Download PDF | Christopher MacEvitt - The Crusades and the Christian World of the East_ Rough Tolerance (The Middle Ages Series) -University of Pennsylvania Press (2007).
281 Pages
Introduction
A few months after the capture of Antioch (3June 1098), the leaders of the First Crusade wrote a letter to Pope Urban II, on whose urging they had embarked on their long, strange journey across Europe and Byzantium. The rigors of nearly two years on the march, the exhausting eight-month siege of Antioch, the euphoria of its capture, the miraculous discovery of the relic of the Holy Lance, and the astonishing victory over yet another Turkish army had left the crusaders dazed and overwhelmed. The last straw came on 1 August with the death of Adhemar of LePuy, the papal representative accompanying the crusaders.
His passing left the crusaders without a guiding and unifying voice. Confused and lacking direction, the crusaders hoped a letter to Urban might elicit further guidance. After summarizing the recent events of the crusade, the letter-writers urged that Urban himself come to Antioch, which was, as they noted, the first seat of St. Peter, and that the pope then lead the crusaders on to Jerusalem. Why? The crusaders confessed that they had found some challenges beyond their military skills: “we have subdued the Turks and the pagans,” they wrote to Urban, “but the heretics, Greeks and Armenians, Syrians and Jacobites, we have not been able to overcome (expugnare).”1 What the crusaders wanted to do to the “heretics” is unclear: kill them as they had the Turkish inhabitants of Antioch? Expel them from the lands the crusaders had conquered? Or perhaps the crusaders’ frustration arose because they did not know how to confront an issue as complex and unexpected as eastern Christianity. For the modern historian, the letter is a glimpse at a moment of possibility, as the army’s leaders gathered in Antioch on that late summer’s day to consider the direction of their journey. At Antioch, the crusaders stood at the edge of the Byzantine world, a world different from their own yet more familiar than the great sweep of Islamic lands that lay open to the south and east of them. The letter from Antioch hints at their anxiety on leaving the familiar to venture into the unknown. Yet their anxiety circled not so much around the Turks or Islam; for as the writers confidently asserted, “we have subdued the Turks and the pagans.”
Rather, the crusaders were alarmed by the religious diversity of the Christian world of the Middle East. Turks and Muslims they were prepared for, but for Armenians, Greeks, and Jacobites they were not. The letter raises a series of questions. How would the Franks approach local Christians? What language would they use to frame their relationship? Would the Franks perceive them as a conquered community like the Muslims, or would they see them as fellow Christians, or simply as an occupied subordinate people? These inquiries have provoked strikingly divergent answers from historians of the crusades and of the Frankish East. In one sense, the harsh attitude displayed in the crusader letter from Antioch conforms to what many would expect from a group of soldiers who believed that killing Muslims was a meritorious act—it simply extended that persecutory and violent agenda to another foreign and suspect group, indigenous Christians. Scholars and educated readers alike have seen the twelfthcentury Middle East as an era dominated by crusade and jihad: a world in which conflict between Muslims and western (Latin Catholic) Christians not only expressed itself in a series of battles fought in the name of religious ideology, but formed a fundamental part of the way individuals and communities defined themselves and others. For such Christian and Muslim leaders as Bernard of Clairvaux, Nur al-Din, or Richard the Lion-heart, this may well have been true. But for communities living in the Levant, both indigenous and Frankish, crusade and jihad played little role in the way they understood or experienced the world around them. Rather, individuals and communities formed their identity through a network of families, civic relationships, professional ties, and associations with churches, shrines, and local holy places. Taken together, such identities often crossed religious boundaries. This book examines the intersection of two Christian worlds, that of western Christians (or Franks, as they were generally known in the Middle East) who conquered Syria and Palestine as part of the First Crusade and remained to settle in the occupied lands, and that of eastern Christians over whom they ruled.
The society that emerged at that intersection has been characterized as colonial and European, or as creole and orientalized; both descriptions rely on a dichotomized understanding of interreligious relations as either oppressive or tolerant. Instead, I argue for a mode of social interaction between local Christians and the Franks in twelfth-century Syria and Palestine that I call “rough tolerance,” which encompassed conflict and oppression yet allowed multiple religious communities to coexist in a religiously charged land. The Twelfth-Century Middle East Over the period of a century (1090–1190), the Middle East underwent dramatic political change. So rapid were these changes that one Armenian chronicler believed that contemporary events “were showing us change, decay, and disappearance of what exists and revealing to us the instability of mankind on earth.”2 The north Syrian town of Marash, for example, in the course of the century fell under the rule of Armenians, Byzantines, Franks, the Seljuk Turks of Rum, and the Zengids of Mosul—in essence every major power in the Levant. This sense of instability and change underlies much of the cultural permeability of twelfth-century Syria and Palestine.
Political Change in the Levant Two moments capture the dramatic changes the twelfth century brought. The first moment comes in the 1160s, when Franks, Byzantines, and Turks vied for political dominance. The Franks controlled the Mediterranean seacoast, having captured the last Muslim-held port, Ascalon, in 1153. The Byzantines, under emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143–80), routinely led large armies to northern Syria to ensure their dominance there, while the Turkish leader Nur al-Din (1146–74), building on the victories of his father Zengi (1127–46), brought the important cities of Mosul, Aleppo, and Damascus under one ruler for the first time in sixty years. Notably, two of these powers were Christian. All eyes were turned to Fatimid Egypt, which, while economically dynamic and fertile, was paralyzed by political conflict. It seemed possible that any of the three could gain control of Egypt and thereby dominate the Middle East. Within twenty years, that came to pass. Nur alDin’s successor, Salah al-Din (1174–93), successfully conquered both Egypt and the Frankish principalities; never again would a Christian power based in the Levant threaten Muslim hegemony. Yet some seventy years earlier (1090), a very different future seemed imminent. In the eyes of many, the days of a united Islamic world had returned, this time under Turkish leadership. The Byzantines had retreated to the very walls of Constantinople as Seljuk armies marched as far as the Aegean andthe Bosporus.
Even Christians of the Middle East celebrated the seeming renewal of the ancient Islamic empire under Seljuk leadership. The Armenian chronicler Matthew of Edessa (c. 1070–c. 1136) eulogized the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah (1072–92) by remembering “there was no land which did not submit to his rule.” But his authority was not based on cruel conquest, for “he showed a fatherly affection for all the inhabitants of the lands and so gained control of many towns and regions without resistance.”3 Iran was the center of Turkish authority; Baghdad was ruled by the caliphs, and Palestine and Syria were just the dusty borderlands of a vast empire sweeping almost to India. Malik-Shah died in 1092, and was the last ruler to wield authority from “the Caspian to the Mediterranean” for more than two hundred years.
The First Crusade The difference between 1090 and the 1160s lies in the fragmentation of Islamic authority and the emergence of Frankish principalities in the Levant. The two are intimately linked; the First Crusade (1096–99) did not cause the collapse of the Seljuk empire, but took advantage of the squabbles of MalikShah’s successors by conquering Antioch and Jerusalem. The First Crusade struck participants and (Christian) commentators as nothing short of miraculous. Matthew of Edessa marveled that “God protected the army as he had the children of Israel in the past.”4 Its assorted armies traveled from western Europe through Hungary and the Balkan territories of the Byzantine empire to arrive in Constantinople in various groups during the winter and spring of 1097, a journey of roughly 2000 miles which in itself was a notable achievement. With their departure from Constantinople, the crusade armies left Christian lands, and for the next two years faced the daunting challenge of surviving in Muslim-controlled territory. The crusaders first captured Nicaea (19 June 1097), capital of the recently established Seljuk sultanate of Rum, and then defeated two Turkish armies while crossing central Anatolia. The crusade nearly ended during the grueling eight-month siege of Antioch in Syria, but the city was captured by ruse on 3 June 1098. The crusaders then immediately had to defend the city against another Turkish army sent from Mosul. It was soon after this that the crusaders sought guidance by letter from Urban II. After recouping their strength in Antioch for several months, the army then marched to their final destination of Jerusalem, capturing it on 15 July 1099 with a bloody massacre.
The survival of the army through three years’march, innumerable sieges, and pitched battles with several large Turkish armies seemed possible only by virtue of divine intervention. With the conquest of Jerusalem, the crusade ended, and the vows the crusaders had taken were fulfilled. But they were left with the question: what should be done with the cities and territories the crusaders had conquered from Antioch to Jerusalem? Rather than relinquishing the lands they conquered to Byzantium, as they had done with Nicaea and other lands in Anatolia, the crusaders established the kingdom of Jerusalem, with Godfrey of Bouillon as its ruler, with the remaining crusaders (the majority having died or returned to Europe on completion of their vows) as its new political and military elite. Bohemund of Taranto, a Norman from southern Italy, had claimed Antioch as his own before its capture, and Godfrey’s brother Baldwin of Boulogne already ruled Edessa. The last Frankish principality to be created was the county of Tripoli, carved out of the Syrian coast by the Provençal nobleman Raymond of St. Gilles and his descendants after an eight-year siege of the city of Tripoli.
These four polities—the county of Edessa, principality of Antioch, county of Tripoli and kingdom of Jerusalem—are often referred to as the “crusader states,” an appellation that more accurately describes how they were established than how they survived. Though their protection was the motivation for crusades during the next two centuries, the princes who ruled them were not crusaders. They had conquered Jerusalem and fulfilled their vows. Their concerns were no longer about their own salvation or protection of the holy places, but those of ruling elites everywhere—to defend their lands against any threat, Muslim or Christian, and to augment and solidify their authority. While the societies they ruled are commonly discussed in books that take “the crusades” as their subject (as this book itself does), the history of the Frankish Levant only intersected with the history of the crusades proper at brief moments. For extended periods, they did not coincide at all.
Geography of the Frankish Levant While the First Crusade may have been motivated by the religious significance of Jerusalem, the rest of the cities and regions the crusaders conquered were chosen for more prosaic, strategic reasons. The Franks did not, for example, occupy the barren Sinai peninsula, even though it contained the mountain where God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments and Moses saw the glory of God. Instead, the Franks seized the fertile lands of theMediterranean coast, as well as strategic highlands and areas where Christians made up the majority of the population. At their greatest extent, the lands of the Franks covered the region now occupied by Israel, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the western border area of Jordan, Lebanon, the seacoast of Syria, and the southeastern coast of Turkey, as well the TurkishSyrian borderlands stretching halfway to Iraq.5
The area covered a variety of landscapes, from the oases of the Dead Sea to the rich farmlands of the Euphrates valley, and a large proportion of it was productive land. The crusaders first entered the area from the north, descending out of the steep river valleys of the Taurus Mountains, the chain that stretches from the Mediterranean coast inland to the Caucasus Mountains and divides the highlands of Anatolia—windswept and cold in the winter, hot and dry in the summer— from the flatter hills and plains of Syria. Their destination was the city of Antioch, which sat in the valley of the Orontes river, well-watered and humid, marshy in places but allowing cultivation of sugarcane, wheat, and barley.6 To the north were the Syrian Gates, the pass through the Amanus Mountains to Cilicia, while the Orontes valley itself led east and then south, sheltering the cities of Apamea, Hama, and Homs, only the first of which ever came under Frankish rule. To the east of the Orontes lay the Syrian limestone massif, a series of hills which gradually flattened out into the dry plains around Aleppo, which themselves continued as a great flat desert stretching east to Mesopotamia. The limestone hills marked the edge of Frankish power; towns and fortresses such as ‘Imm and Harim allowed the Franks to overlook and at times to dominate the plains, but rarely to occupy them.
To the north, however, the Franks moved much further inland, following the foothills of the Taurus Mountains east, which were home to the county of Edessa, the only entirely land-bound Frankish principality. The county had no natural boundaries to the east; similar topography and climate continued east to the black-walled city of Amida on the Tigris River and even farther, as the Taurus Mountains ran headlong into the Zagros chain, which makes up the backbone of Persia. Occupying land on both sides of the Euphrates, the county covered the rich farmlands along the river, as well as the foothills of the Taurus, which, while dry, allowed the cultivation of pistachios, walnuts, and, in the western hills, olives. For the most part, however, the Franks preferred proximity to the coast. Not only did sea travel provide the quickest route to Latin Europe, but seaborne trade was an ever increasingly important part of the Frankish economy, as the navies from the commercial cities of Italy—Pisa, Genoa, and Venice—largely dominated the eastern Mediterranean sea routes, and allowed the establishment of mercantile colonies in many of the Frankish-controlled seaports. To the south of Antioch, the county of Tripoli stretched approximately eighty-five miles along the Levantine coast, and extended some thirty miles to the east into the Lebanon Mountains, which run northsouth, parallel to the seacoast. Between the sea and the mountains was a rich but narrow coastal plain, well watered, which supported a variety of agricultural products.
The kingdom of Jerusalem was the largest of the Frankish principalities, stretching from Beirut in the north to the Sinai desert in the south. The Lebanon Mountains rumbled to an end in the fertile rolling hills of the Galilee, a region sandwiched in the thirty-four miles between the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee. The kingdom was largely defined by the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River to the east, which flowed south from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. Southward, the valley through which it flowed was deep, hot, and increasingly dry, though punctuated with fertile oases. Across the river to the east rose the high hills of biblical Gilead. These rocky hills, almost cliffs, are the eastern edge of the great geological scar running all the way to East Africa, better known as the Great Rift Valley. On their heights at the southern end of the Dead Sea, the Franks built the great castle of Kerak (Krak des Moabites), which watched over the merchants and pilgrims traveling from Muslim-ruled Damascus south to Mecca and Cairo. On the other side of the Jordan rose the Judean hills in which sat Jerusalem; the hills gradually gave way to the coastal plain, which was at its widest here. To the south was the Negev Desert, over which the Franks exercised only sporadic authority.
Religious Communities of the Levant The Syrian and Palestinian lands conquered by the crusaders and their successors were home to a wide variety of religious communities. It is commonplace to discuss the diversity of the Middle East in terms of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, yet even this simplifies its religious complexity. Each group can (and should) be considered as several different, often competing, communities. Three separate Christian communities constituted the bulk of the Christian residents of Palestine and Syria, and were formally distinguished by theological disagreement over the Council of Chalcedon, held in 451. Called Introduction 7 to settle debate over how Christ’s divine and human characteristics were related, the council established that Christ had one human nature and one divine nature “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Instead of resolving disagreements, the council only fed the fire of controversy. Over the following century and a half, different factions within the Christian community, particularly in Syria, struggled to ensure the dominance of their theology, eventually leading to the establishment of separate church institutions and hierarchies. By the twelfth century, a host of liturgical and cultural differences also distinguished communities, and often these were more significant than theology. The number of fingers used when blessing oneself, the use of leavened or unleavened bread in church services, even the words of the liturgy itself came to bear the weight of religious identity and the anxieties of Christian division.
Each group claimed the name of “orthodox,” that is, “those who believe rightly”; thus, in this book I use the names by which they were known (often polemically) by other Christians outside their community in order to avoid repeatedly using the name “orthodox” for different communities, as well as the confusion of designations like “Greek” or “Syrian,” which sometimes signal ecclesiastical affiliation and sometimes liturgical language. The Melkites (Greek Orthodox) were the Christians of Syria, Palestine and Egypt who accepted the definition of Christ’s nature promulgated at Chalcedon, and remained in communion with the patriarch of Constantinople and the emperor, once their lands and cities came under Muslim rule. At times the Melkite patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria were appointed from Constantinople. Their name derived from the Syriac word “malka,” meaning king or emperor, signaling their continued adherence to the emperor of Constantinople. But Melkites themselves could be divided into two groups, those who spoke Greek and those who spoke Arabic or Syriac. Antioch, once among the centers of Hellenistic culture in the ancient world and under Byzantine rule from 969 to 1086/7, still had a large Greekspeaking Melkite population in the twelfth century. In Palestine too the Melkites constituted the great majority of the Christian population, but these more often spoke Syriac or Arabic. The Jacobite (Syrian Orthodox) tradition developed from the ascetic and theological traditions of Alexandria, exemplified in Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444) and developed by Severus of Antioch (d. c. 539).7 The Jacobites rejected the conclusions of the Council of Chalcedon, believing the council to have mistakenly separated Christ’s human and divine qualities. Yet only a 8 Introduction century later, under the leadership of the bishop of Edessa, Jacob Burd‘ana (or Burd‘aya, Baradaios in Greek, d. 578, from whom the epithet “Jacobite” arose), did such miaphysite8 communities begin to define themselves independently of the imperial church and ordain a separate hierarchy.9 Jacobite communities could be found from Antioch across northern Syria and Mesopotamia, but by the time of the First Crusade were no longer the majority of the population.
In Late Antiquity, Jacobites used Syriac as both a spoken and a liturgical language. By the twelfth century, however, many had shifted to Arabic as their primary language, though Syriac remained important as a written and liturgical language in many communities. The third group of Christians was the Armenians, with whom the Franks interacted and intermarried most often. The Armenian church had a distinct tradition both politically and theologically, having been established under the independent Arsacid monarchy in the fourth century, rather than within the Roman empire as in the case of the Melkites and Jacobites. The Armenians, like the Jacobites, did not accept the Council of Chalcedon. While some Armenian councils condemned the Chalcedonian formula, proximity to Byzantium meant that Chalcedonian theology always had an appeal to some Armenians. Armenian communities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries dominated the cities and countryside in Cilicia and northern Syria, as well as in their homeland around Lake Van and the Caucasus Mountains. Jerusalem had an Armenian quarter from the early medieval period, with a cathedral dedicated to St. James that was rebuilt in the twelfth century. Other smaller Christian communities also lived in Palestine and Syria. Perhaps the group most closely associated with the crusades in the eyes of many historians is the Maronites, who looked to the early fifth-century ascetic Maron as a founder. The Maronites developed an institutional structure separate from the imperial church only after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the seventh century.
Their leader claimed the title of patriarch of Antioch, and by the twelfth century their communities were largely concentrated in the mountains of Lebanon. Many came under the rule of the county of Tripoli, but few twelfth-century sources mention them explicitly, with the exception of William of Tyre, who believed them to be monothelite heretics, that is, Christians who believed that Christ has two natures but one will. William was delighted to report, however, that under Frankish influence they had repented of their error and had reconciled themselves to the Roman church.10 The Maronites thus became the first “Uniate” church, in communion with Rome but maintaining a separate hierarchy, liturgy, and canonical traditions. Introduction 9 The Nestorians inhabited the same Syriac-speaking cultural world as the Jacobites and also rejected the council of Chalcedon, but for the opposite reason—they believed that the council had failed to adequately distinguish between Christ’s divine and human natures. The Nestorians had already separated from the imperial church following the ecumenical council of Ephesus in 431. Also known as the East Syrian church, the Church of the East, or later the Chaldeans, the Nestorians flourished largely in areas under Sassanian rule in Late Antiquity.11 The Nestorians developed close relations with the ‘Abbasid caliphate, and at times served as the representative of all Christians in the empire. In the early medieval period, Nestorian missionaries and merchants traveled east along the trade routes, establishing communities as far east as China. Only a few small Nestorian communities, however, came under Frankish rule in the twelfth century. Other Christians may have had religious communities in Jerusalem in the twelfth century.
The German pilgrim Theodericus recorded that “Nubians” also had clergy in Jerusalem, but it is unclear whether this refers to Egyptian Copts or Ethiopians. Both groups were miaphysite in theology and were in communion with the Jacobites.12 Georgians, who were in communion with the Melkites but came from the same Caucasian cultural world as Armenians, controlled the monastery of the Holy Cross just to the west of the city wall of Jerusalem, and Georgian hermits and monks could be found elsewhere in Palestine.13 In many areas, of course, Muslims were in the majority, but again many different communities lived in the Levant, with different attitudes towards the crusaders. The fundamental divide within the Islamic community was between groups generally called Sunnis (ahl al-Sunna) and Shi‘a (shi‘at ‘Ali). Having its origin among supporters of the Caliph ‘Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, Shi‘ism developed as a religious movement after the ‘Abbasids seized the caliphate in 750, pushing aside descendants of ‘Ali whom the Shi‘a believed to be the rightful leaders of the Islamic community. As Shi‘ism evolved from a partisan group into a religious community, adherents asserted that ‘Ali received secret knowledge from Muhammad, which he passed on to his descendants and which was the basis of a variety of esoteric, mystical, and “secret” teachings. Sunna, on the other hand, designated those Muslims who accepted the authority of the first generation of Muslims and the continuity of the historical community, represented by the caliphs. This too was a flexible term, and different writers used it to encompass various schools of thought. 10 Introduction In many areas, the Shi‘a did not form separate communities, but intermingled among the Sunni population; each community formed a majority in different areas of the Muslim world. Some branches of Shi‘ism, however, did strive to establish separate polities. A group of Isma‘ilis (supporters of Isma‘il, an eighth-century descendant of ‘Ali) established a Shi‘i (Fatimid) caliphate in North Africa in 909, capturing Egypt in 969 and, a few years later, southern Syria. Another group of Isma‘ilis (called Nizaris for their support of Nizar, the son of the Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir, 1036–94) seized control of a series of fortresses in western Iran shortly before the death of Malik-Shah in 1092.
The Nizaris also gained castles in the 1130s and 1140s in the hills west of Hama, and boosted their relatively weak military strength by the wellplanned murder of opponents, gaining them the name of “Assassins” and a fantastical reputation among Sunnis as well as Franks.14 The Nizaris of Syria often joined in alliance with the Franks against their Sunni neighbors. Still other communities of Isma‘ili inspiration existed in the Levant. The Druze looked to the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (996–1021) as the source of supreme religious knowledge, maintaining their doctrines in secret. Thus Shi‘a living in towns such as Tripoli, Aleppo, and Damascus could identify with or support a variety of different movements.15 Jewish communities were among the oldest communities of the Middle East, and were established throughout Frankish territory. Rabbinic communities were the largest, and documents from the Genizah collection from Cairo demonstrate that in the eleventh century important communities lived in Jerusalem, Tyre, and Tiberias, as well as other cities in Palestine and Syria. Palestine was also home to one of the three Talmudic academies of the Jewish world. Many Karaites, a Jewish group that rejected the authority of the Talmud, were also found in Palestine. Palestine, and particularly Jerusalem, had been a center for Karaism in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the crusader conquest of Jerusalem devastated both the Rabbanite and Karaite communities.16 Karaism continued to flourish in the Byzantine empire, in Egypt, and later in eastern Europe, but the crusader sack of Jerusalem in 1099 effectively ended Karaite presence in Palestine for two centuries. Rabbanite communities survived under the Franks in other cities, most notably Tyre.
Also significant in the Frankish period were the Samaritans, who accepted only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as divinely inspired, and probably emerged as a distinct group at the time of the Babylonian Exile (c. 587–539 B.C.E.), since they did not go into exile but remained on the land. In the medieval period, Samaritan communities were spread throughout the Introduction 11 Middle East, from Thessalonika to Cairo. The center of Samaritan worship was (and is) Mount Gerezim, outside the modern city of Nablus (ancient Neapolis), and the Jewish pilgrim Benjamin of Tudela, traveling in 1169–71, recorded a number of Samaritan communities under Frankish rule.17 In many ways, this enumeration of Levantine religious diversity is misleading, suggesting discrete, well-defined communities, fitting together like pieces of a mosaic. Rather, we should imagine societies in which a religious community was only one of a number of groups or associations in which a person might participate. Others were based on professional identity (doctors, for example, came from all religious communities)18 or regional, urban, or even neighborhood identities. Middle Eastern cities were not segregated by religious community, although some might have quarters identified with certain groups (a Christian or Jewish quarter, for example). The establishment of the Frankish principality simply added another community, language, and religious identity to the mix.
Importance of Christian Communities in the Middle East Why, the reader might ask, focus on Armenians, Jacobites, and Melkites out of all these different local communities? The most important reason is that only these Christian communities produced written sources that allow us to understand the experience and perspective of local communities who lived under Frankish authority. While considerable material survives documenting Jewish and Muslim views of the crusades and of the Frankish settlements in the Levant, it was written from the perspective of those living outside the Frankish principalities, and therefore cannot represent those who experienced Frankish authority directly.19 Local Christian sources—chronicles, theological treatises, and letters—originated almost entirely in northern Syria, where Jacobites and Armenians made up the majority of the population. While historians have long been familiar with these texts, and many of them have been translated, they generally have been used to verify Latin texts about the Levant, rather than being analyzed for their own perspective. It is only through them that the relationships of indigenous communities and Franks can be discussed with any confidence. The challenge of this approach is determining the extent to which local Christian experience aids the historian to understand the experience of other indigenous communities. The historiographic assumption has been that the Franks treated local Christians better than Jews or Muslims on the basis of 12 Introduction shared faith, though they still did not treat them as equals.
While such an argument has an aura of common sense to it, the underlying assumption that social groups prefer those who are similar to them and feel antagonism towards those who are most different is based largely in evolutionary psychology, and may not apply in all historical situations. In many episodes of social conflict, it is the “intimate enemy,” a term which Elaine Pagels has used in discussing Jewish and early Christian intracommunal struggles, who is perceived as the greatest challenge and threat.20 Given contemporary attitudes towards schismatic and heretic Christians in Latin Europe, it is easy to imagine that the crusaders might have viewed local Christians as more of a threat than Jews and Muslims. Samaritan communities, for example, suffered little under the Franks; their center of worship was undisturbed, and a large number of Torah scrolls survive from the period. It was under the Mamluks that their ritual center was taken from them.21
The letter written from Antioch shows that the Franks were prepared to use the language of heresy against local Christians, and Peter the Venerable (1092–1156) notably argued that violence against Christian schismatics, heretics, and rebels was even more justified than against infidels. As Jonathan Z. Smith declared about other religious groups, “the radically other is merely other; the proximate other is problematic, and hence of supreme interest.”22 This book, therefore makes no such assumptions about the necessity of better treatment for local Christians, or worse treatment for Jews and Muslims, but seeks whenever possible to delineate the ways in which Jewish and Muslim experiences were broadly similar to or sharply different from those of local Christians. This study is largely restricted to the period between 1097 and 1187, that is, from the period when the crusaders first entered Syria until the conquests of Salah al-Din, which brought the vast majority of those lands back under Muslim rule for five, ten, or twenty years, or even permanently. While the Third Crusade and subsequent campaigns brought some areas back under Frankish rule, it was a slow process, and the society that was reestablished in the thirteenth century was noticeably changed.
Historiography of the Crusades Current historiography of the crusades has developed a consistent picture of the relationship between the Franks and local communities.24 Joshua Prawer and other scholars have depicted a segregated world in which a small FrankIntroduction 13 ish elite dominated Palestine and Syria, isolating themselves from the local population through discriminatory legal systems, the importation of European serfdom, and the exclusion of locals from positions of authority. This position has begun to be questioned by historians, but no alternative has been suggested.25 This book offers new ways to think about this question; I argue that the Frankish Levant was a world in which religious and social identities were flexible, and in which violence and tolerance were not exclusive characteristics, but strategies often employed simultaneously. The question of how the crusaders interacted with local communities became a subject of inquiry only in the nineteenth century, although the study of the crusades began much earlier, emerging almost imperceptibly from the narratives of the medieval chroniclers of the crusades themselves. The first collection of sources was the Gesta Dei per Francos of Jacques Bongars, which gathered many of the important Latin texts for the crusades and history of the Frankish East, but did not include sources from other languages.26 While the study of Arabic and Syriac had been well established in Europe since the Renaissance and even before, those who knew these languages rarely applied their knowledge to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Middle East, restricting their use to biblical scholarship and patristics.
The Arabist Antoine Galland (1646–1715), translator of The Thousand and One Nights, first suggested the benefit of using eastern sources to better understand the crusades.27 Edward Gibbon used some Arabic and Syriac sources in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and presented the social history of the Latin states as a decline from Frankish virility and freedom to oriental sloth and pleasure-seeking, while the native inhabitants yearned for the more tolerant rule of the caliphs.28 The Armenian chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, for example, did not appear in print in western Europe until 1813, when the scholar Jacques Chahan de Cirbied published extracts from two manuscripts from the imperial library in Paris.29 Only with the publication of the monumental Recueil des historiens des croisades in the early and mid-nineteenth century did a substantial number of Middle Eastern medieval texts become available to the student of the crusades. This ambitious project began with the Benedictine Maurists of St. Germaindes-Prés about 1770, but after they were suppressed during the French Revolution (the superior-general and forty of the monks died at the guillotine), the royalist Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres took over the project.30 The subject of local relations with the Franks excited considerable interest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly among French historians. While earlier histories of the crusades, such as Michaud’s in14 Introduction fluential narrative, had focused largely on the Latin narrative of war and settlement, devoting little interest to cultural interactions with local populations,31 this changed as French colonial ambitions in the Middle East grew. The French had cultivated close relations with the Ottoman sultans since the sixteenth century, and were the first European nation to receive special trading status within the empire. France’s economic power and relationship with the Maronites were the twin tools used to expand French influence in the Middle East, particularly along the Levantine coast. Through religious missions, merchants, and consular officials, the French established a close relationship with the Maronites, as the only Christians in the Middle East who remained in communion with the Catholic Church from the medieval period, and eventually claimed the role as their protectors.
Other European powers did the same with other minority communities—the Russians claimed a special relationship with Greek Orthodox communities, while the British developed relations with the Druze—but the French wielded the most influence. Further commercial treaties with the Ottomans in the nineteenth century, particularly in 1838, extended the rights of French and other European merchants to buy and sell within the empire.32 The French particularly dominated the silk trade, which was a significant part of Lebanon’s economic connections to Europe. When Napoleon III sent French troops to Lebanon to protect local Christian communities during the civil disturbances in Syria and Lebanon in 1860, he reminded the soldiers to “show yourselves the dignified children of these heroes who gloriously brought the banner of Christ to that land,” that is, the crusaders. 33 France’s preeminent position in the Levant was explicitly linked to the French leadership of the crusades, and nineteenth-century French historians of the crusades reinforced this image with accounts emphasizing the close relations between the Franks and local populations, particularly Christians. In the introduction to his 1883 book entitled Les colonies franques de Syrie aux XIIme et XIIIme siècles, Emmanuel Rey announced his intention to examine “the causes which favored their [the crusaders’] establishment and development in the midst of a population of Orientals of all races, Syrians, Greeks, and Armenians, [which] appears to me a new subject destined to fill one of lacunae in the history of the crusades.”34 The title of Rey’s book gave the Frankish settlements of the Levant a new title—“colony,” which linked the Latin principalities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to France’s colonial ambitions in Syria in the late nineteenth century. Rey asserted that the numerous offspring of mixed marriages, called poulains in Frankish sources, identified themselves with the local traditions and values of their indigenous Introduction 15 mothers rather than with any aspect of their Frankish fathers.35 Throughout his account, Rey emphasized the interactions of Franks with local Christians, whether in the realm of business, war or religion.
Interest in the local Christian influence on the crusaders was not limited to the French. Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Conder’s work showed much the same interest in understanding Frankish society within the context of local Christian communities.36 Conder led the Survey of Western Palestine in the late nineteenth century, which documented archaeological and historical sites from the Biblical through the Ottoman period, and thus saw the Franks within the context of Middle Eastern history, rather than through the lens of medieval Europe. The first American historian of the crusades, Dana Carleton Munro, agreed with the conclusions of the French school, concluding, “a study of the administration and laws shows the care the Franks took to win the goodwill of the natives.”37 Scholars, however, began to turn away from the image of an integrated Levant as two issues gained attention: an increased emphasis on ChristianMuslim conflict, and a growing sense of the influence of French colonialism on crusade historiography. The English historian William Stevenson, writing soon after Conder, enunciated this new view of the Latin East. For Stevenson, the cultural and social history of the Frankish settlements was secondary to the crusades proper; instead, “the story is one of a contest between Moslems and Latins.”38 But it was post-World War II historians, beginning with R. C. Smail, who nailed shut the coffin on the French school of thought. Smail suggested that Frankish society segregated Europeans from native Arabs, Syrians, and Armenians, and that little significant cultural or social exchange existed between the Frankish conquerors and local populations. Furthermore, he argued that pre-war French historians such as Rey saw an integrated society where there was none in an attempt to justify colonial regimes in the Near East, particularly the French domination of Syria and Lebanon.39
The segregationist historiographic position that Smail advocated has remained the dominant one among crusade historians to the present day. Steven Runciman’s three-volume epic History of the Crusades, written from his eastern perspective as a Byzantinist, concluded that “when they [the crusaders] set themselves up in the East they treated their Christian subjects no better than the Caliph had done before them. Indeed, they were sterner, for they interfered in the religious practices of the local churches.”40 As historians such as Joshua Prawer and Jonathan Riley-Smith turned their attention to the social, legal, and political structures of the Frankish Kingdom of 16 Introduction Jerusalem, a consensus emerged that depicted the Frankish society as largely urban and isolated from the local population by segregated cities, separate law courts, and different religious traditions. Joshua Prawer’s 1972 book, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, revived Rey’s characterization of the Frankish settlements as colonies; for Prawer, however, these “colonies” displayed none of Rey’s rose-tinted imperialist characteristics, and he even used the term “apartheid” to describe its judicial and legal systems.41 In Prawer’s work, the “segregationalist” model reached its fullest and most explicit development. For him, the main explanation for the lack of integration was economic. The Franks depended on a subjugated and disenfranchised local population to finance their occupation, and would do nothing to jeopardize those economic interests. Nor has interest in or adherence to this approach diminished; Prawer’s book was republished in 2001, and other recent studies on the position of the local population have emphasized the segregated nature of the Frankish Levant.42 Carole Hillenbrand’s encyclopedic work revealed the variety of Muslim responses to the crusaders, and concluded that Islamic resentment, suspicion, and ultimate rejection of the Franks outweighed other reactions.43 Prawer also studied the position of Jewish communities under Frankish rule, and likewise saw a community which, while inevitably impacted by the political and military events of the age, remained isolated from the Franks and even other local communities.44
While the work of Smail and his historiographic heirs may well have been necessary to correct the colonialist agenda in older French crusade historians, their own vision of the Levant reflected late twentieth-century events in Israel and Palestine. The Zionism that founded Israel was too easily seen as a parallel to the crusades, and the failure of Israel to create an integrated society among its Jewish and Palestinian citizens and subjects has given historians a model of ceaseless conflict between immigrant and indigenous communities that was easily applied to Israel’s twelfth-century counterpart. Furthermore, the desire to overturn the historiography of the earlier generation led them to apply the ideology and impact of nineteenth-century colonialism to the twelfth-century Levant.
The Crusades in the Historiography of Medieval Europe The segregationalist position has added powerful arguments for the inclusion of the Frankish Levant as a part of the growing European world of the Introduction 17 twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For the western medievalist, the crusades are emblematic of Europe’s dynamism and expansion, a result of the religious reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and, in the thirteenth, a part of the growth of papal power. Frankish settlements in the Levant were similarly seen as part of a larger expansion of western elites into frontier areas such as Ireland, eastern Europe, and Spain which, as Robert Bartlett has argued in The Making of Europe, resulted in distinctive settlement patterns, formulation of separate legal systems, and interethnic conflict. The segregationalist view of the Latin East thus matches a pattern found throughout the frontiers of medieval Europe. Bartlett argues, as his title suggests, that such experiences and processes both within Latin communities and at their borders helped to create the “Europe” of today. The “crusader” states are an example of what we might call a “failed frontier,” which ultimately did not become part of “Europe” only because certain of these characteristics did not develop enough—for example, not enough European colonists settled in Palestine compared to Ireland, Sicily, or Lithuania.45 Some historians have even linked Europe’s twelfth-century Levantine colony and practice of segregation to the history of European colonies in the Americas, Asia, and Africa in the early modern period, making the conquistadors sixteenth-century crusaders.46 Contributing to the sense that the Frankish Levant was a segregationalist regime, a European bubble floating on a sea of Middle Eastern resentment, is the conflation of crusades with the history of the “crusader” East. Most books (and college courses) entitled “the crusades” attempt to encompass both a history of the Frankish East (the “crusader” states) and the religious ideology and subsequent military endeavors that were the crusades themselves.
The latter were acts of holy war in which battle against the infidel, often with the goal of recovering or defending the Holy Land, aided the reconciliation of the sinning Christian with his god, and were part of a triumphalist and universalist Christianity, which did not acknowledge the existence of any truth other than the word of God as expressed in the Old and New Testaments and interpreted by the fathers of the church. Crusade ideology thus rarely led the warrior to think about the faith of his enemy; the crusade was not a war of conversion, concerned with the salvation of others, but about the salvation of the warrior himself. The infidel represented a path to salvation, not a focus of concern for the crusader.47 This is a subject that has little to do with the polities that ruled Palestine and Syria from 1098 to 1291, or the cultures and societies over which they 18 Introduction ruled. This conflation ultimately limits the historian’s ability to discuss either subject effectively. The usual compromise is to ignore or sideline crusades that are not directed against Muslim powers, as well as those after 1291, when the last Frankish city on the Levantine mainland fell to the Mamluks. Likewise it implicitly suggests that the ideology that underpinned the crusades was equally the foundation for the “crusader” states. By that definition the true crusader state was the kingdom of France under Louis IX, not the Frankish principalities of Outremer. The difference can be marked by the use of the term “crusader” versus “Frank”—I use “crusader” only for those who took a crusade oath, or who at least fought under someone who had, and had not yet fulfilled that oath. “Frank” I use to refer to western Christians (sometimes former crusaders) who settled in the Levant or visited for a period of time.
The Frankish Levant differed not only from other frontier areas of Latin Europe but also from the European heartlands. Although founded by aristocrats from Provence, northern France, Flanders, and southern Italy, the Frankish East did not participate in the political, religious, and cultural changes that Europe underwent in the twelfth century. In Latin Europe, the institutions of the Roman church, for example, grew stronger, in part driven by the conflicts of the Investiture Conflict and an urgent sense of reform sweeping through Latin Christian society. While the crusades themselves were both product of and impetus for those changes, the culture of the twelfth-century Frankish East was unaffected by concerns about the relationship of the church to secular power, or the purity of the clergy. The hallmarks of the vigorous reformist culture of the church were not found in Outremer, such as a new clerical learned elite or assertive bishops (with the possible exception of Daibert of Pisa). Nor do the darker aspects of twelfth-century European reform appear, such as the persecution of Jews and heretics through which new elites and ambitious kings secured their power and built new polities based on law and an autocratic monarch. Nor can the historian claim that the Latin East was simply ignorant of these developments. Pilgrims, crusaders, and churchmen traveled back and forth, and were aware of what was happening in Latin Europe. The council of Nablus in 1120, assembled by Baldwin II of Jerusalem and attended by the leading ecclesiasts of the kingdom of Jerusalem, shows all the characteristic signs of the reform movement: it ensured ecclesiastical control of tithes, instituted a death penalty for sodomy (the first in the medieval period), and decreed that a man who engaged in sexual relations with a Muslim concubine should be castrated and have his nose cut off. Bigamy and adultery were Introduction 19 also outlawed. The concern over sexual crimes is what we might expect from a small, anxious community that feared being overwhelmed by surrounding Muslim societies. Such concern with pollution, sexual in this case, is a theme that would have been familiar to many, as the theme of religious pollution was often invoked in crusade propaganda. Indeed, Fulcher of Chartres, who was living in Jerusalem in 1120 and may have even attended the council, used the theme extensively in his narrative of the First Crusade.48 But Benjamin Kedar has shown that the statutes drafted at Nablus drew inspiration from the Byzantine legal tradition, not from western reformist trends.49 Noticeably missing from the council were any decrees having to do with heresy or restrictions on the Jewish population, two subjects that would seem most useful to a monarchy and church hierarchy desperate to establish their authority.
The Latin East, we might say, dabbled in the reformist, centralizing, and “persecuting” trends of the twelfth century, but chose not to participate in them. The segregationalist model has also kept scholars from including the culture and history of the Frankish Levant in discussions of multiethnic societies or interethnic conflict, despite the popularity of the subject in both Islamic and medieval European studies. Over the last twenty years, historians have sought to understand the roots of European persecution of minorities, particularly Jews, producing a body of scholarship that can be useful for situating the twelfth-century Levant in a spectrum of practices of the medieval Mediterranean.50 Perhaps the most significant work has been that of David Nirenberg, who has argued that episodes of violence between Jews and Christians in fourteenth-century Spain and France were not merely the outburst of irrational hatreds, but the expression and manipulation of local beliefs and concerns. Furthermore, Nirenberg pointed out that the modern dichotomy between “tolerance” and “intolerance” fails to account for the centrality of conflict for constructing social relations.51 Episodic violence can be a way of establishing boundaries between communities and articulating the power dynamics between communities. In other words, it is often violence that allows communities to coexist. Nirenberg’s work is particularly useful for dismantling the dichotomy of violence and coexistence. It no longer suffices to point out episodes of violence involving Franks and local populations and conclude that “tolerance” did not exist; violence must be used to explore how relationships among communities were managed, defined, and exploited. Whereas in Nirenberg’s Spain symbolic or real violence was used as a tool to delineate boundaries between communities, in the Frankish Levant, 20 Introduction coexistence was based on ignoring difference; they were not communities of violence, but communities of silence. Silence allowed different religious communities to live side by side, but also permitted the Franks to exile, oppress and even massacre local populations with little backlash.
Rough Tolerance: A New Model of Religious Interaction Much of the reason the segregationalist model has endured for fifty years is that it is the only model available for historians to use. Without it historians are left with the nineteenth-century colonialist model of an integrated Levant, a variety of convivencia of the East, where content locals flourish under the benevolent rule of creole Franks “gone native.” The evident errors of this vision have led historians perforce to cling to the segregationalist explanation, which at least captures the darker aspects of Frankish authority. One of the principal goals of this book is to argue that the segregationalist vision of the Frankish Levant is deeply flawed, and to present an alternative. “Rough tolerance,” as we might call it, is not the equivalent of modern concepts of multiculturalism, in part because it was not an ideology but a practice. I use the term “tolerance” because the practices of rough tolerance allowed the coexistence of diverse religious and ethnic communities without the legal or social structures of control or domination that were emerging in contemporary Latin Europe; it was “rough” because political power rested largely in the hands of the new Frankish aristocracy, who employed it against indigenous communities as they felt necessary. I do not use “tolerance” in a moral sense (some moral philosophers refer to it as the “impossible virtue” because the conditions for its full existence can never exist). Franks and others who engaged in rough tolerance were not doing so because they believed it to be a virtuous quality. If tolerance is defined as “the refusal, where one has the power to do so, to prohibit or seriously interfere with conduct one finds objectionable,” we cannot be certain whether it is tolerance or indifference we are discussing.52 All we can say is that the Frankish aristocracy allowed conduct and beliefs that would have been unacceptable in Christian Europe. Because violence directed against indigenous communities was localized and unaccompanied by other forms of legal and social control, and because the social boundaries of local communities were porous and ill-defined, neither Latins nor locals developed the rhetoric of “us” and Introduction 21 “them,” or images of the “other” or the “oppressor.” Episodes of conflict, violence, and oppression occurred frequently, yet they were often directed at specific groups within local communities in a way that used intracommunal factionalism to drain away the sense of threat to the larger community. Whereas in Nirenberg’s fourteenth-century Spanish world each act of violence was loaded with symbolic meaning, in the Latin principalities of the Levant, Franks and local Christians denied that any lasting symbolic significance had accumulated around incidences of conflict. Rough tolerance is difficult to define and describe, for by its very nature it is unspoken, undefined, and amorphous. Nevertheless, there are characteristics by which we can catch its presence, if only in silhouette or shadow.
The first and most difficult sign to uncover is silence itself. Arguments based on silence are proverbially verboten for historians, yet in the case of the Frankish East, it is essential to discuss what is not present. Silence covers a variety of absences from both local Christian and Frankish sources. The most striking absence is that of local Christians from Latin texts. While they appear periodically as groups and individuals in episodes described by many chroniclers such as Fulcher of Chartres and William of Tyre, local Christians and their communities were identified only by linguistic characteristics, identities that masked the more problematic markers of religious identity. The Armenians are most easily identified, distinguished by their own language, but all other Christians were designated as either “Graeci” or “Suriani,” names with only a tenuous connection to the languages the communities spoke or used in liturgy. The theological and ecclesiastical issues separating the various Christians of the Levant were rarely discussed. The Latin Patriarch of Antioch, Amalric of Limoges, for example, apparently thought it appropriate to invite Michael the Great (Michael the Syrian) to the Third Lateran Council in 1179, and solicited a refutation of the Cathar heresy from him. He ignored the fact that Michael, as leader of the Syrian Orthodox (Jacobites), claimed the same title of patriarch of Antioch that Amalric himself held, and was thus the leader of a church that, from a Latin perspective, had a heretical pedigree as ancient as the Cathars themselves. Absence is also a feature of local Christian sources, but not concerning theological issues. Patriarch Michael the Great, in contrast to Amalric of Limoges, was clearly familiar with the Christological beliefs of the Latin church, and willing to discuss them. Rather, the deliberate blindness of local sources concerned issues of power and governance. Although Frankish leaders repeatedly used violence and intimidation against local Christians to es22 Introduction tablish and maintain their authority, local Christians did not develop a litany of crimes which had been committed against them, nor did they develop a stereotype of the Franks, though both Armenians and Jacobites certainly had such images of the Byzantines, and to some extent the Armenians had developed one of the Turks. Michael the Great failed to even mention in his chronicle a Frankish raid on his own monastery of Mar Barsauma, despite his familiarity with other sources that mentioned it. Both local Christians and Franks chose not to know, to forget, or to overlook those aspects of the other which had the most power to control and define the other.53
The second characteristic that allowed rough tolerance to exist was permeability: the easy flow of persons and practices across social and religious boundaries. Permeability thus also depended on the silences discussed above. It allowed a Frankish noble such as Baldwin, count of Marash, to have an Armenian priest as his confessor without either having converted, a Latin family to build a shrine to a Jacobite saint who healed their child, and a Melkite bishop to request that he be buried as a Latin Hospitaller. For local Christians, permeability arose from the relative weakness of their elites; both Melkites and Armenians had been devastated in different ways by the tribulations of the eleventh century, and the Jacobites had long suffered from factionalism and internal conflict that made them vulnerable to external influence. Strikingly, permeability did not extend to intellectual exchange; books and ideas did not flow across communal boundaries in the Frankish Levant as they did in other multicultural societies such as Sicily and Spain. This may be due to the reluctance on the part of the Frankish elite to patronize or support educated clergy of the sort who would seek new editions of classical texts such as Aristotle, for such a group could tighten boundaries and create exactly the regimes of knowledge they were so clearly avoiding.54
A third characteristic of rough tolerance was localization. Rough tolerance operated only on a local level; one might say it existed only in the line of sight. Frankish military power was employed only against specific groups: this group of rebellious councilors or that warlord, or this specific community living in this one place. Both the Franks and local communities understood such violence within specific social, physical, and geographic limits. An attack on one group or individual was never interpreted as an attack on an entire community or class, nor did the Franks ever systematically attack all Armenian warlords, or all Jacobite monasteries. In part, the localization of violence was enabled by the weakened elites of local communities, by their willingness to forget, as well as by Frankish unwillingness to recognize local Introduction 23 communities as they constituted themselves. Indigenous leaders, wielding only local authority, were thus reluctant to use a discourse of oppression as a way to bolster their own authority, both for fear of becoming targets of Frankish attack themselves, and because they did not want to give up access to sources of support coming from Frankish leadership. Rough tolerance has its roots in early medieval western practices, not in the relationship between Islam and the dhimmi communities.55
Many historians have seen Frankish toleration of other religious communities as a continuation of Islamic practices, with Muslims forced into a subordinate status alongside Jews, and in some interpretations, local Christians. Yet rough tolerance differed from the dhimmi system in a number of ways. Most significantly, the dhimmi system envisioned a society of discrete and hierarchalized communities: at the top was the community of Muslims, and beneath them, the inferior dhimmi communities, each separately constituted. The dhimmi community should be represented by a leader, often a bishop or patriarch for the Christian community, who served as the intermediary between the community and Islamic authority. The system thus required the delineation of difference between Christian, Jew, and Muslim; different communities sometimes petitioned to be recognized as entities distinct from others. For example, the Karaites in eleventh-century Cairo petitioned the Fatimid caliph to be allowed to butcher animals without Rabbanite supervision.56 The Franks, in contrast, had no formal structures governing local communities and had no interest in defining them. The practices of rough tolerance were about avoiding such categorization. The origin of rough tolerance was rather a development of early western medieval disinterest in categorization and difference.
The experience of Jewish communities in early medieval western Europe, for example, is akin to that of local communities in the Frankish Levant. Unlike the high medieval period, Jews in France and Italy practiced a wide variety of professions, owned land, and had few legal restrictions placed on them. Yet they were also subject to violence and attack and sometimes forced conversion. Although the Christian tradition had developed a negative image of “the Jew” that pervaded exegesis and canon law, rulers such as the Carolingians showed little interest in separating, identifying, or classifying difference in the communities over which they ruled. Rather, Jews were considered members of the community on an equal footing with other groups.57 Just as Jews were not subjected to legal restrictions, the beliefs and practices of Christians were not subjected to examination in the way that they were after the eleventh century. 24 Introduction The twelfth-century description of the Franks by Michael the Great, patriarch of the Jacobite church, which noted that “they never sought a single formula for all the Christian people and languages, but they considered as Christian anyone who worshipped the cross without investigation or examination,”58 could equally be a description of Frankish kingdoms of the early medieval West. Rough tolerance also differed from the forms of political, social, and religious interactions that existed in medieval Spain, often referred to as convivencia. The nature of the relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims is still a contentious historiographic topic, but several characteristics distinguish it from rough tolerance: both the size and prominence of Jewish communities in Spain and the shared Arabic culture in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews could participate mark out the multireligious interactions in Spain as distinctly different.
In particular, convivencia was not silent; disputation and dialogue among different groups was common. This book approaches rough tolerance from a variety of directions. The first chapter examines the eleventh-century history of the Middle East, establishing the social and political patterns and expectations local communities developed prior to the First Crusade. Chapters 2 and 3 take the exercise of Frankish power for their subject, particularly in northern Syria, exploring how their authority was established and used both against and with the majority Christian population. It was in northern Syria that the largest concentration of local Christians lived, and that the Armenian and Syriac texts written under Frankish rule were produced. It was also here that the crusaders first came to political power in the Levant, and it was here the most important Frankish rulers had their formative political and cultural experiences. The first two kings of Jerusalem (both named Baldwin) were first counts of Edessa before ascending to the throne of the Holy City; Melisende, who ruled the kingdom with her son until 1150, was the daughter of an Armenian mother from Melitene and grew up in Edessa. Not only do we have the best opportunity to understand the relationships between locals and Franks in the Levant through an examination of experiences in northern Syria, it was a cultural world deeply influential in the Frankish East. Chapter 4 studies the relationship between local Christian ecclesiastical hierarchies and the Franks, discussing the basis and effects of Frankish “theological ignorance,” as well as the ways in which locals and Latins did learn about each other. The legal and social status of indigenous individuals under Frankish rule is the subject of Chapter 5.
Using primarily Introduction 25 Latin charters, I argue that European serfdom was not imported to the Levant, and show that Syrians, Palestinians, and Armenians participated in Frankish governance at a variety of levels. The last chapter turns to the ecumenical negotiations that became important in the 1160s. Byzantine attempts to unite the churches of the Levant under imperial leadership paradoxically heightened the importance of sectarian identity, undermining the permeability and silence that were so vital to rough tolerance. The result is a book which presents the Frankish Levant as imbedded within a larger Middle Eastern world, and gives an explanation of interreligious relationships found elsewhere in the premodern world.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق