Letters from the East: Crusaders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th–13th Centuries (review)

This excellent and very useful collection of eighty-two letters ranges from the well-known letter of Stephen of Blois to his wife, Adela, in June 1097, displaying admirable domestic affection, but grossly underestimating the time it might take to travel from Nicaea to Jerusalem—“[five weeks] if Antioch does not hold us up” (p. 1)—to one from James of Molay to James II, king of Aragon, in April 1306, announcing the death of one messenger and the appointment of another, who also was to deliver an oral supplement to the letter. In the latter case, James was tactfully refusing to accede to a request from the king. Between 1097 and 1306 (and, after 1306, from Cyprus—James of Molay’s letter is sent from Limassol—and other bases) a great deal of the business of the Holy Land was accounted for in letters, not only from the great to the great (Conrad III [nos. 15, 17], Louis VII of France [no. 16], various kings of Jerusalem [nos. 22–24, 26, 32, 36], Frederick Barbarossa [no. 49], Richard I of England [nos. 50–51], two Il-Khans of Persia [nos. 72, 81] the leader of the Assassins [no. 52], and Prester John [no. 33]) but also from a considerably wider spectrum of Christian society in the East than other letter collections contain. The existence of oral supplements occurs in other letters as well, suggesting that the messages beyond the letters—most now, of course, lost—were probably as interesting and important as the letters themselves. After 1098, all the letters traveled by sea, risking shipwreck (James of Vitry [no. 58]), and a number of them contain indications of authenticity, since forgery was as possible in letters as in charters.

Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate translate directly from printed editions of the original sources and therefore give a contemporary linguistic consistency to their translations, even catching the level of Latin of the originals. They translate ten of the twenty-three letters on the First Crusade edited by Heinrich Hagenmeyer in 1901, but there is, alas, only a brief bibliographical mention of the pioneering earlier translations into English by Dana Munro in 1896 and A. C. Krey in 1921 (p. 173). The rest are translated from various nineteenth-century editions (PL, RHG, various cartularies and chronicles, and the MGH) as well as from more recent editions by Alan Forey, Nikolas Jaspert, B. Z. Kedar, and Paul Meyvaert.¹

Overall, the coverage is more than adequate for the entire period. The nine letters recounting the disasters at Hattin and Jerusalem from July to October 1187 (nos. 41–49), and the letter describing the destruction of Jerusalem and the defeat at La Forbie in 1244 (no. 68) convey a kind of alarm verging on despair that is different from the more routine requests for aid on other occasions. From another perspective, the relentlessly informative James of Vitry (nos. 58–60) tells us as much as anyone ever did about the perception of an educated, pastoral-minded bishop on the journey out from Western Europe, who became furiously displeased with the moral climate of his new Diocese of Acre. The military orders are well represented (nos. 18, 25, 27–31, 35, 38, 42, 46, 48, 53, 55, 61, 62, 67, 70, 73, 75–80, 82), as are, when possible, lower-ranking folk (nos. 38, 56, 79). John Sarrasin’s letter of 1249 (no. 69) is an essential complement to the narrative of Joinville on the crusade of King Louis IX.

The book is now essential reading for any course in crusade history and takes a proud place in a distinguished publication series.