Melkites

In the period of the crusades, Melkites was one of the names given to Christians living under Islamic rule who belonged to the Greek Orthodox faith of the Byzantine imperial church. The Arabic term for Melkites, malakiyyun, is derived from the Syriac malka or Arabic malik (king), referring to the Byzantine emperor (Gr. basileos). In modern times the term Melkites refers to the members of the Catholic Melkite Church, which seceded from the Orthodox Melkite Church in the seventeenth century; the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community is now named Rum (“Roman,” i. e., Byzantine) Orthodox. Up to the thirteenth century, the Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians called themselves al-Suryam because of their use of Syriac as liturgical language. Thus, the Melkites are termed Syroi in Greek sources and Syri or Suri-ani in Latin crusader sources. While in Palestine the majority of the indigenous Christians were Melkites, in Northern Syria the Jacobites of the Syrian Orthodox church may have outnumbered the Melkites in many regions. Since the Jacobites also called themselves “Syrians,” the usage of the term Syri or Suriani in Latin sources referring to Northern Syria is ambigious.

When they established their domination over Syria and Palestine after the First Crusade (1096-1099), the Franks did not create a new social order, but effectively took over the Muslim system of dhimmis (protected peoples). Under this social and administrative system, the various religious communities of the non-Muslim population had the status of second-class citizens, but had far-reaching internal autonomy, as the administration and jurisdiction of each religious community was incumbent upon the respective church leaders. In the legal framework of the Frankish states of Out-remer, a society of two classes was thus generated: the Franks formed the ruling class, while the subjects consisted of the non-Christian populace, along with those Christians who, according to the Assises of Jerusalem, did not belong to the Latin (Roman Catholic) Church.

Frankish rule changed little for the Syrian Orthodox and Armenians, whom the Franks regarded as heretics. However, the Melkites came under the jurisdiction of the Latin Church, since, according to the Latin view, they still belonged to the one church encompassing East and West. As a consequence, the Greek Orthodox patriarchs and bishops were replaced by Latins, although the Greek patriarchal clergy still performed its duties in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The transition to Latin church leadership seems not to have been a smooth one, as demonstrated by the account of the Easter ceremony of 1101 by the Armenian chronicler Matthew of Edessa. According to his testimony, the miracle of the self-igniting Easter fire, performed annually by the Greek clerics, had not taken place that year, since the indigenous Christians had been driven from their monasteries; only after the Franks restored them to their rightful possessions was the miracle again performed.

The daily life of the Melkite community was also characterized by constant minor conflicts between Latins and the Greek Orthodox, which were ignited by disputes about ritual matters such as the use of azymes (unleavened bread in the Eucharist), the fast on the Sabbath day, and the cutting of one’s beard—that is, the external signs by which one could tell a Latin from an Orthodox Christian. In contrast to the hostile attitude of the Latin hierarchy, the Frankish rulers proved friendly toward the local Christians. Thus, King Baldwin I of Jerusalem resettled Christians from east of the Jordan in Jerusalem, since he needed their support in revitalizing the city, which had lost large parts of its native population during the crusader conquest of 1099.

Little is known of the Greek Orthodox bishops remaining in the country and their relationship with the Latin Church. They seem to have receded to the fringes of Frankish territory in order to avoid any direct competition with Latin bishops. Thus, a Latin deed dated 1173 refers to a bishop of Gaza and Eleutheropolis. This bishopric (to which the Latins had not appointed any bishop) was located on the southwestern border of the kingdom of Jerusalem. To what extent the Orthodox bishop may have (even only formally) accepted the Latin patriarch is unclear. The Melkites remained loyal to their patriarchs, who continued to be appointed by the Byzantine emperor and resided in exile in Constantinople (mod. Istanbul, Turkey). There is no evidence that the

Orthodox Church in Palestine was divided into Arabicspeaking Christians recognizing the supremacy of the Latins on the one hand and Greek clerics and monks oriented to the Byzantine imperial church on the other. On the contrary, a closer alignment with Byzantium was brought about from the end of the twelfth century onward on the levels of ritual and canon law. In this context, the Procheiros Nomos, a legal text issued by the Byzantine emperor around 900, was translated at the beginning of the thirteenth century into Arabic and copied by Melkites in Palestine and Syria, even if its relevance for the regulation of internal jurisdiction of the Melkites was slight. The Melkite clergy consisted of Greeks as well as Arabs, as is proved by an Arabic contract of sale issued by Melkites and dated 1169. Arabic also found its way into the liturgy: the sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for example, was read in an Arabic translation following the reading of the Greek original.

In the 1150s the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos was able to assert his role as protector of the Greek Orthodox Church and community in Outremer. He was able to force the prince of Antioch to replace the Latin patriarch of Antioch (mod. Antakya, Turkey) with a Greek Orthodox one, at least for a few years. The kingdom of Jerusalem was more independent from the Byzantine Empire as a result of its greater distance from it, so that Manuel had to content himself with financing construction and decoration in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Bethlehem, and in several Orthodox monasteries, all the while closely cooperating with the king of Jerusalem.

In the twelfth century we find numerous indications of an active religious, intellectual, and artistic life of the Melkite community under Frankish rule. A number of Orthodox monasteries continued to exist, the most important of them being the monastery of St. Sabas in the Judaean desert. Orthodox monastic life in Palestine, whose tradition goes back to the beginnings of monastic and anachoretic life, strongly influenced Orthodox Christianity, as well as the Latin monks in the Holy Land. The production of books and the continued existence of the libraries of the Orthodox monasteries and churches in the twelfth century may be regarded as an expression of the intellectual and religious life of the Melkites. All in all, around 100 Greek manuscripts can be identified as probably having been written either in the twelfth or in the thirteenth century in Palestine or as having been located there at that time. The translation of Byzantine legal texts into Arabic testifies to the continued existence of a living Greco-Arabic tradition in Palestine. Another example of this phenomenon was the physician Muwaffaq al-Din Ya‘qub ibn Siqlab, who worked in Jerusalem in the 1170s and 1180s and later became personal physician to the Ayyubid lord al-Mu‘azzam. He was educated in a monastery in the Judaean desert and in Jerusalem, translated Greek texts into Arabic, and owned a number of books by the ancient physician Galen in the Greek original. These examples of intellectual activity indicate that the potential and the cultural life of the Melkites in Jerusalem should not be underestimated, even if the Latin sources remain silent in this respect.

In view of the tensions between Melkites and Latins in Jerusalem, it is not surprising that the Melkites sympathized with Saladin during the siege of the city in 1187. According to the Coptic Historiapatriarcharum Alexandrinorum, they were even prepared to open the gates to Saladin because of their rejection of the Latins, thus contributing to the surrender of the city by the Franks. Whether they were acting in coordination with the Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelos is unclear, but their actions would fit in well with the known existing relations between Saladin and Isaac. It was not simply cultural differences and the Melkites’ inferior legal status that prevented their integration into Frankish society. Rather, the Melkites of Outremer formed, even in the twelfth century, a unified community in the tradition of the Islamic dhimmi system whose conception of themselves was based on their belonging to the church of the Byzantine Empire.

With Saladin’s victory at the battle of Hattin and his subsequent conquest of much of Outremer in 1187, the situation for the Melkites changed completely. From this time onward most of them lived under Ayyubid rule and again became dhimmis under the protection of the Muslims. The indifferent attitude of the indigenous Orthodox Christians toward the conquest of Jerusalem by Saladin is demonstrated by a Melkite colophon dated 3 October 1187, the very day of the Muslim takeover of the city, which is casually mentioned without any commentary. Even though there were occasional repressions against the Melkites (as, for example, in 1217-1219 in reaction to the Fifth Crusade), the Melkite church profited from Ayyubid rule. The episcopate in Ayyubid territory could carry out its duties unhindered, and between 1204 and 1206/1207 the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem returned to the Holy City. According to the reports of the Latin pilgrims Willibrand of Oldenburg and Thietmar who traveled to the Holy Land in 1211-1212 and 1217, respectively, the Melkites took over most of the shrine churches from the Latins. Evidently the Melkites succeeded to some extent in regaining the position they held before the crusades. Neither the establishment of Frankish rule nor its end had any effect on the difficult relationship between the Melkites and the other indigenous Christian communities. Bishop Paulos of Sidon wrote (probably in the first half of the thirteenth century) a treatise on the errors of the Eastern churches without mentioning the Latins at all.

In the thirteenth century, only the coast of Palestine and Syria remained under Frankish rule. Here the Melkites were at least theoretically still subordinate to the Latin Church. But in reality things were different. Jacob of Vitry, Latin bishop of Acre (mod. ‘Akko, Israel) from 1216, reports of the Suriani and their bishops that they said they would be obedient to the Latin bishops, but obeyed them only superficially, through fear of the secular lords. Again, one of the most disputed issues was the question of the azymes. But this time the Latins were no longer in a position to assert themselves against the Melkites.

For the second half of the thirteenth century, when the Mamluks succeeded the Ayyubids as rulers in Egypt and the Near East, we have hardly any information on the history of the Melkites in Palestine and Syria. After the conquest of Antioch by Sultan Baybars I in 1268, the Greek patriarch returned to the city. In Jerusalem his colleague continued in residence and still played a role in the wider Orthodox world. A prerequisite for the close ties that both patriarchates maintained with Constantinople was the fact that Byzantine relations with the Mamluks were generally good. The Mamluks’ main interest was to prevent any impediment to the import of military slaves from the north of the Caucasus. Byzantium was thus able to regain its role as protector of the orthodox Christians in the Holy Land.

-Johannes Pahlitzsch

See also: Antioch, Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of; Byzantine Empire; Jerusalem, Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of

Bibliography

Ehenblum, Ronnie, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Griffith, Sidney H., “The Church of Jerusalem and the ‘Melkites’: Christianity in the Holy Land during the Byzantine Era,” in Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 175-204.

Memel

Hamilton, Bernard, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London: Variorum, 1980).

Jotischky, Andrew, “Greek Orthodox and Latin Monasticism around Mar Saba under Crusader Rule,” in The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present, ed. J. Patrich (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), pp. 85-96.

-, “Ethnographic Attitudes in the Crusader States: The

Franks and the Indigenous Orthodox People,” in East and West in the Crusader States: Context—Contacts— Confrontations III, ed. Krijnie N. Ciggaar and Herman Teule (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), pp. 1-20.

Kolbaba, Tia M., The Byzantine Lists. Errors of the Latins (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

Nasrahah, Joseph, Histoire du mouvement litteraire dans I’eglise melchite du Ve au XXe siecle: Contribution a I’etude de la litterature arabe chretienne, vol. 3, part 1 (Louvain: Peeters, 1983).

Pahlitzsch, Johannes, Graeci und Suriani im Paldstina der Kreuzfahrerzeit: Beitrdge und Quellen zur Geschichte des griechisch-orthodoxen Patriarchats von Jerusalem (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001).

-, “Georgians and Greeks in Jerusalem (1099-1310),”

In East and West in the Crusader States: Context—

Contacts—Confrontations III, ed. Krijnie N. Ciggaar and Herman Teule (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), pp. 35-51.

Pahlitzsch, Johannes, and Daniel Baraz, “Christian Communities in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187 CE),” in Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 205-235.

Pahlitzsch, Johannes, and Dorothea Weltecke, “Konflikte zwischen den nicht-lateinischen Kirchen im Konigreich Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem im Hoch - und Spdtmittelalter. Konflikte und Konfliktbewdltigung—Vorstellungen und Vergegenwdrtigungen, ed. Dieter Bauer, Klaus Herbers, and Nikolas Jaspert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2001), pp. 119-145.

Rubin, Milka, “Arabization versus Islamization in the Palestinian Melkite Community during the Early Muslim Period,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, First-Fifteenth Centuries ce, ed. Arieh Kofsky and Guy Stroumsa (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute, 1998), pp. 149-162.