MacEvitt, Christopher [en] - The Crusades and the Christian World of the East. Rough Tolerance

The Crusades and the Christian World of the East

12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page i

T H E M I D D L E AG E S S E R I E S

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series EditorEdward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher

12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page ii

The Crusades and theChristian World of the East

Rough Tolerance

Christopher MacEvitt

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page iii

Contents

Note on Transliteration and Names viiMap viii

Introduction 1The Twelfth-Century Middle East 3Historiography of the Crusades 13Rough Tolerance: A New Model of Religious Interaction 21

1 Satan Unleashed: The Christian Levant in the Eleventh Century 27A Brief History of the Christian East 29Contact and Knowledge Between Eastern and Western Christians 43

2 Close Encounters of the Ambiguous Kind: When Crusaders andLocals Meet 50Responses to the First Crusade 54The Franks in Edessa 65Armenian Resistance 71

3 Images of Authority in Edessa, 11001150 74Frankish Authority 75Armenian Authority: A Response to the Franks 81Edessa Under Joscelin I 92Edessa and the Frankish East 97

4 Rough Tolerance and Ecclesiastical Ignorance 100Local Christians from a Latin Perspective 102Local Priests and Patriarchs in the Frankish Levant 106Architecture and Liturgy 126Pilgrimage 132

12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page v

5 The Legal and Social Status of Local Inhabitants in the Frankish Levant 136Historiography 136The Peasantry 142Local Rural Landowners and Administrators 149

6 The Price of Unity: Ecumenical Negotiations and the End ofRough Tolerance 157Manuel I Komnenos and the Mediterranean World 158Ecumenical Dialogue with the Armenian Church 161Jacobite Patriarch Michael and the Quest for Legitimacy 167Cultural Consequences of Ecumenical Negotiation 171

Conclusion 177

Notes 181

Bibliography 229

Index 253

Acknowledgments 271

vi Contents

12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page vi

Note on Transliteration and Names

The names of people and places mentioned in this book havebeen translated and transliterated into English in a variety of ways that arenot always consistent. I have attempted to render personal names in a waythat reflects most closely the sound in the original language, even when thatname is being used in another language. I have thus referred to the Ayyubidsultan as Salah al-Din rather than Saladin. Many names of towns and geo-graphical features have different names in Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, Greek,Latin, Turkish, and Old French. I have generally used the name of the com-munity that was dominant in the period under discussion, with a few excep-tions for well-known places. Thus, I have consistently used Edessa for the sakeof familiarity, when almost everyone in the twelfth century knew it by somevariation of its ancient Syriac name, Urhay (Latin Rohas, Arabic al-Ruha,Turkish Urfa, Armenian Urha). Only a few classicizing Latin chroniclers usedEdessa, but that has stuck. In transliterating Armenian into English, I havegenerally followed the system of transliteration of the Library of Congress. Ihave generally used the standard western calendar for dates, although thecommunities under discussion used a variety of different calendars.

12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page vii

The Frankish Levant, c. 1130.

12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page viii

Introduction

A few months after the capture of Antioch (3 June 1098), the lead-ers of the First Crusade wrote a letter to Pope Urban II, on whose urging theyhad embarked on their long, strange journey across Europe and Byzantium.The rigors of nearly two years on the march, the exhausting eight-monthsiege of Antioch, the euphoria of its capture, the miraculous discovery of therelic of the Holy Lance, and the astonishing victory over yet another Turkisharmy had left the crusaders dazed and overwhelmed. The last straw came on 1 August with the death of Adhemar of LePuy, the papal representative accompanying the crusaders. His passing left the crusaders without a guidingand unifying voice. Confused and lacking direction, the crusaders hoped aletter to Urban might elicit further guidance. After summarizing the recentevents of the crusade, the letter-writers urged that Urban himself come toAntioch, which was, as they noted, the first seat of St. Peter, and that the pope then lead the crusaders on to Jerusalem. Why? The crusaders confessedthat they had found some challenges beyond their military skills: we havesubdued the Turks and the pagans, they wrote to Urban, but the heretics,Greeks and Armenians, Syrians and Jacobites, we have not been able to over-come (expugnare).1 What the crusaders wanted to do to the heretics is unclear: kill them as they had the Turkish inhabitants of Antioch? Expelthem from the lands the crusaders had conquered? Or perhaps the crusadersfrustration arose because they did not know how to confront an issue ascomplex and unexpected as eastern Christianity.

For the modern historian, the letter is a glimpse at a moment of possi-bility, as the armys leaders gathered in Antioch on that late summers day toconsider the direction of their journey. At Antioch, the crusaders stood at theedge of the Byzantine world, a world different from their own yet more fa-miliar than the great sweep of Islamic lands that lay open to the south andeast of them. The letter from Antioch hints at their anxiety on leaving the fa-

12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page 1

miliar to venture into the unknown. Yet their anxiety circled not so mucharound the Turks or Islam; for as the writers confidently asserted, we havesubdued the Turks and the pagans. Rather, the crusaders were alarmed bythe religious diversity of the Christian world of the Middle East. Turks andMuslims they were prepared for, but for Armenians, Greeks, and Jacobitesthey were not. The letter raises a series of questions. How would the Franksapproach local Christians? What language would they use to frame their re-lationship? Would the Franks perceive them as a conquered community likethe Muslims, or would they see them as fellow Christians, or simply as an oc-cupied subordinate people? These inquiries have provoked strikingly diver-gent answers from historians of the crusades and of the Frankish East.

In one sense, the harsh attitude displayed in the crusader letter from An-tioch conforms to what many would expect from a group of soldiers who be-lieved that killing Muslims was a meritorious actit simply extended thatpersecutory and violent agenda to another foreign and suspect group, indige-nous Christians. Scholars and educated readers alike have seen the twelfth-century Middle East as an era dominated by crusade and jihad: a world inwhich conflict between Muslims and western (Latin Catholic) Christians notonly expressed itself in a series of battles fought in the name of religious ide-ology, but formed a fundamental part of the way individuals and communi-ties defined themselves and others. For such Christian and Muslim leaders asBernard of Clairvaux, Nur al-Din, or Richard the Lion-heart, this may wellhave been true. But for communities living in the Levant, both indigenousand Frankish, crusade and jihad played little role in the way they understoodor experienced the world around them. Rather, individuals and communitiesformed their identity through a network of families, civic relationships, pro-fessional ties, and associations with churches, shrines, and local holy places.Taken together, such identities often crossed religious boundaries.

This book examines the intersection of two Christian worlds, that ofwestern Christians (or Franks, as they were generally known in the MiddleEast) who conquered Syria and Palestine as part of the First Crusade and re-mained to settle in the occupied lands, and that of eastern Christians overwhom they ruled. The society that emerged at that intersection has beencharacterized as colonial and European, or as creole and orientalized; bothdescriptions rely on a dichotomized understanding of interreligious relationsas either oppressive or tolerant. Instead, I argue for a mode of social interac-tion between local Christians and the Franks in twelfth-century Syria andPalestine that I call rough tolerance, which encompassed conflict and op-

2 Introduction


pression yet allowed multiple religious communities to coexist in a reli-giously charged land.

The Twelfth-Century Middle East

Over the period of a century (10901190), the Middle East underwent dra-matic political change. So rapid were these changes that one Armenianchronicler believed that contemporary events were showing us change,decay, and disappearance of what exists and revealing to us the instability ofmankind on earth.2 The north Syrian town of Marash, for example, in thecourse of the century fell under the rule of Armenians, Byzantines, Franks,the Seljuk Turks of Rum, and the Zengids of Mosulin essence every majorpower in the Levant. This sense of instability and change underlies much ofthe cultural permeability of twelfth-century Syria and Palestine.

Political Change in the Levant

Two moments capture the dramatic changes the twelfth century brought.The first moment comes in the 1160s, when Franks, Byzantines, and Turksvied for political dominance. The Franks controlled the Mediterranean sea-coast, having captured the last Muslim-held port, Ascalon, in 1153. TheByzantines, under emperor Manuel I Komnenos (114380), routinely ledlarge armies to northern Syria to ensure their dominance there, while theTurkish leader Nur al-Din (114674), building on the victories of his fatherZengi (112746), brought the important cities of Mosul, Aleppo, and Damas-cus under one ruler for the first time in sixty years. Notably, two of thesepowers were Christian. All eyes were turned to Fatimid Egypt, which, whileeconomically dynamic and fertile, was paralyzed by political conflict. Itseemed possible that any of the three could gain control of Egypt and therebydominate the Middle East. Within twenty years, that came to pass. Nur al-Dins successor, Salah al-Din (117493), successfully conquered both Egyptand the Frankish principalities; never again would a Christian power basedin the Levant threaten Muslim hegemony.

Yet some seventy years earlier (1090), a very different future seemed im-minent. In the eyes of many, the days of a united Islamic world had returned,this time under Turkish leadership. The Byzantines had retreated to the verywalls of Constantinople as Seljuk armies marched as far as the Aegean and

Introduction 3


the Bosporus. Even Christians of the Middle East celebrated the seeming re-newal of the ancient Islamic empire under Seljuk leadership. The Armenianchronicler Matthew of Edessa (c. 1070c. 1136) eulogized the Seljuk sultanMalik-Shah (107292) by remembering there was no land which did notsubmit to his rule. But his authority was not based on cruel conquest, for heshowed a fatherly affection for all the inhabitants of the lands and so gainedcontrol of many towns and regions without resistance.3 Iran was the centerof Turkish authority; Baghdad was ruled by the caliphs, and Palestine andSyria were just the dusty borderlands of a vast empire sweeping almost toIndia. Malik-Shah died in 1092, and was the last ruler to wield authority fromthe Caspian to the Mediterranean for more than two hundred years.

The First Crusade

The difference between 1090 and the 1160s lies in the fragmentation of Is-lamic authority and the emergence of Frankish principalities in the Levant.The two are intimately linked; the First Crusade (109699) did not cause thecollapse of the Seljuk empire, but took advantage of the squabbles of Malik-Shahs successors by conquering Antioch and Jerusalem. The First Crusadestruck participants and (Christian) commentators as nothing short of mirac-ulous. Matthew of Edessa marveled that God protected the army as he hadthe children of Israel in the past.4 Its assorted armies traveled from westernEurope through Hungary and the Balkan territories of the Byzantine empireto arrive in Constantinople in various groups during the winter and springof 1097, a journey of roughly 2000 miles which in itself was a notable achieve-ment. With their departure from Constantinople, the crusade armies leftChristian lands, and for the next two years faced the daunting challenge ofsurviving in Muslim-controlled territory. The crusaders first captured Nicaea(19 June 1097), capital of the recently established Seljuk sultanate of Rum, andthen defeated two Turkish armies while crossing central Anatolia. The cru-sade nearly ended during the grueling eight-month siege of Antioch in Syria,but the city was captured by ruse on 3 June 1098. The crusaders then imme-diately had to defend the city against another Turkish army sent from Mosul.It was soon after this that the crusaders sought guidance by letter from UrbanII. After recouping their strength in Antioch for several months, the armythen marched to their final destination of Jerusalem, capturing it on 15 July1099 with a bloody massacre. The survival of the army through three years

4 Introduction


march, innumerable sieges, and pitched battles with several large Turkisharmies seemed possible only by virtue of divine intervention.

With the conquest of Jerusalem, the crusade ended, and the vows thecrusaders had taken were fulfilled. But they were left with the question: whatshould be done with the cities and territories the crusaders had conqueredfrom Antioch to Jerusalem? Rather than relinquishing the lands they con-quered to Byzantium, as they had done with Nicaea and other lands in Ana-tolia, the crusaders established the kingdom of Jerusalem, with Godfrey ofBouillon as its ruler, with the remaining crusaders (the majority having diedor returned to Europe on completion of their vows) as its new political andmilitary elite. Bohemund of Taranto, a Norman from southern Italy, hadclaimed Antioch as his own before its capture, and Godfreys brother Bald-win of Boulogne already ruled Edessa. The last Frankish principality to becreated was the county of Tripoli, carved out of the Syrian coast by theProvenal nobleman Raymond of St. Gilles and his descendants after aneight-year siege of the city of Tripoli. These four politiesthe county ofEdessa, principality of Antioch, county of Tripoli and kingdom ofJerusalemare often referred to as the crusader states, an appellation thatmore accurately describes how they were established than how they survived.Though their protection was the motivation for crusades during the next twocenturies, the princes who ruled them were not crusaders. They had con-quered Jerusalem and fulfilled their vows. Their concerns were no longerabout their own salvation or protection of the holy places, but those of rul-ing elites everywhereto defend their lands against any threat, Muslim orChristian, and to augment and solidify their authority. While the societiesthey ruled are commonly discussed in books that take the crusades as theirsubject (as this book itself does), the history of the Frankish Levant only in-tersected with the history of the crusades proper at brief moments. For ex-tended periods, they did not coincide at all.

Geography of the Frankish Levant

While the First Crusade may have been motivated by the religious signifi-cance of Jerusalem, the rest of the cities and regions the crusaders conqueredwere chosen for more prosaic, strategic reasons. The Franks did not, for ex-ample, occupy the barren Sinai peninsula, even though it contained themountain where God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments and Mosessaw the glory of God. Instead, the Franks seized the fertile lands of the

Introduction 5


Mediterranean coast, as well as strategic highlands and areas where Chris-tians made up the majority of the population. At their greatest extent, thelands of the Franks covered the region now occupied by Israel, the GazaStrip, the West Bank, the western border area of Jordan, Lebanon, the sea-coast of Syria, and the southeastern coast of Turkey, as well the Turkish-Syrian borderlands stretching halfway to Iraq.5 The area covered a variety oflandscapes, from the oases of the Dead Sea to the rich farmlands of the Eu-phrates valley, and a large proportion of it was productive land. The cru-saders first entered the area from the north, descending out of the steep rivervalleys of the Taurus Mountains, the chain that stretches from the Mediter-ranean coast inland to the Caucasus Mountains and divides the highlands ofAnatoliawindswept and cold in the winter, hot and dry in the summerfrom the flatter hills and plains of Syria. Their destination was the city of An-tioch, which sat in the valley of the Orontes river, well-watered and humid,marshy in places but allowing cultivation of sugarcane, wheat, and barley.6

To the north were the Syrian Gates, the pass through the Amanus Mountainsto Cilicia, while the Orontes valley itself led east and then south, shelteringthe cities of Apamea, Hama, and Homs, only the first of which ever cameunder Frankish rule.

To the east of the Orontes lay the Syrian limestone massif, a series ofhills which gradually flattened out into the dry plains around Aleppo, whichthemselves continued as a great flat desert stretching east to Mesopotamia.The limestone hills marked the edge of Frankish power; towns and fortressessuch as Imm and Harim allowed the Franks to overlook and at times todominate the plains, but rarely to occupy them. To the north, however, theFranks moved much further inland, following the foothills of the TaurusMountains east, which were home to the county of Edessa, the only entirelyland-bound Frankish principality. The county had no natural boundaries tothe east; similar topography and climate continued east to the black-walledcity of Amida on the Tigris River and even farther, as the Taurus Mountainsran headlong into the Zagros chain, which makes up the backbone of Persia.Occupying land on both sides of the Euphrates, the county covered the richfarmlands along the river, as well as the foothills of the Taurus, which, whiledry, allowed the cultivation of pistachios, walnuts, and, in the western hills,olives.

For the most part, however, the Franks preferred proximity to the coast.Not only did sea travel provide the quickest route to Latin Europe, butseaborne trade was an ever increasingly important part of the Frankish econ-

6 Introduction


omy, as the navies from the commercial cities of ItalyPisa, Genoa, andVenicelargely dominated the eastern Mediterranean sea routes, and al-lowed the establishment of mercantile colonies in many of the Frankish-con-trolled seaports. To the south of Antioch, the county of Tripoli stretchedapproximately eighty-five miles along the Levantine coast, and extendedsome thirty miles to the east into the Lebanon Mountains, which run north-south, parallel to the seacoast. Between the sea and the mountains was a richbut narrow coastal plain, well watered, which supported a variety of agricul-tural products.

The kingdom of Jerusalem was the largest of the Frankish principalities,stretching from Beirut in the north to the Sinai desert in the south. TheLebanon Mountains rumbled to an end in the fertile rolling hills of theGalilee, a region sandwiched in the thirty-four miles between the Mediter-ranean and the Sea of Galilee. The kingdom was largely defined by theMediterranean coast and the Jordan River to the east, which flowed southfrom the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. Southward, the valley through whichit flowed was deep, hot, and increasingly dry, though punctuated with fertileoases. Across the river to the east rose the high hills of biblical Gilead. Theserocky hills, almost cliffs, are the eastern edge of the great geological scar run-ning all the way to East Africa, better known as the Great Rift Valley. On theirheights at the southern end of the Dead Sea, the Franks built the great castleof Kerak (Krak des Moabites), which watched over the merchants and pil-grims traveling from Muslim-ruled Damascus south to Mecca and Cairo. Onthe other side of the Jordan rose the Judean hills in which sat Jerusalem; thehills gradually gave way to the coastal plain, which was at its widest here. Tothe south was the Negev Desert, over which the Franks exercised only spo-radic authority.

Religious Communities of the Levant

The Syrian and Palestinian lands conquered by the crusaders and their suc-cessors were home to a wide variety of religious communities. It is common-place to discuss the diversity of the Middle East in terms of Muslims, Jews,and Christians, yet even this simplifies its religious complexity. Each groupcan (and should) be considered as several different, often competing, com-munities. Three separate Christian communities constituted the bulk of theChristian residents of Palestine and Syria, and were formally distinguished bytheological disagreement over the Council of Chalcedon, held in 451. Called

Introduction 7


to settle debate over how Christs divine and human characteristics were re-lated, the council established that Christ had one human nature and one di-vine nature without confusion, without change, without division, withoutseparation. Instead of resolving disagreements, the council only fed the fireof controversy. Over the following century and a half, different factionswithin the Christian community, particularly in Syria, struggled to ensurethe dominance of their theology, eventually leading to the establishment ofseparate church institutions and hierarchies. By the twelfth century, a host ofliturgical and cultural differences also distinguished communities, and oftenthese were more significant than theology. The number of fingers used whenblessing oneself, the use of leavened or unleavened bread in church services,even the words of the liturgy itself came to bear the weight of religious iden-tity and the anxieties of Christian division. Each group claimed the name oforthodox, that is, those who believe rightly; thus, in this book I use thenames by which they were known (often polemically) by other Christiansoutside their community in order to avoid repeatedly using the name ortho-dox for different communities, as well as the confusion of designations likeGreek or Syrian, which sometimes signal ecclesiastical affiliation andsometimes liturgical language.

The Melkites (Greek Orthodox) were the Christians of Syria, Palestineand Egypt who accepted the definition of Christs nature promulgated atChalcedon, and remained in communion with the patriarch of Constantino-ple and the emperor, once their lands and cities came under Muslim rule. Attimes the Melkite patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria were ap-pointed from Constantinople. Their name derived from the Syriac wordmalka, meaning king or emperor, signaling their continued adherence tothe emperor of Constantinople. But Melkites themselves could be dividedinto two groups, those who spoke Greek and those who spoke Arabic or Syr-iac. Antioch, once among the centers of Hellenistic culture in the ancientworld and under Byzantine rule from 969 to 1086/7, still had a large Greek-speaking Melkite population in the twelfth century. In Palestine too theMelkites constituted the great majority of the Christian population, but thesemore often spoke Syriac or Arabic.

The Jacobite (Syrian Orthodox) tradition developed from the asceticand theological traditions of Alexandria, exemplified in Cyril of Alexandria(d. 444) and developed by Severus of Antioch (d. c. 539).7 The Jacobites re-jected the conclusions of the Council of Chalcedon, believing the council tohave mistakenly separated Christs human and divine qualities. Yet only a

8 Introduction


century later, under the leadership of the bishop of Edessa, Jacob Burdana(or Burdaya, Baradaios in Greek, d. 578, from whom the epithet Jacobitearose), did such miaphysite8 communities begin to define themselves inde-pendently of the imperial church and ordain a separate hierarchy.9 Jacobitecommunities could be found from Antioch across northern Syria andMesopotamia, but by the time of the First Crusade were no longer the ma-jority of the population. In Late Antiquity, Jacobites used Syriac as both aspoken and a liturgical language. By the twelfth century, however, many hadshifted to Arabic as their primary language, though Syriac remained impor-tant as a written and liturgical language in many communities.

The third group of Christians was the Armenians, with whom theFranks interacted and intermarried most often. The Armenian church had adistinct tradition both politically and theologically, having been establishedunder the independent Arsacid monarchy in the fourth century, rather thanwithin the Roman empire as in the case of the Melkites and Jacobites. TheArmenians, like the Jacobites, did not accept the Council of Chalcedon.While some Armenian councils condemned the Chalcedonian formula,proximity to Byzantium meant that Chalcedonian theology always had an ap-peal to some Armenians. Armenian communities in the eleventh and twelfthcenturies dominated the cities and countryside in Cilicia and northern Syria,as well as in their homeland around Lake Van and the Caucasus Mountains.Jerusalem had an Armenian quarter from the early medieval period, with acathedral dedicated to St. James that was rebuilt in the twelfth century.

Other smaller Christian communities also lived in Palestine and Syria.Perhaps the group most closely associated with the crusades in the eyes ofmany historians is the Maronites, who looked to the early fifth-century asceticMaron as a founder. The Maronites developed an institutional structure sepa-rate from the imperial church only after the Muslim conquest of the Levant inthe seventh century. Their leader claimed the title of patriarch of Antioch, andby the twelfth century their communities were largely concentrated in themountains of Lebanon. Many came under the rule of the county of Tripoli, butfew twelfth-century sources mention them explicitly, with the exception ofWilliam of Tyre, who believed them to be monothelite heretics, that is, Chris-tians who believed that Christ has two natures but one will. William was de-lighted to report, however, that under Frankish influence they had repented oftheir error and had reconciled themselves to the Roman church.10 The Ma-ronites thus became the first Uniate church, in communion with Rome butmaintaining a separate hierarchy, liturgy, and canonical traditions.

Introduction 9


The Nestorians inhabited the same Syriac-speaking cultural world asthe Jacobites and also rejected the council of Chalcedon, but for the oppositereasonthey believed that the council had failed to adequately distinguishbetween Christs divine and human natures. The Nestorians had already sep-arated from the imperial church following the ecumenical council of Eph-esus in 431. Also known as the East Syrian church, the Church of the East, orlater the Chaldeans, the Nestorians flourished largely in areas under Sassan-ian rule in Late Antiquity.11 The Nestorians developed close relations withthe Abbasid caliphate, and at times served as the representative of all Chris-tians in the empire. In the early medieval period, Nestorian missionaries andmerchants traveled east along the trade routes, establishing communities asfar east as China. Only a few small Nestorian communities, however, cameunder Frankish rule in the twelfth century.

Other Christians may have had religious communities in Jerusalem inthe twelfth century. The German pilgrim Theodericus recorded that Nu-bians also had clergy in Jerusalem, but it is unclear whether this refers toEgyptian Copts or Ethiopians. Both groups were miaphysite in theology andwere in communion with the Jacobites.12 Georgians, who were in commun-ion with the Melkites but came from the same Caucasian cultural world asArmenians, controlled the monastery of the Holy Cross just to the west of thecity wall of Jerusalem, and Georgian hermits and monks could be found else-where in Palestine.13

In many areas, of course, Muslims were in the majority, but again manydifferent communities lived in the Levant, with different attitudes towardsthe crusaders. The fundamental divide within the Islamic community wasbetween groups generally called Sunnis (ahl al-Sunna) and Shia (shiat Ali).Having its origin among supporters of the Caliph Ali, cousin and son-in-lawof the prophet Muhammad, Shiism developed as a religious movement afterthe Abbasids seized the caliphate in 750, pushing aside descendants of Aliwhom the Shia believed to be the rightful leaders of the Islamic community.As Shiism evolved from a partisan group into a religious community, adher-ents asserted that Ali received secret knowledge from Muhammad, which hepassed on to his descendants and which was the basis of a variety of esoteric,mystical, and secret teachings. Sunna, on the other hand, designated thoseMuslims who accepted the authority of the first generation of Muslims andthe continuity of the historical community, represented by the caliphs. Thistoo was a flexible term, and different writers used it to encompass variousschools of thought.

10 Introduction


In many areas, the Shia did not form separate communities, but inter-mingled among the Sunni population; each community formed a majorityin different areas of the Muslim world. Some branches of Shiism, however,did strive to establish separate polities. A group of Ismailis (supporters ofIsmail, an eighth-century descendant of Ali) established a Shii (Fatimid)caliphate in North Africa in 909, capturing Egypt in 969 and, a few years later,southern Syria. Another group of Ismailis (called Nizaris for their support ofNizar, the son of the Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir, 103694) seized control ofa series of fortresses in western Iran shortly before the death of Malik-Shahin 1092. The Nizaris also gained castles in the 1130s and 1140s in the hills westof Hama, and boosted their relatively weak military strength by the well-planned murder of opponents, gaining them the name of Assassins and afantastical reputation among Sunnis as well as Franks.14 The Nizaris of Syriaoften joined in alliance with the Franks against their Sunni neighbors. Stillother communities of Ismaili inspiration existed in the Levant. The Druzelooked to the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (9961021) as the source of supremereligious knowledge, maintaining their doctrines in secret. Thus Shia livingin towns such as Tripoli, Aleppo, and Damascus could identify with or sup-port a variety of different movements.15

Jewish communities were among the oldest communities of the MiddleEast, and were established throughout Frankish territory. Rabbinic commu-nities were the largest, and documents from the Genizah collection fromCairo demonstrate that in the eleventh century important communities livedin Jerusalem, Tyre, and Tiberias, as well as other cities in Palestine and Syria.Palestine was also home to one of the three Talmudic academies of the Jew-ish world. Many Karaites, a Jewish group that rejected the authority of theTalmud, were also found in Palestine. Palestine, and particularly Jerusalem,had been a center for Karaism in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and thecrusader conquest of Jerusalem devastated both the Rabbanite and Karaitecommunities.16 Karaism continued to flourish in the Byzantine empire, inEgypt, and later in eastern Europe, but the crusader sack of Jerusalem in 1099effectively ended Karaite presence in Palestine for two centuries. Rabbanitecommunities survived under the Franks in other cities, most notably Tyre.

Also significant in the Frankish period were the Samaritans, who ac-cepted only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as divinely inspired, andprobably emerged as a distinct group at the time of the Babylonian Exile (c.587539 B.C.E.), since they did not go into exile but remained on the land. Inthe medieval period, Samaritan communities were spread throughout the

Introduction 11


Middle East, from Thessalonika to Cairo. The center of Samaritan worshipwas (and is) Mount Gerezim, outside the modern city of Nablus (ancientNeapolis), and the Jewish pilgrim Benjamin of Tudela, traveling in 116971,recorded a number of Samaritan communities under Frankish rule.17

In many ways, this enumeration of Levantine religious diversity is mis-leading, suggesting discrete, well-defined communities, fitting together likepieces of a mosaic. Rather, we should imagine societies in which a religiouscommunity was only one of a number of groups or associations in which aperson might participate. Others were based on professional identity (doc-tors, for example, came from all religious communities)18 or regional, urban,or even neighborhood identities. Middle Eastern cities were not segregatedby religious community, although some might have quarters identified withcertain groups (a Christian or Jewish quarter, for example). The establish-ment of the Frankish principality simply added another community, lan-guage, and religious identity to the mix.

Importance of Christian Communities in the Middle East

Why, the reader might ask, focus on Armenians, Jacobites, and Melkites outof all these different local communities? The most important reason is thatonly these Christian communities produced written sources that allow us tounderstand the experience and perspective of local communities who livedunder Frankish authority. While considerable material survives documentingJewish and Muslim views of the crusades and of the Frankish settlements inthe Levant, it was written from the perspective of those living outside theFrankish principalities, and therefore cannot represent those who experi-enced Frankish authority directly.19 Local Christian sourceschronicles,theological treatises, and lettersoriginated almost entirely in northernSyria, where Jacobites and Armenians made up the majority of the popula-tion. While historians have long been familiar with these texts, and many ofthem have been translated, they generally have been used to verify Latin textsabout the Levant, rather than being analyzed for their own perspective. It isonly through them that the relationships of indigenous communities andFranks can be discussed with any confidence.

The challenge of this approach is determining the extent to which localChristian experience aids the historian to understand the experience of otherindigenous communities. The historiographic assumption has been that theFranks treated local Christians better than Jews or Muslims on the basis of

12 Introduction


shared faith, though they still did not treat them as equals. While such an ar-gument has an aura of common sense to it, the underlying assumption thatsocial groups prefer those who are similar to them and feel antagonism to-wards those who are most different is based largely in evolutionary psychol-ogy, and may not apply in all historical situations. In many episodes of socialconflict, it is the intimate enemy, a term which Elaine Pagels has used in dis-cussing Jewish and early Christian intracommunal struggles, who is per-ceived as the greatest challenge and threat.20 Given contemporary attitudestowards schismatic and heretic Christians in Latin Europe, it is easy to imag-ine that the crusaders might have viewed local Christians as more of a threatthan Jews and Muslims. Samaritan communities, for example, suffered littleunder the Franks; their center of worship was undisturbed, and a large num-ber of Torah scrolls survive from the period. It was under the Mamluks thattheir ritual center was taken from them.21 The letter written from Antiochshows that the Franks were prepared to use the language of heresy againstlocal Christians, and Peter the Venerable (10921156) notably argued that vi-olence against Christian schismatics, heretics, and rebels was even more jus-tified than against infidels. As Jonathan Z. Smith declared about otherreligious groups, the radically other is merely other; the proximate other isproblematic, and hence of supreme interest.22 This book, therefore makesno such assumptions about the necessity of better treatment for local Chris-tians, or worse treatment for Jews and Muslims, but seeks whenever possibleto delineate the ways in which Jewish and Muslim experiences were broadlysimilar to or sharply different from those of local Christians.

This study is largely restricted to the period between 1097 and 1187, thatis, from the period when the crusaders first entered Syria until the conquestsof Salah al-Din, which brought the vast majority of those lands back underMuslim rule for five, ten, or twenty years, or even permanently. While theThird Crusade and subsequent campaigns brought some areas back underFrankish rule, it was a slow process, and the society that was reestablished inthe thirteenth century was noticeably changed.23

Historiography of the Crusades

Current historiography of the crusades has developed a consistent picture ofthe relationship between the Franks and local communities.24 Joshua Prawerand other scholars have depicted a segregated world in which a small Frank-

Introduction 13


ish elite dominated Palestine and Syria, isolating themselves from the localpopulation through discriminatory legal systems, the importation of Euro-pean serfdom, and the exclusion of locals from positions of authority. Thisposition has begun to be questioned by historians, but no alternative hasbeen suggested.25 This book offers new ways to think about this question; Iargue that the Frankish Levant was a world in which religious and socialidentities were flexible, and in which violence and tolerance were not exclu-sive characteristics, but strategies often employed simultaneously.

The question of how the crusaders interacted with local communities be-came a subject of inquiry only in the nineteenth century, although the study ofthe crusades began much earlier, emerging almost imperceptibly from the nar-ratives of the medieval chroniclers of the crusades themselves. The first collec-tion of sources was the Gesta Dei per Francos of Jacques Bongars, whichgathered many of the important Latin texts for the crusades and history of theFrankish East, but did not include sources from other languages.26 While thestudy of Arabic and Syriac had been well established in Europe since the Renais-sance and even before, those who knew these languages rarely applied theirknowledge to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Middle East, restricting theiruse to biblical scholarship and patristics. The Arabist Antoine Galland(16461715), translator of The Thousand and One Nights, first suggested the ben-efit of using eastern sources to better understand the crusades.27 Edward Gib-bon used some Arabic and Syriac sources in his Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire, and presented the social history of the Latin states as a decline fromFrankish virility and freedom to oriental sloth and pleasure-seeking, while thenative inhabitants yearned for the more tolerant rule of the caliphs.28 The Ar-menian chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, for example, did not appear in print inwestern Europe until 1813, when the scholar Jacques Chahan de Cirbied pub-lished extracts from two manuscripts from the imperial library in Paris.29

Only with the publication of the monumental Recueil des historiens descroisades in the early and mid-nineteenth century did a substantial number ofMiddle Eastern medieval texts become available to the student of the crusades.This ambitious project began with the Benedictine Maurists of St. Germain-des-Prs about 1770, but after they were suppressed during the French Revolu-tion (the superior-general and forty of the monks died at the guillotine), theroyalist Acadmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres took over the project.30

The subject of local relations with the Franks excited considerable interestduring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly amongFrench historians. While earlier histories of the crusades, such as Michauds in-

14 Introduction


fluential narrative, had focused largely on the Latin narrative of war and settle-ment, devoting little interest to cultural interactions with local populations,31

this changed as French colonial ambitions in the Middle East grew. The Frenchhad cultivated close relations with the Ottoman sultans since the sixteenth cen-tury, and were the first European nation to receive special trading status withinthe empire. Frances economic power and relationship with the Maronites werethe twin tools used to expand French influence in the Middle East, particularlyalong the Levantine coast. Through religious missions, merchants, and consularofficials, the French established a close relationship with the Maronites, as theonly Christians in the Middle East who remained in communion with theCatholic Church from the medieval period, and eventually claimed the role astheir protectors. Other European powers did the same with other minoritycommunitiesthe Russians claimed a special relationship with Greek Ortho-dox communities, while the British developed relations with the Druzebutthe French wielded the most influence. Further commercial treaties with the Ot-tomans in the nineteenth century, particularly in 1838, extended the rights ofFrench and other European merchants to buy and sell within the empire.32 TheFrench particularly dominated the silk trade, which was a significant part ofLebanons economic connections to Europe. When Napoleon III sent Frenchtroops to Lebanon to protect local Christian communities during the civil dis-turbances in Syria and Lebanon in 1860, he reminded the soldiers to showyourselves the dignified children of these heroes who gloriously brought thebanner of Christ to that land, that is, the crusaders. 33

Frances preeminent position in the Levant was explicitly linked to theFrench leadership of the crusades, and nineteenth-century French historiansof the crusades reinforced this image with accounts emphasizing the close re-lations between the Franks and local populations, particularly Christians. Inthe introduction to his 1883 book entitled Les colonies franques de Syrie auxXIIme et XIIIme sicles, Emmanuel Rey announced his intention to examinethe causes which favored their [the crusaders] establishment and develop-ment in the midst of a population of Orientals of all races, Syrians, Greeks,and Armenians, [which] appears to me a new subject destined to fill one oflacunae in the history of the crusades.34 The title of Reys book gave theFrankish settlements of the Levant a new titlecolony, which linked theLatin principalities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to Frances colo-nial ambitions in Syria in the late nineteenth century. Rey asserted that thenumerous offspring of mixed marriages, called poulains in Frankish sources,identified themselves with the local traditions and values of their indigenous

Introduction 15


mothers rather than with any aspect of their Frankish fathers.35 Throughouthis account, Rey emphasized the interactions of Franks with local Christians,whether in the realm of business, war or religion.

Interest in the local Christian influence on the crusaders was not limitedto the French. Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Conders work showed much thesame interest in understanding Frankish society within the context of localChristian communities.36 Conder led the Survey of Western Palestine in thelate nineteenth century, which documented archaeological and historicalsites from the Biblical through the Ottoman period, and thus saw the Frankswithin the context of Middle Eastern history, rather than through the lens ofmedieval Europe. The first American historian of the crusades, Dana Car-leton Munro, agreed with the conclusions of the French school, concluding,a study of the administration and laws shows the care the Franks took towin the goodwill of the natives.37

Scholars, however, began to turn away from the image of an integratedLevant as two issues gained attention: an increased emphasis on Christian-Muslim conflict, and a growing sense of the influence of French colonialismon crusade historiography. The English historian William Stevenson, writingsoon after Conder, enunciated this new view of the Latin East. For Stevenson,the cultural and social history of the Frankish settlements was secondary tothe crusades proper; instead, the story is one of a contest between Moslemsand Latins.38 But it was post-World War II historians, beginning with R. C.Smail, who nailed shut the coffin on the French school of thought. Smail sug-gested that Frankish society segregated Europeans from native Arabs, Syri-ans, and Armenians, and that little significant cultural or social exchangeexisted between the Frankish conquerors and local populations. Further-more, he argued that pre-war French historians such as Rey saw an integratedsociety where there was none in an attempt to justify colonial regimes in theNear East, particularly the French domination of Syria and Lebanon.39

The segregationist historiographic position that Smail advocated has re-mained the dominant one among crusade historians to the present day.Steven Runcimans three-volume epic History of the Crusades, written fromhis eastern perspective as a Byzantinist, concluded that when they [the cru-saders] set themselves up in the East they treated their Christian subjects nobetter than the Caliph had done before them. Indeed, they were sterner, forthey interfered in the religious practices of the local churches.40 As histori-ans such as Joshua Prawer and Jonathan Riley-Smith turned their attentionto the social, legal, and political structures of the Frankish Kingdom of

16 Introduction


Jerusalem, a consensus emerged that depicted the Frankish society as largelyurban and isolated from the local population by segregated cities, separatelaw courts, and different religious traditions.

Joshua Prawers 1972 book, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: EuropeanColonialism in the Middle Ages, revived Reys characterization of the Frankishsettlements as colonies; for Prawer, however, these colonies displayed none ofReys rose-tinted imperialist characteristics, and he even used the termapartheid to describe its judicial and legal systems.41 In Prawers work, thesegregationalist model reached its fullest and most explicit development. Forhim, the main explanation for the lack of integration was economic. The Franksdepended on a subjugated and disenfranchised local population to finance theiroccupation, and would do nothing to jeopardize those economic interests.

Nor has interest in or adherence to this approach diminished; Prawersbook was republished in 2001, and other recent studies on the position of thelocal population have emphasized the segregated nature of the Frankish Lev-ant.42 Carole Hillenbrands encyclopedic work revealed the variety of Mus-lim responses to the crusaders, and concluded that Islamic resentment,suspicion, and ultimate rejection of the Franks outweighed other reactions.43

Prawer also studied the position of Jewish communities under Frankish rule,and likewise saw a community which, while inevitably impacted by the po-litical and military events of the age, remained isolated from the Franks andeven other local communities.44

While the work of Smail and his historiographic heirs may well havebeen necessary to correct the colonialist agenda in older French crusade his-torians, their own vision of the Levant reflected late twentieth-century eventsin Israel and Palestine. The Zionism that founded Israel was too easily seenas a parallel to the crusades, and the failure of Israel to create an integratedsociety among its Jewish and Palestinian citizens and subjects has given his-torians a model of ceaseless conflict between immigrant and indigenouscommunities that was easily applied to Israels twelfth-century counterpart.Furthermore, the desire to overturn the historiography of the earlier genera-tion led them to apply the ideology and impact of nineteenth-century colo-nialism to the twelfth-century Levant.

The Crusades in the Historiography of Medieval Europe

The segregationalist position has added powerful arguments for the inclu-sion of the Frankish Levant as a part of the growing European world of the

Introduction 17


twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For the western medievalist, the crusadesare emblematic of Europes dynamism and expansion, a result of the reli-gious reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and, in thethirteenth, a part of the growth of papal power. Frankish settlements in theLevant were similarly seen as part of a larger expansion of western elites intofrontier areas such as Ireland, eastern Europe, and Spain which, as RobertBartlett has argued in The Making of Europe, resulted in distinctive settle-ment patterns, formulation of separate legal systems, and interethnic con-flict. The segregationalist view of the Latin East thus matches a pattern foundthroughout the frontiers of medieval Europe. Bartlett argues, as his title sug-gests, that such experiences and processes both within Latin communitiesand at their borders helped to create the Europe of today. The crusaderstates are an example of what we might call a failed frontier, which ulti-mately did not become part of Europe only because certain of these char-acteristics did not develop enoughfor example, not enough Europeancolonists settled in Palestine compared to Ireland, Sicily, or Lithuania.45

Some historians have even linked Europes twelfth-century Levantine colonyand practice of segregation to the history of European colonies in the Amer-icas, Asia, and Africa in the early modern period, making the conquistadorssixteenth-century crusaders.46

Contributing to the sense that the Frankish Levant was a segregational-ist regime, a European bubble floating on a sea of Middle Eastern resent-ment, is the conflation of crusades with the history of the crusader East.Most books (and college courses) entitled the crusades attempt to encom-pass both a history of the Frankish East (the crusader states) and the reli-gious ideology and subsequent military endeavors that were the crusadesthemselves. The latter were acts of holy war in which battle against the infi-del, often with the goal of recovering or defending the Holy Land, aided thereconciliation of the sinning Christian with his god, and were part of a tri-umphalist and universalist Christianity, which did not acknowledge the exis-tence of any truth other than the word of God as expressed in the Old andNew Testaments and interpreted by the fathers of the church. Crusade ideol-ogy thus rarely led the warrior to think about the faith of his enemy; the cru-sade was not a war of conversion, concerned with the salvation of others, butabout the salvation of the warrior himself. The infidel represented a path tosalvation, not a focus of concern for the crusader.47

This is a subject that has little to do with the polities that ruled Palestineand Syria from 1098 to 1291, or the cultures and societies over which they

18 Introduction


ruled. This conflation ultimately limits the historians ability to discuss eithersubject effectively. The usual compromise is to ignore or sideline crusadesthat are not directed against Muslim powers, as well as those after 1291, whenthe last Frankish city on the Levantine mainland fell to the Mamluks. Like-wise it implicitly suggests that the ideology that underpinned the crusadeswas equally the foundation for the crusader states. By that definition thetrue crusader state was the kingdom of France under Louis IX, not the Frank-ish principalities of Outremer. The difference can be marked by the use of theterm crusader versus FrankI use crusader only for those who took acrusade oath, or who at least fought under someone who had, and had notyet fulfilled that oath. Frank I use to refer to western Christians (sometimesformer crusaders) who settled in the Levant or visited for a period of time.

The Frankish Levant differed not only from other frontier areas of LatinEurope but also from the European heartlands. Although founded by aristo-crats from Provence, northern France, Flanders, and southern Italy, theFrankish East did not participate in the political, religious, and culturalchanges that Europe underwent in the twelfth century. In Latin Europe, theinstitutions of the Roman church, for example, grew stronger, in part drivenby the conflicts of the Investiture Conflict and an urgent sense of reformsweeping through Latin Christian society. While the crusades themselveswere both product of and impetus for those changes, the culture of thetwelfth-century Frankish East was unaffected by concerns about the relation-ship of the church to secular power, or the purity of the clergy. The hallmarksof the vigorous reformist culture of the church were not found in Outremer,such as a new clerical learned elite or assertive bishops (with the possible ex-ception of Daibert of Pisa). Nor do the darker aspects of twelfth-century Eu-ropean reform appear, such as the persecution of Jews and heretics throughwhich new elites and ambitious kings secured their power and built newpolities based on law and an autocratic monarch.

Nor can the historian claim that the Latin East was simply ignorant ofthese developments. Pilgrims, crusaders, and churchmen traveled back andforth, and were aware of what was happening in Latin Europe. The councilof Nablus in 1120, assembled by Baldwin II of Jerusalem and attended by theleading ecclesiasts of the kingdom of Jerusalem, shows all the characteristicsigns of the reform movement: it ensured ecclesiastical control of tithes, in-stituted a death penalty for sodomy (the first in the medieval period), anddecreed that a man who engaged in sexual relations with a Muslim concu-bine should be castrated and have his nose cut off. Bigamy and adultery were

Introduction 19


also outlawed. The concern over sexual crimes is what we might expect froma small, anxious community that feared being overwhelmed by surroundingMuslim societies. Such concern with pollution, sexual in this case, is a themethat would have been familiar to many, as the theme of religious pollutionwas often invoked in crusade propaganda. Indeed, Fulcher of Chartres, whowas living in Jerusalem in 1120 and may have even attended the council, usedthe theme extensively in his narrative of the First Crusade.48 But BenjaminKedar has shown that the statutes drafted at Nablus drew inspiration fromthe Byzantine legal tradition, not from western reformist trends.49 Notice-ably missing from the council were any decrees having to do with heresy orrestrictions on the Jewish population, two subjects that would seem mostuseful to a monarchy and church hierarchy desperate to establish their au-thority. The Latin East, we might say, dabbled in the reformist, centralizing,and persecuting trends of the twelfth century, but chose not to participatein them.

The segregationalist model has also kept scholars from including theculture and history of the Frankish Levant in discussions of multiethnic so-cieties or interethnic conflict, despite the popularity of the subject in both Is-lamic and medieval European studies. Over the last twenty years, historianshave sought to understand the roots of European persecution of minorities,particularly Jews, producing a body of scholarship that can be useful for sit-uating the twelfth-century Levant in a spectrum of practices of the medievalMediterranean.50 Perhaps the most significant work has been that of DavidNirenberg, who has argued that episodes of violence between Jews andChristians in fourteenth-century Spain and France were not merely the out-burst of irrational hatreds, but the expression and manipulation of local be-liefs and concerns. Furthermore, Nirenberg pointed out that the moderndichotomy between tolerance and intolerance fails to account for the cen-trality of conflict for constructing social relations.51 Episodic violence can bea way of establishing boundaries between communities and articulating thepower dynamics between communities. In other words, it is often violencethat allows communities to coexist. Nirenbergs work is particularly usefulfor dismantling the dichotomy of violence and coexistence. It no longer suf-fices to point out episodes of violence involving Franks and local populationsand conclude that tolerance did not exist; violence must be used to explorehow relationships among communities were managed, defined, and ex-ploited. Whereas in Nirenbergs Spain symbolic or real violence was used asa tool to delineate boundaries between communities, in the Frankish Levant,

20 Introduction


coexistence was based on ignoring difference; they were not communities ofviolence, but communities of silence. Silence allowed different religious com-munities to live side by side, but also permitted the Franks to exile, oppressand even massacre local populations with little backlash.

Rough Tolerance: A New Model of Religious Interaction

Much of the reason the segregationalist model has endured for fifty years isthat it is the only model available for historians to use. Without it historiansare left with the nineteenth-century colonialist model of an integrated Lev-ant, a variety of convivencia of the East, where content locals flourish underthe benevolent rule of creole Franks gone native. The evident errors of thisvision have led historians perforce to cling to the segregationalist explana-tion, which at least captures the darker aspects of Frankish authority. One ofthe principal goals of this book is to argue that the segregationalist vision ofthe Frankish Levant is deeply flawed, and to present an alternative.

Rough tolerance, as we might call it, is not the equivalent of modernconcepts of multiculturalism, in part because it was not an ideology but apractice. I use the term tolerance because the practices of rough toleranceallowed the coexistence of diverse religious and ethnic communities withoutthe legal or social structures of control or domination that were emerging incontemporary Latin Europe; it was rough because political power restedlargely in the hands of the new Frankish aristocracy, who employed it againstindigenous communities as they felt necessary. I do not use tolerance in amoral sense (some moral philosophers refer to it as the impossible virtuebecause the conditions for its full existence can never exist). Franks and oth-ers who engaged in rough tolerance were not doing so because they believedit to be a virtuous quality. If tolerance is defined as the refusal, where onehas the power to do so, to prohibit or seriously interfere with conduct onefinds objectionable, we cannot be certain whether it is tolerance or indiffer-ence we are discussing.52 All we can say is that the Frankish aristocracy al-lowed conduct and beliefs that would have been unacceptable in ChristianEurope.

Because violence directed against indigenous communities was local-ized and unaccompanied by other forms of legal and social control, and be-cause the social boundaries of local communities were porous andill-defined, neither Latins nor locals developed the rhetoric of us and

Introduction 21


them, or images of the other or the oppressor. Episodes of conflict, vio-lence, and oppression occurred frequently, yet they were often directed atspecific groups within local communities in a way that used intracommunalfactionalism to drain away the sense of threat to the larger community.Whereas in Nirenbergs fourteenth-century Spanish world each act of vio-lence was loaded with symbolic meaning, in the Latin principalities of theLevant, Franks and local Christians denied that any lasting symbolic signifi-cance had accumulated around incidences of conflict.

Rough tolerance is difficult to define and describe, for by its very natureit is unspoken, undefined, and amorphous. Nevertheless, there are character-istics by which we can catch its presence, if only in silhouette or shadow. Thefirst and most difficult sign to uncover is silence itself. Arguments based onsilence are proverbially verboten for historians, yet in the case of the Frank-ish East, it is essential to discuss what is not present. Silence covers a varietyof absences from both local Christian and Frankish sources. The most strik-ing absence is that of local Christians from Latin texts. While they appear pe-riodically as groups and individuals in episodes described by manychroniclers such as Fulcher of Chartres and William of Tyre, local Christiansand their communities were identified only by linguistic characteristics,identities that masked the more problematic markers of religious identity.The Armenians are most easily identified, distinguished by their own lan-guage, but all other Christians were designated as either Graeci or Suri-ani, names with only a tenuous connection to the languages thecommunities spoke or used in liturgy. The theological and ecclesiastical is-sues separating the various Christians of the Levant were rarely discussed.The Latin Patriarch of Antioch, Amalric of Limoges, for example, apparentlythought it appropriate to invite Michael the Great (Michael the Syrian) to theThird Lateran Council in 1179, and solicited a refutation of the Cathar heresyfrom him. He ignored the fact that Michael, as leader of the Syrian Orthodox(Jacobites), claimed the same title of patriarch of Antioch that Amalric him-self held, and was thus the leader of a church that, from a Latin perspective,had a heretical pedigree as ancient as the Cathars themselves.

Absence is also a feature of local Christian sources, but not concerningtheological issues. Patriarch Michael the Great, in contrast to Amalric ofLimoges, was clearly familiar with the Christological beliefs of the Latinchurch, and willing to discuss them. Rather, the deliberate blindness of localsources concerned issues of power and governance. Although Frankish lead-ers repeatedly used violence and intimidation against local Christians to es-

22 Introduction


tablish and maintain their authority, local Christians did not develop a litanyof crimes which had been committed against them, nor did they develop astereotype of the Franks, though both Armenians and Jacobites certainly hadsuch images of the Byzantines, and to some extent the Armenians had devel-oped one of the Turks. Michael the Great failed to even mention in his chron-icle a Frankish raid on his own monastery of Mar Barsauma, despite hisfamiliarity with other sources that mentioned it. Both local Christians andFranks chose not to know, to forget, or to overlook those aspects of the otherwhich had the most power to control and define the other.53

The second characteristic that allowed rough tolerance to exist was per-meability: the easy flow of persons and practices across social and religiousboundaries. Permeability thus also depended on the silences discussed above.It allowed a Frankish noble such as Baldwin, count of Marash, to have an Ar-menian priest as his confessor without either having converted, a Latin fam-ily to build a shrine to a Jacobite saint who healed their child, and a Melkitebishop to request that he be buried as a Latin Hospitaller. For local Chris-tians, permeability arose from the relative weakness of their elites; bothMelkites and Armenians had been devastated in different ways by the tribu-lations of the eleventh century, and the Jacobites had long suffered from fac-tionalism and internal conflict that made them vulnerable to externalinfluence. Strikingly, permeability did not extend to intellectual exchange;books and ideas did not flow across communal boundaries in the FrankishLevant as they did in other multicultural societies such as Sicily and Spain.This may be due to the reluctance on the part of the Frankish elite to patron-ize or support educated clergy of the sort who would seek new editions ofclassical texts such as Aristotle, for such a group could tighten boundariesand create exactly the regimes of knowledge they were so clearly avoiding.54

A third characteristic of rough tolerance was localization. Rough toler-ance operated only on a local level; one might say it existed only in the lineof sight. Frankish military power was employed only against specific groups:this group of rebellious councilors or that warlord, or this specific commu-nity living in this one place. Both the Franks and local communities under-stood such violence within specific social, physical, and geographic limits. Anattack on one group or individual was never interpreted as an attack on anentire community or class, nor did the Franks ever systematically attack allArmenian warlords, or all Jacobite monasteries. In part, the localization ofviolence was enabled by the weakened elites of local communities, by theirwillingness to forget, as well as by Frankish unwillingness to recognize local

Introduction 23


communities as they constituted themselves. Indigenous leaders, wieldingonly local authority, were thus reluctant to use a discourse of oppression as away to bolster their own authority, both for fear of becoming targets ofFrankish attack themselves, and because they did not want to give up accessto sources of support coming from Frankish leadership.

Rough tolerance has its roots in early medieval western practices, not inthe relationship between Islam and the dhimmi communities.55 Many histo-rians have seen Frankish toleration of other religious communities as a con-tinuation of Islamic practices, with Muslims forced into a subordinate statusalongside Jews, and in some interpretations, local Christians. Yet rough tol-erance differed from the dhimmi system in a number of ways. Most signifi-cantly, the dhimmi system envisioned a society of discrete and hierarchalizedcommunities: at the top was the community of Muslims, and beneath them,the inferior dhimmi communities, each separately constituted. The dhimmicommunity should be represented by a leader, often a bishop or patriarch forthe Christian community, who served as the intermediary between the com-munity and Islamic authority. The system thus required the delineation ofdifference between Christian, Jew, and Muslim; different communities some-times petitioned to be recognized as entities distinct from others. For exam-ple, the Karaites in eleventh-century Cairo petitioned the Fatimid caliph tobe allowed to butcher animals without Rabbanite supervision.56 The Franks,in contrast, had no formal structures governing local communities and hadno interest in defining them.

The practices of rough tolerance were about avoiding such categoriza-tion. The origin of rough tolerance was rather a development of early west-ern medieval disinterest in categorization and difference. The experience ofJewish communities in early medieval western Europe, for example, is akinto that of local communities in the Frankish Levant. Unlike the high me-dieval period, Jews in France and Italy practiced a wide variety of professions,owned land, and had few legal restrictions placed on them. Yet they were alsosubject to violence and attack and sometimes forced conversion. Althoughthe Christian tradition had developed a negative image of the Jew that per-vaded exegesis and canon law, rulers such as the Carolingians showed littleinterest in separating, identifying, or classifying difference in the communi-ties over which they ruled. Rather, Jews were considered members of thecommunity on an equal footing with other groups.57 Just as Jews were notsubjected to legal restrictions, the beliefs and practices of Christians were notsubjected to examination in the way that they were after the eleventh century.

24 Introduction


The twelfth-century description of the Franks by Michael the Great, patri-arch of the Jacobite church, which noted that they never sought a single for-mula for all the Christian people and languages, but they considered asChristian anyone who worshipped the cross without investigation or exami-nation,58 could equally be a description of Frankish kingdoms of the earlymedieval West.

Rough tolerance also differed from the forms of political, social, and re-ligious interactions that existed in medieval Spain, often referred to as con-vivencia. The nature of the relationships among Jews, Christians andMuslims is still a contentious historiographic topic, but several characteris-tics distinguish it from rough tolerance: both the size and prominence ofJewish communities in Spain and the shared Arabic culture in which Mus-lims, Christians, and Jews could participate mark out the multireligious in-teractions in Spain as distinctly different. In particular, convivencia was notsilent; disputation and dialogue among different groups was common.

This book approaches rough tolerance from a variety of directions. Thefirst chapter examines the eleventh-century history of the Middle East, estab-lishing the social and political patterns and expectations local communitiesdeveloped prior to the First Crusade. Chapters 2 and 3 take the exercise ofFrankish power for their subject, particularly in northern Syria, exploringhow their authority was established and used both against and with the ma-jority Christian population. It was in northern Syria that the largest concen-tration of local Christians lived, and that the Armenian and Syriac textswritten under Frankish rule were produced. It was also here that the cru-saders first came to political power in the Levant, and it was here the mostimportant Frankish rulers had their formative political and cultural experi-ences. The first two kings of Jerusalem (both named Baldwin) were firstcounts of Edessa before ascending to the throne of the Holy City; Melisende,who ruled the kingdom with her son until 1150, was the daughter of an Ar-menian mother from Melitene and grew up in Edessa.

Not only do we have the best opportunity to understand the relation-ships between locals and Franks in the Levant through an examination of ex-periences in northern Syria, it was a cultural world deeply influential in theFrankish East. Chapter 4 studies the relationship between local Christian ec-clesiastical hierarchies and the Franks, discussing the basis and effects ofFrankish theological ignorance, as well as the ways in which locals andLatins did learn about each other. The legal and social status of indigenousindividuals under Frankish rule is the subject of Chapter 5. Using primarily

Introduction 25


Latin charters, I argue that European serfdom was not imported to the Lev-ant, and show that Syrians, Palestinians, and Armenians participated inFrankish governance at a variety of levels. The last chapter turns to the ecu-menical negotiations that became important in the 1160s. Byzantine attemptsto unite the churches of the Levant under imperial leadership paradoxicallyheightened the importance of sectarian identity, undermining the perme-ability and silence that were so vital to rough tolerance. The result is a bookwhich presents the Frankish Levant as imbedded within a larger Middle East-ern world, and gives an explanation of interreligious relationships foundelsewhere in the premodern world.

26 Introduction


Chapter 1

Satan Unleashed: The Christian Levant inthe Eleventh Century

When the Armenian communities of the Kingdom of Ani, lo-cated in the highlands of what is now eastern Turkey, experienced an eclipseand an earthquake simultaneously in 1036/7, they knew that something be-yond the ken of ordinary men had occurred. King Hovhannes and thekatolikos Petros, the leader of the Armenian church, seeking the significanceof these omens, sent an embassy of eminent men to consult Hovhannes Koz-ern, a venerable vardapet1 whose wisdom and piety wreathed him with thestature of an Old Testament prophet. When the emissaries from the king andkatolikos arrived at the hermits cell, they found the holy man prostrate inprayer, bathed in tears and unable to speak. After the vision that gripped himpassed and his grief subsided, he explained to his alarmed audience what theominous portents presaged. Soon overwhelming calamities would strike the Armenians, Hovhannes warned. Christians would turn away from theChurch, blaspheming and ignoring Gods law, forgetting the fasts, and ne-glecting their prayers. Even patriarchs and priests would abandon their al-tars, and princes and kings would grow cruel and capricious in the use oftheir God-given authority. Harlots and whoremongers would lead the peo-ple, and parents and children would turn against each other. The cause ofthese disasters, the hermit explained, was the release of Satan from the con-finement in which Christs crucifixion had placed him; the end of the worldwas at hand. With the strength of Satan behind them, a cursed peopletheTurkswould burn the lands of the Armenians, kill their families, level theircities, and desecrate their churches.

Their sufferings would end, Hovhannes predicted, only after sixty years,when the valiant nation called the Franks will rise up; with a great numberof troops they will capture the holy city of Jerusalem, and the Holy Sepulcher,


which contained God, will be freed from bondage.2 Yet the crusaders wouldachieve only a temporary victory; the Turks would then return with ferocityseven-fold. After fifty years, the Roman Emperor will be awakened as if froma sleep, and like an eagle, rapidly will come against the Turks with a very greatarmy, as numerous as the sands of the seashore. He will march forth like aburning fire, and all creatures will tremble in fear of him.3 His triumph overthe Muslims would be complete, and once again the known world would beunder the rule of the Roman emperor. Hovhannes did not explicitly predictthe return of Christ, but his depiction of the ultimate triumph of the em-peror drew on the apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, a seventh-century Syr-iac account. Pseudo-Methodius first described the figure of the lastemperor, who would defeat the Muslims and lay his crown on the cross atGolgotha; cross and crown would then ascend to Jesus in heaven, signalingthe end of earthly dominion and the inauguration of the kingdom of God onearth.4

Hovhanness vision appears in the chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, anArmenian monk living in northern Syria under Frankish rule in the earlytwelfth century. The vision the chronicler described was not a predictionfrom 1036/7, but a description of the dilemma Matthew believed Armeniancommunities of the Middle East, who had already witnessed the arrival of thecrusaders in Syria and heard of their capture of the holy city of Jerusalem in1099, faced in his own day. He saw his people as orphans, exiles from theirmotherland and abandoned by their leaders. Byzantine diplomacy hadrobbed Armenians of their independence, dispersed their rulers, and dividedthe church, while Turkish attacks ravaged their land and sacked their cities.Nevertheless, the threat that Armenians such as Matthew of Edessa perceivedwas not persecution or war, but the danger of integration with surroundingcommunities. Leaderless, their church divided by schism, and surrounded byByzantines, Franks, and Turks, many Armenians drifted easily in the politicaland cultural currents of their neighbors, buoyed by values shared among thediverse communities of the Middle East.

Just as Matthew of Edessa inserted the crusaders into an apocalypticnarrative as a way to transform the unexpected into the predicted, other Lev-antine Christians brought their own paradigms and expectations to their ini-tial encounters with the crusaders, which continued to underlie theirrelationships for decades after. This chapter discusses the origins of thoseparadigms and expectations, and also provides a background history of me-dieval Christian communities in the Middle East, a subject not widely known

28 Chapter 1


except to the few who study it. Such a history serves as an alternate introduc-tion to the Frankish Levant as well, replacing the traditional western Euro-pean narrative that begins in western Europe at the turn of the millenniumwith one that begins in the Levant in Late Antiquity, an era always hauntingthe collective memory of eastern Christians.

A Brief History of the Christian East

As discussed in the introduction, this book focuses on three religious com-munitiesMelkites, Jacobites, and Armenians. For each, the events of LateAntiquity shaped their beliefs and identity, while each reacted to the emer-gence of an Islamic empire in different ways.

Armenians in Late Antiquity

Some readers might be surprised at the prominence of Armenians in a bookabout twelfth-century Syria and Palestine, for those territories are a long wayfrom the mountains of the Caucasus and the shores of Lake Van, which werethe homeland of the Armenians. However, it is difficult to speak of a distinctarea called Armenia in the pre-modern period. The heart of Armenian ter-ritory was perhaps the Araxes River valley, which today forms part of the bor-der between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, as well as between Iran andAzerbaijan. Here can be found the ancient cities of Artaxata, Dvin, andEjmiacin, the center of the ancient Armenian church. Yet the kingdoms andprovinces that at various times have borne the name Armenia or some vari-ation of it cover a range of territories across what is now eastern Turkey, Ar-menia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and northwest Iran, and have expanded,contracted, and shifted from east to west over the last two millennia. Thelands most often referred to by the name Armenia were characterized byhigh mountain ranges and deep river valleys, which both invited invasionand hindered conquest. The Tigris and Euphrates, the rivers of Paradise ac-cording to the book of Genesis, arise in the Armenian highlands and flowdown to the fabled lands of the Fertile Crescent. The Armenian highlandswere equally attractive from the west, and were often borderlands, porous tocultural influences from both directions. Fertile valleys, forests, mineral re-sources, and strategic mountain passes tempted Assyrians, Medes, Persians,and Romans, but the mountainous terrain made permanent conquest diffi-

Satan Unleashed 29


cult. Nor were local leaders any more successful at imposing a unified au-thority over a wide area. Aristocratic dynasties (naxarar, pl. naxarark) dom-inated local cantons, and Armenian lands remained notorious for brigandageinto the nineteenth century.5

As the northernmost people sandwiched between the eastern Romanempire and the Persian kingdom, Armenians sometimes could use the near-continuous Roman-Persian conflicts of antiquity to their own advantage, butoften had little role in the fate of their communities. The ruling dynasty ofArmenia from A.D. 66 to 428 was a branch of the Parthian royal family (theArsacids), and a local form of Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion.6

The Armenians used a Persian palette to paint their world; their early litera-ture depicts an aristocratic Iranian society of hunts and banquets.7 The in-fluence of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world, however, grew from thefirst century B.C., when Tigranes II (the Great) conquered much of Syria,Mesopotamia, and Cappadocia. His capital, Tigranocerta, had a Greek the-ater for the performance of plays, and the king encouraged Greek philoso-phers to settle in his capital, as intellectual adornments to match the citysHellenistic architecture.8 Ties to the Roman empire were further strength-ened when King Tiridates III converted to Christianity in 314,9 encouragingthe Christianization of Armenia that legendarily began with the apostlesBartholomew and Thaddeus. Local cults and Zoroastrianism competed for atime, but by the sixth century Armenian identity had become linked toChristianity. While Christianity in Armenia felt the impact of both Greek andSyriac influences, it quickly developed an autonomous hierarchy and distincttraditions. The Armenian patriarchate initially rested in the hands of a singlefamily, the descendants of St. Gregory the Illuminator, from the patriar-chates institution in the early fourth century to the death of Gregorys great-great-great-grandson in 437/9.

The later fourth century saw the return of Armenia to Persian influence.A Persian victory in 363 over the Romans, resulting in the death of theRoman emperor Julian, led to a Persian invasion of Armenian lands. Thearmies of the shah subsequently razed many cities established under Romaninfluence and exiled the Armenian king Arsak II to Persia, where he commit-ted suicide. In 387, Emperor Theodosius I and the Sassanian King of KingsShapur III signed a treaty that formally divided Armenia between the twoempires, an event that Ren Grousset compared to the signing of the Treatyof Verdun for the extraordinary duration of its effects.10 The end of the Armenian kingship and the continuation of hostilities between Rome and

30 Chapter 1


Ctesiphon left Armenians buffeted by two storms, whose swells and galespushed in conflicting directions.

Armenian society was further isolated from the Romans by the theolog-ical disputes of the fifth century concerning the relationship of divine andhuman characteristics in Jesus, which culminated in the declaration of theecumenical council of Chalcedon in 451 that Christ existed in two natureswithout confusion, without change, without division, without separation.Many Armenians did not accept the definition of faith formulated at Chal-cedon, for few Armenians participated in its deliberations. Only five monthsbefore the council, many of the Armenian clergy and aristocracy had beendefeated in a rebellion against the Persians, who were attempting to imposeZoroastrianism on the portion of Armenia under their control. The Persianforces crushed the Armenian resistance on the plains of Avarayr (north ofLake Urmia in what is now northwest Iran) on 26 May 451. Many of theclergy were executed, and many noble naxarar families wiped out.11 But theArmenian church did not entirely reject Chalcedonianism.12 Even underPersian control, the Armenian church continued to have contact with impe-rial Christianity, but Jacobite and Nestorian thought also had an impact onArmenian theology.13 After the loss of the Arsacid monarchy, separationfrom the Roman Christian tradition, and the defeat of 451, the fourth centurybecame in retrospective the golden era in Armenian memory, when kingsconverted to Christianity, inspired theologians taught the true faith to theentire Christian world, and the line between East and West did not run di-rectly over them.

Jacobites and Melkites Under Muslim Rule

In the summer of 636, the emperor Heraklios sent a large Byzantine armysouth to Syria to protect the region from Arabs raiding from the south. Ex-hausted by a long struggle for survival against Persia that had already devas-tated Syria and Palestine, the Byzantines were now unprepared to face a newopponentthe Muslimsinvigorated with the confidence of the newlyproselytized, for it had only been four years since the prophet Muhammadhad died in Medina. Islamic armies quickly conquered Byzantine Egypt,Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and soon afterward defeated the PersianEmpire. Within two decades, most Jacobite and Nestorian communities hadcome under Islamic rule, as had three of the four eastern patriarchates of theimperial churchAntioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, leaving only Con-

Satan Unleashed 31


stantinople still under Byzantine rule. The Muslim conquest also broughtinto being a new Christian community, the Melkites. Unlike the Jacobites,Armenians, or Nestorians, the Melkites remained in communion with thepatriarch of Constantinople, but their immersion in a new Islamic worldmade them distinctive from the Byzantine communities with whom theyshared theology and religious practices.14

Under Islamic law, Christians joined Jews, Zoroastrians, and the myste-rious Sabians15 as religious communities given protected status of dhimma,a word which signifies the contract of hospitality and protection extended bythe Islamic community. Although different regimes may have been in placein different areas, especially in the first century of Islamic rule, essential wasthe stipulation that dhimmi communities must pay the jizya, a tax represent-ing their subordinate status and the superiority of Islamic authority. In addi-tion, relations between Christians and Muslims were governed by what cameto be known as the Pact of Umar, which claimed to be a letter written by theChristian community of Jerusalem to Caliph Umar (63444), but whichprobably developed in the ninth or tenth century. The pact enjoined thatChristians could not build new churches, restore old ones, dress like Mus-lims, or hold public religious ceremonies, along with a host of other restric-tions that often were not enforced, but could be used against Christians whenMuslim authorities felt it necessary.16

Melkite communities of the Middle East struggled to understand how aChristian empire could be defeated by infidels, as the permanence of theArab victory became apparent.17 No longer could they feel superior to pa-gans and Jews and praise God as King David had in the Psalms, knowingthat you love me I know by this, that my enemy does not triumph over me,but because of my integrity you sustain me and I stand before you forever(Ps. 41.1213). Yet Melkite communities adapted rapidly to the realities oftheir new Islamic world. By the early ninth century, Syriac and Arabic be-came the written and liturgical languages of choice, as Melkite communitiesrelinquished the Greek traditions that were part of a vanishing HellenisticNear East, and joined a vigorous new Islamic intellectual world. Levantinecities such as Jerusalem and Antioch and the regions around them were cen-ters for the largest Melkite communities; but the intellectual heart of theMelkites beat in the Judean desert monasteries, most famously at Mar Saba,home to titans of theology such as John of Damascus (c. 676749), who wrotelargely in Greek, and Theodore Abu Qurrah (c. 750c. 825), who wrote inArabic. These and other Melkite philosophers and theologia

MacEvitt, Christopher [en] - The Crusades and the Christian World of the East. Rough Tolerance

Documents