The Latin Church of Outremer

When the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099 the conquerors did not simply add a diocese. They built a whole Latin church on top of an existing Christian landscape, erecting a Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem and expelling the Greek patriarch, and then another at Antioch. For nearly two centuries this transplanted hierarchy ran parishes, cathedrals and an enormous pilgrim traffic to the holy places, with the canons of the Holy Sepulchre at its centre and a distinctive liturgy shaped by processions to the sites themselves. It governed a population that was mostly not Latin — Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Muslim — and its dealings with those communities ranged from workable accommodation to plain dispossession. When Jerusalem was lost in 1187 the patriarchate moved to Acre, and when Acre fell in 1291 the church of Outremer ended with it.