God's War: A New History of the Crusades (40 page)

Much the same eclecticism finds demonstration in other Latin responses to the Near East. In recent centuries the Frankish settlements in Outremer have attracted attention as precursors of later European expansion and colonialism in the region. More properly, they should be seen on their own terms and in their own time. Certain elements of Latin Outremer culture and society reflected western life, notably in the church, language and law, but overlaid with a profound provincialism. The radical intellectual, artistic and legal developments in western
Europe in the twelfth century found only a thin echo in the east. Only two even relatively recent writers were represented in the library of Nazareth cathedral, the theologian Anselm of Canterbury and the canon lawyer Ivo of Chartres. There were few home-grown Outremer theologians or canon lawyers; no universities or Gothic cathedrals; the bureaucratic practices of the royal chancery appear crude in comparison with the papacy, Sicily or England; the coinage imitative and unsophisticated. Academically, Outremer existed in a backwater, distanced alike from west and east. With a few notable exceptions, such as biblical scholar and translator Aimery of Limoges, patriarch of Antioch, western immigrant clergy came from intellectual drawers below the top. Despite cathedral schools, equipped with modest, old-fashioned libraries, indigenous scholars were rare. Apart from the western-educated Jerusalemite William of Tyre, notable was Gerard of Nazareth, bishop of Lattakiah (1140–61), an anti-Greek polemicist and hagiographer. Vernacular literature similarly derived from the west; even the crusade
Chanson des Chétifs
, concerning the 1101 expeditions, which was written in the east, was produced for the immigrant Prince Raymond of Antioch (d. 1149).
⁴⁵

The plastic arts were similarly dominated by immigrant artists and models, the most notable being Byzantine influence on decorative painting, illumination and mosaics and, in architecture, southern French and Italian styles. The exquisite illuminated Melisende Psalter of the 1130s or the programme of Greek mosaics with Latin inscriptions erected at the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem
c.
1170 for an English bishop, under joint patronage of Amalric I and Manuel I Comnenus place the art of Outremer in a cosmopolitan, Mediterranean context, distinctive by the coincidence of influences rather than any specific local originality. Here, the ravine between Latin and Greek proved as serious an obstacle to effective cultural symbiosis as that between Latin and Muslim. There is some debate over the existence of a stonemasons’ workshop in Jerusalem and the provenance of its artisans and skilled masons, European or indigenous. Were such skilled workers like the church hierarchy, constantly reinforced by western immigrants, or the lay aristocracy, increasingly local descendants of immigrants of previous generations? Both are plausible. One notable feature of Latin art in Outremer was provided by skill in working stone, either in sculpture, as in surviving capitals from Nazareth or the tomb of Baldwin V (d. 1186) in Jerusalem,
or in the dressing of ashlar masonry of prestige buildings such as castles or churches, witnessed still in the clear, clean, sharp lines of the twelfth-century piers of Tortosa cathedral, the mighty walls of Saone castle in the principality of Antioch, or the cool certainty of the churches of St Anne in Jerusalem and at Abu Ghosh. How far the intensive labour involved in creating and erecting such stonework was conducted by slave labour, probably Muslim, is unknowable, although the contemporary account of the rebuilding of Saphet castle in northern Galilee from 1240 makes it clear that there the work was carried out by
operarii et sclavii
, workmen and slaves. Without the particular circumstances of Outremer’s large resource of Muslim slaves, noted with awe and horror by Ibn Jubayr in 1184, its physical monuments would have been less impressive.
⁴⁶
This, at least, did not distinguish the Franks from their Near Eastern neighbours.

Living in Outremer did not leave Franks unmarked, even if only in superficial habits of daily existence. The memoirs of Usamah of Shaizar, whose stories are frequently too good to be precisely true, mentioned an agent of his dining in Antioch with a Greek friend at the house of a Frankish veteran of the First Crusade who employed an Egyptian cook, avoided Frankish dishes and never allowed pork under his roof.
⁴⁷
Such fastidious conversion to Muslim habits was uncommon; westerners in Outremer may have adopted many local comforts, but their taste for pork appeared constant. Pork butchers traded at Tyre; swineherds tended their flocks in the countryside; surviving rubbish tips evince continued consumption. A privilege of William II of Sicily in 1168 allowed the monastery of St Mary of the Latins in Jerusalem to export from Messina without paying customs 200 sides of bacon, as well as 100 barrels of tunny fish and a large shipment of lambskin cloaks, rabbit-skins, ox-hides, linen and wool: winters are chilly in the hills of Judea.
⁴⁸
Perhaps the greatest dietary impact of the east on the immigrants was castor sugar; exploitation of sugar cane, especially around Acre and Tyre, became a major industry in Outremer. In dress, acclimatization went with loose-fitting clothes, cool fabrics in the summer, furs in winter, protection of skin and armour from the sun by veils and surcoats; some Franks adopted the turban.
⁴⁹
Most notable in contrast to the west, Franks in Outremer imitated the high standards of hygiene practised by locals. The lack of washing and ignorance of bathhouse culture and etiquette was just one source of hilarity and contempt for Usamah, on a
par with what he regarded as the Franks’ lax sexual mores and poor treatment of women. Care was taken in providing water supplies for domestic use as well as irrigation, via aqueducts on the coastal plain and networks of cisterns in the arid uplands and desert. Even the Hospitaller castle at Belvoir contained a bathroom. Twelfth-century domestic architecture may rarely have reached such lavish proportions as at the Ibelin palace at Beirut, built in the first years of the thirteenth century, with its fountains, airy halls, mosaics, marble and long vistas inland and out to sea, a sort of Outremer Alhambra. However, even comparatively modest houses of the well-to-do in cities and substantial properties in the countryside boasted mosaic flooring, often with inlay of antique marble, painted plaster walls, the interiors probably furnished with carpets and textile hangings, the tables laid with pottery imports from overseas. Away from the cities, such pottery probably did not circulate, the habitations of the rural peasantry being basic in design and utensils, dependent on local produce and artefacts.

The rural economy of Outremer proved largely resistant to radical change by the western immigrants, who may nonetheless have imported their heavy ploughs to tame the thin soils of Palestine: they divided their plots of land into carrucates, as in the west, although similar land divisions and ploughs were familiar to the east. While not such a monopoly crop as in the west, cereals – wheat and barley – provided a central feature of village economy. Sesame and vegetables were planted as summer crops. The shortage of cereals apparent from imports in the early years of the century did not persist. Olives remained a staple, which would have made immigrants from southern Europe feel at home, although the orchards around the villages provided more exotic fruit. In many new villages, the central activity concentrated on winemaking.

Most evident is the degree to which the Franks in Outremer fitted into the Levantine economy, exporting dyes, luxury textiles, castor sugar and glassware and, increasingly, spices, while importing from Europe and Islamic neighbours such things as foodstuffs, metals, wood, and cotton. Outremer stimulated cross-Mediterranean commerce, in men (i.e. pilgrims) and goods. By the 1160s, one Genoese notary was recording a higher value (almost double) in trade to Syria than to Alexandria, the greatest entrepôt of the eastern Mediterranean.
⁵⁰
In return, the profits of commerce increasingly sustained the economy and finances of Outremer. Thus it may have appeared to restless westerners that Outremer indeed
promised a land of opportunity which its rulers and patrons of settlements struggled to realize.

Despite acculturation, the comparative brevity of the Frankish presence in the Syrian and Palestinian countryside and the truncated occupation of the coastal cities precluded further developments towards either social integration or the creation of a distinctive cohesive cultural identity. The cosmopolitan backgrounds of the settlers, their lack of numbers and the constant influx of visitors and new immigrants was reflected in the diversity of art and architecture. Outremer has been described as a fragmentary colony of western Europe, displaying only disjointed facets or incomplete bits of the mother culture.
⁵¹
Equally, it developed only a fragmentary unity with the indigenous Christian population and none at all with the Muslims. The divides of language, law, religion and status failed to coincide. Concerted attempts to convert Muslim subjects were limited. Owners resented the freeing of converted Muslim slaves. Elsewhere, conversions appeared as individual responses to circumstances, although there may have been some pull towards accepting the faith of the rulers of a confessional state, as there was in the later multi-faith Ottoman or Habsburg empires. Yet the ambiguity, if not of the Latin settlement than of the evidence for it, is well expressed in some surviving capitals from the cathedral of the Annunciation in Nazareth. While some have regarded their formalized, unrealistic depiction of Syrians as quintessential proof of the Franks’ colonial blindness and policy of apartheid, two of the capitals, depicting apocryphal conversion missions of the apostles Bartholomew and Matthew, have prompted suggestions that some of the Nazarene clergy desired the Christianization of their Muslim neighbours.
⁵²

Twelfth-century Frankish Outremer did not disappear in the face of Saladin’s conquest of 1187–9. Some of the rural population must have survived. In places, on the plain of Acre perhaps, villages may have sustained themselves, subjugated but intact, surrounded as they were by other Christian communities; certainly with the reconquest of the coast after 1191, some settlements resorted to their previous ownership and inhabitants to their former privileges. In such a geographically diverse and complicated region, numbers of Franks may have stayed, survival not necessarily dependent on the fate of the lords or even of the cities. The castle of Montréal had held out against Saladin for a year and a
half before surrendering early in 1189. Twenty-eight years later, in 1217, when a German pilgrim, Thietmar, visited the town beneath the castle, still in Muslim hands and inhabited by Muslims and Syrian Christians, he stayed with a Frankish widow. On Thietmar’s departure, she provided him with directions on the best route towards his destination of Mt Sinai and supplied him with provisions for his journey: twice-baked bread, cheese, raisins, figs and wine.
⁵³
Here, at least, was one Frankish settler whose stay in the east was not temporary, superficial, transient or destitute. As Fulcher of Chartres had trumpeted optimistically a century before, the widow of Montréal was indeed an Occidental who had become an Oriental.

The Second Crusade

8

A New Path to Salvation? Western Christendom and Holy War 1100–1145

To the snobbish, mother-fixated failed abbot Guibert of Nogent, spinning his vision of ‘the Deeds of God performed by the Franks’ (
Gesta Dei per Francos
) before 1108, the Jerusalem campaign offered the laity a new path of salvation; the German abbot Ekkehard of Aura, a veteran of the 1101 fiasco, saw it as a new means of penitence.
¹
Many western observers were quick to associate the Jerusalem enterprise’s uniqueness with a general manifesto for spiritual redemption, ecclesiastical discipline and Christian expansion, such rewarded, sanctified violence exploited by a reinvigorated papacy and its supporters to reinforce the tradition of penitential war in the church’s interests. However, the radical effect of the First Crusade can be exaggerated. Secular and clerical refinements of the story of the First Crusade, in poem, song, chronicle or sermon, confirmed as much as redefined long-standing cultural acceptance of the equality of physical with spiritual religious militancy. Urban II had not invented soldiers of Christ nor spiritually beneficial and meritorious warfare, a tradition that encompassed rather than surrendered to the First Crusade. While the first Jerusalemites basked in unique glory, their example did not lead to a succession of large expeditions east following the disasters of 1101. Some regions that had supplied large contingents between 1095 and 1101, including the Limousin, Champagne and Provence, provided few traceable military
crucesignati
between 1102 and 1146.
²
Those who assumed the cross and departed to fight in the east attracted admiration; the cause of Outremer received close, often anxious attention; yet, despite papal commitment and sporadic local recruitment, no mass movement emerged. The images, attitudes and actions of the First Crusade were disseminated across western society widely but fitfully, often as rhetorical evangelical tropes as much as calls to arms. Jerusalem in
Christian hands stimulated a wave of pilgrims with the occasional military adventurer or princely swell, their motives possibly as chivalric as pious. Meanwhile, popes integrated aspects of Urban’s expedition into their increasingly authoritarian role as leader and protector of Christendom within as well as beyond its frontiers, encouraging use of the language and institutions of this new holy war against papal enemies in Italy or bandits in northern France as well as Muslims in Outremer or Spain.