Adherents of the segregation model based their assertion – that the Franks preferred living in cities to residing in villages – on a ‘sense of fear’ which prevailed among the relatively few Crusaders in Palestine and which more than anything else affected Frankish life in the country. ‘Crusader’ cities and the Frankish castles are both portrayed by these scholars as a means of defending life and property, while they consider the villages to have been insecure and the lives of their residents constantly endangered.

‘The character of Frankish settlement stemmed primarily from one cause, their small numbers’, wrote Claude Cahen in his first published work, which dealt with the area of Antioch. He continued:

We shall deal in Chapter 10 devoted to ‘The geography of fear’ with the assertion that the Levant was subject to ‘a precarious security situation’ during the twelfth century. However, already at this stage it should be noted that one of the difficulties in accepting the claim that the Franks tended to shut themselves off behind the walls of cities and castles lies in the absence of a clear definition of the Crusader ‘city’ and ‘castle’, as well as the lack of differentiation between these two and the Crusader ‘village’.