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), Shı ﷳ’ite Muslims (and derivative Ismaʿı ﷳlis, Nus ayrı 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.
