Year 1163 (MCLXIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar.
Marco Sanudo was the creator and first Duke of the Duchy of the Archipelago, in Italian: "Duca del Mare Egeo e Re di Candia", Barone delle Isole di Nasso, Pario, Milo, Marine ed Andri, duchy granted by the Republic of Venice to him and all his descendants, after the Fourth Crusade his lineage became named Sanudo de Candia.
Khambhat, also known as Cambay, is a city and the surrounding urban agglomeration in Anand district in the Indian state of Gujarat. It was once an important trading center, but its harbour gradually silted up, and the maritime trade moved to Surat. Khambat lies on an alluvial plain at the north end of the Gulf of Khambhat, noted for the extreme rise and fall of its tides, which can vary as much as thirty feet in the vicinity of Khambat. Khambat is known for its halvasan sweet, sutarfeni, akik stone and kites (patang), and for sources of oil and gas.
Marino SanutoTorsello was a Venetian statesman and geographer. He is best known for his lifelong attempts to revive the crusading spirit and movement; with this objective he wrote his Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis.
Francisco Quaresmio or Quaresmi, better known by his Latin name Franciscus Quaresmius, was an Italian writer and Orientalist.
Portolan charts are nautical charts, first made in the 13th century in the Mediterranean basin and later expanded to include other regions. The word portolan comes from the Italian portolano, meaning "related to ports or harbors", and which since at least the 17th century designates "a collection of sailing directions".
Henry of Antioch was a nobleman from the Latin East who governed the Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1263 until 1264. He was made bailli by his wife, Isabella of Cyprus, who exercised regency on behalf of their nephew King Hugh II of Cyprus. He died in a shipwreck after their son, Hugh III, became king of both Cyprus and Jerusalem.
Burchard of Mount Sion, was a German priest, Dominican friar, pilgrim and author probably from Magdeburg in northern Germany, who travelled to the Middle East at the end of the 13th century. There he wrote his book called: Descriptio Terrae Sanctae or "Description of the Holy Land" which is considered to be of "extraordinary importance".
Pietro Vesconte was a Genoese cartographer and geographer. A pioneer of the field of the portolan chart, he influenced Italian and Catalan mapmaking throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He appears to have been the first professional mapmaker to sign and date his works regularly.
Historia Hierosolymitana is the name of a number of chronicles of the crusades:
Domenico and Francesco Pizzigano, known as the Pizzigani brothers, were 14th-century Venetian cartographers. Their surname is sometimes given as Pizigano in older sources.
A rutter is a mariner's handbook of written sailing directions. Before the advent of nautical charts, rutters were the primary store of geographic information for maritime navigation.
Joseph's granaries is a designation for the Egyptian pyramids often used by early travelers to the region. The notion of a granary being associated with the Hebrew patriarch Joseph derives from the account in Genesis 41, where "he gathered up all the food of the seven years when there was plenty in the land of Egypt, and stored up food in the cities ... And Joseph stored up grain in great abundance, like the sand of the sea, until he ceased to measure it, for it could not be measured". "So when the famine had spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians". Similarly, in the Quran: "(Joseph) said: 'Give me charge of the granaries (خَزَائِنِ) of the land. I shall husband them wisely'" (12:55). The designation was used throughout the Middle Ages and only really abated in the Renaissance, when travel to the region became easier and closer investigation revealed the implausibility of the structures serving as storehouses for foodstuffs.
Crusade Texts in Translation is a book series of English translations of texts about the Crusades published initially by Ashgate in Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, Vermont, and currently by Routledge. Publication began in May 1996. The editors of the series, all from the United Kingdom, are Malcolm Barber, University of Reading; Peter Edbury, Cardiff University; Bernard Hamilton, University of Nottingham; Norman Housley, University of Leicester; and Peter Jackson, University of Keele.
The collection of the Marciana Library contains 4,639 manuscripts and 13,117 manuscript volumes. Its historical nucleus is the private collection of Cardinal Bessarion, which was donated to the Republic of Venice in 1468.
Fidentius of Padua was a Franciscan administrator and writer active in the Holy Land between 1266 and 1291. He wrote a tract on the Christian recovery and retention of the Holy Land.
The Directorium ad faciendum passagium transmarinum is an anonymous 24,000-word Latin treatise on crusading submitted to King Philip VI of France on 26 July 1330 or 1332. The treatise proposes the conquest of the Holy Land, the Byzantine Empire and Russia and their subjection to the Catholic Church; outlines how this might be achieved; and describes how the conquered territories could be administered.
Paolino Veneto was an Italian Franciscan inquisitor, diplomat and historian. He served as an ambassador for the Republic of Venice and the Papacy. From 1324 until his death, he was the bishop of Pozzuoli. He simultaneously served as a member of the royal council of King Robert of Naples. He wrote three universal chronicles in Latin–the Epithoma, Compendium and Satirica–and a mirror for princes in Venetian.
The theme of recovery of the Holy Land was a genre in High–Late Medieval Christian literature about the Crusades. It consisted of treatises and memoranda on how to recover the Holy Land for Christendom, first appearing in preparation for the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. They proliferated following the loss of Acre in 1291, shortly after which the permanent Crusader presence in the Holy Land came to an end, but mostly disappeared with the cancellation of Philip VI of France's planned crusade in 1336 and the start of the Hundred Years' War between England and France the next year. The high point of recovery proposals was the pontificate of Clement V.
Emanuele Piloti was a Venetian merchant who spent over two decades in Egypt and wrote a treatise on the recovery of the Holy Land.
