This book is based almost entirely upon the wealth of existing published translations of the major sources for the First Crusades. With such texts, taken from a plethora of languages and literary traditions – medieval Latin, Old French, Provençal, Byzantine Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew – a certain degree of harmonisation is necessary if the average reader is not to be distracted or, worse, disorientated by stylistic discontinuities, especially in the treatment of names.
To this end, the names of western individuals have generally been standardised to their English forms. Byzantine names and other Greek terms conform to their traditional Latinate spellings. And all Turkish and Arabic names and words have been regularised to, at the least, recognisable variations on familiar forms, rather than in accordance with any strictly scholarly logic. The same is true of place-names: whichever of the various modern, medieval, western or eastern (or occasionally classical) forms has seemed most appropriate in context has been followed, and, if helpful, the variants identified in the accompanying footnotes and glosses.
In those few places where, for ease of reading, it has been necessary to make minor cuts within extracts, these have been done silently – as has the excision of chapter numbers and headings where they disrupt the narrative flow. However, all significant omissions have been marked with ellipses. Except for the substitution of the western calendar for dates originally given in the Islamic and Jewish ones, all substantive emendations or editorial interpolations within the source extracts are placed within square brackets.
CJT