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  • The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance
  • William Tronzo (bio)
Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 272 pp.

MacEvitt sets out to chart relations in the twelfth century between the Western Christian conquerors of the Levant and local Christians—a task daunting on at least one count. Complicated by ethnic and linguistic differences, Christianity in the Levant had already shattered into a multiplicity of sects, though these were also interpenetrating (even to the extent of borrowed rites and churches). Boundaries between groups were, in varying degrees, permeable. Ambiguity—amounting to the sum total of attitudes and behaviors recognizing this reality and dealing with it on an ad hoc basis—was the order of the day. According to MacEvitt, the Crusaders handled the situation through a policy of “rough tolerance,” encompassing “conflict and oppression” yet allowing “multiple religious communities to coexist in a religiously charged land.”

The ebb and flow of events in this dense and complicated narrative have their inexorable rhythm. But where the pace of action slackens and the human element comes to the fore, a few moments do stand out. There is, for example, the bizarre funeral oration of Barsegh on the death of Baldwin II in 1146—a text that teeters between adulation and vilification, praise and blame. Baldwin was “incorrigible,” “irredeemable” yet “mighty” and “wise”; he was “an example [End Page 519] to the unrepentant, arrogant, and wicked leaders of the western forces” and, at the same time, he “will be crowned by God together with the pious princes and brave martyrs”; he is full of “errors” and yet has “redeemed” this land “by the sole effusion of [his] blood.” A visual analogue to this text might be a Cubist painting, with its vertiginous changes of palette and plane; but here the end result is different. There is no intensifying of the edges, of the categories by which we structure and organize the world—the categories are undermined, merely. I would like to have seen MacEvitt linger on this text, contextualize it, perhaps within the framework of the funeral oration as a genre, in order to bring out more sharply its character as a political act. He considers the speech exemplary to the degree to which it “encapsulates the complexities of the attitudes that regulated relationships between the ruling Franks and local Christians.” But even complexity thus defined has a history, embodying distinctive and significant moments of change. For the twelfth century, that history is especially important, given how MacEvitt and other scholars have noted a fundamental recalibration in perception of “the other” that occurred in the thirteenth century.

William Tronzo

William Tronzo, currently a visiting professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, is the author of The Via Latina Catacomb: Imitation and Discontinuity in Fourth-Century Roman Painting and The Cultures of His Kingdom: Roger II and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, as well as the editor of Intellectual Life at the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen and Italian Church Decoration of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.

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