A long tradition of pandemic – or plague – literature, dating back at least as far as classical Greece, has used catastrophic communicable disease as a backdrop to explore the human condition: what it means to live in a community of other humans, and, as awareness of the crises of environmental devastation and climate change grows, on a planet with other living organisms. In different ways, and with differing resolutions, twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of pandemic fiction show how pandemics stem not only from human practices, but also from the values, beliefs, and stories about the past – the histories – in which they are rooted. Whether dystopic or utopic, apocalyptic or contained, literary pandemics warn that in order to change the way humans collectively inhabit the world, we need to change the dominant stories we tell about it.

Crusading in the Levant remains one of the notorious chapters in medieval history. Though rich in source material and featuring an expansive historiography, the violence of the subject has seldom received attention as a discrete topic. This study limits the analysis to the First Crusade and specifically to events at Jerusalem in July 1099. Consulting Western, Armenian, Arabic and Hebrew sources reveals the nature and perception of this eleventh-century event. Crucial considerations include: pre-existing contextual tumult in the Levant, questions around crusader extermination policy, source material reliability, and if crusade violence was exceptional. Within a century, the fall of Jerusalem became a tool in the service of political agendas. This created mythistory that served to illuminate as well as obfuscate and influenced subsequent scholarship. The central question persists: Did genocide occur at Jerusalem? The sources agree that violence, bloodshed and mass killing characterize the crusader victory. The research concludes that it is not necessary to think or argue that the crusades were in fact genocide, but underscores what we might learn from looking at the violence of the crusades through the paradigm of genocide studies.