The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton (review)

The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton. Edited by John France and William G. Zajac. (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate. 1998. Pp. xix, 297. $76.95.)

The editors of this volume may be congratulated for issuing a Festschrift in which all fifteen contributors address themselves to a common theme: sources for the study of the history of the crusades. Ten of the authors are from Great Britain. Of the remaining five, two write in French and one in German. Two papers are illustrated. The majority pertain to the period around the First Crusade and the twelfth century, yet some consideration is also given to the thirteenth, fourteenth, and even the sixteenth century. The preliminaries include a chronological list of Bernard Hamilton's works published between 1961 and 1997, while the book ends with a useful general index. Not surprisingly, in a volume concerned largely with medieval sources, nearly half of the authors refer to problems inherent in the use of undated documents. The task of establishing chronological accuracy is a much-underestimated aspect of the history of the period, and one which only in recent years has begun to become somewhat less elusive due to the introduction of improved computer applications to textual analysis. The DEEDS Project at the University of Toronto has already developed a methodology for dating undated charters, and it may not be long before similar approaches can be applied to a variety of other legal and literary sources, not only in attempts to date them, but also to identify authorship and forgeries.

In his paper on the conquest of Lebanon, Jonathan Riley-Smith concentrates on charter sources and provides new material for prosopographical studies of those active in the Holy Land at the turn of the twelfth century. Relying heavily on narrative sources written by Abu Shama, Ibn al-Athir, and William of Tyre, Malcolm Barber discusses the Campaign of Jacob's Ford, arguing that the demolishing of the fortress of Chastellet in 1179 initiated "the process leading to the defeat at Hattin." In a paper based largely on secondary opinions of a primary source, Susan Edgington finds evidence that Albert of Aachen was influenced by the Chansons de Geste when writing his Historia Ierosolimitana. John France provides convincing arguments for re-evaluating the individual value of what have long been thought to be purely derivative sources concerning the First Crusade. He further proposes that the first surviving account of that crusade was the Gesta Francorum, closely followed by the Historia Francorum of Raymond of Aguilers, and Peter Tudebode's Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere. Robert Irwin's paper is an excellent study of Usamah ibn Munqidh, who, he reminds us, "was not writing to provide twentieth-century infidel historians with accurate documentary information about Christian-Muslim relations in the twelfth century." Gérard Dédéyan looks to the colophons on Armenian manuscripts as a heretofore untapped, precise source for the history of the crusades. Benjamin Kedar discusses, and appends a much-needed new edition of, the Tractatus de locis et statu sancte terre ierosolimitane, which he believes "may be an impersonal rendering of what was originally a first-person account." Anthony Luttrell provides a highly analytic and source-based contribution on the Hospitallers' early written records and correctly insists that "the habitual reliance on the sometimes misleading Cartulaire [of Delaville le Roulx] should be abandoned and account taken of new materials." A charter of 1128 by Peter of St. Lazarus, a confrater of the Holy Sepulchre, in which he sets up a foundation for his wife, Maria, and two daughters, provides Hans E. Mayer with material for a study of marriage conditions in Jerusalem at the time. Peter Edbury finds in John of Jaffa's Livre des Assises "a major source for our understanding of the social and legal fabric of the Latin East," while Jean Richard determines from a pontifical account concerning the Kingdom of...