God's War: A New History of the Crusades

customs, possibly headmen (ra’is), perhaps even qadi (judges) remained largely untouched except for purposes of taxation and profit. As a consequence Franks in Outremer displayed a form of cultural blindness towards their Muslim subjects and neighbours. The Franks recognized the very different nature of the Turci, the Turks, the hostile forces governed by Turks as well as the Turkish armies themselves, beyond the frontiers who constituted the main threat to the western settlers’ survival. As a result of harassment, discrimination and limited economic opportunities, the indigenous Jewish communities in Outremer suffered sharp decline after 1099, although maintaining a presence in certain areas such as western Galilee. Although, like the Muslims, Jewish communities avoided active persecution after the initial murderous expulsions, and there is evidence of surviving rabbinical courts, in a predominantly Christian and Muslim landscape, the most prominent role for Jewish artisans appears to have been as dyers.²⁹

To portray Outremer as a haven of inter-communal, still less inter-faith, harmony would be absurd. The Muslims of Galilee in the 1180s called Baldwin IV the pig and his mother, Agnes of Courtenay, the sow.³⁰ There were sporadic Muslim rebellions in the principality of Antioch, where their treatment alternated between economic encouragement and extortion. While in some areas Muslims remained unmolested in others they fell under a harsh regime. Given a chance, as with the invasion of Palestine by Mawdud of Mosul in 1113 or Saladin in the 1180s, local Islamic communities aided invaders. Muslim slaves, including women in shackles, were a common sight. The massacre of all non-Franks at Tripoli in 1152 regardless of religion exposed an element of racial tension that embraced all non-Franks, particularly likely, perhaps, in crowded cities. Fulcher of Chartres expressed distaste for black Africans he encountered near the Dead Sea in 1100, ‘despising them as if they were no more than sea-weed’.³¹ Anecdotal evidence noted the intolerance of boorish new arrivals towards any fraternization with Islam, but William of Tyre’s disapproval of fashionable Arab medicine points to a more general cultural unease, even if, unlike Norman Sicily, there were few, if any, anti-Muslim riots. As most indigenous peoples in the kingdom of Jerusalem, whatever their religion, spoke Arabic, the formal confessional solidarity could be overlaid by cultural distinction. Syrian Christians and Muslim converts could rise in Latin society, not least in the royal household, yet, beside any religious and ethnic discrimination or tolerance, social status imposed further barriers. With the exception of the Armenians of northern Syria, there were few non-Latin aristocrats within the orbit of Latin Outremer. Although patchy vestiges of a Graeco-Syrian episcopal structure remained, apart from the heads of Greek and Syrian religious houses, the higher reaches of the church were colonized by Latins. Muslim nobles had fled the early Frankish conquests. Prominent local Christians and Muslim converts tended to be professionals – civil servants, merchants, doctors – with only a few significant landowners, perhaps including the family of Muisse Arrabit, a vassal of Hugh of Ibelin around 1160.³² While conversion as a prerequisite for marriage appears to have been common, Baldwin I’s success may have prompted a number of more superior Muslim conversions. One possibly fanciful account records one such convert as governor of Jerusalem in Baldwin’s absence in 1112, while a member of his entourage who received the lordship of Hebron in 1107 was known as Walter cognomine Mahumet. Other Muslim converts probably joined the ranks of largely Syrian Christian light cavalry in the armies of Outremer, the so-called Turcopoles. However, in general terms social and political as well as religious or ethnic barriers precluded integrated multiculturalism.

Western Christians possessed no monopoly on inter-communal friction and suspicion. One of the odder myths concerning the middle ages is of intolerant Christendom corrupting tolerant Islam. Islamic lawyers at the time of the crusades warned against fraternization, preferring clear segregation. An eleventh-century Baghdad legist, al-Shirazi, urged discriminatory dress on Christians and Jews. The Spanish Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr intellectually disapproved of Muslims willingly living under Christian rule, behaviour for which he insisted ‘there can be no excuse in the eyes of God’.³³ Conversely, just as non-Muslim communities survived under Islam, so non- Christians lived unfree but largely unmolested in Frankish Outremer. After the early massacres, displacements and expulsions of Muslims and Jews from conquered cities, coexistence rather than either integration or persecution prevailed.

No neat picture of inter-communal relations emerges from Outremer. In cities where Latin and Syrian Christians lived cheek by jowl with Muslims, accommodation was apparent. At Acre, where the two faiths shared a converted mosque as well as a suburban shrine, Muslim visitors were treated fairly and efficiently. Mosques still operated openly in Tyre and elsewhere. Muslims of substance were able to travel through the hinterland of Outremer. Although banned from living there, in 1120 Arab traders were encouraged by Baldwin II to sell cereals and vegetables in Jerusalem. In the 1180s, according to Ibn Jubayr, two of the dominant commercial entrepreneurs along the coast of Outremer were Muslim merchants from north Africa based in Damascus. In wide tracts of the countryside Muslim villagers farmed the land under Frankish ownership, paying dues in cash and kind, the lack of active resentment evinced by their political docility probably connected with the general absence of labour services required on Frankish estates. Yet some landlords exacted harsher control; Baldwin of Ibelin in the 1150s increased the poll tax fourfold and insisted on a right of corporal punishment on his Muslim tenants in villages south-west of Nablus. The general tax of 1183 almost certainly fell more harshly on the peasantry than on any other group, although there was formal equality of assessment and exaction between the religious communities. Throughout Outremer, Muslim shrines and cemeteries fell into disrepair and out of use. To visiting co-religionists old men could inaccurately recount as folk memories the epic struggles of the loss of the coastal ports early in the century, but without the presence or investment of a Muslim social or intellectual elite, popular Islamic culture stagnated.³⁴

Where communities coincided, relations could be volatile. Nablus and its neighbourhood presented dramatic contrasts. Situated on the edge of the frontier zone, vulnerable to attacks and pillage, such as the raid from Damascus in 1137, it formed part of the royal domain until granted to Balian of Ibelin c.1177. The immediate vicinity contained Christian villages with Frankish peasants surrounded by a largely non-Christian population. In one street of the town, a Frankish wine merchant’s shop stood opposite an upmarket Muslim guesthouse. A local Muslim highwaywoman exhibited a penchant for waylaying and murdering Franks, a habit possibly connected with her once having been married to one, whom she also killed. Another stylish Nablus woman, the Frank Paschia de Riveri, wife of the local draper, achieved notoriety as the alleged mistress of the Patriarch Heraclius, earning herself the nickname Madame la Patriarchesse and a wardrobe stuffed with silks and precious jewels. Although there were sufficient Franks settled there to have a Frankish court (a Cour des Bourgeois), the local Samaritan sect was permitted to continue its annual Passover ritual, which attracted devotees from all over the Near East, a tolerance of an active non-Christian religious centre unique within Christendom. The Frankish viscount, the king’s representative in the town, allowed an Arab emir to witness a sanguinary trial by battle between two Franks over one party’s alleged complicity in setting Muslim thieves on to his opponent’s property. A bullying Frankish landlord drove a group of devout Muslims of the Hanbali sect to evacuate their villages during the 1150s and 1160s: before that they had enjoyed full Friday prayers and sermons. In the combination of inter- and infra-communal violence, lawlessness, indifference, practical coexistence, unresolved tensions and exaggerated cultural behaviour, these stories recall the flavour of other competitive frontiers, such as the American ‘Wild’ West.³⁵

Nablus sat on the edge of a frontier zone. Elsewhere in Outremer practical coexistence largely prevailed, even with Muslims. Religious divides could be crossed by conversion; the laws of Jerusalem insisted that former Muslim slaves, if genuine converts, became freedmen. Amongst the nobility, periods of peace, treaties or truces could lead to temporarily amicable contacts. After the treaty that ended the long and bitter siege of Tyre in 1124, the inhabitants emerged to fraternize with their conquerors and inspect the elaborate siege engines used against them. At such times of truce the loquacious raconteur Usamah Ibn-Munqidh of Shaizar, who claimed friends among the Frankish aristocracy, managed to visit his social equals throughout Outremer, even in Antioch and Jerusalem, with impunity. On one occasion Usamah managed, so he later boasted, to secure damages for the theft of part of his sheep flocks from King Fulk against Renier de Brus, lord of Baniyas. Renier’s own wife, when captive in Muslim hands in the 1130s, on her own admission ‘had not satisfactorily preserved the sanctity of the marriage bed’, prompting her husband to divorce her on her release. Amity remained superficial. During a truce between Antioch and Izz al-Din of Shaizar in 1108, Tancred of Antioch befriended a Kurdish knight called Hasanun, who had joined in horse races with the Franks; in 1110, in renewed hostilities, Hasanun was captured and tortured, Tancred personally ordering that the young man’s right eye be gouged out despite apparently having given Hasanun his personal guarantee of safety. Another Antiochene, Robert FitzFulk the Leper, struck up an alliance if not friendship with the atabeg of Damascus, Tughtegin, in 1115, although his friend later struck off his head rather than ransom him.³⁶