‘LA NATION FRANCO-SYRIENNE’

The crusaders established their dominion over peoples whose numbers far exceeded their own. Many of these native Syrians were Christians, but even more were Muslims and were bound, always by religion, often by culture and race, to the external enemies of the Latin states. For this reason alone the relations established between the Franks and their Syrian subjects were highly relevant to their military situation, and they are the subject of this chapter.

It has been written that ‘the researches into this subject of Prutz, Rey, Munro, Duncalf, and Cahen have … almost exhausted the subject, at least until new sources of information shall be discovered’. It is possible that this is too optimistic an opinion, and that the problem on which so much has been written awaits fuller understanding. It certainly does not indicate that the historians mentioned do not agree in their interpretation of the evidence. The student is left to choose between two sharply differing conceptions of the nature of Franco-Syrian society. On the one hand are the scholars who have regarded the orientalizing of Frankish manners in Syria, and the instances which appear in the sources of friendly relations between Franks and Muslims, as evidence of the creation of a Franco-Syrian nation and civilization; on the other are those who have assigned greater importance to other aspects of social organization in the Latin states, and to the instances of hostile relations between Franks and Muslims.