Byzantium and the Crusader States 1096-1204 By Ralph-Johannes Lilie. Translated by J. C. Morris and Jean E. Ridings (review)

424 BOOK REVIEWS portant merchant families in Vic have been identified, men who were later to become the merchant elite orprobt homines. Family-led insurrection was to become a feature of many Catalan towns in the fourteenth century, but nowhere was it more firmly entrenched than in Vic. Much of the information given on enserfment in Catalonia has since been included in Freedman's monograph, but of special interest are Articles XIII and Xrv. The legendary reason given for the servitude of peasants, "cowardice ," dates from the ninth century and is inextricably bound with the medieval image of Catalonia (Article XVI). In this collection the author explains the significance of the ius maletractandi, referring to "the privilege it conferred to mistreat peasants without just cause" (XIII, 41). Such mistreatment increased in the later Middle Ages, exacerbated by social and economic factors, and eventually led to the wars of the Remenees in the late fifteenth century. As a result of this uprising, servitude was abolished in Catalonia. Freedman compares peasant unrest in Catalonia with that in sixteenth-century Germany and concludes that the difference lies in the absence of religious motivation for the wars of the Remenees. The significance of the present volume lies in its focus on topics which were not unique to Catalonia: the relations between the Papacy and the local church, early attempts to gain redemption from overlords by both townsmen and peasants, and the role of symbolism and legend in history. By collecting these studies into an easily accessible volume, Freedman has ensured that scholars of ecclesiastical and social institutions do not overlook either his important contributions to Catalonia's early history, or indeed the significance of that history for an understanding of medieval European social behavior. Jill R. Webster St. Michael's College University of Toronto Byzantium and the Crusader States 1096-1204. By Ralph-Johannes Lilie. Translated by J. C. Morris and Jean E. Ridings. (New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press. 1993. Pp. xiv, 342. $5900.) This book, first published in German in 1981, revised in 1988, and translated into English in 1993, is concerned, as the title clearly declares, with the relations between the Byzantine Empire and the states established by western Europeans in Syria and Palestine in the period from the first Crusade to the Latin conquest of Constantinople. Beginning with the first encounter of the Crusaders with the Byzantines, in 1096—1098, the main part of the book is arranged in chronological order in six chapters, three of which correspond to the reigns of the three major Komnenian emperors. A summary of the BOOK REVIEWS 425 author's findings and opinions forms a final chapter. There follow four appendices on controverted topics, a bibliography, and an index. Although there is a vast corpus of scholarly writing about the Crusades and the Crusader states and a much smaller corpus about the Byzantine Empire, this is the first detailed book to focus on the relations between those states and the empire. This is not a history of the Crusader states or of Byzantium; Lilie presumes that the reader is already well acquainted with those histories. Instead, he concentrates his attention, and ours, on his avowed primary interest , the relations between those states and the empire. Still, he has based his work solidly on historical facts and, in places, has devoted considerable energy to the clarification of some factual problems, but he is much more concerned about the political motivations of the individuals and the governments he writes of. He begins, as one might expect, with the forceful attempts of Alexios I, and then the more confrontational ones ofJohn II, to secure the recognition of their overlordship in the Crusader states, particularly in Antioch . He then shows how Manuel II altered this policy to one which sought friendship with the Latins. This chapter, of course, must now be read in the light ofPaul Magdalino's magisterial study: TheEmpire ofManuelIIKomnenos (Cambridge, 1993). The last chronological chapter shows a weakened empire abandoning Manuel's détente in favor of a more aggressive stance, which culminated in the catastrophe of 1204. It should be noted that Lilie's book, excellent though it is, treats primarily of political...