A History of the Crusades-Vol 2 (37 page)

Amongst the chief reasons for this failure had
been the difference in habits and outlook between the Franks resident in the
East and their cousins from the West. It was a shock for the Crusaders to
discover in Palestine a society whose members had in the course of a generation
altered their way of life. They spoke a French dialect; they were faithful
adherents of the Latin Church, and their government followed the customs that
we call feudal. But these superficial likenesses only made the divergences more
puzzling to the newcomers.

Had the colonists been more numerous they might
have been able to keep up their occidental ways. But they were a tiny minority
in a land whose climate and mode of life was strange to them. Actual numbers
can only be conjectural; but it seems that at no time were there as many as a
thousand barons and knights permanently resident in the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Their non-combatant relatives, women and old men, cannot have numbered much
more than another thousand. Many children were born, but few survived. That is
to say, apart from the clergy, who numbered a few hundreds, and the knights of
the Military Orders, there can only have been from two to three thousand adult
members of the Frankish upper classes. The combined population of the knightly
classes in the Principality of Antioch and the counties of Tripoli and Edessa
was probably about the same. These classes remained on the whole racially pure.
In Edessa and Antioch there was some intermarriage with the local Greek and
Armenian aristocracy; both Baldwin I and Baldwin II had, when Counts of Edessa,
married Armenian wives of the Orthodox persuasion, and we are told that some of
their nobles followed their example. Joscelin I’s wife and the wife of Waleran
of Birejik were Armenians of the separated Church. But farther south there was
no local Christian aristocracy; the only eastern element was the Armenian blood
in the royal family and the house of Courtenay and, later, the descendants,
royal and Ibelin, of the Byzantine Queen, Maria Comnena.

The Turcopoles

The class of the ‘sergeants’ was more numerous.
The sergeants were in origin the fully armed infantry of Frankish stock, who
settled on the lords’ fiefs. As they had no pride of birth to maintain, they
married with the native Christians; and by 1150 they were beginning to form a
class of
poulains
already merging with the native Christians. By 1180
the number of sergeants was estimated at little more than 5000; but we cannot
tell what proportion remained of pure Frankish blood. The ‘sodeers’ or
mercenary soldiers probably also claimed some Frankish descent. The ‘Turcopoles’,
raised locally and armed and trained after the model of the Byzantine light
cavalry, whose name they took, consisted partly of native Christians and
converts and partly of half-castes. There was perhaps a difference between the half-castes
who spoke their fathers’ tongue and those that spoke their mothers’. The
Turcopoles were probably drawn from the latter.

Map 4. Jerusalem
under the Latin Kings.

Except in the larger towns, the settlers were
almost all of French origin; and the language spoken in the kingdom of
Jerusalem and the principality of Antioch was the
langue d’oeil,
familiar to the northern French and the Normans. In the County of Tripoli, with
its Toulousain background, the
langue d’oc
was probably employed at
first. The German pilgrim, John of Wurzburg, who visited Jerusalem in about
1175, was vexed to find that the Germans played no part in Frankish society,
although, as he claimed, Godfrey and Baldwin I had been of German origin. He
was delighted when at last he found a religious establishment staffed
exclusively by Germans.

The towns contained considerable Italian
colonies. The Venetians and the Genoese each possessed streets in Jerusalem
itself. There were Genoese establishments, guaranteed by treaty, in Jaffa,
Acre, Caesarea, Arsuf, Tyre, Beirut, Tripoli, Jebail, Lattakieh, Saint Symeon
and Antioch, and Venetian establishments in the larger of these towns. The
Pisans had colonies in Tyre, Acre, Tripoli, Botrun, Lattakieh and Antioch, the
Amalfitans in Acre and Lattakieh. These were all self-governing communes, whose
citizens spoke Italian and did not mingle socially with their neighbours. Akin to
them were the establishments owned by Marseilles in Acre, Jaffa, Tyre and
Jebail, and by Barcelona in Tyre. Except in Acre, these merchant colonies
numbered none of them more than a few hundred persons.

Native
Christians
,
Moslems
and Jews

The vast majority of the population was
composed of native Christians. In the kingdom of Jerusalem these were of mixed
origin, most Arabic-speaking, and carelessly known as Christian Arabs, almost
all members of the Orthodox Church. In the County of Tripoli some of the
inhabitants were members of the Monothelete sect called the Maronites. Farther
north the indigenous inhabitants were mostly Monophysites of the Jacobite
Church, but there were very large colonies of Armenians, almost all of the
Separated Armenian Church, and, in Antioch, Lattakieh and Cilicia, considerable
groups of Greek-speaking Orthodox. In addition there were in the Holy Land
religious colonies of every Christian denomination. The monasteries were mainly
Orthodox and Greek-speaking; but there were also Orthodox Georgian
establishments, and, especially in Jerusalem itself, colonies of Monophysites,
both Egyptian and Ethiopian Copts and Syrian Jacobites, and a few Latin groups
who had settled there before the Crusades. Many Moslem communities had
emigrated when the Christian kingdom was set up. But there were still Moslem
villages round Nablus; and the population of many districts that were conquered
later by the Franks remained Moslem. In northern Galilee, along the road from
Banyas to Acre, the peasants were almost exclusively Moslem. Farther north, in
the Buqaia, the Nosairi mountains and the Orontes valley there were heretical
Moslem sects acknowledging Frankish rule. Along the southern frontier and in
Oultrejourdain there were nomad Bedouin tribes. Massacres and the fear of
massacre had greatly reduced the number of Jews in Palestine and Christian
Syria. Benjamin of Tudela was distressed to see how small their colonies were
when he visited the country in about 1170. In Damascus alone they were more
numerous than in all the Christian states.
But at some time during
the twelfth century they purchased the monopoly of dye-making from the Crown;
and glass manufacture was largely in their hands. A small Samaritan community
lived on at Nablus.

These various communities formed the basis of
the Frankish states; and their new masters did little to disturb them. Where
natives could prove their title to lands they were allowed to keep them; but in
Palestine and Tripoli, with the exception of estates owned by the native
churches, the landowners had almost all been Moslems who had emigrated as a
result of the Frankish conquest, leaving large territories in which the new
rulers could install their compatriot vassals. It seems that there were no free
villages left, such as had existed in earlier Byzantine times. Each village
community was tied to the land and paid a portion of its produce to the lord.
But there was no uniformity about this proportion. Over the greater part of the
country where the villagers followed a simple mixed agriculture the lord
probably expected enough produce to feed his household and his
poulains
and Turcopoles who lived grouped round the castle; for the native peasant was
not fitted to be a soldier himself. In the rich plains agriculture was run on a
more commercial basis. Orchards, vineyards and above all sugar-cane plantations
were exploited by the lord, and the peasant probably worked for little more
than his keep. Except in the lord’s household there was no slave labour, though
Moslem prisoners might temporarily be used on the King’s or the great lords’
estates. The villagers’ dealings with their lord were conducted through their
headman, called sometimes by the Arabic name of
rais,
sometimes by a
latinized form
regulus
. On his side the lord employed a compatriot as
his factor or
drogmannus
(dragoman), an Arabic-speaking secretary who
could keep the records.

The Fiefs of the
Kingdom

Though there was little change in the lives of
the peasants, the kingdom of Jerusalem was superficially reorganized according
to the pattern of fiefs that we call ‘feudal’. The royal domain consisted of
the three cities of Jerusalem, Acre and Nablus and, later, the frontier town of
Daron, and the territory around them. It had occupied a larger proportion of
the kingdom, but the first kings and especially Queen Melisende were lavish in
the gifts of land that they made to friends and to the Church and the religious
Orders. Further portions might be temporarily alienated as dowers for widowed
queens. The four chief fiefs of the kingdom were the County of Jaffa, usually
reserved for a cadet of the royal house; the principality of Galilee, which
owed its grandiose title to Tancred’s ambition; the Seigneurie of Sidon; and
the Seigneurie of Oultrejourdain. The holders of these fiefs seem to have had
their own high officers in imitation of the King’s. So also did the Lord of
Caesarea, whose fief was almost as important, though it ranked with the twelve
secondary fiefs. After Baldwin II’s reign tenure was based on hereditary right,
females succeeding in default of the direct male line. A tenant could only be
evicted by a decision of the High Court after some gross misdemeanour. But he
owed the King, or his superior lord, a fixed number of soldiers whenever it was
required of him; and it seems that there was no time-limit to their service.
The Count of Jaffa, the Lord of Sidon and the Prince of Galilee owed a hundred fully
armed knights, and the Lord of Oultrejourdain sixty.

The size of the fiefs was variable. The secular
fiefs had been set up by conquest and formed solid blocks of land. But the
estates of the Church and the Military Orders, which had grown chiefly through
charitable gifts and bequests or, in the case of the Orders, from strategical
convenience, were scattered throughout the Frankish territories. The unit in
which estates were measured was the village, or
casal,
or, very rarely,
a half or a third of a village; but villages also varied in size. Round Safed,
in northern Galilee, they seem to have averaged only forty male inhabitants,
but we hear of larger villages round Nazareth and smaller villages round Tyre,
where, however, the general population was thicker.

Many of the lay-lords also owned money-fiefs.
That is to say, they were granted a fixed money revenue from certain towns and
villages and in return had to provide soldiers in proportionate numbers. These
grants were heritable and almost impossible for the King to annul. As with the
landed fiefs he could only hope that the possessor would die without heirs, or
at least with only a daughter, for whom he had the right to choose a husband or
to insist on the choice of a husband out of the three candidates that he
proposed.

The Constitution

The royal cities were obliged to produce
soldiers, according to their wealth. Jerusalem was scheduled for sixty-one,
Nablus for seventy-five and Acre for eighty. But they were provided not by the
bourgeoisie but by the nobility resident in the city, or owners of
house-property there. The leading ecclesiastics also owed soldiers in respect
of their landed estates or house-property. The bourgeoisie paid its
contribution to the government in money taxes. Regular taxes were levied on
ports and exports, on sales and purchases, on anchorage, on pilgrims, on the
use of weights and measures. There was also the terraticum, a tax on bourgeois
property, of which little is known. In addition there might be a special levy
to pay for some campaign. In 1166 non-combatants had to pay ten per cent on the
value of their movables; and in 1183 there was a capital levy of one per cent
on property and debts from the whole population, combined with two per cent on
income from the ecclesiastical foundations and the baronage. Beside the produce
that their villages had to provide, every peasant owed a personal
capitation-tax to his lord; and Moslem subjects were liable to a tithe or
dime
which went to the Church. The Latin hierarchs continually tried to extend the
dime
to apply to Christians belonging to the heretic churches. They did not succeed,
though they forced King Amalric to refuse an offer made by the Armenian prince
Thoros II to send colonists to the depopulated districts of Palestine by their
insistence that they should pay the
dime.
But even with the
dime
the Moslems found the general level of taxation lower under the Franks than
under neighbouring Moslem lords. Nor were Moslems excluded from minor
governmental posts. They, as well as Christians, could be employed as
customs-officers and tax-collectors.