Roman, Frank, or Hellene? The Crusades in Eastern Christian Cosmology

For indigenous Christians of Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, the First Crusade and subsequent military ventures brought confusion to the political and theological order of the known world.  For many Christians of the Near East, that world safely balanced two divinely established forces.  The first was the Byzantine Empire, who however poorly and heretically they might do so, continued the tradition of the righteous emperors of the late antique past.  The second was the empire of the Muslims, thought to serve as the hammer with which God punished errant Christians, most prominently the Byzantines.  In the eyes of the Armenians and Jacobites, the punishment inflicted by Muslims was only just in consideration of Byzantine mistreatment of other Christian communities, such as themselves.  Western Christians (Franks) were peripheral to the world of near eastern Christians.  At the time of the First Crusade, the Franks were largely perceived as Byzantine mercenaries.  As it became apparent that the Franks were in many ways different from the Byzantines--in culture, religious practice, and political aims--Armenians and Jacobites sought to fit the Franks and the crusades into their understanding of the world.  For some, the Franks could only be assimilated within an apocalyptic framework--that is, their arrival signaled the collapse of the existing world order and the emergence of a new one.   For others, however, the crusades required only lead to the substitution one group for another, but the larger historical structure remained largely unchanged.  The Jacobite bishop of Amida, Dionysios bar Salibi, argued that the Franks were the true Romans and the true successors of Constantine, while the Byzantines were themselves just “Hellenes.”  Dionysius’s approach makes the Franks the legitimate conduit of divine power on earth, though still heretical.  Thus many eastern Christians accepted the central premises of the crusading movement.