William of Tyre was one of the most accomplished men to live in the Latin East. After receiving the best university education Europe had to offer, William climbed through the ranks of Church and state to become archbishop of Tyre and chancellor of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He was thus uniquely positioned to tell us about the kingdom's political, ecclesiastical, and military history. This week's host, Patrick DeBrosse, discusses William of Tyre's chronicle, a massive - and complicated - narrative of the kingdom's history down to the 1180s. Join us to discover the many, many uses that scholars have found for William's chronicle.
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When considering the relations between the Crusader States and the neighboring lands of Syria and Egypt in the twelfth century, no source is as valuable as the the Book of Contemplation written by the Syrian aristocrat and courtier Usama ibn Munqidh. Born in the same year that the First Crusade was preached at the Council of Clermont, Usama was of the generation of Levantine Muslims who grew up as neighbors or subjects of the Franks. In 1174, at nearly 80 years of age, Usama wrote a work of adab, the Book of Contemplation for the new master of Damascus, Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin) which reflects back on a life lived beside and occasionally inside the Latin East. Join Cody Benke for an explanation of the value of Usama's work for understanding the Franks in the East.
The frescoes in the Church of the Resurrection at Abu Gosh are magnificent examples of 12th century crusader iconography. As Katherine McCombs demonstrates, by focusing closely on the iconography of the Dormition of the Virgin we can come to a better understanding of the compositional elements, even though many details have been lost over time. We can also see how the fresco would have originally been rendered in the 12th century.
Images of the frescoes at Abu Gosh can be found at this site
A large percentage of the Latin ("Frankish") population of the Crusader States were neither nobles nor peasant farmers but a middle class of "burgesses" defined by their holding a particular kind of property. The importance of the burgesses is attested by the survival, among the many French legal treatises of the Latin East, of the "Livres des assises de la Cour des Bourgeois" (The Book of the Assizes of the Burgess Court). This week's host, Sean Loritz, introduces us to the crucial piece of evidence for the social and economic history of the Latin East, and some of its quite surprising statutes.
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