Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Part I National discourse and the study of the Crusades
- Part II Crusader studies between colonialist and post-colonialist discourse
- 4 Colonial and anti-colonial interpretations
- 5 Who invented the concentric castles?
- 6 ‘Crusader cities’, ‘Muslim cities’, and the post-colonial debate
- 7 Crusader castle and Crusader city: is it possible to differentiate between the two?
- Part III Geography of fear and the spatial distribution of Frankish castles
- Part IV The castle as dialogue between siege tactics and defence strategy
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Author index
- Subject index
7 - Crusader castle and Crusader city: is it possible to differentiate between the two?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Part I National discourse and the study of the Crusades
- Part II Crusader studies between colonialist and post-colonialist discourse
- 4 Colonial and anti-colonial interpretations
- 5 Who invented the concentric castles?
- 6 ‘Crusader cities’, ‘Muslim cities’, and the post-colonial debate
- 7 Crusader castle and Crusader city: is it possible to differentiate between the two?
- Part III Geography of fear and the spatial distribution of Frankish castles
- Part IV The castle as dialogue between siege tactics and defence strategy
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
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:
The attempt to live in the heart of a neutral or hostile population placed the Franks in a lethally dangerous position. They therefore congregated in a small number of locations, with the majority of them living in a few cities, particularly Antioch … The nobles, together with their subjects, settled down in a few fortresses which they built or captured in order to defend an area or a key position.
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’.
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- Information
- Crusader Castles and Modern Histories , pp. 84 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007