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"Therefore why should one return to the Occident who has found the Orient like this?"2
However, Fulcher's famous description of the comfortable transformation of the Crusaders as they colonized and were colonized by their new home hides a neat human problem.
Christians and Saracens were anathema to each other. Each regarded the other as spawn of the devil and various kinds of infection crawling about the earth.
Yet each side was intensely curious about every aspect of each other, including and perhaps especially sexuality.
The result scarcely needs emphasising. Lurid descriptions of romantic liaisons and curious sexual practices resulting between the men and women of Christendom and Islam are recounted elsewhere.
And the Christians had another serious problem involving sexuality. If no more than one in ten of the Crusaders was female, how were they to increase the population they so desperately needed in order to defend and maintain their new possessions?
Cohabitation seems to have begun almost immediately upon the beginning of the conquest, as is suggested in the story of the wayward nun. And this illicit conjunction of the sexes continued throughout the history of the Kingdom. A memorial plaque on a tomb in Erfurt Cathedral, for example, shows Ernest of Gleichen Count of Thuringia between two women. One - at his right hand - clasps to her breast what is apparently a psalter. The woman on the left is empty handed. Tradition has it that Ernest had been captured on Crusade in 1228. He met and fell in love with an Islamic woman who helped him to freedom. The happy couple returned to Europe, and to honour his promises of love, a menage a trois was set up by Ernest with the Christian and Islamic ladies, until his death in 1246.3
Male Franks who settled in the East married where they could to local Syrians, Armenians, even Moslems - the hint is that the conversions may have been rather superficial - and to European women who followed the first wave of conquest looking for new homes and new lives.
Again, Fulcher suggests another historical problem: how did the men and women of these different cultures converse with each other in order to make their marriages work? The answer seems to be that a new language was created through cross cultural collisions of all kinds, the lingua franca or language of the Franks, a kind of pidgin. Fulcher says that ... "Words of different languages have become common property known to each nationality."4
The law belatedly recognised intermarriage as a fait accompli, and gave the unions a degree of legality, as witnessed in a thirteenth century treatise on law as it applied to the middle class settlers of the towns: The Book of the Courts of the Burgesses (Livre de Assises de Bourgeouis). This study appears to have been written by a legal practitioner living in Acre in around 1240, and may well have been a commentary on legal practices which became customary about 100 years earlier. One of its provisions deals with the question of mixed marriages, where either the bride or groom was infidel. Taking a very realistic attitude, it provides merely that three conditions are necessary for such a marriage to be legal, whether it be of lady, knight or burgess:
-that the partners be of a suitable age (13 for both male and female);
-that consent is given;
-and that the degrees of relationship are observed.5
Such practices reflect the gradual development of a culture specifically that of the Crusaders out of the chaos of Palestine as it was at the end of the conquest.
And this chaos was immense. Chroniclers hint at the insanity of murder that occurred in the streets of Jerusalem: at first, all was a haze of blood and plunder. Arab or Syrian, man or woman, aged or infant, all fell before the Frankish sword in three unholy days of brigandage.
By contrast, the chroniclers' words seem pale and listless when talking about the hangover that came in the days after the party of death.
Fulcher writes that following the great slaughter in Jerusalem, which he graphically delineates, the mob broke into the houses of the citizens, seizing whatever they found. They then squatted in the house or palace, claiming it as their own.
Thus, the poor became wealthy.
Others raced from site to site, looking for relics. A Syrian revealed a family treasure, a splinter of the Cross, which had been long hidden. Set in gold and silver and fashioned into a cross, the relic was gleefully seized upon by the Crusaders, who bore it triumphantly to the Sepulchre, all the time giving thanks to God for His treasure.6
After the orgy of blood and slaughter around the Sepulchre, and the outpouring of fervour associated with the completion of the pilgrimage, the men and women only gradually began to awake to the task of settling what they had conquered.
The outcome was an untidy fusion of Byzantine, Arabic and Western styles of life which was peculiar to the Crusading Kingdoms.7
At the same time, the Franks stamped their own way of life on their new land, often violently, sometimes peaceably.
Gigantic Roman statues were dismantled and reused as foundations for new buildings: the head of one ancient sculpture required four horses to drag it to its new resting place. The supposed tomb of Christ itself was not immune: souvenir hunters began immediately to chip away bits of it as souvenirs, some of them complaining about the hardness of the rock! 8
While the settlers began to make their colony a concrete reality, intellectuals began to create literary versions of society, borrowing ideas from their Franks homeland. Archbishop William of Tyre wrote history of a standard that has stood the test of the centuries, while law makers embodied their vision of society in works such as the Assize of Jerusalem.
At the same time, one senses the culture shock that comes with any attempt at colonising a foreign land, coupled with the dawning realisation once the mists of religious fervour had settled that the Holy Land was no Paradise.
The Jerusalem described by the pilgrim Fulcher is not Eden, but a real settlement on the edge of survival:
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