God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Outremer, captivity provided a more peculiar school of languages; during his imprisonment in the 1160s, Raymond III of Tripoli learnt Arabic, probably not a unique pastime among long-stay prisoners. Others acquired Arabic out of curiosity, intellectual energy, political judgement or necessity. Reynald lord of Sidon (1171–1200), employed a Muslim language teacher, enjoyed religious debate and studied Arabic literature. Sufficiently fluent and adept to charm Saladin himself, Reynald used his linguistic skill to bamboozle the sultan into withdrawing from his stronghold at Beaufort in May 1189 and buy a year’s grace and good surrender terms for his castle. Later Reynald acted as a diplomat in negotiations with Saladin during the Third Crusade. Another Frankish noble who, according to Saladin’s associate and biographer Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad (1145–1234), spoke Arabic well was the effeminate Humphrey III of Toron, whose linguistic talent was in turn employed by Richard I of England in his negotiations with Saladin in 1191.⁴³ Both Reynald and Humphrey came from families long established in Outremer, their proficiency in Arabic, while striking Arabic chroniclers as sufficiently unusual to be worthy of note, perhaps reflecting a growing facility among the Latin rulers, surrounded as they were, even in their own households, by Arabic- speaking Christians as well as a few Muslims and Arabized Jews. Throughout the twelfth century, chance comments or descriptions of exchanges between Franks and Arabic-speaking neighbours, even at the level of spying, hint at a perhaps wide pool of linguists. The parallel may be with Anglo-Norman England, Sicily and Spain, where conquerors encountered resilient and sophisticated local languages of learning, literature, government and an indigenous social elite. Again, in the context of relations with Syrian Christians, the desire to communicate, even if not strictly imperative for political or administrative survival, appears unsurprising. Much the same could be said of other eastern elite languages. The charter recording the negotiations between the Hospitallers and Meletus the Syrian archbishop in Gaza and Bethgibelin of 1173 is bilingual in Latin and Greek. The Edessan nobleman Baldwin of Marasch, killed in a failed attempt to recapture Edessa in 1146, spoke fluent Armenian and employed an Armenian priest as his confessor.⁴⁴

Much the same eclecticism finds demonstration in other Latin responses to the Near East. In recent centuries the Frankish settlements in Outremer have attracted attention as precursors of later European expansion and colonialism in the region. More properly, they should be seen on their own terms and in their own time. Certain elements of Latin Outremer culture and society reflected western life, notably in the church, language and law, but overlaid with a profound provincialism. The radical intellectual, artistic and legal developments in western Europe in the twelfth century found only a thin echo in the east. Only two even relatively recent writers were represented in the library of Nazareth cathedral, the theologian Anselm of Canterbury and the canon lawyer Ivo of Chartres. There were few home-grown Outremer theologians or canon lawyers; no universities or Gothic cathedrals; the bureaucratic practices of the royal chancery appear crude in comparison with the papacy, Sicily or England; the coinage imitative and unsophisticated. Academically, Outremer existed in a backwater, distanced alike from west and east. With a few notable exceptions, such as biblical scholar and translator Aimery of Limoges, patriarch of Antioch, western immigrant clergy came from intellectual drawers below the top. Despite cathedral schools, equipped with modest, old-fashioned libraries, indigenous scholars were rare. Apart from the western-educated Jerusalemite William of Tyre, notable was Gerard of Nazareth, bishop of Lattakiah (1140–61), an anti-Greek polemicist and hagiographer. Vernacular literature similarly derived from the west; even the crusade Chanson des Chetifs, concerning the 1101 expeditions, which was written in the east, was produced for the immigrant Prince Raymond of Antioch (d. 1149).⁴⁵

The plastic arts were similarly dominated by immigrant artists and models, the most notable being Byzantine influence on decorative painting, illumination and mosaics and, in architecture, southern French and Italian styles. The exquisite illuminated Melisende Psalter of the 1130s or the programme of Greek mosaics with Latin inscriptions erected at the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem c.1170 for an English bishop, under joint patronage of Amalric I and Manuel I Comnenus place the art of Outremer in a cosmopolitan, Mediterranean context, distinctive by the coincidence of influences rather than any specific local originality. Here, the ravine between Latin and Greek proved as serious an obstacle to effective cultural symbiosis as that between Latin and Muslim. There is some debate over the existence of a stonemasons’ workshop in Jerusalem and the provenance of its artisans and skilled masons, European or indigenous. Were such skilled workers like the church hierarchy, constantly reinforced by western immigrants, or the lay aristocracy, increasingly local descendants of immigrants of previous generations? Both are plausible. One notable feature of Latin art in Outremer was provided by skill in working stone, either in sculpture, as in surviving capitals from Nazareth or the tomb of Baldwin V (d. 1186) in Jerusalem, or in the dressing of ashlar masonry of prestige buildings such as castles or churches, witnessed still in the clear, clean, sharp lines of the twelfth-century piers of Tortosa cathedral, the mighty walls of Saone castle in the principality of Antioch, or the cool certainty of the churches of St Anne in Jerusalem and at Abu Ghosh. How far the intensive labour involved in creating and erecting such stonework was conducted by slave labour, probably Muslim, is unknowable, although the contemporary account of the rebuilding of Saphet castle in northern Galilee from 1240 makes it clear that there the work was carried out by operarii et sclavii, workmen and slaves. Without the particular circumstances of Outremer’s large resource of Muslim slaves, noted with awe and horror by Ibn Jubayr in 1184, its physical monuments would have been less impressive.⁴⁶ This, at least, did not distinguish the Franks from their Near Eastern neighbours.

Living in Outremer did not leave Franks unmarked, even if only in superficial habits of daily existence. The memoirs of Usamah of Shaizar, whose stories are frequently too good to be precisely true, mentioned an agent of his dining in Antioch with a Greek friend at the house of a Frankish veteran of the First Crusade who employed an Egyptian cook, avoided Frankish dishes and never allowed pork under his roof.⁴⁷ Such fastidious conversion to Muslim habits was uncommon; westerners in Outremer may have adopted many local comforts, but their taste for pork appeared constant. Pork butchers traded at Tyre; swineherds tended their flocks in the countryside; surviving rubbish tips evince continued consumption. A privilege of William II of Sicily in 1168 allowed the monastery of St Mary of the Latins in Jerusalem to export from Messina without paying customs 200 sides of bacon, as well as 100 barrels of tunny fish and a large shipment of lambskin cloaks, rabbit-skins, ox-hides, linen and wool: winters are chilly in the hills of Judea.⁴⁸ Perhaps the greatest dietary impact of the east on the immigrants was castor sugar; exploitation of sugar cane, especially around Acre and Tyre, became a major industry in Outremer. In dress, acclimatization went with loose-fitting clothes, cool fabrics in the summer, furs in winter, protection of skin and armour from the sun by veils and surcoats; some Franks adopted the turban.⁴⁹ Most notable in contrast to the west, Franks in Outremer imitated the high standards of hygiene practised by locals. The lack of washing and ignorance of bathhouse culture and etiquette was just one source of hilarity and contempt for Usamah, on a par with what he regarded as the Franks’ lax sexual mores and poor treatment of women. Care was taken in providing water supplies for domestic use as well as irrigation, via aqueducts on the coastal plain and networks of cisterns in the arid uplands and desert. Even the Hospitaller castle at Belvoir contained a bathroom. Twelfth-century domestic architecture may rarely have reached such lavish proportions as at the Ibelin palace at Beirut, built in the first years of the thirteenth century, with its fountains, airy halls, mosaics, marble and long vistas inland and out to sea, a sort of Outremer Alhambra. However, even comparatively modest houses of the well-to-do in cities and substantial properties in the countryside boasted mosaic flooring, often with inlay of antique marble, painted plaster walls, the interiors probably furnished with carpets and textile hangings, the tables laid with pottery imports from overseas. Away from the cities, such pottery probably did not circulate, the habitations of the rural peasantry being basic in design and utensils, dependent on local produce and artefacts.

The rural economy of Outremer proved largely resistant to radical change by the western immigrants, who may nonetheless have imported their heavy ploughs to tame the thin soils of Palestine: they divided their plots of land into carrucates, as in the west, although similar land divisions and ploughs were familiar to the east. While not such a monopoly crop as in the west, cereals – wheat and barley – provided a central feature of village economy. Sesame and vegetables were planted as summer crops. The shortage of cereals apparent from imports in the early years of the century did not persist. Olives remained a staple, which would have made immigrants from southern Europe feel at home, although the orchards around the villages provided more exotic fruit. In many new villages, the central activity concentrated on winemaking.

Most evident is the degree to which the Franks in Outremer fitted into the Levantine economy, exporting dyes, luxury textiles, castor sugar and glassware and, increasingly, spices, while importing from Europe and Islamic neighbours such things as foodstuffs, metals, wood, and cotton. Outremer stimulated cross-Mediterranean commerce, in men (i.e. pilgrims) and goods. By the 1160s, one Genoese notary was recording a higher value (almost double) in trade to Syria than to Alexandria, the greatest entrepot of the eastern Mediterranean.⁵⁰ In return, the profits of commerce increasingly sustained the economy and finances