How much did populations mix in the Levant and are there traces today?
RELATED POSTS
What does DNA reveal about the Crusaders’ legacy?
How much did populations mix in the Levant and are there traces today?
In 2019, a team of scientists published a landmark study in the American Journal of Human Genetics after studying the remains archaeologists found in a burial pit near the Crusader-era Church of Saint John in Sidon on the modern-day Lebanese coast. Radiocarbon dating showed this was a mass grave for people who died during the last years of the Crusades in the thirteenth century, as the kingdom’s doomed remnants clung on along the Levantine coast after Saladin’s decisive blow at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, before finally collapsing in 1291. The DNA extracted from the remains confirmed what many expected: that there was significant genetic mixing in the Crusader realms, with some individuals showing mainly Western European origins but other ancestry profiles indicating both strong Levantine and Western European components. The sources had already suggested a huge influx of knights and soldiers – not to mention merchants, craftsmen, and clergy – after Pope Urban II in 1095 launched the First Crusade, calling on Western Christian knights to invade the Holy Land to reverse the Muslim conquest nearly four centuries before. And the local populations were far from homogenous themselves, encompassing Arab Muslims, Eastern Christian groups such as Maronites and Melkites, alongside smaller Jewish and Druze populations. The Sidon site’s archaeological context is indicative of the Crusader principalities’ desperate state in their final years, as the corpses showed unmistakable evidence of perimortem trauma, including injuries such as sword wounds pointing to violent deaths, as well as signs the bodies were burned. The excavating archaeologists described this as typical of the mass disposal of casualties from a big battle or siege. Sidon was repeatedly taken and retaken by Crusader and Muslim forces over the thirteenth century – with its fortifications damaged or destroyed and then built again until the definitive Mamluk conquest of the Crusaders’ last remnants of territory. But the most striking question is whether that genetic mixing between Crusaders and local populations shaped today’s Levantine populations. Given the Sidon findings – not to mention the scale of the influx and the noted European-seeming appearance of some modern Levantines, most famously the late Syrian jihadist Mustafa Setmariam Nasar – it seemed likely the DNA evidence would confirm that the Crusaders left a significant genetic legacy. The scientists addressed this question by contrasting the genomic data from the Sidon burials with genomic datasets from contemporary Lebanese populations. The surprising conclusion was that the Crusader ancestry component is a very minor fragment of their ancestry – an awful lot smaller than the documentary sources would imply. The Mamluk capture of the last Crusader coastal territory, culminating in the Fall of Acre in 1291, was followed by a systematic policy of expelling the Franks (their term for all people of Western European descent). Many were either killed or fled to the nearest Christian territory they could find – which predominantly meant Cyprus. In contrast to the Spanish reconquest of territory from the Moors two centuries later, which led to forced religious conversions, it seems there was more of an ethnic, as opposed to just religious, aspect to the Mamluk policy. And clearly this policy was more thoroughgoing and effective than historians had thought. World Politics & History is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell World Politics & History that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
|
Posts
0 Comments