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.

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[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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Crusader Society Re-Visited: Rural Knights Living in Harmony with the Local Christian Population

For the better part of the 20^th century, Frankish society in the Holy Land was depicted as a decadent urban elite, collecting rents from oppressed native farmers. Allegedly, the Franks were afraid to venture into the hostile environment of the countryside, not only because of an “ever-present” Saracen threat but also because they were hated by their own tenants and subjects. Some historians such as Joshua Prawer did not hesitate to draw parallels between Frankish rule in Palestine/Syria and apartheid in South Africa. 

Yet such conclusions, no matter how superficially convincing or confidently proclaimed, have been rendered obsolete by the meticulous studies and archaeological surveys conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. What follows is a short summary of the findings of these studies.  

In his seminal work Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Ellenblum, Ronnie. Cambridge University Press, 1998) Professor Ellenblum has catalogued the findings of meticulous (indeed tedious) study of legal documents recording the demarcation and/or sale and settlement of disputes over landed property combined with an intensive archaeological survey. The “data mining” of the documents enabled the “reconstruction” of entire villages ― property by property ― identifying in the process the origins and vocations of many of the inhabitants. The archaeological survey turned up roughly 200 Frankish settlements in the geographically limited area of the study alone. Most of these had never been heard of before, either because the settlements themselves had since been abandoned, ruined and obliterated by nature, or because their Frankish origins were hidden behind modern Arabic names and more recent construction.

This research revealed that Frankish rural settlement was much more widespread than had been previously assumed ― without evidence. The Franks, the survey proved, built large numbers of smaller towns and villages, often without walls or fortifications of any kind ― a clear indication that they did not feel as threatened as historians hypothesized. The survey further uncovered evidence of Frankish manor houses and farmhouses, of Frankish mills, irrigation, and terracing systems and of roads. The latter, as Ellenblum points out, required not only a major investment in construction but also a permanent investment in maintenance.  Perhaps most significant, the survey turned up hundreds of parish churches, an investment that underlined the fact that these villages were not inhabited by a Muslim peasant population. The villagers and permanent residents of these Frankish settlements were irrefutably Christian since churches need not be built where there are no parishioners. (Note: in other regions mosques proliferated.) 

Copyright M. Foltz

While it cannot be proved that the Frankish lords lived permanently in the rural castles and manors they built, it is hardly credible that they built large, expensive stone manors and castles for the comfort of their “oppressed” native serfs. Furthermore, the documentary evidence revealed that many of these rural manors owed sergeants or knights to the lord.  In short, just as in Europe, these rural estates were held as fiefs by the Frankish elite.  In contrast to the assumptions of earlier historians, the backbone of the Frankish army was composed of rural knights, who drew their income from agriculture not urban “money fiefs.”  The knights of Outremer, far from being the decadent city-dwellers of legend, were countrymen and farmers, just as they were in Western Europe.

Equally significant, the Frankish settlers did not displace the local inhabitants, expelling them from their land and houses.   They did not deprive them of either their land or their status. On the contrary, the documentary evidence proves that the Franks were punctilious in recording and respecting the rights of the Syrian inhabitants. Rather than displacing the locals, they built villages and towns in previously unsettled areas or, more commonly, built beside existing towns.  The most common pattern was to build a castle/manor on the highest point outside an existing town/village and settle Frankish farmers at the foot of this administrative center. The native towns and villages, usually located in valleys, were left intact along with the ownership of the land cultivated by the native inhabitants. What this meant is that the Frankish settlers were bringing new land under cultivation. To do that they built terraces, reservoirs, cisterns and highly sophisticated irrigation systems, sometimes based on dams and mills or employing aqueducts. 

And who were these settlers? Based on nearly complete records for a sampling of settlements it is possible to show that these settlers came from widely separated areas in the West. For example, in the town of Mahomeria 150 Frankish households were identified with heads-of-household originating in Burgundy, Poitiers, Lombardy, the Ile de France, Bourges, Provence, Gascony, Catalonia, the Auvergne, Tournai, Venice and eight other towns no longer clearly identifiable but apparently in France or Italy. The largest number of families coming from any one place was four.

This helps explain why, as Fulcher of Chartres claimed in his History, the settlers rapidly lost their ties to their “old country” and identified with their new residence. (“We who were Occidentals have now become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or Palestinian.” Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095-1127, Book II.) Ellemblum points out that the 12^th century was a period in which many people were emigrating from their place of birth to new areas in search of better opportunities, and that the Holy Land was only one of the options available to these adventurous and ambitious settlers.

Equally important, and a major thesis of Ellenblum’s work, is the fact that the “Franks” (whatever their place of origin) settled almost exclusively near to existing native Christian communities. Even new settlements were in regions where the nearest communities were predominantly Christian. Indeed, the Franks in some cases built castles in response to requests from the native Christian population. For example, the castle of Kerak in Oultrejourdain was built in 1142 because “the Christian inhabitants of the place begged the Franks to build the castle in order to protect them.” (Ellenblum, p. 141.) However, as Ellenblum proves, the Franks avoided settling in regions that were predominantly Muslim.

This was possible because large parts of the Holy Land were still predominantly Christian. For example, Muslim scholar Ibn al-Arabi, who spent several years in Palestine shortly before the First Crusade, wrote that the countryside around Jerusalem (as opposed to the region around Acre) was “still theirs” ― i.e. still Christian! Indeed, areas with the greatest concentration of Frankish settlements in the 12^th century still had many towns that were still predominately ― if not exclusively ― Christian in the 1922 census! For example, the 1922 census for the town of Abud recorded 335 Greek Orthodox Christians and 41 Latin Christians and not one single Muslim.

What this tells us is that the Islamization of the Holy Land was neither as complete nor as geographically homogeneous as historians previously assumed. If, as has been argued by other historians, people converted to Islam to avoid the extra taxes, humiliations and disadvantages of life as a "dhimmis” (non-Muslims of either Christian or Jewish faith, i.e. “people of the Book,” who had not yet converted to Islam), then Islamization should have occurred evenly across the entire region. Opportunists and men of ambition are not concentrated by location.  Yet, as Ellenblum proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Muslim population was concentrated in clearly delineated regions.

 

Ellenblum postulates that the Muslim population of the Holy Land in the 12^th century were for the most part not converts but immigrants. Taking the example of Samaria, a predominantly Muslim region during the crusader period, he shows that the region had been largely depopulated before the Arab invasions.  “In the revolt of 529 almost 20,000 Samaritans were killed in one battle and others fled over the Jordan…The last revolt of 556 was followed by massive expropriation of property and a plague that decimated the population.” (Ellenblum, p. 262.) When the Arab invasion came, Samaria was still desolate and largely unpopulated: “…the region was abandoned by its original sedentary population and the subsequent vacuum was apparently filled by nomads who, at a later stage, gradually became sedentarized.” (Ellenblum, p. 264.) In short, by the 12^th century, the inhabitants of Samaria were largely Muslim, but not because the Christian/Jewish/Samaritan population had converted, but rather because Muslims from elsewhere had settled there.

The patterns of settlement meticulously documented by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has other implications for Frankish society.  Because Franks settled almost exclusively in regions that were still predominantly Christian they did not feel like aliens nor did they feel threatened by possible cooperation between their native neighbors and their Muslim enemies. After all, in several well-documented cases “the local Christian population…was overjoyed at the conquest of First Crusade and…welcomed the Frankish conquerors.” (Ellenblum, p.136)  When the Frankish settlers (farmers and craftsmen rather than soldiers) followed the crusaders (men of war) to the Holy Land, they built and shared the churches with the Orthodox natives, just as they shared the markets and intermarried with native Christians. Native Christians, as Christopher MacEvitt (The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) also documented, were integrated into the Frankish administration. While they did not form the pinnacle of either secular or ecclesiastical society, they held positions of authority, responsibility, and trust. 

 

In conclusion, the work of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem shows that the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem was not a fragile construct composed of a tiny and frightened alien, urban elite living separated from (and looking down on) their predominantly Muslim subjects.  The Frankish elites did not hover behind the high walls of cities and isolated castles, in constant fear of their “subjugated” native population and the next Saracen attack.  On the contrary, the Muslims living inside the Kingdom were almost certainly still a minority of the population, living in concentrated pockets where the Franks did not settle, and for long periods, notably from 1120 to 1177, there were no invasions of the core of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In short, the Frankish population felt completely secure for the better part of the 12^th century.

Likewise, although there were urban Latin elites, notably the Italian communes, that were by nature city-dwellers in Italy no less than in Syria, these were not the backbone of Frankish society.  Large numbers, easily more than the previously estimated 140,000 Frankish settlers (estimates that pre-date the archaeological survey of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), lived in essentially rural communities, making up a substantial portion of the population.  Most of the knights of the Frankish army, like knights in England and France, likewise lived on rural estates and earned their income from agriculture. The Franks shared towns and churches, mills, reservoirs, and wells with the still predominantly Christian native population, and it was this mix of Frankish and native Christians that constituted and characterized the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 12^th century.

Crusader society is depicted as accurately as possible in all of my novels set in Outremer: 
 

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Dr. Helena P. Schrader holds a PhD in History.

She is the Chief Editor of the Real Crusades History Blog.

She is an award-winning novelist and author of numerous books both fiction and non-fiction. Her three-part biography of Balian d'Ibelin won a total of 14 literary accolades. Her most recent release is a novel about the founding of the crusader Kingdom of Cyprus. You can find out more at: http://crusaderkingdoms.com