In the wake of Jerusalem's fall in 1099, the crusading armies of western Christians known as the Franks found themselves governing not only Muslims and Jews but also local Christians, whose culture ...and traditions were a world apart from their own. The crusader-occupied swaths of Syria and Palestine were home to many separate Christian communities: Greek and Syrian Orthodox, Armenians, and other sects with sharp doctrinal differences. How did these disparate groups live together under Frankish rule? InThe Crusades and the Christian World of the East, Christopher MacEvitt marshals an impressive array of literary, legal, artistic, and archeological evidence to demonstrate how crusader ideology and religious difference gave rise to a mode of coexistence he calls "rough tolerance." The twelfth-century Frankish rulers of the Levant and their Christian subjects were separated by language, religious practices, and beliefs. Yet western Christians showed little interest in such differences. Franks intermarried with local Christians and shared shrines and churches, but they did not hesitate to use military force against Christian communities. Rough tolerance was unlike other medieval modes of dealing with religious difference, and MacEvitt illuminates the factors that led to this striking divergence. "It is commonplace to discuss the diversity of the Middle East in terms of Muslims, Jews, and Christians," MacEvitt writes, "yet even this simplifies its religious complexity." While most crusade history has focused on Christian-Muslim encounters, MacEvitt offers an often surprising account by examining the intersection of the Middle Eastern and Frankish Christian worlds during the century of the First Crusade.
Il saggio delinea l'approccio personale dell'autore al significato del martirio per l'ordine francescano. Il libro in discussione è nato partendo da ricerche precedenti sulle crociate e sulla ...presenza dei Latini nel Vicino Oriente. L'autore risponde brevemente ad alcune delle critiche avanzate dai tre lettori, spiegando perché ha privilegiato fonti narrative su martíri compiuti in terre islamiche. Conclude con l'augurio che il libro possa portare a nuove riflessioni sui nessi tra martirio, santità, ordine francescano, evangelizzazione e crociata nei secoli finali del medioevo.
Twelfth-century narrative accounts in Armenian, Syriac and Latin recount a number of processions in Syria and Palestine in which both Eastern Christians and Latins participated. Processions were one ...of the many ways by which the Franks expressed their political dominance over the urban (and likely also the rural) landscape, but it was also a way that all Christian communities used to express and even construct relationships among themselves. Scholars often assume that the procession performs (in a Durkheimian sense) the work of creating or displaying unity. Yet the scattered sources of the twelfth-century Frankish Levant suggest that this is only one of the functions an inter-confessional procession can play. As common were processions that delimited, separated and hierarchised communities.
When William, the Archbishop of Tyre and Chancellor of the kingdom of Jerusalem wrote his chronicles in the late 12th century, a word for crusade had not yet been created. William's writings and ...sermons did much to shape the memory of Latin Christians in both the Levant and Western Europe, authoring a history of the Islamic rule in the Levant
For Christians of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, the First Crusade and subsequent settlements brought confusion to the political and theological order of the world. Previously, the world existed ...as a stable balance between two divinely established forces: the divinely established empire of the Romans (the Byzantines), and the empire of the Muslims, equally established by divine providence, but intended to serve as the hammer with which God punished errant Christians. Western Christians (Franks) were peripheral to this world; at the time of the First Crusade, the Franks were commonly perceived as Byzantine mercenaries. After the Franks conquered Jerusalem, the city central to providential history, Armenians and Jacobites began to ask: who were the true Romans? The term in both Armenian and Syriac texts began to be applied to the Franks instead of the Byzantines, particularly in apocalyptic and providential schemes of history.
Beginning in 1220, groups of Franciscan friars traveled to Muslim lands, where they testified to the truth of Christian preaching and denounced the lies of Muhammad and Islam. In doing so, the friars ...intentionally broke Islamic law and were executed. The friars were proclaimed as martyrs, and the stories that preserve their memory valorized the desire for martyrdom rather than the successful conversion of Muslims, serving to emphasize the distinction between the Christian and Muslim worlds.
