Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

• Author: MELOY, JOHN L.
• Position: Review

Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. BY RONNIE ELLENBLUM. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xvii + 321, maps, tables, illustrations. $59.95.

To echo his own description of this project--investigating Frankish rural settlement patterns in Palestine--Ronnie Ellenblum has indeed here taken on a Sisyphean task, a task that requires lengthy discussions of data and argumentation based on a broad chronological context. To a great extent, however, he has increased the burden of his task by discussing Frankish settlement within the context of the "Islamization" of Palestine; unfortunately, his discussion of this wider context falters and the project does not reach its figurative summit. His Sisyphean labor is further impeded by poor editing--no fault of the author's--that adds to the difficulty of understanding his reasoning. In spite of these difficulties, Frankish Rural Settlement raises interesting questions about Frankish society in the Latin East.

The book has three main objectives. The first is to prove that Frankish settlements existed in several regions of the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, to reveal the complexity of their settlement patterns, and to compare and contrast them to contemporary settlement patterns in Europe. The second objective is to prove that the network of relations between the Frankish community and the Palestinian Christian community was based on the loyalty of the eastern Christians to the Franks. The third is to investigate new fields of research regarding the process of the Islamization of Palestine. In other words, Ellenblum sees the history of the Crusades as an "important and perhaps crucial" stage in "the process of the Islamization and Turkicization of the Levantine world" (p. 37). In addition, the author believes that the history of the Crusades bears significantly on the "Arabization" of Palestine. Ellenblum doubts the extent of the "absorption of Arabic amongst all classes and in all regions already during the period of Frankish conquest" (p. 27), in spite of his admission that "most of the Syrian inhabitants of the Levant spoke Arabic" (p. 26).

An appreciation of the wider context is welcome in any archaeological or historical study and this one is both, commendably relying on the results of both archaeological excavation and survey and European and Middle Eastern historical sources. Ellenblum sets his study within the context of previous models of Frankish society in the Latin East. Regarding his second objective, he proposes a synthesis of two earlier models. The older, which he calls the "French" or the "previous" model, was promoted by scholars such as E. G. Rey, G. Dodu, L. Madelin, D. Hayek, and R. Grousset in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. These scholars characterized Crusader society as one founded on an "unprecedented atmosphere of law, order, and tolerance" (p. 20), in which eastern Christians and Muslims were fully integrated...