ABSTRACT
Twelfth-century narrative accounts in Armenian, Syriac and Latin recount a number of processions in Syria and Palestine in which both Eastern Christians and Latins participated. Processions were one of the many ways by which the Franks expressed their political dominance over the urban (and likely also the rural) landscape, but it was also a way that all Christian communities used to express and even construct relationships among themselves. Scholars often assume that the procession performs (in a Durkheimian sense) the work of creating or displaying unity. Yet the scattered sources of the twelfth-century Frankish Levant suggest that this is only one of the functions an inter-confessional procession can play. As common were processions that delimited, separated and hierarchised communities.
