Could descendants of the European crusaders survive to the modern day as a distinctive cultural minority in the Middle East?
It also depends which crusaders your talking about. The crusades took place over 100's of years. You must remember some were French, some were English, some were German, and so on. So it gets rather complicated.
I don't see why that matters. No matter which particular crusade in the Middle East we're talking about, it's always Europeans entering the Middle East. Each subsequent group would reinforce the previous, until eventually the crusading spirit dies out as it did in OTL. I also don't see why the multinational aspect of the crusaders would matter - The crusades united factions of various Western European nationalities together, binded by Western (Catholic) Christianity. Presumably, a offshoot of an oïl French dialect would become the primary language of any surviving community, as that was the language spoken by the nobility who established themselves in the crusader states. Perhaps Latin might even become their common language.
They sort of did OTL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin-Levantines. I guess the key to their survival is more intermarriage with the natives and just all around bringing more Crusaders to the Levant. If the Fourth Crusade and any Crusades directed towards Egypt or anywhere that's not the Levant could be avoided, that only helps their survival in the Levant.
Interesting! It's too bad the article is so vague about the actual contribution of the crusaders and their descendants into the Levantine communities. Of the two examples given of famous contemporary Levantines, both have roots much more recent than the crusades... One is the descendant of an 18th century French expatriate who married into an Anatolian Greek family, whose Western roots were constantly refreshed by more and more recent European expatriates. The other is the grandson of recent Neopolitan immigrants on one side, and immigrants from a Greek island on the other, with distant Genoese heritage lost in all but surname through assimilation. I'll definately be doing more research into these communities, though it seems like there was too much going on for any cohesive cultural identity to emerge.
I also found a community of Italian-descended Lebanese Catholics, whose Italian origins only date back to the 20th century. Their elements have been absorbed almost entirely into the native Arabic-speaking Catholic community. Assimilation seems to have been the fate of most crusader descendants in the Levant, too, spawning the popular legendary explanations behind light-haired, light-eyed Arabs in Lebanon and Palestine.
I was reading an article about Levantines in modern day Turkey (Constantinople, specifically), and I believe that one famous woman in Turkey is descended from the actual, 13th Century Crusaders. I'll look into it.
I don't see why that matters. No matter which particular crusade in the Middle East we're talking about, it's always Europeans entering the Middle East. Each subsequent group would reinforce the previous, until eventually the crusading spirit dies out as it did in OTL. I also don't see why the multinational aspect of the crusaders would matter - The crusades united factions of various Western European nationalities together, binded by Western (Catholic) Christianity. Presumably, a offshoot of an oïl French dialect would become the primary language of any surviving community, as that was the language spoken by the nobility who established themselves in the crusader states. Perhaps Latin might even become their common language.
To be fair at the beginning of the Crusading period there was a furious rivalry between the Normans and the Franks before the Franks became the dominant group.
There is also the possibility of a modern (say, after 1800) rediscovery in some areas of Lebanon of a recovered/invented "crusader" identity (in a sense, some Lebanese Christian groups sort of did that, advocating French as their language for example, stressing links with the Waest and the Papacy, and so on) though I suppose that Muslim neighbors won't find it funny (neither would the Orthodox ones, probably).