The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives by Carole Hillenbrand

Author:Carole Hillenbrand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

CHAPTER SIX

Aspects of Life in the Levant in the Crusading Period

Peace was not, however, the favourite subject of the Muslim historians – nor perhaps of any historian.1 (Gabrieli)

Introduction

IN THE PERIOD before 1100 there had been two major frontier areas where Christians and Muslims could and did exert influence on each other’s society: the frontier between Muslim al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain, and the frontier between Muslim Sicily and Christian Italy. An interesting frontier society would soon also develop between Muslim Anatolia and Christian Byzantium. In such border areas a chivalric code developed in which both sides often respected the other during protracted periods of mutual warfare.

The Crusading situation was different. Despite being linked by sea with Europe, the Crusader states were set amidst a Muslim world whose population vastly outnumbered theirs. Crusaders from northern Europe who arrived in Syria and Palestine in 1099 represented a novel phenomenon. They brought a kind of war which was markedly different from the often almost stylised skirmishes on the long-established frontiers of Islam in Spain, eastern Anatolia and southern Italy. The First Crusade crashed into the very heartlands of Islam, and the establishment of four Crusader states in the Levant therefore presents the historian with an opportunity to study the socio-cultural interplay between the Muslims and the ‘barbarians’ from Europe over a period of two centuries. How were these European, Christian, feudal ‘proto-colonies’ going to co-exist with the Muslims who almost literally surrounded them and against whom they were numerically a tiny force? And how did the Muslims, their ‘victims’, view them close up, as opposed to their preconceptions of the denizens of the frozen, barbarian lands of the north?

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