God's War: A New History of the Crusades

elite. In the countryside, in addition to these essential skilled crafts, the sources reveal Latins as blacksmiths; drovers and herdsmen of camels, goats and, distinctively, pigs; gardeners; specialists in grain or vines; butchers; and bakers. Some may have arrived in the train of invading armies, but like Constantine, a poor cobbler from Chalons, or John, a mason from Vendome, not all, probably not most.²²

Some settlers would not have become permanent residents and the maintenance of national distinctions apparent in pilgrims’ accounts point to a transient urban population, or, like expatriate communities through the ages, groups constantly reinforced in their regional differences by visitors from home. As with all towns in the west, the cities of Outremer housed a constantly changing cosmopolitan population. Where the Italian maritime communes received privileged quarters within ports such as Acre, Tripoli and Tyre, their permanent population of residents in these trading stations remained small between the spring and autumn ‘passages’. With the reduction of the power of the crown and the physical size of the Latin principalities in the thirteenth century, and the commensurately greater dependence on commerce, the Italians became powerful autonomous political forces. Despite their privileges, there is not much evidence for this in the twelfth century.

Whether rural or urban, the significance of the continued stream or trickle of non-noble settlement was reflected in the kingdom’s laws. By 1110, the non-noble Frankish settler, known as the bourgeois, appeared as a recognizable social group; by the early 1130s they were allowed to hold their own courts, the cour des bourgeois, which operated in cities or urban and village communities in the countryside. Under Baldwin III, directed at pilgrims and the poor, in practice new arrivals, the assise du coup apparent exempted them from the customary legal requirement for sworn bona fides in a court of law. Newcomers would be unlikely to know anybody, yet were not immune to the usual exigencies of bad luck and the law. The presence of a substantial population of Latin non-noble freemen finds recognition in the number of sergeants whose service was claimed by the kings of Jerusalem in emergencies from towns and the extensive lands of churches and monasteries, as well as in Amalric I’s assise sur la ligece asserting his right to demand fealty from freemen in fiefs held directly of the crown. Clearly, not all such men, as used to be thought, lived in towns and cities; the unfortunate young men from Magna Mahomeria slaughtered at Gaza testify to that.²³

So, too, do the various attempts by Latin landlords to entice Frankish settlers to their land and other documentary and archaeological indications of immigrant rural communities. The king and his agents appear active in the plain of Acre in the 1140s to 1160s, offering competitive terms to attract settlers. The priory of the Holy Sepulchre established an extensive network of Frankish villages north of Jerusalem, often on what would now be called ‘green field’ sites, with distinctive advantageous tenancy agreements. The Hospitallers attracted Frankish settlers to Bethgibelin after 1136 by offering good tenancy terms with formal legal protection of rights which, in the 1160s, they further altered to ease restrictions on tenants’ ability to buy and sell their holdings. The order also promoted Frankish settlement on the plain of Sharon. Such entrepreneurial initiatives were common accomplices to political settlement. Frankish customs had been established early at Ramla-Lydda, probably by the Latin bishop, and in the lordship of Caesarea, where the settlers before 1123 included a number of Lombards, possibly connected with the Italians who had helped capture the town in 1101. The pattern of settlement in the train of conquest – ‘the settler’s plough followed the horse of the conqueror’²⁴ – continued in the enclaves established in the south of the kingdom and around Ascalon such as Ibelin, Darum and Gaza, or in the fortified villages surrounding the great castles of Oultrejordain at Montreal and Kerak. These communities all contained some Franks, even if, as in the Hospitaller holdings near Ascalon or on the plain of Sharon, they lived alongside Syrian Christians. Elsewhere, Latin lords attempted to maximize their profits by encouraging settlement by locals rather than Frankish immigrants: in the 1150s Baldwin, son of Ulric, viscount of Nablus, sponsored the cultivation of new land by Muslims as well as Syrian Christians.²⁵

The distribution of Latin settlement was uneven across Outremer. In the kingdom of Jerusalem, beyond the cities, farming villages, fortified or not, comprising recent immigrants from Europe as well as Latins already established in Outremer, were to be found in western Galilee, on the coastal plains from north of Acre southwards through the plain of Sharon to Ramla, Bethgibelin, Daron and the plains around Ascalon; in Transjordan at Montreal and Kerak; south of Jerusalem between Bethlehem and Hebron; around Sebaste north-west of Nablus; and in lower Galilee. The most densely settled region lay north of Jerusalem towards Sinjil (St Gilles) in southern Samaria; it was probably the first to be systematically colonized. The density of occupation in the region near Jerusalem by the 1160s prevented Duke Bela of Hungary finding suitable property to buy.²⁶ However, elsewhere, in eastern Galilee, central Samaria, northern Transjordan, settlement did not follow lordship, whole areas of the kingdom being populated almost exclusively by Muslims and Jews. This patchwork pattern may be explained by the Franks’ tendency to settle almost exclusively in areas already dominated by local Christians.²⁷ In a number of places, Latin and Syrian Christians – probably in Palestine Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox, Maronites or Jacobites – may have shared villages and sites. Baldwin II encouraged Christians from Transjordan to settle in Judea. At a number of villages, as in the great churches of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem and the Nativity in Bethlehem, Latin and Syrian Christians possibly shared liturgical as well as demographic and economic space. Thus is some parts of Outremer, Frankish influence in and on the countryside was negligible, in others considerable and significant in the same way that empty Christian Jerusalem contrasted with cosmopolitan Acre, the large Muslim populations of Tyre and Tripoli or Greek and Armenian Antioch.

MELTING POT OR APARTHEID?

This raises the question posed by many twentieth-century historians of the extent, if any, to which the Latin settlers mixed with the indigenous people to create a cohesive heterogeneous society or one divided by a form of legal, religious, racial and social apartheid. Given the nature of twelfth-century society, contact between communities was inevitable. Outremer was hardly alone in Christendom in containing polyglot neighbours. Communal diversity was a characteristic of the middle ages, not least in the twelfth century: in the British Isles Celts and English, English and French, Flemish settled in Pembroke, Jews establishing quarters in commercial centres; in Sicily Greek, Muslim, Norman, Lombard; the old Jewish communities of the Rhineland; the German expansion into Slavic territory across the Elbe; the competing German and Scandinavian aggression towards the Balts and other pagans; in Spain the long interaction of Christians, Muslims and Jews. Outremer’s distinction lay in the extent of the ethnic and religious fragmentation, a feature of the Near East. Nur al-Din, ruler of Aleppo and conqueror of Muslim Syria, was a Turk who surrounded himself with Kurds ruling Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians. In Egypt the Shi’ite Fatimid caliphs employed Christian Copts and Armenians as secretaries, generals and administrators; the powerful twelfth-century Vizier Bahram (1135–7), called Saif al- Islam, Sword of Islam, was an Armenian Christian from Turbessel (Tell Bashir) in northern Syria; his brother was Armenian patriarch of Egypt. One of the Kurdish Saladin’s physicians was a Jew.²⁸

In Outremer, the Frankish invaders and immigrants discriminated between the several distinct racial and religious groups in language and law. Closest to the ruling class, and often married into it, were the Armenian Christians, mainly in the north. The Greeks, i.e. Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, appear mainly as an urban community, periodically discriminated against politically and ecclesiastically in Antioch and elsewhere. The category of Suriani, Syrians, included Christians speaking Arabic and possibly Syriac, or using Syriac as a liturgical language, the Franks often not bothering to distinguish between Orthodox Melkites, Nestorians (who emphasized the humanity as opposed to divinity of Christ) and Monophysite Jacobites (who emphasized the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity) in Palestine and Lebanese Monothelete Maronites. However, local Christians were not confused, at least in the descriptive terms of chronicles, charters and the law courts, with Muslims. The settled Muslim population were known as Saraceni; the Bedouin, most but not all Muslim, could be distinguished by the description of Arabi, probably because of their wanderings on the desert edges of Outremer towards what the Franks rather vaguely called Arabia. Whereas local Christians, even if excluded from authority within the ecclesiastical hierarchy, lived within the pale of Frankish law, in the market courts, for instance, as neighbours, as property owners, as legitimate spouses, as priests, monks and worshippers, Muslims did not. The Council of Nablus in 1120, even if its draconian moral legislation acted mainly as a propagandist gesture, overtly discriminated against Muslims, forbidding any sexual congress with them (although the punishments for transgressors were equitable regardless of religion) and imposing dress discrimination. In reversal of the Islamic tax regime, Muslims now paid the poll tax instead of Christians. However, where it suited the Franks, for example on the frontier between northern Galilee and Damascus, cooperation in agricultural exploitation existed between Christians and Muslim; in some places, Muslim communities, their laws,