The mills of god grind slowly: the Na’aman River milling dispute and the thirteenth-century hydraulic crisis in the Crusader States

Abstract

In the mid-thirteenth century, the Hospitaller and Templar military orders engaged in a long-running dispute over the supply of water to two hydraulic gristmills outside the city of Acre in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem that prompted international scandal, royal and papal intervention, and mutual attempts at sabotage. This article examines this dispute in the context of a broad survey of milling operations in the Crusader States and argues that this dispute was representative of a widespread hydraulic shortfall in the Latin East by the thirteenth century, when the kingdom’s military collapse and the increased cultivation of sugar cane aggravated a pre-existing shortage of water-power in the relatively labor-poor eastern Mediterranean. The efforts of local landholders like the military orders to maintain access to hydraulic resources provide an instructive example of a pre-modern society’s efforts to accommodate an environmental crisis.

Appendix 1

Survey of mills in the Latin East

The data underlying this article are provided here as a list of mills in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli, during the period of Crusader occupation. No effort has been made to include mills from Cyprus or the Latin Empire of Constantinople.

The chief sources of mill references are charters, a common genre of medieval legal writing used to record the conveyance of privileges or property. The corpus of charters pertaining to the Crusader States is large, but uneven. In general, charters have survived only for religious corporations, particularly large institutions with branches in Europe that ensured the survival of texts after the fall of the Latin East. Since these corporations frequently interacted with smaller religious institutions and lay individuals, those groups are present in the sample, but they are certainly under-represented.

Most charters from the Crusader States have been incorporated into Jonathan Riley-Smith’s Revised Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani Database (2016) but because the database remained incomplete at the time of writing, I have supplemented the survey with printed collections of charters, such as Reinhold Rohricht’s general Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani (1878) and more focused collections of charters pertaining to the Hospitallers (Le Roulx 1894–1906), the Teutonic Knights (Strehlke 1869), and the Canons of the Holy Sepulcher (Geuthner 1894). Furthermore, mill sites were drawn from Denys Pringle’s Secular Buildings in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: An Archaeological Gazetteer (1997) and from references to mills in chronicles and travel narratives encountered in the course of research, although no effort was made to make a systematic survey of surviving narrative sources or published archaeological evidence. In addition to the mills inevitably omitted through the limitations of the source survey, mills were also omitted as a result of a conscious effort to avoid inadvertently double-counting mills and consequently exaggerating the tendency for eastern mills to occur in tight clusters. If, on the basis of location and ownership data, multiple mill references might plausibly have referred to the same mill, they were assumed to have done so.

Mills were noted according to the use (grist, sugar, or oil) and motive force (water, animal, or wind). In general, contemporary sources seem to describe gristmills as “mills,” without modification, while sugar mills (and the only oil mill in the sample) are described explicitly. References to mills in the sources have therefore been assumed to be gristmills, unless otherwise stated. It is possible that this assumption, as well as a likely source bias toward urban environments, may have exaggerated the number of gristmills in this sample relative to sugar mills. It is worth noting also that the distinction between types of mill may have been less clean than is represented here. Gristmills and sugar mills were identical except for the cut of the millstone (Benvenisti 1972, p. 254), and it is quite conceivable that some mills were converted over time with the rise of the sugar industry.

Charters occasionally distinguish mills powered by horses from mills powered by water, and on other occasions the geography of the area makes it possible to distinguish water-mills from other kinds of mills with a high degree of confidence. The mills on the banks of the Orontes, for example, were assumed to be hydraulic (Riley-Smith 2016, nos. 565; 1152; 2081), while the mill which obstructed the door to the Tower of David in Jerusalem and had to be removed was assumed not to be water-driven (Riley-Smith 2016, p. 515).

Owing to the difficulty in precisely placing mills, the plotted position of each mill is approximate. For example, the Docke and Recordane mills are both listed as if they were in the city of Acre, even though both were somewhat outside it. Given the impossibility of precisely locating most of the mills, and the scale of Fig. 2, these approximations were deemed acceptable, especially since they facilitated the use of exploded clusters in the QGIS mapping software to better portray the number of total mills, which might have been concealed by the partial over-lap of points that were not noted as precisely co-located. Plotted positions were drawn from the online gazetteers Geonames and GeoHack, or from Denys Pringle’s Secular Buildings in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (1997).

See Table 1.

Table 1 Mills in the Latin East