Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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Does this psalter reflect wider truths about the nature of life in the Frankish Levant? Was the society inhabited by Melisende and her contemporaries itself distinct in character and quality; and was this ‘crusader’ world one of perpetual war–a closed community of religious and ethnic intolerance–or a melting-pot of cross-cultural interchange? This debate has the potential to offer profoundly instructive insights into the reality of medieval life. It is also among the most heated in all crusade history. Over the last two hundred years historians have presented wildly divergent visions of the relationship between Frankish Christians and the indigenous peoples of the Near East, with some emphasising the forces of integration, adaptation and acculturation and others depicting the crusader states as oppressive, intolerant colonial regimes.

Given the relative paucity of a surviving body of medieval evidence that sheds light on Outremer’s social, cultural and economic context, it is not surprising that the image put forward of the crusader states has often revealed more about the hopes and prejudices of our own world than the mentality and mores of the medieval past. For those who believe in the inevitability of a ‘clash of civilisations’ and a global conflagration between Islam and the West, the crusades and the societies they begat can serve as grim proof of mankind’s innate propensity to savagery, bigotry and tyrannical repression of an enemy ‘other’. Alternatively, the evidence of transcultural fusion and peaceful coexistence in Outremer can be harnessed to underpin the ideal of convivencia (literally ‘living together’), to suggest that peoples of differing ethnic and religious backgrounds can live together in relative harmony.⁸³

Despite all of these manifest complexities, the world of Outremer demands close and careful examination, because it has such integral bearing upon the fundamental issues of crusade history, opening up a pair of pressing questions: was the Frankish conquest and colonisation of the Near East unusual because it occurred in the context of holy war, or actually quite unremarkable? And did the creation of the crusader states change the history of western Europe–accelerating cross-cultural contact and the diffusion of knowledge; serving as a breeding ground for greater familiarity and understanding between Latin Christians and Muslims?

Life in Outremer

A number of elementary facts conditioned the nature of life in the crusader states. Outremer’s foundation did not bring about a widespread displacement of the Levant’s indigenous population. Instead, Frankish settlers governed polities whose populations reflected that region’s historic diversity–a mixture of Muslims, Jews and eastern Christians. This latter group included a bewildering number of Christian rites, among them Armenians, Greeks, Jacobites, Nestorians and Copts; as well as ‘Syrian’ (or Melkite) Christians, who were Greek Orthodox but spoke Arabic. The distribution and relative representation of these different peoples varied considerably across the crusader states because of established settlement patterns: with a preponderance of Armenians in the county of Edessa and Greeks in the principality of Antioch; and probably a higher proportion of Muslims in the kingdom of Jerusalem.

The Latins ruled over these native subjects as an elite, heavily outnumbered minority. Linguistic difference seems to have remained as a defining and dividing factor. The common spoken tongue adopted by the Latins was Old French (with Latin used in formal documentation) and, while some settlers did learn Arabic and other eastern languages like Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Hebrew, most did not. Many Franks resided in urban and/or coastal communities–and thus in relative isolation from the agrarian indigenous population. In rural inland settings, western lords generally lived in separate manor houses, largely cut off from their subjects, but the pragmatic necessity of sharing scarce resources like water sometimes prompted increased contact. In general, small rural settlements tended to have a coherent devotional identity, so that one village might be made up of Muslims, another of Greeks (the same is true in parts of the Near East today). But large towns and cities were more multicultural.

So the Franks evidently ruled over, and in some cases lived among, a diverse range of ‘eastern’ peoples. Did the Latins stand aloof, or integrate themselves into this richly variegated setting? According to King Baldwin I’s chaplain Fulcher of Chartres, writing in the 1120s, they seem quickly to have undergone a high degree of acculturation:

Consider, I pray, and reflect how in our time God has transformed the Occident [West] into the Orient. For we who were Occidentals have become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian. He who was of Rheims or Chartres has now become a citizen of Tyre or Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth.

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.⁸⁴

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:

When I went to visit the holy sites in Jerusalem, I would go in and make my way up to the Aqsa mosque, beside which stood a small mosque that the Franks had converted into a church. When I went into the Aqsa mosque–where the Templars, who are my friends, were–they would clear out that little mosque so that I could pray in it.

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.⁸⁵

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:

Our way lay through continuous farms and ordered settlements, whose inhabitants were all Muslims, living comfortably with the Franks. God protect us from such temptation. They surrender half their crops to the Franks at harvest time, and pay as well a poll-tax of one dinar and five qirat for each person. Other than that, they are not interfered with, save for a light tax on the fruits of trees. Their houses and all their effects are left to their full possession.

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.⁸⁶

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.⁸⁷

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 1173.⁸⁸

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.⁸⁹ 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.⁹⁰

The extent to which this medical knowledge influenced actual practice in the Latin Levant is debatable. Usama ibn Munquidh wrote with relish about the peculiar and sometimes distinctly alarming techniques used by Frankish doctors. In one case a sick woman was diagnosed as having ‘a demon inside her head’. Usama apparently watched as the attending Latin physician first shaved her head and then ‘took a razor and made a cut in her head in the shape of a cross. He then peeled back the skin so that the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman died instantaneously.’ Usama concluded dryly: ‘I left, having learned about their medicine things I had never known before.’ Latin settlers in the crusader states seem to have recognised that Muslims and eastern Christians possessed advanced medical knowledge; and some, like the Frankish royal family in Jerusalem during the second half of the twelfth century, retained the services of non-Latin doctors. But there were some centres of excellence operated by western Christians, including the massive hospital in Jerusalem dedicated to St John and run by the Hospitaller Military Order.

The artistic fusion of Melisende’s Psalter was echoed in buildings erected in the crusader states around this time, most famously in the massive reconstruction programme undertaken at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, during the reigns of Fulk and Melisende. When the Franks first conquered Palestine this church was in a state of some decay. Through the 1130s and 1140s the Latins rejuvenated this most sacred site, designing a suitably majestic structure that, for the first time, would enclose all the various shrines associated with Christ’s Passion: including the Calvary chapel (on the supposed site of his crucifixion) and his burial tomb or Sepulchre. By this time, the church was also closely associated with the Frankish crown rulers of Jerusalem, being the venue for coronations and the burial site of kings.

In overall configuration, the new plan for the Holy Sepulchre adhered to the western European ‘Romanesque’ style of the early Middle Ages, and bore some similarity to other major Latin pilgrim churches in the West, including that found in Santiago de Compostela (north-western Spain). The ‘crusader’ church did have some distinctive features–including a large domed rotunda–but many of these peculiarities resulted from the building’s unique setting, and from its architects’ ambition to incorporate so many ‘holy places’ under one roof. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre standing today is still, broadly speaking, that of the twelfth century, but almost all of the interior ‘crusader’ decoration has been lost (as have the royal tombs). Of the extensive Latin mosaics only one remains–almost hidden on the ceiling, within the dim confines of the Calvary chapel–depicting Christ in Byzantine style. The main entryway to the building, through grand twinned portals on the south transept, was crowned by a pair of lavishly sculpted stone lintels: one, on the left, showing scenes from Jesus’ final days, including the Last Supper; the other, a complex geometric web of interwoven vine-scrolling, dotted with human and mythological figures. These lintels remained in situ until the 1920s, when they were removed to a nearby museum for preservation. Throughout, the sculpture on the south façade appears to incorporate Frankish, Greek, Syrian and Muslim influences.

The new ‘crusader’ church was consecrated on 15 July 1149, exactly fifty years to the day after Jerusalem’s reconquest. This building set out to proclaim, honour and venerate the unique sanctity of the Holy Sepulchre–Christendom’s spiritual epicentre. It also stood as a bold declaration of Latin confidence, affirming the permanency of Frankish rule and the might of its royal dynasty; and as a monument that celebrated the achievements of the First Crusade, even as it bore splendid testimony to Outremer’s cultural diversity.⁹¹

God’s land of faith and devotion

The ‘crusader’ Church of the Holy Sepulchre was just one expression of the intense devotional reverence attached to Jerusalem, and to the Holy Land as a whole. For the Franks, this Levantine world–through which Christ himself had walked–was itself a sacred relic, where the air and earth were imbued with the numinous aura of God. It was inevitable that the religious monuments built in this hallowed land, and the expressions of faith carried out among its many holy places, would be coloured by an especially febrile piety. Latin religious life was also affected by the fact that many of the indigenous peoples of the Near East (including eastern Christians, Muslims and Jews) shared this sense of zealous adoration.

Through the twelfth century, the most common western European visitors to Outremer were not crusaders; they were pilgrims. Thousands came from Latin Christendom, making landfall at ports like Acre–the human equivalent of the precious cargo shipped from east to west; others came from the likes of Russia and Greece. Some stayed as lay settlers or became monks, nuns or hermits. Only a few religious houses were erected on entirely undeveloped sites, but many disused locations were revitalised (such as the Benedictine convent of St Anne in Jerusalem), and Latin monasteries that pre-dated the crusades, like Notre-Dame de Josaphat (just outside the Holy City), enjoyed a massive boost in popularity and patronage.

Acts of devotion also brought Franks into contact with the native inhabitants of the Levant. Some Latins sought to get closer to God by living ascetic lives of isolation in areas of wilderness like Mount Carmel (beside Haifa) and the Black Mountain (near Antioch); there they mingled in loose communities with Greek Orthodox hermits. One of the most remarkable examples of religious convergence occurred at the Convent of Our Lady at Saidnaya (about fifteen miles north of Damascus). This Greek Orthodox religious house, deep in Muslim territory, possessed a ‘miraculous’ icon of the Virgin Mary which had been transmuted from paint into flesh. Oil supposedly flowed from the icon’s breasts and this liquid was treasured for its incredible healing properties. Saidnaya was a well-established pilgrimage destination, popular with eastern Christians and Muslims (who revered Mary as the mother of the prophet Jesus). From the second half of the twelfth century onwards, it also was visited by a number of Latin pilgrims–some of whom took phials of the Virgin’s ‘miraculous’ oil back to Europe–and the shrine proved to be particularly popular among the Templars.

Just as some Franks were permitted to pass through Islamic lands to reach Saidnaya, so were Muslim pilgrims occasionally able to access sacred sites in Outremer. In the early 1140s, Unur of Damascus and Usama ibn Munqidh were allowed to visit the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Around this same time, Usama also travelled to the Frankish town of Sebaste (near Nablus) to see the crypt of John the Baptist (and, as previously noted, he claimed to have made frequent trips to the Aqsa mosque). In the early 1180s, the Muslim scholar ‘Ali al-Harawi was able to make a thorough tour of Islamic religious sites in the kingdom of Jerusalem, and later wrote an Arabic guide to the area. On the basis of these few potentially isolated incidences, however, it is impossible accurately to gauge the real extent of Muslim pilgrim traffic.

In spite of these various forms of devotional interaction, the underlying religious atmosphere was still characterised by a marked degree of intolerance. Frankish and Muslim writers continued to denigrate one another’s faiths, commonly through accusations of paganism, polytheism and idolatry. Relations between Latin and Levantine Christians also continued to be shaded by tension and distrust. The crusaders’ conquest of the Near East put an effective (if not permanent) end to the region’s established Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy. New Latin patriarchs were appointed in Antioch and Jerusalem, and Latin archbishops and bishops were installed all across Outremer. The leaders of this Latin church made strident efforts to defend their ecclesiastical jurisdiction and to curtail what they regarded as the dangers of cross-contamination between western and eastern Christian rites, particularly with regard to monasticism.⁹²

The Frankish East–Iron Curtain or open door?

The crusader states were not closed societies, wholly isolated from the Near Eastern world around them, nor uniformly oppressive, exploitative European colonies. But by the same token, Outremer cannot accurately be portrayed as a multicultural utopia–a haven of tolerance in which Christians, Muslims and Jews learned to live together in peace. In most regions of the Latin East, at most times in the twelfth century, the reality of life lay somewhere between these two polar opposites.

The ruling western European minority showed some pragmatic willingness to accommodate and incorporate non-Franks into the legal, social, cultural and devotional fabric of Outremer. Economic imperatives–from maintaining a subjected native workforce to facilitating the passage of trade–also promoted a degree of equitable interaction. Theoretically, two conflicting paradigms might be expected to have shaped ‘crusader’ society: on the one hand, the softening of initial antipathies over time, through gradually increasing familiarity; and, on the other, the potentially counteractive force of mounting jihadi enthusiasm within Islam. In reality, neither trend was so clear cut. From the start, Franks and Muslims engaged in diplomatic dialogue, negotiated pacts and forged trade links; and they continued to do so as the twelfth century progressed. And even as the decades passed, writers of all creeds persistently fell back on traditional stereotypes to express seemingly immutable suspicion and loathing of the ‘other’.⁹³

Franks, eastern Christians and Muslims living in the Near East may have come to know each other a little better in the course of the twelfth century, but this did not lead to real understanding or enduring harmony. Given the prevailing realities of the wider world, this should be no surprise. The medieval West itself was racked by inter-Latin rivalry and interminable martial strife; endemic social and religious intolerance was also on the rise. By these standards, the uneasy mixture of pragmatic contact and simmering conflict visible in the Levant was not that remarkable. And while the ethos of holy war may have influenced the nature of Frankish society, Outremer does not seem to have been defined by the crusading ideal.