God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Such stories of aristocratic exchange, largely based on the gilded self-serving memories of the rather unsuccessful Usamah of Shaizar, feature an underlying alienation between the Latins and their Muslim neighbours. Relations between Franks and the Muslim subjects were inescapable. While direct evidence of Muslim self- government is sparse, it is likely that Muslim village life continued much as before, but with heavier tax burdens, the relationship of Latin lords and their Muslim subjects remaining essentially fiscal. There was little overt attempt at conversion; those few Franks who bothered to learn Arabic probably did so to satisfy cultural and aesthetic interests or to converse with their Syrian Christian servants and tenants rather than establish contacts across the communal divide. Muslims existed outside the scope of most Frankish law, as Syrian Christians did not, or were lumped together in opposition to all Christians. Thus the assise des bourgeois recorded severe penalties for Muslim violence against Christians but not vice versa.³⁷ Any concept of an integrated society in Outremer that includes the Muslim community lacks evidence. Contact was administrative or personal, not communal or cultural, either at second or third hand, through village headmen or estate managers, bailiffs and interpreters, or through employment of individuals, such as doctors, possibly a few scribes or eccentric patronage such as that bestowed on Hamdan Ibn Abd al-Rahim by Alan of al-Atharib. The relationship never strayed from that of exploiting lord and regulated subject.

On the other hand, relations with local Christians assumed a very different guise. In some areas, notably Antioch, the institutional power of local churches could not be ignored. Despite visceral anti-Greek ecclesiastical prejudice and discrimination, as revealed in the work of Gerald of Nazareth (d. 1161), in the kingdom of Jerusalem, the ancient Greek abbey of St Sabas enjoyed the patronage of the Latin monarchs, three of whom married Orthodox princesses (Baldwin II, Baldwin III and Amalric I). Greek imperial funds helped rebuild the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Greek clergy were restored to the Holy Sepulchre by Baldwin I after the fiasco of the failure of the regular Easter miracle of the Holy Fire under Latin auspices in 1101, the annual ritual on Easter eve when Holy Fire is supposed to descend from heaven to light the priests’ candles in the edicule of the Holy Sepulchre. The newcomers evidently had not learnt the knack. An archbishop of the Syrian and Greek communities in Gaza and Bethgibelin negotiated successfully on their behalf with the Hospitaller landlords in 1173 and was even admitted as a confrater of the order. Latin and eastern Christians lived together in city and country; in places they worshipped together. Arabic-speaking Syrian Christians occupied important positions as scribes and customs officers, as they did under Muslim rule. Legal rights of local religious groups could be sustained in Frankish courts even, perhaps exceptionally, against Franks. In 1137/8, the Lorraine crusader Godfrey of Asch, a companion of Godfrey of Bouillon, on the plea of the Armenian catholicus of Jerusalem finally gained his freedom from captivity in Egypt, where he had languished for thirty-five years. Long presumed dead by his compatriots, his Jerusalem lands had reverted to the local Jacobite (i.e. monophysite) community, the pre-1099 owners. On his release, Godfrey claimed his property back, presumably in the High Court, but, on the intervention of Queen Melisende, had to be satisfied with compensation of 300 besants (gold pieces), leaving the Jacobites in possession.³⁸

Integration progressed only so far. Beneath the Frankish legal system, the Syrians held their own courts for petty crimes and civil cases, but serious criminal cases were heard in solely Frankish courts, the cour des bourgeois. Even in the cour de la fronde, possessing wide civil and limited criminal jurisdiction at Acre and probably in other city ports, where Syrians were represented as jurors, the president was the Frankish viscount. Surviving witness lists of Latin land charters include very few Syrians. Mixed Latin–Syrian marriages, entirely legal and possibly common, may be disguised behind Frankish names, however, contact, cooperation and acceptance did not mean cultural integration. The Arabic-speaking Syrian Christian communities persisted in sharp contrast to the Franks in language, law and culture even though they cohabited the same cities and rural areas. The numbers of immigrants were too small and the duration of their dominance too short for much effective cultural or social symbiosis to occur: too many to be naturalized, too few to transform.

Yet the Franks left their mark and were, in turn, marked by their environment. As elsewhere in areas of conquest and frontiers, the immigrants in Outremer expressed both the necessities of settlement and the requirements of lordship through building. The most obvious statement by the new order rose, if slowly, at the church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, but across Outremer the political, religious and economic needs of the new rulers were met by extensive construction work from grand projects such as the sophisticated concentric Hospitaller castle at Belvoir overlooking the Jordan, to town and village churches, rural fortified towers, manor houses and hall houses, residential terraces for agricultural workers in new settlements such as Magna Mahomeria, to roads, water mills, olive and wine presses and sugar-processing plants. Identifying archaeological remains as specifically Frankish rather than built during the period of Frankish occupation is, in the absence of documentary support, hazardous, yet an extensive Frankish building programme, in the countryside as well as in towns and castles, is apparent in perhaps over 200 locations. Given the hundreds of castle sites identified in post-Conquest England, such an enterprise is unsurprising, even if the building materials, mainly stone, cost more in time, money and men than the plentiful wood of the west. Frankish building in the countryside, including farmhouses and towers for seigneurial and bailiff habitation, as at the Red Tower (al Burj al-Ahmar) on the plain of Sharon, and the planned villages of Frankish farmers and labourers, such as Parva Mahomeria (Qubaiyba) north-west of Jerusalem, indicate a far from entirely absentee landowning aristocracy or exclusively urban bourgeois population.³⁹ The tangible remains of the Frankish settlements, alongside the records of a vibrant land market at all levels of rural society, display a level of economic viability never fully matched by political or demographic security.

The impression of Frankish society in Outremer as an alien intruder incapable of being grafted on to indigenous culture has been derived, where not from modern politicized analogies of empire, colonization, racial separate development and competing political and religious communities, from the seeming indifference of the Latins to assume a local Palestinian or Syrian identity. Part of this image relies on concentrating on the lack of contact or co-operation between the Franks and the Muslims to the exclusion of Franco-Syrian Christian association. We are told few Franks learnt local languages: ‘these people speak nothing but Frankish; we do not understand what they say,’ snapped Usamah, blithely ignoring his own admitted inability to speak Turkish.⁴⁰ Yet communication between linguistic groups was both essential and constant, in commerce, agriculture, estate management, taxation and justice, most obviously in the multi-ethnic cour de la fronde. At Qaqun (Caco) on the plain of Sharon, a mixed settlement of Franks, Syrian Christians and possibly some Muslims, the lord of Caesarea was represented fiscally and judicially by a viscount who owed him the service of one knight and probably used the fort in the village when he visited. However, administrative contact with the Syrian villagers was maintained by the dragoman, literally interpreter, one of whom, called Peter, sold to Walter I of Caesarea land worth 200 besants in 1146. Clearly of some means, Peter, like other dragomans, probably owed his lord a duty of service, conceived in western idiom as a sergeant of a rear-vassal of the lord.⁴¹ In turn, it is possible the Arabic-speaking local Christians had their own headman to negotiate for them. While the lords of Caesarea authorized charters directly with local Syrians, the dragoman acted as the mediator. With Frankish tenants, the lord’s interests rested separately with his agent, the dispensator. Thus parallel systems of administration could exist within a mixed Christian village. Physically, too, while Franks settled in areas of previous Christian settlement, it is hard to identify displacement. Rather, the Franks created new villages, resettled abandoned sites or located themselves beside existing Christian villages, even where they shared the local church. The picture emerges of linked, cooperating communities, not fully integrated or assimilated into each other, with only limited need for shared language, a model familiar in contemporary cities and on other frontiers. In such circumstances, maintenance of identity did not imply intolerant exclusivity.

Inevitably, some Franks did learn local languages as well as more generally becoming acculturated with the Near East in diet, dress, hygiene, economic activity and accommodation. A smattering of Arabic for judicial, diplomatic or administrative purposes may have been commonplace; at least one western knight, William de Preaux, managed to learn the Arabic for king, malik, during the Third Crusade, using it to divert the attention of Turkish troops away from Richard I during an ambush near Jaffa in 1191.⁴² Learning to speak, even read, other languages came as less of a burden to twelfth-century western aristocrats than to some of their modern successors. In addition to his own local vernacular, an educated nobleman would have daily confronted Latin (if only in church or at prayers) and probably numerous other vernaculars, if only orally. Henry II of England was fluent in northern French and Latin, with a smattering of other western European languages; his son Richard I cracked jokes in Latin and recited verse in northern and southern French. To rule England or Sicily, Norman rulers or their officials needed to be trilingual; Bohemund spoke Greek. Among the Frankish nobility in