Life in the Crusader States: Urban Landscapes and Infrastructure

 Unlike the early settlers in the Americas and Australia, the Europeans who established the crusader states were confronted with a densely populated region that had been urbanised for thousands of years. Thus,  European settlers who came to the Holy Land had to cope not only with an alien climate and unfamiliar geography, but also with a majority population whose language, architecture and social customs were non-European. To their credit, the Franks rapidly adapted to their new environment. Thus, while the roots of Frankish culture were European, the lifestyle of the Franks of Outremer was shaped by elements borrowed from the people and civilizations that surrounded them. The result was a unique and distinctive identity and culture of their own, reflected in their buildings, art, fashion, food and social structures.

Urban Landscapes and Infrastructure

The Near East’s geography and climate set the parameters for human habitation in the region, ensuring many common features across cultures and centuries. Furthermore, in major urban areas, the Franks occupied cities that had already existed for centuries or, in some cases, thousands of years. In consequence, Frankish influence was subtle and nuanced. Nevertheless, it is possible to speak of ‘Frankish cities’ and identify some common features that impacted the life and lifestyle of those cities’ inhabitants during the era of the crusades.

A visitor approaching any major Frankish city from any direction but the sea would have encountered a green ring of cultivated, usually irrigated land composed of orchards and utility gardens. These agricultural suburbs evolved to meet the demands of the urban population for fresh produce such as fruits, vegetables, eggs and dairy goods. Thus, the environment immediately surrounding most Frankish cities was green and lush with vegetation.

Inside this soft-shell of cultivated vegetation, many cities were protected by walls. The height, thickness and defensibility of these walls varied greatly, as did the number of towers and gates. Antioch, for example, was famed for having four-hundred towers; Ascalon had fifty-three. The smaller cities undoubtedly had fewer towers and gates, but the major coastal cities (Sidon, Beirut, Tyre, Caesarea, Arsuf and Jaffa) were all walled. The majority of these had been fortified for generations, if not millennia, and the Franks did little more than repair or modernise the existing defensive structures. The walls of Ascalon, for example, were built by the Romans, expanded and strengthened first by the Byzantines and then by the Fatimids before the Franks gained control of the city in 1153, who did no more than effect repairs and make modest additions.

On the other hand, inland cities were conspicuously non-fortified, providing striking evidence of the comparatively peaceful environment that characterised life in the crusader states for most of their existence. With the exception of Jerusalem, Banias, Tiberias and Caymont, the major inland cities, such as Nablus, Nazareth, Hebron and Ramla, were not fortified.

The size of Frankish cities varied greatly. Jerusalem enclosed seventy-two hectares, Acre sixty, Ascalon fifty, but Sidon, the next largest city, had only fourteen hectares and Caesarea twelve. In terms of population, Antioch, Acre, Tyre and (in the twelfth century) Jerusalem all had populations exceeding 20,000 people. In the thirteenth century, Acre and Tyre are believed to have housed close to 30,000 inhabitants each. Ascalon had an estimated 10,000, but the other cities were smaller, with Caesarea probably home to just under 5,000 inhabitants. The interplay of geographic space and population determined the population density and had a powerful impact on the character of the city.

Jerusalem was so large that despite a significant population, it was known for its many gardens, squares, courtyards and open markets, and for its clean, healthy air. There were orchards within the city walls as well as gardens, open markets and many pools. Despite butchers and tanners operating within the walls, contemporary accounts indicate the city did not smell.

Acre, on the other hand, had a terrible reputation as overcrowded and polluted. This was particularly pronounced in the thirteenth century when the city was flooded with permanent refugees from the lands lost to Saladin. The gardens and orchards within the city walls were converted to housing to accommodate these new inhabitants, while the courtyards of the older houses were built up. Even the gardens of the royal palace were divided into parcels and sold-off for development between 1257 and 1273. By mid-century, a population 50 per cent larger than Jerusalem lived on a land area 20 per cent smaller. Despite highly sophisticated and extensive infrastructure, the sewage system inevitably became overwhelmed, and the inner harbor became a cesspool known as the ‘filthy sea’.

So much was written about Acre by pilgrims passing through the Frankish port that the image of a cramped, overcrowded and polluted city tends to dominate modern portrayals of life in all cities of the Holy Land in the Frankish era. This ignores the fact that Acre was the exception, not the rule. According to Ibn Jubayr, the houses in Tyre were larger and more spacious than in Acre, the roads and streets cleaner, while the conditions of the Muslims living there better, although he does not say in what way. Likewise, Ascalon had a reputation as clean and pleasant, as did the Frankish cities of Cyprus, particularly Nicosia. 

Contributing to the overall positive reputation of Frankish cities were sophisticated public infrastructure projects that could be found throughout Frankish Syria, Palestine and Cyprus, namely aqueducts, cisterns, public pools, fountains, bathhouses and underground sewage systems. Securing adequate water supplies was critical in the Middle Eastern climate, and it is striking that the lack of water is never mentioned in any of the accounts of sieges, underlining how effective Frankish infrastructure was in this regard. Caesarea, for example, had no less than three aqueducts. Jerusalem had one aqueduct and several springs, and the fountains of the city were said never to run dry.

Baths were another prominent feature of Frankish cities. Some were inherited, but the Franks built many more. As with Roman baths, the heat was produced in furnaces and distributed as hot air running through vents under the marble floors. Bathhouses were generally spacious and, as in Roman times, popular places to meet and socialise. The Hospitaller Rule prohibited their brothers from eating and sleeping in bathhouses, an indication that both were possible. Bath attendants provided massages and shaves as well. At least one source suggests wives could accompany their husbands to the baths, but separate days or separate spaces for men and women appears to have been the rule.

Open markets for cattle, horses, pigs, poultry and dairy were features common to Frankish cities. By their nature, loud and smelly, they were generally located on the city’s edge, near the gates. However, covered markets or souks, so characteristic of Near Eastern cities, were also found in Frankish ones. Souks consist of covered streets with vaulted roofing flanked by a series of bays formed by vaulted chambers perpendicular to the road. Each bay housed a different merchant displaying wares. The most famous Frankish souk is a market street in Jerusalem built under Queen Melisende in 1152 that is still in use today. The central passage is 6 metres high and 3 metres wide, while the shops lining it are each 4 metres square. Holes at regular intervals in the roofs of these medieval souks allowed light and fresh air to enter.

Perhaps more surprising to the modern reader, Frankish cities were served by highly sophisticated, public sewage systems. In Acre, the Hospitallers had a latrine block built on several floors offering 35 stone seats and a flushing system. We can assume that while differing in scale, the arrangement was standard across Hospitaller structures. Similar features were found in the Lusignan palace. It is reasonable to presume that Templars, Teutonic knights and the Italian ‘fundacos’ all had like arrangements. The waste from these latrines fed into a city-wide sewage system. Such systems, which have been identified in more than one crusader city, demonstrate centralised planning and infrastructural maintenance. Furthermore, the major canals for drawing the wastewater out of the city could be accessed from individual houses and shops along the length of the stone drainage pipes before emptying outside the walls.

All in all, the Franks converted existing structures or built new ones to create cities with all the conveniences expected in this period: open and covered markets, factories, workshops, hospices, hospitals, churches, foundations, individual residences and palaces. Frankish construction and modifications put a stamp on the face of the cities they occupied, despite older structures underneath. While this imprint has been effaced by centuries of rebuilding and repurposing Frankish structures, we still have a glimpse of what Franks built in an Arab description of Jerusalem, written shortly after Saladin’s reconquest in 1187. Ibn-Khallikan wrote:

‘The infidel had rebuilt [Jerusalem] with columns and plaques of marble … with fair fountains where the water never ceased to flow — one saw dwellings as agreeable as gardens and brilliant with the whiteness of marble; the columns with their foliage seemed like trees’.[i]

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[i]Ibn-Khallikan, quoted in A History of the Crusades Volume 4: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States, ed. Harry W. Hazard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 138.

The bulk of this entry is an excerpt from Dr. Schrader's comprehensive study of the crusader states.

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The Economy of the Crusader States: Technological and Intellectual Exchange

  It was not only commodities and manufactured goods that moved between East and West in the era of the crusades; ideas and technology were also exchanged. Contrary to common belief, this exchange was two-way and it benefited both sides, particularly in the field of medicine.

While Islamic culture undoubtedly experienced a significant flourishing in the centuries immediately preceding the crusades, Western Europe was not trapped in some ‘dark age’. On the contrary, Europe enjoyed noteworthy technological and intellectual advancement in the centuries preceding the First Crusade. Professor Rodney Stark claims: ‘The so-called Dark Ages were a period of profound enlightenment in both the material and intellectual spheres, which when combined with Christian doctrines of moral equality, created a whole new world based on political, economic, and personal freedom’.[i]

While Stark may be overstating the case, there is no doubt that the learning of the Greeks and Romans was not lost to Western Europe in the years after the fall of Rome but was preserved and translated in centres of learning across Europe. Furthermore, before the First Crusade, the first Western university had been founded; several others followed it in the next century. These were not schools of theology comparable to Islam’s madrassas, but institutions dedicated to scientific inquiry. These Western institutions practised critical peer review and were protected by the concept of academic freedom. Other advances of the pre-crusades era were polyphonic music and the invention of the organ and the violin. Clocks, compasses and eyeglasses were other innovations that made their appearance in the West during the crusading era — without input from the Muslim world.

Yet the most profound Western developments in the centuries before the First Crusade were those practical innovations that enabled agricultural productivity to expand to the point where generations of peasants no longer lived on the brink of starvation. The development of a horse-collar for ploughs enabled the introduction of horsepower in agriculture. Horses could plow at twice the speed of oxen, doubling production. Indeed, they made it possible to cultivate more land. Combined with new ploughs that turned the earth — rather than merely scratching the surface of it —the productivity of the land increased dramatically. Peasants were able to move beyond subsistence agriculture to cash crops. Except in periods of exceptional natural or political disruption, they had enough nutritious food to reach their full genetic potential.

Other practical Western inventions in the centuries before the First Crusade were brakes on wagons and swivel axles, both radical innovations at the time. When combined with the development of the horse-collar and the breeding of larger, stronger horses, these enabled the transport of heavy cargoes over land. This was a boon to trade and helped develop the interior, however, heavy transport vehicles also made a significant contribution to warfare by enabling the transportation of siege engines, for example. Indeed, heavy transportation wagons with teams of four or more horses and large siege engines were just two of the technological innovations brought from the West to the Near East rapidly adopted by the crusaders’ Muslim opponents.

Throughout the ages, military technology and tactics have been characterised by rapid innovation, imitation and adaptation. In the context of the crusades, the Franks adopted the surcoat and mounted archers (turcopoles), while the Saracens adopted heavy siege equipment and heavy (lance-bearing) cavalry. In military architecture, useful features in castle construction introduced by either party were almost immediately copied by the other. In his outstanding examination of crusader castles, however, Ellenblum demonstrates that it was the crusaders who first made significant advances in military architecture with the introduction of key features such as thicker, higher and concentric walls, posterns, vaulted chambers in the ‘safe-zones’, and massive storage to withstand lengthy sieges.[ii] However, the Mamluks learned fast, and later Muslim castles were equal to those of the crusaders.

Nevertheless, the West benefitted enormously, both technologically and intellectually, from exposure to the Muslim East via the crusader states. The most modern means for making paper, for example, was taken back to Europe by clerics who learned about the process in the Latin East. Likewise, the means for making high-quality glass, which the glassmakers of the Levant had already mastered before the arrival of the crusaders, was introduced in Venice in 1277, giving Venice a competitive edge in that sector that lasted to the eighteenth century.

Overall, when assessing which party benefitted most from contact with the other, we should not automatically assume that the culture more open to adaptation was the weaker or more backward. For example, despite the superiority of European naval architecture, the Arabs could not imitate it because they lacked high-quality shipwrights. The chimneys built in the Holy Land by the Franks fell into disrepair and subsequently disappeared from local architecture after the departure of the Franks, not because chimneys were useless or old-fashioned, but due to the inertia of ‘tradition’.

An important factor impacting the direction of technology transfer was the environment. The Franks, not their Arab and Turkish opponents, were living in a new environment, which meant they needed to adapt, not the other way around. Significantly, that new environment was one with extremes of heat unknown in their homelands, an environment that was more arid, less forested and more densely populated. It would have been absurd — and stupid — to cling to traditions and technologies unsuited to the Mediterranean, no matter how well-suited those technologies were for, say, agriculture in Scotland or fighting in Prussia. 

The adoption of surcoats is an excellent example of this. In the intense heat of the Syrian summer, wearing a loose cloth garment over one's armour made sense. That the Franks rapidly did so, and – even more surprising – that it became fashionable across Western Europe is not evidence of the inferiority of previous forms of dress. The surcoat had a function that was related directly to the physical environment in the Near East. Its later evolution into a means of showing off one's arms and affinity had nothing to do with Arab/Turkish superiority but rather with Western customs of chivalry.

Similarly, the prevalence of stone structures across the Middle East in an era when most construction in Western Europe was still wooden was not the result of a higher level of civilization in the Arab world. Instead, it was a function of the scarcity of wood in the Near East. To this day, archaeologists can date crusades-era buildings based on the exceptionally high standards of Frankish masonry and the chimneys. 

On the other hand, although Western European ploughs were undoubtedly more sophisticated than the ploughs in use in the Holy Land and had contributed considerably to rising standards of living and higher levels of nutrition among the poor in Europe, they were unsuitable for use in the Middle East. Consequently, Frankish settlers abandoned a higher level of technology unsuited to the environment in favour of an ‘old-fashioned’ technology that did less environmental damage to a fragile ecosystem. 

Adaptation from West to East, on the other hand, was inhibited not only by the fact that the environment remained the same for Muslims but also by Muslim presumptions of superiority. The Muslims viewed Franks as fundamentally backwards because they were ‘blasphemers worshipping God incorrectly … or as idolaters worshipping cross-shaped idols’.[iii] In the extreme, they shared the attitude expressed by Bahr al-Fava’id, who wrote: ‘Anyone who believes that his God came out of a woman’s privates is quite mad; he should not be spoken to, and he has neither intelligence nor faith’.[iv]

It is to the Franks’ credit that regardless of what they thought of Islam as a religion, they did not dismiss its adherents as madmen or idiots. Because of this willingness to separate religion from science and art, the Franks proved remarkably adept at adapting to their new environment and developing a unique hybrid culture.

There is no better example of this than the impact of Arab medicine on the West. Recent scholarship demonstrates that ‘medical practice in the armies of the First Crusade was comparable with Byzantine and Islamic practice, both in terms of practical treatment and also the theory behind the origins of disease’.[v] In short, before the establishment of the crusader states, ‘Saracens and Christians shared the same conceptual framework for medical science, which they [both] inherited from the classical world’.[vi]

However, in the subsequent 200 years, during which the Franks lived amidst Eastern cultures, medicine evolved rapidly. In this period, after the establishment of the crusader states, scholars can trace new influences on Western medicine from the Latin East. The most significant medical innovation to travel from the crusader states to Europe was undoubtedly the concept of an institution staffed by medical professionals (not monks or nuns) and dedicated to curing — not just caring for — the sick and injured, i.e., a hospital. Yet, while the Franks may have learned about hospitals from Muslims, the latter had learned about hospitals from the Byzantines, making this an example of a ‘melting pot’ innovation.

Likewise, while the regulation of medical practice and practitioners appears to be one aspect of medicine in which Franks learned from the natives of Outremer, the natives in question were not necessarily Muslims.[vii] Scholars believe that as many as two-thirds of the medical practitioners in Egypt, for example, were Christians or Jews. In Syria, Christians, Jews, Samaritans and Zoroastrians all practised medicine. Many of the most famous crusader-era physicians, such as Abu Sulayman Dawud, who treated Baldwin IV for his leprosy, and Ibn Butlan, a leading medical theoretician and author of medical texts, were Orthodox Christians. When contemporary accounts refer to ‘Saracen’ or ‘Eastern’ doctors, they did not necessarily mean Muslim doctors. The bulk of the medical personnel employed by the Franks were Jews, Jacobites or other Orthodox Christians. In short, the apparent preference for ‘Muslim medicine’ attributed to the Franks by many modern writers is based on a misunderstanding of the primary sources.

Scholars have identified several specific examples demonstrating that the ‘exchange of medical knowledge was a two-way phenomenon’.[viii] Based on extensive research of both texts and archaeological finds, Osteoarchaeologist Piers D. Mitchell concludes that: ‘The evidence … does not support the widely held view that Frankish practitioners from Europe were ignorant and technically inferior to those who learnt their medicine in the East’.[ix]

What was happening in Outremer was that highly trained and dedicated medical practitioners of different religions — Orthodox and Latin Christians, Jews, Shia and Sunni Muslims — lived and worked closely with one another. Those without bigotry were willing and anxious to learn from their colleagues, regardless of religious background. They exchanged experiences, techniques, theory and practice. Under Frankish rule, Antioch blossomed into a major centre for the translation and writing of medical texts as well as the study and development of medical theory. Medicine in Outremer is a textbook example of intellectual exchange between different cultures and traditions, stimulating an advancement in knowledge for all.

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[i] Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), 68.

[ii] Ronnie Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 231-257, 299-301. 

[iii] Niall Christie, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic Sources (London: Routledge, 2014), 78.

[iv] See note 11, Christie, Muslims and Crusaders, 77-78.

[v] Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 216.

[vi] Susan B. Edington, ‘Oriental and Occidental Medicine in the Crusader States’, in The Crusades and the Near East: Cultural Histories, ed. Conor Kostick (London: Routledge, 2011), 189.

[vii] See note 14, Edington, ‘Oriental and Occidental Medicine in the Crusader States’, 205.

[viii] See note 13, Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 217.

[ix] See note 13, Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, 239.

The bulk of this entry is an excerpt from Dr. Schrader's comprehensive study of the crusader states.

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Dr. Helena P. Schrader is also the author of six books set in the Holy Land in the Era of the Crusades.

                         

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The Economy of the Crusader States: Trade

  Without doubt, trade was the main engine of economic prosperity in the crusader states. It is easy to conclude, as many historians have written, that geography dictated this development. That ignores the fact that before and after Frankish rule, the coastal ports were provincial backwaters with little role in the international carrying trade. In the pre- and post-crusades eras, Constantinople and Alexandria – not Acre, Tyre or Famagusta – were the principal trading hubs of the Eastern Mediterranean.

 

Under the Franks, in contrast, trade flourished on a scale unknown under the Arabs or the Turks. Three factors can best explain the blossoming of trade during the era of the crusades: (1) the overall economic revival of the region under the Franks, which included a growing permanent and transient population (pilgrims, crusaders), (2) the development of new industries (e.g., sugar, wine, religious tourism, glass, icons, books), and (3) Christian dominance of the waterways, making trade across the Mediterranean comparatively safe for Western merchants. Together, these factors sparked a commercial ‘revolution’ that peaked during the crusader era and subsided afterwards. Furthermore, while the principal beneficiaries of this commercial revolution were the crusader states, a revival of trade was felt across the Mediterranean. This was simply because ships of this period needed to make several stops for water and provisioning when travelling long distances.

Before looking more closely at the components of this trade, it is necessary to stress that the ‘safety’ of shipping in this era was relative rather than absolute. To be sure, from roughly 1123, when the Venetians destroyed a large Fatimid fleet until the rise of the Ottomans, the Mediterranean was dominated by Western naval power. In the twelfth century, the combination of Byzantine, Sicilian and Italian naval power protected Europe’s merchant shipping. In later centuries, the Italians (particularly Venice) and the Hospitallers (Knights of Rhodes and Malta) provided this protection. However, rivalries between the various maritime states also led to periodic naval warfare. Although diminished, Egyptian fleets were likewise active from time to time and proved capable of preying upon Christian merchant shipping. Furthermore, the Venetians were more likely to attack the ships of their Christian rivals (as they had attacked Zara and Constantinople on land) than Muslim shipping. Finally, pirates were never eliminated. While the Mediterranean was not ‘safe’ in the modern sense of the word, it had become sufficiently safe by the standards of the day — with ample profits — to enable trade to grow at exponential rates.

In turn, trade sparked significant advances in naval architecture and a reorientation of production across the region. At the end of the eleventh century, ships were small, single-decked, with at most two-masts, and had steering oars instead of central rudders. By the time Acre fell to the Mamluks, three-masted ships with multiple decks and central rudders were standard. Meanwhile, the economies of the Mediterranean basin shifted their focus away from pure domestic demand towards production for export. Within half a century, trade had become so significant and lucrative that economies began to specialise in sectors in which they held a comparative advantage.  

Yet while it is easy to see why trade between the Christian states on the littoral of the Mediterranean flourished after the establishment of the crusader states, the more surprising development was the dramatic expansion of trade with the Muslim world — and beyond. Exposure to the ‘luxuries of the orient’ sparked demand for those products in the West. Suddenly spices, pharmaceuticals (such as opium), gold, ivory, incense, silk, and other exotic products such as Chinese porcelain, could be purchased in Christian ports.

To be sure, the most adventurous Western merchants had not hesitated to do business in Arab ports, chiefly in Alexandria, before the establishment of the crusader states. Nevertheless, the sheer explosion in trade after the establishment of Frankish control of the ports of the Levant is itself evidence that most Western Christian merchants of this period were more comfortable trading through Christian ports. This was so much the case that Acre came to rival or possibly briefly eclipsed Alexandria as the most vital trading hub in the eastern Mediterranean. The preference of Christian merchants for Christian ports is understandable. Christian merchants enjoyed substantial privileges in the crusader states, and they felt protected in a way impossible in Muslim countries, where they were highly vulnerable to sudden shifts in policy. The crusader states provided merchants with a base in the Middle East, a foothold where they felt safe and from which they could cautiously explore and exploit opportunities further inland.

For Muslim merchants, trade with the West was lucrative enough to justify the comparatively low risk of venturing — usually only for a few days at a time — into Christian-controlled territory. Muslim trade was aided by Islamic teachings of the era that explicitly condoned trade with ‘the enemy’, provided ‘war materials’ were not among the items sold. Thus, Muslim merchants were prohibited from selling weapons, armour, slaves and horses to the Christian West but were otherwise free to trade.

Trade was profitable not only for those engaged in it but for the states through which it passed. Both Christians and Muslims taxed the goods exported, imported and transited through their territories. These taxes and duties were so crucial to the revenue of the rulers that Christian and Muslim alike became increasingly reluctant to disrupt trade through warfare. Indeed, hostilities were sometimes carried out without any impact on trade. The Iberian Muslim traveller, Ibn Jubayr, noted while travelling to Mecca via the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1184:

‘Muslim and Christian … armies may meet … and yet Muslim and Christian travellers come and go … without interference. [Even while Saladin was attacking Kerak] the caravans still passed successively from Egypt to Damascus, going through the land of the Franks without impediment from them. In the same way, the Muslims continuously journeyed from Damascus to Acre [through Frankish territory unharmed]… . The soldiers … engage themselves in their war, while the civilians are at peace’.[i]

The trade routes that converged on the ports of the crusader states in the twelfth century reached all the way to China, India, Siberia and Ethiopia. Siberia sent ermine, marten, otter, beaver and wild cat hides to be worked and sold in the long ‘Street of the Furriers’ in Jerusalem. Ethiopia sent gold, ivory and incense. From India and China came opium, jade, pearls, porcelain, silk and spices such as pepper, cinnamon and ginger. In addition, ship inventories and customs documents attest to trade in perfume, musk, myrrh, balm, aloe, gum and senna. The Arabian Peninsula provided marble and enameled pottery, while Egypt was a source of cotton and flax. Syria sent carpets, textiles, cotton, and damascened copper and steel weapons — despite the religious prohibitions on selling weapons to the ‘enemy’. From Western Europe came timber, iron and scrap iron, silver, copper, amber and wool.

Notably, many of the products from the West, such as timber and iron, contributed to Muslim military capability. In consequence, there were sporadic attempts by various popes in the fourteenth century to prohibit the sale of these commodities to Muslim customers. But the greed of merchants always triumphed over their sense of solidarity with Christianity. Even more reprehensibly, the West was a major source of slaves for the slave- markets of the Muslim world. The Italian merchant states specialised in transshipping human beings from the pagan wilds of northeastern Europe and from Constantinople via the crusader states to the Muslim states. Many of those slaves would later become Mamluks and contribute to the downfall of Frankish rule.

In addition to the export items produced in the crusader states, the Frankish ports became large warehousing and transshipment centres for goods in transit between regions beyond the borders of the crusader states. Here goods were collected and stored, enabling a rationalization of transport. For example, a camel caravan from India might bring hundreds of different products in small quantities. These were then stored in Acre until sufficient quantities of each product had been collected to justify a shipment to the West. This reduced freight costs and improved profit margins.

While trade brought revenue to the political elites in both East and West who taxed the import, export, and transshipment of goods, as well as the ships that anchored and the caravans that passed through the gates of the cities, the merchants themselves made the largest profits. In the crusader states, trade was dominated by the Italian city-states. Much has been written about their role in the Latin East economy, yet their contribution remains highly controversial. Some historians, such as Joshua Prawer, argue that too many privileges and monopolies were granted to the Italian maritime powers, resulting in lost income to the crown and a stifling of a native or Frankish merchant class. Other historians, such as Jonathan Riley-Smith, counter that the networks, experience and overall competence of the established Italian mercantile states fostered a faster growth of trade than would otherwise have been possible. In this sense, he suggests their activities contributed substantially to the crusader states’ overall economic prosperity, therefore benefitting all.

There can be little doubt that whatever benefits accrued to the crusader states were a by-product rather than the goal of the Italians. Where commercial interests collided with crusader interests, the Italians routinely sacrificed the welfare of the crusades and the crusader states for their own profits and benefits. This was seen most vividly in the so-called Fourth Crusade and the ‘War’ of St. Sabas. Ultimately, regardless of the economic gains of the Italian mercantile presence in the Latin East, it had become a political liability by the mid-thirteenth century. Intensifying rivalries contributed to the growing fragmentation within Frankish society, seriously undermining the viability of the crusader states on the mainland of the Levant. In Cyprus, too, it was the Genoese and Venetians — not the Turks — that ultimately destroyed the Lusignan dynasty and, with it, the independent Latin kingdom. 

 

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[i] Ibn Jubayr quoted in Yehoshua Frankel, ‘Muslim Responses to the Frankish Dominion of the Near East, 1098-1291’ in The Crusades and the Near East: Cultural Histories, ed. Conor Kostick (London: Routledge, 2011), 43.

 

The bulk of this entry is an excerpt from Dr. Schrader's comprehensive study of the crusader states.

Order now!

Dr. Helena P. Schrader is also the author of six books set in the Holy Land in the Era of the Crusades.

                         

           Buy Now!                                                  Buy Now!                                                    Buy Now!

 

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