History of the Crusades is described in detail in the ancient chronicles, widely reported in the scientific works, and has become a favorite subject for the cinema. It has been less known that the Crusader invasion led to mass destruction and annihilation of the local Muslims and Christians: Orthodox, Jacobites, and Armenian Monophysites. It was from then on that they became a humiliated, despised minority, which currently is only suffering on their own territories. Very quickly, Arabic supplanted the Aramaic language of the indigenous population. Now only residents of three small villages north of Damascus speak it. The Crusades have shown what the Franks and their culture were really like – hateful of anything they were not acquainted with, thinking highly of themselves, whereas everyone else was inferior and simply despising anything that was not according to their liking.
The first who were rather worn out by the "friendship" with the West were the Byzantine rulers. Although initially it was them, who repeatedly asked the European monarchs to send aid to fight the Muslims, quickly enough the situation changed. As a result the emperor of Byzantium was among the first who congratulated Saladin with the expulsion of the Crusaders from Jerusalem. Franks have treated everyone else so badly that it came to the fact that local Christians have voluntarily opened the gates of the armies of the Mohammedans as the Franks simply got to them.
When the Crusaders returned and managed to gain victory the situation of the Christians and Muslims did not improve. As to the local Christians, the followers of the Latin Pope perceived their Eastern coreligionists as "defective" people. There could not even be a question of admitting them into the ruling class. The Franks saw in the Orthodox and Jacobites (Monophysites) only servants and tribute payers. This war caused all the new levies that completely befell on the shoulders of the local population without any discrimination - whether it was a Mohammedan Muslim or a follower of the Christ. When it came to armed clashes, then, closeted in their castles, the knights were not able to protect the land and civilians from the fire and the sword of the Saracens. The culmination of discontent has reached the new government, when came the news of the Egyptian city Bilbeis being captured by the Franks. Having mastered it after a three-day siege, the Knights waged a brutal massacre not only the Muslims but also Christians - the Copts. Having lost the support of the locals, the Crusaders could not count on the fact that they would have stayed there for too long.
In the Kingdom of Jerusalem, local Christians felt the arrogant and contemptuous attitude on the part of the alien Catholic clergy, who saw them as schismatics and even as heretics and tried to convert them to Catholicism. The economic situation of local farmers and artisans of the Christian religion, caught up in the bondage of the Frankish lords and their vassals, was not better than that of serfs-Muslims. In the difficult situation were the serfs and villeins, who had come to the East under the sign of the cross and having taken to the well-known labor of the farmer.
Frankish and Muslim feudals waged war, signed truces, led the diplomatic negotiations, entered into an agreement one with the other, however everywhere the peasants and artisans (both Muslims and Christians) suffered not only from the high rents and heavy corvee, but also from the devastation of fields and destruction of villages during the war. However, none of this changed the way Franks thought about and treated the locals. Turning to Usamah ibn-Munqidh and his thoughts about the Franks, we can see that the latter thought everyone to be inferior to them. The Franks saw both the Muslims and local Christians as dumber, less competent and virtually pagant. This was especially clear in terms of medicine. When a Christian healer from the locals came to one of the knights, who was badly injured the Frankish physician simply critized everything:
“They brought before me a knight in whose leg an abscess had grown; and a woman afflicted with imbecility. To the knight I applied a small poultice until the abscess opened and became well; and the woman I put on diet and made her humor wet. Then a Frankish physician came to them and said, "This man knows nothing about treating them."
And when the woman followed the advice of the Crusader:
“The physician then said, "The devil has penetrated through her head. He therefore took a razor, made a deep cruciform incision on it, peeled off the skin at the middle of the incision until the bone of the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman also expired instantly.”
Thus the Franks showed no sign of pity or compassion. Nonetheless, trying to make others look unprofessional, the Frank themselves did not possess the necessary medical knowledge in terms of healing the patient and making him better. Simply because someone else from the locals has already prescribed something was in itself an excuse to cancel everything and diagnose the patient with something else. This was the Franks’ way.”
The Crusades were only an excuse, or rather a means to gain something for oneself. As Ibn al-Athir described the Catholic clergy:
“The Grand Patriarch of the Franks left the city with the treasures from the Dome of the Rock, the Masjid al-Aqsa, the Church of the Resurrection and others, God alone knows the amount of the treasure; he also took an equal quantity of money.”
All they wanted and all they needed was personal gain and power. In no case were they worried about such elevated ideas as simply regaining the power over Jerusalem as the Holy City. No, the Crusaders showed their true intentions through the way they had treated everyone who was not like them. They collected tribute, harassed the people and in general made everyone hate them. Let alone the situation when the local Christian gladly opened the gates to the Saladin Muslim warriors so that they would drive the Franks out. Imad ad-Din in the History of the fall of Jerusalem wote:
“When Jerusalem was purified of the filth of the hellish Franks and had stripped off her vile garments to put on the robe of honour, the Christians, after paying their tax, refused to leave, and asked to be allowed to stay on in safety, and gave prodigious service and worked for us with all their might.”
The locals were even happy to pay the “tax for protection” to Muslims, whom in reality truth must be said they at first despised. However, seeing how their own “brothers in faith treated Christians, made them reconsider their loyalties.
Bibliography
Gibb, H. A. R. The life of Saladin: based on the works of Baha' ad-Din ibn Shaddad and 'Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani. London: Saqi, 2006.
Richards, D. The annals of the Saljuq Turks: selections from al-Kāmil fīʻl-Taʻrīkh of ʻIzz al-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr. New York, NY: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2010.
Madden, Thomas F. The concise history of the crusades. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishes, Inc, 2013.
Munqidh, Usāmah i., and Philip K. Hitti. An Arab-Syrian gentleman and warrior in the period of the Crusades: memoirs of Usāmah ibn-Munqidh (Kitāb al-Iʻtibār); translated from the original manuscript by Philip K. Hitti; with a new foreword by Richard W. Bulliet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
