The crusaders in the East.
A brief history of the wars of Islam with the Latins in Syria during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The subject of the following pages is less, and more than a history of the crusades. It is a history of the political relations between the states which the crusaders founded and those Moslem states with which they waged war, or a history of the struggle between the Latins and the Moslems in Syria during the I2th and 13th centuries.
In the treatment of this subject, the eastern point of view has been emphasized and the main thread of the narrative is drawn, as far as possible, from the history of the Moslem states. The stress laid on the eastern point of view, and the special attention paid to the chronology of the period, maybe held to justify a new work on the subject. In the narrative the writer endeavors to trace the course of events from year to year as closely as the sources permit. Some marked variations in the fulness of treatment are explained by differences in the fulness of the available sources.
In the notes, the requirements of future investigators and of the editors of new texts have been particularly kept in view. The writer's special contribution to the chronology of the period is drawn from Arabic sources and the critical methods applied to these sources are the subject of Appendix A.
Some new suggestions regarding the chronology of William of Tyre are offered in Appendix B. The minor corrections of accepted dates made throughout the work are very numerous and results of wider im- portance may be held to have been established in a considerable number of cases for the first time. Chapters I and II, containing the history of the Latin conquest, describe the course of events necessarily more from the side of the Latins than of the Moslems and the detailed narrative of chapter VI is limited to the periods when there was war between the Moslems and their opponents.
While the history in chapter VI is sketched more broadly than in the earlier chapters, attention may be called to the fresh contributions offered in the treatment, for example, of the crusades of Theobald of Navarre, Richard of Cornwall, and Frederick II. The writer owes his interest in the subject of this volume, and his conception of the history of the crusades as part of the history of the Moslem east, to the late Sir William Muir, K.C.S.I. As Principal of Edinburgh University, he pointed out the opportunity for research in this department, and in response to his invitation, the present writer was the author of a University Prize Essay on the subject. The list of books on pages 372-376 may be regarded as an acknowledgment of the writer's debt to the modern authors who are there mentioned.
Author: | William Barron Stevenson,(1869-1954) was Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages at the University from 1907 to 1937 and Dean of Faculties from 1953 until his death in 1954. He was awarded an LLD in 1938 |
Publication date: | 1907 |
Keywords: | Crusades, Jerusalem -- History Latin Kingdom, 1099- Saladin |