The publication of René Grousset’s Histoire witnessed the high-water mark of the Franco-German colonial model. New research perspectives and different academic environments combined with growing unease and increasing hostility to the cultural assumptions that had underpinned it. The expansion in range and depth of scholarship came in part as a product of the demands of a burgeoning international historical profession, with its doctorates, academic journals, conferences, proliferation in history departments, job competition and sensitivity to status. The challenge to colonialism and imperialism mirrored the uneven collapse of European hegemony and self-confidence in the half-century from 1914. Local political conditions exerted an influence, as in the caesura in German crusade study after Carl Erdmann’s great study on the origins of the idea of the crusade in 1935 or the stimulus to fresh appraisal of Latin Outremer provided by the Jewish settlements in Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel. British negative appraisals of the crusades from the 1940s, at least as regards their impact on the eastern Mediterranean, may have owed not a little to the experience of war and the decline of empire as an ideal as well as a reality. After 1945, the moral and material costs of both looked rather different than they had in the palmy days of the Pax Britannica. The creation of what could almost be regarded as a US school of crusade historians, begun by D. C. Munro in the 1890s, hugely increased the volume and scope of scholarship. Less obvious but as fundamental, accessibility of primary material, in print, libraries and archives, increased internationally in tandem with recognition of its importance, a symptom as well as cause of this new professionalism.
Immediate attacks on Grousset came from two directions: that, despite a work devoted to political history, he had ignored any analysis of the political system in his supposed French state in the Levant and that he had exaggerated or misrepresented the extent of cultural sympathy and synthesis between communities in Outremer. Within a generation, this second assault had developed into a full-scale rejection not of Grousset’s colonial assumptions so much as his positive characterisation of Latin Outremer as a tolerant, integrated society. The arguments about crusader settlement still operated within the traditional circuit of liberal economic determinism and the understanding that the Holy Land, as the crusades’ main goal, constituted the salient focus for the study of the crusading phenomenon. More radical were those who, from the 1930s, initially in Germany and then France and latterly Britain, set aside the colonial obsession. Instead they investigated the nature of the impulses that gave rise to crusading, swivelling the lens of research from east to west in a return to an earlier sort of cultural self-examination of which nineteenth-century scholars had fought shy. The anti-colonialists were therefore matched by those who, from observing wars on other medieval religious frontiers or from study of western religion and canon law, broke with the Franco-German nineteenth-century consensus completely and restored, consciously or not, the diversity of earlier interests. These latter historians will be the subject of a subsequent chapter. This one looks at the fate of the colonial model itself.
One early reviewer of Grousset’s Histoire, Frederic Duncalf, a pupil of D. C. Munro, was contemptuous: the first two volumes ‘make little or no contribution to our knowledge’.1 One difficulty, as identified by two nearly contemporaneous reviews by younger scholars, the Oxford art historian and medievalist T. S. R. Boase and John L. La Monte, a Harvard-trained scholar, lay in Grousset’s avoidance of any serious analysis of the nature of Outremer society beyond superficial descriptions derived from the narrative sources. La Monte, whose Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem 1100–1291 had appeared in 1932, was particularly severe, although he used Grousset’s omissions to argue for a new, collaborative history that would cover all aspects of crusading. Both La Monte and Boase noted the absence of any consideration of what Boase described, very much in the language of Oxford medievalists of the day, as ‘the constitutional problem’, perhaps better understood as the question of crusader institutions, their nature, scope and imposition. This was a revealing lapse in Grousset’s scholarship. In the 1920s, Maurice Grandeclaude had subjected the thirteenth-century law codes of Jerusalem, the Assises, to careful analysis to try to determine the survival of any of the pre-1187 legal procedures.2 Thirty years earlier, Munro had insisted that such law codes could not simply be used to describe twelfth-century circumstances, as Dodu had imagined. In his Lowell lectures at Harvard in 1924, Munro himself had sketched a picture of how Outremer society worked based on sources not sentiment and covering wide aspects of social, economic and commercial life.3 These critics accepted the Latin states as colonies, a term not yet deconstructed and reviled. However, they sought to integrate study of the Latin East further into mainstream medieval scholarship, both in terms of the critical use of sources and in what would now be called comparative history. Much of the early impetus came from Anglophone scholars.
With the possible exception of Bishop Stubbs and, at a pinch, Charles Mills, almost no English-language work of serious scholarship had been devoted to the crusades for more than a century after Edward Gibbon. The study of crusading had devolved to historical popularisers and literary potboilers. Only slowly did university history departments emerge from the shade of classics and with them some national interest. Thus in Oxford between the World Wars, squeezed in beside a hefty diet of English political, diplomatic and especially constitutional history, there lurked a specialised option on the Third Crusade. Yet even by then, in Britain the most influential works were composed by non-specialists: the historical writer Archer and later medievalist Kingsford; the biblical philologist Stevenson; and the political theorist Ernest Barker (1874–1960), whose 1911 essay for the Encyclopaedia Britannica was reissued in separate book form four times between 1923 and 1939 and was perhaps the most widely read account of the crusades in English of its day. Stevenson (on the First Crusade) and Kingsford (on the kingdom of Jerusalem) reprised their crusade performances for Volume V of the Cambridge Medieval History (1926 after an elephantine gestation), where they were joined by a young Cambridge don, E. J. Passant, later a noted expert on the history of modern Germany, whose contribution on the effects of the crusades comprised a feeble mishmash of stale opinion and bombast, its conclusions remarkable for inconclusiveness except for the bracing observation that the crusades provide an excellent example of international cooperation.4 Perhaps because of the perceived lack of English prominence, and the equivocal standing of the one national crusade hero, Richard I, in the Whig highway of constitutional progress, British writing on the crusades remained, until the 1930s, derivative and provincial. It is notable that none of these authors mentioned confront, let alone react to, the French colonial model – except for Ernest Barker.
Barker, a professional academic, classicist, historian and political scientist, was also a prolific commentator on public affairs. A late Victorian liberal, he enjoyed a conventionally successful career as an Oxford don, head of a London University college and, from 1927, first holder of a chair in political science at Cambridge. An internationalist, libertarian, patriotic critic of nationalism and excessive statism, Barker was unusual in his generation for his emphasis on the positive civic virtues and benefits of organised religion. This was reflected in his essay on the crusades in his eloquent sympathy for the beliefs of individuals. For concision, the application of a classicist’s critical eye for texts and lucid style, Barker’s essay takes the palm, not least for pithy and, in retrospect, prescient analysis of the phenomenon. For Barker, the crusades formed a central part of a western European religious revival, both holy wars and ‘pilgrim progresses’, whilst also being the papacy’s foreign policy. He saw the First Crusade as ‘a penitentiary pilgrimage under arms – with the one additional object of conquering the goal of pilgrimage’, Jerusalem. It represented a consecration of the fighting instinct, ‘the offensive side of chivalry’ (possibly a pun), but rooted in economic circumstances. Here his comparison was less with the British Empire than with Australian and American gold rushes. Barker drew suggestive and unemotional comparisons and contrasts between Outremer and Norman England and Sicily. His well-honed critical sense provided an acute forensic account of the Jerusalem Assises, even though his description of Frankish feudalism tended to follow Dodu. He dismissed the so-called ‘Letters of the Sepulchre’, reputedly the laws established by Godfrey de Bouillon, as a myth, anticipating by three-quarters of a century recent similar scholarly opinion. His calm assessment of the Fourth Crusade absolved Venice of responsibility for the diversion to Constantinople. In the politest terms, he rejected the French enthusiasm of Rey and Dodu for the Frankish colonists, whose habits he described as ‘lawless greed’ and their kingdom ‘a state of brigands’.5 In a subsequent reworking of his article, published in 1931, he went further in his dismissal of the Rey–Madelin thesis: ‘the absence of any mixture of culture, or indeed of any degree of culture of any kind, in the kingdom of Jerusalem is a striking thing’.6 While sceptical of the primacy of Outremer as a conduit of eastern culture to the west, preferring Spain and Sicily, Barker nonetheless repeated the cliché of cultural exchange in the context of the immemorial struggle of east and west, although by 1931 he had significantly glossed this crude dichotomy: ‘The duel of East and West is a geographical simplification of a complicated series of historical facts.’7 Well read and intelligent, Barker’s tour de force, lacking originality of research, exists as an elevated old-fashioned Oxbridge tutor’s commentary of the better sort: clever, panoramic, informed, sharp, critical, questioning, accessible and elegant, suggestive as much as definitive. In the high tradition that leads back to Gibbon, its literary virtues are as effective as its academic. The peroration is a triumph of rhetoric over reason, with its talk of ‘the majesty of man’s incessant struggle towards an ideal good’, and of giving thanks for the memory of those ‘millions of men who followed the pillar of cloud and fire in the sure and certain hope of an eternal reward’. Yet, in the even older tradition of Fuller, the Congregationalist-turned-Anglican Barker cannot resist a Protestant last word: ‘nor can we but give thanks for their memory, even if for us religion is of the spirit, and Jerusalem in the heart of every man who believes in Christ.’8
While not entirely free from such literary flights, the group of American crusade scholars that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s adopted a more sober demeanour. At the centre of this circle sat Dana C. Munro, successively from the 1890s until his death in 1933 a professor at the universities of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Princeton. His link with German Quellenkritik was direct, having studied in Germany in 1889/90 with the prominent medievalist document scholar Paul Scheffer-Boichorst. Munro returned to the USA a crusade enthusiast. While himself publishing little he taught a whole generation of crusade historians of note, including Frederic Duncalf and August C. Krey, later collaborators with J. La Monte in planning a collaborative history, and the authors of a series of pioneering crusade biographies, a form of historical writing of enduring prominence in US academic circles: M. W. Baldwin (Raymond III of Tripoli); C. W. David (Robert Curthose) and R. W. Yewdale (Bohemund of Taranto). Pupils of Munro’s own students included R. L. Nicholson (who wrote on Tancred, Joscelin I and Joscelin III of Edessa) and J. H. Hill, editor of Raymond of Aguilers and Peter Tudebode and biographer of Raymond IV of Toulouse. Simply by reciting the topics covered indicates the inherent conservatism of approach, the focus on the material- military, political and colonial. Even the work on Genoese trade by another of Munro’s students, E. H. Byrne, and his pupils fitted the familiar frame of investigation, despite the fact that, as in this case, it was novel in exploring a mass of fresh archival material.9
No less hidebound was the study of the Frankish monarchy in Jerusalem by John La Monte (1902–49), for all his declared openness to new fields of research. Although not one of Munro’s pupils, he became closely associated with his circle after 1930. Like theirs, La Monte’s attacks on Grousset were pointed and severe. Reviewing the first two volumes, he accused the Frenchman of neglecting constitutional, social and economic history, of excessive reliance on William of Tyre, and of displaying ignorance of German, English or Italian scholarship. He even lightly hinted at racism, noting – accurately – that Grousset ascribed Saladin’s chivalrous behaviour to his being not a Turk but a Kurd and hence ‘an Indo-European’.10 However, La Monte, in neither of his published reviews (in 1935 and 1940), takes issue with Grousset’s central Franco-Syrian colonial thesis. He either seems tacitly to accept it or simply avoids the whole issue. This is also apparent in his Feudal Monarchy, which is in fact even more narrowly focused than Grousset and as subservient to a highly contestable theory. The question of social, economic or cultural relations between conquerors and conquered never arises, indeed was ‘purposely omitted’, La Monte contenting himself with referring his readers interested in social history to Rey’s Colonies franques. Where he is forced to consider the jurisdiction of royal courts over the native population, his commentary is brief, uneasy and derivative, as if he would rather talk of something else (which indeed he does). La Monte’s purpose was ‘merely to study monarchy’, even to the exclusion of what he called the ‘private law’ of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Given the book’s origins in a doctoral thesis, this narrowness of focus is understandable. However, the constitutional and legal arrangements portrayed are not so much a picture as a mirage. La Monte sees Frankish Jerusalem as ‘a typical feudal state’, subject to ‘pure feudalism’ (La Monte’s italics), a phrase echoing – hopefully unconsciously – Kingsford’s ‘purest form’ of feudalism in the 1926 Cambridge Medieval History. This conviction was based on La Monte’s uncritical acceptance of the testimony of the tendentious thirteenth-century Jerusalem law books as evidence for the reality of twelfth-century law and politics, in particular the weakness of the crown vis-à-vis the baronage. Yet Munro had exposed the fallacy of this approach in his review of Dodu in 1896, an insight confirmed more recently by the intuition of Barker and the researches of Grandeclaude. Even a clever Oxford undergraduate, in a prize essay of 1937, ‘Feudal Society in the Latin States of Palestine and Syria and its Relations to the Saracens’, managed a critique of the concept of feudalism and a sceptical scrutiny of the sources that makes La Monte’s efforts appear intellectually pedestrian. What makes this even stranger is that La Monte later produced a series of ‘fundamental’ articles on Jerusalem baronial families.11
However, La Monte’s legacy was more substantial. As professor at Pennsylvania from 1940, he revived Munro’s series of translated sources. He also became the flag-bearer for a scheme to produce a multi-volume collaborative history of the crusades. Munro was the inspiration on two counts, through what he achieved through teaching and research and by failing to complete the massive new interpretation he had planned. With La Monte, the prime movers for a collaborative history that would achieve what one author could not in breadth and depth of coverage were two of Munro’s older pupils, Frederic Duncalf (1882–1963) and August Krey (1887–1961). It was La Monte who provided the impetus, outlining the scheme to the American Historical Association in 1938. After tracing the history of crusade historiography, La Monte explained the two dominant approaches. Either the crusades were seen as an aspect of European history and the confrontation between Christianity and Islam; or studied as agents that created Christian colonies in the eastern Mediterranean. He identified gaps in research, such as the role of the papacy and detailed study of certain individual expeditions, such as the Second and Fifth Crusades. He pointed to recent work by the German Carl Erdmann in crusade ideology and Aziz S. Atiya on the later middle ages and to current research in Grandeclaude’s wake on the Jerusalem laws by a very young Oxford scholar mentioned by Boase in his review of Grousset, J. O. Prestwich, the author (although La Monte may not have known it) of the 1937 undergraduate prize essay challenging the idea of Jerusalem feudalism. La Monte referred to a group of willing coadjutors, that included, as well as the core of Munro’s pupils already mentioned, the Lebanese Arabist Philip K. Hitti (then at Princeton) and Palmer A. Throop, a late pupil of Munro, shortly to produce his influential, if, in its underlying thesis, highly conventional Criticism of the Crusade (1940). The 1938 outline of the projected work conformed to a familiar orthodox model: origins and First Crusade; crusades and crusader states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; later crusades and the influence on ‘medieval civilisation’.12 The conservative and narrative structure remained a marked feature of much of the long-delayed finished work.
After early approval from the American Historical Association and the Medieval Academy of America, necessary imprimaturs in the then somewhat deferentially hierarchic world of US scholarship, the Second World War forced the postponement of the enterprise. In 1946, La Monte was appointed editor in chief and his university, Pennsylvania, agreed to underwrite the project. The team of contributors was extended to include foreign scholars. La Monte died in 1949, but his successor at Pennsylvania, Kenneth M. Setton (1914–95), as general editor, supervised a glacial progress of production. Volumes one and two appeared in 1955 and 1962. The project was then taken over by the university of Wisconsin and four further volumes, alongside reissues of the first two, emerged between 1969 and 1989, over half a century after La Monte’s original prospectus. Inevitably, the scope expanded, but rarely systematically. As often with collaborative works, the dispositions owed as much to the interests, availability, productivity and mendacity of individual authors as to the requirements of scholarship.13 Inevitably, some contributions were out of date when they were published (a few when they were written). Numerous contributors never lived to see their prose in print. While slowly reflecting changes in how the crusades were seen, witnessed by the inclusion of the later crusades in volumes three and six, art and architecture (volume four) and analytical pieces on social, economic and financial aspects (especially in volumes five and six), by relying in the main on established experts there could be little new or innovative about the work produced, nor was there. Narratives by Steven Runciman (in volume one), or studies of Outremer by Joshua Prawer and Jean Richard, were more easily and satisfyingly found elsewhere. With research on crusading witnessing an extraordinary and extravagant protean growth precisely as the US History was creeping and grinding its laborious way into bookshops and libraries, the point of the project came into question. The academic landscape was changing so rapidly that synthetic summaries were otiose, a point made as early as 1957 by R. C. Smail.14 When in 1951 Runciman challenged the ‘massed typewriters’ of the US work (to which with characteristic insouciance he himself contributed three rehashed chapters) with his solitary pen, in a literary vein he could not fail.15 More seriously, the US collaborative history was cumbersome in arrangement, marmoreal in tone yet timid in ambition. Seeking inappropriate definition and impossible consensus, it remained forever dogged by the conservatism that attended its birth. For all its industry, weight of material, useful maps, notes on nomenclature, bibliographies and glossaries, it traduced the memories of its dedicatees, Munro, La Monte, Duncalf and Krey, by contributing more or less nothing to the debate on the crusades.
Some of the issues considered by the original planners of the US History in the 1930s found rather different treatment by scholars who, while also studying the Latin East, questioned the theoretical bases of their subject. Such attacks on the nineteenth-century ‘positive’ colonial model came from a number of quarters, deriving not only from fresh scrutiny of the evidence but from the ideological and political stances of the historians. Scholars of the Muslim Near East and Arabic sources combined in criticism with those looking afresh at Frankish Outremer from new perspectives of western scepticism of the virtues of colonialism and the newer still context of the establishment in 1948 of the Zionist State of Israel in the same geographic space. Half a century after Grousset’s final volume appeared, very little, if any, of the tradition he represented retained academic credibility. However, this rejection of received interpretation exerted a much more limited impact on popular, public and political attitudes. Equally, as has recently been observed, the critics of the colonial model shared with its creators a concentration on the material features of crusading, its conquests, settlements, and effect on trade, finance, economics, warfare, military and civilian architecture and art. Thus, in a paradoxical manner, they reinforced a ‘neo-imperialistic and materialistic interpretation’.16 It is claimed this continued configuration of crusading as colonialist, even where disapproved of, is shared by liberal, Marxist, Zionist and Muslim commentators alike, to the detriment of seeing the crusades primarily as religious acts. Alternatively, it could be suggested that continued interest in Latin settlements in the eastern Mediterranean flowed from the historical fact of those conquests and their apparent eccentricities. Whatever motivated or compelled Latin settlers, settle they did with concrete results. It is the nature of those results that formed the bone of contention for the critics of the colonialist model.
In his review of Grousset in 1937, Boase had mentioned the recent (1934) critique of Madelin’s Franco-Syrian theory by a young French scholar, Claude Cahen (1909–91), whose study of Arabic sources indicated that the Franks had in fact made very little impact on the indigenous population.17 These ideas he developed over the rest of a career that also embraced studies of the social and economic history of the Near East and pre-Ottoman Turkey. After 1945 successively a professor at Strasbourg and in Paris, for twenty years a member of the Communist Party and a life-long Marxist, Cahen established himself as the most influential western historian of the medieval Islamic Near East in the twentieth century. His work on the crusades, although an adjunct to his chief concerns, was revelatory by placing them in a context that eluded almost all others. Cahen’s contempt for Grousset’s Histoire was profound, regarding it as a work devoid of specialist insight by a popularising author ignorant of ‘any of the necessary languages’. But, as he said, this was no laughing matter.18 For Cahen, a rare Marxist in crusade studies as well as an orientalist, Grousset and the rest who represented the crusades in a positive light, appeared variously as apologists for past social hierarchies, monarchy, colonial mission and for the crusades as precursors of French cultural influence in the Mediterranean since the eighteenth century. His comments on French appropriation of the crusades were particularly dry. Cahen’s central criticism was directed at scholarship that looked at the Near East from a wholly western perspective through almost exclusively western sources, an implicit form of patronising western Orientalism. Much of this rested on a near universal ignorance of Arabic among crusade historians before and during much of Cahen’s lifetime, but was also a symptom of a wider cultural distortion. Cahen insisted that the crusade settlements in Syria and Palestine should be examined in their local not colonial context, as their colonial nature was itself contestable, conforming neither to classical nor modern types. He insisted that the study of the crusades as a product of western society was one thing; that of the Latin settlements, ‘states like the rest’, another.19
By adjusting the focus to highlight the experience of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish natives as seen through indigenous sources, happy assumptions of cultural exchange disappeared. From this perspective, the Franks were just one more foreign ruling class, like the Turks, whose impact on daily lives was negligible and, Cahen pointedly remarked in a dig at those more interested in the antics of the rich and powerful, ‘daily life … is almost all life’.20 Indigenous sources indicated no cultural symbiosis, rather a mutual ignorance and the customary relationships of exploitation by rulers of the ruled. The precise ways in which exploitation could in fact rely on social contact, drawing communities together, became a matter of later controversy. In much of their activities, the Franks excluded locals. They left no lasting imprint on Syrian or Palestinian society, culture, language or demographics, their influence marginal and peripheral in the wider history of the Near East. Almost all the supposed elements of cultural exchange, in arts, learning and commerce, so lauded in the colonial model, now appeared illusory, superficial or owing little specifically to the crusading enterprises. That the crusades received such attention at all in Arabic sources, Cahen argued, came as a consequence of the revival witnessed by the Muslim Near East during the period, but paled in significance beside the thirteenth-century emergence of the Mamluks and the incursions of Mongols. In any case, larger geopolitical shifts in the structures of the Muslim world from the decline of the Abbasid caliphate in the tenth and eleventh centuries were of far greater moment than the Frankish occupation of parts of the Levantine littoral. If nothing else, Cahen deflated the self-importance of western crusade historiography as well as its sloppy tendency to ill-informed generalisations about the Muslim world that would not be tolerated in their own areas of expertise. He also noted that even by the 1980s Near Eastern scholars were reluctant to take up the task themselves, a situation confirmed at the very end of the century by Carole Hillenbrand’s innovative The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999), despite her surprising omission of Cahen in her brief historiographic survey.21 However, Cahen’s unsentimental, orientalist approach helped change the rules of engagement even for western scholars unable to read Arabic, not least in offering new Arabic texts and sterner source criticism of literatures previously known to most crusade historians only in translation.
New scrutiny of texts was not reserved to eastern sources; western texts, many very familiar, came in for radical reassessment at the same time from scholars with equally strong intellectual and personal motives who nonetheless remained focused on the Latin East. Some of the new developments are closely linked to more general revisionism within medieval studies, moving away from a narrowly political and constitutional approach to a wider appreciation of religious, economic and social contexts and a greater sensitivity to the complexities of understanding the actual workings of legal and administrative institutions from the formal evidence such activities generated. Inevitably, university history faculties provided a focus for such debates which also existed within a wider cultural dimension. After the First World War, in most political societies, whether democracies or dictatorships, much lip-service and public attention was paid to ‘the people’ and to ideas both of change and of modernisation. This frequently combined with interest in valuing, reshaping or inventing a past attuned to the present, by governments but also by oppositional political factions. Some historians, in places such as Russia, Germany, Italy and Spain, but more subtly in democratic societies, joined or were recruited into such recrafting of history. The rise of Marxist historians in France and Britain is an obvious example. To challenge old-fashioned concentration on the middle ages as a time of kings and castles, knights and battles, churchmen and lawyers surrounded by an undifferentiated, inarticulate and ignored mass of peasantry was not necessarily entirely academic. Militant ideology, war, empire, colonisation, mass conscription, intercontinental conflict and contact all possessed contemporary resonance. The crusades offered scope to all parties, as examples, according to choice, of efficient or, alternatively, inefficient hierarchies; of mass involvement and social cooperation; or as yet another example of material exploitation of followers and conquered; or of the power of faith and ideology to move populations and implement political action across society.
If Cahen attacked the colonial model from without, as it were, others undermined from within the western tradition. In the late 1930s, two young English scholars, John Prestwich at Oxford and R. C. Smail at Cambridge, turned their attention to Outremer. Although he abandoned study of the Latin East, Prestwich, building on his undergraduate prize essay, had essayed a pursuit of Grandeclaude’s analysis of the Jerusalem laws to test the prevailing assumptions about the nature of the supposedly ‘pure’ feudal society established by the Franks in Outremer, untouched by local heterogeneous circumstances. His scepticism, which later he transferred and developed into a forceful critique of feudalism in the Anglo-Norman world, was fuelled by the traditional obsession of English medievalists. Debates about the nature of feudalism and the chronology or even fact of its introduction or not into English society had become and remained a staple of historians’ wrangling, exposing fundamental differences in their approach to the past, its sources and the structure of medieval society. This was far from being an English obsession alone; the productive Claude Cahen had himself delivered some pointed comments on accepted orthodoxy in a 1940 book on feudalism in Norman Italy.22 This concern with the institutions of feudalism was linked to the later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century academic interest in medieval constitutions in general in the context of the development of the contrasting national histories of Germany, France and England. This was also fuelled by the fashionable legalistic bent among medievalists and their interpretations of medieval states and polities. For Outremer as for western Europe, certainties like those of Dodu and La Monte looked increasingly credulous and unconvincing, irrelevant even, when set against the evidence, from chronicles as well as charters and law books, of how societies actually operated in practice and, in particular, of the realities of war. This was to become one of Prestwich’s central insights in his post-war work on the Anglo-Norman realm. It also formed the core of what became one of the most effective assaults on the crusader colonial model.
‘Warfare is a related part of the whole activity of any society.’23 Thus, argued R. C. Smail in 1956, examination of how military activity actually operated within Latin Outremer would provide valuable insights into the nature of the settlement and rule. His innovative study of Frankish warfare 1097–1193 explored features, notably campaigning between 1129 and 1187, previously largely ignored by military historians. He established new maxims, most famously that successful defence against aggressors relied on the relationship between adequately manned static garrisons combining with a mobile field army. From this study of Frankish warfare in action, and to some extent picking up a point made by Ernest Barker a generation earlier, Smail concluded that the Franks were never entirely secure in their hold over either territory or native people. Their numbers were too small to engage with the locals in anything beyond a distant and potentially oppressive system of economic exploitation, producing a segregated not integrated society, a view suggested by Cahen and, a century before him, Beugnot. The Franks stayed in their cities, castles and fortified places, their relations with the mass of their subjects fiscal, commercial and seigneurial. The adoption of local habits and dress, as well as the aristocratic contacts across religious and political divides, were essentially superficial. The Rey–Madelin thesis was dismissed as the product of modern French interests in colonialism, a form of self-justification for a contemporary activity for which Smail, in contrast to the French writers he criticised, expressed neither affection nor admiration. Hostility not friendship or cooperation marked intercommunal relations in Outremer, the tacit implication being that the same was, mutatis mutandis, likely to be true in modern colonies. In Frankish Outremer there was no superior western culture benevolently to disperse, nor any reciprocal absorption by the conquerors of the sophisticated civilisation of the conquered. Smail took pains to expose the misreading of the sources by those who argued for a Franco-Syrian cultural integration. Thus he contested the old orthodoxy on both historical and historiographical grounds. Late in life, he was content to abandon the term ‘colony’ altogether as being both too simple and too loaded with inappropriate and complex implications to be a useful descriptive or analytical tool.24 Although certain links in Smail’s argument, such as the distribution of the different local faith communities or the extent of Frankish settlement, were ignored or assumed, his research stemmed from a clearer theoretical grasp on the extensive role of war in medieval society and a consequently broader analysis of the sources. However, in effect, he did not so much reject the colonial model as completely invert it.
If Smail’s deconstruction of the colonial model occurred in the circumstances of the twentieth-century end of western European empires in Asia and Africa, a similar attack emerged from the context of a political beginning, the creation of the State of Israel (1948). From the early nineteenth century, study of Frankish Outremer had been conducted almost as a shadow crusade, with writers such as Michaud, de Vogüé, Rey or Prutz making their own passagia to the east. The physical remains had similarly been studied by visitors, a process accelerated by the French and British mandates after 1920. Local Arab scholars displayed little interest in serious study of the crusades. Only with the establishment of western-style university history departments in the wake of Zionist settlement (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded in 1925) were the medieval Frankish settlements studied by scholars resident in the same geographic space. Superficial similarities between the plantation of then largely European Jews with the Frankish invaders made a sense of association – even connection – unavoidable even if it was, for some, uncomfortable. Inescapable parallels could speak of rude foreign conquest and impermanent settlement or, alternatively, as negative precursors, warnings from a failed past to guide a different future. For others, as one present-day Israeli historian has put it, by reacting to a form of sentimental empathy, a shared memory born of a shared place, the ‘Crusaders … were transformed simply into another group of former inhabitants of the country, part of its history’. He added, less irenically, ‘the fact that the Crusaders had fought the Muslims made this conceptual transformation all the easier’.25
In the years immediately after the founding of the State of Israel, attitudes were dominated by a scholar who stood diametrically at the other end of the spectrum of Israeli response to the crusaders’ conquest. Joshua Prawer (1917–90), born in Polish Silesia, emigrated to Palestine in 1936 to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Under the influence of Richard Koebner, a historian of medieval German colonisation and settlement, Prawer concentrated his postgraduate research on the Frankish settlements, almost exclusively in the kingdom of Jerusalem. His approach was far removed from the earlier French school. In a series of major articles beginning in the early 1950s, culminating in three major books, Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem (Paris, 1969–71), The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonisation in the Middle Ages (London, 1972) and Crusader Institutions (Oxford, 1980, a collection of revised articles), Prawer examined the social institutions of the kingdom, the power of the kings, the laws, the evidence of settlement, agriculture and economic exploitation, presenting an alternative model that completely contradicted the older colonial theories. Instead of the almost exclusive focus on the noble elites that marked most earlier studies of Outremer, Prawer was drawn to evidence of the whole of Frankish society, notably the free non-nobles, the so-called burgesses. For Prawer, the Frankish settlement was numerically small, restricted to cities, physically and culturally distant from the countryside and its inhabitants except for the few defensive garrison castles. There was no perfect feudal constitution holding the kings in aristocratic thrall. Between the new rulers and the indigenous people, very largely Muslim he assumed, unbridgeable gulfs were erected by law, religion and, most sweepingly, by a ‘colonial attitude’ that rendered the realities of indigenous culture effectively invisible to the western invaders and settlers. The paternalistic benevolent cooperation and synthesis of Rey and Madelin (misguided ‘do-gooders’) was replaced by a picture of complete separation, of, in a word he used advisedly and often, ‘apartheid’. Outremer was a colony but ‘there was no fraternization with the local population, there was a refraction with regard to local culture, apartheid with regard to the local population, dependence on Europe in several respects’.26
Prawer’s opinions complemented and extended the ideas of Smail and, in terms of fresh approach to sources, were matched by others who held somewhat less defined hostility to the older French thesis. Another post-Second World War scholar, the Frenchman Jean Richard (b. 1921), a wide-ranging and innovative historian of the county of Tripoli, Outremer lordships, the church, Cyprus, Louis IX and the Asiatic context, retained a profound respect for Grousset while radically reshaping and supplanting Grousset’s picture of Outremer in ways that complemented Prawer’s own work.27 However, while not explicitly drawing modern parallels, Prawer placed the medieval past in a historical continuum. He linked the colonialism of Outremer, not least as exercised by the Italian maritime cities, with the European expansion of the early modern period in Africa, the Atlantic and the Americas. He noted, pointedly if not mischievously, that Jerusalem had been a capital city for only four of the regimes that had ruled in Palestine: the Israelites, the crusaders, the British Mandate and the State of Israel. More widely, his theories held a clear message for his compatriots. As he wrote in the Histoire du royaume latin, ‘although it became a homeland (patrie) for its inhabitants, the Latin State never became a cradle (berceau) of a nation’.28 The reasons were evident. The Franks never settled in sufficient numbers to secure their survival and, partly as a consequence but also because of their ‘colonial mentality’, they failed to make the countryside theirs by settling there. Prawer was in a sense answering an unspoken but loud question, one which other Zionists had posed: are the Israelis just like the crusaders and will they suffer the same fate? His work points to a clear answer: no. With its dedication to attract large-scale immigration, and those immigrants’ close engagement with the landscape and environment, for example in the kibbutz movement, the State of Israel was the antithesis to the Frankish state and so would not share its fate. Only perhaps in the suggestion of the lack, perhaps even impossibility, of cultural synthesis with the other peoples of the region did the Franks provide a direct lesson. Prawer had experienced colonialism at first hand, under the increasingly ragged and unsympathetic British Mandate. He would not have regarded Zionism as a colonial enterprise comparable with those that had penetrated the region before. In 1984 he pointed out that, unlike in European languages where they were called colonies, with all its layers of meaning, the Hebrew word for the Zionist presence in Palestine was moshavah, literally ‘settlement’.29 Prawer was a man of affairs as well as a scholar, becoming a central figure in the establishment of Israeli universities and its education system. The modern resonance of his work cannot have escaped him. It certainly did not those of a younger generation, for whom Prawer’s work forms one strand in a vigorous debate on Zionism itself.30 Delegates at a crusade historians’ conference in Jerusalem in 1987 were frequently reminded by locals, sometimes casually in the street, that the Israelis were not like the crusaders; they were in the Holy Land to stay.
Central to Prawer’s view lay the question of the demography of Frankish settlement and a certain reading of the evidence. Much of the conceptual frame was traditional, even if the picture itself was new. The assumption of colonialism, the generalisations about cultural exchange, even asides on the nature of the crusading enterprise itself – ‘one wonders if the whole idea was not polluted at source (viciée à base)’ – address issues familiar to crusade historians over the previous two centuries.31 More specifically, in the light of different perspectives and new research, some of it archaeological, Prawer’s thesis proved vulnerable on a number of fronts, such as the details of intercommunal relations (closer than he imagined); the extent and location of Frankish settlement (more widespread in the countryside); the structure of indigenous society (more variegated and less exclusively Muslim); the power of Frankish kings (more circumscribed, earlier); and the nature of urban confraternities (faith based rather than political estates). Some of the questions Prawer asked have been superseded by different approaches, such as that of the German Hans Eberhard Mayer (b. 1932). Basing his research on meticulous study of charters and very close reading of chronicles, Mayer has gone further than Prawer in investigating the internal working of secular and ecclesiastical lordships and in exposing both how government worked and how politics operated. Although a wonderfully gifted synthesiser and author of one of the most important and widely read modern general accounts of the crusades, as regards Outremer Mayer looks beyond or perhaps behind the grand structures of constitutionalism in building an impression very much from the bottom upwards.32 However, more fundamental challenges to Prawer’s understanding of Frankish Outremer came from scholars who argued directly against the ‘apartheid’ model.
Some criticisms operated within the broad Prawer-esque views of the coercive and urban nature of Frankish rule. This did not necessarily confirm a system of ‘apartheid’. One of Prawer’s former students, Benjamin Z. Kedar, noted that intercommunal relations tended to be stable, partly because of the very lack of Frankish settlement and an attitude of resignation on the part of the Muslim majority. However, while more limited than in Spain or Sicily, Outremer’s contribution to ‘the transfer of Arabic learning to the West was … somewhat less negligible than usually assumed’. With his skill at forensic micro-history, as it is sometimes called, Kedar also argued that the apparently racially discriminatory decrees regarding dress and sex issued by the Council of Nablus (1120), in which Prawer had placed great store, were not quite what they had seemed. They had been promulgated in the context of an immediate crisis, may never have been implemented, were not as harsh as similar codes elsewhere in the Mediterranean, displayed Byzantine not Frankish antecedents and, as another scholar had observed, were not included in the Jerusalem Assises.33 Similar chips came off the Prawer edifice elsewhere. For example, in a series of articles from the early 1970s, the English historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, as well as questioning the extent of royal power early in the twelfth century, argued that the Frankish overlords inevitably had links with the local population through the mechanics of lordship, the administration of manorial estates and the fiscal system, and that these contacts were in no sense necessarily disruptive or hostile. Pursuing this idea of continuity, he further suggested (implausibly in Mayer’s view) that Frankish bureaucracy inherited the previous Fatimid system. Pointing to the number of sites of shared worship and religious veneration and to a social relationship equivalent to the Muslim dhimma system, which allowed for religious freedom in return for a poll tax and certain legal restrictions (a point also made for example by Kedar), Riley-Smith argued for peaceful if not harmonious relations between the communities, including the Franks. In some ways this represented a reworking of the insights of Claude Cahen that portrayed the Franks as yet another foreign ruling class. Riley-Smith’s recognition of active administrative borrowing and continuity for indigenous institutions cut near the heart of Prawer’s model of absolute segregation and ‘colonial mentality’, whatever that implied.34
More fundamental to the Prawer–Smail interpretation is the size and distribution of the Frankish population and the military, economic and social circumstances of the settlement. The Israeli historian and archaeologist Ronnie Ellenblum has argued in two recent works, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1998) and Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007), that what he calls the anti-colonialist segregation model of Prawer and Smail is fatally flawed. By re-examining the written evidence, the cultural assumptions of previous historians and fresh archaeological material, Ellenblum constructs a very different picture of Frankish society. He suggests that there were proportionately more western settlers than previously admitted; that native Palestinians included significant communities of local Christians; that it was in these Christian areas, for instance north of Jerusalem, that numerous Frankish villages were established; that in consequence Frankish society was far from being the urbanised ghettoes of Prawer’s imagination; that the Franks did engage directly with the rural landscape and its agriculture as more than absentee landlords; that the security situation of the Franks for most of the mid-twelfth century at least was not so very precarious; that the spread of castles across the often peaceful landscape was for economic and not solely military and defensive purposes; that earlier interpretations had been coloured by their advocates’ personal attitudes towards colonisation in general. Ellenblum draws comparisons with Latin emigration and settlement in southern Europe.
This is far from a return to the Rey–Madelin fairy tale. Communities were divided by religion; Franks did not settle in predominantly Muslim rural areas. Militarisation increased as the political balance shifted against the Franks in the generation before Hattin. It is however a root and branch rejection of the Prawer–Smail thesis. Prawer himself was dismissive of Ellenblum’s findings when first presented. Much of Ellenblum’s account rests, as with previous interpretations, on assumptions about texts, demographic models and material remains more or less unprovable. Even among archaeologists, Ellenblum’s theories have not gone unchallenged. Denys Pringle, perhaps the most learned modern scholar of all types of Frankish architecture in Palestine, has pointed out that even on Ellenblum’s own evidence, the idea of Franks settled in the countryside in fortified villages, houses and towers hardly contradicts the Prawer–Smail thesis of the permanent tension of an occupying elite. Similarly, the evidence for lack of numbers, as for example produced by Smail, is scarcely refuted in Ellenblum’s model, which may not be as radical a departure as it appears. Mayer commented a generation ago that the number of burgesses ‘who settled in the countryside should not be underestimated’.35
There is another connection with older theories, the influence of the writer’s own intellectual and social context. Ellenblum himself provides a clue at least to one element in his own cultural influences. After describing anti-colonial and Zionist views of the Frankish states, he argues that the invention of any national history is determined by a selection of past episodes within that nation’s geographic space. Consequently, societies that have no obvious affinity with previous occupants of their space nonetheless find some selective identification, as with the British interest in and preservation of their island’s Roman past. By using the Frankish incursion as ‘a sort of reverse prefiguration’ for the State of Israel, the crusader episode was recognised as part of the history of the Holy Land and therefore of Israel, a view reinforced by the powerful testimony of the physical remains in the Israeli landscape, ‘part of the history of the Israeli nation … part of my own country, and to a certain degree, as part of my own history’.36 This is a telling contrast to the colonial rejectionism of Prawer’s generation. Yet it too speaks of its time, at once more confident of established belonging, full ownership of the territory and its history yet with an awareness of persistent threats. The identification with the Franks (or its rejection) cannot be conceived within the sort of colonial matrix that occurred naturally to an older generation of immigrants. Yet the absorption and Israelification of the Palestinian landscape that Ellenblum’s almost elegiac response suggests in fact derives from one of Prawer’s main concerns, the engagement with the land. There may be a further ironic twist that speaks to emotions similar to those expressed by Ellenblum, although leading in a very different direction to his scenario of accommodation. It has recently been observed (or argued, according to taste and political persuasion) by one Israeli former crusade historian that Israel’s crusader past is seen as more acceptable than its Arab one. Ummayad remains and posh formerly Arab houses are rebranded as ‘crusader’, just as archaeological periods have become attached to invaders rather than indigenous inhabitants. Better to immortalise the 1096 killers of Rhineland Jews than acknowledge Arab civilisation.37 Such things are not neutral, and potentially just as corrosive as the most rancid application of colonialism.
In the context of debates about crusading, perhaps the chief significance of such new approaches is the extent to which they represent a genuine abandonment of all western European perspectives on the Frankish conquests, whether orientalist, nationalist, imperial, colonial, anti-colonial or, as originally, crusader. The models of integration or segregation exist as part of arguments borrowed from separate historical, political or cultural discussions. These are tenacious. Carole Hillenbrand’s landmark study of Islamic evidence in 1999, where she exposes the extensive rhetoric of external and émigré Muslim hostility to the Franks, sits securely in this tradition; both Stevenson and Runciman (‘an excellent starting point’) are cited approvingly.38 Hans Mayer’s elegant and lucid chapter on ‘the Latin East 1098–1205’ in volume four of the New Cambridge Medieval History (2004) is a masterpiece of concision. Yet it deals exclusively with the ‘Latin’ rather than the ‘East’, constrained by space to concentrate on the political, legal and constitutional history of the immigrant Staatsvolk ‘to the exclusion of the Muslims and Syro-Christians, not to mention the minorities of the separated eastern churches or, even smaller in number, the Jews’.39 Merely acknowledging the absence exposes the distortion, like studying Norman England without the English, Anglo-Norman Ireland without the Irish, Norman Sicily without the Muslims or the German conquest of Prussia and Livonia without the Prussians and Livs. Similar historiographical traditions, dating back to medieval apologists, surrounded western European expansion in northern, eastern and southern Europe. Yet the Frankish conquest displayed special features as well as a markedly different history when contrasted with the Baltic or Sicily or Andalusia. Observing that non-Latin locals existed and then excluding them tacitly accepts a segregation model if only as a literary convenience. Kedar, an extremely original and sensitive student of intercommunal relations in Outremer, still felt the need to play with concepts of colonial ‘fragments’.40 Even Ellenblum, while seeking to subvert the colonial and anti-colonial models alike by demonstrating a more complex set of relationships, appears somewhat conceptually trapped by the theory he is attacking.
Others are pursuing more radical abandonment of the colonial/segregation argument. The work, for instance, of Cahen and Richard indicate other possibilities, especially in Cahen’s idea that the Frankish states need to be distinguished from the crusades and placed in their proper historical context as Near Eastern polities without any intrusive neo-colonial model. Once that model has been entirely discarded, as distorting, then other parallels and analytical techniques can be introduced, derived from or contrasted with studies of other multi-communal societies. One recent attempt at this has been Christopher MacEvitt’s (2008) description of relations between the Franks and local Christian communities as ‘rough tolerance’. This MacEvitt characterises by three prime features: ‘silence’, or a lack of intercommunal engagement, of the sort witnessed by the absence of local Christians from William of Tyre’s history of twelfth-century Outremer; permeability – of people but not ideas or learning – across social and religious divides; and localisation. This last point emphasises the previous tendency to generalise and lump together both the different communities and their detailed experiences of each other. It is suggested that in fact social relationships were marked by a disinterest in rigid categorisation or delineation of or between neighbouring communities. Thus MacEvitt rejects an idea favoured by anti-colonial historians that the Franks treated Muslims and others as dhimmi, pointing out that, in contrast to the system in Muslim lands, the non-Latin communities possessed no recognised hierarchies or leadership, their groupings remained undifferentiated in the eyes of their conquerors and were dealt with on a local ad hoc basis not a formal legal one.41 Whatever view is taken of such ideas, which only apply to Frankish–Christian relations, chiefly in the northern Frankish territories, and are still in the process of articulation, they counter westernised assumptions that have determined most previous interpretations, and promote understanding that the habit of determinist generalisations tends to mislead, whether conditioned by inappropriate analogies, the study of elites or theories of multiculturalism. In positing an intrinsic difference, uniqueness even, in Outremer’s experience that owes nothing to general schemes of colonialism or the interplay of civilisations, the challenge to familiar approaches is clear, radical and potentially liberating. It is a model, almost an anti-model, which implies that, properly observed and understood, Outremer society, as opposed to its conquest, is actually irrelevant to debates on the crusades: an end of consensus indeed.
1 F. Duncalf’s review of Grousset vols. i and ii, American Historical Review, 41 (1935–36), 124–6.
2 T. S. R. Boase, ‘Recent Developments in Crusading Historiography’, History, 22 (1937), 110–25; J. L. La Monte, ‘Some Problems in Crusading Historiography’, Speculum, 15 (1940), 57–75.
3 Revised and published posthumously, D. C. Munro, The Kingdom of the Crusaders (New York NY, 1935).
4 Cambridge Medieval History, v, ed. J. R. Tanner et al. (Cambridge, 1926), chaps vii–ix.
5 E. Barker, The Crusades (London, 1923), esp. on Letters of the Sepulchre, p. 42, note 1; on Franks as brigands, p. 50.
6 E. Barker, ‘The Crusades’, in T. Arnold and A. Guillaume, The Legacy of Islam (Oxford, 1931), p. 54; cf. p. 46.
7 Barker, ‘Crusades’, p. 40.
8 Barker, Crusades, p. 104.
9 In general, H. E. Mayer, ‘America and the Crusades’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 125 (1981), 39–45; K. Setton, ‘Foreword’ to 1955 edn of A History of the Crusades, i (Madison WI, 1969), xiii–xviii; G. Constable, ‘Crusading Studies in America’, in his ‘The Historiography of the Crusades’, in his Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 32–42.
10 J. L. La Monte’s review of Grousset’s Histoire des croisades vols i and ii, Byzantion, 10 (1935), 685–700; the Indo-European reference appears in R. Grousset, Histoire des croisades (Paris, 1934–36), ii, 535–6. It is notable that La Monte ignores the colonial dimension completely.
11 J. L. La Monte, Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge MA, 1932), pp. vii, ix, 108–9, 243, 244; cf. C. L. Kingsford, ‘The Kingdom of Jerusalem 1099–1291’, in Cambridge Medieval History, v, 303; J. O. Prestwich’s Lothian Prize essay was published posthumously, Feudal Society in the Latin States of Palestine and Syria and its Relations to the Saracens (Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Durham, 2006); cf. M. Prestwich, ‘Foreword’ to J. O. Prestwich, The Place of War in English History (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. xi–xii; for Munro’s 1896 review, above, pp. 147, 154; Mayer, ‘America and the Crusades’, 42.
12 La Monte, ‘Some Problems in Crusading Historiography’.
13 At least one invited contributor serially lied to Setton about a chapter he claimed was nearing completion of which not a word seems to have been penned. Setton clearly possessed enormous patience and capacity to forgive; he and the contributor – who never did write the chapter – remained friends.
14 R. C. Smail’s review of the then Pennsylvania History of the Crusades, vol. i, alongside Runciman’s complete History of the Crusades, to which the comment was equally applied, English Historical Review, 72 (1957), 687.
15 S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge, 1951–54), i, xii–xiii.
16 J. Riley-Smith, Crusades (2nd edn New Haven CT, 2005), pp. 303–4.
17 Boase, ‘Recent Developments in Crusading Historiography’, p. 112 referring to C. Cahen, ‘Indigènes et croisés’, Syria, 15 (1934), 351–60.
18 C. Cahen, Orient et Occident aux temps des croisades (Paris, 1983), pp. 6, 257, note 3; cf. idem, ‘Notes sur l’histoire des croisades et de l’Orient Latin’, ii, Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg, 29 (1950–51), 286–310.
19 Cahen, Orient et Occident, p. 208 and passim.
20 Cahen, ‘Indigènes et croisés’, 359.
21 Cahen, Orient et Occident, p. 7; C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 10–13; cf. E. Sivan, ‘Modern Arab Historiography of the Crusades’, Asian and African Studies, 8 (1972), 109–49.
22 Prestwich, Place of War, pp. xi–xii; cf. J. C. Holt’s chapter ‘English History 1066–1272’, in A Century of British Medieval Studies, ed. A. Deyermond, (Oxford, 2007); C. Cahen, Le régime féodale de l’Italie normande (Paris, 1940), p. 64. For the continuing debate of Outremer feudalism, S. Reynolds, ‘Fiefs and Vassals in Twelfth Century Jerusalem’, Crusades, 1 (2002), 29–48; P. Edbury, ‘Fiefs and Vassals in the Kingdom of Jerusalem: From the Twelfth Century to the Thirteenth’, Crusades, 1 (2002), 49–62; J. Rubin, ‘The Debate on Twelfth Century Frankish Feudalism’, Crusades, 8 (2009), 53–62.
23 R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare (Cambridge, 1956), p. 16; cf. pp. v, 2 and passim for what follows.
24 R. C. Smail, ‘Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem: The First European Colonial Society?’, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 342–7.
25 R. Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007), p. 61.
26 Smail, ‘Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem’, p. 366; cf. pp. 364 and 360–6; J. Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonisation in the Middle Ages (London, 1972), pp. ix, 524 and generally pp. 469–533; idem, Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem (2 vols. Paris, 1969–71), i, 6–8 for current parallels; Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 57–9 for a view of Prawer and Zionism; cf. B. Z. Kedar, ‘Joshua Prawer (1917–90), Historian of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 5 (1990), 107–16; B. Z. Kedar et al., Outremer (Jerusalem, 1982), pp. 1–4.
27 J. Richard, The Crusades c. 1071–c. 1291 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. xii–xii, xiv; idem, ‘National Feeling and the Legacy of the Crusades’, in Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. H. Nicholson (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 218–19; Dei Gesta per Francos: Etudes sur les croisades dédiées à Jean Richard, ed. M. Balard et al. (Aldershot, 2001), pp. ix–x for the impact of Grousset on the adolescent Richard; in 1947 Grousset provided the preface for Richard’s youthful Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem.
28 Prawer, Histoire, i, 7, 13.
29 Horns of Hattin, p. 361.
30 Apart for Ellenblum above, cf. A. Arkush, ‘The Jewish State and its Internal Enemies’, Jewish Social Studies, 7 (2001), 178–9; D. Ohana, ‘Are Israelis the New Crusaders?’, Palestine–Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture, 13:3 (2006), 36–42; Z. J. Asali, ‘Zionist Studies of the Crusade Movement’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 14 (1992), 45–59.
31 Prawer, Histoire, i, 9.
32 H. E. Mayer, The Crusades (Eng. trans. J. Gillingham, 2nd edn Oxford, 1988); for appreciation and bibliography only to 1997, Montjoie: Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans Eberhard Mayer, ed. B. Z. Kedar et al. (Aldershot, 1997), pp. vii–xx.
33 B. Z. Kedar, ‘The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant’, in Muslims under Latin Rule, ed. J. M. Powell (Princeton NJ, 1990), pp. 135–74, esp. pp. 165–6, 174; for an appreciation and bibliography, In Laudem Hierosolymitani, ed. I. Shagrir et al. (Aldershot, 2007), pp. ix–xxiii.
34 J. Riley-Smith, The Feudal Nobility and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (London, 1973), pp. 40–98; idem, ‘Some Lesser Royal Officials in Latin Syria’, English Historical Review, 87 (1972), 1–26; idem, ‘The Survival in Latin Palestine of Muslim Administration’, in The Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Period of the Crusades, ed. P. M. Holt (Warminster, 1977), pp. 9–22; idem, ‘Further Thoughts on Baldwin II’s établissement’, in Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. Edbury (Cardiff, 1985), pp. 176–9; Mayer, Crusades, p. 165.
35 D. Pringle’s review, H-France Review, 8 (2008), 180–3; Mayer, Crusades, p. 156.
36 Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 60–1.
37 M. Benvenisti, Scared Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (London, 2000), pp. 192–3, captions to illustration nos. 18 and 23, pp. 299–303, 309–10.
38 Hillenbrand, Crusades, pp. 11 and 13.
39 H. E. Mayer, ‘The Latin East 1098–1205’, in New Cambridge Medieval History, iv–ii, ed. D. Luscombe and J. Riley-Smith (Cambridge, 2004), 666 and generally 644–74.
40 Horns of Hattin, pp. 350–2.
41 C. MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia PA, 2008), esp. pp. 13–26.