2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
In the armies of the crusaders there could be not only Europeans, but also immigrants from the Middle East, and people with mixed origins, according to The American Journal of Human Genetics. This is the conclusion made by geneticists by analyzing DNA from the remains of people buried in the crusader cemetery in Sidon, Lebanon. The authors, however, note that the same result could have been obtained if the crusaders and Arabs killed in the battle were simply buried in the grave, without distinguishing between their own and enemy soldiers.
The crusades to Palestine lasted almost two hundred years, from the end of the 11th to the end of the 13th century. At this time, hundreds of thousands of Europeans appeared in the Middle East to participate in campaigns and settle in the newly founded states. Local residents were either driven from the occupied territories, or somehow got along with them.
In one of his previous studies of genetics from the UK and Lebanon, led by Chris Tyler-Smith of the Sanger Institute, it was shown that the Y-chromosomal haplogroup R1b, which is most common in Western Europe, is common among modern Lebanese. Then the researchers suggested that the Lebanese men inherited it from the Crusaders. However, when scientists analyzed the nuclear genomes of Lebanese people, it turned out that they are genetically similar to the ancient inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean and nomads from the Eastern European steppes.
In the new work, British and Lebanese scientists decided to find out if the modern and medieval inhabitants of the Middle East are similar, and what changed after the Crusades. To do this, they examined the remains of crusaders from a medieval cemetery in the city of Sidon in southern Lebanon. During the Crusades, it was an important outpost of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the site of battles between the Crusaders and the Arabs. During archaeological excavations, a collective burial was found here, and in it the remains of at least 25 people. They were dated 1025-1283 years, but judging by the artifacts found along with the bones, people died in the XIII century during one of the battles.
Researchers sequenced the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes of nine crusaders and, for comparison, four people who lived in Sidon before the advent of the crusaders, in the 3rd-7th centuries. Also, as a reference, scientists analyzed the genomes of 600 ancient and 3171 modern inhabitants of the planet.
It turned out that among the crusaders were not only Europeans, but also immigrants from the Middle East, as well as people with mixed origins. Scientists explained this either by the fact that the crusaders and Arabs who died in the battle were buried in the same grave, or that there were local residents in the army of the crusaders, and all the dead, regardless of origin, were buried together.
At the same time, the inhabitants of the city in the first centuries of our era were genetically similar to the modern inhabitants of Lebanon and medieval immigrants from the Middle East. “If you look at the genetics of the people who lived [in Lebanon] during the Roman period, and the people who live there today, you would think that there was a direct succession. You would think that nothing happened between the Roman period and modernity, and you would miss the period when Europeans and people with mixed backgrounds lived in Lebanon,”says lead author Marc Haber of the Sanger Institute.
“Our results show that it is worth looking at ancient DNA even from a time when not much genetically seems to have happened. There may be many such transient genetic mixes in our history that [later] disappear without a trace,”adds Tyler-Smith.
The first crusade that started it all was organized by the decision of Pope Urban II after the Byzantine emperor asked for help in protecting Anatolia from the Seljuk Turks. During the campaign, in 1099, the crusaders conquered Jerusalem. More details about the First Crusade are described in one of the issues of "Limbo".
