The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

  When they first captured cities like Antioch and Jerusalem and decided to settle in the Near East, the Latins had to develop the means to rule their new lordships by establishing administrative frameworks. In general, their approach was to import many practices from the West, while adopting and adapting some Levantine models. This process was probably driven by the pragmatic need rapidly to set up a functioning system, rather than any particular desire to embrace new forms of government. Regional considerations also influenced decisions. In the principality of Antioch, with its history of Greek rule, the main city official was a dux (duke), an institution drawn from a Byzantine template; in the kingdom of Jerusalem, a similar role was performed by a Frankish-style viscount.

  Eastern Christians certainly played some role in local and even regional government; so, too, on occasion, did Muslims. Most Muslim villages seem to have been represented by a ra’is–the equivalent of a headman–just as they had been under Turkish or Fatimid rule. Through a single reference, it is known that in 1181 the Muslim citizens of Tyre also had their own ra’is named Sadi. A similarly isolated piece of evidence indicates that in 1188 the Latin-held Syrian port of Jabala had a Muslim qadi (judge). It is impossible to gauge the true extent of this type of representation.84

  Perhaps the most fascinating source of evidence for the nature of life in Outremer is Usama ibn Munqidh’s Book of Contemplation, a collection of tales and anecdotes by a northern Syrian Arab nobleman who watched the war for the Holy Land unfold through the twelfth century. Usama’s text is crammed with direct comments on (and incidental details about) contact with the Franks and life in the crusader states. His interest was almost always in the bizarre and unusual, so the material he recorded has to be used with some caution; nonetheless, his work is an invaluable mine of information. On the question of orientalised Latins, he wrote: ‘There are some Franks who have become acclimatized and frequent the company of Muslims. These are better than those who have just arrived from their homelands, but they are the exception, and cannot be taken as typical.’ In the course of his life, Usama encountered Franks who had taken to eating Levantine food and others who frequented hammam (bathhouses) that were open to Latins and Muslims alike.

  One of the most surprising revelations to emerge from Usama’s writings is the normalised, almost day-to-day nature of his encounters with Franks. While some of these took place in the context of combat, many meetings were of an amicable and courteous form. This may well have been a function of Usama’s high social class, but it is clear that Latins did establish friendships with Muslims. In one case, Usama described how ‘a respected knight [in King Fulk’s army] grew to like my company and he became my constant companion, calling me “my brother”. Between us there are ties of amity and sociability.’ Nonetheless, there was an undertone to this tale, one that reverberated through many of the stories related in the Book of Contemplation: an inbred sense of Muslim cultural and intellectual superiority. In the case of his knightly friend, this came to the fore when the Frank offered to take Usama’s fourteen-year-old son with him back to Europe so that the boy could receive a proper education and ‘acquire reason’. Usama thought this preposterous proposition revealed ‘the Franks’ lack of intelligence’.

  Another seemingly unlikely association enjoyed by Usama ibn Munqidh was his amicable relationship with the Templars. According to Usama:

  When I went to visit the holy sites in Jerusalem, I would go in and make my way up to the Aqsa mosque, beside which stood a small mosque that the Franks had converted into a church. When I went into the Aqsa mosque–where the Templars, who are my friends, were–they would clear out that little mosque so that I could pray in it.

  Usama evidently had no difficulty either in making a pilgrimage to the Holy City or in finding a mosque in Frankish territory within which to perform his canonically mandated daily prayers. Did this right to worship extend to Muslims living under Latin rule; indeed, was Outremer’s non-Frankish population as a whole treated equitably, or subjected to oppression and abuse? One fact is clear: in the Latin East, the primary division was not between Christians and Muslims, but between Franks (that is to say, Latin Christians) and non-Franks (be they eastern Christian, Jewish or Muslim). This second group of subjected indigenous peoples was made up mostly of peasants and some merchants.85

  In legal terms, non-Franks were generally treated as a separate class: for serious breaches of law they were subject to the ‘Burgess’ court (just like non-noble Latins), and here Muslims were allowed to take oaths on the Koran; but civil cases came before the Cour de la Fonde (or Market Court), specifically instituted for non-Franks. The constitution of this body favoured eastern Christians because it was manned by a jury of two Franks and four Syrians, with no Muslim representation. Outremer’s Latin law codes also seem to have assigned harsher punishments to Muslim offenders.

  Much of the historical debate about the treatment of subjected Muslims has centred on the day-to-day issues of rights to worship and financial exploitation. In this regard, the evidence provided by the Iberian Muslim traveller and pilgrim Ibn Jubayr is enlightening. During a grand journey in the early 1180s that took in North Africa, Arabia, Iraq and Syria, Ibn Jubayr passed through the kingdom of Jerusalem, visiting Acre and Tyre before taking ship to Sicily. Of his journey through western Galilee he wrote:

  Our way lay through continuous farms and ordered settlements, whose inhabitants were all Muslims, living comfortably with the Franks. God protect us from such temptation. They surrender half their crops to the Franks at harvest time, and pay as well a poll-tax of one dinar and five qirat for each person. Other than that, they are not interfered with, save for a light tax on the fruits of trees. Their houses and all their effects are left to their full possession.

  This account seems to indicate that a large, sedentary Muslim population lived in relative peace within Latin Palestine, paying a per-capita levy (like the poll-tax imposed by Islamic rulers on their non-Muslim subjects) and a produce tax. Surviving evidence for the level of taxation imposed within Islamic polities around this same time suggests that Muslim peasants and farmers were no worse off living under Frankish Christian rule. In fact, Ibn Jubayr even suggested that Muslims were more likely to be treated with ‘justice’ by a ‘Frankish landlord’ and to suffer ‘injustice’ at the hands of ‘a landlord of [their] own faith’. This did not mean that he approved of peaceful coexistence or abject submission to Latin rule. At one point he noted that ‘there can be no excuse in the eyes of God for a Muslim to stay in any infidel county, save when passing through it’. But principled objections such as this actually lend further credence to the positive observations he chose to record.86

  Ibn Jubayr also reported that subjected Muslims had access to mosques and rights to prayer in Acre and Tyre. On the basis of this sliver of evidence, it is impossible to state categorically that all Muslims living in Outremer enjoyed similar devotional liberty. Broadly speaking, the most that can be suggested is that outnumbered Frankish settlers had a vested interest in keeping their native subjects content and in situ, and the conditions of life for indigenous eastern Christians and Muslims did not prompt widespread civil unrest or migration. By the contemporary standards of western Europe or the Muslim East, non-Franks living in the crusader states were probably not particularly oppressed, exploited or abused.87

  One mode of contact that undoubtedly brought together Levantine Franks and Muslims was trade. There were sure signs of vibrant commercial enterprise during the first hundred years of Latin settlement. Italian merchants from Venice, Pisa and Genoa played leading roles in this process, establishing enclaves in Outremer’s great ports and coastal cities and creating a complex network of trans-Mediterranean trade routes. These pulsing arteries of commerce, linking the Near East with the West, enabled Levantine products (such as sugar cane and olive oil) and precious goods from the Middle East and Asia to reach the markets of Europe. As yet, the bulk of trade flowing out of the Orient still passed through Egy
pt, but, even so, Outremer’s economic development proved extraordinarily lucrative: it paved the way for cities like Venice to become the leading mercantile powers of the Middle Ages; and through customs and levies, it also helped to stock the treasuries of Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem. This does not mean that the Latin settlements in the East should be regarded as exploitative European colonies. Their establishment and survival may have depended, in part, upon the likes of Genoa; but they were not set up, in the first instance, as economic ventures. Nor did they serve the interests of ‘western homelands’ as such, because the financial benefits accrued by the ‘state’ tended to stay in the East.

  The passage of goods from the Muslim world to the Mediterranean ports of the Frankish Levant was crucial not only to the Latins. It also became one of the linchpins of the wider Near Eastern economy: vital for the livelihoods of Muslim merchants plying the caravan routes to the East; critical to the incomes of Islam’s great cities, Aleppo and Damascus. These shared interests produced interdependency and promoted carefully regulated (and thus essentially ‘peaceful’) contact, even at times of heightened political and military conflict. In the end–even in the midst of holy war–trade was too important to be disrupted.

  Historians often present 1120 as a year of crisis and tension in the Levant. After all, the Field of Blood was fresh in the memory, and it was in this year that the council of Nablus prescribed harsh punishments for intercultural fraternisation. But in 1120 Baldwin II also instituted scything commercial tax cuts in Jerusalem. According to Fulcher of Chartres (who was then living in the Holy City), the king declared that ‘Christians as well as Saracens were to have freedom to come in or go out to sell whensoever and to whomsoever they wished.’ According to Muslim testimony, around the same time, Il-ghazi–the victor at the Field of Blood–abolished tolls in Aleppo and agreed terms of truce with the Franks. The degree of coordination between these two supposed enemies is impossible to determine, but both were obviously making strident attempts to stimulate trade. In fact, the tenor and scope of Latin–Muslim commercial contacts appear largely to have been unaffected by the rising tide of jihadi enthusiasm within Islam. Even Saladin, the ‘champion’ of the holy war, forged close links with the seaborne merchants of Italy when he became ruler of Muslim Egypt. Keen to promote profitable trade and to secure ready supplies of shipbuilding timber (which was difficult to source in North Africa), he endowed the Pisans with a protected commercial enclave in Alexandria in 1173.88

  Knowledge and culture

  Another form of exchange was also taking place in Outremer during the twelfth century: the transmission of Muslim and eastern Christian knowledge and culture among members of the Latin intellectual elite. The evidence for this form of ‘dialogue’ in Jerusalem is limited, but in Antioch, with its long-embedded traditions of scholasticism, the situation was quite different.89 The city and its environs were home to numerous eastern Christian monastic houses, predating the crusades and famed as centres of intellectual life. Here, some of the great minds of the Christian world gathered to study and translate texts on theology, philosophy, medicine and science that were written in languages such as Greek, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian. With the creation of the crusader states, Latin scholars naturally began to congregate in and around the city. In about 1114 the famous philosopher and translator Adelard of Bath visited, perhaps staying for two years. A decade later, Stephen of Pisa–the Latin treasurer of the Church of St Paul–was carrying out groundbreaking studies. In the course of the 1120s he produced some of the most important Latin translations ever to originate in the Levant. Stephen was most famous for his translation of al-Majusi’s Royal Book–an extraordinary compendium of medical lore–that later helped to advance knowledge in western Europe.90

  The extent to which this medical knowledge influenced actual practice in the Latin Levant is debatable. Usama ibn Munquidh wrote with relish about the peculiar and sometimes distinctly alarming techniques used by Frankish doctors. In one case a sick woman was diagnosed as having ‘a demon inside her head’. Usama apparently watched as the attending Latin physician first shaved her head and then ‘took a razor and made a cut in her head in the shape of a cross. He then peeled back the skin so that the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman died instantaneously.’ Usama concluded dryly: ‘I left, having learned about their medicine things I had never known before.’ Latin settlers in the crusader states seem to have recognised that Muslims and eastern Christians possessed advanced medical knowledge; and some, like the Frankish royal family in Jerusalem during the second half of the twelfth century, retained the services of non-Latin doctors. But there were some centres of excellence operated by western Christians, including the massive hospital in Jerusalem dedicated to St John and run by the Hospitaller Military Order.

  The artistic fusion of Melisende’s Psalter was echoed in buildings erected in the crusader states around this time, most famously in the massive reconstruction programme undertaken at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, during the reigns of Fulk and Melisende. When the Franks first conquered Palestine this church was in a state of some decay. Through the 1130s and 1140s the Latins rejuvenated this most sacred site, designing a suitably majestic structure that, for the first time, would enclose all the various shrines associated with Christ’s Passion: including the Calvary chapel (on the supposed site of his crucifixion) and his burial tomb or Sepulchre. By this time, the church was also closely associated with the Frankish crown rulers of Jerusalem, being the venue for coronations and the burial site of kings.

  In overall configuration, the new plan for the Holy Sepulchre adhered to the western European ‘Romanesque’ style of the early Middle Ages, and bore some similarity to other major Latin pilgrim churches in the West, including that found in Santiago de Compostela (north-western Spain). The ‘crusader’ church did have some distinctive features–including a large domed rotunda–but many of these peculiarities resulted from the building’s unique setting, and from its architects’ ambition to incorporate so many ‘holy places’ under one roof. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre standing today is still, broadly speaking, that of the twelfth century, but almost all of the interior ‘crusader’ decoration has been lost (as have the royal tombs). Of the extensive Latin mosaics only one remains–almost hidden on the ceiling, within the dim confines of the Calvary chapel–depicting Christ in Byzantine style. The main entryway to the building, through grand twinned portals on the south transept, was crowned by a pair of lavishly sculpted stone lintels: one, on the left, showing scenes from Jesus’ final days, including the Last Supper; the other, a complex geometric web of interwoven vine-scrolling, dotted with human and mythological figures. These lintels remained in situ until the 1920s, when they were removed to a nearby museum for preservation. Throughout, the sculpture on the south façade appears to incorporate Frankish, Greek, Syrian and Muslim influences.

  The new ‘crusader’ church was consecrated on 15 July 1149, exactly fifty years to the day after Jerusalem’s reconquest. This building set out to proclaim, honour and venerate the unique sanctity of the Holy Sepulchre–Christendom’s spiritual epicentre. It also stood as a bold declaration of Latin confidence, affirming the permanency of Frankish rule and the might of its royal dynasty; and as a monument that celebrated the achievements of the First Crusade, even as it bore splendid testimony to Outremer’s cultural diversity.91

  God’s land of faith and devotion

  The ‘crusader’ Church of the Holy Sepulchre was just one expression of the intense devotional reverence attached to Jerusalem, and to the Holy Land as a whole. For the Franks, this Levantine world–through which Christ himself had walked–was itself a sacred relic, where the air and earth were imbued with the numinous aura of God. It was inevitable that the religious monuments built in this hallowed land, and the expressions of faith carried out among its many holy places, would be coloured by an especially febrile piety. Latin religious life was also affected by the fact that many of the indigeno
us peoples of the Near East (including eastern Christians, Muslims and Jews) shared this sense of zealous adoration.

  Through the twelfth century, the most common western European visitors to Outremer were not crusaders; they were pilgrims. Thousands came from Latin Christendom, making landfall at ports like Acre–the human equivalent of the precious cargo shipped from east to west; others came from the likes of Russia and Greece. Some stayed as lay settlers or became monks, nuns or hermits. Only a few religious houses were erected on entirely undeveloped sites, but many disused locations were revitalised (such as the Benedictine convent of St Anne in Jerusalem), and Latin monasteries that pre-dated the crusades, like Notre-Dame de Josaphat (just outside the Holy City), enjoyed a massive boost in popularity and patronage.

  Acts of devotion also brought Franks into contact with the native inhabitants of the Levant. Some Latins sought to get closer to God by living ascetic lives of isolation in areas of wilderness like Mount Carmel (beside Haifa) and the Black Mountain (near Antioch); there they mingled in loose communities with Greek Orthodox hermits. One of the most remarkable examples of religious convergence occurred at the Convent of Our Lady at Saidnaya (about fifteen miles north of Damascus). This Greek Orthodox religious house, deep in Muslim territory, possessed a ‘miraculous’ icon of the Virgin Mary which had been transmuted from paint into flesh. Oil supposedly flowed from the icon’s breasts and this liquid was treasured for its incredible healing properties. Saidnaya was a well-established pilgrimage destination, popular with eastern Christians and Muslims (who revered Mary as the mother of the prophet Jesus). From the second half of the twelfth century onwards, it also was visited by a number of Latin pilgrims–some of whom took phials of the Virgin’s ‘miraculous’ oil back to Europe–and the shrine proved to be particularly popular among the Templars.