In Laudem Hierosolymitani: Studies in Crusades and Medieval Culture in Honour of Benjamin Z. Kedar

Abstract

This collection of thirty-one essays reflects the variety and importance of the honorand's contributions to medieval and other historical studies which have embraced archaeology, canon law, the crusades, Italian commercial cities, settlement patterns, personal names, social history, intellectual history, institutional history, military history, even aerial photography and contemporary history, and, perhaps most prominently, inter-faith relations from shared cults to conversion and the plight of religious minorities. Benjamin Kedar peels away unfounded assumptions and unwarranted traditions of historical orthodoxy, frequently through the discovery or meticulous re-examination of primary sources in order to shed new critical light on familiar events and discussions, whether to understand the conceptual and actual relation of crusading and conversion or to clarify the details of one day of war by clambering around the arid Galilean battlefield of Hattin. In a brief review it is impossible to do justice to all the contributions to this Festschrift that manage to touch on almost all of Professor Kedar's interests: textual analysis and discovery (Linder, Edbury, Riley-Smith); personal by-names (Shagrir); settlement and administration in Syria and Palestine (Boas, Ellenblum, Amitai); inter-faith and intercultural dialogue and conflict (Friedman, Folda, Limor, Debby, Talmon-Heller); Mediterranean commerce (Richard, Jacoby, Balard); crusading warfare (Bachrach, Hamilton, Harari, Murray, Pryor); archaeology (Kool, Pringle); intellectual history (Airaldi, Epstein); the Military Orders (Nicholson, Mencahe); language (Cohen); law (Reynolds); Jewish experience of persecution (Toch); and historiography (Mayer, Olstein). Inevitably, some essays will command wider appeal than others. Daniella Talmon-Heller neatly analyses the relations of Muslim preachers of the jihad with local Syrian rulers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, just as Reuven Amitai's discussion of Mongol administration in the area in 1260 opens a vista on an intriguing counter-factual image of what might have been if the battle of Ain Jalut had gone the other way. On the crusades, Bernard Hamilton resurrects a footnote of pre-crusading warfare in his account of the papal-Byzantine war against the Muslim bases in central Italy in 915 led by John X. Alan Murray's account of the money and moveable wealth taken and acquired on Frederick Barbarossa's campaign of 1189–90 posits the arresting—and in this case convincing—idea that crusaders who lasted the course could expect to make money out of the expedition itself, even if they had made a loss in setting out. The power of the ordinary soldier to influence strategy and tactics by virtue of the shared immediacy of military command and service is well expounded by Yuval Noah Harari. Students raking over the bones of Urban II's intentions in 1095 will be drawn to Bernard S. Bachrach's substantial piece which, divertingly but ultimately unconvincingly, argues for the pope's overt duplicity in using the lure of Jerusalem to conceal his real purpose, which was to use the large armies sent to Constantinople to force Alexius Comnenus to resolve the church schism in favour of the papal supremacy. This constitutes a sort of neo-Erdmann thesis, dependent on highly speculative assertions that a sea-borne invasion of Palestine was both logistically possible and within the conceptual horizons of Urban II and his advisers—the pope's rejection of this route indicating his true anti-Greek motives. Among other things, Bachrach is misleading over crucial aspects of the political context, such as the 1074 eastern plan of Gregory VII, hardly simply a united Byzantine invitation; wildly overestimates the degree of papal control over western arms-bearers, making Urban II seem more like Innocent III; and ignores the alien nature of sea-travel for significant numbers of crusade recruits, let alone its cost. However, like so much of Kedar's own work, Bachrach's argument will enliven debate even on such well-combed subjects. While scrupulously avoiding slanting his work to reflect his personal or political predilections, Professor Kedar has also represented an example of the best sort of historian as a public figure in the community, ‘an important part of the historical and cultural heritage’ of his country—as the cover blurb has it. Even this finds an echo, possibly discordant, in Hans Eberhard Meyer's acute and elegant description of the context and reputation of one of the grandest crusade scholars, Reinhold Rohricht. However, as this volume attests, few historians could serve as a greater, livelier contrast to the nineteenth-century Prussian antiquarian than Benjamin Kedar.