ABSTRACT
A recurring theme in frontier history is that of acculturation. The extent to which the dominant minority in a border settlement adapted its culture to that of the subordinated majority depended, of course, on factors which varied a good deal from place to place. Every frontier society was different in makeup and few were culturally homogeneous. Pluriformity was a feature of Palestine in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Leaving aside an unknown number of converts to Catholicism1 (including from the 1180s onwards whole uniate communities, the Maronite and a section of the Armenian), the indigenous peoples in the kingdom of Jerusalem consisted of various Christian groups (Orthodox Greeks who were generally Arabic-speaking, Nestorians and Monophysites of different kinds, particularly Jacobites, Armenians and Copts); Muslims (Sunni and Shi’i of various types, including Druses); Jews of several schools and Samaritans; and a few Zoroastrians. Religion is not everything, but it was very important to the indigenous peoples themselves and led to differences in social behaviour. It is not surprising that the search for a satisfactory method of governing the subject peoples in a settlement established by force, and exposed to the threat of reconquest, involved a process which was by its nature experimental and stressful for all sides.
