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which were held regularly from Thursday to Sunday, the shoppers passed by a series of smaller villages and inns lining the two roads that approached the township.16
Dunaysar seems to be typical of many of the small townships dotting the region, some of them established by the Crusaders in order to maintain their domains and to attract Christian settlers from Europe. Men and women who emigrated to the east could settle in newly established villages such as Qalansuwa, which is in the hinterland just behind Caesarea, and Qubeiba, half a day's walk from Jerusalem. Typically two storey houses of European style were built on either side of a long, wide street. At the end of the street was an administrative centre and town square. The administrative centre contained a courthouse, a defensive tower, and a series of storerooms. Between the houses and the centre stood the small parish church. Here, there was a simulacrum of European life in the semi desert of the Holy Land, designed to ease the culture shock for new settlers.
Old inhabitants of the land had few kind words for these later arrivals: the emir of Shaizar amongst others saw the earliest crusaders as the elite, who settled down on their newly won vast domains and set about preserving their considerable fortunes. They were content with their lot, seeking calm and peace, and soon all but forgot their original country.
After them, he bemoaned, there came swarms of pilgrims of every sort and quality, drawn to the east by the lure of booty, seeking an easy fortune, full of ambition and appetites, and devoid of scruples. The older settlers they treated as cowards and traitors. Whereas the first settled amongst the Moslems from the start and cultivated friendship, becoming good neighbours and honest partners, the recent arrivals were arrogant, brutal and ill mannered.17
Such settlers - whose intolerance became legendary - came from all over the European world.
At Beit Jibrin, for example, 32 families arrived from Europe in about 1153, encouraged by liberal land holding arrangements. They included settler families from the Auvergne, Gascony, Lombardy, Poitou, Catalonia, Burgundy, Flanders, Carcassone, as well as two from Jerusalem.18
Each settler in this settlement was given over 60 hectares of land to build upon and cultivate, in return for some cash payments, an annual rental in produce, and a tithe. As well, they were encouraged to plunder the Saracens, in order to pay a share of their rental in loot.
Special laws were passed to deal with what were anticipated as the two main social problems of such a colony: thieving of each other's produce, and adultery. The importance of these two causes of social disruption is to be seen in that the remainder of the colony's judicial institutions were adopted in their entirety from traditional law. Theft was to be punished by confiscation and imprisonment: adultery by lashing and expulsion. Obviously, the latter was considered to be the more serious offence.18
Yet another kind of settlement involving women were large scale settlements carried out by wealthy churches, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre's foundation at al-Bira. Here, the Church used some of its funds to set up a colony, mainly of free families. By the middle of the twelfth century, this consisted of ninety families engaged in vineyard cultivation. Amongst the settlers were "fratres and sorores", people who surrendered themselves and their land to the Church. These brothers and sisters were people who enjoyed special protection under the auspices of various Church groups, such as the Templars. Their exact relationship to the Church is unclear, but it is possible that the men would serve as sergeants in time of war, and otherwise the families would be given the sort of protection owed by a feudal lord to a vassal. In return for their devotion, the church allowed them to live in their own houses for the rest of their lives. It is apparent that this standing could apply to a woman as well as a man. Thus, Prewar cites the example of a case in the court of the Patriarch in 1134-5 involving the Church of the Holy Sepulchre's client Maria, as well her husband Roger, and her daughter's husband Bernard.20
And women as well as men sometimes gave the Church land on which to establish religious foundations and colonies. Thus, in 1180, Ahuhisa, lady of Palmarea, gave the abbot of the monastery on Mount Tabor estates and privileges in the area.21
The second wave of settlers also gradually adopted some of the Palestinian customs of dress and life, so that the Bishop of Acre came to criticise them as soft and effeminate, more used to baths than battles, unclean and riotous, and dressed in womanish soft robes.
Such luxuriousness, as many of the Westerners became Easterners, was in the minds of many Church commentators in itself an explanation for the eventual destruction of Outremer - a Divine punishment for a modern Sodom and Gomorrah.
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