As the Templars’ leader (or master), Hugh of Payns travelled to Europe in 1127 in search of validation and endorsement for his new order. Formal recognition by the Latin Church came in January 1129, at a major ecclesiastical council held at Troyes (Champagne, France). In the years to come, this official seal of approval was further garlanded by papal support and extensive privileges and immunities. The Templars also earned the endorsement of one of the Latin world’s great religious luminaries, Bernard of Clairvaux. As abbot of a Cistercian monastery, Bernard was renowned for his wisdom and trusted as an adviser in all the courts of the West. The combination of political and ecclesiastical power that he wielded was unprecedented, but in physical terms Bernard was a wreck, forced to have an open latrine trench dug next to his pew in church so that he could relieve the symptoms of an appalling chronic intestinal affliction.
Around 1130 Bernard composed a treatise–titled In Praise of the New Knighthood–extolling the virtues of the Templars’ way of life. The abbot declared the order to be ‘most worthy of total admiration’, lauding its brethren as ‘true knights of Christ fight[ing] the battles of their Lord’, assured of glorious martyrdom should they die. This lyrical exhortation played a central role in popularising the Templar movement across Latin Europe, garnering acceptance for a revolutionary offshoot of crusade ideology that in many ways was the ultimate distillation and expression of Christian holy war.
The example set by the Templars encouraged another charitable religious movement founded by Latins in the Near East to embrace militarisation. Since the late eleventh century, Jerusalem’s Christian quarter had contained a hospital, funded by Italian merchants and devoted to the care of pilgrims and the sick. With the Holy City’s conquest by the First Crusaders and the associated influx of pilgrim traffic, this institution, dedicated to John the Baptist and so known as the Hospital of St John, grew in power and importance. Recognised as an order by the pope in 1113, the Hospitallers, as they came to be known, began to attract widespread international patronage. Under the guidance of its master, Raymond of Le Puy (1120–60), the movement appended a martial element to its ongoing medical functions, emerging by the mid-twelfth century as the second Military Order.
Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Templars and Hospitallers stood at the heart of crusading history, playing leading roles in the war for the Holy Land. In the central Middle Ages, Latin lay nobles commonly sought to affirm their devotion to God by giving alms to religious movements, often in the form of title to land or rights to its revenue. The mercurial popularity of the Military Orders therefore brought them rich donations in Outremer and across Europe. Despite their relatively humble origins–immortalised in the Templars’ case by their seal, depicting two impoverished knights riding a single horse–both were soon endowed with enormous wealth. They also attracted a steady stream of recruits, many of whom became highly trained, well-equipped warrior-monks (as knights or lower-ranking sergeants). Most medieval European war bands were startlingly amateurish, accustomed only to fighting in short seasonal campaigns and predominantly composed of poorly drilled, lightly armed irregulars. The Templars and Hospitallers, by contrast, could levy expert full-time standing forces: in effect, Latin Christendom’s first professional armies.
The Military Orders became supranational movements. Primarily focused on the protection of the crusader states, they nonetheless developed an array of other European military, ecclesiastical and financial interests, including a prominent role in the Iberian frontier wars against Islam. In the Levant their unprecedented military and economic might brought them a concomitant degree of political influence. Both orders enjoyed papal patronage, gaining independence from local secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and so had the potential to destabilise the Latin East’s sovereign polities. As rogue powers, they might question or even countermand crown authority, or ignore patriarchal edicts and episcopal instruction. For now, though, this danger was more than balanced by the transformative benefits of their involvement in Outremer’s defence.
Together, the Templars and Hospitallers brought a desperately needed influx of manpower and martial expertise to crusader states starved of military resources. Crucially, they also possessed the wealth to maintain, and in time extend, Outremer’s network of forts and castles. From the 1130s onwards, the lay lords of the Latin East began ceding control of fortified sites to the orders, often allowing them to develop semi-independent enclaves in border zones. Command of the castle of Baghras gave the Templars a dominant position in the northern reaches of the Antiochene principality. Rights to Safad in Galilee and to Gaza in southern Palestine brought the order similar rights and responsibilities. The Hospitallers, meanwhile, gained centres at Krak des Chevaliers, perched above the Bouqia valley between Antioch and Tripoli, and at Bethgibelin, one of three strongholds built in southern Palestine to defend Jerusalem and exert military pressure upon Muslim-held Ascalon.79
Turning to Christendom
After 1119 the Levantine Franks also began to look beyond their own borders for aid. In theory at least, eastern Christians should have been one obvious source of assistance.* Encircled by Islam and distant as it was from western Europe, Outremer needed a neighbouring ally if it was to achieve long-term survival. Yet, although the crusader states shared a common Christian faith with the Byzantine Empire–the Mediterranean superpower feared and respected by the Muslim world–since Jerusalem’s conquest the Greeks had contributed precious little to the war for the Holy Land. The embittered dispute over Antioch lay at the heart of this failure to secure imperial support and, if unaddressed, this problem looked set to cripple the Frankish Levant for decades to come. In 1137, after long years of distraction elsewhere in Byzantium, Alexius I’s son and heir, Emperor John II Comnenus, marched into Syria to reassert Greek influence over what he considered the eastern fringes of his realm. John managed to impose theoretical suzerainty over Antioch, and from this point forward the principality’s relations with the rest of Outremer were always balanced by its ties to Constantinople. But in military terms the empire’s contribution was disappointing, with expeditions against Aleppo and Shaizar ending in failure. John returned to the East in late summer 1142, probably planning to create a new Byzantine polity at Antioch ruled directly by his youngest son Manuel. As it was, John died in a hunting accident in Cilicia in April 1143–a sudden catastrophe that brought the Greek expedition to an immediate halt.80
In fact, Outremer turned most frequently to western Christendom for assistance after the Field of Blood. In January 1120, at a general assembly of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s secular and ecclesiastical leaders in Nablus (north of the Holy City), the crisis facing the crusader states was discussed. This resulted in the first direct appeal to Pope Calixtus II for a new crusade to the Holy Land and a further entreaty to Venice. The Italian mercantile republic responded by sending a fleet of at least seventy ships east in autumn 1122 under the crusading banner. With Venetian help the Jerusalemite Franks captured the heavily fortified city of Tyre in 1124–one of Palestine’s last remaining Muslim-held ports and a major centre of Mediterranean shipping and commerce.* King Baldwin II sought to rally another crusade for a projected attack on Damascus in 1129, but despite recruiting a sizeable party of western knights, the campaign itself proved to be a fiasco.
Intent upon forging closer links with the Latin West and keen to solve their own succession crises, the Levantine Franks also looked to secure eligible European husbands for a number of Outremer’s heiresses. In the crusader states, as in much of medieval Christendom, there was a perceived need for male rule; secular lords, from kings to counts, were expected to lead, or at least direct, their armies in times of war, and military command generally was deemed to be the preserve of men. Ideally, marriage candidates would be high-born aristocrats–men willing to commit to the defence of the Holy Land and possessed of the social standing to bring new wealth and manpower to the East. One such figure was Raymond of Poitiers–the d
uke of Aquitaine’s second son and a relation of France’s Capetian king–who was married to Constance of Antioch in 1136, bringing a long period of political turbulence in northern Syria to an end. An even more influential union was orchestrated in the late 1120s. King Baldwin II had four daughters with his Armenian wife Morphia, but no sons, and therefore he sought a match for his eldest child Melisende to secure the royal succession. After protracted negotiations, in 1129 the princess duly wed Count Fulk V of Anjou, one of France’s most eminent potentates with ties to the monarchs of England and France.
Upon Baldwin II’s death, Fulk and Melisende were consecrated and crowned on 14 September 1131. Perhaps twenty-two years of age, the new queen was the first ruler of Jerusalem to be born of mixed (Latin-Armenian) parentage. As such, she was the living embodiment of a new oriental Frankish society. Around 1134, however, Latin Palestine was brought to the brink of civil war by a dispute over crown rights. Resentful of the new king’s decision to appoint his own handpicked supporters to positions of wealth and influence, and his growing estrangement from Melisende, Jerusalem’s established Frankish aristocracy set out to curb Fulk’s authority by forcing him to rule jointly with the queen. After a decidedly frosty period, during which the king apparently ‘found that no place was entirely safe among the kindred and partisans of the queen’, the royal couple were reconciled. From this point forward, Melisende started to play a central role in governing the realm, and her position was further consolidated after Fulk’s death in 1143, when she was appointed as joint ruler with her young son Baldwin III.
In the longer term, these events helped to reshape the nature and extent of royal authority in Palestine. Baldwin I and Baldwin II had often ruled almost as autocrats, but as the twelfth century progressed it became clear that the Latin nobility could limit the absolute might of the monarchy. Over time, the crown rulers of Frankish Jerusalem engaged in a greater degree of consultation with their leading nobles, and the council of the realm’s most important landholders and ecclesiastics, known as the Haute Cour (High Court), became Palestine’s most important forum for legal, political and military decision making.81
A CRUSADER SOCIETY?
One of the rarest and most beautiful treasures to survive from the crusading era is a small prayer book, thought to have been made in the kingdom of Jerusalem during the 1130s and now residing in London’s British Library. Bound between two ornate ivory covers decorated with carvings of unsurpassed delicacy, its pages contain a series of magnificent and deeply emotive illuminations illustrating the life of Jesus. The work of many master craftsmen, a piece of the highest attainable quality, the book was designed as a personal guide to Christian life and religious observance–detailing saints’ days, listing prayers–that technically would be called a psalter. Taken simply on its own terms, it is a masterpiece of medieval art.
Yet what sets this remarkable remnant of a distant age apart is its provenance. For this psalter is thought to have been commissioned by King Fulk of Jerusalem as a gift for his wife, Melisende; perhaps even as a peace offering to salve the wounds opened in 1134. As such, it offers us an extraordinary, tangible connection to Outremer and the world of Melisende. The notion of seeing, perhaps even of touching, an item that belonged to the queen, particularly one so intimately related to her daily life, is stirring enough.
But Melisende’s Psalter has far more to tell us; indeed, its mere existence opens up a furious debate that cuts to the heart of crusading history. For the book’s construction and decoration seem to speak of an artistic culture in which Latin, Greek, eastern Christian and even Islamic styles have intermingled, fusing to create a new and unique form; what might be termed ‘crusader art’. At least seven artisans, labouring in the workshop of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, collaborated in the Psalter’s production (including a Byzantine-trained artist bearing the distinctly Greek-sounding name Basilius, who signed one of the internal images). The images wrought upon its ivory covers are broadly Byzantine in form, but are enclosed within densely packed geometric borders suggestive of Islamic influence. Other elements of the manuscript exhibit different influences: the text has been attributed to a French hand; the numerous decorated capital letters that introduce pages are western European in conception; and the detailed calendar contained within is English.82
Does this psalter reflect wider truths about the nature of life in the Frankish Levant? Was the society inhabited by Melisende and her contemporaries itself distinct in character and quality; and was this ‘crusader’ world one of perpetual war–a closed community of religious and ethnic intolerance–or a melting-pot of cross-cultural interchange? This debate has the potential to offer profoundly instructive insights into the reality of medieval life. It is also among the most heated in all crusade history. Over the last two hundred years historians have presented wildly divergent visions of the relationship between Frankish Christians and the indigenous peoples of the Near East, with some emphasising the forces of integration, adaptation and acculturation and others depicting the crusader states as oppressive, intolerant colonial regimes.
Given the relative paucity of a surviving body of medieval evidence that sheds light on Outremer’s social, cultural and economic context, it is not surprising that the image put forward of the crusader states has often revealed more about the hopes and prejudices of our own world than the mentality and mores of the medieval past. For those who believe in the inevitability of a ‘clash of civilisations’ and a global conflagration between Islam and the West, the crusades and the societies they begat can serve as grim proof of mankind’s innate propensity to savagery, bigotry and tyrannical repression of an enemy ‘other’. Alternatively, the evidence of transcultural fusion and peaceful coexistence in Outremer can be harnessed to underpin the ideal of convivencia (literally ‘living together’), to suggest that peoples of differing ethnic and religious backgrounds can live together in relative harmony.83
Despite all of these manifest complexities, the world of Outremer demands close and careful examination, because it has such integral bearing upon the fundamental issues of crusade history, opening up a pair of pressing questions: was the Frankish conquest and colonisation of the Near East unusual because it occurred in the context of holy war, or actually quite unremarkable? And did the creation of the crusader states change the history of western Europe–accelerating cross-cultural contact and the diffusion of knowledge; serving as a breeding ground for greater familiarity and understanding between Latin Christians and Muslims?
Life in Outremer
A number of elementary facts conditioned the nature of life in the crusader states. Outremer’s foundation did not bring about a widespread displacement of the Levant’s indigenous population. Instead, Frankish settlers governed polities whose populations reflected that region’s historic diversity–a mixture of Muslims, Jews and eastern Christians. This latter group included a bewildering number of Christian rites, among them Armenians, Greeks, Jacobites, Nestorians and Copts; as well as ‘Syrian’ (or Melkite) Christians, who were Greek Orthodox but spoke Arabic. The distribution and relative representation of these different peoples varied considerably across the crusader states because of established settlement patterns: with a preponderance of Armenians in the county of Edessa and Greeks in the principality of Antioch; and probably a higher proportion of Muslims in the kingdom of Jerusalem.
The Latins ruled over these native subjects as an elite, heavily outnumbered minority. Linguistic difference seems to have remained as a defining and dividing factor. The common spoken tongue adopted by the Latins was Old French (with Latin used in formal documentation) and, while some settlers did learn Arabic and other eastern languages like Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Hebrew, most did not. Many Franks resided in urban and/or coastal communities–and thus in relative isolation from the agrarian indigenous population. In rural inland settings, western lords generally lived in separate manor houses, largely cut off from their subjects, but the pragmatic necessity of sharing
scarce resources like water sometimes prompted increased contact. In general, small rural settlements tended to have a coherent devotional identity, so that one village might be made up of Muslims, another of Greeks (the same is true in parts of the Near East today). But large towns and cities were more multicultural.
So the Franks evidently ruled over, and in some cases lived among, a diverse range of ‘eastern’ peoples. Did the Latins stand aloof, or integrate themselves into this richly variegated setting? According to King Baldwin I’s chaplain Fulcher of Chartres, writing in the 1120s, they seem quickly to have undergone a high degree of acculturation:
Consider, I pray, and reflect how in our time God has transformed the Occident [West] into the Orient. For we who were Occidentals have become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian. He who was of Rheims or Chartres has now become a citizen of Tyre or Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth.
Admittedly, Fulcher was writing the equivalent of a recruitment manifesto; seeking to new lure new Latin settlers to the East. But even with this proviso in mind, his testimony seems to indicate openness to the idea of assimilation. Fulcher went on to describe another mode of cross-cultural contact–intermarriage. Unions between Franks and eastern Christian Greeks and Armenians were relatively commonplace, and sometimes served to cement political alliances. Queen Melisende of Jerusalem herself was a product of just such a marriage. Frankish men might also wed Muslim women who converted to Christianity. But marriages between Latins and Muslims seem to have been extremely rare. At a council held in Nablus in 1120, soon after the crisis caused by the Field of Blood, the Frankish hierarchy instituted a series of laws explicitly forbidding fraternisation. The punishments for sex between Christians and Muslims were severe: a man would be castrated; a consenting woman would have her nose cut off. These were the first such examples of encoded prohibition in the Latin world. The same batch of legislation also banned Muslims from wearing clothing ‘in the Frankish custom’. The import of these rulings is debatable, in part because any law can be read in a positive or negative light. Do the Nablus decrees reflect a world of intense segregation, where such acts would be unimaginable; or were these laws created to restrict what had become a common practice? Certainly, there is no evidence to indicate that these edicts were put into action, nor were they carried over into Outremer’s thirteenth-century law codes.
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Page 18
