The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance

Introduction

Introduction A few months after the capture of Antioch (3 June 1098), the leaders of the First Crusade wrote a letter to Pope Urban II, on whose urging they had embarked on their long, strange journey across Europe and Byzantium. The rigors of nearly two years on the march, the exhausting eight-month siege of Antioch, the euphoria of its capture, the miraculous discovery of the relic of the Holy Lance, and the astonishing victory over yet another Turkish army had left the crusaders dazed and overwhelmed. The last straw came on 1 August with the death of Adhemar of LePuy, the papal representative accompanying the crusaders. His passing left the crusaders without a guiding and unifying voice. Confused and lacking direction, the crusaders hoped a letter to Urban might elicit further guidance. After summarizing the recent events of the crusade, the letter-writers urged that Urban himself come to Antioch, which was, as they noted, the first seat of St. Peter, and that the pope then lead the crusaders on to Jerusalem. Why? The crusaders confessed that they had found some challenges beyond their military skills: “we have subdued the Turks and the pagans,” they wrote to Urban, “but the heretics, Greeks and Armenians, Syrians and Jacobites, we have not been able to overcome (expugnare).”1 What the crusaders wanted to do to the “heretics” is unclear: kill them as they had the Turkish inhabitants of Antioch? Expel them from the lands the crusaders had conquered? Or perhaps the crusaders’ frustration arose because they did not know how to confront an issue as complex and unexpected as eastern Christianity. For the modern historian, the letter is a glimpse at a moment of possibility , as the army’s leaders gathered in Antioch on that late summer’s day to consider the direction of their journey. At Antioch, the crusaders stood at the edge of the Byzantine world, a world different from their own yet more familiar than the great sweep of Islamic lands that lay open to the south and east of them. The letter from Antioch hints at their anxiety on leaving the fa- miliar to venture into the unknown. Yet their anxiety circled not so much around the Turks or Islam; for as the writers confidently asserted, “we have subdued the Turks and the pagans.” Rather, the crusaders were alarmed by the religious diversity of the Christian world of the Middle East. Turks and Muslims they were prepared for, but for Armenians, Greeks, and Jacobites they were not. The letter raises a series of questions. How would the Franks approach local Christians? What language would they use to frame their relationship ? Would the Franks perceive them as a conquered community like the Muslims, or would they see them as fellow Christians, or simply as an occupied subordinate people? These inquiries have provoked strikingly divergent answers from historians of the crusades and of the Frankish East. In one sense, the harsh attitude displayed in the crusader letter from Antioch conforms to what many would expect from a group of soldiers who believed that killing Muslims was a meritorious act—it simply extended that persecutory and violent agenda to another foreign and suspect group, indigenous Christians. Scholars and educated readers alike have seen the twelfthcentury Middle East as an era dominated by crusade and jihad: a world in which conflict between Muslims and western (Latin Catholic) Christians not only expressed itself in a series of battles fought in the name of religious ideology , but formed a fundamental part of the way individuals and communities defined themselves and others. For such Christian and Muslim leaders as Bernard of Clairvaux, Nur al-Din, or Richard the Lion-heart, this may well have been true. But for communities living in the Levant, both indigenous and Frankish, crusade and jihad played little role in the way they understood or experienced the world around them. Rather, individuals and communities formed their identity through a network of families, civic relationships, professional ties, and associations with churches, shrines, and local holy places. Taken together, such identities often crossed religious boundaries. This book examines the intersection of two Christian worlds, that of western Christians (or Franks, as they were generally known in the Middle East) who conquered Syria and Palestine as part of the First Crusade and remained to settle in the occupied lands, and that of eastern Christians over whom they ruled. The society that emerged at that intersection has been characterized as colonial and European, or...