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.
Asymmetric warfare and military conduct in the Middle Ages
The concept of asymmetric warfare is a useful analytical tool for examining military conduct, especially acts of excessive military brutality, during the Middle Ages. A broader sense of asymmetric warfare is required: one that includes not just politico-military asymmetries, but also social, legal, religious and ethnic dimensions. A typology of military asymmetries is proposed and it is demonstrated how these differences might radically affect the conduct of medieval warfare.
Brigandage and Resistance in Lancastrian Normandy: A Study
The period of English conquest and occupation of Nonnandy (1415-50) saW a great deal of that social and economic di sruption so often associated with medieval warfare. The. aspect of this disruption to be investigated here is the occurence of brigandage and of resistance to English rule. These were the two main forms wh ich popular movements seem to have taken. There were outbreaks of open res istance, when the peasantry look up anns against the government, such as those in central Normandy in 1433-34, and in the Caux in 1435-36, as weJl as smaJler outbreaks , such as the ri sing in 1424 which foJlowed false reports of a French victory at the battle of VerneuiJ. Then there was the phenomenon of the ' brigands'. The nature of these armed bands, whose activities posed a major problem for the English authorities, has been the subject of some debate. centering on the question of whether they shou ld be viewed as rebels or bandits. This is a debate wh ich, in AJlmand's words, has usuaJly seen 'participants drawn up along nationallines'.l Nineteenth-century French historians, notably Lefevre-Pontalis, saw the brigands as patriots, 'tombes pour la France '.2 Puiseux, placed the ri sings of the 1430s in the same context: