The Realandimagined Landscape of the First Crusade: Baudri of Bourgueil, Flavius Josephus, and Jerusalemite History

The First Crusade was one of the most important spatial events of the Latin Middle Ages that transformed the spatial identity of occidental Christianity in lasting ways. The historians who first wrote about the events in the Holy Land made a broad use of the histories of Flavius Josephus to express a new chapter in Judeo-Christian history. One of the earliest of these authors, Baudri of Bourgeuil, made extensive use of Josephus's most popular first-century work, Judean War, in order to reimagine medieval geographic writing and present the First Crusade as a new chapter in the long history of Jerusalem. This study uses Edward Soja's theory of Thirdspace to reappraise the spatial significance of the First Crusade and the impact that Judean War had on the Historia Ierosolimitana of Baudri.