Download PDF | Franks, Muslims and Oriental Christians in the Latin Levant: Studies in Frontier Acculturation, by Benjamin Z. Kedar, Ashgate , 2006.
344 Pages
PREFACE
Steven Runciman characterized intellectual life in the Frankish Levant as “disappointing”; Joshua Prawer claimed that the Franks refused to open up to the East’s intellectual achievements. The present collection presents and interprets facts that require a modification of these still widely prevalent views. To cite a few countervailing facts: the earliest laws of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were influenced, whether directly or indirectly, by some Byzantine law book of the ninth or tenth century; medical routine in the Jerusalem Hospital, unparalleled in Europe, was probably modeled, in several significant respects, on Oriental hospitals; worshippers of different creeds repeatedly converged; multi-directional conversion recurred time after time.
A Frankish king of Jerusalem asked for rational, non-scriptural evidence for the future resurrection, ordered that a history of the Orient’s rulers be written on the basis of Arabic works, employed an Oriental-Christian physician-astrologer and probably patronized a French vernacular poet. A Jacobite who studied Syriac and Latin in Antioch, the works of al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Euclid and Ptolemy in Mosul, and medicine in Baghdad, ultimately served as philosopher, physician and translator at the court of Emperor Frederick II. An oculist, who called himself ‘Benvenutus de Yherusalem’ and most probably spent some time in the Frankish Levant, had a major impact on European medieval ophthalmology. Two studies deal with persons who abstained from intercultural contacts: the first study examines the demography and personal names of Muslim villagers who lived under Frankish rule, the second traces the startling progress of a hermit who, while in Frankish Jerusalem, came to believe that he was no less than God’s second incarnation. A third study dwells on the asymmetry of Frankish and Muslim mutual perceptions.
The volume concludes with studies of specific locations: the first argues that Acre was considerably more extensive than hitherto assumed; the second compares Acre’s Venetian and Genoese quarters; the third attempts to locate the remnants of a main street of the latter; the fourth reconstructs the history of the Frankish lordship of Caymont. Three studies (I, II and XI) contain re-editions of texts; one (X VII) heavily relies on a painting of which only a part has until now been known. I believe that a few words on the genesis of two of these studies may be instructive for younger researchers. Study I is based on a new edition of the 25 canons promulgated at the Council of Nablus in 1120, for which historians have until now been using the text appearing in volume 21 of Mansi’s Concilia, published in 1776.
Since that volume’s editors refer to the single Vatican manuscript that contains these canons, I decided to have a look at it during one my visits to Rome. I soon realized that Mansi’s text is faulty on several counts, and that some learned discussions become redundant once the manuscript itself is consulted. Consequently I decided to tackle the canons afresh. Similarly, Study XVII started with an unplanned decision to use a pause at the Bibliothéque nationale de France to see for myself, in the Cartes et plans, the oft-reproduced painting of Acre done in about 1686 by a member of Etienne Gravier d’Ortiéres’s mission to the Levant. To my astonishment I discovered that all reproductions of the painting show only about one-third of the original, and that the unknown two-thirds reveal extensive ruins of Acre well to the east of the city’s harbor. The discovery led to a long investigation, and to the conclusion that Frankish Acre was much larger than hitherto believed.
These two episodes demonstrate, to my mind, that it is imperative to go back to the original text—whether written or visual—and to avoid reliance, whenever feasible, on published material no matter how authoritative. Two studies present editions of previously unpublished texts. One of these (Study X) contains a detailed description of the daily routine in the Jerusalem Hospital. The text—appearing only in a single manuscript—is evidently faulty, and several sentences are altogether incomprehensible; but since the understandable passages contain valuable information, I decided to edit it. The work was extremely time-consuming, for the fourteenth-century scribe who copied his model must have been highly incompetent. Having spent several weeks on the text, I hit upon the idea of ordering photographs of other texts copied by the same scribe but existing also in critical editions based on other manuscripts.
Close scrutiny of the scribe’s renderings of these texts enabled me to confidently decipher several of his peculiar abbreviations and to assume that in the text about the Hospital, too, he had misconstrued some less common expressions and skipped words or even passages. Even so, many sentences remained unclear to me. Dr Susan Edgington (London) and Dr Giinter Glauche (Munich) helped to decipher several of them; but it was Professor Robert Huygens (Leiden) who checked my entire transcription, offered numerous conjectures, identified several quotations and saved me from numerous pitfalls. Several years earlier he similarly checked my transcription of the canons of Nablus. More recently we turned our attention to the texts relating the discovery of the Patriarchs’ remains in Hebron, and our study is to appear in two installments in two different volumes of Crusades.
Upon the appearance of a problematic re-edition of the text on the Jerusalem Hospital, Huygens scathingly reviewed it in his inimitable style (for details see Addenda et Corrigenda, Study X). I dedicate the present volume to Robert B.C. Huygens, whose peerless command of medieval Latin is matched by his rare humanitas. Finally, I would like to thank all editors and publishers of the periodicals and books in which the studies reprinted below were originally published for granting permission to reproduce them. BENJAMIN Z. KEDAR Mount Scopus, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, March 2006
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