The middle class was a far more important body than in either the England or the France of that day. Palestine during the Crusades was not visited exclusively for religious or military reasons. Besides being a goal of pilgrimage, it was also what California or Australia was in the middle of the last century—a place where shrewd men of business could make money rapidly. Long before the first Crusade, there had been an Italian colony from Amalfi at Jerusalem, in the capture of which a Genoese detachment had assisted; colonies from Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Marseilles followed; in the monastery of La Cava is a deed of Baldwin IV, granting the ships of the monks access to the Syrian coast; we even find an “English quarter” at Acre[939]. Owing to the small numbers of the nobility, and the constant need of recruiting its ranks after its losses in battle, it was easy for the wealthy members of the middle class to enter the aristocracy, while, from the nature of its occupations, it was thrown into much closer contact with the natives. Mixed marriages were consequently commoner among the bourgeoisie, although Baldwin I and II and Josselin I of Edessa married Armenians, and Baldwin III and Amaury I Greeks.
The issue of these mixed marriages was known as the Poulains[940]. These half-castes, who corresponded to the Γασμοῦλοι of Frankish Greece, are not depicted in flattering terms by contemporary writers. Jacques de Vitry[941], the Bishop of Acre, describes them as “nourished in delights, soft and effeminate, more accustomed to baths than to battles, given to uncleanliness and luxury, dressed in soft garments like women, slothful and idle, cowardly and timid, little esteemed by the Saracens,” with whom they were ready to make peace, and from whom they were prone to accept assistance against their fellow Christians in their internecine quarrels. They were, alike by nature and interest, opposed to the arrival of fresh bodies of Crusaders, because war interfered with their business and interrupted their commercial relations with the Moslems, whose family life they imitated, veiling their wives, shutting them up in Oriental seclusion, and allowing them to go out thrice a week to the baths, but only once a year to church. This undue preference of cleanliness to godliness had disastrous effects, for it led the ladies to intrigue all the more to get out.
The worthy Bishop, speaking doubtless from personal experience, adds that the Poulains swindled the ingenuous pilgrims by overcharges at inns, by exorbitant prices in shops, and by giving them poor exchange. Worse still, they despised these Christian “boxers” and exiles, calling them fatuous idiots for their pains—for to the Poulains the Holy Land had no halo. They wore flowing robes, as even the first King of Jerusalem had done, while a coin of Tancred of Antioch represents him with a turban; and their whole outlook was Oriental rather than European. Indeed, Foucher, Baldwin I’s chaplain, remarked quite early how soon the Westerner became an Easterner in Palestine, and how the Crusader who married an Armenian or a Syrian soon forgot the land of his birth, adopting the comfortable maxim—“ubi bene, ibi patria.” Hence the marked contrast between the Frankish residents, and still more the Poulains, and the newly-arrived Crusaders. Hence, too, the often far too harsh judgments passed by the latter, especially after the second crusade in 1148. Like the Philhellenes, who went to Greece in the War of Independence, expecting to find the Peloponnese peopled by the superhuman heroes of Plutarch, instead of by men like themselves, they did not realise that poor human nature, even under conditions far more favourable, could not have possibly shone resplendent in the tremendous setting of the Holy Land. Consequently, they were often disillusioned, whereas men like William of Tyre, born and living in the country, were far fairer in their judgments, because they measured the Holy Land by the standard of other and more prosaic lands and not by the unattainable perfection of the greatest figure in all history, with whom it must ever be associated.
Society in the Crusading States was, it must be remembered, even apart from the Poulains, an extraordinary mixture of races. Even an Austrian army did not contain so many nationalities as the Crusaders. The Franks, as they were generically called, included Normans (at first the dominant race), French (who ousted the Normans, and thenceforth maintained their influence, culture and language, as they did nearly two centuries later at the Court of Athens), English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, Flemings, Italians, Germans (these not very numerous), and Scandinavians. Jacques de Vitry considered the Italians as the most satisfactory. He describes them as “prudent, temperate in eating and drinking, ornate and prolix in speaking, but circumspect in counsel, diligent in managing their own public affairs, and a very necessary element in the country, not only in battle, but at sea and in business, especially in the import trade. Since they are sober in food and drink, they live longer than other Western nations in the East”; and “they would be very formidable to the Saracens, if they would cease fighting among themselves.” Unfortunately, the rivalries between Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans were even more serious than the feuds between the Normans and the French; and the possession of the Church of St Saba at Acra (two pillars of which are now outside St Mark’s Venice) led to an Italian colonial war, in which we may find one cause of the final loss of the Holy Land. These Italian colonies, indeed, formed practically an imperium in imperio. Their respective quarters in the Syrian towns were the property of their governments, which appointed their officials (called “Consuls” in the Genoese and Pisan colonies, “Bailies” in the Venetian), often from among the most celebrated families of the Venetian Republic. Venice had also what we should call a Consul-General, a “Bailie” for all Syria; and both she and Genoa received a large portion of the harbour dues at Tyre and Acre. The Italian colonies had their own tribunals, like the consular courts in Turkey in our own day. Thus, Italian interests in the Holy Land were considerable and mainly commercial. To Venice and Genoa foreign affairs were—the affairs of their merchants.
The French and the English settlers were “less composed and more impetuous, less circumspect in action and more full of superfluity in food and drink, more lavish in expense and less cautious in talk, hasty in counsel, but more fervent in almsgiving, and more vehement in battle, and most useful for the defence of the Holy Land, and very formidable to the Saracens.”
Besides these various elements among the Crusaders, Palestine contained a large variety of indigenous races. Of these the native Christians of Arab speech, collectively known as Syrians, were the most favoured. Baldwin I gave them marked privileges at Jerusalem, and they could give evidence on oath. But they were of little use in war, except as archers; and are accused by Jacques de Vitry of betraying the secrets of the Christians to the Saracens, whose customs they largely imitated. The Maronites of the Lebanon were, however, noted for their military prowess and for the help which they rendered to the Franks.
Next to the Syrians came the Armenians, reckoned the best fighters of the Orientals, who, from the proximity of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia to the County of Edessa, often assisted the Frank Counts, and copied their feudal arrangements. It is noticeable that the Assizes of Antioch have come to us through the Armenian, and that the Court of Sis, like that of Jerusalem, had its seneschal, its marshal, and its constable. The Greeks were regarded as opponents of the Latins; and, when Saladin took Jerusalem, he allowed them to remain. But we could scarcely expect them to view with sympathy the annexation of the Greek states of Edessa (still governed by a Greek official at the time of the Latin conquest) and Antioch, which only fourteen years before had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. And Anna Comnena describes her father’s alarm at the march of large armies of foreigners across his rich and peaceful dominions who might (and in 1204 did) say with the Roman centurion: Hic manebimus optime!
Historians of the Moslem Arabs admit that, except in war time, Christians and Moslems lived together in harmony. There are examples of friendship, and even of adopted brotherhood, between Frank barons and Moslem emirs, who used to grant each other mutual permits to hunt. Every reader of The Talisman knows of the mutual courtesies between Richard I and Saladin, who sent medical aid to a sick opponent, but even more curious was the action of Guy de Lusignan, whose first act, on exchanging the Kingdom of Jerusalem for that of Cyprus, was to ask his former captor how to keep the island. Many Franks spoke Arabic; and it was even found necessary for commercial purposes to coin money bearing in Arabic characters the name of Mohammed and the date of the Moslem era! The merchants of Tyre and Acre, where these heretical coins were minted, protested that “business is business”; but the Papal Legate, who accompanied Louis IX on the sixth crusade, was so scandalised that he reported the matter to Pope Innocent IV, who excommunicated all who coined them. The wily merchants, however, circumvented his prohibition by minting similar coins with Christian inscriptions and the year of our Lord, both in Arabic, and with a cross in the centre of the coin. Of this hybrid currency, which began in 1251, there are several specimens. Like Frederick II in Sicily, the later Princes of Antioch and Counts of Tripolis had Saracen guards; and, under the name of Turcoples, given originally to Turks born of Greek mothers, Moslems entered the Christian armies as light cavalry. Of actual Turks there were few, for they had overrun Syria too short a time before the Crusades to take root in Palestine. Like the Franks, and like the Turks in the Balkans, they were only a garrison.
Special interest attaches to the Jews, at this period only a small section of the population, and, as usual, exclusively urban. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Palestine about 1173, found two hundred Jews in the ghetto at Jerusalem beneath the Tower of David, where they had a monopoly of the dyeing trade, and twelve, all dyers, at Bethlehem. The largest Jewish colonies were, as was natural, in the great commercial towns, Tyre and Acre; and the total in the whole of the Latin states was only 7000 to 8000. They could not hold land, and were classed below the Moslems, but practised successfully as doctors and bankers, and had their own judges. Many had come from the south of France. A few Samaritans still survived at Nâbulus, the biblical Shechem, and at Cæsarea.