The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (22 page)

Admittedly, Fulcher was writing the equivalent of a recruitment manifesto; seeking to new lure new Latin settlers to the East. But even with this proviso in mind, his testimony seems to indicate openness to the idea of assimilation. Fulcher went on to describe another mode of cross-cultural contact–intermarriage. Unions between Franks and eastern Christian Greeks and Armenians were relatively commonplace, and sometimes served to cement political alliances. Queen Melisende of Jerusalem herself was a product of just such a marriage. Frankish men might also wed Muslim women who converted to Christianity. But marriages between Latins and Muslims seem to have been extremely rare. At a council held in Nablus in 1120, soon after the crisis caused by the Field of Blood, the Frankish hierarchy instituted a series of laws explicitly forbidding fraternisation. The punishments for sex between Christians and Muslims were severe: a man would be castrated; a consenting woman would have her nose cut off. These were the first such examples of encoded prohibition in the Latin world. The same batch of legislation also banned Muslims from wearing clothing ‘in the Frankish custom’. The import of these rulings is debatable, in part because any law can be read in a positive or negative light. Do the Nablus decrees reflect a world of intense segregation, where such acts would be unimaginable; or were these laws created to restrict what had become a common practice? Certainly, there is no evidence to indicate that these edicts were put into action, nor were they carried over into Outremer’s thirteenth-century law codes.

When they first captured cities like Antioch and Jerusalem and decided to settle in the Near East, the Latins had to develop the means to rule their new lordships by establishing administrative frameworks. In general, their approach was to import many practices from the West, while adopting and adapting some Levantine models. This process was probably driven by the pragmatic need rapidly to set up a functioning system, rather than any particular desire to embrace new forms of government. Regional considerations also influenced decisions. In the principality of Antioch, with its history of Greek rule, the main city official was a
dux
(duke), an institution drawn from a Byzantine template; in the kingdom of Jerusalem, a similar role was performed by a Frankish-style viscount.

Eastern Christians certainly played some role in local and even regional government; so, too, on occasion, did Muslims. Most Muslim villages seem to have been represented by a
ra’is
–the equivalent of a headman–just as they had been under Turkish or Fatimid rule. Through a single reference, it is known that in 1181 the Muslim citizens of Tyre also had their own
ra’is
named Sadi. A similarly isolated piece of evidence indicates that in 1188 the Latin-held Syrian port of Jabala had a Muslim
qadi
(judge). It is impossible to gauge the true extent of this type of representation.
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Perhaps the most fascinating source of evidence for the nature of life in Outremer is Usama ibn Munqidh’s
Book of Contemplation
, a collection of tales and anecdotes by a northern Syrian Arab nobleman who watched the war for the Holy Land unfold through the twelfth century. Usama’s text is crammed with direct comments on (and incidental details about) contact with the Franks and life in the crusader states. His interest was almost always in the bizarre and unusual, so the material he recorded has to be used with some caution; nonetheless, his work is an invaluable mine of information. On the question of orientalised Latins, he wrote: ‘There are some Franks who have become acclimatized and frequent the company of Muslims. These are better than those who have just arrived from their homelands, but they are the exception, and cannot be taken as typical.’ In the course of his life, Usama encountered Franks who had taken to eating Levantine food and others who frequented
hammam
(bathhouses) that were open to Latins and Muslims alike.

One of the most surprising revelations to emerge from Usama’s writings is the normalised, almost day-to-day nature of his encounters with Franks. While some of these took place in the context of combat, many meetings were of an amicable and courteous form. This may well have been a function of Usama’s high social class, but it is clear that Latins did establish friendships with Muslims. In one case, Usama described how ‘a respected knight [in King Fulk’s army] grew to like my company and he became my constant companion, calling me “my brother”. Between us there are ties of amity and sociability.’ Nonetheless, there was an undertone to this tale, one that reverberated through many of the stories related in the
Book of Contemplation
: an inbred sense of Muslim cultural and intellectual superiority. In the case of his knightly friend, this came to the fore when the Frank offered to take Usama’s fourteen-year-old son with him back to Europe so that the boy could receive a proper education and ‘acquire reason’. Usama thought this preposterous proposition revealed ‘the Franks’ lack of intelligence’.

Another seemingly unlikely association enjoyed by Usama ibn Munqidh was his amicable relationship with the Templars. According to Usama:

Usama evidently had no difficulty either in making a pilgrimage to the Holy City or in finding a mosque in Frankish territory within which to perform his canonically mandated daily prayers. Did this right to worship extend to Muslims living under Latin rule; indeed, was Outremer’s non-Frankish population as a whole treated equitably, or subjected to oppression and abuse? One fact is clear: in the Latin East, the primary division was not between Christians and Muslims, but between Franks (that is to say, Latin Christians) and non-Franks (be they eastern Christian, Jewish or Muslim). This second group of subjected indigenous peoples was made up mostly of peasants and some merchants.
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In legal terms, non-Franks were generally treated as a separate class: for serious breaches of law they were subject to the ‘Burgess’ court (just like non-noble Latins), and here Muslims were allowed to take oaths on the Koran; but civil cases came before the
Cour de la Fonde
(or Market Court), specifically instituted for non-Franks. The constitution of this body favoured eastern Christians because it was manned by a jury of two Franks and four Syrians, with no Muslim representation. Outremer’s Latin law codes also seem to have assigned harsher punishments to Muslim offenders.

Much of the historical debate about the treatment of subjected Muslims has centred on the day-to-day issues of rights to worship and financial exploitation. In this regard, the evidence provided by the Iberian Muslim traveller and pilgrim Ibn Jubayr is enlightening. During a grand journey in the early 1180s that took in North Africa, Arabia, Iraq and Syria, Ibn Jubayr passed through the kingdom of Jerusalem, visiting Acre and Tyre before taking ship to Sicily. Of his journey through western Galilee he wrote:

This account seems to indicate that a large, sedentary Muslim population lived in relative peace within Latin Palestine, paying a per-capita levy (like the poll-tax imposed by Islamic rulers on their non-Muslim subjects) and a produce tax. Surviving evidence for the level of taxation imposed within Islamic polities around this same time suggests that Muslim peasants and farmers were no worse off living under Frankish Christian rule. In fact, Ibn Jubayr even suggested that Muslims were more likely to be treated with ‘justice’ by a ‘Frankish landlord’ and to suffer ‘injustice’ at the hands of ‘a landlord of [their] own faith’. This did not mean that he approved of peaceful coexistence or abject submission to Latin rule. At one point he noted that ‘there can be no excuse in the eyes of God for a Muslim to stay in any infidel county, save when passing through it’. But principled objections such as this actually lend further credence to the positive observations he chose to record.
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Ibn Jubayr also reported that subjected Muslims had access to mosques and rights to prayer in Acre and Tyre. On the basis of this sliver of evidence, it is impossible to state categorically that all Muslims living in Outremer enjoyed similar devotional liberty. Broadly speaking, the most that can be suggested is that outnumbered Frankish settlers had a vested interest in keeping their native subjects content and in situ, and the conditions of life for indigenous eastern Christians and Muslims did not prompt widespread civil unrest or migration. By the contemporary standards of western Europe or the Muslim East, non-Franks living in the crusader states were probably not particularly oppressed, exploited or abused.
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One mode of contact that undoubtedly brought together Levantine Franks and Muslims was trade. There were sure signs of vibrant commercial enterprise during the first hundred years of Latin settlement. Italian merchants from Venice, Pisa and Genoa played leading roles in this process, establishing enclaves in Outremer’s great ports and coastal cities and creating a complex network of trans-Mediterranean trade routes. These pulsing arteries of commerce, linking the Near East with the West, enabled Levantine products (such as sugar cane and olive oil) and precious goods from the Middle East and Asia to reach the markets of Europe. As yet, the bulk of trade flowing out of the Orient still passed through Egypt, but, even so, Outremer’s economic development proved extraordinarily lucrative: it paved the way for cities like Venice to become the leading mercantile powers of the Middle Ages; and through customs and levies, it also helped to stock the treasuries of Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem. This does not mean that the Latin settlements in the East should be regarded as exploitative European colonies. Their establishment and survival may have depended, in part, upon the likes of Genoa; but they were not set up, in the first instance, as economic ventures. Nor did they serve the interests of ‘western homelands’ as such, because the financial benefits accrued by the ‘state’ tended to stay in the East.

The passage of goods from the Muslim world to the Mediterranean ports of the Frankish Levant was crucial not only to the Latins. It also became one of the linchpins of the wider Near Eastern economy: vital for the livelihoods of Muslim merchants plying the caravan routes to the East; critical to the incomes of Islam’s great cities, Aleppo and Damascus. These shared interests produced interdependency and promoted carefully regulated (and thus essentially ‘peaceful’) contact, even at times of heightened political and military conflict. In the end–even in the midst of holy war–trade was too important to be disrupted.

Historians often present 1120 as a year of crisis and tension in the Levant. After all, the Field of Blood was fresh in the memory, and it was in this year that the council of Nablus prescribed harsh punishments for intercultural fraternisation. But in 1120 Baldwin II also instituted scything commercial tax cuts in Jerusalem. According to Fulcher of Chartres (who was then living in the Holy City), the king declared that ‘Christians as well as Saracens were to have freedom to come in or go out to sell whensoever and to whomsoever they wished.’ According to Muslim testimony, around the same time, Il-ghazi–the victor at the Field of Blood–abolished tolls in Aleppo and agreed terms of truce with the Franks. The degree of coordination between these two supposed enemies is impossible to determine, but both were obviously making strident attempts to stimulate trade. In fact, the tenor and scope of Latin–Muslim commercial contacts appear largely to have been unaffected by the rising tide of
jihadi
enthusiasm within Islam. Even Saladin, the ‘champion’ of the holy war, forged close links with the seaborne merchants of Italy when he became ruler of Muslim Egypt. Keen to promote profitable trade and to secure ready supplies of shipbuilding timber (which was difficult to source in North Africa), he endowed the Pisans with a protected commercial enclave in Alexandria in 1173.
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Knowledge and culture

Another form of exchange was also taking place in Outremer during the twelfth century: the transmission of Muslim and eastern Christian knowledge and culture among members of the Latin intellectual elite. The evidence for this form of ‘dialogue’ in Jerusalem is limited, but in Antioch, with its long-embedded traditions of scholasticism, the situation was quite different.
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The city and its environs were home to numerous eastern Christian monastic houses, predating the crusades and famed as centres of intellectual life. Here, some of the great minds of the Christian world gathered to study and translate texts on theology, philosophy, medicine and science that were written in languages such as Greek, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian. With the creation of the crusader states, Latin scholars naturally began to congregate in and around the city. In about 1114 the famous philosopher and translator Adelard of Bath visited, perhaps staying for two years. A decade later, Stephen of Pisa–the Latin treasurer of the Church of St Paul–was carrying out groundbreaking studies. In the course of the 1120s he produced some of the most important Latin translations ever to originate in the Levant. Stephen was most famous for his translation of al-Majusi’s
Royal Book
–an extraordinary compendium of medical lore–that later helped to advance knowledge in western Europe.
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