Luxury Exports and Religious Tourists: The Urban Economy of the Crusader Kingdoms

It has been estimated that roughly 50% of the Frankish population in the crusader kingdoms was urban. That represents a much higher proportion than in Western Europe at this time, and particularly in the post-Hattin era, the majority of noblemen were dependent on non-agricultural income for their wealth. In short, the degree of urbanization in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, particularly the 13^th century Kingdom, resembled the Italian city states more than the large western kingdoms such as England and France. To understand the crusader kingdoms, therefore, it is important to understand the urban economy.

The Medieval cities of the Holy Land had many covered markets similiar to these in 

Acre (left) and Jerusalem (right).

The most obvious source of wealth was the control of the key ports along the coast of the Levant which meant the points at which the “riches of the Orient” were transshipped for export to the increasingly prosperous population of the West. It was in Beirut and Tyre, Acre and Caesarea, Jaffa and Ascalon that Damascus steel and Indian spices, Ethiopian incense and Nubian gold, Persian carpets and Chinese silk, African ivory and Egyptian papyrus were exported to the hungry markets of Italy, and from there onward to the Holy Roman Empire, France, Iberia and far off England and Scandinavia.

The port of Acre was the most important in the crusader states.

In addition to these transshipped items, the crusader kingdoms themselves had a number of export goods that were highly lucrative. While sugar was probably the most important bulk commodity, the export of Holy Relics and souvenirs should not be under-estimated. By some estimates, the population of Jerusalem doubled during the summer pilgrimage (tourist) season, and all of those pilgrims wanted to take some mementos home with them as well as gifts for family and friends, just like modern tourists today.

All those pilgrims also needed a place to stay and food to eat — and not just in Jerusalem. The pilgrimage sites included not just obvious sites such as Bethlehem and Nazareth, but also the site of every moment in Christ’s life as recorded in the Gospels, and places associated with the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and other saints. There was hardly a place in the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem that could not lay claim to some biblical event of importance, and devout pilgrims, who ventured so far at such cost and risk, generally stayed until the fall sailing season, which meant spending roughly six months in the Holy Land. In short, the pilgrimage “service industry” was in proportion to the population of the time at least as important as tourism is to Israel today.

The Knights Hospitaller provided hostles, hospices and hospitals for the pilgrims. Above the Hospitaller compound in Acre.

Last but not least, a large proportion of the Latin settlers were skilled craftsmen. Serfs could not legally leave their villages and lands (and most probably didn’t want to), so the pilgrims, whether armed and unarmed, were predominantly men of higher status: craftsmen, guildsmen, or merchants. They brought their skills with them, and established themselves in the cities and towns of the crusader kingdoms, where they worked side-by-side with native craftsmen. Here some of the most productive if most prosaic of inter-cultural exchanges took place in the development of dying and cloth-making, leatherworking, gold and silver workmanship, pottery, carpentry, masonry, glass-working, and all the countless other skills essential to survival and a high contemporary standard of living.

Based on the names of the streets alone, it is clear, for example, that Jerusalem had a high concentration of furriers and tanners, but also gold and silver smiths. Pottery from the region, glazed on the inside, is known to have been a particularly popular practical ware, (an early version of Teflon), and that glass-makers and glass-blowers were renowned. The massive construction projects undertaken primarily in the mid-12^th century, ensured work for carpenters, masons and sculptors, and the remaining fragments of their work are testimony to the high quality of their workmanship.

At the high-end, Jerusalem also exported illustrated manuscripts from a scriptorium established by the Canons of the Holy Sepulcher. Books produced in such a sacred place had an added value beyond the high quality of the work, and undoubtedly represented one of the luxury goods with the highest margins exported from the crusader kingdoms — albeit, as with all truly valuable, custom made objects, only in very small quantities. 

The crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, far from being a wasteland inhabited by barbarians, was a highly cultured, economically dynamic powerhouse.

Learn more about crusader society at: Balian d'Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Principal sources:

·         Barber, Malcolm, The Crusader States, Yale University Press, 2012.

·         Hamilton, Bernard, The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

·         Riley-Smith (ed), The Atlas of the Crusades, Facts on File, 1990.

·         Conder, Claude Reignier, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem 1099 to 1291, The Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1897.

Blooming Landscapes: The Rural Economy of the Crusader States

Whether in films like “Kingdom of Heaven” or in novels like “Jerusalem” by Cecilia Holland, the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem is most frequently depicted as a desert wasteland dotted with massive castles on barren hills. This image traces its roots at least in part to accounts by crusaders and pilgrims from Northern Europe, who found the Holy Land oppressively hot and comparatively dry. But those images are deceptive.

First, modern students of the crusader states should keep in mind that most pilgrims arrived in the spring, at the start of the warm, dry season, and departed in the fall before the rains.  Crusaders who remained longer in the Holy Land, like Richard the Lionheart, encountered drenching rain and even sleet and hail along with far less than tropical temperatures. More important despite some climate change over the last 800 years, it is reasonable to assume that the climate of the “Land of Milk and Honey” is not so very different today from what it was during the period of the crusades.

The landscape near the Sea of Galilee





                                                              The coast near Ascalon

In short, far from being a crucible of heat and sand, the Holy Land under Latin Christian rule was still a highly fertile and agriculturally productive environment. That was what made it so valuable to invaders from all corners of the earth over the millennia!

But the new rulers from the West did not simply take over the existing territory, they increased its productivity substantially. Of the estimated 650,000 inhabitants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the second half of the 12^th century, roughly 140,000 were “Franks” — Frank being the collective term for the Western Europeans that came to the Holy Land in the 12^th and 13^th centuries. Of these, roughly half lived in rural villages. These sixty thousand rural “Frankish” settlers lived predominantly, archaeologists believe, in new settlements and so represented a significant influx of new agricultural labor and — even more important — brought more land under cultivation.    

Equally important and far too often under-estimated, the Western settlers that came to the Holy Land during the first century of Latin rule, adapted their agricultural techniques to the new environment so effectively that their presence led to what historian Malcolm Barber calls a “agricultural revival” of the region. Thus, in addition to traditional Mediterranean products such as wheat, barley, olives and grapes, with which they were already familiar, the Western settlers in the crusader states developed commercial production of dates, sugar cane, figs, bananas and citrus fruits. The cities of Outremer — including Jerusalem itself — were not surrounded by barren desert but rather by a blooming agricultural landscape of orchards and plantations catering to the urban population.

The ancient olive orchard outside Jerusalem - The Mount of Olives - as probably been here since crusader times.

The archaeological evidence further suggests that the typical settler village was not walled, did not have a citadel or tall keep or even a defensible church tower as in other “frontier” areas as, for example, Prussia. This discovery strongly undermines the notion that the Franks lived in constant fear of the more populous native population. Rather the pattern of settlement reproduced typical settlement patterns of Southern France adapted architecturally to the climate, and so reinforces the thesis that the Franks in Outremer lived in harmony with their neighbors.  The great castles and walled cities were built to protect the entire population from foreign (Saracen) invasions, not to protect the local lords from their subjects.

It should also be remembered that even the non-Frank workers on the farms and in the factories were not slaves. They were for the most part natives of the region, which meant they were predominantly Christian and their status was similar to that of serfs in Western Europe. They had clearly defined rights and privileges as well as obligations, and they were ruled by local administrators of the same faith, who administered traditional law rather than imposing foreign customs on the population. Even Muslims and Jews retained a strong degree of judicial autonomy in settling family and civil cases.

Far from being the desert battleground of popular literature and film, the Kingdom of Jerusalem — like the Kingdom of Cyprus — were agriculturally fertile, rich kingdoms in a mild, Mediterranean climate. This was the land of “milk and honey” that had seduced — and continues to seduce — conquerors since the start of recorded time.

Learn more about crusader society at: Balian d'Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Principal sources:

·         Barber, Malcolm, The Crusader States, Yale University Press, 2012.

·         Hamilton, Bernard, The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

·         Riley-Smith (ed), The Atlas of the Crusades, Facts on File, 1990.

·         Conder, Claude Reignier, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem 1099 to 1291, The Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1897.

"The Crusader States" by Malcolm Barber

Far more has been written about the crusades than the states they established and supported.  Yet it was the threat to the Christian states that justified every crusade after the First. Furthermore, the crusader states were catalysts for a number of key developments in Western Europe from dramatic improvements in shipping to the exchange of goods, technology and ideas with Constantinople and the Arab/Turkish world.  Indeed, historian Claude Reignier Condor wrote at the end of the 19^th Century that: “…the result of the Crusades was the Renaissance.” (The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem 1099 to 1291 AD, The Committee of Palestine Exploration Fund, 1897, p. 163.)

Professor Malcolm Barber, a distinguished scholar who has already produced seminal works about the Templars and Cathers, has produced a long overdue work that provides a comprehensive history of the crusader states rather than the sporadic crusades. It is meticulously researched and documented, as one would expect from a professor of history, and as such is an invaluable reference work for anyone interested in the period and indeed in the West’s presence in the Near East.

Whereas histories of the crusades invariably focus on military campaigns and so on “aggression,” Barber reminds us that the crusader states themselves were builders rather than destroyers. Barber concludes his comprehensive history by noting that: the crusaders “pragmatic approach to the challenge of providing for defense, administration and economic development produced political entities which resist stereotyping…and predetermined models.” He furthermore stresses that their accomplishments cannot be reduced to military conquests but also “entailed the rebuilding and embellishment of the holy shrines” and notes that they “ultimately produced their own independent and vibrant culture.”

Barber draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources in Latin, Arabic, French, and German, and his bibliography alone is a treasure trove for the historian.  However, the very detail of his account tends to slow the pace and complicate the flow of the narrative. This is more a reference or a research resource than a good read. 

Myths about the Crusader States 4:

Christian Rulers were Bigoted and Intolerant

  

Most popular literature about the crusader states alleges that the Latin rulers were “less tolerant” of religious diversity than their Muslim predecessors. It is hard to trace the origins of this myth – other than in an excess of political correctness in today’s world.

It is true that in the four centuries of Muslim rule in the Holy Land preceeding the crusades some Muslim rulers were content to live-and-let-live, but -- as my last entry stressed -- there were also periods of extreme repression.  Furthermore, at all times Christians (and other non-Muslims) were taxed extra and treated as second-class citizens, certainly they had no right to positions of power and influence.

This is the standard against which the Christian leaders should be judged.  If used it is quickly clear that the Christians were not more oppressive than their Muslims predecessors.  To be sure Muslims and Jews were subject to special taxes -- as had been the case under Muslim rulers for non-Muslims.  As under the Muslims, all people were allowed to practice their own religion. However, under the Muslims the penalty for trying to preach or convert a Muslim to Christianity was death – as it is to this day in many Muslim countries. (A woman was only recently condemned to death in Sudan, for example, for claiming to be a Christian and marrying a Christian man.) I have never read or heard about a similar law punishing the preaching of Islam with death in the crusader kingdoms.

It is true that the crusaders took the Holy Land by force – as had their Muslim predecessors.  It is also true that while the Muslims allowed Christians to live in Jerusalem, the crusaders prohibited Muslims from living there.  Nevertheless, they did not tear down the Dome of the Rock or destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque, as the Caliph al-Hakim had leveled the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  The crusaders simply converted these buildings to Christian or secular purposes.

Islam's most sacred shrine in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, was not destroyed;

it was converted into a Church instead.

It is also true that Latin clergy was given control of the most sacred places and put into the positions of greatest ecclesiastical power, such as the patriarchies in Jerusalem and Antioch. Whether the Abbaids, the Fatamids, or the Seljuks were in control, however, they too put their own men into positions of power; Sunnis do not tolerate Shiia religious leaders in their mosques and madrassas and vice versa. Conquerors always take the best spoils for themselves.

The fact that hardly any city resisted Saladin’s conquest of the Kingdom of Jerusalem after the Battle of Hattin is often taken as evidence that he non-Latin population in the kingdom preferred Muslim rule. This is hardly a sustainable argument since the reality was that the kingdom was simply not defensible after the losses sustained at Hattin.  Under the circumstances, the civilian population was eager to avoid the destruction and retribution that the rules of war designated for cities that resisted and were taken by storm.  The civilian population preferred to trust to Saladin’s reputation for clemency.  The situation might have looked very different if the notoriously brutal Zengi had been mopping up – or Baibars or one of the other equally merciless Mamluke sultans had been the opponent in 1187.

Rather, those who assert the “preference” of the subject peoples of the crusader states for Muslim over Latin rule ought to ask why there were no revolts against the Latin leaders? Why was there no “Intifada” against the Christian kings?  How could the tiny Latin Christian elite rule for nearly two hundred years, if their subjects were secret allies of their enemies? Why weren’t Christian towns betrayed to the Muslims each time a Muslim army appeared – and not just after the devastation of Hattin but during Saladin's invasions in 1177, 1179, 1181, 1182, and 1183. 

It is safe to say the loyalty of the various non-Latin elements in the crusader states varied across regions and time.  Initially, the Armenians appear to have been very enthusiastic about crusader rule after decades under the Turks.  Later, they became disillusioned, at least in Eddessa, probably due to misrule and greed on the part of the Latin rulers. In Antioch, the Armenians appear to have been considerably more loyal. Yet in both states, the continued presence of an independent Armenian kingdom undoubtedly undermined loyalty to the Latin elite by keeping alive hopes of reincorporation in a greater Armenian state.

In the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Armenians played a much less significant role and the other religious groups were fragmented, so that no one group was in a position to seriously challenge Latin leadership.  Furthermore, a Muslim traveler from Spain lamented the passivity of the Muslims under Christian rule.  In his religious zeal, he may have forgotten or discounted the fact that even the majority of Muslims in the Holy Land were not ethnically Arab or Turkish.  They viewed the Latin rulers as just one more alien invasion in a millennia long history of such invasions.  They had indeed become passive, accepting and accommodating of each change of regime. Furthermore, there was a significant amount of intermarriage between males from Western Europe and females native to the Holy Land.  This tended to reinforce tolerance on the part of both rulers and ruled.

Last but not least, the prominent role played by sergeants in the armies of the Holy Land suggests that the crusader states commanded considerable loyalty among the native, middle-class population.  Some historians speculate that sergeants were drawn from the large population of “half-breed” youth, who – they postulate – did not qualify for knighthood because of native blood. The theory is not convincing, because knighthood could be bestowed on anyone, even full-blooded Arabs, Turks or Kurds. A more logical explanation is that the conditions of fighting in the Holy Land, particularly the fact that the Turks could muster armies with tens of thousands of light horse, made it necessary to have more mounted fighting men than the knightly class could support.  The development of light cavalry on the Christian side was a response to the overwhelming number of cavalry on the Muslim side.

Because horses were expensive, however, these sergeants had to be recruited from among the social classes with comparatively high incomes, albeit not rich enough to afford the armor, arms and training of knights.  The fact that secular leaders of the crusader kingdoms and the militant orders could recruit such men in such numbers (there was an almost two to one ratio of sergeants to knights at most of the Templar and Hospitaller castles) makes it very clear that the “middle classes” in the crusader states -- whether half-breeds or non-Latin Christians –- stood firmly behind the Christian regime. 

That hardly seems reasonable if the Christian rulers were as “intolerant” as many modern books portray them.

Myths about the Crusader States 3:

Muslim Rulers were Benign and Tolerant

It has become commonplace to allege that prior to the crusades, Muslims and Christians lived together in harmony in the Holy Land. These assertions ignore the fact that in the 7^th century the Holy Land was conquered for Islam with the sword – not gently proselytized by peaceful imams. It also ignores the fact that the Seljuk Turks wrested the Holy Land from the (over time complacent and comparatively benign) Fatamids also by the sword between 1071 and 1085.  Finally, it ignores the fact that the Muslim Caliph al-Hakim utterly raised the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and many other churches. It ignores the massacre of some 3000 Christian pilgrims in the decade between 1185 and 1195. In short, it ignores all the abuses referenced in Pope Urban II in his call for the First Crusade.

It is no longer politically correct to believe there was any truth in Urban II’s catalogue of crimes committed by Muslims against Christians in the Holy Land.  Undoubtedly, Pope Urban the Second and the Byzantine Emperor Alexis I, who approached Urban with a request for Western help against the Seljuks in the first place, were both seeking to manipulate emotions. Urban II furthermore had a hidden agenda – namely increasing the power of the papacy, possibly healing the schism with the Eastern Church, and getting rid of excess numbers of violent young men, who were disruptive factors in Western feudal society.  Alexis I wanted mercenaries to keep the aggressive Seljuks at bay.

Nevertheless, it is disingenuous to assert that all the allegations made by Alexis and Urban respectively were pure fantasy. The archeological record alone testifies to the destruction of Christian monuments under Seljuk rule, belying the vaunted “tolerance” of Muslim rulers. Furthermore, the abuse of Christians was well enough documented to result in an almost complete halt of pilgrimage traffic and even trade with Europe during the period following Seljuk seizure of the Holy Land; Christian pilgrims and merchants had been made to feel unwelcome and unsafe once the Holy Land was in Seljuk hands.

Even under the more moderate Fatimids, Christians in the 12^th century – no less than in the 21^st century – were second-class citizens, subject to extra taxes and excluded from positions of power and authority.  The Fatimids, no less than the Seljuks, silenced the church bells, and punished attempts by Christians to spread their religion with death.

This is not my definition of “tolerance” – not then any more than now.

                

Myths about the Kingdom of Jerusalem 2:

The Population in the Crusader Kingdoms was Predominantly Muslim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-assessing the Crusades and Crusaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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