Browsing by Subject "Crusades"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Crusade, Crisis, and Statecraft in Latin Christendom: The Case of Fulk V of Anjou (1090-1143)
    (2017-06) Qureshi, Basit Hammad
    Traditionally, scholars approached early crusading as a hermetically sealed phenomenon, whose Eastern Mediterranean locus of activity had no enduring impact on the political culture of western Europe. Recent studies have demonstrated this assumption to be untenable. However, in assuming cross-regional and/or diachronic approaches, these studies could not fully consider how crusading realities shaped and, in turn, were shaped by the historically contingent concerns of individual rulers embedded within specific contexts. This dissertation is a case study that illuminates how crusading informed the rulership and ruling identity of a prince who was prominent in twelfth-century landscapes of change: Fulk V, count of the western French principality of Anjou (r. 1109-1129) and monarch of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (r. 1131-1143). Treating his reign as count, this project demonstrates that, for Fulk, the crusading phenomenon was neither a substrate nor an overlay, but rather, a central determinant of his rulership in Anjou, transforming his performance of just governance. To rule effectively within the political-social environment of crusading, Count Fulk V of Anjou had to engage in a process of reformulating and systematizing administrative, material, and discursive strategies of governance that had previously been used only inconsistently. Drawing upon a wide array of archival and published Latin sources, I demonstrate that these crusade-inspired reforms of rulership included: the creation of an apparatus of bureaucratic functionaries who enforced justice at the local level as living extensions of the prince’s office; the routinization of charter production as a means of affirming re-centralized public authority; the collaborative exercise of power by male and female actors in elite kin-groups; and, selective building campaigns to articulate power through material representation. The resulting body of formalized practices yielded an administrative praxis of governance that helped establish the conceptual and logistical groundwork for the subsequent emergence of the medieval European state under Fulk’s continental successors. Fulk's comital reign offers, thus, a unique but neglected opportunity to illuminate how crusading revolutionized rulership in the western tradition. This dissertation concludes with a comprehensive cataloging and diplomatic analysis of Fulk’s 124 surviving pre-royal acta/acts, many of which have hitherto been unknown to scholars.
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    The Frankish Nobility and The Fall of Acre: Diplomacy, Society, and War in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, c.1240-1291
    (2016-10) Izzo, Jesse
    In May of 1291, armies of the Mamluk dynasty, a Sunni Muslim regime based in Cairo, overwhelmed the defenses of the city of Acre, thereby conquering the last major stronghold in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. This brought to a close nearly two hundred years of Frankish settlement in Syria and destroyed the last vestiges of the principalities the Franks had established there during and immediately after the First Crusade (1095-1099). There has long been a pervasive assumption among scholars that the kingdom was terminally weak by the early thirteenth century; that the Franks living there had little control over their own affairs; and that its eventual conquest by a neighboring Muslim power was all but inevitable. In this dissertation I challenge these assumptions through a close study of the nobility’s military and diplomatic actions and an analysis of how these actions fit into the broader context of their social and cultural attitudes during the period c.1240-1291. I conclude that the Franks remained more diplomatically and military relevant than commonly believed and that it was a pervasive attitude of political and social competition among its leading nobles and their perception of threat to their economic, social, and political dominance of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from other segments within Frankish society that proved to be its undoing.
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    Muslims in the Landscape: A Social Map of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Thirteenth Century
    (2016-07) Zimo, Ann
    This dissertation is a study of how Muslims fit into the society of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem during the thirteenth century. It examines their roles from multiple perspectives, drawing from extent Latin, Old French, Arabic, and archaeological sources. The first chapter explores where Muslims lived within the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and demonstrates that they were not concentrated at the margins or in places where they were easily ignored. The second chapter focuses on the economic contributions of Muslims and argues that their centrality was recognized by the Mamluk regime, which deliberately attempted to sap the kingdom by removing them. The third chapter reviews the legal landscape and the various legal systems Muslims navigated in theory. It argues that while the Frankish legal systems did attempt to disenfranchise Muslims, they were frequently also more concerned with maintaining distinctions between groups of differing social status. The final chapter examines the political landscape, where Muslims can be found exercising political and administrative powers within the kingdom. The evidence, especially from the jointly-held lands, reveals that Muslims played a much bigger role in the administration of the kingdom than hitherto thought.
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    The Norman Kingdom of Africa and the Medieval Mediterranean
    (2018-03) King, Matt
    During the twelfth century, the Mediterranean Sea contained a complex array of economic, political, military, religious, and social networks. My dissertation explores the relationship of two dynasties that were at the center of these networks: the Norman lords of Sicily and the Zirid emirs of Ifriqiya (roughly modern-day Tunisia, eastern Algeria, and western Libya) in the years leading up to the Norman conquest of Zirid lands and the formation of the Norman Kingdom of Africa (1148-1160). Previous scholarship, particularly work written by French colonial historians, has emphasized the triumph of the Christian Normans over their Muslim foes and disregarded the agency of the Zirids. I show that the medieval sources tell a different story. Latin and Arabic texts attest to the importance of the Zirid emirs of Ifriqiya to larger networks in the Mediterranean. In 1123, for example, the Zirid emir al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali united a group of Arab and Berber (indigenous North African) tribes to defeat the navy of the Norman lord Roger II. Several years later, al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali formed an alliance with the Almoravids of Morocco to raid cities along the coast of Sicily. Zirid power in Ifriqiya only waned in the wake of a decade-long drought, which allowed the opportunistic Normans to seize Zirid lands. The Normans under Roger II and his son William I ruled the coastline of Ifriqiya for twelve years, during which time they made small changes to its society that favored Christians over Muslims while occasionally proclaiming themselves “King of Africa.” Arabic chroniclers writing about the Norman conquest of Ifriqiya did not acknowledge the legitimacy of the Normans’ kingship in Ifriqiya and instead presented the Normans as one prong of a Mediterranean-wide “Frankish” assault upon the lands of Islam, one that warranted jihad on all fronts.