11 - Laments for the Lost City: The Loss of Jerusalem in Western Historical Writing

Summary

In July 1187, the Christian army of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem suffered a devastating defeat at the Horns of Ḥaṭṭīn. Three months later, on 2 October, the city of Jerusalem fell to an army commanded by the Muslim Sultan Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn. The loss of Jerusalem was a watershed moment, unleashing a massive literary response across Latin Christendom: letters streamed from the crusader states to the Latin West, while in response the papacy issued letters and dispatched legates. Gradually, news spread to western annalists and chroniclers and, over time, the events of 1187 took root in the minds of western Christians, who commemorated the loss by retelling the story of the defeat in letters, chronicles, poems and treatises.

Contemporary and near-contemporary historians, writing in the decades after Jerusalem's fall, display conscious desires and initiatives to preserve the memory of this loss and to transmit its narrative to future generations. Through a process of lamentation, authors deployed rich emotional language and situated recent events within a larger timeframe by referencing previous destructions of Jerusalem, especially the Old Testament devastation of the Holy City in 587 BCE. In doing so, the city's fall became a universal loss. It is this literary drive that is the focus of this chapter, which aims to situate Latin Christian reactions to 1187 in a wider framework of city laments and to demonstrate that references to Old Testament prophecies, especially those contained in the Book of Lamentations, helped twelfth- and thirteenth-century chroniclers to forge a cross-temporal emotional mnemonic community.

The City Lament Genre

The tradition of lamenting the destruction of a city is a long-standing literary genre found in epic poetry, drama, liturgy and folktales. City laments are collective expressions of grief, but they also share traits with individual laments, including a desire to keep memories alive. An individual lament – often caused by the death of a person, which may be sad and unexpected – is far more prevalent and has developed a ‘carefully ritualised emotional outlet’. By contrast, the destruction of cities or whole populations, being far less common, lacks the same traditional form, albeit common ‘structures, patterns, and types of discourse’ can be identified through a comparative approach to collective reactions to the demise of cities.

Although well known from the Old Testament Book of Lamentations, the origins of city laments can be traced even earlier.