Download PDF | The Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn A critical edition and translation of the anonymous Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum By Keagan Brewer, James Kane,Routledge, 2020.
300 Pages
The Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum (or Little Book about the Conquest of the Holy Land by S· alāh· al-Dīn) is the most substantial contemporary Latin account of the conquest of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187. Seemingly written by a churchman who was in Jerusalem itself when the city was besieged and captured, the Libellus fuses historical narrative and biblical exegesis in an attempt to recount and interpret the loss of the Holy Land, an event that provoked an outpouring of grief throughout western Christendom and sparked the Third Crusade. This book provides an English translation of the Libellus accompanied by a new, comprehensive critical edition of the Latin text and a detailed study in the introduction.
Keagan Brewer and James H. Kane are both historians of the crusades at the University of Sydney, Australia. Keagan Brewer is an Honorary Research Associate at the Medieval and Early Modern Centre and James H. Kane is a lecturer in medieval language and literature.
PREFACE This project began nearly ten years ago at the University of Sydney under the leadership of Associate Professor John H. Pryor. It emerged from a special subject on the sources for the Third Crusade that John taught in 2008 and 2009 to a small group of undergraduate students completing or planning to complete Honours in Medieval Studies. That group of students included the authors of this book. What initially drew us all to this unusual text with its curious reference to the man with the arrow through his nose is difficult to say, but we soon decided to collaborate on a new edition and translation of ‘the Libellus’. Our leading lights in those early days were John himself and our friend and fellow student Jenny Green.
Thanks to John’s firm guidance and meticulous scholarship, and Jenny’s boundless enthusiasm for the project, work proceeded quickly at first. It was a wonderful time of shared historical passion and scholarly discovery that coincided with a blossoming of undergraduate Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney and, at least for the two of us, played a crucial role in making us the historians we are today. A particular highlight for all of us was the week in January 2009 that we spent producing our initial translation at John’s home away from home at Jervis Bay on the south coast of New South Wales. This was a process that naturally called for a steady supply of wine and led to some robust discussions— many of them topical rather than strictly on-topic. (Jenny’s unforgettable claim one morning that she had dreamed of polar bears sitting on shrinking ice floes and singing lines from the Lamentations of Jeremiah should give a sense of the range of issues we touched on.) But the week was ultimately very productive.
By the end of 2009, we had a working translation of the text, facsimiles of all four medieval manuscripts, and the beginnings of a collation. Momentum on the project steadily ebbed over the next few years. By the time the two authors of this book began their respective doctoral studies in Sydney and Cambridge, the other main contributors had moved on to different projects, degrees, jobs, or life priorities. John himself was becoming increasingly (and understandably) preoccupied with a complex project on the primary chronicles of the First Crusade that will hopefully be published in the near future. Due to these various commitments, all work on the Libellus effectively stalled. It was only in 2015 that we held some scattered discussions about the possibility of reigniting the project.
Whether any future efforts would involve all of us was unclear at the time, but two unforeseen events (one tragic, and one nearly so) in as many years resolved that question for us cruelly and decisively. The first and most painful blow came in November 2015, when Jenny passed away. Though she had been unwell since July, her death came as a complete shock and left us utterly heartbroken. Jenny was a supremely talented and instinctive medievalist who had an astounding knowledge of the Vulgate Bible, a profound grasp of exegesis, and an ability to draw connections with a deftness that regularly left her peers and teachers stunned. She was also a unique and irreplaceable friend. Her absence from this world is a gaping wound that will never heal, and we cannot imagine dedicating this book to anybody but her.
The second blow, and the one that nearly derailed the entire project, struck later in the following year when John had a serious accident. Fortunately, he was able to make a significant recovery, but the accident prompted him to relinquish this edition and translation to us so that he could free up time to work on his other major projects. We want to thank John here not only for showing enough faith in us to hand over all his material on the Libellus and encouraging us to see the project through, but for all his leadership, wisdom, and friendship over the years. His insistence on passionate, rigorous, and tireless enquiry has inspired both of us ever since we first attended his undergraduate lectures on the history of the crusades.
If we have become even moderately respectable scholars, then that is in large part due to the foundations that John laid in his teaching. We owe him more than we can say. Our renewed collaboration on the project began in early 2017 with a complete revision of the collective translation made in 2009. We then divided the labour between us so as to make completing the book by the end of 2018 a feasible goal. James Kane focused on revising and finishing the earlier collation of the medieval manuscripts, then drew up the edition itself, together with the critical apparatus. Keagan Brewer wrote the bulk of the introduction down to but not including the section on manuscripts, finalised the footnotes to the translation, and prepared the back matter on the basis of research done by the original team.
In recent months we have cross-checked each other’s writing, combed the edition and translation for errors using detailed feedback from proof-readers, and revised certain problematic passages in the introduction and translation. It should be clear from this discussion that a good deal of the material in this book owes its inclusion to the hard work, skills, insights, and ideas of our early collaborators, especially John Pryor, Jenny Green, and Deyel Dalziel-Charlier. We thank them all for their contributions and regret that their names have not appeared on this volume alongside ours. For their proof-reading efforts and advice, we are very grateful to Hazel Freestone, Paul Reisner, and Linda Stone.
Paul’s meticulous reading of our translation against the edition was particularly valuable in helping us to remedy certain grammatical infelicities and occasional outright semantic errors in the closing stages of the project, and we would like to thank him sincerely for his Herculean efforts. We want to express our deepest thanks to Peter Edbury and Massimiliano Gaggero, whose work on the new edition of the Chronicle of Ernoul we eagerly anticipate, for their enthusiasm for this project over the years and their advice on many related points. Peter, in particular, has our sincerest thanks for his close attention to detail, which saved us from a variety of errors in the final stages of the project.
We are also extremely grateful to James Willoughby for corresponding with us and sharing his expertise on palaeographical matters as we were writing the introduction. The publishing staff at Routledge, including Robert Langham, Michael Bourne, Julie Fitzsimons, and Michael Greenwood all have our thanks for their help and advice over the past 18 months. Last, but far from least, we want to thank our partners, Kelvin Tang and Stephanie Wong, for their love and support in everything, and especially for bearing with us during our long mental (and sometimes physical) absences over the past few years.
Like all editions and translations, this book is not so much an end in itself as an invitation. As we hope will be clear from our introduction and notes, there is scope for far more research on the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum than currently exists. Our primary aim in preparing the book has been to stimulate that research and encourage scholars from all backgrounds to bring their expertise to bear. We firmly believe that not just historians, but palaeographers, codicologists, linguists, literary experts, theologians, archaeologists, geographers, and scholars from many other disciplines will be able to shed further light on the text.
But we also hope that the book proves useful and interesting to the intended audience of our translation: students and general readers who have an interest in the history of the crusades, as well as scholars whose research careers are built around the subject. This unique and important source for the events that led to the Third Crusade has not yet revealed all its secrets. We hope that all readers enjoy trying to decrypt it as much as we have.
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