Once upon a time, it was something of a scholarly truism that the cultural achievements of the Franks who settled in Syria following the First Crusade were virtually nil: a few innovations in castle architecture, a Latin history by Archbishop William of Tyre, and little else worthy of note. In making this unflattering assessment, scholarship typically looked for direct influence and diffusion into the Latin West from the Byzantine and Islamic worlds as the criterion for cultural accomplishment. In this regard, Frankish Syria has generally been found deficient in comparison with Iberia and Sicily. However, over the course of the last generation or two, scholarship has begun to revise our understanding of the social and cultural life of the Franks of Syria and recognize a good deal more creativity and vigor—the “inventiveness” of this book’s subtitle—than previously allowed. This new and more nuanced view has emerged from important studies across a broad range of disciplines and subdisciplines. Yet until now this research has not been synthesized into a comprehensive reevaluation of Frankish social and cultural life. Here, with Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem, Benjamin Kedar offers just such a synthesis, while also incorporating fresh research and new insights.
The demographic makeup of the four Frankish states that emerged as a consequence of the First Crusade—the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem—varied considerably. It is on the last and largest of these that Kedar focuses his attention, particularly in the twelfth century. Over the course of eleven chapters, he addresses architecture, ceramics, coinage, dialect, domestic architecture, dress, foodways, liturgy, textiles, and more. He digests scholarship from a range of disciplines and subfields and draws on sources in a plethora of languages.
Chapter One offers a panorama of the population in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Franks and non-Franks are both present, but with a marked emphasis on the former. Kedar considers the many reasons why Franks migrated to the Holy Land from the Latin West. The First Crusade naturally laid the foundations of Frankish settlement and established the initial conditions for the evolution of Frankish society and culture there over the course of the ensuing century. With respect to the First Crusaders and their motivations, there is a venerable debate between those who prefer materialist and those who prefer spiritualist explanations, with the latter somewhat more dominant recently. Kedar grants that many, even most, crusaders were genuinely spiritually motivated but notes that it certainly helped them along that Urban II’s call to crusade fit so comfortably with the knightly vocation.
If Chapter One is panoramic, Chapter Two offers a street-level view of the kingdom through the eyes of a single traveler from the Latin West—an Icelandic pilgrim called Nikulás Bergsson. Taking Nikulás’s surviving pilgrimage account as a starting point, Kedar fleshes it out with a fictitious but plausible encounter with a Swede named Ragnvald who, Kedar imagines, had served at Constantinople in the Varangian Guard. Kedar explains that “[t]he subsequent account is admittedly imaginary, but its components are not: almost all reflect, in one way or another, some contemporary evidence on acculturation in various spheres” (44). Kedar has this Ragnvald meet and befriend Nikulás at Cyprus, then lead him to Syria. Nikulás sails into the harbor at Acre, hears the bells that were customarily rung to welcome pilgrims, and sees the harbor chain that could be raised to keep out unwanted ships. Disembarking on the quay, Nikulás sees the stone houses of the city, so different from the turf houses of his homeland. He is led to a hospice—a two-story house built around a courtyard—where he is greeted by the Frankish owner and his wife, an erstwhile Muslim slave who has been manumitted and baptized into Christianity. Nikulás notices how the rooms are appointed with textiles, mattresses, and cushions rather than the wooden furniture he is accustomed to in the West. He later goes to the baths and haggles over the price of entry. After leaving the baths, he witnesses a wedding procession passing by. In the market he is struck by a panoply of unfamiliar smells and bright colors. In the hands of a lesser historian or writer, this experiment in historical imagination and creative augmentation easily could have gone awry, but Kedar brings it off masterfully. If anyone objects, it is likely to be only the most hidebound of scholars. I suspect that most will appreciate the vividness and plausibility of Kedar’s account while also finding themselves quite satisfied by the ample notes and the authorial guidance found in them about how and why he has used the source material as he has.
In the next several chapters, Kedar turns his attention to intellectual life in the kingdom. He begins with the problem of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, conceding that if we are looking for innovation in philosophy, theology, or canon law, the clerical denizens of the Kingdom of Jerusalem will indeed come out looking like “a sorry lot” in comparison to their brethren in the Latin West (75). However, he argues that when the kingdom is considered in its “appropriate, geographically peripheral framework,” rather than in comparison with, say, central France, “it turns out to be typical of Latin Europe’s marches” and no longer seems deficient at all (82). To the contrary, adjusting for geographic and population size, the Kingdom of Jerusalem comes off quite well. There is evidence for cathedral schools and libraries, and we even have one extant catalog of a Frankish library, that of the canons of the cathedral of Nazareth. The catalog, whose contents are listed in Appendix Three, contains 100 volumes and seventy-two separate titles. Kedar also points out that “more than 330 Latin ecclesiastical edifices were constructed or reconstructed in the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem and its successor, the Kingdom of Acre,” which, he suggests, makes “the ratio of Frankish churches constructed per year and per area...one of the highest in the Latin world of that age” (119).
Kedar also explores how the Frankish clergy established, reappropriated, and administered new “cores of devotion” in the Holy Land—specifically, the True Cross, the Holy Fire, and the Holy Resurrection. Appropriated from local Christians, these were “turned into foci of a fresh, distinctive religiosity” (105). In Kedar’s view, the inventiveness of these activities has been underestimated. They structured religious life and ritual in the kingdom for Frankish settlers and pilgrims alike, but because they did not obviously influence liturgy or practice in the Latin West, and because they were so explicitly tied to place and ceased to be operative after Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187, they have generally been discounted as cultural accomplishments. In arguing for the inventiveness of the Frankish clergy of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Kedar offers a new coinage: sancterranean [1]. As he puts it, the Frankish clergy were sancterranean “not only because they lived in the Holy Land, but—first and foremost—because they were preoccupied with the celebration, propagation, and day-to-day husbanding of its sacred treasures” (144). He continues: “In doing so they exhibited considerable creativity and innovativeness; the extant remains of their writings suggest a notable sanctity-related output of which probably mere vestiges have come down to us. Indeed, these clerics may be considered as an outlying variant of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance” (144).
Chapters Six and Seven focus on Archbishop William of Tyre and King Amaurry of Jerusalem, two of the most well-known Franks of the twelfth-century kingdom. William, who was born in Jerusalem around the year 1130, received an advanced education in the West, where he studied with some of the intellectual giants of the age, including Peter Lombard (here introduced by his Latin appellation, Petrus Lombardus). Amaurry reigned in Jerusalem from 1163 to 1174. Kedar makes much of the latter’s interest in the resurrection of the flesh. According to William of Tyre’s history, the king, during a grievous illness, asked the archbishop to offer him a rational rather than scripture-based argument for its truth. This line of thinking seems to have disturbed William and would have shocked Peter Lombard, his teacher in theology, or, for that matter, “any conventionally trained Westerner of his age” (178). However, “King Amaurry’s request would not have surprised a learned Easterner familiar with some facet of the stormy discussions about the resurrection of the flesh” that had long percolated in the Islamic, Jewish, and Byzantine worlds (178).
Chapter Eight deals with both the lay knighthood and the two most important military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers. Kedar highlights tactical adaptations, cooperation with Muslims, and occasional basic knowledge of Arabic among both lay knights and the military orders as examples of inventiveness. He has rather little to say about Frankish fortifications and castle design, which makes perfect sense, as castle architecture is one of the few areas where scholarship has long recognized and studied Frankish innovation. Consequently, there is less that is new for Kedar to bring forth.
The military orders offer one of the clearest and most dramatic instances of frontier inventiveness, fusing the vocations of monk and knight. Pride of place in terms of invention goes to the Templars, who, although founded after the Hospitallers, took up the sword before them. On the other hand, Kedar notes the profound innovation of the Jerusalem Hospital, which the Hospitallers administered: “It was not only a traditional hospital—habitual in the West—that offered accommodation and care of the poor and feeble and resembled a hospice, but also a medicalized hospital...in which salaried physicians treated the sick by medications and diets tailored to their individual afflictions.” Indeed, it was the first hospital of this kind in the Latin World and later would be “emulated to some extent in the West” (230).
Chapter Nine focuses on the non-elites of Frankish society for whom the source material is less abundant than it is for the knightly and clerical cohorts. Nevertheless, archeology and onomastics in particular help to shed light on the life of Frankish burgesses and peasants in both urban and rural places. Chapter Ten focuses on the indigenous non-Franks of the kingdom—Jews, Muslims, Samaritans, and eastern Christians of various denominations. Chapter Eleven provides a brief look forward to the thirteenth-century “Kingdom of Acre,” the kingdom reconstituted in the course of the Third Crusade which lasted until 1291. One major difference between the twelfth and the thirteenth century was “the demise of the three foci of Frankish religiosity,” that is, the loss of the True Cross, and of the city of Jerusalem where the Holy Fire and the Holy Resurrection had been celebrated and administered by the Frankish clergy (283). Among the laity, Old French prose flourished, especially in the genres of historiography and jurisprudence. This is a development that was already underway in the twelfth century. The Old French translation of the Templar Rule, dating to sometime between 1135 to 1139, is “one of the earliest French prose works anywhere,” while the chronicle of Ernoul, written around 1187, “is one of the very earliest—possibly, the earliest—vernacular work of prose historiography written in Old French” (205).
The book contains six valuable appendices. The most intriguing is the first, in which Kedar expounds on a topic initially broached in the introduction, that is, his “experiment with a novel nomenclature” (2). In his view, the scholarly convention of rendering Frankish names in whatever modern language the scholar is writing in “distorts the appellations by which the persons concerned were known in their own time and erects a needless barrier between them and the present-day reader” (6). He departs from this convention and attempts to give “back the Franks their genuine names, reproducing them in the manner in which they were probably pronounced at the time” (6). There are plenty of clues to contemporary pronunciation found through comparison of how an individual’s name was rendered in different languages—Latin and Old French, of course, but also Hebrew or Arabic. The result is that certain names that are extremely familiar to scholars of the Crusades and the Latin East—indeed, to all medievalists—such as Peter the Hermit, will be immediately defamiliarized (in this case, as Pedron, based on comparison with a Hebrew text). On the other hand, Kedar follows “current Anglo-American convention with regard to the names of biblical persons, church fathers, popes, Western emperors, and some others,” giving them in their English form—yet renders some names (e.g. Petrus Lombardus) in their Latin form (328). I expect that specialists who are accustomed to seeing these names in other forms will understand and respect the reasons Kedar has provided for the decisions he has made, though they may find the experience of encountering unfamiliar forms somewhat jarring, nonetheless. Appendices Two through Five expand on other topics raised in the body chapters while Appendix Six provides a handy list of the kings and patriarchs of Jerusalem.
Kedar’s aim is to recuperate the reputation of the Franks of the Kingdom of Jerusalem as culturally vibrant. He is overwhelmingly successful in meeting this aim. The book argues for discarding teleological obsessions about influence and diffusion in favor of a comprehensive engagement with cultural activity, inventiveness, and vibrancy as it unfolded in situ. As he notes in the introduction, this is a book that Kedar has been working on in some fashion for the last four decades. It is the culmination of a lifetime of research and thought on the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the medieval world more generally. It is apposite, I think, to call it his magnum opus—one that those who study the Crusades and the Latin East have eagerly awaited. It does not disappoint.
--------
Note:
1. In an endnote, Kedar credits Richard A. Landes for suggesting the term to him in conversation. See p. 420, n. 197.