This book is a study of the spatial distribution of Frankish settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades, and is based on an unprecedented field study of more than two hundred Frankish rural sites and on a close reexamination of the historical sources. The author reexamines some of the basic assumptions of standard recent scholarship, and advocates a new model of the nature of Frankish settlement, as a society of migrants who settled in the Levant, had close relations with Eastern Christians, and were almost completely shut off from the Muslim society that lived elsewhere in the country.