Our way lay through continuous farms and ordered settlements, whose inhabitants were all Muslims, living comfortably with the Franks. God protect us from such temptation. They surrender half their crops to the Franks at harvest time, and pay as well a poll-tax of one dinar and five qirat for each person. Other than that, they are not interfered with, save for a light tax on the fruits of trees. Their houses and all their effects are left to their full possession.

This account seems to indicate that a large, sedentary Muslim population lived in relative peace within Latin Palestine, paying a per-capita levy (like the poll-tax imposed by Islamic rulers on their non-Muslim subjects) and a produce tax. Surviving evidence for the level of taxation imposed within Islamic polities around this same time suggests that Muslim peasants and farmers were no worse off living under Frankish Christian rule. In fact, Ibn Jubayr even suggested that Muslims were more likely to be treated with ‘justice’ by a ‘Frankish landlord’ and to suffer ‘injustice’ at the hands of ‘a landlord of [their] own faith’. This did not mean that he approved of peaceful coexistence or abject submission to Latin rule. At one point he noted that ‘there can be no excuse in the eyes of God for a Muslim to stay in any infidel county, save when passing through it’. But principled objections such as this actually lend further credence to the positive observations he chose to record.⁸⁶

Ibn Jubayr also reported that subjected Muslims had access to mosques and rights to prayer in Acre and Tyre. On the basis of this sliver of evidence, it is impossible to state categorically that all Muslims living in Outremer enjoyed similar devotional liberty. Broadly speaking, the most that can be suggested is that outnumbered Frankish settlers had a vested interest in keeping their native subjects content and in situ, and the conditions of life for indigenous eastern Christians and Muslims did not prompt widespread civil unrest or migration. By the contemporary standards of western Europe or the Muslim East, non-Franks living in the crusader states were probably not particularly oppressed, exploited or abused.⁸⁷

One mode of contact that undoubtedly brought together Levantine Franks and Muslims was trade. There were sure signs of vibrant commercial enterprise during the first hundred years of Latin settlement. Italian merchants from Venice, Pisa and Genoa played leading roles in this process, establishing enclaves in Outremer’s great ports and coastal cities and creating a complex network of trans-Mediterranean trade routes. These pulsing arteries of commerce, linking the Near East with the West, enabled Levantine products (such as sugar cane and olive oil) and precious goods from the Middle East and Asia to reach the markets of Europe. As yet, the bulk of trade flowing out of the Orient still passed through Egypt, but, even so, Outremer’s economic development proved extraordinarily lucrative: it paved the way for cities like Venice to become the leading mercantile powers of the Middle Ages; and through customs and levies, it also helped to stock the treasuries of Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem. This does not mean that the Latin settlements in the East should be regarded as exploitative European colonies. Their establishment and survival may have depended, in part, upon the likes of Genoa; but they were not set up, in the first instance, as economic ventures. Nor did they serve the interests of ‘western homelands’ as such, because the financial benefits accrued by the ‘state’ tended to stay in the East.

The passage of goods from the Muslim world to the Mediterranean ports of the Frankish Levant was crucial not only to the Latins. It also became one of the linchpins of the wider Near Eastern economy: vital for the livelihoods of Muslim merchants plying the caravan routes to the East; critical to the incomes of Islam’s great cities, Aleppo and Damascus. These shared interests produced interdependency and promoted carefully regulated (and thus essentially ‘peaceful’) contact, even at times of heightened political and military conflict. In the end–even in the midst of holy war–trade was too important to be disrupted.

Historians often present 1120 as a year of crisis and tension in the Levant. After all, the Field of Blood was fresh in the memory, and it was in this year that the council of Nablus prescribed harsh punishments for intercultural fraternisation. But in 1120 Baldwin II also instituted scything commercial tax cuts in Jerusalem. According to Fulcher of Chartres (who was then living in the Holy City), the king declared that ‘Christians as well as Saracens were to have freedom to come in or go out to sell whensoever and to whomsoever they wished.’ According to Muslim testimony, around the same time, Il-ghazi–the victor at the Field of Blood–abolished tolls in Aleppo and agreed terms of truce with the Franks. The degree of coordination between these two supposed enemies is impossible to determine, but both were obviously making strident attempts to stimulate trade. In fact, the tenor and scope of Latin–Muslim commercial contacts appear largely to have been unaffected by the rising tide of jihadi enthusiasm within Islam. Even Saladin, the ‘champion’ of the holy war, forged close links with the seaborne merchants of Italy when he became ruler of Muslim Egypt. Keen to promote profitable trade and to secure ready supplies of shipbuilding timber (which was difficult to source in North Africa), he endowed the Pisans with a protected commercial enclave in Alexandria in 1173.⁸⁸

Knowledge and culture

Another form of exchange was also taking place in Outremer during the twelfth century: the transmission of Muslim and eastern Christian knowledge and culture among members of the Latin intellectual elite. The evidence for this form of ‘dialogue’ in Jerusalem is limited, but in Antioch, with its long-embedded traditions of scholasticism, the situation was quite different.⁸⁹ The city and its environs were home to numerous eastern Christian monastic houses, predating the crusades and famed as centres of intellectual life. Here, some of the great minds of the Christian world gathered to study and translate texts on theology, philosophy, medicine and science that were written in languages such as Greek, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian. With the creation of the crusader states, Latin scholars naturally began to congregate in and around the city. In about 1114 the famous philosopher and translator Adelard of Bath visited, perhaps staying for two years. A decade later, Stephen of Pisa–the Latin treasurer of the Church of St Paul–was carrying out groundbreaking studies. In the course of the 1120s he produced some of the most important Latin translations ever to originate in the Levant. Stephen was most famous for his translation of al-Majusi’s Royal Book–an extraordinary compendium of medical lore–that later helped to advance knowledge in western Europe.⁹⁰

The extent to which this medical knowledge influenced actual practice in the Latin Levant is debatable. Usama ibn Munquidh wrote with relish about the peculiar and sometimes distinctly alarming techniques used by Frankish doctors. In one case a sick woman was diagnosed as having ‘a demon inside her head’. Usama apparently watched as the attending Latin physician first shaved her head and then ‘took a razor and made a cut in her head in the shape of a cross. He then peeled back the skin so that the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman died instantaneously.’ Usama concluded dryly: ‘I left, having learned about their medicine things I had never known before.’ Latin settlers in the crusader states seem to have recognised that Muslims and eastern Christians possessed advanced medical knowledge; and some, like the Frankish royal family in Jerusalem during the second half of the twelfth century, retained the services of non-Latin doctors. But there were some centres of excellence operated by western Christians, including the massive hospital in Jerusalem dedicated to St John and run by the Hospitaller Military Order.