God's War: A New History of the Crusades

time were geared for warfare. Nobles resorted to violence as a matter of course and culture; in Outremer they behaved no differently. From the 1120s to the 1180s, much of the coastal plain northwards to Tripoli and Antioch, Judea, Samaria, western Galilee, even southern Transjordan was no less peaceful than many parts of western Europe. The imposition of precise military obligations on those who owned or held property, including farmers, did not indicate a state of perpetual ferment any more than similar arrangements did in the west. Although possibly sentimental and certainly propagandist, the impression of Outremer society left by Fulcher of Chartres, himself a settler first at Edessa then Jerusalem, while emphasizing the precarious lack of numbers, was of a growing civilian population successfully coming to terms with new surroundings. After the early days when settlers hung on the words of every visiting pilgrim in the hope of news from home, by the 1120s, Fulcher insisted not altogether plausibly, Jerusalemites had forgotten their homelands. Some had married local Syrian or Armenian Christians, even baptized Muslims, a statement corroborated by other sources. Others, once established, were joined by relatives from the west. Contact with indigenous communities was eased by the emergence of a level of lingua franca; sixty years after Fulcher wrote, the Spanish Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr recorded the word ‘bilghriyin’, an Arabic derivation from Romance words for pilgrim (peregrinus, Latin; pelerin, French; pellegrini, Italian). Usamah Ibn Munqidh of Shaizar recorded the Arabic version of the Frankish bourgeois (i.e. non-noble Franks): burjasi.⁵ Some settlers, universally described as Franks, learnt the local languages, although interpreters, dragomanni, were ubiquitous, even if their role was more involved in estate management than translation. In any case, monoglot Frank lords were not alone in this polyglot society; local Arab emirs thrived without learning Turkish. Fulcher contradicted the idea, commonly held by modern historians, that Outremer society was essentially a ‘crusader’ society. He implied (or hoped) that immigration was a constant process not restricted to veterans of military expeditions or pilgrims who stayed on. This too is borne out by documentary evidence. Around 1150, a cobbler from Chalons-sur-Marne emigrated to Jerusalem to avoid restrictive market dues.⁶ In Outremer itself secular and ecclesiastical entrepreneurs set out to attract settlers on to their estates by offering advantageous tenancy contracts; judging by their names, such offers were accepted by newcomers as well as established residents. While the aura of holiness cannot be ignored as an incentive for settlers to choose the Levant rather than areas of colonization nearer home, long-distance migration was a familiar feature of western and northern Europe. Not all settlers were religious zealots. Not all immigrants stayed. In the late 1150s, one tenant of the priory attached to the Holy Sepulchre gave up the struggle with alien and hostile agricultural conditions and abandoned his land and left. At about the same time an immigrant from Vezelay in Burgundy returned home after seven years in Outremer to find his wife had remarried; another, a married woman from the same region, who had gone east without her spouse, came back after some years to find him wed again.⁷

With settlement came accommodation. Baldwin III, described by William of Tyre as a vigorous Christian champion, waged generally successful war on his Egyptian and Turkish neighbours. This did not prevent him extending royal protection to a Muslim merchant from Tyre, Abu Ali Ibn Izz ad-Din, plying his trade with Egypt nor his funeral cortege being accompanied by mourning infidels from the hills of the interior. Such association could cause offence. William of Tyre evinced anger at the eminently sensible fashion promoted by noblemen’s wives of avoiding Latin physicians in favour of ‘Jews, Samaritans, Syrians and Saracens’ (i.e. Muslims), although the law allowed for foreign doctors, from Europe or ‘Painime’ (i.e. non-Christian lands), to receive episcopal licences to practise.⁸ Abroad, the unavoidable discrepancy between myth and reality earned the Jerusalemites hostile reactions. The acerbic and puritanical Anglo-Norman historian Ralph Niger was appalled at the quality of the ambassadors from the east who toured the capitals of Europe in search of aid in 1184/5; instead of austere heirs to the blessed Godfrey of Bouillon and Adhemar of Le Puy, which he might have imagined, Ralph was confronted in Paris by a parade of lavishly rich ostentation, led by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem in clouds of perfume. If not the gigolo of hostile memory, a brave and skilled politician if not a paragon of celibate virtue, Heraclius, originally from the Auvergne, reinforced the contempt some in the west felt for the poulains, as they derisively called those who lived in Outremer. (The easterners reciprocated in kind, calling westerners ‘sons of Hernaud’, a tag equally obscure but certainly very rude.) William of Tyre recorded western disenchantment with the Jerusalemites dating from the Second Crusade (1146–8), the fate of which still rankled in the 1180s. He shared the view that the lustrous giants of old had been succeeded by idler and more decadent successors, even if he stopped short of Ralph Niger’s fulminations against their ‘dissolutior’ way of life.⁹ Racial and national stereotypes were familiar features of twelfth-century writing; the Latins in the Holy Land were especially vulnerable by being on view to so many visitors whose expectations had been fuelled by the popular vernacular adventure stories of the First Crusade, the pieties of wishful churchmen and the Bible.

Nonetheless, residents in Outremer were careful to provide for many of these expectations. Building on the long tradition of pilgrimage and cult sites, they meticulously fashioned a new for old sacred geography to satisfy the flood of western pilgrims, for example excavating relics of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob at Hebron in 1119. The pilgrim John of Wurzburg in the late 1160s wrote of ‘new Holy Places newly built’. At times such enthusiasm led to complications; at least two sites near Jerusalem were claimed as biblical Emmaeus; confusion surrounded certain precise locations in the church of the Holy Sepulchre; and not all pilgrims swallowed uncritically the gaudier claims of their tour guides, such as that the Tower of David by the Jaffa Gate did actually date from the time of King David.¹⁰ In stamping a Latin religious as well as ecclesiastical mark on the Holy Land, the settlers did no more than follow a much repeated formula in remapping the sacred landscape, a process familiar from Titus and Hadrian in the first and second centuries, the Christians in fourth, the Muslims after 638, 1187 and 1291, and the Israelis after 1948. The twelfth-century Jerusalemites needed to attract and reassure pilgrims from whom as tourists they derived income and on whom the kings levied hefty taxes at the ports of entry (just as their Muslim predecessors had). They provided itineraries; physical protection (for example by the early Templars on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem); health care (in the Hospital of St John); guesthouses; new churches at shrines designed to suit the pilgrims’ needs, as with the new altars, chapels and church at the Holy Sepulchre itself; and encouragement for western shippers (mainly Italians) in their ports: at one time there could be as many as seventy pilgrim ships crowding the harbour at Acre, some capable of carrying hundreds of passengers each.¹¹ Central to the whole international industry were relics. A report by Gui de Blond, a monk of Grandmont, to the canons of St Junien at Condom in Gascony in the 1150s, authenticating the Holy Land relics he had distributed to religious houses across the region on his return from the east, listed their donors, including the ecclesiastical grandees of Jerusalem, the patriarch and the heads of the main religious houses associated with biblical sites, and other significant figures such as the bishop of Bethlehem, perhaps the worldly Englishman Ralph, and the abbot of the Greek monastery of St Catherine’s, Sinai. In Brother Gui’s treasure trove were fragments of the True Cross; earth mingled with the blood of Christ; hairs of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen; pieces of Christ’s cradle, the Virgin’s tomb and the stone where Christ prayed at Gethsemane; and mementoes of biblical incidents and characters, Apostles, John the Baptist, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Stephen Protomartyr, each a tangible reminder of the original mission that lay behind the Outremer settlements.¹²

A religious justification for conquest did not make Outremer different from Spain, Sicily or the Baltic. Its special holy status and the weight of pilgrimage did. The west adopted a proprietorial attitude to the Holy Land, even at a distance. Leaders of Outremer continually looked westwards for assistance, even if not a single twelfth- century century ruler of Jerusalem, as king or heir, visited the west, the furthest any reached being Amalric’s visit to pay homage to the Greek emperor Manuel I at Constantinople in 1171. Popes circulated news, usually alarmist or depressing; monastic and clerical chroniclers from all parts of western Christendom recorded eastern events. In high politics, rulers such as the kings of England and France publicly accepted their responsibility to sustain the Christian settlement, even if between 1149 and 1187 they did little enough about it. Great magnates visited, Thierry count of Flanders four times; some went to fight, as did Philip count of Flanders in 1177; others, like Henry the Lion duke of Saxony in 1172, to pray and endow. In return, the kingdom of Jerusalem paid Peter’s Pence to Rome and sent its brightest students to the west for education, such as William of Tyre, from a burgess family living in Jerusalem. Whereas, outside the faltering royal dynasty, the number of westerners claiming important secular lordships even by marriage declined in the second half of the century, the church in Outremer exhibited a tenacious dependence on immigrants. Of all the Latin bishops, archbishops and patriarchs in the kingdom of Jerusalem, only one can be identified as having been born in the east, the chronicler William, who was archbishop of Tyre 1175–86. Although this may have added to the colonial appearance of the Jerusalem church, it emphasizes the lack of available, well-educated sons of the nobility who crowded the episcopal benches of western Europe, although it