Les difficultés de l’épigraphie franque de Terre sainte aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, Frankish epigraphy has generated a lot of misunderstandings and chronological mistakes owing to the poor condition of the materials found in the Holy Land and the use of several different dating systems during the crusades. The aim of this paper is to address some recurrent problems and to identify several of the deceased persons who had come from Europe. Some museums have not retained information on the origin of graves discovered in Palestine before World War I: for example, the Louvre preserves the tombstones of Jacques Lesaboni and Aliénor Lamiral without any indication of provenance. Many scholars have misread their death dates, by ignoring the use of the Annunciation Style in the patriarchate of Jerusalem in the thirteenth century. A systematic analysis shows the difficulty of restoring the missing epitaph when a tombstone is fragmentary or some letters are deleted. Among these corrections, we can cite as an example the grave of an anonymous prelate who died near Jaffa in 1259, on the day of the Feast of Saint Vincent and Saint Anastasius. Another example is given by the Occitan Archbishop of Nazareth, Guillaume of Saint-Jean, whose tombstone was examined rather hastily by Joshua Prawer in the 1970s. Many cases attest the existence, in the thirteenth century, of the funeral formula “ET TRESPASSA,” employing a specific abbreviation that has been ignored up to this time.