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Chapter 2 Close Encounters of the Ambiguous Kind: When Crusaders and Locals Meet According to the twelfth-century Jacobite chronicler and bishop Basil bar Shumana, his city of Edessa—Urhay in Syriac—was none other than Ur of the Chaldees, founded by Nimrod and birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham. “Ur,” Basil recognized, was merely an ancient word for “city,” and “hay” signified the Chaldeans.1 The bishop was justifiably proud of Edessa, a city whose people, according to a well-known legend dating to Late Antiquity, believed in the divinity of Jesus before his death and before the citizens of any other city. While western eyes kept Jerusalem in sharp focus, for many eastern Christians “the city,” Edessa, sparkled with a brighter light. Edessa’s contemporary size and wealth as well as its associations with the remembered origins of the Jacobite and Armenian communities made it a vital center of the Christian Levant. Most historians of the Latin East have shared the crusader fascination with Jerusalem, and have focused their studies on the Frankish kingdom that shared its name. This is in many ways sensible. The city was the intended destination of the First Crusade; its recovery after Salah al-Din conquered it in 1187 was the motivation for the Third Crusade and most of the major expeditions of the thirteenth century. Jerusalem was the capital of the only Frankish kingdom in the Levant, and its ruler was crowned in the Holy Sepulcher, the holiest shrine in Christendom. The kingdom outlasted all others established in the wake of the First Crusade, and the king served as overlord and protector of the others. The kingdom’s army was larger, the land it covered more extensive, and from a historian’s perspective, the primary sources concerning it survive in far greater numbers and quality. It is not surprising, then, that the history of the Frankish East is largely synonymous with the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. As alluring as Jerusalem and the story of Frankish rule over Palestine might be, compelling reasons suggest that historians should cast their eyes elsewhere as well. Jerusalem was, despite its surpassing holiness for three religions , a minor city. Acre, Tripoli, and Tyre, coastal cities all, outranked it in commercial importance, and its citadel and fortifications served only to protect itself, without greater strategic significance, unlike the great castles of Krak des Moabites (Kerak) and Krak de Montreal (Shaubak) to the east, and Tell Bashir, al-Bira, or Baghras to the north. It is to Edessa we should turn, as Basil bar Shumana suggests, for the twelfth-century Near East is a different world when viewed from its citadel. The city sits upon the foothills of the Taurus Mountains, which stretch from the Mediterranean Sea east to the towering Caucasus Mountains. From its perch on the boundary between the highlands of Anatolia and the deserts and plains of Syria and Mesopotamia, the Roman empire of Justinian seems not long ago, and the idea that it might still return entirely possible. While Jerusalemites must always keep an anxious eye to the south, for armies marching from oasis to oasis across the northern Sinai from rich and populous Egypt, Edessans knew that armies arrive from the east—from Mosul, Mardin, Baghdad, even far off Khorasan. To the borders of India lay innumerable cities and peoples whose march to the Mediterranean must pass under the walls of Edessa. The Franks, too, periodically glimpsed this vista; Baldwin, the first king of Jerusalem, titled himself at times “king of Babylon and Asia,” and he ruled Edessa before coming to Jerusalem. For the historian of the Latin East as well, the perspective from Edessa is unique. The chronicles, letters, and theological treatises left behind by the Jacobites and Armenians in northern Syria offer an unparalleled opportunity to understand the experience and perspectives of indigenous communities living under Frankish rule, rather than the views of their compatriots writing amid different political and cultural situations in Constantinople, Baghdad, Mosul, Damascus, and Aleppo. Two chronicles written by local Christians of Edessa illuminate the establishment of the Franks in northern Syria and the position of local communities both before and after their arrival. The first, and better known, is that of Matthew of Edessa, whose annal began in 952/3 and ended in 1136/7 and covered events in Edessa, the Armenian kingdoms of the Caucasus Mountains , and Byzantium as well as the Muslim world. Matthew believed that the complexities of the twelfth-century Levantine...

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