Myths about the Kingdom of Jerusalem 2:

The Population in the Crusader Kingdoms was Predominantly Muslim

It is a well-known fact that the crusader states suffered from an almost perpetual shortage of knights necessary for their defense. It has been estimated that at no time could the four crusader states muster more than 2,000 secular knights, i.e. knights that lived in the Holy Land, held fiefs and owed feudal (knights) service to the Kings of Jerusalem, directly or indirectly.  Both the founding of the powerful militant orders, the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar, and the series of crusades can be traced back to this simple fact.  To defend the sacred places of Christendom from militant Islam a stream of fighting men from the West was required.  Ten of thousands of fighting men in Western Europe either dedicated their whole lives to the defense of the Latin kingdoms by joining the military orders, or they “took the cross” and came out temporarily on crusade for the same purpose.

The Seal of the Barons of Ibelin shows a Knight wearing the Crusader Cross

This suggests a tiny layer of Christian ruling elite sitting upon an oppressed and alien population; an image projected in almost all popular literature about the crusader kingdoms today.  The picture is, however, a caricature that misrepresents reality. 

The number of knights is a poor measure of the number of Christians in the Holy Land for a number of reasons. First, the knightly class is always a minority, even in a Christian country.  In the Kingdom of Jerusalem, no less than in England or France at this time, the army was composed predominantly of foot-soldiers.  Unique to the Holy Land, these foot-soldiers were supplemented by mounted sergeants (i.e. light infantry).  At the decisive battle of Hattin, the Christian forces have been estimated by military historians at 15,000 men and 1,200 knights.

So where did those 15,000 foot and light cavalry come from?  There were three primary sources, settlers and their offspring, pilgrims and crusaders. At any one time, there were able-bodied pilgrims in the Kingdom of Jerusalem willing to take up arms in the defense of the Holy Land. During crusades there were even more.  But by far the more important element in the King of Jerusalem’s defensive forces were the large numbers of Latin Christian settlers, who came out from Western Europe and stayed permanently, like colonists in later centuries. 

There is archeological evidence of entire, new villages, particularly in the southern part of the kingdom as well as settlement in existing cities such as Ceasarea and, of course, Jerusalem itself. These people might be peasants, but were more commonly freemen because serfs had to have the permission of their lords to leave their land.  Most Western settlers, therefore, would have been craftsmen with enough means to finance the expensive pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the tradition of mobility not found among serfs or landed peasants. Once in the Holy Land, they started families, either with the wives they brought with them (and it was common for married couples to undertake a pilgrimage together and even more common for settlers to come as families), or with native women.  In short, just as in the colonies of the 18^th and 19^th century, the number of residents descended from the early settlers increased year by year – while continuously being reinforced by new settlers.

Another important source of Christian manpower was the large and growing enclaves of Italian merchants in all the ports of the Holy Land.  Because the crusader states were heavily dependent on supplies from the West and fleets to support campaigns against coastal cities, the Italian city states were granted wide-ranging privileges in all the crusaders states. The trade between Western Europe and the fabled “East,” with its silks, spices, ivory, and perfumes etc – was extremely lucrative, and the various Italian city states vied for dominance, building up large and luxurious outposts in the various cities of the Levant.

But manpower is only half the equation.  For every Christian fighting man in the crusader states there were women, children and clerics.  The clerics are a particularly important factor; the Holy Land naturally attracted exceptional numbers of clerical pilgrims, and the rulers of the Christian states established and endowed Latin churches, monasteries, convents and ecclesiastical institutions of all kinds. It can therefore be assumed that 15,000 fighting men were drawn from a population as a whole of three to four times that many or as many as 60,000 Latin Christians.

But these elements are also only the tip of the iceberg. Forgotten in too many modern depictions of the crusader kingdoms is the fact that the Muslims were themselves invaders, who conquered Christian territories in the mid-seventh century. In the three and half centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land many inhabitants undoubtedly converted to Islam -- but very many did not. 

In the County of Edessa and the Principality of Antioch, where Muslim rule was significantly shorter than in the territories of the Kingdom of Jerusalem proper, and the population in these northern crusader states was certainly predominantly Christian – Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christian. In the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, it is harder to guess what proportion of the population was Muslim, but it is absolutely certain that a large minority – if not a majority – of the inhabitants were still Christian. Since there was also still a significant Jewish population as well, the Muslims were thus almost certainly in the minority, albeit a large minority.

The demographics of the crusader kingdoms were thus much more complex than simply Muslim subjects under Latin rulers. The reality was a complex patchwork of Latin, Orthodox, Armenian, Jacobite, and Maronite Christians, living side-by-side with Jews and Muslims – none of which had a majority.

Re-assessing the Crusades and Crusaders

It has become commonplace (not to say popular) to describe the Islamic states that governed the territories that later became the crusader kingdoms as “civilized” and the crusaders as “barbarians.” This perception rests primarily on two facts: 1) the Greek historian Anna Comnena used the term to describe the participants of the First Crusade, and 2) the sack of Jerusalem.

Now, it must be remembered that the Greeks used the term “barbarian” to refer to anyone who didn’t speak Greek. This included, in a different age, the highly civilized Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians etc. Second, the Greek Emperors considered themselves the descendants and heirs to the Roman Empire – and viewed the German, French, and Norman crusaders as the descendants of the “barbarian hoards” that had over-run the Western Empire. Because the Byzantine Empire preserved greater continuity with Rome, it also had a very sophisticated bureaucracy and hierarchy that left the Byzantines confused and offended by the lack of formalized command structures and, indeed, the absence of a supreme commander among the crusaders. Anna Comnena certainly saw the crusaders as barbarians – that does not mean that we should. The lack of understanding for a different culture exhibited by the Byzantine chroniclers does mean the other culture was inherently inferior – as modern readers ought to appreciate.

The sack of Jerusalem was unquestionably a barbaric act – from the modern perspective. It was hardly so in the eyes of contemporaries. The contemporary rules of war were very explicit: a city that surrendered could expect mercy, a city that did not could expect “to be put to the sword.” This had been the rule of war since the sack of Troy. Modern sensibilities are offended particularly by the fact that Christians, allegedly fighting in the name of a peaceful, forgiving and loving Christ, could commit this “atrocity.” It is surely evidence that medieval understanding of Christianity and our own diverges – or that the crusaders by the time they reached Jerusalem were not willing to curb their baser instincts even in such a sacred place. But it does not make the crusaders “barbarians” in the contemporary context, certainly not when it is clear that most apocalyptic descriptions of the sack are exaggerations and religious zeal on the part of later writers and that thousands of Jerusalem’s inhabitants survived the sack.

The Arabs, after all, had taken the Holy Land by the sword, not with sweet words and persuasion. In 997 the Muslims sacked Santiago de Compostella, the most important pilgrimage church in the West. In 1009 the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by the Byzantines over three hundred years starting in the reign of Constantine the Great (306 – 337), was utterly destroyed. Meanwhile, however, the Muslims had divided into Shiites and Sunnis and engaged in bloody wars in which they murdered, raped, pillaged and burned rival Muslim cities. Zengi, atabeg of Mosul, for example, not only (according to a Muslim source) ordered the “pillaging, slaying, capturing, ravishing and looting” of Edessa, but was feared in Damascus because of “his exceptionally cruel and treacherous behavior” – to his co-religionists.

Attempts to depict the crusaders as illiterate brutes lacking in cultural accomplishments also miss the mark. The “unwashed masses” might not have been very cultivated – but nor were the peasants and common soldiers of the Byzantine Empire or the Turks.  The upper classes in 11^th century Europe, on the other hand, had already started to develop arts and architecture to a high degree of sophistication as manuscripts, artifacts and the architectural record shows. Literacy was confined to an elite, and fostered mostly by the clergy – but that was true in the Byzantine and Muslim world as well.  Nevertheless, it is fair to say that in certain fields, notably medicine, mathematics and astronomy the Muslim world was far ahead of Western Europe.  The differences are hardly so dramatic, however, as to paint the one culture as civilized and the other as “barbaric.”

What then made the crusaders appear so “barbaric” to their contemporaries in the East? Two features of Western European feudal society set it apart from the East into which the crusaders came so suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of the 11^th century. 

First was the decentralized system of government based on complex, feudal relationships. Both the Byzantine and the Muslim world in this period were intensely hierarchical societies in which the Emperor (in the one) and the Caliph (in the other) had supreme and absolute control over his subjects – at least in theory. True, reality looked different.  By the end of the tenth century the Abbasid Caliphs were virtual prisoners of the Persian Abuyid dynasty, and changed masters when the Seljuk Turks captured Bagdahd in 1040.  Thereafter they were puppets of the Selkjuk sultans, while the Fatimid Caliphs were at the mercy of their viziers. 

But whether the theoretically absolute rulers wielded actual power or not, their powerful “protectors” always ruled in their name; they considered – and called themselves – slaves of their masters. Western feudalism, in which kings were little more than the “first among equals,” was utterly alien to the Eastern mentality, and so was the outspokenness and (from the Easter perspective) impudence of vassals. The Eastern elites saw the inherent dangers of such a fluid system and associated it with primitive tribal structures. Yet it was exactly these feudal kingdoms that gradually devolved power to ever wider segments of the population until (through a series of constitutional crises) they eventually developed into modern democracies. Meanwhile, the Eastern states remained mired in autocracy.

The other feature of Western European society that the Muslims (though not the Byzantines) found disgusting and incomprehensible was the presence of women in public life. The fact that women had names and faces that were known outside the family circle was viewed as immoral and dishonorable (much the way the Athenians viewed Spartan women) by the Muslims of the 12^th and 13^th centuries. The fact that women not only had names and faces, but a voice in affairs and could play a role in public life including controlling wealth and influencing politics was even more offensive. Yet modern development research shows a strong correlation between societies that empower and enfranchise women and development, while societies that insist on muzzling and oppressing half their population are nowadays considered less “civilized.”

Whether you view the crusaders or the Saracens as more civilized will therefore depend less on objective factors than on how you view democracy and womens’ rights.

The Establishment of the Crusader States

The first crusade re-established Christian rule over some parts of the Holy Land, notably Antioch and Jerusalem, but the Western knights and noblemen who finally made it to Jerusalem felt they had been betrayed by the Byzantine Emperor.  Instead of returning the territory they had captured to Byzantine control, the crusaders established a series of independent states with Christian rulers: the Principality of Antioch, the County of Edessa, the County of Tripoli, and – most important – the Kingdom of Jerusalem. (Later, during the Third Crusade, the Latin Kingdom of Cyprus was also established, but that will be dealt with in a separate entry.)

Initially, these "kingdoms" were little more than Christian-controlled islands in an Islamic sea, separated from one another by large swaths of territory. Between 1099 and 1144 the Christians steadily increased their area of control -- in most cases giving the defeated Muslim defenders of cities and castles a safe-conduct after surrender. By 1144, the crusaders controlled the entire coastline of the Levant from south of Gaza to roughly Antalya. In short, the crusader kingdoms covered all of what is now Israel, most of modern Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria and Anatolia as well.

The Arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem

The crusaders who founded and ruled these states were a tiny elite of Latin Christians from Western Europe, dependent economically on the local population – composed predominantly of Byzantine, Syrian, and Maronite Christians, with smaller populations of Jews, Muslims, and new settlers from the West – all speaking a variety of languages. Although Latin churches were built and the various Latin religious orders soon established a presence, neither the Orthodox Churches, nor the synagogues nor mosques were destroyed; the inhabitants of the crusader kingdoms were free to follow their religious conscience. 

Furthermore, the states were at the crossroads of trade between East and West, and the ports of Christian Palestine were the key points for trans-shipping the riches brought by caravan from China, Persia, Egypt, and Arabia to the entire Western world. This made these states both prosperous and cosmopolitan. The crusader states, known collectively in the West as “Outremer” (beyond the sea), rapidly became a melting pot for culture and a breeding ground for art and science.

The First Crusade: 1096-1099

The response to the Pope’s appeal was overwhelming. It is believed that over 100,000 people, an enormous number given the population of Western Europe at this time, took part in this first crusade. First, an estimated 20,000 common people without particular organization or planning followed a self-proclaimed prophet, Peter the Hermit, thinking he would lead them to a kind of paradise on earth in Jerusalem. After plundering their way through the Balkans, they were completely destroyed by a Turkish army just beyond the Bosporus. 

The real crusading army, consisting of roughly 35,000 fighting men, set out on the official First Crusade several months later. This force was led by some of the most powerful noblemen of Western Europe at the time, including the Dukes of Flanders and Normandy and Count Raymond IV of Toulouse.

While some of the leaders, notably the Count of Toulouse and Godfrey de Bouillon, were men with land and riches at home, whose motives for embarking on such a dangerous and difficult expedition were largely pious, the same cannot be said of all crusaders. Bohemond, the Prince of Otranto, and Baldwin of Boulogne, for example, proved their interests were largely venal by setting themselves up as princelings in conquered territory even before reaching Jerusalem. 

As for their followers, as Richard Barber writes in The Knight and Chivalry: “The Papacy saw the crusades as a way of harnessing the concept of knighthood to spiritual ends; the knights saw them as a solution to earthly ills, with the promise of absolution and heavenly reward as well …. Furthermore, by removing the discontented knights from their homes in the West, the popes believed that they would bring peace to Europe as well as helping their fellow Christians in Palestine and Byzantium.”(Barber, Richard W., The Knight and Chivalry, p. 254.)  In short, many men went on crusade for practical more than religious reasons: to avoid debts, taxes, and feudal duties, for adventure, for spoils, in hope of a better future in the Holy Land ….

The First Crusade reached Constantinople in April 1097. Here the leaders dutifully swore fealty to the Byzantine Emperor, in whose name they continued as soldiers of an Emperor seeking to re-take territory that had belonged to his predecessors. The crusaders then crossed into Muslim-held territory for the first time (modern Turkey) and confronted Seljuk forces on July 1. The crusaders routed the Seljuk army and continued east until they came to Antioch.

Here, after an eight-month siege, Antioch fell to the crusaders – who promptly found themselves under siege by a much larger Muslim army. The crusaders appealed desperately for aid from the Byzantine Emperor, their ‘overlord,’ who had sent them on this mission and promised them support. In fact, the Byzantine Emperor had moved his troops in behind the crusaders, “mopping up” what remained of the Seljuk forces and re-establishing Byzantine control over Asia Minor. But, unfortunately for Christianity, one of the crusaders, Stephan of Blois, deserted the crusader cause and on his way home told the Byzantine Emperor that the crusaders were defeated and lost. The Emperor therefore decided to consolidate what he had and returned to Constantinople, leaving the crusaders on their own.

Trapped in Antioch, on the brink of starvation, the crusaders discovered a relic, which one of the priests identified as the lance that pierced Christ’s side before the Crucifixion. This “miracle” inspired the crusaders to undertake what turned out to be a decisive sortie that drove the besiegers off. But the survivors no longer trusted the Byzantine Emporer, or felt that they owed him fealty. Instead, they established two independent kingdoms, at Edessa and Antioch before the hard-core of the crusaders pressed on for Jerusalem itself. A year later, the weary, much decimated, ill-equipped, and half-starved crusading army reached Jerusalem.

This army had suffered extreme privation during its march, notably thirst so intense that according to the chaplain of the Count of Toulouse, at one pool “those who were strong pushed and shoved their way in a deathly fashion through the pool, which was already choked with dead animals and men struggling for their lives …. Those who were weaker sprawled on the ground beside the pool with gaping mouths, their parched tongues making them speechless, while they stretched out their hands to beg water from the more fortunate ones.” (Hopkins, Andrea, Knights: The Complete Story of the Age of Chivalry, from Historical Fact to Tales of Romance and Poetry, p. 85.)

The army was no longer large enough to encircle the city, so no proper siege was possible. Furthermore, the leaders believed that a Muslim relief army from Egypt was on its way, which made a rapid victory all the more important. The crusaders therefore attempted to take the city by storm almost at once, but lacked sufficient ladders to scale the walls; the assault was driven off. An imperfect siege began, during which the Christians secured materials to build siege engines. On the night of July 13, 1099, a new assault was launched, but it was not until the afternoon of July 15 that a breakthrough was achieved.

The crusaders reportedly poured into Jerusalem. At this moment of their greatest triumph, the crusaders committed the atrocity that has besmirched the very words “crusades” and “crusaders” ever since. Knowing the Christians had been expelled before the siege, the crusaders put all the defenders to the sword.  Later accounts would claim that the crusaders' horses waded up to their fetlocks in running blood, but serious historians note that in fact thousands of inhabitants survived the capture of Jerusalem, so that oft cited accounts of wading in blood were exaggerated -- not to say allegorical. All Muslims were, however, expelled turning Jerusalem into a Christian city once again.

The Genesis of the Crusades

The Crusader Kingdoms were founded in the wake of the First Crusade, so an understanding of the crusades and their genesis is essential to any study of the crusader kingdoms.

Essentially, the Crusades were a series of campaigns undertaken by Christians in the 11th to 13th centuries to establish (or re-establish) control over the Holy Land (the sites of Christ’s passion), particularly Jerusalem. These campaigns were a response to the expansion of Islam, which had spread in the wake of invading armies that used the sword to impose Islam on previously Christian territory. Most – but not all – crusades were fundamentally defensive campaigns that responded to aggression with aggression.

The successful First Crusade established a string of Christian states in the Holy Land that, although prosperous, were always threatened by the overwhelming military superiority of the surrounding Muslim states. Whenever one or more of these states was invaded or fell to the Saracens (the opposing Muslim forces, which were ethnically Egyptian, Syrian, Kurdish or Turkish; I will use the contemporary term “Saracen” to refer to these diverse but consistently Muslim fighting groups), the call went out to the West for aid – for a new crusade. Thus in the course of two centuries, a total of eight numbered crusades were launched, not counting such tragedies as the Children’s Crusades, the Reconquista (liberation) of the Iberian Peninsula, or the wars against the heathens of northeastern Europe and the heretics of Southern France, which were sometimes also referred to as crusades.

In the course of these crusades, Christian leaders and troops committed many atrocities that are incompatible with Christianity, but not all crusaders were inherently depraved and brutal. Furthermore, the enemy also committed countless well-documented atrocities. These were violent centuries, but they were also a period in which the close contact between the East and the West produced cross-fertilization of culture and art, and a period in which trade and science flourished.

Below is a short chronology of the events leading up to the First Crusade:

The First Muslim Invasion of Christian Territory: 632-750

Between 630 and 750, Islam aggressively expanded across North Africa and into the formerly Christian territories of the Byzantine Empire. They captured the Holy Land, including Jerusalem, and also modern-day Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Cyprus and other islands in the Mediterranean were also either conquered or subjected to destructive raids.

The First Muslim Invasion of Western Europe: 710-732

The first Muslim invasion of Western Europe started in 710 with the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by Muslim armies from North Africa. The Muslim armies conquered the bulk of what is now Spain and Portugal, establishing Muslim states that over the next five centuries developed flourishing cities and a highly sophisticated culture. In 732 a Muslim army crossed the Pyrenees, defeated the Christian forces in what is now Aquitaine, and continued north, approaching the Loire valley. They were stopped and forced to withdraw by Charles Martel, the leader of the Franks, near Poitiers in 732.

Further Muslim Conquests: 827-878

Sicily and Crete were conquered by Muslim forces.

First Christian Offensive: 969-975

The Byzantine Empire made its first attempt to reconquer lost Christian territory in 969, with the recapture of Antioch. By 975 the Byzantine army had captured much of Palestine, particularly on the coast, but the Christian armies failed to capture Jerusalem. A peace treaty in 1001 ended the Byzantine attempt to re-establish political control over the Holy Land and resulted in a period of intensive persecution for native Christians living under Muslim rule. The situation improved somewhat by the middle of the 11th century.

The Norman Conquest of Sicily: 1061-1091

The Norman adventurer Roger de Hauteville recaptured Sicily from the Muslims, who were fighting among themselves, in a series of campaigns between 1061 and 1091. Sicily thereafter fell under the Latin rather than the Byzantine Church, but remained Christian until the present.

The Rise of the Seljuk Turks: 1056-1075

Turkish tribes, who had converted to Islam, began to establish an empire in the 11th century, conquering large parts of Persia and Armenia. In 1071 they destroyed a Byzantine army sent to stop their westward expansion and captured Jerusalem along with the rest of Palestine. The Seljuk Empire soon stretched from Aleppo to Egypt. Christians, whether pilgrims to Jerusalem or merchants, were now more likely to be robbed or enslaved than left in peace.

The Call for a Crusade: 1095

The Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos saw in the internal conflicts between Turks, Syrian Muslims, and Egyptian Muslims the chance to restore Christian rule to the Holy Land, but lacked the military strength to make an attempt. He appealed to the Pope, highlighting alleged atrocities committed against Christians in the Holy Land and other former Byzantine territories. On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a rousing speech, calling for Christians to free Jerusalem from the Muslims and reopen it to Christian pilgrims. Urban II was both persuasive and charismatic, and he must have struck a chord with his listeners; it is recorded that the audience spontaneously started chanting “Deus le volt” (God wills it). When he finished speaking, many men crowded around him, vying to be among the first to “take the cross” – that is, to wear a cross on their sleeve as a symbol of their vow to free the Holy Land from Muslim rule. The concept of a crusade – a Christian holy war – had been born. (The notion of jihad – Muslim holy war – was, of course, already hundreds of years old by then.)