A History of the Crusades-Vol 3 (63 page)

Outremer produced other poetical works;
but none of the known authors was born in the East. Philip of Novara,
statesman, chronicler and jurist, who was Italian by birth but wrote in French,
inserted verse of his own lively if not very poetical composition into his
chronicle. Philip of Nanteuil, when captive at Cairo, wrote nostalgic poems
about his French homeland. But, though Philip of Novara can be regarded as one
of the founders of the provincial Frankish culture of Cyprus, the literature of
Outremer is simply a branch of the literature of France. There was no
indigenous literature amongst the Franks’ native subjects in Syria, though in
Cyprus and in Greece itself there grew up under Frankish domination a
semi-popular Greek literature strongly affected by Frankish influences.

The intellectual life of Outremer was, in
fact, that of a Frankish colony. The Courts of the Kings and Princes had a
certain cosmopolitan glamour; but the number of resident scholars in Outremer
was small; and wars and financial difficulties prevented the institution of
real centres of study where native and neighbouring learning could have been
absorbed. It was the absence of these centres that made the cultural
contribution of the Crusades to western Europe so disappointingly small.