Crusades

Volume 18

Benjamin Z Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Iris Shagrir, Benjamin Z Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Iris Shagrir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367375355
• eBook ISBN: 9781000073058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: World History

Crusades covers the seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095-1102) to the fall of Malta (1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and military history.

Routledge publishes this journal for The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Particular attention is given to the publication of historical sources - narrative, homiletic and documentary - but studies and interpretative essays are welcomed too. Crusades also incorporates the Society's Bulletin.

The editors are Professor Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; Professor Jonathan Phillips, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; Iris Shagrir, The Open University of Israel; and Nikolaos G. Chrissis, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece.

Us and Them: Identity in William of Tyre’s Chronicon

Ann E. Zimo

University of New Hampshire [email protected]

Abstract

In this article I closely analyze the vocabulary William of Tyre used in the Chronicon to describe the groups that opposed and those that supported the kingdom of Jerusalem. William’s text offers a varied and specific vocabulary for the opponents of the Franks, preferring geographic terms like Turci and Egyptii to infideles and Sarraceni. An analysis of hostes reveals that William did not include Christians in the generic category of “the enemy”; however, I argue that, in light of how he used other terms, this division reflects his acknowledgment of geo-political realities rather than a simple religious bigotry against Muslims. William’s use of nostri, Christiani, Latini, and Franci reveals that he possessed a somewhat pragmatic understanding of his own identity. At the core, he considered himself to be an eastern Latin Christian, but throughout the work we can see his self-identity expand to encompass all Christians, or narrow to include only Latins of the kingdom of Jerusalem. The language of the Chronicon does not support the view that the Franks divided the world into two undifferentiated groups of good Christians and bad everyone else. William instead evinced a flexible conception of identity capable of inclusivity and cultural discernment as well as intolerance.

Who were the Franks, those Europeans who stayed behind in the Levant following a crusade? Historians of the crusades and the crusader states have sought to answer this question through close readings of the several chronicles produced in the Latin East by men who settled or spent much of their lives there.¹ Arguably the most prominent of these is the chronicle written by William, archbishop of Tyre. Emily Babcock and A. C. Krey’s 1941 English translation of William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, has long been a staple of the classroom and, in many ways, sets the tone for how we continue to characterize the twelfth-century crusader experience.² A close comparison reveals, however, that the translation misleads the reader when naming and describing the peoples William writes about. While William most often uses the simple terms “our people” and “the enemy” in his accounts of conflict, Babcock and Krey’s translation choices effectively change the narrative into an account of the battle between (good) Christians and (infidel) Muslims.³

1 Alan V. Murray, “Ethnic Identity in the Crusader States: The Frankish Race and the Settlement of Outremer,” in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray (Leeds, 1995), 59–73; David Jacoby, “Knightly Values and Class Consciousness in the Crusader States of the Eastern Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Historical Review 1 (1986): 158–86. See also idem, “La littérature française dans les états latins de la Méditerranée orientale à l’époque des croisades: diffusion et création,” in Essor et fortune de la chanson de geste dans l’Europe et l’Orient latin. Actes du IXe Congrès International de la Société Rencevals pour l’étude des épopées romanes (Padoue-Venise, 1982) (Modena, 1984), 617–46.

2 William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. Emily A. Babcock and A. C. Krey, 2 vols. (New York, 1943; repr. 1976). Examples of popular textbooks and readers using Babcock and Krey include S. J. Allen and Emilie Amt, The Crusades: A Reader, 2nd ed. (Toronto, 2010); Thomas Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades (Lanham, MD, 2006).

3 The purpose of this paper is to analyze William’s words and not Babcock and Krey, so a few examples will have to suffice. The translators frequently render hostes as an entirely different word, for example “infidel” or “Turk” (Babcock and Krey, History of Deeds, 2:328, 500 respectively). William is sparing in his use of the term infidelis, however, Babcock and Krey’s translation uses it synonymously with hostes which imposes negative connotations not necessarily in the text. For example, in Book 12, William uses infidelium once (WT 12.9, p. 556) however “infidel” appears eight times in the translation. When not translating hostes into another word altogether, they often add detail not included in the Latin. In Book 20, William writes, “quod hostium incessanter augebantur numerus,” which Babcock and Krey translate as “that the enemies of the Christian faith were constantly increasing” (WT 20.22, p. 942; Babcock and Krey, History of Deeds, 2:377). By adding “of the Christian faith” the translators put added weight to a religious component understood but not emphasized in the original. Moreover, they are making a claim about William’s priorities which are not universally supported in the Latin. Many of the stories he presents are pragmatic, the enemies are the enemies of the kingdom of Jerusalem, not of the universal Christian faith.

Although one might be tempted to dismiss this particular binary as reflecting an earlier, and now outdated, understanding of the crusades, the conception has not disappeared.⁴ Some scholars, taking the language from contemporary papal and other major ecclesiastical sources, argue that the crusades were, in fact, defensive wars against a monolithic Islamic threat, glossing over differing attitudes that may be found in sources more reflective of a lived reality.⁵ Others argue that Latin Christians and the crusaders saw themselves surrounded by dangerous error in belief and set themselves to correct it without an interest in exchange or understanding.⁶ Whether from the perspective of apology or critique, both attitudes in the scholarship accept and tacitly reinforce the notion that, for Latin Christians, the world was divided between good Latin Christians and a barely differentiated mass of everyone else. This essay investigates, through a close analysis of the language in his Chronicon, the manner in which William of Tyre described his own identity group and those around him.⁷ It first explores the terms used to describe those put in opposition to the Franks, that is, the enemies the crusaders fought against. This is followed by a more in-depth analysis of the most common terms used to describe the groups within Frankish society starting with nostri. Even though William was a member of the Frankish ecclesiastical elite, his language demonstrates that he did not think in terms of a simple Christian–Muslim binary, but rather saw the world in religious and political terms that shaded his understanding of the various Christians and Muslims he lived among.⁸

4 Although recent scholars have been attempting to dispel this idea, e.g. Nicholas Morton, “William of Tyre’s Attitude towards Islam: Some Historiographical Notes,” in Deeds Done Beyond the Sea: Essays on William of Tyre, Cyprus and the Military Orders presented to Peter Edbury, ed. Susan B. Edgington and Helen J. Nicholson (Abingdon, 2014), 14.

5 Some of the more popularly oriented work on the crusades points in this direction: Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, x; Paul F. Crawford, “The First Crusade: Unprovoked Offense or Overdue Defence?” in Seven Myths of the Crusades, ed. Alfred J. Andrea and Andrew Holt (Indianapolis, 2015), 1–28; and idem, “Four Myths about the Crusades,” Intercollegiate Review 36 (Spring 2011): 13–22.

6 Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Crusading as an Act of Love,” History 65 (1980): 177–92; Benjamin Z. Kedar, “The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant,” in Muslims Under Latin Rule, 1100–1300, ed. James M. Powell (Princeton, 1990), 174; David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, 2014), 17–19.

7 References to word frequency are based on information from the concordance: Willelmi Tyrensis Archiepiscopi and CETEDOC, Chronicon/[Concordance], CCCM 63–63A, Instrumenta lexicologica Latina. Series A, Formae, fasc. 32 (Turnhout, 1986).

8 With respect to the Byzantines, see Peter W. Edbury and John Gordon Rowe, William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East (Cambridge, 1988), 167–74. For a recent overview of the scholarship on William’s attitudes towards Muslims, see Morton, “William of Tyre’s Attitude towards Islam,” 13–23. William of Tyre barely discusses the Jews and Samaritans who also comprised part of the society of the kingdom of Jerusalem. He mentions Jews eight times in the whole chronicle, four times in the context of the earlier history of Jerusalem, once mentioning Josephus’s history of the Jews, twice with regards to the massacres during the First Crusade, and once when referring to Jewish doctors whom the Frankish nobility consulted. Samaritans are only mentioned in the latter reference. WT 18.34, p. 859.

Over the course of his life, William wrote three historical works, of which the Chronicon is the only one to survive (the other two were a history of the Islamic world from the time of Muhammad, and an account of the Third Lateran Council). While William originally intended the Chronicon to inspire renewed efforts against Muslim forces by his fellow Franks, upon his return from the Third Lateran Council, he changed focus to include the wider Latin world, which he considered to be ill-informed about the state of the Latin East.⁹ Although William’s language is generally uniform, this analysis will focus particularly on his language from the last eight books (16–23) as, it is assumed here...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Abbreviations
• Articles
• REVIEWS