Crusader settlers confronted religious diversity that defied their categories

Evidence

The Crusader States established in the wake of the First Crusade in 1095 lasted some two hundred years on the east Mediterranean littoral, occupying more or less the area from south-east Turkey to the Red Sea and including at their greatest extent the present-day states of Israel/Palestine, Lebanon and parts of western and northern Syria and eastern Turkey. The European settlers constituted a minority, albeit the dominant military force, among the indigenous peoples. More to the point, perhaps, they found the indigenous peoples far more diverse and difficult to categorise than they appear to have expected. In preaching the Crusade, Pope Urban II probably referred in general terms to the indigenous Christians of the Holy Land, but it was left to the first generation of Western settlers after the Crusade to negotiate the variety of religious and ethnic groups in newly conquered territory and to fit them into a scheme of law and government. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 191

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The rulers of a violently binary religious worldview had to actually govern a region where Christian and Muslim populations were linguistically indistinguishable and Muslims were themselves ruled by Turks — the category system broke against lived reality.