Defending the Crusader Kingdoms

Saturday, February 14, 2026

The Orthodox Christians in the Crusader States

Orthodox Christians made up the majority of the native population in the crusader states, however, they were not a homogeneous population; the Christians in the Holy Land of the crusader era were extremely diverse. In order to understand the crusader states it is therefore necessary to understand the differences between these groups and how they interacted with the new Latin elites.

The most numerous Christian populations were Melkites, Armenians, Jacobites and Maronites, but there were also smaller communities of Coptics, Georgians, Nestorians and Ethiopians. Furthermore, the distribution of these groups was uneven across the crusader states. Edessa, for example, was essentially an Armenian state with a Jacobite minority. Antioch was mostly Melkite (Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox) with considerable communities of Armenians and Jacobites. The Christian half of the population in the County of Tripoli and the far northern parts of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (what is now part of Lebanon) were predominantly Maronite. The rest of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in contrast, was predominantly Melkite. However, it was also home to smaller communities of Greek-speaking Orthodox as well as Armenian, Georgian, Coptic and Ethiopian Christians.

Differences of doctrine separated all these various Christian denominations from one another and the Latin Church, as the Roman Catholic Church was commonly called in this polyglot environment. Confusingly, linguistic differences did not always conform to doctrinal differences. Thus, Melkites and Greek Orthodox shared the same basic doctrines and viewed the Patriarch of Constantinople as the head of the church, but the former spoke Syriac or Arabic, while the latter retained the use of Greek in the liturgy. Syriac or Arabic was used by Jacobites, Maronites and Coptics, although they differed on doctrine. Serious tensions and frictions existed between the various Orthodox communities dating back to Byzantine rule, when Armenians, Jacobites and Maronites had all been viewed as heretics and persecuted to various degrees by the Greek Orthodox state.

The assumption that the Latin Church likewise viewed these various other Christian denominations as heretics and sought to suppress them, however, is incorrect. Pope Urban II, in his initial appeal, explicitly described the Eastern Christians as ‘brothers’ and ‘sons of the same Christ’.[i] Furthermore, recent research based on Orthodox sources reveals a surprisingly nuanced and tolerant approach to the various Christian groups on the part of the Latins. The Patriarch of the Jacobite church writing in the twelfth century noted that the Franks ‘never sought a single formula for all the Christian people and languages, but they considered as Christian anyone who worshipped the cross without investigation or examination’.[ii]

While it is true that all forms of Orthodox Christianity were viewed with various degrees of skepticism by the Roman Catholic theologians, the crusader states were not theocracies run by religious scholars. They were secular states governed by educated but fundamentally hard-nosed, practical, fighting men. From the very start, Frankish knights, sergeants and settlers mingled with the local population, sharing not only markets and taverns, but churches and confessors ― a clear indication that for the average Frank, the common belief in Christ outweighed the theological differences that animated church scholars. Furthermore, with time, the Frankish feudal elite intermarried with the local aristocracy, while farther down the social scale, intermarriage with local Christians came sooner and occurred on a wider scale. The Frankish kings viewed themselves as the protectors of all their subjects, regardless of religious affiliation.

Undoubtedly, in both secular and ecclesiastical spheres, the apex of society was occupied by Franks, who were, by definition, Latin Christians. In the context of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this was normal. People of this era unanimously recognised the simple rule: to the victor go the spoils. The Orthodox Christians living in the crusader states did not look at their position through the lens of modern human rights activists or political scientists expecting absolute equality of legal status and opportunity. On the contrary, the native Christians viewed the Franks in comparison to their predecessors.

Much has been written over the last century about the tolerance of Muslim regimes towards Christians and Jews, the so-called ‘dhimmis’ or non-Muslims sharing the same roots as Islam. Most of what has been written focuses on the theories propounded by Muslim scholars of the golden age and anecdotal evidence of non-Muslims, especially Jews, who rose to positions of privilege and power. In contrast, in her seminal work, ‘The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude’, Egyptian scholar Bat Ye’or’s study of the prevailing practice of Muslim regimes over 1,300 years of history based on Arab, Turkish, Armenian, Syriac, Latin and Greek sources demonstrates that the treatment of non-Muslims was based on verse 9:29 and the example of Mohammad’s treatment of Jews and Christians which included the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Medina.

Conquest in the name of ‘jihad’, furthermore, meant that all non-Muslim inhabitants of newly-conquered territories were legally prisoners of war, who had to ransom their lives, property and freedom through the payment of tribute — in perpetuity — unless the ‘captive’ converted to Islam. In the early years of Islamic expansion, the standard treatment of ‘prisoners’ was massacre and enslavement; the numbers of slaves recorded in conquest after conquest are in the tens of thousands, all of whom were deported to reduce the likelihood of revolt. They were replaced either by Muslim settlers or, more often, (Christian) slaves from somewhere else. While slaughter and enslavement were standard practice throughout the world, other powers such as Persia, Byzantium, or the Vikings, did not justify their treatment of conquered people with religious dogma. The factor that made the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries unique was that the Muslims based their sense of superiority on religion (Quran 3:106) and believed they were ‘fulfilling a religious duty and executing the will of Allah’.[iii]

Gradually, however, as regions became pacified, ‘the predations … upon the natives, the only taxable labour force, assumed such catastrophic proportions that the revenue of the Umayyad state diminished considerably’.[iv] In consequence of this economic imperative, Islamic jurists developed sophisticated theories on the correct treatment of ‘dhimmis’, which have charmed modern historians. Indeed, there is evidence that some Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian elites prospered under Muslim rule. On the one hand, the ‘dhimmi’ leaders — often the religious leaders of the respective subject faiths — were responsible for collecting and paying the tribute to the Muslim rulers; some — a sometimes much — of what they gathered found its way into their own pockets. On the other hand, as with the Franks themselves, the Arab and Turkish military elites responsible for conquest needed educated and experienced administrators. Christian and Jewish secretaries, accountants, diplomats, translators, bankers and merchants were too useful to exterminate, so a small class of non-Muslim urban elites enjoyed comparative immunity from the discrimination and oppression of their poor, uneducated and rural co-religionists.

The prosperity and privileges of the few should not obscure the misery, impoverishment and denigration of the vast majority. There are countless examples from Muslim, Christian and Jewish sources that demonstrate the discrepancy between the fine theories laid out in Islamic legal texts and the reality on the ground. At best, the legal protection offered dhimmis by Islam resembled the ‘protection’ provided to the Jews of Western Europe by the pope. There were equally wide discrepancies between the fate of urban elites and the peasant majority.

This majority was systematically decimated by massacres, reduced to slavery or — at best — impoverished by taxation (tribute), arbitrary theft, which destroyed their livelihood during Muslim rule. Oppression was so great in some periods and regions that it resulted in mass exodus, leaving entire villages abandoned. ‘The Syro-Palestinian oases cultivated since antiquity, the agricultural and urban centres of the Negev, Jordan, and the Orontes, Tigris and Euphrates valleys … had disappeared and become ghost towns, abandoned to pasturage, where herds of goats and camels grazed amid the ruins’.[v]

Most Christians and Jews who survived in this oppressive environment had no legal protections because their word was considered worthless in an Islamic court. They were required by Sharia law to live in smaller and more dilapidated homes. They were not allowed to build houses of worship or conduct any religious rite or ceremony in public and were prohibited from wearing symbols of their religion. They were required to wear distinctive clothing and carry proof they had paid their taxes. They were forbidden from riding horses or camels and from bearing arms. The Muslim population was actively encouraged to demonstrate contempt for non-Muslims by shoving them aside or otherwise demeaning them.

Compared to such humiliations, the difference in the status between Orthodox and Latin Christians in the crusader states was negligible. The two centuries of crusader rule constituted a period of economic and religious revival for the Christians of the Levant. Orthodox monasticism experienced a significant expansion under Frankish rule as old monasteries were restored, and new monasteries were built. The Frankish elite also proved generous patrons to Orthodox parish churches, while the Orthodox clergy enjoyed the same privilege of being exempt from the jurisdiction of secular courts as the Latin clergy. The squabbles over titles and sources of income between the senior clergy of the various Christian denominations tend to obscure the fact that, at the parish level, the Orthodox faithful remained under the care and guidance of Orthodox priests and free from interference, much less pressure, to convert to Latin rites.

The most lucrative and prestigious ecclesiastical posts did come under the control of the Latin church in the crusader era, but not because of the expulsion of the Orthodox clergy. On the contrary, after capturing Antioch, the authority of the Greek Patriarch over both Latins and Melkites was explicitly recognised by the crusaders. However, many Orthodox prelates had fled Muslim persecution prior to the arrival of the crusaders, and these vacant sees were filled by the crusader leadership with Latin bishops. The only instance of a Melkite bishop being ousted from his post to do with power politics (an attempt by the Greek Emperor to impose his authority), rather than church politics. The bottom line is that ‘more Melkite bishops could be found throughout Palestine after the crusader conquest then had been there in the previous fifty years’.[vi]

Meanwhile, Frankish rule offered opportunities for Orthodox secular elites. The Franks, particularly in the first decades of the First Kingdom, were far too few in number to control their rapidly expanding territories without the active support of the indigenous population. They needed men capable of collecting taxes, customs duties, market fees and other revenue. They needed men to enforce the laws and administer justice to the local communities. They needed a functioning economy, which meant not disrupting agricultural activities or interfering in existing trade patterns. Christopher MacEvitt, in his excellent work, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance, demonstrates that many Orthodox Christians became wealthy landowners and merchants throughout the crusader states. Armenian lords were major landowners and vassals. Orthodox knights not only fought with the Franks; in some instances, they commanded Frankish knights and, in one case, rose to the prestigious position of Marshal of Jerusalem.

While individuals might be exceptions, there is evidence of more widespread identification between natives and Franks. For example, native Orthodox Christians were patrons of both the Templars and Hospitallers. Chronicles in Syriac express admiration for the piety and charity of the Franks. Perhaps most poignant, two poems written in the late twelfth century by different Syriac authors lament the fall of the Frankish kingdom, revealing complete identification on the part of the native authors with the Franks, by referring to them as ‘our people’.[vii]

The greatest evidence of native support for the Franks, however, is the fact that the native (Arabic-, Syriac- and Armenian-speaking) population of Syria and Palestine contributed materially to the defence of the crusader kingdoms. On the one hand, Christians living both inside and outside the crusader states contributed to an effective intelligence network. We know anecdotally of native Christians acting as spies and scouts. At least one modern scholar claims ‘the Frankish field intelligence was better than the Muslim one’.[viii] Exactly what this intelligence network looked like, however, is unclear.

On the other hand, and of far more importance, was the contribution of native Christians to the military forces of the crusader states. This is especially surprising in light of the fact that, except for the Armenians, centuries of ‘djimmi’ status had completely demilitarised the native population. Yet, in the period of Frankish rule, the native population formed a substantial portion of urban garrisons and contributed to the infantry of the field army. Steve Tibble in his recent study, ‘Crusader Armies’, argues that not only were there very few ‘genuine crusaders’ in the armies that defended Outremer, but that ‘even local Franks were in a minority, marching in units with Armenian-speaking comrades, or with other native [Arabic-speaking] Christian soldiers’.[ix]

Most significant and startling is the dominance of native Christians in the light cavalry, particularly mounted archers. The latter was an arm of cavalry unknown to the West but militarily essential in the Near East of the crusader period. In his excellent study of Frankish turcopoles, Yuval Harari demonstrates definitively that the term ‘turcopole’ did not refer to Muslim mercenaries, much less to apostate Muslims or the children of ‘mixed marriages’, as is so frequently alleged in popular literature. On the contrary, the turcopoles of the Frankish armies were predominantly Christians — native Christians. Harari also reveals that these troops made up, on average, 50 per cent of the cavalry of the crusader states in any engagement.[x] In short, native Christians were financially able to support the huge expense of training, equipping and maintaining a cavalryman and his mount, i.e., they were affluent and empowered, and they were in large numbers willing to fight — and die — for the crusader states.

[i] Pope Urban II quoted by Baldric of Dol in The Crusades: A Reader, eds. S.J. Allen and Emilie Amt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 37-38.

[ii] Michael the Syrian quoted in Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 25.

[iii] See note 1, Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, 52.

[iv] See note 1, Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, 60.

[v] See note 1, Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, 107.

[vi] See note 5, MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East, 112.

[vii] Benjamin Z. Kedar, Franks, Muslims and Oriental Christians in the Latin Levant (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), V-212.

[viii] See note 3, Harari, ‘The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment’, 115.

[ix] Steve Tibble, The Crusader Armies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 98.

[x] For details, see note 3, Harari, 75-116.

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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Saturday, February 7, 2026

Demographic Overview of the Crusader States

The popular perception of the Holy Land in the era of the crusades is one in which a native Muslim population is ruled by a tiny, Christian elite. Indeed, leading historians of the last two centuries portrayed the crusader states as ‘proto-colonial’ in character. However, over the previous quarter-century, this picture has been profoundly altered by new archaeological finds, analysis of neglected sources and data mining of a variety of documents. To understand the demography of the Holy Land in the era of the crusades, it may therefore be useful to forget preconceived notions and begin with the basics.

When Jerusalem fell to Muslim forces in 638, the population was entirely Christian; the Jews had been expelled after supporting the Persian assault on the city a quarter-century earlier. The establishment of a Muslim regime in the region did not result in the instant conversion of the entire population to Islam. On the contrary, the Quran condemns forced conversions, and while they are known to have taken place wherever Muslim regimes were established, conversions were neither wholesale nor instantaneous.[i] The Arab conquests of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries did not result in the spread of the religion of Islam so much as the spread of regimes ruled by Islamic military elites.

Despite the oppression and humiliation of non-Muslims under Islamic rule throughout the Umayyad period (661-750), non-Muslims still constituted the majority of the population throughout the Arab empire in 1000 AD, including in the Holy Land. The Muslim scholar Ibn al-Arabi writing at the end of the eleventh century, noted that the countryside around Jerusalem was entirely Christian. Indeed, many towns in Palestine were still overwhelmingly Christian in 1922, nearly 1,300 years after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem. In other words, although the territory controlled and ruled by Islamic elites expanded dramatically between 634 and 1099, the number of people adhering to Islam grew at a much slower rate.

Furthermore, between the Muslim conquest and the First Crusade, the Holy Land changed hands between Abbasids, Fatimids and Seljuks. To the natives of the Levant, the Arabs and Egyptians were no less ‘alien elites’ than the Romans and Byzantines, who had ruled the region before 638 AD, and the Turks and Franks, who ruled after 1099 AD. In all cases, the conquerors formed the political, military and, to a lesser extent, the economic elites during their respective period of dominance, but they did not replace the native population. Both Arabs and Turks relied heavily on troops drawn from outside the region (e.g., Turcoman tribesmen) and slave-soldiers (Mamluks), a factor that contributed significantly to their unpopularity.

Levels of oppression measured in terms of expropriations, massacres, deportations, enslavement, suppression of religious establishments, harassment, discrimination, social ostracism, labour conscription, taxation and other financial burdens varied over the centuries depending on the individual ruler. Accounts written by the natives — as opposed to those reported by the Arab/Turkish chroniclers — catalogue the massacres, torture, wholesale enslavement, financial oppression and humiliations that impoverished and demoralised the Christian and Jewish populations, even under allegedly enlightened and tolerant regimes.[ii] These methods inevitably led to ‘voluntary’ conversions, often to escape death, slavery, expropriation or the sale of children to the Muslim state, yet at a much slower rate than was assumed in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

Furthermore, the minority Muslim population found in the Holy Land at the time of the First Crusade was less the product of the gradual Islamization of the native population than a result of immigration. Nomadic Arab tribes had been encouraged to migrate to conquered territories, where land, infrastructure and entire villages had been handed over to them after the slaughter, enslavement and deportation of the native population. This immigration occurred unevenly across the region so that concentrations of Muslim inhabitants were found in some areas but not others.

Although the crusaders did not seek either extermination or mass conversion of the Muslim population, the numbers of Muslims population in the Holy Land shrank during the Frankish conquest due to both casualties and voluntary emigration. Thus, while the populace of cities such as Ascalon, Acre and Tyre had been predominantly Muslim before the First Crusade, siege and assault took their toll. Furthermore, terms of surrender enabled Muslim inhabitants to withdraw with their movable property. Most ruling Muslim elites were not interested in remaining in places where they had lost their power and status, and so departed. Left behind were the poor and powerless. After the establishment of Frankish rule, Muslims were prohibited from residing in selected cities such as Jerusalem and Ascalon yet remained a significant minority in other cities such as Acre, Tyre, Beirut and Sidon.

In short, the demographics of the crusader states were highly complex and varied considerably from region to region. Nevertheless, some features are clear. The urban populations of most cities, with the notable exceptions of coastal Antioch (Latakia and Jabala), were predominantly Christian, in some cases with small Jewish and Samaritan minorities. The rural population in Edessa, Antioch and Cyprus was predominantly Orthodox Christian, with Christians accounting for two-thirds of the population in Edessa and Antioch and 95 per cent in Cyprus. Tripoli was probably 50 per cent Christian, while the Kingdom of Jerusalem was the most ethnically and religiously diverse crusader state. Altogether, historians now estimate that when the kingdom was established, native Christians made up more than 50 per cent of the populace, while Muslims formed a sizeableminority and Jewish and Samaritan communities represented smaller minority groups.

During the first half-century of Frankish presence, however, the balance tipped in favor of Christian dominance. An estimated 140,000 predominantly Christian immigrants from Western Europe settled in the region, and their offspring were also Christian. In addition, the Kings of Jerusalem pursued a policy of encouraging (Orthodox) Christian immigration from neighbouring Muslim states. Melkite Christians are known to have left the Sultanate of Damascus to resettle in Jerusalem and possibly other cities, while Coptic Christians from Egypt settled in Ascalon.

Furthermore, when Nur al-Din’s forces overran the County of Edessa between 1144 and 1150, tens of thousands of Armenian refugees fled to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Here they formed a large, dynamic and loyal community. In 1172, this Armenian community was enlarged when the Armenian Patriarch in Egypt relocated to Jerusalem, bringing many of his flock with him. Finally, many Muslims converted to Christianity in this period. Some converts may have been nominal Muslims, men and women who had adopted Islam to avoid being killed, enslaved or impoverished and humiliated as ‘dhimmis’. Another motive for conversion was the draconian punishment for interfaith marriage, which put many women under pressure to convert to marry a Christian. Estimating numbers, much less motives, is nearly impossible, yet some sources claim that conversions were ‘extensive’.[iii]

On the mainland, roughly half of the total population lived in the large urban centres, while on Cyprus, the inhabitants were 90 per cent or more rural. Although urbanization was greater in the Holy Land than in Western Europe in the same period, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was not a predominantly urban society until the hinterland was lost in the wake of Saladin’s conquests.

Altogether, the total native population of the mainland crusader states is estimated at approximately 600,000, of which 450,000 were in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 100,000 in Antioch and about 25,000 in Edessa and Tripoli each. In Cyprus, the population probably numbered about 100,000. Added to the native people were the 140,000 immigrants from Western Europe. Unaccounted in the above numbers are the Franks born in the Holy Land, predominantly the children of mixed marriages. Given the fact that the Franks were cultivating land that had become depopulated and lost to desertification by building irrigation systems and other infrastructure, it is probable that significant population growth occurred during the Frankish era. While no precise estimate of the population growth is possible, the combined population of the crusader states by 1187 might well have reached one million people.

[i] The myth of Muslim tolerance is so embedded and widespread in modern Western views of Middle Eastern history that it cannot be addressed adequately in this book. The documentary evidence of Islamic oppression and religiously-rationalised exploitation, humiliation, enslavement and extermination are, in fact, vast. Readers interested in the topic should start with Bat Ye’or’s books such as The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996) for the situation in the Near East or Dario Fernandez-Morera’s The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews Under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2016). For specifics on forced conversions, see Ye’or, 88-91. Both book provide ample bibliographies for pursuing further study on the topic.

[ii] See note 1, Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (for the situation in the Near East) or Dario Fernandez-Morera’s The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise for Islamic Spain.

[iii] Yuval Harari, ‘The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment’, in Mediterranean Historical Review: 12:1:105.