Download PDF | The Latin Church in the Crusader States The Secular Church, By Bernard Hamilton, London 1980.
428 Pages
This is the first major work on the history of the secular church in the Frankish states of Syria and the Holy Land — a subject which has not hitherto attracted the interest of ecclesiastical historians. The present book has been written to fill this important gap in crusader studies.
It deals with the period stretching from the establishment of a Latin hierarchy after the First Crusade to the final conquest by the Mamluks in 1291.
Dr Hamilton examines the development of the Church in the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch and its organisation from the parish level upwards. Two chapters are devoted to a study of its sources of income and the financial problems that arose after the Battle of Hattin through the thirteenth century.
Particular attention is paid to the relations between the Latin and the Eastern Churches. The author documents the unequal treatment given to the Orthodox and to the separated Churches, and traces the course of the various attempts at church union.
In his conclusion he makes an overall assessment of the spiritual achievements of the Church during this period and the extent to which it justified the first crusaders' ideals.
PREFACE
The history of Frankish Syria has not hitherto proved very attractive to ecclesiastical historians. Important monographs have been written on special aspects of the history of the Latin church there, but there has been no general treatment of this subject except for W. Hotzelt's Kirchengeschichte Palástinas im Zeitalter der Kreuzzuge, 1099—1291, (Cologne 1940), which deals only with the kingdom of Jerusalem and concentrates chiefly on the activities of the Latin patriarchs. The present book has been written in an attempt to fill this gap in crusader studies.
I have not dealt with the military orders, except in so far as they exercised patronage in the secular church, because excellent studies of them already exist, nor have I written about the monastic establishment of Latin Syria, since adequate treatment of that topic would require a separate volume. I have been concerned solely with the history of the secular Latin church and of its relations with eastern-rite churches.
When rendering Arabic names into English I have, as a general rule, used the forms adopted in the Pennsylvania History of the Crusades, omitting diacritical marks which would be an affectation in a general work of this kind. For Greek names I have generally used Latin forms which are more familiar to English readers. I would not claim to have been completely consistent in either case, since sometimes I have considered it more helpful to use a form which is immediately recognisable to an English reader rather than one which is technically more correct.
My particular thanks are due to Professor J. Riley-Smith who read the manuscript of this book and made many valuable suggestions about the ways in which it might be improved; and also to Dr M.C. Barber who undertook the considerable labour of editing it. Since I have not in all cases acted on the advice which either of these scholars has given, they should not in any way be held responsible for mistakes which occur in the text. The faults of this work are exclusively my own.
I have received much help from many people in the course of my work. My thanks are particularly due to the Ecclesiastical History Society for giving me the opportunity to read preliminary drafts of some of my chapters as papers at their summer conferences. I am also grateful to the British Academy for making me agenerous grant which enabled me to visit some of the sites about which I have written. While in Israel I received much help from the Revd John Wilkinson, Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and from Mr Kevork Hintlian of the Armenian Convent in Jerusalem. But my thanks are specially due to my medieval colleagues in the department of History of the University of Nottingham who, at some cost to themselves, have made time available to me to complete the writing of this book. I would also like to thank Mrs Turner and the staff of Variorum Publications for their courtesy and help at all stages of preparing this work for publication.
I wish to thank the staff of the following libraries who have assisted me: the Vatican Library and Archives; the Royal Library, Valetta, Malta; the British Library; the Warburg Institute; the University of London Library; the Institute of Historical Research; the London Library; Dr Williams’s Library; and, not least, the University of Nottingham Library.
But my chief thanks must be given to my family for their continuous support: to my mother, who encouraged me in this work in its early stages, but who has, regrettably, not lived to see its completion; and to my wife, who has borne with good humour the antisocial hours and moods in which writing this book has involved me, and to whom, in gratitude, it is dedicated.
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