This book provides a corrective to scholarship on the Crusader East that has viewed Christian-Muslim encounters through the perspective of the Frankish Christians: for example, work that focused on the cultural elements and economic products that the Franks borrowed from local cultures or ways in which Frankish leaders cooperated with local Muslim leaders when it benefitted them to do so. Zimo instead focuses on the subjected Muslim populations themselves, asking where and when they interacted with Franks, what kinds of legal and social agency they had in those interactions, and how they exchanged cultural and intellectual knowledge with and about the Franks. This shift from centering the perspective of the ruling minority to that of the subjected majority restores historical agency to the Muslim population and brings important new insights into the complex society of the Latin East.
Zimo places her work within a long historiographical debate about the degree of integration or, conversely, separation of the Franks from the various local religious communities. She spells out that debate in great detail, both in the introduction and in each chapter. We thereby see that while the fundamental question of the book may not be new, the novelty of the book arises from the author’s ability to bring together sources in European languages (Latin and Old French) with Arabic texts and archaeological data in order to shift the focus to Muslim presence and activity. In doing so, she draws upon a wide variety of texts: narrative sources, legal texts, biographical dictionaries (in Arabic), and more. The chronological focus of the book is on the thirteenth century, a time when the Crusader kingdom was at its most imperiled in military and political terms but, as Zimo puts it, “Crusading as an institution hit its stride” (6). This chronology is partly a result of the greater source survival from that period. It also allows her to interrogate Muslim-Christian encounters during a time of Christian weakness and to compare it--as far as her sources allow--to what came before.
Chapter 1 asks how integrated the Muslim and Frankish (and Eastern Christian) communities were in terms of settlement patterns. Reacting to earlier debates about whether the Franks lived primarily in urban centers, isolated from local populations, or also in rural areas populated by indigenous peoples (now the prevailing perspective), Zimo addresses the question of how many of those indigenous peoples were Muslim. To do so, she aggregates data (both archaeological and that derived from pilgrimage accounts) for places of Islamic worship across the broad sweep of the eleventh-fourteenth centuries, arguing that shrines and mosques may indicate Muslim habitation but definitely indicate Muslim presence. To address the question of whether these tidbits of data reflect long-term settlement, Zimo assumes that the rate of Islamization would have been slow and that settlement patterns would have persisted even across periods of intense change such as external invasion. From this data she argues that Muslims--whether in permanent habitation or temporary visits to shrines--were an “ordinary and visible presence throughout the kingdom” (54) and, therefore, that interacting with or at least seeing them was a regular part of the experience of Franks in the East.
The rest of the book explores the implications of this proximity and familiarity. Chapter 2 addresses the economic role that Muslims may have played in the thirteenth-century kingdom. Much of Zimo’s evidence is circumstantial but, until archaeology can reveal information about the identities of laborers, the best she can do is to surmise, for example, that ceramic and glass works produced in areas with some Muslim inhabitation may have had Muslims working in them. It is more certain that Muslims were economic agents as enslaved workers, captives traded for ransom, regional merchants, and agricultural laborers, although their numbers and economic impact cannot be quantified. She finds, however, that the economic importance of the Muslim peasantry was significant enough that the Mamluks could use it as a pressure point in their campaigns against Franks, for example depopulating agricultural lands in order to weaken Frankish control.
Next, the book turns to the intersecting legal traditions to which Muslims of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem were subject. Chapter 3 examines the theoretical legal position of Muslims (in prescriptive legal sources) and chapter 4 looks to the practical experiences of Muslims in the legal-political realities of the thirteenth century. Zimo first argues that the prescriptive legal sources segregated peoples as much on lines of social rank as on those of religion and that the restrictions on certain relations between Muslims and Franks presume that some degree of contact was actually taking place. Chapter 4 demonstrates that legal restrictions were often contravened in practice, and that Franks and Muslims regularly entered each other’s legal and political spaces. Using a series of treaties between the Franks and the Ayyubids and Mamluks, Zimo sees Christian and Muslim powers negotiating political boundaries on equal terms, sharing protocols and expectations for treaty-making, and holding joint administration of certain territories. The latter meant working out the division of revenues and distribution of justice, meaning that the political reality was a complex one of overlapping jurisdictions.
Chapters 5 and 6 turn to shared cultural systems among Muslims and Franks. In chapter 5, Zimo shows the two sides holding similar positions on intelligence gathering and exchanging specialized knowledge (particularly medical knowledge) to argue that networks of cultural knowledge in the region included Muslims, Western Christians, and Eastern Christians (and bridges between them such as translators, converts, and Franks who knew some Arabic). Chapter 6 looks at Arabic literature in three genres—letters, poetry, and the tales of Usama ibn Munqidh—to find evidence that, in each, Muslim authors were reacting to and incorporating Frankish presence, even as they lamented it.
The book’s primary argument is that Muslims and Franks encountered each other much more regularly and in many more venues than has previously been discussed in Crusades scholarship. A second important point is that Frankish-Muslim encounters encompassed far more than violence, and that a strict model of antagonism between the two religio-political groups cannot be supported. This conclusion falls in line with recent trends in scholarship on multicultural relations across the medieval world.
Much of the book’s argument is based on logical inference from multidisciplinary and multilingual evidence that Zimo has collected. This type of conjecture and logical interpretation is necessary given the paucity of direct evidence. And while individual bits of the argument may appear tenuous, as a whole the impact is convincing. One of the strengths of this work is how carefully it articulates regional differences within the territory of the kingdom. Even though much of the evidence is anecdotal or suggestive, Zimo resists generalizing for the region as a whole and instead differentiates based on precise locations and what is known or deduced about Muslim activity in each. Muslims in certain urban centers would have had more contact with Franks than ones living in rural villages, which themselves also varied considerably across the region. We get, therefore, a nuanced picture of what was possible and what was probable for Muslim-Frankish relations and are always reminded that none of these were blanket claims for the entirety of the Crusader period or the kingdom. Instead, we get a nuanced and deeply complex vision of Muslim-Christian interactions within this very complex society.