God's War: A New History of the Crusades (36 page)

7

East is East and East is West: Outremer in the Twelfth Century

There is no more haunting passage in contemporary writing on the crusades than William of Tyre’s description of the young Baldwin IV, the blue-eyed (to hostile Arabic scrutiny) young prince of Jerusalem whose youthful promise turned into despair at the discovery of his leprosy. The pain of the account comes from personal involvement. William, then archdeacon of Tyre, was Baldwin’s tutor; it was in his household that the first symptoms appeared. William continued to chronicle the life of his pupil, who succeeded to the throne in 1174 aged thirteen and died in 1185, a ravaged, blind, crippled wreck only twenty-four. It was as a hero of Christendom, struggling and usually triumphing for the Faith against the enormous odds of the growing power of the infidel and his own disease that Baldwin was depicted. Yet this doomed child’s doctor, Abu Sulayman Da’ud, a native Syrian Christian born – like the Latin William of Tyre – in Jerusalem, had worked for the Fatimids in Egypt before being hired in the late 1160s by Baldwin’s father, Amalric I, an enthusiast for Arabic medicine, as was his predecessor Baldwin III. One of Abu Sulayman’s sons successfully taught Prince Baldwin to ride; another succeeded his father as Amalric’s physician. After 1187, the family enlisted in the service of Saladin, the enemy against whom Baldwin IV had expended so much of his wasting energy.
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In common with other Levantine princelings, Baldwin grew up in a cosmopolitan court; his tutor steeped in Latin culture and learning, enhanced by a twenty-year stay in western Europe studying at Paris, Orleans and Bologna; his doctor and riding-instructor Syrians with experience of working for Muslim rulers; his stepmother, Amalric I’s second wife Maria Comnena, a Byzantine Greek. However, the image the regime wished to portray through its own rhetoric, one which
received elaborate and forceful corroboration from the pen of William of Tyre himself, remained that of the frontier myth, the Latin rulers in Palestine and Syria as heirs of the legendary Christian heroes of the First Crusade, the defenders of the Faith in God’s own land, a myth excluding temporal realities, political compromises and social exchange. While demonstrating the nature of the Latin presence in Outremer as one of a number of communities at once cooperating, competing and coercing, William sought to explain past success and current weakness according to a two-dimensional myth of conquest and battle, not least because his audience in western Europe expected it and his eastern compatriots understood its place in such a constructed justification for their existence. Yet myth it was and remains. Much of the twelfth-century kingdom of Jerusalem for most of the time did not resemble a military frontier, nor did its social and economic and hence legal and political arrangements follow crudely racist or supremacist ideology. Despite closer frontiers with aggressive Turks, similar conditions prevailed in the northern enclaves. The Latins dominated the regions they had conquered, imposing a hierarchy of power with themselves at the apex. Yet their community was isolated neither in city nor countryside, the settlers not withdrawn from the means of their survival. The livelihood of the Latin settlers and rulers depended on using, not ignoring, their surroundings and neighbours. In the absence of overcrowding, after the military phase of conquest, exploitation of resources did not necessarily or sensibly entail systematic persecution or discrimination of other communities. Westerners came east to live for Christ just as enthusiastically as to die for Him. As the
assises
(laws) of Jerusalem noted with reference to market courts where both Latins and Syrians comprised the jurors, witnesses were permitted to swear oaths on their respective holy books, Christians on the Gospels, Jews and Samaritans on the Torah, and Muslims on the Koran, ‘because be they Syrians or Greeks or Jews or Samaritans or Nestorians or Saracens, they are also men like the Franks’.
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The great hospital in Jerusalem run by the Order of St John, accommodating many hundreds of sick at any one time, was committed to treating anybody regardless of race or religion; only lepers were excluded, on obvious medical grounds.

This was not the picture the clerical opinion formers in the west or their colleagues in the east were prepared to accept. In the years after the First
Crusade, Guibert of Nogent wishfully looked on the settlements in Jerusalem as ‘Holy Christendom’s new colony’ (
novae coloniae
). In the late 1130s, the Anglo-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis wrote of ‘the Christians who live in exile in the east for the sake of Christ’, especially potent imagery as the idea of exile was closely associated by contemporaries with monastic vocation as a metaphor for absolute commitment to Christ and a godly life. Messages from the east confirmed this idealistic vision. During the grim days of 1120, the patriarch of Jerusalem struck a similar vein of emotion in describing the perils besetting Outremer from all sides: Muslims, poor harvests, grasshoppers:

For the name of Jesus, before abandoning the holy city of Jerusalem, the cross of Our Lord and the most holy tomb of Christ, we are ready to die… Strive to come and join the army of Christ and bring us speedy aid…
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The author, Patriarch Gromond, fond of such gloomy admonitory tones, came from Picquigny in northern France, drawn to the east by such attitudes. Yet even after the pacification of most of Outremer, the rhetoric of martial solidarity and emergency persisted in official correspondence, hardly surprising, as it tended to be aimed at securing western aid. It also provided the central drama in the growing body of epic vernacular literature inspired, but significantly not written, by the Latin conquerors in the east.

The settlers’ perspective scarcely matched the epic vision. Most of the castles, fortified settlements and towers were built not on exposed frontiers but in peaceful areas largely undisturbed for the central decades of the twelfth century, their function seigneurial rather than primarily military.
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All Latin societies of the time were geared for warfare. Nobles resorted to violence as a matter of course and culture; in Outremer they behaved no differently. From the 1120s to the 1180s, much of the coastal plain northwards to Tripoli and Antioch, Judea, Samaria, western Galilee, even southern Transjordan was no less peaceful than many parts of western Europe. The imposition of precise military obligations on those who owned or held property, including farmers, did not indicate a state of perpetual ferment any more than similar arrangements did in the west. Although possibly sentimental and certainly propagandist, the impression of Outremer society left by Fulcher of Chartres, himself a settler first at Edessa then Jerusalem, while emphasizing the precarious lack of numbers, was of a growing civilian population successfully
coming to terms with new surroundings. After the early days when settlers hung on the words of every visiting pilgrim in the hope of news from home, by the 1120s, Fulcher insisted not altogether plausibly, Jerusalemites had forgotten their homelands. Some had married local Syrian or Armenian Christians, even baptized Muslims, a statement corroborated by other sources. Others, once established, were joined by relatives from the west. Contact with indigenous communities was eased by the emergence of a level of
lingua franca
; sixty years after Fulcher wrote, the Spanish Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr recorded the word ‘bilghriyin’, an Arabic derivation from Romance words for pilgrim (
peregrinus
, Latin;
pèlerin
, French;
pellegrini
, Italian). Usamah Ibn Munqidh of Shaizar recorded the Arabic version of the Frankish bourgeois (i.e. non-noble Franks):
burjasi
.
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Some settlers, universally described as Franks, learnt the local languages, although interpreters,
dragomanni
, were ubiquitous, even if their role was more involved in estate management than translation. In any case, monoglot Frank lords were not alone in this polyglot society; local Arab emirs thrived without learning Turkish. Fulcher contradicted the idea, commonly held by modern historians, that Outremer society was essentially a ‘crusader’ society. He implied (or hoped) that immigration was a constant process not restricted to veterans of military expeditions or pilgrims who stayed on. This too is borne out by documentary evidence. Around 1150, a cobbler from Châlons-sur-Marne emigrated to Jerusalem to avoid restrictive market dues.
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In Outremer itself secular and ecclesiastical entrepreneurs set out to attract settlers on to their estates by offering advantageous tenancy contracts; judging by their names, such offers were accepted by newcomers as well as established residents. While the aura of holiness cannot be ignored as an incentive for settlers to choose the Levant rather than areas of colonization nearer home, long-distance migration was a familiar feature of western and northern Europe. Not all settlers were religious zealots. Not all immigrants stayed. In the late 1150s, one tenant of the priory attached to the Holy Sepulchre gave up the struggle with alien and hostile agricultural conditions and abandoned his land and left. At about the same time an immigrant from Vézelay in Burgundy returned home after seven years in Outremer to find his wife had remarried; another, a married woman from the same region, who had gone east without her spouse, came back after some years to find him wed again.
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With settlement came accommodation. Baldwin III, described by William of Tyre as a vigorous Christian champion, waged generally successful war on his Egyptian and Turkish neighbours. This did not prevent him extending royal protection to a Muslim merchant from Tyre, Abu Ali Ibn Izz ad-Din, plying his trade with Egypt nor his funeral cortège being accompanied by mourning infidels from the hills of the interior. Such association could cause offence. William of Tyre evinced anger at the eminently sensible fashion promoted by noblemen’s wives of avoiding Latin physicians in favour of ‘Jews, Samaritans, Syrians and Saracens’ (i.e. Muslims), although the law allowed for foreign doctors, from Europe or ‘Painime’ (i.e. non-Christian lands), to receive episcopal licences to practise.
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Abroad, the unavoidable discrepancy between myth and reality earned the Jerusalemites hostile reactions. The acerbic and puritanical Anglo-Norman historian Ralph Niger was appalled at the quality of the ambassadors from the east who toured the capitals of Europe in search of aid in 1184/5; instead of austere heirs to the blessed Godfrey of Bouillon and Adhemar of Le Puy, which he might have imagined, Ralph was confronted in Paris by a parade of lavishly rich ostentation, led by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem in clouds of perfume. If not the gigolo of hostile memory, a brave and skilled politician if not a paragon of celibate virtue, Heraclius, originally from the Auvergne, reinforced the contempt some in the west felt for the
poulains
, as they derisively called those who lived in Outremer. (The easterners reciprocated in kind, calling westerners ‘sons of Hernaud’, a tag equally obscure but certainly very rude.) William of Tyre recorded western disenchantment with the Jerusalemites dating from the Second Crusade (1146–8), the fate of which still rankled in the 1180s. He shared the view that the lustrous giants of old had been succeeded by idler and more decadent successors, even if he stopped short of Ralph Niger’s fulminations against their ‘dissolutior’ way of life.
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Racial and national stereotypes were familiar features of twelfth-century writing; the Latins in the Holy Land were especially vulnerable by being on view to so many visitors whose expectations had been fuelled by the popular vernacular adventure stories of the First Crusade, the pieties of wishful churchmen and the Bible.

Nonetheless, residents in Outremer were careful to provide for many of these expectations. Building on the long tradition of pilgrimage and cult sites, they meticulously fashioned a new for old sacred geography
to satisfy the flood of western pilgrims, for example excavating relics of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob at Hebron in 1119. The pilgrim John of Würzburg in the late 1160s wrote of ‘new Holy Places newly built’. At times such enthusiasm led to complications; at least two sites near Jerusalem were claimed as biblical Emmaeus; confusion surrounded certain precise locations in the church of the Holy Sepulchre; and not all pilgrims swallowed uncritically the gaudier claims of their tour guides, such as that the Tower of David by the Jaffa Gate did actually date from the time of King David.
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In stamping a Latin religious as well as ecclesiastical mark on the Holy Land, the settlers did no more than follow a much repeated formula in remapping the sacred landscape, a process familiar from Titus and Hadrian in the first and second centuries, the Christians in fourth, the Muslims after 638, 1187 and 1291, and the Israelis after 1948. The twelfth-century Jerusalemites needed to attract and reassure pilgrims from whom as tourists they derived income and on whom the kings levied hefty taxes at the ports of entry (just as their Muslim predecessors had). They provided itineraries; physical protection (for example by the early Templars on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem); health care (in the Hospital of St John); guesthouses; new churches at shrines designed to suit the pilgrims’ needs, as with the new altars, chapels and church at the Holy Sepulchre itself; and encouragement for western shippers (mainly Italians) in their ports: at one time there could be as many as seventy pilgrim ships crowding the harbour at Acre, some capable of carrying hundreds of passengers each.
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Central to the whole international industry were relics. A report by Gui de Blond, a monk of Grandmont, to the canons of St Junien at Condom in Gascony in the 1150s, authenticating the Holy Land relics he had distributed to religious houses across the region on his return from the east, listed their donors, including the ecclesiastical grandees of Jerusalem, the patriarch and the heads of the main religious houses associated with biblical sites, and other significant figures such as the bishop of Bethlehem, perhaps the worldly Englishman Ralph, and the abbot of the Greek monastery of St Catherine’s, Sinai. In Brother Gui’s treasure trove were fragments of the True Cross; earth mingled with the blood of Christ; hairs of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen; pieces of Christ’s cradle, the Virgin’s tomb and the stone where Christ prayed at Gethsemane; and mementoes of biblical incidents and characters, Apostles, John the Baptist, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Stephen
Protomartyr, each a tangible reminder of the original mission that lay behind the Outremer settlements.
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