Browsing by Subject "Kingdom of Jerusalem"

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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.