Historians and histories of the Crusades identifies the sets of histories and their authors (when known) concerning the Crusades that were conducted from 1095 through the 16th century. Reflecting what Crusader historians have typically considered, works written as early as the 4th century may also be relevant, particularly in the history of the Holy Land and Christian pilgrimages. This discussion is divided into the following eight parts:
The first of these provides the chronology of the Crusades, with key histories associated with each major event (beginning with the First Crusade) and is a guide to the subsequent parts. The original sources for the Crusades are those documents generally written by contemporaneous participants. In later centuries, these sources were provided in collections that have served as the basis for subsequent histories. The later historians are those that prepared histories from the 13th century through the 19th century. Modern histories are those that were written after 1900, many of which are in widespread use today. Separate sections on sources on speciality subjects such as archaeology and travelogues relevant to the Crusades are included. The various bibliographies on the Crusades are also discussed below.
The Crusades began with the First Crusade (1095–1099) that resulted in the formation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Crusades in the Holy Land (or Levant) continued until the siege of Acre in 1291, when the Western nations were expelled from the region. Crusades continued in the Mediterranean, including Cyprus and Rhodes, until 1578, primarily pitting the West against the Ottoman Empire. Crusades in other theaters including northern Europe, Iberia, Italy and the Balkans also occurred. Other crusades were conducted for political or other reasons. This chronology identifies those conflicts identified as crusades by scholars, and provides the principal documents on each such crusade. This list follows various chronologies that are available from current historical studies.[1]
The source documents for the Crusades are generally those accounts of the events that were contemporaneously written. For the First Crusade, the most important of these are documented in the Recueil des historiens des croisades (RHC) and other collections. In their widely-read encyclopedia articles, English political scientist Ernest Barker (1874–1960) and French historian Louis R. Bréhier (1869–1951) identified the important Western, Greek, Arabic and Armenian sources of Crusader history, pilgrimage accounts, ecclesiastical works, letters and correspondence, and archaeological and numismatics studies as a key for historical understanding of the Crusades.[2][3][4]
Later medieval authors that wrote of the Crusades worked primarily from original sources rather than first-hand experience. The first known example is Liber recuperations Terre Sancte (1291) by Franciscan friar Fidentius of Padua, and early historians generally combined their histories with calls for new crusades to the Holy Land or against the Ottoman Empire. General histories were rare through the 16th century, with works focused on more religious, regional or biographical aspects. The work La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) by Italian poet Torquato Tasso remained one of the most widely read work on the subject for two centuries.
The Historie of the Holy Warre (1639) by English churchman Thomas Fuller provides the first comprehensive view of the Crusades.[5] Other famous names were also drawn to the subject, including Martin Luther, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz, and David Hume. Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) remains a readable if somewhat dated history, as does Histoire des Croisades by Voltaire.[6] Arab historians were notably absent after the 15th century, not returning for almost four centuries. The nineteenth century brought an explosion of French, English, German and, later, American, historians, led Joseph François Michaud's Histoire des Croisades[7] and Reinhold Röhricht, a German historian of the Crusades.[8] Popular work of art and fiction such as the Salles des Croisades (Hall of Crusades) and Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe are often cited by historians as relevant to the study of the Crusades.
Historians of the Crusades in the areas of archaeology, cartography and numismatics include those authors whose scientific work in the areas of archaeological exploration; historical geography and cartography; numismatics and sigillography; and document analysis techniques.[4]
Archaeological disciplines have contributed to the understanding of the history of the Crusades by verifying or refuting accounts presented in original sources. Particular emphasis has been on Crusader castles, history of the art of the period, and document analysis techniques such as palaeography, diplomatics and epigraphy.
Historical cartography, geography and topography are important sources in the study of the history of the Crusades. Some of the more important authors and their works are presented below, supplementing works that are essentially travelers' accounts.
The disciples of numismatics, the study of coins and other money, and sigillography, the study of seals of Byzantium and the Latin East, play an important role in interpreting histories. The coinage of Outremer that has been studied are the coins of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Frankish Syria, and those of the Islamic world, including Frankish imitations.
The historical sources of the Crusades derived from pilgrimages and exploration include those authors whose work describes pilgrimages to the Holy Land and other explorations to the Middle East and Asia that are relevant to Crusader history. In his seminal encyclopedia article, Dominican friar and historian Bede Jarrett (1881–1934) wrote on the subject of Pilgrimage[10] and identified that the "Crusades also naturally arose out of the idea of pilgrimages." This was reinforced by the Reverend Florentine Stanislaus Bechtel in his article Itineraria[11] in the same encyclopedia. Pilgrims, missionaries and other travelers to the Holy Land have documented their experiences through accounts of travel and even guides of sites to visit. Many of these have been recognized by historians, for example the travels of ibn Jubayr and Marco Polo. Some of the more important travel accounts are listed here. Many of these are also of relevance to the study of historical geography and some can be found in the Recueil des historiens des croisades (RHC), Corpus Scriptorum Eccesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL), particularly CSEL 39, Itinerarium Hierosolymitana, and publications of the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society (PPTS) and the Hakluyt Society. Much of this information is from the seminal work of 19th-century scholars and explorers such as Edward Robinson, Titus Tobler and Richard Francis Burton.[12]
Bibliographies
Bibliographies of Crusader histories and other documentation have been extant since the early 19th century. These include stand-alone works as well as bibliographies provided as part of an overall history. No two are alike, each representing the views of their authors and the time period of their creation. Some of the more important ones are listed below in no particular order.
The Runciman bibliographies. Each of the three volumes of Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades, published in 1951, 1952 and 1954, includes a discussion on original sources for that volume plus a bibliography consisting of collections, original sources and modern works. Note that these bibliographies are not available in the online versions of the books.[13][14][15]
The Routledge bibliography.The Routledge Companion to the Crusades (2006) by Peter Lock includes as Part VII the Select Bibliography of Publications Mainly in English. It is an extensive bibliography of: Collections of sources in translation; Specific sources in translation; Principal editions of selected Western primary sources; and Secondary sources.[16]
Wisconsin collaborative bibliographies. The History of the Crusades, 6 volumes (1969–1989), published under the general editorship of Kenneth M. Setton, includes the following bibliographies.[9]
Select Bibliography of the Crusades, 1 volume, Madison, Wisconsin (1989). Edited by Hans E. Mayer and Joyce McLellan. Bibliography of Crusades historiography, original sources, collections, narrative works, documents and secondary sources. This is an expansion of Mayer's Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (1960).[17][18]
Topic Bibliographies. Each chapter has an extensive bibliography at the start of the writeup.
The Murray bibliographies.The Crusades—An Encyclopedia by Alan V. Murray contains an extensive general bibliography as well as specific sources for each of the encyclopedia articles. These are only available in the print version of the work, and include the following.[19]
Bibliographies, including Atlases; Reference Works; Periodicals; Surveys of Research; Collections of Essays; The Crusades: General Histories; The Crusades: Origins; The Muslim World; The Byzantine World; Outremer and Cyprus; The Latin Empire of Constantinople and Frankish Greece; Iberia; and, The Baltic Lands and Russia.
Topic Bibliographies. In addition to the general bibliography, each article has a topic-specific bibliography.
The Riley-Smith bibliographies. Crusades historian Jonathan Riley-Smith has published as number of bibliographies associated with his works.
The Oxford History of the Crusades (1995). Not a bibliography per se, but rather a list for further reading.
The First Crusaders (1997). A comprehensive bibliography of the First Crusades through 1129.[20]
The Atlas of the Crusades (1999). A list for further reading.[21]
Encyclopedia articles. The three major encyclopedia articles published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries include bibliographies that focus primarily on original sources and historians in vogue at the time. They include the following.
Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge (1884). Edited by Swiss theologian and ecclesiastical historian Philip Schaff, the article on the Crusades includes an extensive bibliography.[22]
Crusades (Bibliography and Sources) (1908). By French historian Louis R. Bréhier. In the Catholic Encyclopedia.[4]
Crusades (1911). By English political scientist Ernest Barker. In the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. A summary of the history of the Crusades, with a section on the Literature of Crusades.[2]
The Crusades (1923). A later edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica article, edited with additional notes.[23]
Other bibliographies. Other bibliographies include the following.
An Attempt at a Bibliography of Cyprus, 1 volume, Nicosia (1889). Edited by English historian Claude D. Cobham. A comprehensive bibliography of Cypriot history over 700 documents cited, supplementing the one in Cobham's Excerpta Cypria.[24]
Bibliography of English translations from Medieval Sources (1946). By historians Austin P. Evans and Clarissa Palmer Farrar.[25]
Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae, 1 volume, Berlin (1890). Edited by Reinhold Röhricht. Subtitled Chronologisches Verzeichniss der auf die Geographie des heiligen Landes bezüglichen Literatur von 333 bis 1878 und Versuch einer Cartographie, it provides the summaries of 3515 books on the geography of the Holy Land issued between 355 and 1878.[26]
Bibliothèque des Croisades, 4 volumes, Paris (1829). Edited by French historians Joseph Fr. Michaud and Joseph T. Reinaud. A comprehensive bibliography of works related to the Crusades.[27]
Byzantine Sources in Translation, Internet History Sourcebooks Project, Fordham University, New York (2019). Lists of available translations of Byzantine sources in Western European languages.[28]
Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges (History and Literature of the Crusades), 1 volume, Düsseldorf, new edition Leipzig (1841, 1881). Edited by German historian Heinrich von Sybel (1817–1895), translated by English author Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon (1821–1869). A history and bibliography of the Crusades through the Third Crusade.[29]
God's War: A New History of the Crusades (2006), by Crusades historian Christopher Tyerman, does not contain a bibliography per se, but the sections Notes and Further Reading provide a wealth of bibliographic material on the Crusades, including sources and secondary works. Only available in the print edition.[30]
The Crusade: Historiography and Bibliography (1962). Edited by Egyptian Coptic historian Aziz S. Atiya. A bibliography of Crusader texts with an emphasis on Islamic texts.[31]
The Crusades: Bibliography (2001, last updated 2019), by Paul Halsall. A comprehensive bibliography, but with many of the links outdated. In Fordham University's Internet Medieval Sourcebook.[32]
The First Crusade (1096–1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the Middle Ages. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic rule. While Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule for hundreds of years, by the 11th century the Seljuk takeover of the region threatened local Christian populations, pilgrimages from the West, and the Byzantine Empire itself. The earliest initiative for the First Crusade began in 1095 when Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos requested military support from the Council of Piacenza in the empire's conflict with the Seljuk-led Turks. This was followed later in the year by the Council of Clermont, during which Pope Urban II supported the Byzantine request for military assistance and also urged faithful Christians to undertake an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
The Children's Crusade was a failed popular crusade by European Christians to establish a second Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Holy Land in the early 13th century. Some sources have narrowed the date to 1212. Although it is called the Children's Crusade, it never received the papal approval from Pope Innocent III to be an actual crusade. The traditional narrative is likely conflated from a mix of historical and mythical events, including the preaching of visions by a French boy and a German boy, an intention to peacefully convert Muslims in the Holy Land to Christianity, bands of children marching to Italy, and children being sold into slavery in Tunis. The crusaders of the real events on which the story is based left areas of Germany, led by Nicholas of Cologne, and Northern France, led by Stephen of Cloyes.
Albert of Aix(-la-Chapelle) or Albert of Aachen; Latin: Albericus Aquensis; fl. c. 1100) was a historian of the First Crusade and the early Kingdom of Jerusalem. He was born during the later part of the 11th century, and afterwards became canon (priest) and custos (guardian) of the church of Aachen.
The Fifth Crusade was a campaign in a series of Crusades by Western Europeans to reacquire Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land by first conquering Egypt, ruled by the powerful Ayyubid sultanate, led by al-Adil, brother of Saladin.
The Assizes of Jerusalem are a collection of numerous medieval legal treatises written in Old French containing the law of the crusader kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus. They were compiled in the thirteenth century, and are the largest collection of surviving medieval laws.
The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Christian Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these military expeditions are those to the Holy Land between 1095 and 1291 that had the objective of reconquering Jerusalem and its surrounding area from Muslim rule after the region had been conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate centuries earlier. Beginning with the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of military campaigns were organised, providing a focal point of European history for centuries. Crusading declined rapidly after the 15th century.
Louis René Bréhier was a French historian who specialized in Byzantine studies. His brother was the philosopher Émile Bréhier.
The historiography of the Crusades is the study of history-writing and the written history, especially as an academic discipline, regarding the military expeditions initially undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, or 13thcenturies to the Holy Land. This scope was later extended to include other campaigns initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Roman Catholic Church. The subject has involved competing and evolving interpretations since the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 until the present day. The religious idealism, use of martial force and pragmatic compromises made by those involved in crusading were controversial, both at the time and subsequently. Crusading was integral to Western European culture, with the ideas that shaped behaviour in the Late Middle Ages retaining currency beyond the 15thcentury in attitude rather than action.
Historical sources of the Crusades: pilgrimages and exploration include those authors whose work describes pilgrimages to the Holy Land and other explorations to the Middle East and Asia that are relevant to Crusader history. In his seminal article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Dominican friar and historian Bede Jarrett (1881–1934) wrote on the subject of Pilgrimage and identified that the "Crusades also naturally arose out of the idea of pilgrimages." This was reinforced by the Reverend Florentine Stanislaus Bechtel in his article Itineraria in the same encyclopedia. Pilgrims, missionaries, and other travelers to the Holy Land have documented their experiences through accounts of travel and even guides of sites to visit. Many of these have been recognized by historians, for example, the travels of ibn Jubayr and Marco Polo. Some of the more important travel accounts are listed here. Many of these are also of relevance to the study of historical geography and some can be found in the publications of the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society (PPTS) and Corpus Scriptorum Eccesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL), particularly CSEL 39, Itinerarium Hierosolymitana. Much of this information is from the seminal work of 19th-century scholars including Edward Robinson, Titus Tobler and Reinhold Röhricht. Recently, the Independent Crusaders Project has been initiated by the Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies providing a database of Crusaders who traveled to the Holy Land independent of military expeditions.
The Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades is a six-volume set on the Crusades through the 16th century, published from 1969 to 1989. The work was a major collaborative effort under the general editorship of American medieval historian Kenneth M. Setton. Begun at the University of Pennsylvania in 1950, the work was finished at the University of Wisconsin, and is generally known as the Wisconsin History. Setton oversaw the work of over sixty specialists, covering 98 topics on the full gamut of Crusader studies, reflecting of the concurrent state of the knowledge, with timelines, gazetteers and indexes. The work may be today regarded as uneven in parts and at times dated, but remains as an important resource in the study of the various aspects of crusading history, with fine maps, bibliographies and toponymic details.
Paul Edouard Didier Riant was a French historian and scientific editor specializing in the Crusades.
The title of Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, or Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, has been ascribed to Godfrey of Bouillon in his role as the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem. In the aftermath of the First Crusade, there was disagreement among the clergy and secular leaders as the leadership of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. There was opposition to the naming of a king over the Holy City and the wearing of a crown in the city where Christ suffered with a crown of thorns. The original sources differ on the actual title assumed by Godfrey. However, it is generally accepted by most modern historians that, once Godfrey was selected to be leader, he declined to be crowned king instead taking the titles of prince (princeps) and advocate or defender of the Holy Sepulchre.
This list of works on the history of the Crusades and their mainly Muslim opponents, provides a select bibliography of modern works that are frequently cited in books, papers and articles that discuss these "holy wars". Thousands of histories on these topics have been published between the 11th and 21st centuries; this page only lists modern works on the topic. Works included are referenced in the notes or bibliographies of scholarly secondary sources or journals. Included works are: published by an independent academic or notable non-governmental publisher; authored by an independent and notable subject matter expert; or have significant independent scholarly journal reviews.
References
↑ Phillips, Jonathan. "The Crusades: Names and Numbers. Chronology". The Crusades – An Encyclopedia.
1 2 Barker, Ernest (1911). "Crusades". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 7 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press. pp. 524–552.
↑ Bréhier, Louis René. (1908). "Crusades". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. 4. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
↑ Bechtel, Florentine Stanislaus (1910). "Itineraria". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
↑ Schein, Sylvia. "Pilgrimage". The Crusades – An Encyclopedia. pp. 957-963. Retrieved 28 July 2020
↑ Runciman, Steven (1951). "Principal Sources for the History of the First Crusade". A History of the Crusades. Vol.1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. London: Cambridge University Press. pp.327–335, 342–360.
↑ Runciman, Steven (1952). "Principal Sources for the History of the Latin East, 1110–1187". A History of the Crusades. Vol.2: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100–1187. London: Cambridge University Press. pp.475–485, 493–499.
↑ Runciman, Steven (1951). "Principal Sources for the History of the Later Crusades". A History of the Crusades. Vol.3: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades. London: Cambridge University Press. pp.481–488, 493–503.
↑ Lock, P. (2006).The Routledge Companion to the Crusades. Part VII. Select Bibliography of Publications Mainly in English. pp. 447-482
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