12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page i The Crusades and the Christian World of the East 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page ii THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page iii The Crusades and the Christian World of the East Rough Tolerance Christopher MacEvitt University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page v Contents Note on Transliteration and Names vii Map viii Introduction 1 The Twelfth-Century Middle East 3 Historiography of the Crusades 13 Rough Tolerance: A New Model of Religious Interaction 21 1 Satan Unleashed: The Christian Levant in the Eleventh Century 27 A Brief History of the Christian East 29 Contact and Knowledge Between Eastern and Western Christians 43 2 Close Encounters of the Ambiguous Kind: When Crusaders and Locals Meet 50 Responses to the First Crusade 54 The Franks in Edessa 65 Armenian Resistance 71 3 Images of Authority in Edessa, 1100–1150 74 Frankish Authority 75 Armenian Authority: A Response to the Franks 81 Edessa Under Joscelin I 92 Edessa and the Frankish East 97 4 Rough Tolerance and Ecclesiastical Ignorance 100 Local Christians from a Latin Perspective 102 Local Priests and Patriarchs in the Frankish Levant 106 Architecture and Liturgy 126 Pilgrimage 132 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page vi vi Contents 5 The Legal and Social Status of Local Inhabitants in the Frankish Levant 136 Historiography 136 The Peasantry 142 Local Rural Landowners and Administrators 149 6 The Price of Unity: Ecumenical Negotiations and the End of Rough Tolerance 157 Manuel I Komnenos and the Mediterranean World 158 Ecumenical Dialogue with the Armenian Church 161 Jacobite Patriarch Michael and the Quest for Legitimacy 167 Cultural Consequences of Ecumenical Negotiation 171 Conclusion 177 Notes 181 Bibliography 229 Index 253 Acknowledgments 271 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page vii Note on Transliteration and Names The names of people and places mentioned in this book have been translated and transliterated into English in a variety of ways that are not always consistent. I have attempted to render personal names in a way that reflects most closely the sound in the original language, even when that name is being used in another language. I have thus referred to the Ayyubid sultan as Salah al-Din rather than Saladin. Many names of towns and geo- graphical features have different names in Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Turkish, and Old French. I have generally used the name of the com- munity that was dominant in the period under discussion, with a few excep- tions for well-known places. Thus, I have consistently used Edessa for the sake of familiarity, when almost everyone in the twelfth century knew it by some variation of its ancient Syriac name, Urhay (Latin Rohas, Arabic al-Ruha, Turkish Urfa, Armenian Urha). Only a few classicizing Latin chroniclers used Edessa, but that has stuck. In transliterating Armenian into English, I have generally followed the system of transliteration of the Library of Congress. I have generally used the standard western calendar for dates, although the communities under discussion used a variety of different calendars. 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page viii The Frankish Levant, c. 1130. 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page 1 Introduction A few months after the capture of Antioch (3 June 1098), the lead- ers 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 over- come (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 possi- bility, 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 fa- miliar 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- 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page 2 2 Introduction 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 re- lationship? Would the Franks perceive them as a conquered community like the Muslims, or would they see them as fellow Christians, or simply as an oc- cupied subordinate people? These inquiries have provoked strikingly diver- gent answers from historians of the crusades and of the Frankish East. In one sense, the harsh attitude displayed in the crusader letter from An- tioch conforms to what many would expect from a group of soldiers who be- lieved that killing Muslims was a meritorious act—it simply extended that persecutory and violent agenda to another foreign and suspect group, indige- nous Christians. Scholars and educated readers alike have seen the twelfth- century 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 ide- ology, but formed a fundamental part of the way individuals and communi- ties 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, pro- fessional 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 re- mained 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 as creole and orientalized; both descriptions rely on a dichotomized understanding of interreligious relations as either oppressive or tolerant. Instead, I argue for a mode of social interac- tion between local Christians and the Franks in twelfth-century Syria and Palestine that I call “rough tolerance,” which encompassed conflict and op- 12272-Crusades & the Christian (reprint) 7/6/09 2:39 PM Page 3 Introduction 3 pression yet allowed multiple religious communities to coexist in a reli- giously charged land. The Twelfth-Century Middle East Over the period of a century (1090–1190), the Middle East underwent dra- matic political change. So rapid were these changes that one Armenian chronicler believed that contemporary events “were showing us change, decay, and disappearance of what exists and revealing to us the instability of mankind on earth.”2 The north Syrian town of Marash, for example, in the course of the century fell under the rule of Armenians, Byzantines, Franks, the Seljuk Turks of Rum, and the Zengids of Mosul—in essence every major power in the Levant. This sense of instability and change underlies much of the cultural permeability of twelfth-century Syria and Palestine. Political Change in the Levant Two moments capture the dramatic changes the twelfth century brought. The first moment comes in the 1160s, when Franks, Byzantines, and Turks vied for political dominance.