In Plain Sight

Muslims of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

Ann E. Zimo

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781512826463
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

How Muslims integrated themselves into the Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in the wake of the First Crusade In Plain Sight draws from a wide array of interdisciplinary sources to show how Muslims, seemingly hostile to the entire crusading enterprise, integrated themselves into the kingdom founded in the wake of the First Crusade. The book examines how Muslims, whether Sunni or Shi'a or Druze, fit into society in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, uncovering the daily reality of their experience. Exploring how and to what extent Muslims interacted with the Frankish ruling elite, historian Ann E. Zimo presents a new vantage point from which to reconsider the popularly accepted notion that the crusades, and by extension the crusader states, were a locus of a monolithic clash between West and East or between Christianity and Islam. By untangling the relations between the Muslim communities and their rulers, Zimo offers a more fully realized image of a society too multifaceted to be reasonably reduced to a black-and-white binary opposition.Zimo not only re-reads the well-known Frankish sources, including narrative chronicles, letters, charters, and legal treatises, but combines them with an investigation of the Arabic documentary base, including chronicles, biographies, fatwa literature, pilgrimage guides, and treaties which are not translated and largely inaccessible to most historians of the crusades. She also draws from the enormous and growing body of scholarship generated by archaeologists whose work can often provide insights into the aspects of the past not recorded in the historical record. By casting such a wide evidentiary net, In Plain Sight sheds new light on Frankish society and how Muslims fit into it, offering major revisions to the current conception of population distribution within the kingdom and the nature of the Frankish polity itself.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Geography of the Muslim Communities
• Chapter 2. “How Many Villages of Yours Have We Emptied?”: Muslims and the Economic Landscape
• Chapter 3. “Saracens Are Also Men Like the Franks”: Muslims in the Legal Landscape
• Chapter 4. Illusory Borders: Muslims and the Political Landscape
• Chapter 5. Shared Webs of Knowledge
• Chapter 6. Literary Intersections
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments