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Chapter 5 The Legal and Social Status of Local Inhabitants in the Frankish Levant In 1175, Baldwin, lord of Rames (Ramla), donated a local Christian peasant to the Hospitallers. He was to remain “with all things of his and of his heirs of either sex, forever in the authority of, and under the power of, the Hospital alone.”1 Johannes Syrianus, as the charter calls him, was distinguished by a blemish in one eye, and evidently was once in charge of the cisterns of Caffer [Kafr ed-Dik], a small village tucked away in the olive groves southwest of Nablus. The ancient pools John might have cared for can still be found on the outskirts of the village today. This brief notice is perhaps the fullest description of a Palestinian peasant in the twelfth-century documents of the Frankish Levant. This simple transaction, a common one in the charters of the Frankish Levant, raises questions about Frankish authority and the status of local communities. John the Syrian, as we might call him, is quite a different figure from other Syrians and Palestinians we have encountered thus far. Yet the vast majority of the indigenous population of Palestine (as well as northern Syria), whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, were peasants . What then was their experience of Frankish rule? Did the pattern of rough tolerance shape their lives as it did the Armenians of Edessa, or the monks and clergy of the Jacobite church? The donation of John by a Frankish lord to a Latin Christian religious institution was a direct expression of authority, yet what specifically happened in the exchange? Historiography As discussed in the introduction, crusade historians over the last fifty years have laid out a clear and surprisingly detailed model of the society John the Syrian lived in, the conditions under which he worked, and what the donation described above indicated about local communities, based on the assumptions of the segregationalist model discussed in the introductory chapter. According to scholars such as Jonathan Riley-Smith, Joshua Prawer, and Claude Cahen, John, and all indigenous peasants whether Christian or Muslim, were serfs, a legal and social status the Franks brought with them from Europe. They lived in small villages, often of a dozen families or less, and owed half the produce of their lands to their Frankish overlords. Overseeing the lord’s interests was a village headman, often called a ra’is, who, though a serf like the other villagers, enjoyed privileges commensurate with his authority. According to the segregationalist model, John the Syrian would have rarely seen his lord, or any other Franks, for they dwelt in the great cities of the kingdom, like Jerusalem, Acre, and Tyre, among a mixed population of local Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Though free from the servile status of their rural cousins, the indigenous city-dwellers were nonetheless also at a disadvantage compared to their Frankish neighbors. All non-Latins had to pay the capitatio, a sign of their second-class status, just as all non-Muslims once paid the jizya when Palestine was ruled by Muslims. This second-class status also prevented the indigenous population, irrespective of their social status, from joining the ruling elite, which was based on knighthood and Latin Christianity. Unless he converted to Latin Christianity, a local Christian could not give testimony in the High Court of the Kingdom, nor could he be one of the king’s men, or even a knight in a lord’s service. Although the crusaders had ostensibly come to free eastern Christians from the yoke of Muslim tyranny, the segregationalist argument emphasized that they had replaced a Muslim elite with a Frankish one, leaving local Christians in the same, or even a worse subjected position.2 Yet the last four chapters have shown that, despite conflicts and discrepancies of power, daily interactions between Franks and local Christians formed an essential part of communal life in the Latin East. This chapter argues that the twelfth-century status of local Christians in Latin Palestine was considerably different from the well-researched and plausible model presented above. This chapter is largely restricted to the kingdom of Jerusalem, as it is only there that sufficient evidence survives to discuss the status of local Christians. In a broad sense, however, the conclusions reached here can be applied to Tripoli, Antioch, and Edessa, though their legal traditions may have been somewhat different. By relying on twelfth-century documents and The Legal and Social Status of Local Inhabitants 137...

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