Crusader states

Their consensus was that the Frankish population, as the Western Europeans were known at the time, lived as a minority society that was largely urban and isolated from the indigenous Levantine peoples, having separate legal and religious systems.

The ancient Jewish communities that had survived and remained in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and Safed since the Jewish–Roman wars and the destruction of the Second Temple were heavily persecuted in a pattern of rampant Christian antisemitism accompanying the Crusades.

Norman warlords conquered southern Italy from the Byzantines and ousted the Muslim rulers from Sicily; French aristocrats hastened to the Iberian Peninsula to fight the Moors of Al-Andalus; and Italian fleets launched pillaging raids against the north African ports.

This system secured the payment of military commanders through granting them the right to collect the land tax in a well-defined territory, but it exposed the taxpayers to an absent lord's greed and to his officials' arbitrary actions.

The Seljuks contested control of southern Palestine with Egypt, where Shia rulers ruled a majority Sunni populace through powerful viziers who were mainly Turkic or Armenian, rather than Egyptian or Arab.

[46][47] Malik-Shah's brother Tutush and the atabegs of Aleppo and Edessa were killed in the succession conflict, and Suleiman's son Kilij Arslan I revived his father's Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia.

[60] Before reaching Antioch, Baldwin and his men left the main army and headed to the Euphrates river, engaging in local politics and seizing the fortifications of Turbessel and Rawandan, where the Armenian populace welcomed him.

To improve moral standards, the Jerusalemite ecclesiastic and secular leaders assembled a council at Nablus and issued decrees against adultery, sodomy, bigamy, and sexual relations between Catholics and Muslims.

[95][96] As the Fatimid Caliphate no longer posed a major threat to Jerusalem, but Antioch and Edessa were vulnerable to invasion, the defence of the northern crusader states took much of Baldwin II's time.

His younger brother Amalric had to repudiate his wife Agnes of Courtenay on grounds of consanguinity before his coronation, but the right of their two children, Baldwin IV and Sibylla, to inherit the kingdom was confirmed.

Saladin's biographer Ali ibn al-Athir wrote, after the Frankish castles were starved into submission, that "the Muslims acquired everything from as far as Ayla to the furthest districts of Beirut with only the interruption of Tyre and also all the dependencies of Antioch, apart from al-Qusayr".

As neither Bohemond nor Leo could muster enough troops to defend their Tripolitan or Cilician hinterland against enemy invasions or rebellious aristocrats and to garrison Antioch simultaneously, the War of the Antiochene Succession lasted for more than a decade.

Jaffa surrendered and Baibers weakened the military orders by capturing the castles of Krak des Chevaliers and Montfort before returning his attention to the Mongols of the Ilkhanate for the rest of his life.

[197] In 1285, the death of the warlike Ilkhan Abaqa, combined with the Pisan and Venetian wars with the Genoese, finally gave the Mamluk sultan, Al-Mansur Qalawun, the opportunity to expel the Franks.

The Mamluk policy was to destroy all physical evidence of the Franks; the destruction of the ports and fortified towns ruptured the history of a coastal city civilisation rooted in antiquity.

[202] In Tripoli, the fourth Frankish state, Raymond of Saint-Gilles and his successors ruled directly over several towns, granting the rest as fiefs to lords originating in Languedoc and Provence, and Gibelet was given to the Genoese in return for naval support.

Architectural and artistic activity in Lebanese churches provide evidence that the indigenous populations prospered under Frankish rule, in part due to its remoteness from the worst impacts of Saladin's conquests in 1187–1188.

[204] In the second quarter of the century, magnates like Raynald of Châtillon, Lord of Oultrejordain, and Raymond III, Count of Tripoli, Prince of Galilee, established baronial dynasties and often acted as autonomous rulers.

The loss of the vast majority of rural fiefs led the baronage to evolve into an urban mercantile class where knowledge of the law was a valuable, well-regarded skill and a career path to higher status.

[209] The barons of Jerusalem in the 13th century have been poorly regarded by both contemporary and modern commentators: their superficial rhetoric disgusted Jacques de Vitry; Riley-Smith writes of their pedantry and the use of spurious legal justification for political action.

As the regular transfer of goods and money required the development of complex logistical and financial systems, the three orders operated as early forms of supranational trading houses and credit institutions.

The Frankish armies' distinctive feature was the extensive deployment of foot soldiers equipped with crossbows; Muslim commanders employed crossbowmen almost exclusively in a siege situation.

Franks who did not flee could survive the Mamluk conquest as slaves or renegades: a Franciscan friar met with Frankish prisoners of war and converts to Islam at Acre more than a decade after the fall of the city.

The use of villanus is thought to reflect the higher status that villagers or serfs held in the near East; indigenous men were considered to have servile land tenures rather than lacking personal freedom.

Riley-Smith divided these into the urban freemen and rural workers tied to the land; ruʾasāʾ administered the Frankish estates, governed the native communities, and were often respected local landowners.

[266] The crusader states were economic centres obstructing Muslim trade by sea with the west Europe,[clarification needed] and by land with Mesopotamia, Syria and the urban economies of the Nile.

[275] Largely located in the ports of Acre, Tyre, Tripoli, and Sidon, communes of Italians, Provençals, and Catalans had distinct cultures and exerted autonomous political power separate from the Franks.

[297] Relations between Europeans and the Islamic world stretched across the length of the Mediterranean Sea, making it difficult for historians to identify what proportion of cultural cross-fertilisation originated in the crusader states, Sicily and Spain.

[298] Prawer's 1972 work, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, extended this analysis: the lack of integration was based on economics with the Franks' position depending on a subjugated, disenfranchised local population.

[300] These theories support the idea that the crusader states formed part of the wider expansion of Western Europe: driven by religious reform and growing papal power.