Title: The indigenous Christians of the Ayyubid Sultanate at the time of the Fifth Crusade
Abstract: The era of the Crusades is most often portrayed as a great struggle
between Christendom and the Islamic world. A more nuanced view,
however, quickly demonstrates that this is a gross simplification.1 Latin
Christians were all too often at variance with Christians of the Byzantine
Empire, which had both fought with and interacted with the Islamic
world for nearly 500 years by the time of the First Crusade.2 The lands
of the Eastern Mediterranean were, indeed, extremely diverse, with a
population of Sunni Muslims (Arabs, Turks and Kurds), Shi ﷳ’ite Muslims
(and derivative Ismaʿi ﷳlis, Nus ayri ﷳs and Druze), Jews (Rabbanites and
Karaites), Samaritans and, of course, Christians.3 Of these latter, there
were nine different indigenous Christian confessions that the Crusaders
would have encountered: Melkites,4 Georgians,5 Maronites, Armenians,
Syrian Orthodox,6 Copts, Nubians, Ethiopians7 and East Syrians.8 These
groups were spread across the Ayyu bid Sultanate (1171-1250) and the
Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, but were concentrated especially in northern
and coastal Syria, in Palestine and in Upper Egypt.9 At the time of the Fifth
Crusade (1217-21), many of these ahl al-kita ﷳb (‘People of the Book’) or ahl
al-dhimma (protected ‘People of the Covenant’), although officially secondclass citizens, were prospering and even experiencing something of a literary
and artistic renaissance.10 The effects of the Fifth Crusade were particularly
grave for the Coptic Christians.11 This chapter will briefly examine the nine
indigenous Christian confessions present in Greater Syria (Bila ﷳd al-Sha ﷳm)
and Egypt at the time of the Fifth Crusade, before examining the effects of
the Crusade upon the Christians of Egypt.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-10-14
Language: en
Type: article
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