ABSTRACT
If we are to believe the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, these were the words used by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem to encourage his army as it confronted the forces of Fatimid Egypt on the plain of Ramla in September 1101, in the third year after the foundation of a Prankish state in Palestine. The royal rhetoric illustrates the strategic predicament of the new settlements established in Outremer by the First Crusade: four states (Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem) governed and defended by a minority of Latin Christians of European origin who were divided from the other peoples of the Middle East by confession, language and culture, and separated from their own countries of origin by distance and physical geography. This polarity has tended to inform scholarly evaluations of the relationship of the Franks of Syria and Palestine to their new environment Did they remain an essentially alien minority or did they adapt to their new surroundings? Scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dominated by French writers, inclined towards a theory of cultural synthesis of East and West According to this view
the Franks adjusted to their Oriental surroundings and took root among the peoples over whom they ruled. The result was a new nation, in which all elements were thoroughly blended, which was in no way artificial, and which had a life of its own.2
