ABSTRACT
If I am not mistaken, the Muslim inhabitants of the Latin Kingdom hardly ever appear in the Latin chronicles. 'Saracens' are very often mentioned, and almost invariably the term refers to the Muslims outside the kingdom, to the enemy attacking, winning or losing battles. True, this is partly a matter of personal taste, as we find Fulcher of Chartres slightly less taciturn on the subject than Albert of Aachen or William of Tyre. But it must also be traced to a deeper reason. The Muslims living within the confines of the Latin Kingdom could safely be ignored (a) because normally they were not much of a problem, and (b) they hardly ever appear to have acted politically in the broadest sense of the word, either in helping or in damaging the interests of the ruling Latins. It is of course evident that there must have been some sort of rudimentary social life among the Muslims and that they were not without their own internal social-and consequently in a broad sense politicalorganization; but as long as these activities only concerned their own Muslim internal affairs, the Latins who were faced with an extremely colourful mosaic of various ethnic and religious units had a natural tendency to ignore these matters as simply without interest and certainly not worthy of record. A record comes only on the few occasions when the Muslims are acting vis-d-vis the Latins, reacting in some sort of way to their presence. The picture would, of course, look different if we had any traces of written charters or records from within this Muslim community, or an internal Jerusalemite Muslim chronicler. But this is not the case and even the external Muslim chronicles do not normally refer to the Muslims living in the kingdom in more than a cursory manner or in the vaguest general terms, because as long as they stayed quiet, they were almost as uninteresting to the Muslim chroniclers as to the Latin ones.
