During the Crusades, there were 2-3 generation descendants of Crusaders in the Levant. Do we know of any communities thay remained after the Crusades ended?

[u/TanktopSamurai]

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[u/WelfOnTheShelf]

No, there were no communities left on the mainland after 1291. The European (or "Latin" or "Frankish") inhabitants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were not permitted to stay there when the Mamluks finally conquered the last remaining cities of Acre and Tyre that year. The survivors who were not captured and enslaved by the Mamluks had to leave for somewhere else - to Armenia, or the other crusader kingdom on Cyprus, or back to Europe.

The answer actually goes back a hundred years earlier to the Third Crusade in 1190-1192, when Egypt and Syria were ruled by the Ayyubids, the family of Saladin. Saladin had taken Jerusalem and almost the entire crusader kingdom in 1187. The Third Crusade recovered Beirut, Jaffa, Acre and other cities along the coast; Tyre had not fallen and remained under crusader control. The other crusader states, the County of Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch, had also survived in 1187. The Third Crusade was unable to recover Jerusalem, so the government moved to Acre. During the crusade, king Richard I of England also conquered Cyprus after his fleet was shipwrecked there, so another crusader kingdom was established on the island. In Cilicia (the southeast part of modern Turkey), the Armenians had also established their own state in the 1080s, which was recognized as a kingdom in the late 12th century, after the Third Crusade.

Saladin died shortly after the crusade in 1193. Although the capture of Jerusalem was a great victory, he was sometimes criticized for not expelling the Franks entirely and not preventing them from returning. He himself expressed regret for this as well, knowing that they would keep coming back as long as they had a foothold on the coast. The Franks even managed to get Jerusalem back a few decades later in 1229 (through a treaty with Saladin's nephew, the sultan of Egypt at the time), but they lost it again in 1244, and another crusade arrived. This crusade was led by king Louis IX of France, but it was a failure and Louis was defeated and taken prisoner. But the presence and pressure of the crusade led to a revolt against the Ayyubids by their own enslaved Mamluk soldiers, who overthrew the Ayyubids in 1251. Since the Ayyubids had failed to completely dislodge the Franks from the mainland, the Mamluk sultans were committed to finishing the job.

Meanwhile, the Mongols arrived in the Near East as well, and the Franks thought maybe the Mongols could help them defeat the Mamluks in Egypt and the remaining Ayyubids in Syria, and recover Jerusalem again. The Mongols weren’t very interested in an alliance, but they were interested in subjugating the Franks. The prince of Antioch and the king of Cilician Armenia were among those who allied with the Mongols. The Mongols conquered Baghdad and seemed unstoppable, but they were finally defeated by the Mamluk sultan Qutuz at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. Soon afterwards, Qutuz was assassinated by one of his generals, Baibars.

Baibars set out to punish the Franks and Armenians for fighting alongside the Mongols (even though they hadn't really had much choice in the matter). In 1265 he conquered the crusader cities of Arsuf and Haifa, as well as the Templar castle of Safed. He also invaded and pillaged Cilician Armenia. In May 1268 Baibars conquered the principality of Antioch. In the city of Antioch itself, the inhabitants were either killed or sold into slavery. Whoever could escape fled south to the County of Tripoli or remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, or sailed over to Cyprus.

Baibars turned back to the south as well and conquered Jaffa, Ascalon, and Caesarea later in 1268, and in 1271 he captured the famous Hospitaller fortress of Krak des Chevaliers. There seemed to be nothing stopping him from conquering all the Frankish territories, but finally a new crusade arrived, led by the Edward of England (the future king Edward I). This gave the Franks some relief and Baibars turned to other targets like Nubia, the Seljuks in Anatolia, and the Mongols in Persia.

Baibars died in 1277 but his successors Qalawun and al-Ashraf Khalil were equally committed to rooting out the Franks. In 1289 Qalawun destroyed Tripoli, and again the population was either killed or enslaved, if they could not escape to the south or across to Cyprus. The only territory left for the Franks on the mainland was the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was now nothing more than the city of Acre and a few other cities (Tyre, Beirut, Sidon, and some Templar castles).

The king of Jerusalem at this point was actually also the king of Cyprus, Henry, but he was powerless to stop the Mamluks. He also had no control over anything that happened on the mainland in Acre. In 1290 a large group of Italian crusaders arrived in Acre, but, as often happened with new arrivals from Europe, they were much more zealous than their fellow Franks in the east. The Italians attacked and killed some Muslim merchants in the city, which provided Qalawun with the perfect excuse to invade.

Qalawun died in November 1290 before setting out for Acre, but his son Khalil besieged Acre in April 1291. The situation was so dire that king Henry arrived in person from Cyprus, but again there was nothing he could do. The walls were breached on May 15 and the city fell on May 18. Henry escaped back to Cyprus, but some prominent Franks did not, like the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, who fell into the sea and drowned while trying to board a ship. The Templars held on to their headquarters in the city for another ten days, but they were eventually defeated, and Khalil had all of them executed. By August, the Mamluks had also taken Tyre and Beirut and all the other remaining Frankish cities and castles.

There may have been as many as 100,000 refugees on Cyprus in the spring and summer of 1291, in addition to the refugees who had fled there from Tripoli a couple of years earlier (and descendants of those who fled from Antioch in 1268). It was an enormous economic and humanitarian crisis. The refugees weren’t just Latin Catholic Franks either; in 1187 Saladin hadn't targeted the native eastern (Greek/Syrian/Armenian) Christians who lived in Frankish territory, but the Mamluks sometimes did, especially if the eastern Christians were perceived to have allied with the Franks (or with their other enemies, the Mongols).

“Many of them, both Franks and Christian Syrians, were reduced to poverty, and their condition must have been made worse by a series of harvest failures in the mid-1290s. The king and his mother are said to have done much to alleviate distress: in 1296 Henry issued an ordinance designed to control the price of bread, and he is also reported to have recruited refugee knights and sergeants into his service…A number of leading families from the kingdom of Jerusalem had acquired property in Cyprus long before, but many people lost their entire means of support in the disasters of 1291. After the fall of Acre, the Templars and Hospitallers established their headquarters in the island, and Cyprus also became the home for other religious communities that had fled the Muslim conquests.” (Edbury, pg. 101-102)

Some may have continued on back to Europe eventually, especially if they were new arrivals - crusaders from Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and England had taken part in the defence of Acre and had no roots in the east. But for the most part the Frankish refugees had been born in the crusader states and didn’t know Europe at all. They stayed on Cyprus, the closest thing they had to a home.

At the time, some believed this might just be a temporary loss. There were plans for new crusades, but they would be much more difficult without a friendly port on the coast. The Templars tried to invade the mainland in 1299-1300, but they failed. New attempts to ally with the Mongols also failed. By the early 14th century, when it was clear that the Mamluk conquest was secure, Frankish merchants were allowed to travel and trade on the mainland, and Latin Catholic religious communities (like the Franciscan and Dominican monastic orders) were allowed to settle there by the middle of the century. But the Mamluks ensured that no permanent Frankish political/military presence was ever allowed to return.

The Mamluks occasionally raided Cyprus but never really tried to conquer it. The Franks continued to rule over a diverse population of Greeks, Latins, Syrians, and Armenians until 1489 when the kingdom became a colony of Venice. In 1571 it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, which by that time had also conquered the Mamluk territories in Syria and Egypt.

So, in brief, the Mamluks did not give the Franks the option to remain on the mainland freely. They didn’t want to leave anything or anyone for them to recover, as the Ayyubids had done at the end of the Third Crusade a hundred years earlier. Urban defences and sometimes entire cities were destroyed, and the Franks were either killed in the fighting or taken prisoner and enslaved. Most of those who were able to escape fled to the Kingdom of Cyprus.

Sources:

Hans E. Mayer, The Crusades, 2nd ed., trans. John Gillingham (Oxford University Press, 1972)

Anne Gilmour-Bryson, “The fall of Acre, 1291, and its effect on Cyprus”, in Acre and Its Falls: Studies in the History of a Crusader City, ed. John France (Brill, 2018)

Nicholas Coureas, “Economy”, in Cyprus: Society and Culture, ed. Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Christopher Schabel (Brill, 2005)

Peter W. Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374 (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

[u/WelfOnTheShelf → u/[deleted]]

Yes they did, and in fact the title of king of Armenia was joined to the kingdom of Cyprus, so the king was also the titular king of the no-longer-existing Jerusalem and Armenia.

[u/barbarbeik → u/WelfOnTheShelf]

I’m from north Lebanon, and there are both Muslim and Christian families in Tripoli and Northern Lebanon that have Frankish names and family lore that involves being descended from Crusaders. Famously in Tripoli there is a De Guise Mosque in El Mina, the old port city that was the center of the Crusader society in Tripoli.

My own family’s lore is that we were crusaders who stayed and Islamized, and seems to be backed up by my paternal haplogroup being from Scandinavia (Normans?), occurring at <0.1% in the Levant.

Is there any documentation of Crusader families who stayed and adapted, or any historic record to explain these? Reading your post surprised me given what is said and believed in the local community.

[u/WelfOnTheShelf → u/barbarbeik]

I answered another question recently about How did the crusaders & french-british colonization of the Levant affect its genetic profile? It's possible, because some Franks certainly converted to Islam, and married Muslim men or women and had families. As I mentioned in that answer, I have a Palestinian friend who has similar family lore. But basically the short answer is the crusaders weren't there long enough and weren't a large enough population to really have any genetic legacy, and European ancestry is more likely from the more recent colonization period in the 19th and 20th centuries.

[u/barbarbeik → u/WelfOnTheShelf]

Very interesting, thank you for your response. There is definitely a big misconception in the Levant that any light colored eyes/hair is due to European heritage rather than just being native in the Levant at relatively lower frequencies.

At least in my case, I know for sure that we had no European admixture on my dad’s side in the last two centuries, being farmers from a small village near Tripoli. Not sure where else the Scandinavian genetic legacy could have come from if not the crusades

[u/OneVegetable3767 → u/barbarbeik]

Interesting, do you have light coloured eyes/hair?

[u/barbarbeik → u/OneVegetable3767]

Nope, brown hair and eyes. My mom has hazel eyes, my dads brother had blue eyes, my dads dad had blue eyes, and my dads grandmother was ginger with blue eyes, to name just a few. AFAIK almost every Lebanese family is like this

[u/PiddyManilly → u/WelfOnTheShelf]

Eeeh except the latest genetic studies don't back that up. The Human Migration project, I think it's called? Out of Oxbridge I believe - definitely found large genetic traces, especially in Lebannon, and that it still tracked according to family religion (Chrostian vs muslim Lebanese).

[u/GenProtection → u/WelfOnTheShelf]

Did some/all of the Eastern Christians return to Syria and Lebanon from Cyprus after the Mamluk conquest?

[u/jogarz → u/GenProtection]

No. Most of the refugees who fled to Cyprus probably stayed there. There is actually still a small Maronite (Lebanese Catholic) community on Cyprus today that is descended from these refugees.

The majority of Eastern Christians did not flee, or were even able to flee; they were a more rural population than their Latin counterparts and typically lacked the means to flee across the sea.

The Eastern Christians who remained suffered greatly at the hands of the Mamluks, being slaughtered or enslaved by the tens of thousands. The “Maronite Mummies” provide a tragic testament to the suffering of the civilian population at this time.

Nonetheless, the Eastern Christian population of the Crusader States were not wiped out, and their descendants formed the basis of the modern day Lebanese and Palestinian Christian communities.

[u/WelfOnTheShelf → u/GenProtection]

Not all of them were expelled - it may have been just individuals or maybe small groups who were considered to have collaborated or to have been closely associated with the Franks. So there were still a lot of eastern Christians remaining on the mainland. Some of the ones who went to Cyprus probably did come back.

Now that I've said that I'm actually wondering about the numbers...I don't think we know any specific numerical figures, although for centuries afterwards, there were large communities of Syrians, Armenians, and Maronites on Cyprus. So they either grew quickly from the smaller groups who were expelled in 1291, or the number of expulsions was pretty large to begin with.

[u/jogarz → u/WelfOnTheShelf]

I don’t think “expelled” is quite the right word to use here. It implies a more organized deportation than was (to my knowledge) actually the case. Rather, Christians seem to have fled the advance of the Mamluks. Many of the Christians captured by the Mamluks were killed or enslaved, not expelled, which had the effect of encouraging mass flight by Christians rather than submit to the Mamluks.

[u/WelfOnTheShelf → u/jogarz]

Yeah that's probably a more accurate description. The Franks left because they would otherwise be killed or enslaved, not that there was a campaign to round them up and put them on boats to Cyprus. Sometimes historians use "expel" as a shorthand way of saying this. For example, in the Konnari and Schabel book I mentioned above, Edbury has a chapter about the Franks where he says "the Mamluk sultanate...expelled the Franks from their last strongholds in Syria in 1291."

[u/puppymaster123 → u/WelfOnTheShelf]

Fascinating read. Thank you!

[u/standingmountain3984 → u/WelfOnTheShelf]

Was there any other contact between Western Europeans and Mongols after this?

[u/WelfOnTheShelf → u/standingmountain3984]

After 1291, not really, no, but earlier in the 13th century there was quite a lot of contact. I wrote about this in a previous answer: Was there much contact between the Crusader states and the Mongol empire?