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Armenian refugees. Venetian men from good families were eager to marry the
daughters of the local Greek ruling class because the dowries they obtained secured
many a family fortune. The offspring of these unions enjoyed the Latin status of their
fathers, and the culture and wealth of their mothers’ families. The Greek Orthodox
clergy on the island married and had children, while those following the Latin rite
were officially celibate. Crete was not the only island to provide a home to such a rich
mix of marriages and children; Genoese Chios (1346–1566) also comes to mind. Yet
in the famous longue durée it seems that these experiments in the mixing of “pure”
types eventually resulted in some sort of cleansing of diversity because the arguments
for purity were so durable.
Again in the eastern Mediterranean, in this case a new people were also appearing
in the twelfth-century crusader states. Mixed relationships between Franks or Latins
(almost invariably men from the West) and local Christians (predominantly Syrian or
Armenian, some possibly recent converts from Islam) produced a new people, called
in the French lingua franca “poulains,” from the Latin for foals, most likely hybrid
mules. These children, growing up in the crusader states, represent a kind of ethno-
genesis since they were new. Jacques de Vitry, an immigrant bishop of Acre in the
early thirteenth century, seemed to despise the poulains, whom he considered to be
soft, excessively carnal, and not interested in his preaching, hence defective Christians.
In this case of mixed blood the weaker (more effeminate) line seems to have prevailed,
which is an unexpected outcome in a patriarchal culture where some might predict
that virile French fathers would produce hardy offspring, no matter who the mothers
were. The durability of these feeble eastern features, in the blood and not the soil (or
climate), indicates an ethnic argument rising above the level of the individual, also
hereditary, and hence racist. These mixed colonial offspring would not survive the
end of the crusader states, though the category was a durable one wherever men had
children across an ethnic line perceived as sharp enough to create an ineradicable
hybrid.
Hybridity, purity, racism—is there anything distinctively Mediterranean about
these labels? This problem occurs in other sections of this Companion but these cat-
egories provide a good test case for the validity and usefulness of the Mediterranean
paradigm. Jonathan Swift’s satire of the little-enders and the big-enders reminds us
that people have always been capable of inventing the most outlandish reasons for
despising one another. Even when they seem identical to outsiders not sharing their
values, they may bitterly disagree about how to begin eating an egg. But a lot of
human diversity would seem to be a good breeding ground for hybrids. On this basis
the Mediterranean seems to be among the more diverse parts of the planet, but no
more so than the East Indies, central Africa, or east Asia. What is different about the
Mediterranean is not its regions or climates, though they too are certainly diverse,
more so than the ecologies of the Great Plains or the deserts. The Mediterranean
became the center of the Abrahamic faiths, or, to complicate matters, the old model
of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Of course one no longer needs to live along the
shores of the Mediterranean to value Rome or be a Jew, Christian, or Muslim.
Modernism has globalized these beliefs and identities. But if we conclude that the
meaning of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome began in the Mediterranean, and remained
most intense there for a long time, then these meanings provide the framework for
investigating hybridity.