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.
History Writing, Adab, and Intertextuality in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria: Old and New Readings
Fifty years ago, in 1969, the Islamicist, historian, and pioneer of so-calledMamluk studies Ulrich Haarmann (1942–99) submitted his PhD dissertation on history writing in Egypt and Syria in the period 1260–1340ce.1 Haarmann transformed the text of his dissertation almost immediately into a monograph, which was published in 1970 and entitled Source studies for the early Mamluk period (Quellenstudien zur frühen Mamlukenzeit).2 Its main findings were soon also communicated in the summarized format of an article that was published in 1971.3 In the same period, almost simultaneouslywith the youngHaarmann’sQuellenstudien, another dissertationonexactly the same topicwaspublished in monograph format. This was the work of the American historian and “Mamlukist” Donald Little (1932–2017), entitled Introduction toMamlūk historiography: Analysis of Arabic annalistic and biographical sources for the reign of al-Malik al-NāṣirMuḥammad ibnQalāʾūn.4 BothHaarmann’s andLittle’s dissertationswerepublished in twonewly establishedGerman series, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen and Freiburger Islamstudien respectively, each closely related to the invigorating scholarship and academic leadership of Haarmann’s PhD supervisor in Freiburg, Hans Robert Roemer (1915–97). Ever since the early 1970s, these publications of Haarmann and Little have had a substantial impact on the relatively small field of the study of latemedieval Arabic historiography. With that field’s relative growth from the late 1990s onwards, they have continued to retain referential status, even when some of the methods and assumptions that had informed Haarmann’s and Little’s PhD research in the 1960s came under increasing scrutiny. In fact, as will be further detailed in this introduction, the work they began and the insights they brought to the field have continued to inspire, and even define, the study of Arabic history writing in Egypt and Syria between the 13th and 16th centuries.
The Jacquerie: class war or co-opted rebellion?
A careful reconsideration of the chronicle and chancery evidence for the Jacquerie suggests that it was not merely a peasant revolt over the excessive taxation by seigneurs and the Crown. Instead, the Jacquerie became part of a larger anti-Valois protest movement which involved the supporters of both Charles of Navarre and the bourgeois of several northern French towns. Raymond Cazelles has recently described the connection between the peasants and many northern French townsmen, as well as the participation of petty royal officers, minor noblemen and clerics in the uprising. The present study shows that many of the Jacques' bourgeois supporters were also allied with Navarre's cause and suggests that Navarre either coopted the Jacquerie for his own ends or sympathized with its anti-government action. His vicious reaction against the Jacques in the final days of the revolt can be attributed to his losing control of the movement. Far from being a ‘class war’, the rising was part of a broadly-based protest movement arising from the frustrations of peasant, bourgeois, cleric and noble alike.