God's War: A New History of the Crusades Read online

  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.8 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.9 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.10 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.11 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.12

  A religious justification for conquest did not make Outremer different from Spain, Sicily or the Baltic. Its special holy status and the weight of pilgrimage did. The west adopted a proprietorial attitude to the Holy Land, even at a distance. Leaders of Outremer continually looked westwards for assistance, even if not a single twelfth-century century ruler of Jerusalem, as king or heir, visited the west, the furthest any reached being Amalric’s visit to pay homage to the Greek emperor Manuel I at Constantinople in 1171. Popes circulated news, usually alarmist or depressing; monastic and clerical chroniclers from all parts of western Christendom recorded eastern events. In high politics, rulers such as the kings of England and France publicly accepted their responsibility to sustain the Christian settlement, even if between 1149 and 1187 they did little enough about it. Great magnates visited, Thierry count of Flanders four times; some went to fight, as did Philip count of Flanders in 1177; others, like Henry the Lion duke of Saxony in 1172, to pray and endow. In return, the kingdom of Jerusalem paid Peter’s Pence to Rome and sent its brightest students to the west for education, such as William of Tyre, from a burgess family living in Jerusalem. Whereas, outside the faltering royal dynasty, the number of westerners claiming important secular lordships even by marriage declined in the second half of the century, the church in Outremer exhibited a tenacious dependence on immigrants. Of all the Latin bishops, archbishops and patriarchs in the kingdom of Jerusalem, only one can be identified as having been born in the east, the chronicler William, who was archbishop of Tyre 1175–86. Although this may have added to the colonial appearance of the Jerusalem church, it emphasizes the lack of available, well-educated sons of the nobility who crowded the episcopal benches of western Europe, although it might also be noted that a foreign episcopacy was not unique to Jerusalem: for sixty years after 1066, possibly more, no native Englishman was consecrated a bishop in England; in parts of the German-conquered Baltic from the twelfth century such immigrant bishops remained normal. Such a colonized church, as Heraclius discovered in 1184/5, did not necessarily endear itself to the west, not least because of the generally indifferent quality of clerical recruits in the east, men who would not have got near high office at home, at best characterized, it has been argued, by ‘low-brow religiosity’, at worst by material ambition and a lack of conspicuous spirituality. Unlike the rest of Latin Christendom, twelfth-century Outremer produced no successful candidates for canonization, although a sabbatical in the Holy Land could prove useful on a saint’s curriculum vitae, such as that of the bizarre St Ranieri of Pisa, who, while living as an ascetic in Palestine c.1138–54, claimed to be ‘God’s second incarnation’.13 It is difficult to assess whether the foreign monopoly of church leadership aided relations with the west and heightened the militancy of the Jerusalem church, or, conversely, merely produced fertile ground for opportunist timeservers and encouraged western contempt.

  SETTLERS AND SETTLEMENT

  The attraction of the Holy Land to ecclesiastical careerists formed only part of Outremer’s history of immigration. It is impossible to calculate how many westerners settled in the Levant in the twelfth century as
it is to establish what proportion of the total population they constituted. All that can be determined is that, in certain regions and cities, the Franks established a significant presence which should not be minimized just because ultimately, unlike the conquests in Sicily, Spain, eastern Europe or the Baltic, the settlement failed. Not the least consistent theme of life in Outremer was the consciousness of the need for immigration to bolster the military conquest. However, generalizations can mislead. Town and countryside (often a tricky if not false distinction); coastal plains, hills, deserts; north and south; sedentary or nomadic; Outremer presented a mosaic as varied as any that adorned the floors in the homes and manor houses of the Frankish nobility. Thus, while Jerusalem was forbidden to Muslim residents, in 1110 Tancred was encouraging Muslim settlers in the principality of Antioch and negotiating the repatriation of their wives from Aleppo.14 Some towns and cities, such as Ramla or Jaffa in 1099, had been evacuated by Muslims; in others the Muslim population had been massacred after being stormed; while at Sidon (1110) and Tyre (1124) the indigenous communities were permitted to remain. Certain areas possessed large Christian populations before 1099, particularly in southern Samaria north of Jerusalem and in parts of Galilee; others were dominated by Muslims. Jewish communities were similarly unevenly spread across the landscape; nomadic Bedouin stalked the fringes of the desert. The economy of the plains around Tyre or Acre differed from that of the Judean hills, Transjordan or the commercial centres of Acre, Tyre and Antioch. Inevitably, the nature and distribution of settlement depended on the availability of land, the structure of landowning, the economic opportunities, military vulnerability, the attitude of indigenous communities and local entrepreneurial initiatives.

  At the top of Latin society the nobles, having, like Tancred in Galilee, grabbed land or, like his successor there, Hugh of St Omer, been granted it by the king, would naturally dispose of estates to their followers. Other grants included money fiefs, rents from revenues in towns, rather than land. In return, vassals of kings and lords owed military service of knights, at least 675 by c.1180; others, the urban and rural freemen known as burgesses and the church, supplied footsoldiers, in theory by 1180 over 5,000. Judged by accounts of royal campaigns, the system worked at all levels: in 1170, sixty-five light-armed young men from the planted Frankish farming community of Magna Mahomeria north of Jerusalem were killed or wounded defending Gaza.15 Unlike conquests in parts of western Europe, for example England or Sicily, grantor or grantee were not concerned to establish legal continuity with pre-conquest ownership at the level of lordships even if, in practice, they did conform to previous administrative regions, as at Caesarea. In the early days of the conquest, some land was appropriated by individual lords without formal obligations. In the kingdom of Jerusalem, the creation of lordships held directly of the crown was a process of some time, but rewarded those loyal to the king, such as Eustace Garnier, lord of Caesarea and Sidon in 1110.16 Similarly, lesser lordships went to those in the king’s or the seigneur’s entourage. One of Baldwin I’s knights from Edessa, Hubert of Paceo, held land from the king north of Acre; on Baldwin’s death he returned to Edessa with Joscelin of Courtenay.17 The ties were of lordship or kinship not place. Such patterns of aristocratic patronage were inevitable and commonplace. The origins of the nobility of Outremer did not derive entirely from the contingents of the First Crusade or later military campaigns. Some of the greatest in the land were enticed to the east for political advantage not military adventure: Queen Melisende’s cousins Hugh II of Jaffa, actually born in Apulia, and Manasses of Hierges; the Constable Miles de Planchy; Prince Raymond of Antioch; King Fulk. Geographically, many of the earliest lords in the kingdom of Jerusalem came from northern France: Gerard of Avesnes, given a castle near Hebron by Godfrey of Bouillon; Hugh of St Omer in Galilee in 1101; Fulk of Guines at Beirut; Hugh of Le Puiset at Jaffa by 1110. However, their vassals displayed no uniform origins; Hugh of Jaffa’s constable, Barisan or Balian, the founder of the fortunes of the great Outremer house of Ibelin, was probably of Italian or Sardinian extraction. Family ties, as of Joscelin of Courtenay with Baldwin II of Edessa or Richard and Roger of Salerno with Bohemund and Tancred of Antioch counted for much, possibly more than regional affinities, although the nobility of Antioch and Tripoli exhibited Italian, Norman and Provençal traces respectively.

  Lower down the social scale, the evidence of clerical and secular witness lists, pilgrims’ memoirs and documents relating to rural settlement projects reveals a wide catchment area of immigrant recruitment, impossible to restrict to soldierly veterans. Pilgrims outside the military campaigns arrived from as far away as Iceland and Russia. In Jerusalem, among the clergy and lay burgesses, there appear men from most regions of France, from Flanders, Normandy and Paris to Le Puy and Périgord in Languedoc, from northern Italy and Spain.18 These hardly reflect the contingents of the First Crusade. In the 1160s, John of Würzburg listed the nationalities in Jerusalem: Franks, Lotharingians, Normans, Provençals, men from the Auvergne, Italians, Spaniards and Burgundians. Although complaining loyally at the absence of Germans, or, at least, at the lack of recognition of their original contribution, John noted the German church and hospital of St Mary in the Holy City. Among the religious communities John recorded were Germans, Hungarians, Scots, Celts, English, Navarrese, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Bulgars and Hungarians as well as Italians and northern French. The overcrowding in Acre caused by the press of visitors struck the Greek visitor John Phocas in 1185, who also encountered a travelling professional holy man from Spain near the river Jordan he had first met in Cilicia some years before, and a monk on Mt Carmel from Calabria.19

  A more limited but still markedly cosmopolitan basis to immigration is traceable in the countryside by the mid-twelfth century. At the Hospitaller settlement of Bethgibelin near Ascalon, most of the incomers came from France south of the Loire, with a few from north Italy and Spain. A fuller list of settlers on land owned by the Holy Sepulchre north of Jerusalem repeats this pattern of heaviest representation from south of the Loire, Italy and Spain, although there were a significant number from the Ile de France and Burgundy.20 Certain regions of western Europe are conspicuous by their absence: Lorraine, the German Empire and Norman Italy and Sicily, which displayed strangely little interest even in Antioch until late in the century. Part of the explanation for this uneven distribution, even given the extreme narrowness of the sample, may be the presence of easier opportunities nearer home. Yet the royal agent entrusted with attracting settlers to Casal Imbert near Acre in mid-century may have come from Valencia in Spain.21 The motives of these families cannot be excavated: preferment, prosperity, piety; the certainty of privileged free status, a point emphasized by Fulcher of Chartres in the 1120s, all may have played a part. Most if not all must have been of individual means or attached to people of substance. Neither legally nor financially could serfs afford the trip. Yet western land charters suggest a rich pool of free, non-noble pilgrims and crusaders, villagers of property and artisans, able to raise money for the long, arduous and expensive journey.

  Attracting the bulk of settlers and accommodating the largest concentrations of population, the cities of Outremer tended to be refashioned by the new rulers, who redesigned and reconfigured city centres and public spaces to suit their social, commercial and religious needs. Immigrants to cities almost certainly conformed to a similarly cosmopolitan model. Many crusaders and pilgrims originated from the growing towns of the west, so presumably did settlers. Equally, many reared in villages possessed the skills as workmen, artisans, shopkeepers and merchants appropriate to an urban as well as a rural setting. In an environment lacking plentiful wood, thereby placing a premium on skilled craftsmen, where the basic building material was stone, it is unsurprising to find numerous Frankish carpenters and masons who may have been attracted east precisely because of the more profitable market for their trades. In cities, Frankish coiners, goldsmiths, cobblers and furriers catered for a monied elite. In the countryside,
in addition to these essential skilled crafts, the sources reveal Latins as blacksmiths; drovers and herdsmen of camels, goats and, distinctively, pigs; gardeners; specialists in grain or vines; butchers; and bakers. Some may have arrived in the train of invading armies, but like Constantine, a poor cobbler from Châlons, or John, a mason from Vendôme, not all, probably not most.22

  Some settlers would not have become permanent residents and the maintenance of national distinctions apparent in pilgrims’ accounts point to a transient urban population, or, like expatriate communities through the ages, groups constantly reinforced in their regional differences by visitors from home. As with all towns in the west, the cities of Outremer housed a constantly changing cosmopolitan population. Where the Italian maritime communes received privileged quarters within ports such as Acre, Tripoli and Tyre, their permanent population of residents in these trading stations remained small between the spring and autumn ‘passages’. With the reduction of the power of the crown and the physical size of the Latin principalities in the thirteenth century, and the commensurately greater dependence on commerce, the Italians became powerful autonomous political forces. Despite their privileges, there is not much evidence for this in the twelfth century.

  Whether rural or urban, the significance of the continued stream or trickle of non-noble settlement was reflected in the kingdom’s laws. By 1110, the non-noble Frankish settler, known as the bourgeois, appeared as a recognizable social group; by the early 1130s they were allowed to hold their own courts, the cour des bourgeois, which operated in cities or urban and village communities in the countryside. Under Baldwin III, directed at pilgrims and the poor, in practice new arrivals, the assise du coup apparent exempted them from the customary legal requirement for sworn bona fides in a court of law. Newcomers would be unlikely to know anybody, yet were not immune to the usual exigencies of bad luck and the law. The presence of a substantial population of Latin non-noble freemen finds recognition in the number of sergeants whose service was claimed by the kings of Jerusalem in emergencies from towns and the extensive lands of churches and monasteries, as well as in Amalric I’s assise sur la ligece asserting his right to demand fealty from freemen in fiefs held directly of the crown. Clearly, not all such men, as used to be thought, lived in towns and cities; the unfortunate young men from Magna Mahomeria slaughtered at Gaza testify to that.23