Little is known about the state of ecclesiastical legislation in the Latin Kingdom as most of the canon law texts of the Latin East do not survive, and the surviving three sets of extant texts have received relatively little scholarly attention. The available texts show mixed influence from Western and Byzantine law, both ecclesiastical and secular, but many of their sources remain to be traced. It is clear that the state of the Church in the Eastern Mediterranean presented some concern to Western ecclesiastical authorities, as Pope Gregory IX, Jacques de Vitry, who held the patriarchate of Jerusalem from 1240 to his death in 1241, and John of Ancona all wrote to castigate the conduct of clergy in the region, but whether their misbehavior was a result of problems with the legal system we cannot say until further research has been conducted.
The Canons of Nablus The oldest extant collection of laws from the Frankish Levant, known variously as the “Canons of Nablus” or the “Concordat of Nablus,” stem from an agreement between King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and the Patriarch Warmund at the Council of Nablus in 1120. The first three of the 25 canons outline the terms of the agreement, while the remainder regulate the behavior, especially sexual, of the kingdom’s populace. Benjamin Z. Kedar, who has provided the most recent edition and study of the canons, believes three Byzantine codes passed to the Franks through the hands of their Greek subjects contributed some of their source material. About half of the canons represent original “ad hoc” solutions to problems faced by the kingdom at the time of composition. Kedar argues that they had the force of law within the kingdom and exerted moderate influence across geographical bounds. Indeed, at least one canon prescribing the death penalty for sodomy made its way into the secular Livre des assises de la cour des bourgeois more than a century later.
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- Edition: Benjamin Z. Kedar, “On the Origins of the Earliest Laws of Frankish Jerusalem: The Canons of the Council of Nablus, 1120,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 74, no. 2 (1999): 310–35. His article contains a lengthy discussion of the canons in addition to a full transcription of the original Latin text drawn from Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 1345 (s. XII med ./2), fols. lr-3r.
- English Translation: Nicholas Paul, Patrick DeBrosse, and Michael Lipari, trans., “Canons of the Council of Nablus,” The Crusader States, Fordham University.
The Statutes of Odo of Chateauroux Odo (Eude) of Chateauroux (1208-1273), a cardinal and former Chancellor of the University of Paris, accompanied Louis IX to the Holy Land as a papal legate. Upon arriving there, he was disturbed by what he perceived as widespread priestly misconduct including simony and sexual incontinence. As a result, he issued two sets of statutes for the priestly communities of the towns of Jaffa (1253) and Acre (1254). These Latin texts present a useful source for understanding the relationship between the priesthood in the Latin East and the papacy, for which we have very few documents.
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- Edition: P. Labbe and G. Cossart, Sacrosancta Concilia ad regiam exacta, xi, 2 (Paris, 1671), 2382-3, 2405-9.
- Other Resources: Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Ecclesiastical Legislation in the Kingdom of Jerusalem: The Statutes of Jaffa (1253) and Acre (1254),” in Crusade and Settlement: Papers Read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and Presented to R.C. Smail, ed. Peter Edbury (Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1985), 225–30.
John of Ancona’s Summa canonici An academic legal treatise composed by John of Ancona at the behest of William, patriarch of Jerusalem and papal legate, and William of Lautario, archdeacon of Acre between 1265 and 1268. While the text treats canon law more comprehensively than either the Canons of Nablus or the statutes of Odo of Chateauroux, it has largely escaped the attention of scholars and only the prologue has been edited. It represents a particularly useful resource for the study of the Templar order, the legal matters of which John oversaw. Written in Latin, it deals with matters of jurisprudence and legal education in extenso. The only known extant manuscript copy is Brugge, Stadtbibliothek 377.
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- Edition: of prologue in Martin Bertram, “Johannes de Ancona: ein Jurist des 13. Jahrhunderts in den Kreuzfahrerstaaten,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 7 (1977): 49–6.
- Other Resources: Jonathan Rubin, “John of Ancona’s Summae: A Neglected Source for the Juridical History of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 29 (2012): 183–218.