The Oxford History of the Holy Land by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Aspects of Frankish Government and Society

The kingdom of Jerusalem imported a European model of social hierarchy, but it did not correspond exactly to that of feudal Europe. Apart from the clergy, there were only two classes below the monarch: the nobility who provided the main military forces of the kingdom, and the merchant class, known as the burgesses. Apart from the four ruling families of the Frankish states, almost all the nobles who came there were parvenus. But such newcomers could succeed, especially by shrewd marriage alliances. The notorious Reynald of Chatillon, whose escapades down the Red Sea shocked the Muslim world and whom Saladin had personally vowed to kill, made two advantageous marriages, and Guy de Lusignan became King of Jerusalem by marrying Queen Sibylla. The burgesses comprised all those who were not nobles. In the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem they made up the majority of the population, but in the other three Frankish states they were outnumbered by Eastern Christians. The burgesses were in charge of local small-scale trade, but not of the international commerce which was handled by the Italians.

Muslims and Jews were not debarred from entering the Holy City for the whole time of Frankish rule there. In due course they were allowed in to conduct business and to pray, as the evidence of the famous twelfth-century Arab writer of memoirs, Usama b. Munqidh, shows. No doubt, they were also needed by the conquerors to undertake crucial jobs which the Crusaders could not or would not do, serving as vendors, bath-attendants, dyers, and in other practical capacities.

There is evidence that the Franks carried on certain Muslim administrative practices that they found in place on their arrival. For example, they adopted the concept of the muhtasib (mehtesseb), an official whose duty it was to visit the markets daily and to ensure that proper weights and measures were used in the markets. Moreover, it would seem that, certainly in some Frankish areas at least, Muslims were required to pay a poll tax, to the Christian Frankish government, just like the poll tax (jizya) Muslim governments had imposed on their Christian and Jewish subjects in the pre-Crusading period. When writing about Nablus, Ibn Jubayr mentions that its Muslim subjects ‘lived as subjects of the Franks who annually collected a tax from them and did not change any law or cult of theirs’.

The population of the rural areas remained the indigenous inhabitants, Muslims, Eastern Christians, and Jews. They were responsible for the agriculture on which the Frankish cities depended. However, unlike in Europe, there were no close links between the lords who lived in the towns and the peasants who worked their lands. Ironically, too, the western European Christians, who had come out East to rescue their Eastern co-religionists, did not provide the latter with a better life. But it is difficult to discover how Muslims lived under Frankish rule. Neither Frankish nor Muslim chroniclers show any interest in the legal or other internal administration of the subject peoples. Isolated references cannot be taken to indicate widespread practices.

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