God's War: A New History of the Crusades (39 page)

Where communities coincided, relations could be volatile. Nablus and its neighbourhood presented dramatic contrasts. Situated on the edge of the frontier zone, vulnerable to attacks and pillage, such as the raid from Damascus in 1137, it formed part of the royal domain until granted to Balian of Ibelin
c.
1177. The immediate vicinity contained Christian villages with Frankish peasants surrounded by a largely non-Christian population. In one street of the town, a Frankish wine merchant’s shop stood opposite an upmarket Muslim guesthouse. A local Muslim highwaywoman exhibited a penchant for waylaying and murdering Franks, a habit possibly connected with her once having been married to one, whom she also killed. Another stylish Nablus woman, the Frank Paschia de Riveri, wife of the local draper, achieved notoriety as the alleged mistress of the Patriarch Heraclius, earning herself the nickname Madame la Patriarchesse and a wardrobe stuffed with silks and precious jewels. Although there were sufficient Franks settled there to have a Frankish court (a Cour des Bourgeois), the local Samaritan sect was permitted to continue its annual Passover ritual, which attracted devotees from all over the Near East, a tolerance of an active non-Christian religious centre unique within Christendom. The Frankish viscount, the king’s representative in the town, allowed an Arab emir to witness a sanguinary trial by battle between two Franks over one party’s alleged complicity in setting Muslim thieves on to his opponent’s property. A bullying Frankish landlord drove a group of devout Muslims of the Hanbali sect to evacuate their villages during the 1150s and 1160s:
before that they had enjoyed full Friday prayers and sermons. In the combination of inter- and infra-communal violence, lawlessness, indifference, practical coexistence, unresolved tensions and exaggerated cultural behaviour, these stories recall the flavour of other competitive frontiers, such as the American ‘Wild’ West.
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Nablus sat on the edge of a frontier zone. Elsewhere in Outremer practical coexistence largely prevailed, even with Muslims. Religious divides could be crossed by conversion; the laws of Jerusalem insisted that former Muslim slaves, if genuine converts, became freedmen. Amongst the nobility, periods of peace, treaties or truces could lead to temporarily amicable contacts. After the treaty that ended the long and bitter siege of Tyre in 1124, the inhabitants emerged to fraternize with their conquerors and inspect the elaborate siege engines used against them. At such times of truce the loquacious raconteur Usamah Ibn-Munqidh of Shaizar, who claimed friends among the Frankish aristocracy, managed to visit his social equals throughout Outremer, even in Antioch and Jerusalem, with impunity. On one occasion Usamah managed, so he later boasted, to secure damages for the theft of part of his sheep flocks from King Fulk against Renier de Brus, lord of Baniyas. Renier’s own wife, when captive in Muslim hands in the 1130s, on her own admission ‘had not satisfactorily preserved the sanctity of the marriage bed’, prompting her husband to divorce her on her release. Amity remained superficial. During a truce between Antioch and Izz al-Din of Shaizar in 1108, Tancred of Antioch befriended a Kurdish knight called Hasanun, who had joined in horse races with the Franks; in 1110, in renewed hostilities, Hasanun was captured and tortured, Tancred personally ordering that the young man’s right eye be gouged out despite apparently having given Hasanun his personal guarantee of safety. Another Antiochene, Robert FitzFulk the Leper, struck up an alliance if not friendship with the atabeg of Damascus, Tughtegin, in 1115, although his friend later struck off his head rather than ransom him.
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Such stories of aristocratic exchange, largely based on the gilded self-serving memories of the rather unsuccessful Usamah of Shaizar, feature an underlying alienation between the Latins and their Muslim neighbours. Relations between Franks and the Muslim subjects were inescapable. While direct evidence of Muslim self-government is sparse, it is likely that Muslim village life continued much as before, but with heavier tax burdens, the relationship of Latin lords and their Muslim
subjects remaining essentially fiscal. There was little overt attempt at conversion; those few Franks who bothered to learn Arabic probably did so to satisfy cultural and aesthetic interests or to converse with their Syrian Christian servants and tenants rather than establish contacts across the communal divide. Muslims existed outside the scope of most Frankish law, as Syrian Christians did not, or were lumped together in opposition to all Christians. Thus the
assise des bourgeois
recorded severe penalties for Muslim violence against Christians but not vice versa.
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Any concept of an integrated society in Outremer that includes the Muslim community lacks evidence. Contact was administrative or personal, not communal or cultural, either at second or third hand, through village headmen or estate managers, bailiffs and interpreters, or through employment of individuals, such as doctors, possibly a few scribes or eccentric patronage such as that bestowed on Hamdan Ibn Abd al-Rahim by Alan of al-Atharib. The relationship never strayed from that of exploiting lord and regulated subject.

On the other hand, relations with local Christians assumed a very different guise. In some areas, notably Antioch, the institutional power of local churches could not be ignored. Despite visceral anti-Greek ecclesiastical prejudice and discrimination, as revealed in the work of Gerald of Nazareth (d. 1161), in the kingdom of Jerusalem, the ancient Greek abbey of St Sabas enjoyed the patronage of the Latin monarchs, three of whom married Orthodox princesses (Baldwin II, Baldwin III and Amalric I). Greek imperial funds helped rebuild the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Greek clergy were restored to the Holy Sepulchre by Baldwin I after the fiasco of the failure of the regular Easter miracle of the Holy Fire under Latin auspices in 1101, the annual ritual on Easter eve when Holy Fire is supposed to descend from heaven to light the priests’ candles in the edicule of the Holy Sepulchre. The newcomers evidently had not learnt the knack. An archbishop of the Syrian and Greek communities in Gaza and Bethgibelin negotiated successfully on their behalf with the Hospitaller landlords in 1173 and was even admitted as a
confrater
of the order. Latin and eastern Christians lived together in city and country; in places they worshipped together. Arabic-speaking Syrian Christians occupied important positions as scribes and customs officers, as they did under Muslim rule. Legal rights of local religious groups could be sustained in Frankish courts even, perhaps exceptionally, against Franks. In 1137/8, the Lorraine crusader Godfrey of Asch,
a companion of Godfrey of Bouillon, on the plea of the Armenian
catholicus
of Jerusalem finally gained his freedom from captivity in Egypt, where he had languished for thirty-five years. Long presumed dead by his compatriots, his Jerusalem lands had reverted to the local Jacobite (i.e. monophysite) community, the pre-1099 owners. On his release, Godfrey claimed his property back, presumably in the High Court, but, on the intervention of Queen Melisende, had to be satisfied with compensation of 300 besants (gold pieces), leaving the Jacobites in possession.
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Integration progressed only so far. Beneath the Frankish legal system, the Syrians held their own courts for petty crimes and civil cases, but serious criminal cases were heard in solely Frankish courts, the
cour des bourgeois
. Even in the
cour de la fronde
, possessing wide civil and limited criminal jurisdiction at Acre and probably in other city ports, where Syrians were represented as jurors, the president was the Frankish viscount. Surviving witness lists of Latin land charters include very few Syrians. Mixed Latin–Syrian marriages, entirely legal and possibly common, may be disguised behind Frankish names, however, contact, cooperation and acceptance did not mean cultural integration. The Arabic-speaking Syrian Christian communities persisted in sharp contrast to the Franks in language, law and culture even though they cohabited the same cities and rural areas. The numbers of immigrants were too small and the duration of their dominance too short for much effective cultural or social symbiosis to occur: too many to be naturalized, too few to transform.

Yet the Franks left their mark and were, in turn, marked by their environment. As elsewhere in areas of conquest and frontiers, the immigrants in Outremer expressed both the necessities of settlement and the requirements of lordship through building. The most obvious statement by the new order rose, if slowly, at the church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, but across Outremer the political, religious and economic needs of the new rulers were met by extensive construction work from grand projects such as the sophisticated concentric Hospitaller castle at Belvoir overlooking the Jordan, to town and village churches, rural fortified towers, manor houses and hall houses, residential terraces for agricultural workers in new settlements such as Magna Mahomeria, to roads, water mills, olive and wine presses and sugar-processing plants. Identifying archaeological remains as specifically Frankish rather than built
during the period of Frankish occupation is, in the absence of documentary support, hazardous, yet an extensive Frankish building programme, in the countryside as well as in towns and castles, is apparent in perhaps over 200 locations. Given the hundreds of castle sites identified in post-Conquest England, such an enterprise is unsurprising, even if the building materials, mainly stone, cost more in time, money and men than the plentiful wood of the west. Frankish building in the countryside, including farmhouses and towers for seigneurial and bailiff habitation, as at the Red Tower (al Burj al-Ahmar) on the plain of Sharon, and the planned villages of Frankish farmers and labourers, such as Parva Mahomeria (Qubaiyba) north-west of Jerusalem, indicate a far from entirely absentee landowning aristocracy or exclusively urban bourgeois population.
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The tangible remains of the Frankish settlements, alongside the records of a vibrant land market at all levels of rural society, display a level of economic viability never fully matched by political or demographic security.

The impression of Frankish society in Outremer as an alien intruder incapable of being grafted on to indigenous culture has been derived, where not from modern politicized analogies of empire, colonization, racial separate development and competing political and religious communities, from the seeming indifference of the Latins to assume a local Palestinian or Syrian identity. Part of this image relies on concentrating on the lack of contact or co-operation between the Franks and the Muslims to the exclusion of Franco-Syrian Christian association. We are told few Franks learnt local languages: ‘these people speak nothing but Frankish; we do not understand what they say,’ snapped Usamah, blithely ignoring his own admitted inability to speak Turkish.
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Yet communication between linguistic groups was both essential and constant, in commerce, agriculture, estate management, taxation and justice, most obviously in the multi-ethnic
cour de la fronde
. At Qaqun (Caco) on the plain of Sharon, a mixed settlement of Franks, Syrian Christians and possibly some Muslims, the lord of Caesarea was represented fiscally and judicially by a viscount who owed him the service of one knight and probably used the fort in the village when he visited. However, administrative contact with the Syrian villagers was maintained by the dragoman, literally interpreter, one of whom, called Peter, sold to Walter I of Caesarea land worth 200 besants in 1146. Clearly of some means, Peter, like other dragomans, probably owed his lord
a duty of service, conceived in western idiom as a sergeant of a rear-vassal of the lord.
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In turn, it is possible the Arabic-speaking local Christians had their own headman to negotiate for them. While the lords of Caesarea authorized charters directly with local Syrians, the dragoman acted as the mediator. With Frankish tenants, the lord’s interests rested separately with his agent, the dispensator. Thus parallel systems of administration could exist within a mixed Christian village. Physically, too, while Franks settled in areas of previous Christian settlement, it is hard to identify displacement. Rather, the Franks created new villages, resettled abandoned sites or located themselves beside existing Christian villages, even where they shared the local church. The picture emerges of linked, cooperating communities, not fully integrated or assimilated into each other, with only limited need for shared language, a model familiar in contemporary cities and on other frontiers. In such circumstances, maintenance of identity did not imply intolerant exclusivity.

Inevitably, some Franks did learn local languages as well as more generally becoming acculturated with the Near East in diet, dress, hygiene, economic activity and accommodation. A smattering of Arabic for judicial, diplomatic or administrative purposes may have been commonplace; at least one western knight, William de Preaux, managed to learn the Arabic for king,
malik
, during the Third Crusade, using it to divert the attention of Turkish troops away from Richard I during an ambush near Jaffa in 1191.
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Learning to speak, even read, other languages came as less of a burden to twelfth-century western aristocrats than to some of their modern successors. In addition to his own local vernacular, an educated nobleman would have daily confronted Latin (if only in church or at prayers) and probably numerous other vernaculars, if only orally. Henry II of England was fluent in northern French and Latin, with a smattering of other western European languages; his son Richard I cracked jokes in Latin and recited verse in northern and southern French. To rule England or Sicily, Norman rulers or their officials needed to be trilingual; Bohemund spoke Greek. Among the Frankish nobility in Outremer, captivity provided a more peculiar school of languages; during his imprisonment in the 1160s, Raymond III of Tripoli learnt Arabic, probably not a unique pastime among long-stay prisoners. Others acquired Arabic out of curiosity, intellectual energy, political judgement or necessity. Reynald lord of Sidon (1171–1200),
employed a Muslim language teacher, enjoyed religious debate and studied Arabic literature. Sufficiently fluent and adept to charm Saladin himself, Reynald used his linguistic skill to bamboozle the sultan into withdrawing from his stronghold at Beaufort in May 1189 and buy a year’s grace and good surrender terms for his castle. Later Reynald acted as a diplomat in negotiations with Saladin during the Third Crusade. Another Frankish noble who, according to Saladin’s associate and biographer Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad (1145–1234), spoke Arabic well was the effeminate Humphrey III of Toron, whose linguistic talent was in turn employed by Richard I of England in his negotiations with Saladin in 1191.
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Both Reynald and Humphrey came from families long established in Outremer, their proficiency in Arabic, while striking Arabic chroniclers as sufficiently unusual to be worthy of note, perhaps reflecting a growing facility among the Latin rulers, surrounded as they were, even in their own households, by Arabic-speaking Christians as well as a few Muslims and Arabized Jews. Throughout the twelfth century, chance comments or descriptions of exchanges between Franks and Arabic-speaking neighbours, even at the level of spying, hint at a perhaps wide pool of linguists. The parallel may be with Anglo-Norman England, Sicily and Spain, where conquerors encountered resilient and sophisticated local languages of learning, literature, government and an indigenous social elite. Again, in the context of relations with Syrian Christians, the desire to communicate, even if not strictly imperative for political or administrative survival, appears unsurprising. Much the same could be said of other eastern elite languages. The charter recording the negotiations between the Hospitallers and Meletus the Syrian archbishop in Gaza and Bethgibelin of 1173 is bilingual in Latin and Greek. The Edessan nobleman Baldwin of Marasch, killed in a failed attempt to recapture Edessa in 1146, spoke fluent Armenian and employed an Armenian priest as his confessor.
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