The Crusades, the Latin East and Medieval History-Writing: An Introduction

Summary

The period of the crusades and the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean was an important one for medieval historical writing. Indeed, it has been recently suggested that the chroniclers of the First Crusade (1095–99), faced with the need to couch events in a more overtly exegetical register, ‘pioneered a new way of writing about the recent past’. Whether or not one accepts the notion that such writers adopted a fundamentally new mode of composition, there can be little doubt that this initial expedition left a significant imprint on medieval literary cultures. For a start, the vast number of extant narratives is unusual by medieval standards. More than this, though, the enterprise is renowned for popularising the medieval monograph format, with many writers electing to compose standalone histories characterised by a narrow focus on the crusade. As the crusading movement progressed, some embedded crusade accounts into works with wider chronological and geographical scopes, but the free-standing ‘crusade’ history was an outcome of nearly all subsequent expeditions (or at least the major ‘numbered’ ones). It is perhaps a by-product of this textual tradition – among other factors, such as modern historians’ propensity to compartmentalise evidence to facilitate historical analysis and the hangover of nineteenth-century scholarly conventions – that crusading expeditions are often treated in isolation: a discrete series of holy wars related to, but somehow distinct from, the Latin Christian settlements established in the wake of the First Crusade, known collectively as the crusader states, the Latin East or, when viewed from the West, Outremer (‘the land across the sea’). One need only cast an eye over the many modern general histories of the crusades to appreciate that most devote comparatively little space to the crusader states. Instead, the history of those polities on the fringes of Latin Christendom has usually been detailed separately, so much so that even the validity of the long-standing descriptor ‘crusader states’ has been disputed.

Consequently, the historiography of the crusades and the crusader states has developed along slightly different contours. For the purposes of this volume, the most significant difference, to be discussed in greater detail below, is that whereas texts – especially historical narratives – pertaining to the crusades have been subjected to an unparalleled degree of literary scrutiny in recent years, the textual evidence for the Latin East has less frequently been examined through the same interpretative lens.