Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure

by C. R. Conder

During the prosperous period of the kingdom, the Bedawîn, and even the wild Ismaileh assassins, were reduced to tribute; and the confidence which the foreign rulers felt in their subjects is evinced by the institution of the Turcopoles, or native irregular cavalry, who were commanded by an officer known as Grand Turcopoler.

The Christian princes remained, moreover, on friendly terms with the Sultans of Aleppo and Damascus. Mutual permission to hunt in each other’s territory was often accorded, and a special coinage was struck for trade between the Frank and the Syrian, having on one side the Latin cross, and on the other an Arab inscription.

It was not through any effort of the native population of the kingdom that this power of a Christian state in a Moslem land was shattered and finally destroyed. The impulse came from without, from the free Arabs who had never been conquered; and we may well inquire the reason for the decay of Frank influence, and for the demoralisation of Frank energy and courage, which are only too evident in reading the history of the Latin kingdom.

We shall perhaps not be far wrong in supposing that the effects of climate were among the most important causes of the final overthrow of the Frank power. In the earlier Crusading times, the forces of the conquerors were constantly recruited with fresh blood from the West. Foucher of Chartres describes the eagerness with which men hurried to colonise the newly-won territory, but he also tells us of the intermarriages with Armenian, Greek, and even Moslem women, and we know that the children of such marriages (the Pullani of the Crusading chroniclers) reproduced, as in our own times, the vices and weaknesses of either race rather than the virtues of their parents, and that the fatal influence of an enervating climate must have even robbed the children of unmixed blood, brought up in Syria, of the vigour and energy of their fathers nourished in a colder climate.

As the attention of Europe became self-centred, and as the annual levies from the West gradually dwindled and the kingdom was left to care for itself, a generation of enervated and dissipated voluptuaries succeeded the hardy conquerors of the country, and the Christian power decayed through want of the constant infusion of fresh blood into its exhausted veins. This again furnishes a lesson of the inevitable failure of foreign colonisation, just as the earlier years of the twelfth century present us an example of the success of the Latin administration of an Oriental state.

So unchanged is the East in our own times, that the revival of a semi-feudal method of government on the lines of the Jerusalem constitution of the thirteenth century, might be more in harmony with the requirements of the native race than would be any reproduction of our own system of constitutional rule. The scheme for reform in Asia Minor which we have seen frustrated by the corruption and suspicion of Turkish Pachas bore indeed, in some respects, a very striking resemblance to the feudal system of the Latin kingdom, and might for this reason have proved well suited to the object in view. The institutions of mixed courts and of a native force officered by Europeans, remind us of the Cour de la Fonde and of the Turcopoles; but in such a scheme the source of failure, which lay in hereditary government, would have been avoided; and as in India, so in the Levant, the strength of the Franks would have been constantly recruited by the arrival of fresh governors, fresh officers, and fresh judges from England, and thus by a constant infusion of new blood among the staff of the government.

It would, however, appear that some fresh crisis must supervene before any such system of English or European administration can be expected in Palestine, and it is to the country itself that we must look for indications of the immediate future in store for the Holy Land.

The power of Turkey is crumbling before our eyes. The region extending southwards, from the Taurus along the Mediterranean coast, contains no indigenous Turkish population. It is inhabited by races mainly of Semitic origin, and it has been held by the right of the sword since the year 1516, when the Turkish Sultan Selim defeated at Aleppo the Mameluke Sultan, whose ancestors had won Syria from the successors of Saladin.

On every side we see the nationalities once conquered by the Turks recovering their freedom and the right of self-government. We hear of Panslavism, Panhellenism, and Albanian independence; but we are apt to forget that the Arab races in Western Asia occupy a territory of 1,000,000 square miles, whereas the dominions of Turkey in Asia-Minor (where a large portion of the native population is Turkish) extend over not quite 300,000 square miles. Thus more than half the Asiatic dominions of the Sultan are inhabited by a race not of common stock with the Turks, and when once the power of the sword is lost, no further claim exists on the allegiance of the Arabs any more than on that of Greeks or Armenians, Bulgarians or Servians.

It may perhaps be argued that as the head of the Moslem faith the Khalif of the Prophet has still a spiritual right to the supremacy of Islam, but Moslems are better acquainted than the majority of Christians with the bearing of this question. How, we may ask, can a Turkish Sultan claim to be the representative of the Arabian Prophet? The history is a repetition of that of the French Maire du Palais Pepin and his liege lord the Faineant.