Studies of medieval Jerusalem have proliferated in recent years, and Anna Gutgarts has provided a fascinating addition to the corpus with her new book on Jerusalem under Frankish rule. It is rather unlike most modern treatments for, as a socio-economic study, it has much in common with the scholarship of days gone by--perhaps demonstrating that the oft-asserted death of economic history is premature.
Gutgarts challenges a widely-held notion: that crusader-era Jerusalem evolved primarily through the direct influence of its kings and patriarchs (235). Her counterargument is that the city transformed under Latin control neither “at one fell swoop” nor in any sort of centralized, linear process but was actually “dynamic and multifaceted,” a “work in progress, shaped by converging institutional, social and economic interests and motivations,” all operating within the changing context of the Latin East (2, 237). Her method is socio-economic and spatial, as laid out in the Introduction and Chapter 1, and her dataset is a collection of property transactions (972 in total, distributed between 1099 and 1187), which reflect interactions between the people and principal religious institutions, especially the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (20, 41). These transactions seem, at first glance, fragmentary, but when considered together they offer an alternative to histories written on the basis of the well-trodden chronicles and pilgrimage narratives (28).
By “transaction,” Gutgarts means “any instance in which properties or rights were transferred from one party to another (or reaffirmed via existing rights/ownership)” (37). Scads of helpful charts and figures throughout the book help the reader visualize the data. She first categorizes different types of transactions: donations, confirmations, commercial, disputes, privileges, and others, then differentiates these according to agency (who granted them: kings/rulers, popes, clergy, military orders, nobility, burgesses, non-Latins, etc.) and property details (land, edifices, infrastructure, non/monetary, movable goods, and so on). Finally, she situates them spatially (inside Jerusalem, in its immediate environs, or in its hinterland) while looking for patterns as institutions changed over time (45-50). Along the way, Gutgarts compares and contrasts her findings against well-known studies on the Kingdom of Jerusalem by Joshua Prawer, Ronnie Ellenblum, and others.
On the basis of her dataset (which she admits is limited in size and scope), Gutgarts then proceeds to present her findings and arguments. Chapter 2 challenges the consensus that Jerusalem’s urban landscape grew via royal backing and increased pilgrimage and proposes that there was more to the story. Specifically, an increase in property transactions in the 1130s shows that a “proto real estate market” accompanied the better-known “monumental construction” of principal religious and political buildings (55). As a whole, the transactions reveal deliberate attempts by the Sepulchre church and other institutions to shape urbanity in response to social conditions. Chapter 3 examines Jerusalem’s hinterland and finds a similar story, in which the Sepulchre effectively “exported” the successful technique it learned in the city, albeit more slowly and even hesitantly (122): first, a period of endowments of new properties through the 1130s, fueled by royal sponsorship and other donations to the patriarch; second, renewed expansion through the 1160s in which the patriarch and chapter engaged more heavily in management, according to their own designs (140). The numbers bear out the extent of the Sepulchre’s involvement, for it arranged 28 of the 54 transactions concerning the hinterland (150). Chapter 4 then explores the relationship between said institutions and the Jerusalem burgesses, which Gutgarts argues resulted in mechanisms “that provided economic stimuli and social securities to the city’s populace, thus propelling commercial property exchanges” (201). Chapter 5 continues on this topic but from a contextual perspective, linking the roles of competing institutions, such as the Hospital, and shifting burgess interests, to the development of legal structures. These findings necessarily fracture some of the traditional views of Frankish Jerusalem. They juxtapose Jerusalem as a sacred space containing the Sepulchre church, Temple Mount, and other sites of pious interest against a lived environment built on the concerns and desires of its residents (26). Accordingly, her conclusion urges that scholars stop depicting Jerusalem as a “fossilized cityscape” and recognize it, rather, as a city built from a “bottom-up” process (237).
This is clearly a needed study. The place of Jerusalem in the middle ages suffers from over-generalizations and idealized characterizations, borne largely from an ignorance of the broader (read: non-crusade era) context of the city and reliance upon a few important, but dated, studies. The guilty parties include a number of folks within crusades studies itself, who should know better. Gutgarts has therefore done a service to complicate the picture by showing how urban development worked in real time, not from impressions of narrative sources but from hard data. Her book should enhance our understanding of the city during a very turbulent time in its history, during which the nascent kingdom constantly engaged in defensive wars alongside its fellow crusader states, witnessed the rise of the military religious orders, developed relations with neighboring Muslim states, and also engineered multiple invasions of Egypt. A more precise understanding of how a capital could evolve in the midst of such affairs--which is really what this study offers, outside of its narrower focus on urbanity--is valuable and can inform the study of other towns and cities in the medieval Levant.
The audience for the book, however, is probably narrower in scope than the title might suggest. This is not a book for amateurs or a popular audience. Gutgarts’s language is quite technical, readily attested by phrases such as “morphologically inclined analytical approach” (16). Her heavy emphasis on method, theory, and historiography consumes most of the Introduction and Chapter 1--or one-fifth of the book--and reappears in periodic sections thereafter. The theory piece leans upon the “spatial turn,” whose tenets, Gutgarts claims, are “well established in the study of medieval urban environments”: space, place, and landscape (20). While this can help situate social actors, it seems relatively unnecessary here and reads like a dissertation element that could have been excised with no harm to the argument. Gutgarts amply demonstrates that institutions regularly contracted with individuals to develop settlements and urban spaces--her data proves this even in the absence of a framing theoretical construct. Historians of the middle ages can readily grasp her argument without having read Henri Lefebvre & Co., and the theoretical expositions serve as a barrier to an inexpert readership. These and other factors, unfortunately, render the book somewhat inaccessible outside of scholarly realms.
Other elements likewise hamper a broader appeal. Gutgarts’s book is very much centered on Jerusalem’s institutions looking outward, into the streets and then the lands around the city. It has little to say about who was lookingat Jerusalem. Numerous peoples streamed in and out over time--pilgrims, yes, but also Muslims, Jews, and eastern Christians--and accordingly to specific governance decisions, like Baldwin II’s relaxation of tariffs in 1120. How the arrival of more and diverse peoples, whether for trade or settlement or the eventual creation of a market, affected urban development is obscured; an exception is her brief discussion of residential quarters in Chapter 5 (227). The city itself was attacked three times between the First Crusade and Saladin, entered into arrangements with neighboring Muslim polities, and also hosted the principals of the Second Crusade, but such geopolitical context is mostly absent. Organizationally, the chapters flow in a logical sequence but the pages proceed somewhat ponderously due to repetition. Gutgarts spends several pages introducing the goal of each chapter, and then several more recapping what was just argued--an approach that borders on exasperation. Conclusions appear in the past tense (e.g. 237: “...the current study broke from a monolithic characterization...”), which gives the manuscript a curious, almost-defensive tone.
Nonetheless, I recommend this book for a select, academic audience. It is necessary reading for scholars working on the history of medieval Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Knights Hospitaller, the Crusades, and the Latin East. Gutgarts’s findings should be useful to those interested in urbanity, built environments, and medieval economic history. Finally, her book complements previous studies of Jerusalem written by such scholars as Adrian Boas, Yehoshua Frenkel, Benjamin Kedar, and Sylvia Schein.