Chapter 4 - From Depopulated and Dilapidated Town into A Capital

Summary

This chapter focuses on the social bonds shaped by the mutual interests and co-dependency of Jerusalemite institutions and the city’s burgess population. It shows that by the middle of the twelfth century, the connections between the city’s burgesses and the chapter of the Holy Sepulchre formed a quasi-communal structure that employed mechanisms familiar from western Europe. These relationships forged between the burgess community and the Holy Sepulchre laid the necessary infrastructure to increase the level of social cohesion of a newly formed urban society that was otherwise not yet consolidated. While such mechanisms can be paralleled to similar structures that evolved during that period in the West, in Jerusalem they needed to cater to the unique character and highly diverse social composition of the city’s population.