ABSTRACT
In recent years, historians have increasingly emphasised the importance of marriage and family ties between early crusaders and established Christian groups in northern Syria during the process of settlement in the Latin East. As the First Crusaders travelled through strategic areas en route to the Holy Land such as Cilicia, the Taurus Mountains and northern Syria, they came into contact with a range of existing Christian communities, predominantly comprised of Greeks, Armenians and Jacobites.1 Some were governed by Armenian lords displaced from their ancestral homelands by the expansion of the Byzantine Empire in the early eleventh century, or by later advances of the Seljuk Turks. These nobles occupied frontier cities on the edge of Byzantine territories, administering rule on behalf of the Greeks, or striving to establish their own independent lordships.
