ABSTRACT
The members of the first crusade experienced a considerable culture-shock when they reached Syria and found themselves surrounded by a multiplicity of Christian confessions, with all of which they were unfamiliar. They instinctively classed all eastern-rite Christians as heretics because they appeared so different from western Catholics,1 but this sweeping view was never endorsed by the papacy or by the Latin hierarchy of Syria. The western church made a formal distinction between separated eastern Christians, who were not in communion with Rome, and the Orthodox, who were members of the Catholic church of which the western church formed a part. That is why it was Orthodox sees which the Latins took over, not Jacobite or Armenian ones, and Orthodox traditions which they sought to perpetuate in their form of church organisation. This attitude is reflected by William of Tyre who, when he speaks of the substitution of a Latin patriarch of Antioch for the Orthodox John IV, says that the former resigned his see 'realising that a Greek could not rule over Latins effectively enough',2 not because he was schismatic, which he clearly was not.
