True Romans: remembering the crusades among Eastern Christians

Abstract

For Christians of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, the First Crusade and subsequent settlements brought confusion to the political and theological order of the world. Previously, the world existed as a stable balance between two divinely established forces: the divinely established empire of the Romans (the Byzantines), and the empire of the Muslims, equally established by divine providence, but intended to serve as the hammer with which God punished errant Christians. Western Christians (Franks) were peripheral to this world; at the time of the First Crusade, the Franks were commonly perceived as Byzantine mercenaries. After the Franks conquered Jerusalem, the city central to providential history, Armenians and Jacobites began to ask: who were the true Romans? The term in both Armenian and Syriac texts began to be applied to the Franks instead of the Byzantines, particularly in apocalyptic and providential schemes of history.