Benjamin Kedar is a giant among historians of the Crusades. His prolific scholarly output over many years has been wide-ranging, meticulously researched and path-breaking. This most recent volume is a very welcome addition to the field of Crusade studies. It is a collection of 22 articles and book chapters written between 1997 and 2014; four of these were written jointly with Israeli colleagues, one of whom was his wife, Professor Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, who died in 2015.
The title of this book is significant in its use of the terms “Crusaders” and “Franks”. It demonstrates Kedar's firm conviction that the tendency to divide research on the Crusades into two entities – Crusading expeditions from Europe and European settlement in the Levant – is, to use his own words, “an unwelcome development”. Instead, in his view, these two facets of the Crusading phenomenon form a seamless whole.
It is difficult to select which chapters to discuss here. There are papers here that discuss the First and Fourth Crusades, historiography, hospitals, architecture, sculpture, cartography and Eastern Christianity. The book is also enriched by chapters on key events in the 1090s before the armies of the First Crusade set out.
Kedar focuses not just on the Holy Land itself. Indeed, his long article (chapter V) dealing with the barbaric massacre of the Jews in Europe in 1096 is a superb analysis, based on many medieval Latin and Hebrew primary sources. A most penetrating “longitudinal” discussion is also included, highlighting how European historians from the seventeenth century until today have approached this terrible event and what may have been the motivations behind it.
Too often, in the polarized conflict between Crusader Christians and Levantine Muslims, the historical role of the Eastern Christians has been neglected, or even overlooked entirely. Fortunately, in Kedar's book this is not the case. In Chapter XX he points out that although Crusader leaders knew little about Eastern Christian beliefs or, indeed, about the diversity of the indigenous Levantine Christian sects, Frankish settlers allowed all Eastern Christian groups to practise their own rites. Intermarriage took place and Franks preferred when they settled in the countryside to do so in Eastern Christian areas. Kedar argues that all Eastern Christian groups – Copts, Maronites, Nestorians, Armenians and Jacobites – benefitted from Frankish rule. However, the Greek Orthodox Christians were adversely affected by the Crusaders’ arrival. Chapter XXI discusses another neglected topic in inter-faith relations – the sharing of sacred space, sometimes with followers of all three Abrahamic faiths.
By far the longest chapter (Chapter VIII, at 50 pages) is concerned with the Jerusalem massacre of July 1099. Kedar has written here a full, nuanced and thought-provoking study of this key event, which has been hotly debated by Crusader historians, and others less qualified to do so, ever since. As recently as two years ago, an article in the Washington Post, dated 6 February 2015, includes the statement that “Tens of thousands of people … were killed in the conquest of Jerusalem”. Kedar spends some time discussing the possible number of those killed by the Crusaders when they took the Holy City. He mentions the account of the Muslim historian, Ibn al-Athir (d. 1233), which has been so influential in this context. The exact words of Ibn al-Athir are as follows: wa-qatala al-faranj bi'l-masjid al-aqṣā mā yazīdū ‘alā saba‘īn alfan – “the Franks killed in the Aqsa Mosque number more than 70,000”.
What needs to be remembered here is that from the time of the earliest extant Arabic historical accounts, medieval Muslim chroniclers, carried away by triumphant religious enthusiasm, exaggerated in implausibly hyperbolic fashion the estimated numbers of Muslim and non-Muslim armies killed in famous battles. A well-known example of this tendency is the description of the Battle of Qadisiyya at the end of the year 16/638 given in the history of the Muslim chronicler al-Baladhuri (d. 892) in his work Futūḥ al-buldān (The conquests of the lands). He writes the following: “The polytheists numbered 120,000 … while the Muslims, taken together, numbered between 9,000 and 10,000”. Ibn al-Athir clearly stands in this egregiously inflated tradition.
In his analysis of the Jerusalem massacre, Kedar draws first on the evidence of the earliest primary sources, both European and Levantine, grouping them under the categories of eyewitnesses, contemporaries and Frankish chroniclers, especially William of Tyre. He also uses two lesser-known sources – three Geniza letters, which mention details about the Jews of Jerusalem after this event, and the text of the Spanish traveller, Ibn al-ʿArabi (d. 1148), who visited Jerusalem in the 1090s and later wrote that 3,000 men and women were killed in the Aqsa Mosque during the conquest of the city.
Once again, Kedar moves thereafter to what he calls the “longitudinal approach” chronologically and he reviews the opinions on the massacre of 1099 in the writings of a number of luminaries, including Voltaire, Marin, Hume, Gibbon, Wilken, Michaud and Grousset, to name but a few. On reaching the concluding paragraphs of this chapter (which began life as a conference paper in July 1999, the 900th anniversary of the Fall of Jerusalem), Kedar sums up the evidence, arguing that, on the basis of Latin, Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic sources, around 3,000 Muslim men and women died in the Aqsa Mosque. That is, at last, a thoroughly convincing conclusion.
This chapter, then, is a brilliant tour d'horizon. Its final paragraph should be read by all historians working on the Crusades today, and they should focus especially on the wisdom of its last three lines: “Having observed the damaging impact of prejudice and passion in some of our predecessors’ works, we may sensitize ourselves to notice it more readily in the products of our contemporaries – and, hopefully, in our own as well”.
