On 15 July 1099, after besieging the walls of Jerusalem for weeks, Crusader troops stormed the Holy City. A three-year journey culminated in the capture of Jerusalem and, most importantly, its holiest Christian shrine, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The conquest of Jerusalem marked the zenith of the Latin campaign in the East and the achievement of its main objective.Footnote ¹

Despite the vigour and profound religious motivations that had driven the entire campaign, and particularly the conquest of the Holy City, the Crusading troops do not seem to have formed their plans for the day when Jerusalem would be captured. When Heavenly Jerusalem finally materialised in its earthly counterpart, Crusaders faced the challenge of bridging the gap between ideal and reality.Footnote ² More importantly, they were now compelled to devise a course of action that would suit their status as the new rulers of the Holy Land.

This challenge eventually yielded an urban landscape whose traces still dominate the Old City of Jerusalem today. Churches such as the Holy Sepulchre, St Mary of the Valley of Jehoshaphat and St Anne, as well as ample Crusader remains on the Temple Mount, and many other monuments, attest to this short but significant chapter in the history of the Holy City. Yet architectural remains tell only a fraction of a much bigger story, one that encompasses the complex process that shaped the cityscape during the twelfth century. It entailed a profound demographic, social, institutional and cultural transformation, after almost four centuries of Muslim rule. The landscape that was shaped in this process reflected myriad encounters: between Latin newcomers and local populations; between the urban fabric shaped by centuries of Roman, Byzantine and Muslim rule, and the values, beliefs and interests of the Frankish inhabitants and institutions; and finally, between symbolic and physical landscapes.

From a modern perspective, the Frankish period seems like a brief interlude in a long continuum of Muslim rule, starting with the Umayyad period (seventh–eighth centuries ce), and ending with Ottoman rule (sixteenth–twentieth centuries ce). Yet the brevity of Crusader rule belies the remarkable impact it had on the city in terms of architecture, institutions, population and urban landscape. The Frankish period offers a remarkable wealth of extant documentation. As such, this period has long been considered a distinct historical and historiographical unit, both in the eyes of contemporaries and in modern historiography. Thus, scholarship has tended to regard the city as an urban centre whose transformation under Frankish rule took place more or less at one fell swoop, remaining in a rather stable form throughout the period.

This book sets out to challenge this perception by tracking interlaced spatial and socio-economic aspects of urban development in the twelfth century. It aims to investigate the urban transformation of Frankish Jerusalem as a multifaceted and dynamic process that was shaped by a complex mosaic of religious aspirations as well as social, institutional and economic mechanisms that developed in the city after the Crusader conquest. The study examines the formation of these mechanisms and their correspondence with broader processes that were shaping socio-economic structures in the Latin East at the time, but also looks at how these processes corresponded with concomitant trends in medieval urbanisation. This analysis relies primarily on the extant corpus of Frankish documents, supplemented by pilgrimage accounts, chronicles and archaeological evidence. Building on methodologies widely applied in the study of medieval urban environments, this study attempts to tease out of the corpus patterns that reflect socio-economic interactions and their spatial manifestations in the city and its hinterland. Moreover, this synchronous reading of the evidence sheds new light on individual documents, thus providing a glimpse into everyday life in the city through property disputes, neighbourly interactions and the formation of social bonds in an immigrant population. In doing so, this book sets out to address some of the key questions concerning a cityscape that epitomises and symbolises the medieval encounter between western European perceptions and Middle Eastern realities.

Before embarking on this analysis, some introductory remarks that provide a basic acquaintance with the topography of Jerusalem, its main shrines and conditions at the time of the Crusader conquest are in order.

a ‘The Jerusalem the Crusaders Captured’: A Pilgrim’s Birds’ Eye View at the Beginning of the Twelfth Century

Situated amid the Judean hills, separating the Judean desert in the east from the coastal plain on the west that stretches to the shores of the Mediterranean, the city of Jerusalem stands at the meeting-point of varied climatic, topographic and geologic micro-regions.Footnote ³ The landscape in and around Jerusalem is mountainous, and the walled area of the city is dominated by two ridges, one in the west, its peak forming Mount Zion, and another in the east, featuring the plateau of the Temple Mount (see Map I.1). Stretching between these ridges on a north–south axis is the narrow Tyropoeon valley, which connects the Hinnom valley in the south-west to the Kidron valley in the east. To the east of the Kidron valley rises the Mount of Olives, beyond which stretch the hills of the Judean desert.Footnote ⁴

Map I.1 Topography of Jerusalem and its environs.

In the twelfth century, the city was accessed through four main gates: St Stephen’s (present-day Damascus Gate) from the north, Jehoshaphat (present-day Lions’ Gate) from the east, Mount Zion from the south and David’s Gate (present-day Jaffa Gate) from the west. An additional gate at the eastern edge of the Temple Mount was used only once a year, for liturgical purposes during Palm Sunday celebrations.Footnote ⁵ The four main gates connected the city to a network of roads, some dating back to the Roman period, which linked Jerusalem, the local religious and governmental centre with other shrines, holy sites and cities in the region.Footnote ⁶ Thus, the road extending south-west from David’s Gate led to Bethlehem and Hebron; the road entering St Stephen’s Gate led north, connecting the city with Neapolis (Nablus), and the Gate of Jehoshaphat connected the city to the churches of the Kidron valley and the Mount of Olives, such as St Mary of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Gethsemane and the Church of the Ascension. It also led farther east to Bethany, Bethphage, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea and Jericho.

People arriving in Jerusalem in the first half of the twelfth century would enter the city through David’s Gate, which was adjacent to the Tower of David, a massive citadel that was part of the fortifications erected by Herod in the first century bce.Footnote ⁷ This imposing structure was extensively described in accounts of the First Crusade, mostly due to its strategic importance.Footnote ⁸ In later decades, pilgrims noted the biblical traditions associated with the Tower, namely those connecting it to King David, an association that gained currency during the twelfth century as part of the developing imagery of the Frankish monarchy, which wished to link itself to the royal Davidic lineage. This symbolic link was strengthened after the transfer of the royal residence, initially located in the Al–Aqsa Mosque, to the Tower of David sometime after 1119.Footnote ⁹ Immediately to the east of the citadel, pilgrims would encounter the Greek Orthodox Jerusalemite branch of the Laura of St Sabas, and slightly to the south, the Church of St James, the main church of Jerusalem’s Armenian community.

Below the citadel, stretching from west to east, lay one of the city’s main arteries, presumably on the same route as the Roman decumanus, which connected the citadel and the western entrance to the walled area of the Temple Mount.Footnote ¹⁰ Its intersection with the north–south main axis, roughly corresponding with the Roman Cardo, marked the centre of the city and the location of its main commercial areas. Turning north-east shortly before reaching this intersection would lead visitors and inhabitants to the Holy Sepulchre.

The appearance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the beginning of the twelfth century was considerably different from its appearance by the end of the period of Frankish rule in Jerusalem. Visitors who arrived shortly after the Crusader conquest would have found the sepulchre of Christ in the rotunda, and the site of Golgotha in the courtyard to its east. These would later be incorporated into a single roofed complex as part of the Crusader renovation of the church, which was rededicated in 1149.Footnote ¹¹

Also included in the (Latin) pilgrimage circuit in this part of the city was the Church of St Mary Latin, to the south of the Holy Sepulchre. This church was presumably part of the complex of churches and hospices that were supported by a group of merchants from Amalfi who had settled in Jerusalem in the second half of the eleventh century.Footnote ¹² This area of the city, too, would later undergo significant changes, as it became the headquarters of the Hospitaller order, which received papal affirmation in 1113.Footnote ¹³ Additional non-Latin churches dotted this area of the city, where, as we shall see, most of the Christian population was settled prior to the Crusader conquest.Footnote ¹⁴

After visiting the Church of St Mary Latin, pilgrims usually proceeded to the Temple Mount, entering the walled compound through an eastern gate identified in some sources as the porta speciosa, and also depicted on some of the round maps of Jerusalem from the twelfth century.Footnote ¹⁵ On the Temple Mount, they encountered the monumental structure of the Dome of the Rock, dubbed Templum Domini by the Franks, and at the southern edge of the Temple precinct they would see the Al–Aqsa Mosque, which under Latin rule became known as the Templum (or Palatium) Salomonis. The former was transformed into a Christian shrine, served by a community of Augustinian canons.Footnote ¹⁶ The latter served initially as the seat of the Frankish monarchs, but twenty years after the conquest it became the headquarters of the newly established Templar order.Footnote ¹⁷

Exiting the walled area of the Temple Mount through one of the gates on its northern wall, pilgrims would have then visited the church of St Anne, probably constructed shortly after the conquest, and later significantly expanded into a monastic compound.Footnote ¹⁸ Not far from St Anne was the central church of the city’s Jacobite community, St Mary Magdalene. From there, heading further east, pilgrims exited the city’s walls through Jehoshaphat Gate, descended to the Kidron valley and headed towards St Mary of the Valley of Jehoshaphat and Gethsemane. The pilgrimage circuit around this side of the walls passed through additional sites such as the pool of Siloam and Akeldama, and included an ascent to the Mount of Olives and a visit to the Church of the Ascension and the Church of the Lord’s Prayer. On the south-western corner of the city, pilgrims would have found the Church of St Mary of Mount Sion. Off this circuit, which became increasingly standardised during the twelfth century, lay additional pilgrimage sites such as the Monastery of the Holy Cross, about 2.5 km to the south-west of the city, and the desert, mostly Greek Orthodox, monasteries to the east of the city.Footnote ¹⁹

Yet pilgrims’ accounts provide only a limited look at the cityscape, not only because they emphasise (mostly Latin) places of worship, but also because in the first decades of the twelfth century such accounts almost never touch on daily life or describe urban infrastructure such as streets, water and sewage facilities, markets and public spaces.Footnote ²⁰ A description, the so-called La Citez (incorporated in the chronicle of Ernoul from c. 1231), depicting the city at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, somewhat compensates for this lacuna.Footnote ²¹ Unlike many of the earlier accounts, it describes not only religious shrines but also streets and markets. Even more importantly, it departs from earlier descriptions in that it provides glimpses into daily life in the city, as well as practical travelling advice.Footnote ²² In this sense, the gap between La Citez and most of the other pilgrimage accounts from this period captures the city’s most significant transformation, from a symbolic space defined by the sum of its holy shrines to a lived cityscape.

By the time it was written, presumably after the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin, Frankish architectural, administrative and socio-economic activity had already significantly transformed the appearance of the city. Thus, although some urban features, such as the basic street outline or main commercial areas, are attested in earlier sources, the cityscape depicted in La Citez captures only the end point of an almost century-long development. Moreover, its panoramic scope, typical of pilgrimage accounts, obscures the underlying mechanisms of urban development and city life. It focuses our attention on the physical shape of the city and its main monuments at the expense of the social structures and daily interactions that shaped the cityscape over decades of Frankish rule.

If La Citez provides a bird’s-eye view of the twilight of Frankish Jerusalem, then, to better grasp the scope and significance of the transformation that the city underwent until the time of its composition, it is necessary to examine its point of departure. Urban change in the twelfth century should be assessed against the backdrop of the challenges that faced Frankish settlers who came to Jerusalem shortly after its conquest in 1099. These challenges derived, in large part, from the tumultuous events of the eleventh century.

b Jerusalem under Muslim Rule

Despite its strategically important topographic conditions, two main factors limited the growth of Jerusalem over the centuries. First, the city was not situated on the major historical routes that connected different regions of the eastern Mediterranean. This was particularly notable in the period of Frankish rule, when Jerusalem’s economy depended largely on the influx of pilgrims and on regional production, especially compared to the coastal cities of the Latin East, which became major maritime trade hubs. Second, soil and climate conditions, and a natural elevation that demanded solutions for water supply, restricted the agricultural output in its surroundings.

Nevertheless, since about the tenth century bce, Jerusalem has intermittently functioned as a political centre, and later continuously maintained its symbolic importance among the three Abrahamic religions.Footnote ²³ It is due to this unique status that the history of Jerusalem is circumscribed by a tumultuous and often violent past. The many ebbs and flows of the cityscape are associated with different conquering polities which left their mark on the urban layout, reflecting the cultural, religious, social and economic preferences of changing rulers.

Until recently, the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638 has been seen as a crisis that triggered a long period of decline, stemming mainly from political tensions between different Muslim polities and rulers. Coupled with such factors as Jerusalem’s economic and political marginality compared to other cities in Palestine, such as Ramla, this resulted in a dwindling of the city’s population and urban fabric, a decline that was part of a broader regional process of deterioration.Footnote ²⁴ As we shall see, drawing on this narrative, historians of the Crusades have argued that Jerusalem’s recovery under Latin rule resulted from the religious piety of its new Christian rulers, which led them to invest in the transformation of the cityscape. According to this line of thinking, the city’s condition was mostly a matter of political resolution, socio-religious preferences and patronage.

Recent historical studies and archaeological evidence, however, challenge the nexus between cultural-religious partialities and Jerusalem’s urban growth or decline between the seventh and twelfth centuries. These data show continuity, in terms of demography and physical landscape, between the Byzantine and early Muslim periods. During that time Jerusalem maintained its status as a rather prosperous urban settlement, which benefited from the significant investment of both Muslim rulers and Christian benefactors, who were motivated by the city’s religious significance and by other, more mundane, reasons.Footnote ²⁵ Matters started taking a turn for the worse only towards the eleventh century.

This transition is associated with regional geopolitical changes, namely the rise of the Seljuks, and the decline of Byzantium and the Fatimid Caliphate. The ensuing shift in the balance of power in the Levant dovetailed with a climate crisis that affected the entire eastern Mediterranean, prompting droughts, famines, social unrest and the abandonment or significant contraction of settlements.Footnote ²⁶

These phenomena can be traced in historical and archaeological evidence pertaining to Jerusalem and its surroundings in the eleventh century, when the city suffered the consequences of regional turmoil and political unrest. The general instability and food shortages in the Fatimid Caliphate, already noted in contemporary sources from the end of the tenth century, triggered the persecution of religious minorities. Thus, in 1009, the Caliph al-Ḥākim ordered the burning of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, as well as other churches in his dominion.Footnote ²⁷ Later, increasing attacks on the city by nomadic Bedouin tribes led Fatimid authorities to compensate for their losses by imposing harsh taxation on the Jewish community of Jerusalem, a move that prompted many Jewish residents to leave the city.Footnote ²⁸

Disasters continued to befall the city during the following decades, including a devastating earthquake in 1033. It was previously thought that the destruction caused by the earthquake prompted the Fatimid rulers to initiate the reconstruction of the city walls, yet recently scholars have suggested that the construction started even earlier, as a response to the demographic decline and subsequent contraction of the inhabited areas of the city.

The walls that were in place by the end of the eleventh century left out the southern edge of the city.Footnote ²⁹ The contraction of the fortified area of the city and the destruction of the southern section of its walls in the beginning of the eleventh century prompted further shifts in settlement patterns in the city and its surroundings.Footnote ³⁰ The rebuilding of the walls had additional implications, such as the dismantling of churches in the outskirts of Jerusalem, in order to supply building materials for the new walls, as recorded by the Melkite chronicler Yahya of Antioch. Decades later, pilgrims who travelled to Jerusalem shortly after the Crusader conquest also described the dilapidated churches around Jerusalem.Footnote ³¹

Writing over a century later, in a chapter that laid out the historical grounding of the patriarch’s dominion in Jerusalem, William of Tyre further elaborated on this matter, describing the Byzantine involvement in the reconstruction of Jerusalem in the eleventh century and its implications for the city’s Christian population. According to his account, the Christians of Jerusalem turned to the Byzantine emperor for funds demanded by the Fatimid rulers to finance the reconstruction of the walls. The emperor agreed on the condition that the area of the city surrounded by the walls that he sponsored would be reserved solely for Christian residents. Whether as a response to this promulgation, or to the expansion of the Muslim population and institutions in the city after the Seljuk conquest of Jerusalem in 1071, most of the city’s Christian inhabitants concentrated in the north-western corner of the city.Footnote ³² Thus, the calamities of the eleventh century, and the ensuing demographic and spatial contraction of the city, changed previous settlement patterns. As part of this process, the tendency of coreligionists in Jerusalem to cluster in the same residential areas, one that has also been observed in other medieval cities, intensified.

However, as we have seen, a trend towards urban decline was already in place well before the Seljuk conquest, leading some historians to argue that the Crusaders destroyed an already destroyed city.Footnote ³³ Evidence dating from the second half of the eleventh century from the Cairo Geniza attests to the hardships endured by Jerusalemites during this period.Footnote ³⁴ This steady downward course also supports recent studies challenging previously prevalent narratives that stressed the role of the Seljuk conquest in exacerbating the state of crisis before the arrival of the Crusades.Footnote ³⁵ The difficulty in determining the extent of Seljuk impact on Jerusalem is undoubtedly related to the brevity of this period in the history of the city, lasting fewer than thirty years and ending with a Fatimid reconquest in 1098, shortly before the beginning of the Crusader siege.

When, in the summer of the following year, Crusader troops were making their way towards Jerusalem, they remarked on the harsh conditions, especially the scarcity of food and water, around the city. This dearth owed not just to the heat of the Levantine summer but also to the disasters of the previous years, and to the blocking of water sources around the city before the siege.Footnote ³⁶

After finally storming Jerusalem, the Crusaders massacred the local population, which by then had even further diminished, as many inhabitants had fled or were exiled from the city before the siege.Footnote ³⁷ When the dust of the battle had settled, the Crusaders were left with ‘a city of complete desolation and death’.Footnote ³⁸

While the rhetoric of the First Crusade presents the Christian takeover of Jerusalem as the fulfilment of centuries’ old religious aspirations, from a practical point of view it was more of a municipal nightmare. If indeed the Crusaders were to become the new lords of Jerusalem, they needed to make arrangements to revitalise the disaster-stricken city. As the Crusader capital, Jerusalem had to become again a lively urban environment, which could accommodate a highly diverse population, appeal to new Latin settlers and cater to incoming pilgrims.

Considering these precarious circumstances, it is difficult to bridge the divide between ‘the Jerusalem that the Crusaders captured’ and the cityscape that emerged towards the middle of the twelfth century. Jerusalem’s economic marginality supports the prevailing narrative that explains this transition as a top-down process, orchestrated by the collaborative effort of church and monarchy, and motivated by their desire to establish Jerusalem’s status as a capital – rather than an intrinsic development that was stimulated by socio-economic processes. However, this view fails to capture the scope of the change, the complexity of Jerusalem’s urban fabric and the problems that needed to be resolved in order to achieve such a transformation. Moreover, current scholarship on medieval cities in Europe, which incorporates documentary evidence similar to the sources available for Frankish Jerusalem, overturns such straightforward accounts of urban change. The new approach emphasises the array of socio-economic interactions that fostered urban change and examines the reciprocal connection between these factors as well as the spatial development of the cityscape.

This is the point of departure for the current study, which is driven by several sets of core questions: what economic processes led to the transformation of the cityscape towards the middle of the twelfth century, and how were they affected by the municipal activity of Jerusalem’s main religious institutions and the monarchy? What was the position of Jerusalem vis-à-vis its rural hinterland, and how did the reciprocal connection between the city and its surroundings develop during the twelfth century? How did these processes affect the course of urban transformation? What social mechanisms did these processes rely on? How did these mechanisms compensate for the problems of the depopulated and economically fragile urban environment that was Jerusalem in the early decades of the twelfth century?

Moreover, this study aims to challenge a number of prevailing notions in the historiography of Frankish Jerusalem, namely, the causes and underlying mechanisms for the city’s transformation, the course that this transformation took and its connections to broader historical circumstances.

c ‘Crusader Jerusalem’ as a Historiographic Construct

The scholarship of the Crusades abounds with research on the city’s transformation under Latin rule, relying on a rich historiographic tradition that was invigorated by the revival of Western travel to the Holy Land during the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁹ This interest prompted attention to the archaeological remains of the Crusader city. The scholarly tradition that emerged as a result was shaped by such prominent figures as Louis Hugues Vincent, Félix-Marie Abel, Melchior de Vogüe, Camille Enlart and others, who strove to reconstruct the city’s ancient layout.Footnote ⁴⁰ These early expeditions played a significant role in the ‘rediscovery’ of Jerusalem during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their history illustrates the intertwining of political, nationalist, religious and economic aspirations.Footnote ⁴¹

The focus of historians and archaeologists on monumental remains (such as religious worship sites or fortifications) has stemmed, in part, from the idea that each new ruling entity expressed its dominance through monumental architecture. This tendency is still prevalent, as can be seen in the distribution of recent excavations carried out in the city and its environs. A map published several years ago by Gideon Avni and Katharina Galor indicates that the most excavated areas in Jerusalem correlate with the city’s main monuments or their environs (from different periods), or with the outline of the city walls.Footnote ⁴²

The reincarnation of Jerusalem as a Christian capital after the First Crusade has thus been seen as the outcome of an effort led by the Frankish monarchs and church leaders, who sought to recast the cityscape in accordance with the ideals upon which their claim on the city rested.Footnote ⁴³ This perspective draws a direct line from the conquest to the ensuing urban transformation, with the one a natural outcome of the other.

Such an approach blurs the boundary between the categories of Crusading and settlement as two distinct phases in the formation of the Frankish society in Outremer, a distinction that is linked to a broader set of historiographical questions concerning the colonial character of the Crusader movement.Footnote ⁴⁴ While these two distinct categories have been widely employed in the analysis of the social and material history of the Latin East, their incorporation into the study of Frankish Jerusalem is more recent. It applies mostly to the study of devotional practices and liturgy in the city after the Crusader conquest, analysing how they were shaped by the Frankish presence in Jerusalem and affected the transformation of the cityscape.Footnote ⁴⁵

However, the urban development of Jerusalem and its underlying mechanisms merit independent investigation. To ascribe Jerusalem’s urban transformation solely to the religious ideology of the Crusaders disregards the transition from the collective mentality of Crusading to that of settlement and its impact on the course of the city’s development. So inevitable did the refashioning of the urban landscape seem, especially when examined in the framework of the symbolic status of Jerusalem for the Frankish rule, that until recently it was rarely analysed using the toolkit of urban history, which was deemed unfitting for such a distinct and unparalleled case as Jerusalem.

Thus, on the one hand, Jerusalem epitomised the idea and ideal of the city, and the notion of its cityscape as an earthly embodiment of the celestial Jerusalem had a powerful effect on the shaping of medieval urban landscapes across Europe.Footnote ⁴⁶ On the other hand, the perception of medieval Jerusalem as an ideal space, rather than a lived one, is precisely what swayed scholarly interest towards its monumental landscape, thus hindering its analysis within the mainstream historiographical discourse of medieval urban environments. As a result, Jerusalem maintained its status as a unique case study, resisting the analytical currents of medieval urban historiography.

In the 1970s, however, Joshua Prawer coined the term ‘Crusader cities’ as part of a broader scholarly agenda that sought to address the history of the Latin East within a comparative framework. Prawer aimed to incorporate Jerusalem, among other cities in the region, into a wider analysis of Frankish settlement patterns, and to offer a characterisation of its urban space within a broader medieval context.Footnote ⁴⁷ In his analysis, Prawer wove aspects of everyday life and urban administration into Jerusalem’s symbolic cityscape.Footnote ⁴⁸ This approach foregrounded the physical manifestations of the social realities in Crusader cities and presented Jerusalem as one case among others, without necessarily highlighting the singularity with which it was marked by virtue of its elevated symbolic status.

The encompassing model of the ‘Crusader city’ positioned Jerusalem, for the first time, within the then-developing field of medieval urban history. The inclusion of Jerusalem in this comparative framework transcended previous paradigms of the city’s Sonderweg, in regard both to other cities in the Latin East and to medieval cities elsewhere.

Notably, however, as Ronnie Ellenbum has shown, Prawer’s model was rooted in the historiographical paradigm of the Muslim city, which sought to characterise an ideal type of urban form based on a fixed set of parameters. Such parameters relied on the premise that a tight connection can be traced between urban institutions and the architectural and spatial forms that they take, and that this connection is circumscribed by cultural patterns.Footnote ⁴⁹ This taxonomy drew on the East–West divide that until recently dominated the historiography of medieval cities, and relied on an intellectual legacy whose modern phase was first articulated in Max Weber’s seminal The City, followed by Henri Pirenne’s Medieval Cities. The historiographical currents defined by these works yielded a morphologically inclined analytical approach that saw the monumental landscape and the socio-institutional interactions that inhabited it as interlocked factors. Within this framework, the medieval European city was the yardstick against which other cases were measured.Footnote ⁵⁰ This resulted in a ‘morphological essentialism’, implying that a city’s character stems from the physical forms assumed by its institutions and social structures.

Within the model of the ‘Crusader city’, Jerusalem was both an archetypal case study and an anomaly. For Prawer, it epitomised his ‘emptied shell’ principle, according to which, ‘while the main physical features of the Muslim city conditioned the general physiognomy of the Crusader city, its population changed in a revolutionary way’.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet Jerusalem did not exhibit the stages that Prawer considered inherent to the processes of ‘adaptation of the new immigrant population to the pre-existing features of the different localities’, first among which was usually the establishment of the Italian communes.Footnote ⁵²

The absence of areas held by the Italian communes distinguished Jerusalem (and other inland cities such as Tiberias and Nablus) from the cities of the ‘Near Eastern seaboard [that] had become part of the new Euro-Levantine trade relations.’Footnote ⁵³ While the Italian communes had a structural and economic impact on the cities where they were established, Prawer observed continuity between Muslim and Crusader Jerusalem. In doing so, he reinforced the perception of Crusader Jerusalem as a stable cityscape that perpetuated pre-existing patterns, while remaining resistant to the transformative agency of the Italian communes. Thus, the model suggested by Prawer further contributed to the notion of Crusader Jerusalem as a cityscape that did not undergo substantial transformation during the period of Latin rule.

The use of the aforementioned taxonomy prevented Prawer from implementing methods that were applied in the study of medieval European or Mediterranean cities that focused on their underlying socio-economic mechanisms. Notably, Prawer’s Crusader city model countered his general approach to the analysis of socio-economic mechanisms, which often led him to draw parallels between the structures and developments in the Latin East and their European counterparts.Footnote ⁵⁴ His analysis of Jerusalem’s institutions and administration was thus detached from his discussion of urban forms, yielding a static model that reduced the city to the sum of its main physical components. For him, the Crusader city ‘represented a juxtaposition of different elements which nolens volens were caught in the all-embracing city walls’.Footnote ⁵⁵

The East–West paradigm was also key to Prawer’s perception of Frankish settlement patterns in the Levant at large. Arguing that the Crusades and the subsequent Christian settlement in the Latin East were essentially a proto-colonial endeavour, Prawer advanced what was later referred to as ‘the segregated model’, according to which the Frankish settlement was predominantly urban. This model, which drew a clear divide between urban and rural patterns, has since been criticised in the scholarship of the Latin East, both from a post-colonial theoretical standpoint and in light of new evidence that demonstrates the extensive scope of Frankish rural settlement.Footnote ⁵⁶

More recent historiographical currents, such as those presented in Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea, offer the necessary methodological and conceptual infrastructure to formulate alternatives to the ubiquitous yet outdated concept of the ‘Crusader city’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Problematising prevalent historiographical approaches to the analysis and typology of cities, and the criteria that distinguish them from other types of settlements – such as the reliance on culturally prescribed urban forms – Horden and Purcell propose to examine cities as enmeshed in their environments and to place them within a continuum of settlement patterns. This approach, as we shall see, is useful in redefining the relationship between cities and rural settlements in the Latin East, as well as in providing an alternative to the East–West dichotomy, implicit in the ‘Crusader city’ paradigm, which still often echoes in the scholarship on Frankish Jerusalem.

Yet studies of the city still tend to focus on the form that the city eventually took under Latin rule rather than on the processes that shaped it. They yield an impressive synthesis of narrative sources, documents and archaeological finds that provides a clear image of the city’s main features, including its appearance, administration and main industries.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, the city is portrayed as a set of characteristics that are the fixed outcome of decades of urban development, without reflection on the complex processes that moulded it over time. The focus on the outcome of urban change and its form, at the expense of the process and mechanisms that produced it, often overlooked the intriguing transition from Crusade to settlement. Moreover, the effort to produce a comprehensive depiction of the city that could be applied to the entire twelfth century often led scholars to extrapolate from later sources, as in the case of La Citez mentioned earlier, in which social, administrative and economic structures that came to exist in the city by the end of the twelfth century were projected on to earlier stages of its development.

We might also consider, in this regard, the scholarly reconstruction of Jerusalem’s administrative mechanisms, the roles and duties of its officials, and their impact on municipal development, which was often based on a synthesis of early documents and later legal treatises. Thus, when analysing the municipal regulations as they are reflected in the Livre des Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois, Prawer argued that: ‘This collection of laws, produced in thirteenth-century Acre, describes an ideal state of municipal administration, and there is no reason to believe that this general outline differed from the situation in Jerusalem in the twelfth century.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Such notions have further accentuated the perception of Frankish Jerusalem as a stagnant urban environment, and only recently have these depictions of its legal systems begun to be replaced by more nuanced analyses.Footnote ⁶⁰

This book takes a different approach, which aims to analyse the cityscape as a work in progress through which we can better understand the connections between socio-economic processes and their spatial urban manifestations, as well as the connections between the city and its broader environment. It distinguishes between the formal legal and administrative municipal structures, often seen through the prism of later sources, and the socio-economic processes that affected the cityscape in ‘real time’. Although the two are tightly connected, this distinction seeks to portray how socio-economic processes unfolded within their specific historical context, without imposing later legal constructs. Moreover, it acknowledges the gaps between administrative structures and their proclaimed purposes, and their actual manifestations in the urban sphere. This distinction allows us to re-examine previous notions concerning the connection between the mechanisms of municipal jurisdiction and the actual course that Jerusalem’s urban development took at various points in the twelfth century.

In order to apply this notion to Jerusalem, I aim to address its cityscape through a series of daily interactions between its inhabitants and main religious institutions, as recorded in property transactions (a term we return to in Chapter 1). Eventually, the recovery of the dynamics of urban development will allow us to better understand how the city’s symbolic and everyday landscapes were integrated.

This approach draws on the theoretical background of the spatial turn, and primarily the complementary notions of ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘landscape’ as shaped in the discourse on historical geography and critical theory in recent decades. The present study therefore relies on several premises that are well established in the study of medieval urban environments. The first is that space is a continuously shifting construct that is shaped and produced by diverse interactions between people and the environments they inhabit.Footnote ⁶¹ Second is the notion that, while sharing a semantic and hermeneutical field, the terms place and space, at least in contemporary theoretical discourse, refer to different types of human experience. For present purposes, we can say that while ‘space’ designates an abstract perception of the geographical environment, namely its symbolic meanings and religious or cultural significance, ‘place’ implies a more concrete perception of physical surroundings, circumscribed by daily actions and interactions that establish a different kind of spatial symbolism.Footnote ⁶² The third concept, that of ‘landscape’, refers to the ways in which the ‘external world is mediated through subjective human experience’; in other words, how people see and perceive their surroundings, and the multilayered meanings that this gaze conveys.Footnote ⁶³

Henri Lefebvre, Michel De Certeau and Denis Cosgrove, among others, pioneered this conceptualisation of place and space in the urban context. While their theories were originally geared towards the analysis of modern urban environments, they nevertheless provide a valuable toolkit and vocabulary for the investigation of medieval cities as well.Footnote ⁶⁴

In the case of Frankish Jerusalem, this theoretical prism has mainly been applied to depictions of the city in pilgrims’ accounts, or to the visual representations of its space, rather than to the everyday physical environment and its underlying legal and social mechanisms.Footnote ⁶⁵ Thus, the theoretical discussion has remained focused on symbolic space as it was shaped by monumental ecclesiastic architecture and the rituals it inhabited, rather than on the tension between space and place in the theoretical senses mentioned earlier.

This book seeks to mediate the divide between these different categories of place and space in regard to the cityscape of Frankish Jerusalem. In so doing, it traces the reciprocal connection, and occasional tensions, between the evolution of the lived cityscape and the daily interactions that took place there, and the symbolic space occupied by monuments, religious veneration and pilgrimage. The connection between these two aspects of the city was shaped by a complex dynamic between the symbolic meaning and legacy of the cityscape, and the customs, pre-existing norms and presuppositions of city life held by the highly heterogeneous population that inhabited it. Far from being dichotomous in nature, split into ‘East’ and ‘West’, Frankish Jerusalem’s cityscape was a kaleidoscope of diverse communities within each of these broad categories.

By chronologically analysing a wide array of documents that refer to the city of Jerusalem and its main institutions, I identify the phases of urban change and examine them from a socio-economic perspective. The analysis emphasises the mechanisms developed to meet the challenges that were facing the city in the first decades after the Crusader conquest, and traces their evolution towards the middle and second half of the twelfth century.

This course of inquiry relies mainly on a quantitative analysis of trends that emerge from an analysis of property documents, which are categorised according to their primary components. In so doing, I follow the standards set in the study of other medieval urban environments, specifically adapted to the legal, economic and political realities of Frankish Jerusalem. A comparative analysis of the patterns that emerge from this analysis allows us to characterise the municipal activity of different Jerusalemite institutions and their impact on the transforming cityscape.

d Outline

Chapter 1 outlines the methodological background of this study. It argues that the main tendencies in the existing scholarship on Frankish Jerusalem are rooted in the types of sources that were hitherto primarily used and the approaches that were implemented in the examination of these sources. Later, this chapter places the current study within a broader methodological and theoretical framework, providing an overview of recent developments in the study of medieval urban environments. It especially focuses on the conversion of medieval textual sources into quantifiable data and argues that with proper modifications, such methods can be applied to the case of Frankish Jerusalem. Finally, Chapter 1 introduces the database that forms the basis of this study.

Chapter 2 argues that the increasing rate of commercial and location-specific transactions conducted in Jerusalem from the 1130s reflects the gradual densification of the settlement in Jerusalem and the emergence of a proto real estate market. This process occurred simultaneously with, or even preceded, Jerusalem’s monumental transformation. This approach challenges previous notions concerning the periodisation, underlying causes and scope of the city’s transformation. The chapter also traces the development of residential areas throughout the city and analyses the different strategies employed by Jerusalem’s prominent institutions in their municipal policies. It argues that from the middle of the twelfth century a shift occurred in the balance between the different institutions that were actively engaged in the urban sphere, which led to changes in patterns of property ownership and to the development of new areas inside the city. In doing so, Chapter 2 also sheds new light on the connection between the city’s devotional and monumental space, and its non-monumental, namely residential/commercial, development.

Chapter 3 analyses the reciprocal connection and economic co-dependence between the city and its hinterland through patterns of property ownership among the different Jerusalemite institutions. It shows that the extra-urban activities of these institutions directly continued the mechanisms and strategies established earlier in their intra-urban engagement. Thus, for example, in the case of the Holy Sepulchre this included the establishment of close working relationships with local settlers, direct management of rural estates, and reallocation of previously acquired assets in accordance with the Holy Sepulchre’s changing economic needs. Furthermore, the chapter seeks to highlight the different interests that shaped patterns of property ownership outside the city and trace the shifts that occurred after the middle of the twelfth century, as well as their correspondence with the development of Jerusalemite institutions.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the social bonds shaped by the mutual interests and co-dependency of Jerusalemite institutions and the city’s burgess population. Chapter 4 shows that by the middle of the twelfth century, the connections between the city’s burgesses and the chapter of the Holy Sepulchre formed a quasi-communal structure that employed mechanisms familiar from western Europe. These relationships forged between the burgess community and the Holy Sepulchre laid the necessary infrastructure to increase the level of social cohesion of a newly formed urban society that was otherwise not yet consolidated. While such mechanisms can be paralleled to similar structures that evolved during that period in the West, in Jerusalem they needed to cater to the unique character and highly diverse social composition of the city’s population.

Chapter 5 analyses the transformation that these bonds underwent in the second half of the twelfth century, first as the mechanisms established in Jerusalem were exported and adapted to its hinterland, and then when other institutions, such as the Hospital of St John, increased their involvement in the cityscape. When this process coalesced with the increasing autonomy of the burgess population, former social structures were replaced by looser forms of collaboration between the burgesses and individual institutions. Building on this analysis, Chapter 5 then turns to examining the social structures of Frankish Jerusalem through the comparative framework of medieval immigrant cities, in order to readdress its unique status between western perceptions and manifestations of medieval urbanism and local, eastern Mediterranean challenges.