In many studies published in the last forty years the common analysis concludes that Frankish rural settlement in the Levant was very limited. The Franks, it was argued, confined themselves almost exclusively to the large cities and fortresses and engaged to a very limited extent in agricultural activities. “Let it be stated from the beginning,” says Joshua Prawer, “the Crusaders' society was predominantly, almost exclusively, an urban society.” The Frankish urban society and the Muslim rural one were depicted as being almost totally segregated and as having very limited social, cultural, and geographical relations.

The interpretation which had prevailed until the end of the 1940s presented, while relying on the same sources, a totally different picture of Frankish society and of its relations with the local communities. This interpretation assumed that the Franks had become highly assimilated with the local Oriental communities and that an integrated “Franco-Syrian society” consisting of the ruling Franks and of their autochthonous subjects was created during the period of the Crusades. As E. G. Rey wrote, the Franks and their indigenous subjects lived together not only in the countryside, but in the cities, in the mountains, in the ports, and even in the ranks of the Occidental army.

The basic assumptions of this interpretation were rejected already in the 1950s by R. C. Smail and J. Prawer. Smail was the first to oppose the basic assumptions of the new model and those of the earlier model.