Download PDF | (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 147) Krijnie Ciggaar_ M. Metcalf - East and West in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean I_ Antioch from the Byzantine Reconquest until the End of the Crusader Principality, Volume 1, 2006.
416 Pages
FOREWORD
Claude Cahen’s book on crusader Antioch cast a long shadow. That is something that can happen, when an outstandingly thorough monograph seemingly leaves little more to be said. Decades may pass, before scholars begin to feel an impulse to return to the topic. Meanwhile, the whole style of a field of enquiry may gradually move on. The long shadow fell even on the Wisconsin History of the Crusades, which still seeks, essentially, to stitch the written sources together into traditional narrative history, only to do it better. The oriental sources have been rather more fully exploited; and the inter-connectedness of events in Antioch, in Tripoli, and in the Latin Kingdom has been brought much more into the foreground. But topics such as architecture, or coins, are optional extras, treated separately and not much integrated into the whole picture. They could indeed be called ‘the icing on the cake’ of the Wisconsin History.
A year-by-year, step-by-step analysis of political and military developments is indeed the essential groundwork of most medieval history. The sheer cussedness of events too often had its part in determining decisions. It was ever the task of diplomacy to cope with difficulties that did not come singly. But high politics was not the whole of life; and charters and texts are not the only witnesses to that life. Even if politicians are inclined to ride rough-shod over it, there is such a thing as society. Social and economic life has its own momentum and its own continuity. Ordinary people collectively, over the generations, work out how best to contend with the constraints of the places where they live, and how to make a good life for themselves. The moral and spiritual aspects of life deserve historical study, and impose new historical disciplines. Crusades studies have become more inter-disciplinary, and less monolithic.
That new style is fully reflected in the range and variety of the papers printed in this volume. They arise from a meeting held in May 2003 in the agreeable setting of the castle of Hernen, the Netherlands, the seat of the A.A. Bredius Foundation, as part of a series of symposiums devoted to cultural and other contacts between East and West, in the time of the Crusader States. Our symposium was tightly focussed on Antioch — but with a difference. The limiting dates were 969 and 1268. In other words, we included the Byzantine duchy of Antioch in our considerations, as well as the crusader principality which superseded it. Comparisons and contrasts between the two are potentially a very useful source of new ideas and insights, especially perhaps for the historians of the crusades.
Professor Cheynet provided the prologue to our discussions, by giving us a historian’s general assessment of the Byzantine duchy, from the reconquest of the city until the First Crusade (or until the slightly earlier Seljuq occupation). The boundaries of the Frankish state which Bohemond wrested from the Empire corresponded closely with those of the eleventh-century duchy, at least for the first few decades, and until Cilician Armenia was lost to it. It was an enormous domain.
Evidence from the Byzantine period, in particular the evidence of lead seals, offers a forceful reminder to historians of the crusades, of the vast extent and also of the geographical complexity of the area. Antioch was by no means a solitary metropolis set in rural or mountainous landscape. The city itself was indeed the greatest fortress of the region, with a large garrison, but the duchy comprised more than a dozen themes, each with its strategos and other administrative officials, and each with welldefended fortifications. There were also numerous minor fortresses. The political and administrative character of the duchy was very much coloured by its military aspects. And the need for military preparedness, in face of the Fatimid threat to the duchy’s territories, did not disappear overnight when Antioch passed under Frankish control. Urbanism, of a sort, no doubt remained widespread, even if the sources from the crusader period offer fewer specific details of the numerous smaller places.
Having established the context, Professor Cheynet went on to examine the governance of Antioch. Here, the change from being a province or group of provinces of a great empire, to becoming an independent state means that there are fewer obvious analogies for the crusader historian. Under the duchy, in both the civil and the ecclesiastical sphere, choices were made by the emperor, with particular care taken in the appointment of the doux, and of the strategoi who headed the administration of their themes. At a slightly lower level, there was much more reliance on the local aristocracy — who were familiar with the realities of power in their districts. Somewhat similar practices applied in church appointments, where the situation was complicated by religious diversity. The balance between the monophysites, adhering to the Jacobite patriarchate (a majority of the duchy’s Christian population), and the orthodox Chalcedonians of the Melkite patriarchate was, for the most part, peaceable. The hold of the central government over its Syrian frontier regions was thus secure enough as regards internal loyalties: Antioch was not a special case in threatening dissidence or separatism.
Dr Saminsky’s paper, also, focusses on the period of the Byzantine duchy, and specifically on the second half of the eleventh century. He succeeds in attributing to Antioch and its vicinity a number of Greek illuminated manuscripts which, although they were once thought to be from the imperial scriptorium in Constantinople, and to be from the mid- or late thirteenth century (!), have in recent decades been reattributed to Cyprus or Palestine. This stylistic grouping grew in the hands of various scholars until it included almost everything known from the period — more than a hundred manuscripts, and yet only three of them offered any written evidence to support the possibility of a Cypriot or Palestinian origin. The consensus had begun to seem vaguely ridiculous. Dr Saminsky pricks the bubble, pointing out that the great city of Antioch remained, rather implausibly, a blank on this map. A big part of the problem is that both the scribes, and the maestri who illuminated the manuscripts (not necessarily one and the same) could be peripatetic. Constantinopolitan artists might travel to and work in the provinces, where their ceuvre might be admired and imitated; and likewise a local artist might move to another province, taking his skills and his recognizable style with him, and working there too. This degree of latitude made almost any broad hypothesis unfalsifiable. Incontrovertible proof of the place of origin of a manuscript can, in these circumstances, come only from an informative colophon — of which there are extremely few.
Dr Saminsky anchors his proof of Antiochene origins by beginning, not from Greek, but from some Georgian manuscripts with colophons which connect them with monastic houses in the vicinity of Antioch. He explains that there was a Greco-Georgian cultural environment there precisely because, from the days of the pentarchy, the Georgian church had been dependent on the patriarchate of Antioch, and because the link was revived after 969, when the idea of the pentarchy was renewed. In the eleventh century, a number of Georgian monasteries grew up around the city of Antioch; and also there were Georgian brethren in the Greek Monastery of St Symeon the Younger. It was within these various Syrian monasteries that a Georgian literary tradition developed.
Dr Saminsky then proceeds to the delicate and difficult task of the arthistorical assessment of similarities of style and content, between the Georgian manuscripts with colophons, and various Greek manuscripts (without). This is noble work, fit only for an experienced scholar with a trained eye. Dr Saminsky identifies a distinctive style in the Alaverdi Gospel, which was written in 1054, and, step by step, he reaches out, more and more widely, to agglomerate a group of Greek manuscripts which can be considered Antiochene. The miniatures in them exemplify local tradition, which was independent and yet open to Constantinopolitan influences. It may perhaps be traced through as far as the beginning of the thirteenth century, although its heyday was in the late eleventh.
Professor Weitenberg is also concerned with the interaction of Armenian, Syrian, and other monastic communities in the Black Mountain and in the area northwards as far as Maras. Building on Thierry’s Répertoire des monastéres, he subjects the Armenian sources, wherever they mention monasteries in the Black Mountain area, to critical scrutiny, relying especially on colophons.
Monks of different ethnic origins might live in the same religious house, and their friendship is part of the context for cultural contacts. But for us, the translation of texts from one language into another, e.g. from Greek or Syrian into Armenian, is a crucial form of cultural interaction, about which we can hope to have evidence. Professor Weitenberg cites examples of the enthusiasm of monks who succeeded in locating a copy of some rare and cherished work, and undertaking its translation. Nersés of Lampron (1153/4-1198) even translated the Rule of St Benedict, and Gregory’s Life of Benedict, from the Latin, with the help of a Frankish monk in Antioch. Professor Weitenberg also draws attention to two ‘genealogies’ of Armenian scholars and ecclesiastics, i.e. learned men and the pupils who, all their lives, remembered with gratitude their “fathers in scholarship’.
The schism which, unhealed for many centuries, left Antioch with two patriarchs (or, after the Latin conquest, three) meant that part of the Arabic-speaking population of Syria belonged to a church using an Aramaic liturgy, monophysite rather than Chalcedonian in faith, and owing allegiance to a patriarch who was exiled from the imperial city. These West Syrian or Syriac Orthodox Christians, otherwise referred to as Jacobites, are studied by Dr Dorothea Weltecke. She offers a reconsideration of the view expressed by Claude Cahen that, having no nobility and having no military or administrative élite, they were essentially among the lower classes, namely the small people in the cities and the peasants in the countryside. Their only leaders were their clergy. Westemers had some difficulty in distinguishing the Arabic-speaking Orthodox or Melkite Suriani from the Syriac Jacobites, and their confusion carries over to some extent into the sources (which are in any case exiguous). Dr Weltecke gives a more nuanced interpretation, showing that although the Syriac Orthodox were only a minor constituent in the popluation of the city of Antioch, they seem elsewhere in the principality, e.g. in Adana, to have been preponderant in the community. Something similar was true in Tripoli. She also reopens the discussion of the church of Mor Barsawmé, consecrated in 1156, pointing out the shifting alliances between Latin Christians, Armenians, and the disadvantaged Syrians.
Professor Aerts draws attention to a passage in the Taktikon of the Melkite theologian, Nikon of the Black Mountain, who may actually have witnessed the presence of the First Crusade at Antioch. As he died in c. 1100, this is just possible. Although Nikon does not refer specifically to their coming, he has a story about the Georgians: Symeon the Thaumaturge saw crusaders from the East, who came to his monastery. The word used, otavpo@dpot, normally refers to crusaders from the West. In another AGyoc he uses the phrase, ‘since the people of the Franks are on campaign’. It is possible that this reflects an awareness of the First Crusade.
Among the ecclesiastical changes which followed upon the end of the Empire was a very big reduction in the number of dioceses, when a hierarchy using the Latin rite was imposed in place of the existing rite of the patriarchate of Antioch. Professor Hamilton reminds us that within the provinces and dioceses of the patriarchate there had been 153 cathedral churches — the same number, it was noted at the time, as the miraculous draft of fishes described in John’s gospel. Jacques de Vitry commented that because there were so many Syrian and Greek bishops, and because they were impoverished, the Latins grouped the sees together, subjecting numerous of the existing cathedral churches and cities to a single new cathedral. Professor Hamilton, in a comprehensive historical survey of the creation of the new sees, detects more exactly an ulterior motive on the part of the Frankish rulers. They expected their bishops to be men of action as well as men of God, helping to govern and to defend the principality — by arms if need be. To that end the new, larger dioceses sometimes had a strategic or defensive location. Thus Artah (not previously a diocesan see) guarded the route from Aleppo towards Antioch; and Maras guarded the northern approaches. The Latin bishops were endowed with resources accordingly.
Within half a century, the new ideas had been implemented, and the area belonging to the historic patriarchate (shorn of those sees, namely Tyre, Beirut, Sidon, and Acre, which now lay within the Latin Kingdom) had been divided between only seventeen dioceses. Even that number may give an exaggerated idea, as the much smaller total covered Cilicia, Edessa, and the Frankish county of Tripoli. By the middle of the twelfth century, Cilicia and Edessa had been lost, and the number of sees within the principality of Antioch itself was small indeed.
Professor Hamilton points out that there was a need also for considerable numbers of assistant clergy. Able priests recruited in the West could hope for rapid preferment, especially if they were kinsmen of bishops or nobles already in the East. Each of the new cathedrals required an archdeacon and a chapter of canons. Thus there was a strong demand, especially in the first three or four decades, for suitable men “duly qualified to serve God in church and state’. This demand was augmented by the need to find priests of the Western rite to serve Latin churches in the cities, and others to be chaplains to the ruler and to all the various secular lords.
Dr Clara ten Hacken offers a translation of part of an Arabic manuscript, written in various stages in the period c. 1160-1220 by various writers, but now generally referred to as a History of the Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighbouring Countries, by Abi al-Makarim. The sections dealing with Antioch and its vicinity (which she translates) contain a miscellany of information referring to events in the history of the city, and to its churches, relics, fortifications, and gateways, and water supply. Much of the information refers to biblical and to classical times. Dr Ten Hacken provides a critical study of the manuscript sources and their study by various scholars.
Professor Burgtorf reviews the available evidence for the activity of the military orders within the principality. More has survived about the Hospitallers than about the Templars (whose central archives no longer exist). It is clear, nevertheless, that both the major orders were intricately engaged in the region. The Hospitallers were first on the scene, having already acquired much property in the principality by 1118. In 1127 they were exempted from all taxation on their holdings. The Templars were involved in the protection of the northern borders from as early as the 1130s. The castle of Gaston was assigned to them in 1153, and they also came to hold other fortresses in the (northerly) Amanus Mountains. The Hospitallers were not granted the castle of Margat until 1187, when the defeat at Hattin opened a new chapter in the history of the principality.
Professor Burgtorf shows that the Templar commander of the land of Antioch was an official of extremely high status within the order as a whole — much grander than the Hospitaller commander of Antioch, who was out-ranked (after 1187) by the castellan of Margat. New and improved lists of the holders of the chief offices refer mostly to the thirteenth century. In the power struggle between Bohemond IV and Raymond-Roupen, the latter favoured the Hospitallers, and was hostile to the Templars, whose northern fortresses stood between him and Antioch. Gaston fell into his hands in c. 1188, and was not recovered by the Templars until c. 1215.
Dr Susan Edgington addresses the question how the cosmopolitan intellectual life of Antioch could have persisted through the transfer of sovereignty from Byzantines to Franks, given the wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants of the city, of all races, during its capture in 1098, when 10,000 are reputed to have been massacred. Already at the time of the earthquake of 1114, Antioch had recovered to the extent that Latins, Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and (no doubt) Jews were living there. The Norman dynasty which ruled this multicultural diversity had come to the East familiar already with Greeks, Muslims, and Latins living together in Sicily.
The Genoese, the Amalfitans, and the Pisans all had quarters in Antioch. Nor were their interests purely mercantile. Pisa, in particular, mediated translations into Latin of Arabic and Greek texts on medicine, theology, and politics. By the early thirteenth century, however, Antioch had ceased to be a centre of international scholarship.
Dr Edgington draws attention to a string of disruptive natural events in the 1170s and 1180s which certainly damaged the city’s prosperity, and which may have been a turning-point, stunting its cosmopolitan culture. There was another major earthquake; a four-year famine at the beginning of the 1170s; a severe drought in 1176; a major flood in 1178; fire in 1179; and disease. Evidence to show whether Antioch was much able to recover from all these calamities is lacking. Political events, however, were soon to deliver even more damaging blows. In the thirteenth century, Antioch remained linguistically diverse, but from its earlier high status (which had been made possible by prosperity) it sank into cultural isolation.
Dr Krijnie Ciggaar draws on the memoirs of Usamah ibn Munqidh, written in the third quarter of the twelfth century or thereabouts, to illustrate ways in which the Franks of the first generation, who had by then lived in Outremer for a good many years, had become accustomed to an Eastern life-style (suited to the climate), and accordingly were socially more acceptable to Muslims than brash newcomers from the West tended to be. Usamah emphasizes the avoidance of pork, and general cleanliness in food preparation.
There are also stories about Western knights visiting the bathhouse accompanied by their daughters. Mixed bathing was scandalous to the Muslims, as crossing boundaries of sexual propriety. For the Byzantine population, use of the public baths (of which there were many in Antioch) was a normal and pleasurable part of everyday life, as it was also for the Muslims, for whom there were additionally religious reasons for bathing. Visitors were favourably impressed to know that the patriarch of Antioch each year arranged for lepers to be bathed, and himself washed their hair. Other mighty lords performed similar humble services for the poor. These were mitigating acts. The Franks in general, particularly the newly-arrived Franks, were perceived as ‘the great unwashed’; but with time they tended to adopt Syrian ways, and came to appreciate frequent baths, especially warm, scented baths, as a pleasant luxury.
Dr Ciggaar also explores the social significance of beards, which were wom by both Muslims and (Orthodox) Christians in Syria. The Western tradition, by contrast, was to be clean-shaven. This was widely seen as a mark of ethnic identity and (in the eyes of the Greek Orthodox) a deplorable custom. The early rulers of Frankish Antioch, coming from a multicultural background in Norman Sicily, wore beards. In other ways, too, they had assimilated Byzantine social customs.
Professor Metcalf examines half-a-dozen episodes in the monetary history of Antioch, spanning the entire period 969-1268. His concern is to put the numismatic evidence for monetary history into a long perspective, particularly as regards the scale of the currency. He argues that, when it was reconquered in 969, Antioch was not, and did not quickly become, a thriving province. The volume of use of copper (i.e. lowvalue) coinage built up only gradually over several decades. There seems, moreover, to have been some sort of recession in the 1040s and 1050s.
The strange coins issued by the Seljuks during their occupation of Antioch (1085-1098) were restricted, so far as we know, to a low-value copper denomination — as were the earliest issues of the Frankish princes, up until the 1120s. It seems that the Seljuk coppers continued to circulate after the Frankish conquest, for they are regularly found in Corinth.
Prince Raymond of Poitiers introduced Western-style silver deniers. This implies the availability of silver stocks, and raises the question of their source. The date when the deniers were first struck is debateable, but it is likely to have been well before the arrival of King Louis VII in Antioch in 1148 (with silver in his baggage-train?). The long series of issues of silver or billon deniers was continued throughout the reign of Bohemond III, and into that of Bohemond IV. This Antiochene coinage was a ‘strong’ currency, minted in very large quantities, and remarkably free from debasement or weight-reduction. That, and the (long) agestructure of the known hoards, are evidence of flourishing inter-regional trade, and of a favourable balance of payments. The defeat at the Homs of Hattin (1187) inflicted severe damage on the monetary economy.
Unlike the Latin Kingdom and the county of Tripoli, Antioch seems not to have taken any part in the minting of crusader gold bezants. That may have been partly because of a general tendency towards monometallism. Bezants minted further south would no doubt have been acceptable currency within the principality. Evidence that they were used there could, in the nature of the case, come only from hoards discovered in Antiochene territory. There are few such; but the Lattaqiyah hoard, concealed very soon after 1187, is an important example, which may still hold some secrets about the monetary affairs of Antioch.
Dr Tasha Vorderstrasse gives a thorough bibliographical survey of the crusader archaeology of Antioch and of eight or nine sites in the surrounding region, including the port of al-Mina, the crusaders’ Port St Symeon. She rightly emphasizes the paucity of the evidence, other than that of Port St Symeon ware, and of the finds of coins (which she reserves for future publication). The proportions of Port St Symeon ware vary widely from site to site, but unfortunately the archaeological record is obscure, e.g. because the sherds were not counted in categories and because only some of the material was retained. It seems that the inhabitants of the Antioch region also used imported Byzantine pottery, and also Muslim-produced Raqga frit ware, particularly a variety with a turquoise-blue glaze. While admittedly the crusader period was not the main focus of interest of the major excavations conducted before 1939, much of it presents a sorry tale of insufficient recording for the results to be incorporated into any ongoing consensus. One must hope that the topic will be better served in the future.
Dr Martine Meuwese’s article provides a coda to the study of crusader Antioch, in the sense that the beautiful manuscript illustrations which she discusses were part of the thirteenth and fourteenth-century myth of the crusades. The siege and capture of Antioch during the First Crusade was an act of derring-do which seized and held the imagination of the ruling classes. There are two manuscripts of William of Tyre’s Histoire d’Outremer, which were illuminated at Acre in 1286-7 (that is, already nearly two hundred years after the event which they depict), showing the conquest. Such manuscripts were popular in northern France. Other copies were written and illustrated there in the fourteenth century, specifically in Picardy. The Western manuscripts show knights climbing ladders in order to scale the walls of Antioch. The illustrations use heraldry (which was in its infancy in 1098) as a pictorial device to identify crusaders and Saracens. In Flemish manuscripts prominence is given to Robert, count of Flanders, who bears the arms of the county, which would have been instantly recognizable to the users of the manuscript. Godfrey of Bouillon is similarly identified (for the readers) by the arms, gules, a fess vert. Godfrey did not in fact play an important part in the siege, but he was of local interest to the Flemish miniaturist. Like Old Testament stories, such gesta Dei were imagined in modern dress by people to whom the past was not accessible in the sophisticated ways that it is to us.
Dr Meuwese draws attention to a considerably earlier pictorial record in the West, of the siege of Antioch. Incidents in the First Crusade were used as one of the themes of a stained glass window in Suger’s basilica of Saint-Denis, made perhaps in the mid-1140s when the Second Crusade was being promoted — but in any case before 1151. Separate roundels showed the defeat of Suleiman either at Dorylaeum or at Antioch; the siege of Antioch; and the crusaders fighting against Corbohan on the plains of Antioch.
The history of Antioch even found a place in English decorative art. King Henry III, for whom it was a favourite subject, in 1250 caused one of his painters to borrow from the Templars a manuscript describing the events of the First Crusade, to be used as a source for scenes with which to decorate the queen’s room (later known as the ‘Antioch chamber’) in Westminster Palace. In the following year, 1251, he commissioned the painting of three more ‘Antioch chambers’ in other royal residences. Again, historical accuracy seems to us to have been treated cavalierly, as the scenes are made to refer to King Richard I (Coeur-de-Lion) and the Third Crusade.
The topics discussed at our symposium were extremely varied. One theme which emerged quite strongly from a consideration of several of them together was that the year 1187 marked the beginning of the end of Antioch’s glorious days. Until then, the city and the principality were resilient, recovering well enough from the Frankish conquest, the earthquake of 1114, and the decimation of the ruling class in June 1149. After Hattin, the military orders shouldered the burden as best they could, but the fabric of society was disrupted. Until then, for example, wealth had trickled down from those who earned it, to allow monasteries to produce precious manuscripts. We see how one error of military judgement, the decision of a single hour, could result in a catastrophe and could precipitate cultural decline — although of course in the background there was a long geopolitical struggle to control Antioch’s hinterland, and the routes by which wealth and prosperity flowed into the city. That wealth was the prize which justified (and supported) all the expense on fortifications and on military preparedness. The merchant classes who earned the wealth by their day-to-day exertions are largely invisible to the historian, but without them (like Charlemagne without Mahomet) the pre-eminence of Antioch is inconceivable.
At the time, and indeed still in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, derring-do and gung-ho patriotism appeared to be estimable qualities, and were unquestioned. Modern historians, with more god-like eyes, can see a clash of cultures of long duration. The resonances for all of us today will not escape the reader.
D.M. METCALF
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