Central to the popular story were the orders of religious knights: the Templars and the Hospitallers. The Templars, with their chain mail girded with white linen emblazoned with a red cross, became archetypes of the Christian warrior. Named after the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, where they lived, the Templars received the official sanction of the church early in the twelfth century. Not only was the temple the purported center of the first Israelite kingdom in the Holy Land, it was also where later Muslims had built Al-Aqsa Mosque. As a religious order blessed by the pope and sponsored by Bernard of Clairvaux, the Templars represented the fusion of the soldier and the priest, and their fame and wealth survived long after they departed the Holy Land. They and the Hospitallers eventually retreated to Mediterranean islands such as Malta and Rhodes, until the Ottomans supplanted them. As the order disappeared, however, the legend grew until the image of the Templars was permanently imprinted on Western consciousness. They became Crusader icons. They have graced forgettable Victorian novels, French romances, Hollywood films, and international best sellers, and have been cast as sinister characters pulling the levers of history, a dark, hidden force along with the Masons and the Illuminati.
But while the religious orders were prominent in Frankish society in the Near East, they were a small, albeit powerful, minority of all European settlers in the Orient and arguably less important than the Italian merchants who controlled trade but did not fight wars. Even generous estimates suggest that the Templars and Hospitallers never had more than a thousand armed knights at any one time. Yet a quick glance at a
library catalog will yield thousands of entries on the crusading orders, which dwarfs the literature on trade. Merchants may have mattered more in the greater scheme of things, but what they did was less compelling to writers and polemicists, either at the time or centuries later. What would a romantic novelist do with a dull Genoese merchant in Acre? Much better to focus on knights, castles, war, and men in shiny chain mail. For Arab and Turkish court chroniclers, the Templars made a perfect foil, proof of the greed and rapaciousness of the Christians. A spice merchant from Pisa arranging shipments in Sidon was of far less interest.
In the workaday world of the Crusader kingdoms of the twelfth century, however, those merchants, artisans, and peasants outnumbered the Templars and Hospitallers, who were important as vassals of Rome but did little to shape everyday society in Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine. The orders were integral to the ambitions of the pope, but they were only one element of the balance of power in the Near East.
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The actual history of daily life during the age of the Crusades is more mundane and lacks dynamic characters and dominant leaders. The names of the people who lived and died are obscure, if recorded at all. The princes and kings of the Frankish states in the Near East are kept alive by scholars, and most battles of consequence were recorded by either Muslims or Christians. The long lulls in between were not.
Part of the explanation is prosaic: lulls make for boring reading. Until the late twentieth century, no one wrote a novel about a hum-drum life, or filmed a movie with no plot. And it is not only that periods between the wars are less dynamic. They also make history more complicated and ambiguous, and thereby undermine the black-and-white story of conflict. Neither Western cultures nor Muslim cultures have wanted to focus on coexistence. Yet, for much of the twelfth-century in the Near East, daily life was shaped not by heroic warriors but by small Western Christian city-states ruled by a few nobles and bureaucrats who were surrounded by Muslim Arabs and Turks and by Eastern Christian peasants and elites who had never converted to Islam. Their history, largely forgotten, is neither glorious nor ignominious.
The conquest of Jerusalem was followed by the creation of the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem and the crowning of its first king, Godfrey. He soon died and was succeeded by Baldwin of Edessa, who became King Baldwin I of Jerusalem and remained so until his death in 1118. Frankish armies pushed to the coast of Palestine, attacked Tripoli,
and battled both the Fatimids and the Seljuks. As the new Christian states established themselves, they re-created Western Europe feudalism. The kingdom of Jerusalem nominally ruled many of the city-states in what is now Israel and the Palestinian West Bank; the lords of Antioch claimed sovereignty over large parts of present-day Lebanon; and the kingdom of Edessa carved out several thousand square miles inhabited mostly by Armenian Christians.
The Frankish princes ruled over a sparsely settled countryside dotted with towns. Many Muslims had fled just before and after 1099 as word of Christian barbarity spread. Jerusalem was nearly emptied of its inhabitants through the combined effects of flight and massacre, and even a decade later, the population of the city was only in the low thousands. Outside of Jerusalem, the areas controlled by the Crusaders were populated by a mix of Christians and Muslims. Most scholars agree that the Near East even at this point, nearly five hundred years after the first Arab conquests, was still home to a large Christian population, which in many regions was in the majority. That meant that Crusaders found themselves ruling states with substantial numbers of Christians. The conquerors, however, looked down on them because they spoke an incomprehensible language, had alien ways of celebrating mass, and held theological positions that had long ago been declared heretical in the West.
At first, the Franks treated the local Christians as conquered peoples. Though there was some loosening of social constraints, the locals remained second-class citizens. The Franks did not even lift the unpleasant poll tax that Muslims had imposed on the People of the Book. Instead, they maintained the tax, added Muslims to the lists, and continued to assess native Christians and Jews. In essence, most of the population, whether Christian or Muslim, found their lives little changed.
Eastern Christians neither rose up against the Crusaders nor fully embraced them. They served their new masters, just as they had served their old, but they at least shared a basic belief in the centrality of Christ to their lives. The Franks may not have respected the local Christians, but the local Christians found new opportunities for social advancement, primarily as intermediaries between the Muslims of the Near East and the new Crusader kingdoms.
In addition, Eastern Christians had an easier time getting hired as
mercenaries by the Crusader states than they had by the Seljuks or the Fatimids. Unlike the Templars and the Hospitallers, who answered mostly to themselves and nominally to the pope, Eastern Christian mercenaries did the bidding of the prince or king who hired them. It was a good arrangement for both the Frankish rulers and the local population. The Maronite Christians of Mount Lebanon, who had been moving ever closer to Rome, benefited enormously from the establishment of trading posts along the coast, and they found lucrative employment as soldiers for the princes of Acre, Sidon, and Tripoli. They also served as translators and intermediaries for Italian merchants who wanted to access the Seljuk-controlled trade routes east of Damascus and Aleppo. The legacy of close relations between the Maronites and the Franks (French) lasted well into the twentieth century and culminated in the creation of the modern state of Lebanon.
Gradually, however, the Franks began to assimilate. They changed how they dressed, the language they spoke, and even who they married. The majority of intermarriages occurred between Franks and local Christians; marriages between Christians and Muslims were frowned upon by both sides. But men and women have a way of circumventing social controls. Knights who had come to fight and then stayed needed women. Sex was easy enough to obtain, for a price or from a slave, but marriage was a bit more challenging. The aristocrats could arrange marriages to cement alliances between crusading states, between ruling Frankish families in the Near East and Byzantine royals, or with nobility in Europe. But for the rest, the most promising avenue was the easiest one—women from the local population. Often these were Christian, but not always.
The increase in intermarriage drew the notice of the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres. Writing around the year 1127, he observed that the Crusader states had become as corrupt, petty, and divisive as their counterparts in Europe. “Occidentals have now been made Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank is now a Galilean or an inhabitant of Palestine…. We have now forgotten the places of our birth…. Some already possess here homes or servants which they have received through inheritance. Some have taken wives not merely of their own people but Syrians, or Armenians, or even Saracens who have received the grace of baptism.”
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As part of the process of assimilation, Western Christians in the Near
East became more tolerant of religious diversity than they had been in Europe. While they disdained the rites of Eastern Christians and treated Muslims (and Jews) as lost souls, they neither proselytized nor went out of their way to make life untenable for these subjects. In part, that was out of necessity. They were vastly outnumbered by Christians of different sects and by Muslims whose aid and support they often needed. Once the goal of retaking Jerusalem had been accomplished, the Franks confronted the daunting task of creating viable states, without a master plan for governing. They were forced to improvise, and faced with the more sophisticated societies that they had conquered and now ruled, they borrowed liberally.
The Crusader states emulated not just the dress and mores of local Christians but also the policies of the Muslim rulers they had supplanted. The result was a grudging culture of toleration. As long as taxes were paid, most of the local populace was left alone, free to enforce their own social and religious mores. One Muslim chronicler, who was unstinting in his hostility to the Franks, nonetheless acknowledged that they did not interfere with the right of Muslims to worship God as they pleased and “did not change a single law or cult practice.” The courts set up by the Franks, while privileging the testimony of Christians, provided protections to Muslims as human beings “like the Franks.”
The new rulers of Jerusalem did convert Al-Aqsa Mosque into a church, with a monastery for the Templars. They also set aside space for Muslims to worship there. It was understood that when major centers were occupied by Christians or by Muslims, the main church or mosque would be symbolically switched over to reflect the religion of the rulers. As a result, there was no Muslim outcry when Al-Aqsa was transformed into a church. Given the image of the Crusades as a period of unmitigated holy war, the lack of outrage is difficult to reconcile. A similar event in Jerusalem today would plunge the region into chaos.
In the first half of the twelfth century, however, there was no ingrained culture of religious war in the Near East. It was as common for Franks to fight Franks or Byzantium as it was for Franks to fight Muslims. Most Muslim states expended more energy scheming and plotting against one another than they did against the Christian invaders. That seems to have dismayed few inhabitants of Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, or Cairo. Although the occasional cry for war against the infidel was not unheard of, later polemicists—in the interest of giving muscle to the
clash-of-civilizations perspective—have excavated those and emphasized them out of all proportion to their frequency. Muslim calls for holy war in the twelfth century were much like calls to end poverty in the twentieth—no one could disagree with the noble ambitions, but few were interested in actually doing anything.
In fact, Muslims who found themselves under Christian rule, rather than resisting their new overlords, began to emulate them. Much as Christians in Andalusia learned Arabic and tried to ingratiate themselves with the Muslim ruling class, Muslims of the Crusader states did what they could to win the favor of the new lords. Some found that Christian rulers were more equitable than the Muslims they had replaced. In a refrain remarkably like that of the Córdoba martyrs of the ninth century who despaired when they saw Christians embracing Muslim culture, the chronicler Ibn Jubayr moaned that Muslim peasants
preferred Christian landlords. “Their hearts have been seduced This
is one of the misfortunes afflicting the Muslims. The Muslim community bewails the injustice of a landlord of its own faith, and applauds the conduct of its opponent and enemy, the Frankish landlord, and is accustomed to justice from him.” And it wasn’t just Muslims under Christian rule who accepted coexistence. Local sultans signed treaties and established fruitful trade alliances with the Crusader states. According to the chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi, the Muslim governor of Ascalon sent emissaries to King Baldwin of Jerusalem to arrange a treaty because “he was more desirous of trading than fighting, and inclined to peaceful and friendly relation and securing the safety of travellers.”
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It is a truism that most people, most of the time, follow the path of least resistance. Faced with a new political order, people tend to adapt rather than resist. That was true of Christians in Muslim-ruled Spain, and it was true of Muslims in the Christian-ruled Crusader states of the twelfth century. Until recently, most scholars assumed that the few Franks and Italians who immigrated to the Near East lived only in the coastal cities, in Jerusalem or Edessa, or in the fortified castles that lined the north-south corridor from Krak des Chevaliers, between Beirut and Damascus, to Kerak, south of present-day Amman in Jordan. In part, these assumptions were based on the absence of records listing land ownership, but they were also fueled by a long-standing belief that the Crusaders would never have settled in the midst of a hostile and alien rural population. But they did, and the local populace accommodated them.
While many Westerners did settle in cities, others carved out rural estates comparable to what might have been found in France or the Rhine Valley. These estates were tended by Christian and Muslim peasants whose particular creed mattered less to their masters than their ability to tend to crops, herds, and other agricultural business. For the better part of a century, Christian rule over those peasants generated no more, though perhaps no less, tension and animosity than what would have been found in feudal Western Europe at the time. Peasants resented their lords; barons disdained the peasantry. People gossiped, occasionally dreamt of a different world, and almost never did anything about it. The one thing everyone—high and low, Christian, Jew, or Muslim—abhorred was chaos. Injustice was hardly desirable, but it was preferable to revolution. In the world of the Crusader states, what mattered most was class and economic status, not religion.
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