In my last entry
I argued that, on the whole, Muslims were not worse off under the crusaders, so
why should the Christians, that the crusaders had come to deliver from
oppression, have fared worse?
Again, let’s go
back to basics. The First Crusade was as response to a plea by the Byzantine
Emperor — or, if one follows the medieval Chronicler William of Tyre, an appeal
made Peter the Hermit from Amiens who had personally visited Jerusalem. Either way, the appeal to Western Christendom
was that Christians (please note: Orthodox Christians) were being oppressed in
the very city where Christ had been crucified. Rodney Stark provides an
excellent catalogue of various atrocities committed against Christians in the
years leading up to the First Crusade (Stark, pp 78-98). The atrocities included the complete
destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher along with some 30,000 other
churches that were either pillaged or burned.
Aside from these periodic acts of violence that left Christians in a
permanent state of insecurity, the Muslim regimes (even the more tolerant and benign
rulers) persistently punished conversion to Christianity with death, prohibited
the establishment/construction of new churches, prohibited the saying of
Christian service and prayers out-loud — even in one’s home, prohibited Christians
from bearing arms and even riding horse and — most important if one is an
adherent of Machiavelli — taxed Christians at a significantly higher rate than
Muslims.
For Orthodox
Christians to be “worse off” under the crusader regimes, they would have had to
suffer greater indignities than those listed above. They did not. They were
freed of the extra tax, allowed to own horses, bear arms, build their own
churches and monasteries — and they did! — and they practiced their religion
openly and without fear. Not once during crusader rule were Orthodox Christians
subject to massacres or the plundering of their homes by the ruling Franks. I have yet to see even one concrete example of
one way in which the Orthodox
Christians in Outremer were “better off” under the Muslims.
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| Mosaics in the Church of the Nativity commissioned by Baldwin III and clearly showing Byzantine workmanship |
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| Ruined Byzantine Church in Ascalon |
Jotischky notes
that “Greek and Syrian Orthodox, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic and Ehtiopian
monasteries all flourished under Frankish rule.” (Jotischky, p. 126.) According
to Hamilton “...other eastern-rite Churches were granted virtual autonomy by
the Franks under their respective religious leaders…and were not made subject
to the Catholic hierarchy.” (Hamilton, p. 50.) The only point of friction
between Frank and other Christians resulted from the fact that the crusaders
viewed the Greek Orthodox Church as part of the Catholic Church. While this was
clearly advantageous for ordinary Greek Orthodox citizens, who then
enjoyed all the same privileges as the ruling elite, it was a problem for the
Greek Orthodox clergy because it effectively put them under the
rule of the Pope -- something they did not accept. Furthermore, if the two churches were one,
there could only be one bishop per see, and naturally the Pope preferred to
appoint Latin churchmen to such positions.
There was,
therefore, considerable outrage among the Greek Orthodox hierarchy against the “loss”
of episcopal sees, income, privilege and power, but as Jotischky points out: “…the
replacement of Greeks with Latins probably made little difference to many
parochial clergy in the patriarchate of Jerusalem, because the Orthodox bishops
had tended to be Greeks appointed from Constantinople, whereas the Orthodox
clergy and laity were Arabic-speaking.” Furthermore, the Franks allowed the
Orthodox priests to minister to their flocks just as they had done before the First
Crusade. Orthodox services continued as before using leavened bread, and
Orthodox priests could marry as before.
The fact that a
Jacobite (Syrian) Christian on Saladin’s staff (Joseph Batit) sought to
convince the Syrian Christians in Jerusalem to surrender the city to Saladin
during the siege of September 1187 does not
prove that relations between the Franks/Latins and the Jacobites/Syrians were —
as some would suggest — consistently
bad. All it shows is that by September 30, 1187, after ten days of siege and
the collapse of a portion of the wall, nerves in the Christian camp were (understandably)
cracking. Yes, some Syrian Christians undoubtedly did, at that point, want to save their lives (and those of their
wives and children) making them willing to negotiate with Saladin. The same day
the leader of the Latin Christians,
Balian d’Ibelin, did the same thing. Across the Kingdom of Jerusalem, citizens
made the same decision out of sheer necessity, not because they had for a
hundred years been unhappy living under the crusaders or because they had
forgotten the oppression they has suffered under the Muslims in the past.
On the contrary,
not only were Orthodox Christians significantly better off under the crusader
states than they had been before, they were active and often ardent supporters
of the crusader states. A significant
portion of the Armies of Outremer were composed of native Christians who fought
as “Turcopoles” — light cavalry (clearly a great privilege compared to being
prohibited from bearing arms or riding horses under Muslim rulers). We also
know that senior Orthodox clergy supported the Third Crusade, which they would
not have done if they had thought their co-religionists were better off under
Saladin.
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| Scene from the film "The Kingdom of Heaven" in which Balin d'Ibelin negotiates the surrender of Jerusalem to Saladin |
The crusader
states were states with a predominantly Christian population in which practitioners
of the various Christian traditions lived harmoniously side-by-side without
oppressing their Muslim or Jewish neighbors. In short, the crusader states were
an early example — not of intolerance and bigotry as so often portrayed — but
of tolerance and “multi-culturalism.”
In my three part biography of Balian d'Ibelin I endeavor to portray the relations between the various Christians in the Kingdom of Jerusalem accurately.
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