Creating Christian Identities: Crusaders and Local Communities in the Levant, 1097–1187Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference PortalThe National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe International Balzan Prize FoundationDavid A. Michelsoncbsc_adminRecord added to Zotero bycbsc_adminSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portalhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/FQMVQTZK/tei
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CREATED: This bibl record was autogenerated from a Zotero record.Christopher HatchMacEvittCreating Christian Identities: Crusaders and Local Communities in the Levant, 1097–1187http://syriaca.org/cbss/FQMVQTZKhttps://www.zotero.org/groups/a_comprehensive_bibliography_on_syriac_studies/items/FQMVQTZKhttps://www.zotero.org/groups/4861694/items/FQMVQTZK2002When Pope Urban II urged Frankish aristocrats to liberate Jerusalem from the Turks in 1096, he envisioned the participants in the First Crusade co-operating with eastern Christians and helping to re-establish the Byzantine Empire in the Near East. What happened was otherwise. The First Crusade instead founded Latin principalities, established a Catholic hierarchy, and denied Byzantine sovereignty over the areas conquered. Despite the contradiction of Urban’s original ideals, the crusaders settled in parts of the Holy Land where local Christians formed the majority of the population, often living, worshipping and fighting side-by-side. My dissertation, the first to address this subject directly, reinterprets the relationships among different Christian communities in the crusader era, and argues that they played a crucial role in the establishment and survival of the crusader principalities. I pay close attention to local Christian sources, particularly those in Armenian and Syriac, and in doing so, recover a complex world of competing loyalties and antagonisms that allowed co- existence, co-operation and conflict to operate simultaneously. I argue that both Frankish settlers and local Christian communities manipulated conflicts and alliances among different ethnic and religious groups for their own benefit. Depending on whether they were appealing to their brethren outside the Latin east, to their powerful Byzantine neighbors, or struggling with internal divisions, Franks and local Christians could construct the other as enemy, ally, neighbor or foreigner. The later twelfth century saw a concerted effort to unify the separated churches of the eastern Mediterranean. Negotiations between Latins, Byzantines, Armenians and Jacobites led different Christian communities to consider the similarities and differences of their respective faiths. Treatises and accounts from each of the different communities have survived, allowing the historian not only to understand local perceptions of western Christian and vice versa, but also to map the emerging faultlines within local Christian communities concerning compromise and exchange with Catholicism, an issue which has continued to the present day.
MacEvitt, Christopher Hatch. “Creating Christian Identities: Crusaders and Local Communities in the Levant, 1097–1187.” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2002.
Christopher Hatch MacEvitt, Creating Christian Identities: Crusaders and Local Communities in the Levant, 1097–1187 (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2002).CrusadersJacobitesXI CEXII CEidentity