Pullani (Poulains)

Also known as Poulains, native Franks

Locally-born Franks of the Latin East — sometimes a neutral demonym, sometimes a pejorative used by newcomers from Europe to suggest softness or assimilation.

The word Pullani (singular Pullanus, French Poulain) appears in 12th-century chroniclers — notably Jacques de Vitry — as the term for Franks born in the Levant rather than in western Europe. Its etymology is disputed: most likely it comes from pullus, 'colt' or 'foal' (so, 'the young ones', the locally-born), though it has also been derived from Apulia, the homeland of many of the early Italo-Norman settlers.

In the mouths of later western newcomers — and in the moral commentary of Jacques de Vitry himself — Pullani was often pejorative, suggesting that the locally-born Franks had grown soft, gone native, made too many accommodations with Muslim neighbours, or grown lukewarm in their crusading zeal. Modern historians have largely rehabilitated the Pullani as a distinctive and often pragmatic local society — neither the militant crusaders of the first generation nor the assimilated easterners of the polemicists' imagination — but the original ambivalence of the word remains a useful warning that the Latin East was not culturally identical with the western Europe from which it had sprung.

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