The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative
This article discusses the reports on the conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099 in Arabic chronicles. It argues that the reports on this event developed in three distinct and very diverse regional traditions in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. On the basis of the early Egyptian and Syrian evidence, it is highly unlikely that the conquest of Jerusalem was accompanied by a large-scale massacre of the entire population. This evidence shows furthermore that contemporaries did not see the fall of the town as a momentous event. The later Iraqi tradition, by contrast, introduced not only a new dimension to the massacre of the town’s inhabitants, but developed two further narrative strands which were largely unknown to earlier reports: the plundering of the Dome of the Rock and the subsequent delegation to Baghdad. The development of these strands must be seen within the political and intellectual setting of Baghdad, most importantly the conflict between Sultanate and Caliphate and the profile of the Hanbalite traditionalist milieu of the city. Ibn al-Athir’s famous report from the early seventh/thirteenth century almost exclusively goes back to this Iraqi strand and was an “Islamic narrative” in that it sidelined all previous regional traditions and reframed the conquest as a momentous event in terms of eschatology, martyrdom and divine intervention. This development of the Arabic reports on the fall of Jerusalem reflects the broader transformation of how relationships with crusaders and Franks were conceptualized from a pre-jihādī landscape to one where jihād propaganda moved to the centre of political discourse. In 2004 this journal published Benjamin Kedar’s seminal article on the Jerusalem massacre in the Western historiography of the crusades. His article discussed reports ranging from eyewitness accounts to modern studies and tried to establish along the way a historically accurate picture of the events. On the basis of the medieval Latin (and also to some extent the Arabic) sources, Kedar concluded that “the massacre in Jerusalem was considerably more extensive than in other towns.”1 I thank Bernard Hamilton and the anonymous readers for their insightful and very detailed comments on this article. The argument has greatly benefited from discussions with students in the course “The Middle East in the Period of the Crusades” at SOAS (University of London) over the last years. Further helpful comments came from participants in the “Crusades and The Latin East” seminar (Institute of Historical Research, London) where a version of this paper was presented in March 2013. 1 Benjamin Kedar, “The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades,” Crusades 3 (2004): 15–75, here 74.
Encountering Islam on the First Crusade
The First Crusade (1095–1099) has often been characterised as a headto-head confrontation between the forces of Christianity and Islam. For many, it is the campaign that created a lasting rupture between these two faiths. Nevertheless, is such a characterisation borne out by the sources? Engagingly written and supported by a wealth of evidence, Encountering Islam on the First Crusade offers a major re-interpretation of the crusaders’ attitudes towards the Arabic and Turkic peoples they encountered on their journey to Jerusalem. Nicholas Morton considers how they interpreted the new peoples, civilisations, and landscapes they encountered, sights for which their former lives in Western Christendom had provided little preparation. Morton offers a varied picture of crosscultural relations, depicting the Near East as an arena in which multiple protagonists were pitted against each other. Some were fighting for supremacy, others for their religion, many simply for survival.
Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears
Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. Th e Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved: