Poulains

An Old French word applied in some twelfth - and thirteenth-century sources to Latin Christians of Western parentage residing in, and perhaps born in, Outremer.

The word was once thought to refer to someone of mixed parentage, with a Frankish father and a native Christian mother (or vice versa), but this interpretation has been rejected as inaccurate. It is possible that poulain indicates class rather than ethnicity or birthplace.

Margaret Ruth Morgan believed that the word referred to Latin Christians native to Outremer (as opposed to immigrants), that it had acquired a distinctly pejorative connotation by at least the fourteenth century, and that it did not apply to Italians. However, the author known as the Templar of Tyre, writing in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, uses it in a way that does not support this interpretation: in section 454 of his Gestes des Chyprois, poulain is applied to fishermen of Pisan nationality, and without an obviously negative connotation [The “Templar of Tyre”: Part III of the Deeds of the Cypriots, trans. Paul Crawford (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), p. 92].

The factional opposition that various historians have set up between poulains and immigrant Latin Christians is equally suspect. The continuator of William of Tyre claims that supporters of Guy of Lusignan taunted his opponents in 1186 by crying that “despite the poulains, we have a Poitevin” for king [ The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation, trans. Peter W. Edbury (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 45-46]; some modern historians have believed that the late twelfth-century kingdom of Jerusalem was divided along poulain and non-poulain lines (with the latter being foolhardy and rash). But there is good reason to doubt both the classification and the judgment. As recent research by Peter Edbury and Bernard Hamilton has shown, the factions were more complicated and dynastic than this explanation acknowledges, and some of the non-poulain leaders were highly effective. Forcing political and social realities into a linguistic mold of dubious etymology probably serves no useful purpose, and the imprecise nature of this word suggests that it should be understood, and employed, cautiously.

-Paul Crawford

Bibliography

Edbury, Peter W., “Propaganda and Faction in the Kingdom of Jerusalem: The Background to Hattin,” in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 173-189.

Hamilton, Bernard, The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Morgan, Margaret Ruth, “The Meanings of Old French Polain, Latin Pullanus,” Medium Aevum 48 (1979), 40-54.