The Franks’ conquest of a significant area of the eastern Mediterranean around the year 1100 brought, for almost the first time, large numbers of Muslims under Latin Christian control. In the immediate aftermath of these conquests by the First Crusade, Muslims living in the captured territory were subject to different treatment, which was usually dependent on how the area had been taken. In general, those towns captured by being stormed following a siege would be sacked and much of the population killed or enslaved. This happened at Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099, for example. The alternative, and which seems to have occurred more or less equally frequently, was that places were captured after the population surrendered. In those circumstances, the people were usually given the option of moving away to Muslim territory or of continuing to live there under Frankish rule. This comparatively tolerant way of treating the populations of those cities captured by surrender contrasts with popular ideas about crusading, even though this was fairly standard practice in medieval warfare, in both the Middle East and Europe. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about this way of treating the inhabitants of the conquered regions.

It is impossible to make precise comments about the numbers of people who chose to leave their homes and move as refugees to lands still under Muslim control because evidence for this is almost wholly lacking. However, it is possible to trace some general patterns. From the chronicle evidence, it seems that, initially, a majority of Muslims chose to leave. Small numbers even travelled as far as Baghdad, where they publicly lamented the Frankish conquests and lambasted the Muslim rulers there for their failure to respond in any meaningful way. Most, however, merely moved to the nearest convenient Muslim settlement. For example, those who escaped from around Antioch moved a few dozen miles east to Aleppo, while those from near Jerusalem moved a similar distance to the area around Damascus, or to Egypt. However, many of those who did so were evidently disappointed with their lot, as help from their co-religionists was much less forthcoming than they may have been expecting. This was in sharp contrast to the Franks, who started offering generous tax conditions to those Muslims who would live and work in their newly conquered lands.

Around the year 1000, Latin Europe was, generally speaking, a cultural, economic, and political backwater, with the glories of ancient Rome but a dimly recalled memory. The economy was stagnant and there was no centralized or centralizing state power strong enough to bring together the often warring petty states of the region. Consequently, there was little money or opportunity to keep the ancient knowledge alive, much less to create anything new. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, this had all changed. By then, Latin Europe contained many strong, centralized states whose economies were booming despite the fighting that plagued the continent almost incessantly. The knowledge of the ancients, once almost lost, had been rediscovered and developed further. Philosophy, scientific enquiry, and medical knowledge became revivified, permitting further discoveries that would eventually lead to Europeans striking out from their homelands to discover the rest of the world.

It was the institution of crusading that was in large part responsible for this transformation in the continent's condition, for it was via the crusading arenas that the knowledge of antiquity, kept alive in the Islamic world and in Byzantium, passed into Latin Europe. The primary arena in which this occurred was the Iberian Peninsula, which was drawn into the crusading movement during the twelfth century as the Christian kingdoms of the north expanded southward and conquered territory from the Muslims during the Reconquista. Yet scientific exchange also occurred in Sicily and southern Italy—where the eleventh- and twelfth-century Norman kingdom and the thirteenth-century Hohenstaufen state contained significant numbers of Muslims, as well as Greek-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians—and in the eastern Mediterranean, where the crusader states provided Latin Christians with close contact with the central Islamic lands for the first time. In these three areas, Latin Europeans enriched themselves by rediscovering knowledge in a number of different fields, eventually leading to the creation of the modern world.

Language Learning

The main mechanism by which all knowledge exchange between Christians and Muslims occurred was through the acquisition of at least one of the languages of the other religious group.

Muslim Perspectives on Latin Europeans

Over the course of the nearly 200 years of the crusading period, Muslim writers produced many works describing the Christians from Europe. Most of these were less than flattering. They describe them as physically unclean, sexually promiscuous, having strange and exotic funeral practices, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) extremely belligerent. To these parochial (to the Muslims) practices was added the belief that they were religiously backwards, stubborn adherents to a religion that had been superseded by Islam. Of more direct concern, however, was that they were also religiously unclean, with the resultant belief among many of the more fundamentalist Muslims that the Franks’ mere presence around Islamic sites was enough to pollute them spiritually.

These perspectives did not begin with the Crusades. Instead, they had their origins centuries earlier, and on two main bases. One of these were various Islamic texts, such as the Quran, hadith (the supposed sayings of Muhammad), and biographies (sira) of Muhammad, all of which contain sometimes strongly anti-Christian sentiments. These had originally been employed against the Greek Orthodox Byzantines but were taken and then applied to the Latin Christian Franks upon their appearance. The other consisted of primarily geographical works composed by ancient Greek authorities, such as Pliny and Strabo, which had been translated into Arabic and then incorporated into the Islamic worldview. In the latter,, a primary feature was the theory of the climes, which asserted that where a people lived in the world determined their appearance and behaviour. The Muslim world was in the third and fourth climes—the best ones—and so they viewed themselves as being the most attractive, cultured, sophisticated, and intelligent. The Latin Europeans, on the other hand, were in the fifth and sixth climes and so were stereotyped by Muslim writers as ugly, lazy, stupid, and backwards, in what was little more than a racist trope.

One such example can be seen in the following words by Said b. Ahmad, who was writing in the late eleventh century:

Of all the events of the medieval period, it is surely the Crusades which provoke the strongest reaction and continue to have the greatest political impact today. To some, they denote a sense of adventure and a noble quest or the actions of people motivated by sincere religious conviction, while to others they were a forerunner of the colonial period and the oppression of indigenous populations by western Europeans. What these viewpoints have in common, however, is that they view the Crusades primarily as a period of violence intensified by religious fervour, which both drove and resulted from the military conflict. However, a more careful examination of the two hundred years of the crusading period reveals that conflict was in fact rare. Battles were risky and armies were expensive. Instead, for most of the era a mutual accommodation was found between the various groups. This is rarely discussed in modern accounts of the Crusades, yet it is a crucial aspect of them for it demonstrates how, even in times of supposedly the most fervent religious conflict, people usually merely got on with their lives. The purpose of this book is to explore this underexamined aspect of the Crusades in order to demonstrate that they not only resulted in violent conflict, but also produced some of the most tolerant and multicultural spaces of the whole medieval period.

The History of the Crusades

It was on November 27, 1095 that, according to traditional scholarship, it all began. A speech, one of the most significant and influential in history, outside the French town of Clermont was its catalyst. There, the Pope, Urban II, exhorted the people of Western (“Latin”) Europe to leave their homes, travel to the Holy Land, and take control of the Christian holy sites, and particularly Jerusalem, from the Muslims. The effect was electric. Tens of thousands of people heeded the call and in 1096 joined the armies heading east under the banner of the Cross. These armies marched through the Christian Byzantine Empire and then Muslim lands in Anatolia, fighting off the Turks who tried to stop them. Having arrived in northern Syria, in October 1097 they besieged the great city of Antioch, which was notable as having been one of the four main centres of the Church and the place where the followers of Christ were first called Christians.

In his account of his journey through Frankish territory in the eastern Mediterranean in the early 1180s, the Spanish Muslim Ibn Jubayr relates a story he had been told of a Muslim convert to Christianity. This Muslim was originally from Buna, in modern Algeria, and:

Ibn Jubayr's rather bigoted comments make little sense from the everyday perspective of the eastern Mediterranean in the crusading period, however, because such conversions were a regular occurrence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They were so regular, in fact, that they elicit barely a comment from most of the other writers who mention them. Muslims could, and did, convert to Christianity, while Christians could, and did, convert to Islam. This chapter will briefly explore some examples of people who changed their religion and why they did so, highlighting that the Frankish presence in the Holy Land actually helped facilitate conversions in both directions and thereby permitted, in some ways, a larger degree of religious freedom than existed at other times in the region.

Religious Conversion during the Crusading Period

The Latin chronicler of the First Crusade Albert of Aachen relates that, as early as August 1099, just a month after the capture of Jerusalem, the ruler of the city—Godfrey of Bouillon— had in his entourage a former Muslim who fought alongside the king at the Battle of Ascalon, in which the crusading army defeated a Muslim relief force from Egypt. Godfrey had persuaded the Muslim to convert to Christianity, and for years afterwards he remained a loyal servant to the rulers of Jerusalem. Albert's report is just one of dozens of instances of conversions by Muslims to Christianity that are mentioned in passing in the sources.

The Crusades have traditionally been viewed through the lenses of military conflict and the activities—military, religious, or political—of the elite men of action (they were almost always, though not exclusively, men) on both sides. This should be seen as a consequence of the fact that the sources on which we rely for information were almost exclusively written by and, especially, for members of the same elite groups. Furthermore, the circumstances in which they were composed means that conflict, rather than co-operation, is primarily celebrated, and even comparatively tolerant writers such as Ibn Wasil felt the need to clearly justify why his masters were failing to attack the Franks.

However, these attitudes cannot be said to have been shared by the remainder of society, as indeed there is evidence to suggest that those outside the urban and educated elites held very different priorities. The nature of the sources means it is comparatively difficult to see them, but they are there, whether in throwaway remarks in a chronicle or in the various comments of the two writers who provide us with the clearest evidence of day-to-day life in the eastern Mediterranean during this time, Usama ibn Munqidh and Ibn Jubayr. The evidence thus suggests that, alongside the set-piece conflict that dominates the narrative of the crusading period, there was a parallel temporality in which Latin Christians and Muslims lived and worked alongside each other. This meant that, in terms of diplomacy, the exchange of scientific and religious knowledge, everyday life, and religious conversion, there were significant levels of interaction, communication, and relationship building between Latin Christians and Muslims, as well as other groups such as Jews. These interactions, in turn, helped to create conditions for the swift exchange of further mutual knowledge. Accordingly, away from the bombastic propaganda of much of the source material, everyday life in and around the crusader states was as tolerant and mutually co-operative as anywhere else in the medieval world, and perhaps predominantly more so.

In October 1244, an enormous army assembled outside Damascus, the largest urban area in southern Syria. This force was composed of troops from both that Muslim city and from the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, whose capital at the time was the coastal city of Acre. An eyewitness, the local Muslim preacher and writer Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi, provides the following description of what happened to members of the Muslim army:

This combined Franco-Muslim army was the product of an alliance between the Ayyubids of Damascus and the Franks of Jerusalem in the face of a double threat to both of them: the Ayyubids of Egypt and the Khwarazmians, a group of nomads from the east who had fled westward in the face of the Mongol onslaught. The culmination of this episode was the battle of La Forbie (known in Arabic as Harbiyya), in which the Franco-Muslim alliance was crushed by the allied Egyptians and Khwarazmians.

Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi's words suggest the indignation that he felt at seeing the troops of his own city battle other Muslims alongside the detested, infidel, enemy Franks. Yet, as he would have known well as a historian, such a situation was hardly unprecedented, for Muslims and Franks had been forging strategic alliances with and fighting alongside each other ever since the arrival of the latter in the eastern Mediterranean in the late eleventh century. Indeed, such an alliance had been suggested by a group of Muslims as early as the siege of Antioch, during the First Crusade. In this case, according to the eyewitness Latin chronicler Raymond of Aguilers, an embassy from the Fatimid rulers of Egypt travelled to northern Syria and proposed to the Franks an alliance against the Turks, who had conquered the majority of formerly Fatimid lands in Syria in the second half of the eleventh century.