Genetics were first decoded the DNA of the crusaders

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Генетики впервые расшифровали ДНК крестоносцевIn Palestine, emerged four “Crusader States”.

The bones of crusaders who died during the siege of a medieval Sidon, helped geneticists to find out what the Holy Land fought not only the natives of Europe, but children of mixed marriages and locals. The results of the first DNA “warriors of faith” was presented in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

“We had a unique opportunity to uncover the origin of ordinary crusaders. They were not only Europeans – was that while the middle East was incredibly wide from a genetic point of view. Immigrants from Europe, and local residents and their descendants fought, lived and died side by side with each other,” says mark Haber (Marc Haber) from the Sanger Institute in Hinxton (UK).
A history of the Crusades originated in 1095, when the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus appealed to urban II, the Pope requesting military reinforcements at the head of the Catholic Church, declared half a century before this “eternal anathema” to the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The calls of the Emperor was connected with the fact that the Byzantine Empire was losing the war with the Seljuk Turks, rapidly losing the territory of Asia Minor, including the routes through which Christian pilgrims travelled to Jerusalem, where until the mid 11th century was ruled by Arab caliphs.
How to tell the Chronicles of the time, urban II had listened to the arguments of the Emperor and urged other Church leaders to announce the start of “Holy war”, a campaign to the middle East to free the Holy Land, the Holy Sepulchre and the return of Jerusalem under the dominion of the Christians.

Despite the fact that the Pope has performed with such sermons in the past, the speech of urban II at this time has caused great excitement not only among clergymen, but also of the rulers, nobles and ordinary people. This led to the formation of a great European army and its campaign in the middle East in the years 1096-1099.

As a result, in Palestine, emerged four “Crusader States” – the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Principality of Antioch, County of Edessa and County of Tripoli. They lasted until the end of the XIII century, when the Ottomans-the Mamluks captured the last Christian stronghold in the city of Acre.

“We all know that the Crusades was attended by Richard the Lionheart, but we have no idea who they were, how they lived and died ordinary soldiers involved in these Holy wars. These ancient remains have helped us to find the answer to this question,” adds Chris Tyler-Smith (Chris Tyler-Smith), a colleague of Haber.

British scientists have the opportunity a few years ago, when the Lebanese archaeologists found the pit by the medieval wall of Sidon, where he was buried two dozen bodies of men. Italian coin minting and metal buckles of similar origin made them pioneers to believe that they found the bodies of the European crusaders who died during the siege of the city in the early thirteenth century.

Geneticists have found that this was not the case, “raising” the DNA of medieval soldiers and comparing it with the way was constructed the genome of the ancient inhabitants of Lebanon and its modern inhabitants, as well as the medieval Europeans.

Much to the surprise of scientists, the genomes of dead “warriors of faith” was very widely spread on the genetic map of the world. Three of them really were Europeans, while four of their colleagues were locals, and two – combines elements of both European and middle Eastern DNA.

How was it possible? On the one hand, Tyler-Smith and his colleagues do not exclude that Muslims won the battle of Sidon, could be buried in the same pit as the crusaders, and their compatriots.

On the other hand, the presence of “hybrid” DNA suggests that closer to the truth is another hypothesis, which in the past have long argued historians. According to Haber, opening his team confirms that the armies of the crusaders fought not only Europeans, but also the local middle Eastern Christians, who wanted to avenge the Seljuks, as well as descendants of mixed marriages between European conquerors and local women.
Interestingly, traces of the crusaders are completely absent in the DNA of modern Lebanese – they were genetically closer to the ancient inhabitants of the Middle East than to the contemporaries of Richard the Lionheart and Philip II Augustus.

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