History of the Crusades

the Crusades Episode 68, life in the Crusader States.

Hello again.

Last week we took a closer look at the different forms of Christianity present in the Holy Land at the time of the Crusades.

This week we will look at life in general in the Crusaders.

Basically I've approached this topic as follows.

If a European-Latin Christian travelled to the Holy Land during the time of the Crusades, how would the newly arrived traveler view life

in the Crusaders?

Would it be very different to life back in Europe? The short answer to this question is yes.

To answer the question more fully, we are going to need to examine the life of a Latin Christian who was born and raised in the crusader states.

What did they eat? What sort of houses did they live in? What did they wear? How did they interact with the Muslims who also called this region home?

What did they do in their spare time? What language did they speak?

If you would like to know the answers to these questions and more,

keep listening. I'll start with the last question first because it's actually very interesting.

And that is, what language did a native-born Latin Christian speak?

Now, some time back a listener contacted me and posed an interesting question.

When the armies of Europe left on crusade, what language did they use for command?

This question is made even more interesting by the fact that at the time of the Crusades,

there were many more separate languages spoken in Europe

than there are today. In particular the languages of French and Italian as uniform homogenous languages didn't exist.

The countries of France and Italy that we know today were divided into self-governing regions, each with its own distinct language.

A Norman French man speaking a particular form of the language of the French royal family,

...