A Muslim Majority
How the Arab conquest changed the land (part three)
To recap the story so far: In part one we described how the Umayyad conquest initially resulted in only gradual changes to the land’s culture and demographics, a process that intensified following the Abbasid takeover while Palestine still lacked a Muslim Arab majority (examined in part two). The next major turning point was the Crusades. In November 1095, in the French city of Clermont, Pope Urban II called on Western Christians to aid the Byzantine Empire against the Seljuk Turks and liberate Jerusalem. A few years later, in 1098, al-Afdal, the vizier of the Fatimid caliph, took the city, before the Crusaders finally arrived in July 1099.
The Crusaders – or Franks – established four states in the Levant: Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and Jerusalem. At its peak, the Kingdom of Jerusalem included most of the land between the river and the sea. Demographically, though, they were always a minority in their own kingdom, somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the population. Infamously, when they conquered Jerusalem they massacred most of the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, an act that went against the conventions of warfare at the time, and would sow the seeds of their ultimate failure in securing themselves in the long term. According to the chronicler Ibn Muyassar (d. 1278), they also destroyed shrines, burned copies of the Quran, and stole gold and silver candelabras from the Dome of the Rock. The Gesta Francorum (‘Deeds of the Franks’), whose genesis is still debated, famously declared: “The slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles.” This is thought to be an exaggeration, but not by much. The chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi records that the city’s Jews took refuge in the synagogue and were burned alive when the Crusaders set it alight, thus ending Jerusalem’s Jewish community in a single day.
This brutality was replicated along the coast, where the inhabitants were either killed or driven out, but inland there was less bloodshed. Nablus surrendered without violence, and Muslims were permitted to remain in Sidon, while Eastern Christians were able to stay in Jerusalem (Jews and Muslims were able to visit for business and pray but not to live), which was so diminished in size that only the area surrounding the Church of the Holy Sepulchre remained inhabited, with King Baldwin I settling Syrian Christians from Transjordan in the former Jewish Quarter. To solidify their control of the city, the Crusaders took over the Temple Mount and placed a gold cross on top of the Dome of the Rock. Outside of cities, the Crusaders lived in small villages or castles like Ein Hemed or Beaufort. Elsewhere, there were Muslim or Eastern Christian Arabic-speaking Christians, small Jewish communities in the Galilee, Druze in the mountains surrounding Sidon, and the remaining Samaritans (whose story I discussed in part two) near Nablus.
In a mirror image of Islamic policy, in some areas the Crusaders made Muslims pay a jizya-like poll tax. Writing about Nablus, the geographer Ibn Jubayr wrote that the Muslims “lived as subjects of the Franks who annually collected a tax from them and did not change any law or cult of theirs.” There is also some evidence of Muslims converting to Christianity, the Egyptian chronicler al-Maqrizi (d. 1442) said that the Franks often forced Muslims to convert, and we know that the Bishop of Acre James of Vitry (d. 1240) baptised some Muslims. None of this, though, was enough to change the overall demographic picture.
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