Arabic Textual Sources for the Crusades comprises Volume 5 of Brill’s “The Muslim World in the Age of the Crusades” series. As their titles tell us, the study and series approach the Crusades from the major non-European perspectives available. Volume 5, edited by Alexander Mallett, presents nine premodern Arabic sources that discuss the Crusades to varying degrees. More subtly, the contributors each present their premodern author’s explicit and often mixed attitudes toward the Franks in war and peace. Each contributor’s unique handling of this question lends this study its greatest contribution to its field. They themselves show a parallel pattern: while they vary considerably in the stages of their professional careers, specializations, and geographies, they all bring an undeniable depth to their chapters. The result: a coherent collection about nine premodern authors, their works, and their Sitz im Leben.
Each contributor follows the template of an encyclopedia entry that more or less consistently proceeds as follows: the author’s life and world; his major work(s); his work(s)’s treatment of the Crusades; his work(s)’s attitudes toward the Franks; and a concise conclusion that underlines the significance and legacy of the work considered, keyed of course to the Crusades. The book divides its nine chapters into two chronological Parts: Historiographical Texts (four chapters), and Other Texts (five chapters), with each chapter strategically paraphrasing its text(s) in question, homing in on all things Crusades.
Despite the helpful designation of Part 1, its texts resist categorization. Of the Aleppan historiographer al-ʿAẓīmī (d. ca.1160), we learn from Alexander Mallett that this author of the oldest extant Arabic source on the Crusades also wrote commemorative court poetry, mentioned in his Taʾrīkh (History). Gowaart Van Den Bossche elaborates a similar point in his own chapter on Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d.1293), whom he introduces as “a chancery scribe (kātib), poet, prose stylist, and historian” (33). Setting aside his poetry, which survives in a dīwān, we’re told that ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir’s biographies of three Mamlūk sultans invited readers to do more than register their content, namely, “to marvel at the narrative and linguistic virtuosity applied by the author to the specific means by which the sultanate’s claim to power was articulated through scribal practice” (63). Thus, these histories bear an abundance of grammatical, logical, and rhetorical traits ripe for far-reaching analysis and comparison.
Typically, the historiographer relies on multiple sources to engage readers informationally and stylistically, and weaves multiple texts--multiple voices and genres--into their own. In her chapter on Ibn al-Furāt (d.1405), Fozia Bora discusses several notable voices preserved in the historian’s coverage of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Egypt and Syria, including Usāmah ibn Munqidh (d.1188), the Imāmī Shīʿī Ibn Abī Ṭayyiʾ (d.1228), and Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d.1293). Ibn al-Furāt’s fictive and nonfictive testimonies reveal an array of attitudes toward and alliances with the Franks, a theme that develops in Part 2. Part 1 itself closes with the unique case of Badr al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-ʿAynī (d.1451), whose generation witnessedthe Mamlūks’ “regional hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean” (122), with the result that his own history, ʿIqd al-jumān (The String of Pearls), compiles several older chronicles rather than contributing new information to the subject at hand.
Since premodern Arabic sources on the Crusades utilize several genres ranging from the biographical to the fictitious, and weave as many forms from prose to verse, their values prove just as numerous for readers. We appreciate this point especially in Part 2, which teaches us many lessons ancillary to the facts of the Crusades. The life of Usāmah ibn Munqidh, reviewed by Bogdan Smarandache, encapsulates the hardships of court life for men of letters tethered to rulers whose sway waxes and wanes. In a similar vein, Anne-Marie Eddé points out in her chapter on ʿIzz al-Dīn Ibn Shaddād (d.1285) that his geographic history of Greater Syria, dedicated to Baybars (d.1277) in recognition of his triumphs “against the Franks, Armenians, and Mongols,” doubles as one man’s homesickness for his mother country (232), a trope reminiscent of the city elegies recently studied by Nizar Hermes (Of Lost Cities, McGill-Queen’s, 2024).
Although all of the volume’s chapters pay special attention to their sources’ coverage of the Franks, that coverage amounts to surprisingly little, proportion-wise. For ʿIzz al-Dīn Ibn Shaddād and those operating at the Ayyūbid-Mamlūk nexus, the Khwārazmian Turks and Mongols would have proved a greater threat to the thirteenth-century Shām than its neighboring crusader states (230), just as “Muslims from the east” threatened Aleppo following the First Crusade (1096-99) as much as the Franks did from the north (11). ʿAlī al-Sulamī (d.1106)’s Kitāb al-Jihād, the subject of Niall Christie’s chapter, features a variety of writings from the period, borrowing from many genres that surpass the subject of warfare. As for the Franks, “[t]hey are only named once, and actual references to or descriptions of them occupy a total of perhaps two pages out of a total of 164” (135). Here as elsewhere, references to the Franks further subvert expectations. In one instance, al-Sulamī depicts the Franks “as a punishment inflicted by God on the Muslims for their neglect of the jihād and other misdeeds” (135). Readers of Marcel Elias’s English Literature and the Crusades (Cambridge, 2024) will recognize a formula in reverse.
Regarding texts I did not expect to see in this volume, namely Ibn Jubayr’s Riḥlah, covered by Maiko Noguchi, I learned of the Andalusian traveler’s scant but significant sightings of Franks in Alexandria, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and Sicily, learning specifically that his estimation of the Christians encountered shifted according to their treatment of his coreligionists. I also learned from Ayumi Yanagiya’s essay on Bahāʾ al-Dīn Ibn Shaddād (d.1234) that the Franks evaded unambiguous categorization. Bahāʾ al-Dīn’s biography of Saladin (d.1193) concentrates on his five-year service between 1188-93, where he witnessed and recorded Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem; his battles with the Franks leading into the Third Crusade (1189-92); and his peace negotiations with Richard I of England (d.1199). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the variety of these encounters dictated a variety of attitudes toward the Franks (and presumably vice versa). Diplomacy across the crusader divide even brought sometime enemies well within each other’s inner circles: I am thinking of Eddé’s account of “the presence of Frankish ambassadors at Baybars’s court for the wedding festivities of his son al-Malik al-Saʿīd” in 1276 (247). What little these premodern texts say about the Franks, then, more than compensates in terms of their scope, if not depth. However low a standard it proves to expect these sources to depict the Franks in a nuanced manner, it pleases me that they do so on balance, as it pleases me that the contributors presenting them bring out this and so many more details.
This collection’s impeccable organization and many charts and appendices (esp. at Chapters 4, 5, and 9) make it an ideal resource firstly for scholars working on any of the nine authors examined. Rereading its series’ volumes and looking over their own chapters, moreover, I appreciate how much these volumes can help all researchers of the Crusades, whether as a point of entry into the field from the Islamicate perspective, or as an encyclopedic treasury for filling in the European sources’ temporal and other gaps.