grounds, the Franks regarded the Orthodox as members of the same Catholic Church. The other Christian group included ancient indigenous denominations with origins in doctrinal disagreements stretching back to Chalcedon and beyond: Jacobites, Armenians, Nestorians and Maronites. Relations with all these communities depended on politics, status, space, patronage and precedence as much as observance, doctrine or dogma. Ironically, official Latin Catholic relations with the Chalcedonian Orthodox Church proved more fraught than those with the non-Chalcedonians. All were tolerated but the latter, having no hierarchical association with the Latin Church, were afforded protected autonomy, even patronage, whereas the Orthodox Church presented direct competition, at least at the level of episcopal appointments and jurisdiction. Twelfth-century Antioch saw a bitter protracted battle between Latin and Orthodox hierarchies. In Jerusalem, the Latin patriarchs were shadowed by absentee Greek equivalents based in Constantinople. By contrast, ecclesiastical contacts with the Jacobites, strong in northern Syria, and the Armenian Church, prominent in Edessa, were broadly amicable, if largely characterised in the secular sphere by indifference and what has been described as ‘rough tolerance’.32 Political expediency played a role, such as the availability of Armenian noblewomen for Frankish marriages. The Maronites of Lebanon, valued for their military capability, were even persuaded to enter into communion with Rome in 1181 despite their historic doctrinal and continued linguistic and cultural differences.

  Away from ecclesiastical politics, contacts were governed by expediency. Flushed with victory in 1099, the Franks initially banned all non-Latin clergy from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The failure of the Easter Holy Fire ‘miracle’ in 1101 prompted a relaxation of the ban, allowing access to Orthodox clerics (who presumably knew the secret of generating the miraculous flame, important for Easter tourism), an arrangement followed in other shared churches in Jerusalem. Local Orthodox bishops cooperated with the Latin hierarchy, such as Archbishop Melitus of Gaza who received property for the Hospitallers in the 1170s and was a confrater of the order.33 Greek monasteries around Jerusalem and Antioch flourished during the twelfth century; St Sabas in the Judean desert attracted Frankish patronage. Orthodox monasteries such as St Sabas, those on the Black Mountain near Antioch or the famous monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai acted as cultural entrepôts for manuscripts, icons and artists. Funds from Byzantium flowed into the Orthodox community but also paid for redecoration in Latin churches, such as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre. Syrian Orthodox Christians acted as scribes and customs officers. The small Jacobite community in Jerusalem, despite being regarded as heretical by the Latins, was allowed to build a chapel near the entrance to the rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre and on at least one occasion received royal protection for property rights.34 Circumstances could impose inter-denominational contacts and accommodation or the reverse. The Edessan Frankish lord Baldwin of Marasch (d. 1146) apparently spoke Armenian and employed an Armenian priest as his confessor.35 However, Count Joscelin II of Edessa (1131–59) regarded the county’s Jacobites as fifth columnists cooperating with the Turks and harassed them accordingly.

  Outremer’s heterogeneity inevitably eroded formal apartheid, although the loss of most of the material evidence of Frankish settlement makes uncovering informal assimilation difficult, as surviving written evidence points to sharp religious division and much archaeology is of culturally exclusive religious or military sites, although many castles reflected long periods of occupation both before and after Frankish tenure. New ecclesiastical architecture showed European inspiration most clearly, although in the twelfth century largely immune from fashionable contemporary French Gothic. In places, it also borrowed distinctive local Near Eastern features – flat roofs, domes, simple geometric lines. Domestic architecture and decoration have mainly vanished, although what does survive suggests Franks imported some styles and features familiar from the west, such as houses opening directly onto the street with plots of land behind. Other vernacular structures – water mills, bridges, store houses, etc. – displayed local pragmatism not cultural imperialism, as did the use of plentiful stone, not scarce timber, as the chief domestic construction material.36 Prestige buildings could attract an eclectic mix of aesthetic and material influences. An early thirteenth-century pilgrim’s literary description of palatial apartments in the Frankish castle at Beirut is suggestive: the interior was dominated by marble floors and fountains, trompe-l’oeil mosaics and frescoes produced by skilled local craftsmen (see ‘Syrians, Muslims and Greeks’, p. 230).37 Cultural exchange from patron to designer to artisan to labourer is evident elsewhere. The cover and illuminations of the famous psalter prepared for Queen Melisende, now in the British Library, combine western, Byzantine, Armenian and Islamic influences (see ‘The Melisende Psalter’, p. 138). The decorative scheme at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, financed by the Byzantine emperor Manuel I, displays a similar cultural mix (see p. 51). In a polyglot, multi-faith and, in cities, cosmopolitan society, accommodation was inescapable. The written record of the land deal between the Hospitallers and Archbishop Melitus of Gaza is in both Latin and Greek, as were inscriptions in the Church of the Nativity. Baldwin III issued safe conducts for Muslim merchants and Arab lords, such as the peripatetic Usama ibn Munqidh of Shayzar, whose large library of Arabic books he apparently seized.38

  The Franks adapted to a monetised economy very different from that in western Europe. Local cu
rrency, such as gold bezants, continued under the Franks, who persisted in minting imitation Arabic coins. Although Tancred produced his own copper coinage at Antioch by 1110, in Jerusalem no distinctive Frankish currency was produced before the 1130s at the earliest, while imported foreign currencies from Lucca and Valence long remained standard tender. Baldwin III may have been the first king to engage in a substantial re-coinage programme, asserting a royal monopoly on minting in the kingdom, a policy followed by his successor Amalric.39 The fiscal and social role of money was more immediately adopted. Patronage dealt in money fiefs drawn on the revenues of cities, some still calculated in Saracen hypereroi, as well as grants of land.40 The 1183 tax on incomes and property was assessed in bezants. Absorption of indigenous culture had limits. The Arabic texts left by the Franks on the walls of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque (under the Franks the headquarters of the Templars), or on the imitation bezants minted at Acre, did not suggest understanding of the Koran from which they came; rather they were seen as decorative and, in the case of the bezants, usefully familiar and convertible for indigenous merchants.41

  43. A twelfth-century bishop’s crozier found at the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem.

  Diversity

  44. The church of St Anne’s, Jerusalem, an 1856 engraving.

  The courts of the Frankish rulers, like those of their Syrian and Egyptian neighbours, reflected diversity. Nur al-Din (d. 1174), the Turkish atabeg of Aleppo and conqueror of Muslim Syria, ruled over Jews, Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Turks and Armenians, and employed Kurdish mercenary chiefs. The Fatimid caliphs in Egypt employed Christian Copts and Armenians as secretaries, generals and administrators; the Vizier Bahram (1135–7), called the ‘Sword of Islam’ (Saif al-Islam), was originally an Armenian Christian whose brother was the Armenian patriarch of Egypt. Kurdish Saladin’s entourage included Jewish physicians, Iranian and Iraqi civil servants as well as Turks, Arabs and fellow Kurds. Franks not only allied with Turks; some also fought for them, as was permitted under Jerusalem law. The court of King Amalric (1163–74) shared the cosmopolitan Near Eastern pattern. His mother, Queen Melisende, was half-Armenian; his father a Frenchman from Anjou. His first wife was a Palestinian Frank; his second a Byzantine Greek princess. Apparently, he unsuccessfully sought the medical aid of the great Jewish scholar and physician Maimonides (1135–1204), then living in Egypt. The academic tutor of Amalric’s son Baldwin – William of Tyre – was a Jerusalem Frank educated for two decades at the grandest schools of the west – Paris, Orléans and Bologna – while young Baldwin’s riding master was a Palestinian Christian whose father and brother served as the king’s doctors before the family decamped after 1187 to serve Saladin. Jewish, Samaritan, Syrian Christian and Muslim physicians were popular with the Frankish nobility, much to William of Tyre’s disgust. Raymond III of Tripoli’s doctor, a local called Barac, treated the ailing Baldwin III in 1163.42 Antioch, with its rich intellectual history and continued contacts with the academic centres of inner Syria and Iraq, provided a forum for cultural exchange, although chiefly via local Greek- and Arabic-speaking Christians.44 Such cross-community links only grew as the Franks entrenched their presence in Levantine society, settlers picking up demotic Arabic. Frankish rulers could receive similar deference as that afforded their Arab or Turkish predecessors. The process began early. An Arabic poet celebrated the deeds of his employer, Raymond IV of Toulouse, at the battle of Ascalon (1099). The funeral processions of Baldwin I (1118) and Baldwin III (1163) attracted locals from across the ethnic and religious divides, including Muslims, some of whom may have been professional mourners.45