The Franks in Outremer

Thirty years after Alan Murray’s first publication, the appearance of this set of some of his collected essays offers an opportunity to acknowledge the full range of his work on the political society and cultural geography of the Latin settlement in the Holy Land and Syria in the twelfth century. There is insufficient space to mention all of them by name here, but this review will attempt to give something of the flavour of Murray’s work. The volume is divided into four sections: ‘The Frankish Nobility’, ‘Kingship in Frankish Jerusalem’, ‘Sacred Space and the Defence of the Holy Land’ and ‘Ideologies of Confrontation: Franks, Native Christians and Muslims’. The first section features six of Murray’s prosopographically based essays on the origins and identities of some of the original Latin settlers in the Levant and their descendants. It is interesting to read his first published essay, ‘A note on the origin of Eustace Grenier’, which appeared in the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East in 1986, in the light of his more fully developed work. Though a short note rather than a fully worked piece, it already promised the precision, detail and rigour for which Murray has become known among historians of the Crusades. A salient characteristic of the essays in this section is Murray’s profound knowledge of noble and knightly families and their origins in the West, especially in northern France, Flanders and Lotharingia. The prosopographical method is best seen in ‘The prosopography and onomastics of the Franks in the kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099–1187’, first published in a collection edited by the doyenne of medieval prosopographers, Katharine Keats-Rohan, in 2000. This essay might serve as an abstract of Murray’s important book (also published in 2000 by the Oxford Prosopographical Unit), The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Dynastic History 1099–1125 (rev. ante, cxviii [2003], 170–71). Two other essays in this section, ‘Norman Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099–1131’ and ‘How Norman was the Principality of Antioch? Prolegomena to a study of the origins of the nobility of a crusader state’, though separated by ten years and originally appearing in quite different kinds of publication, are best seen as a pair, between them examining, with brilliant forensic skill, the evidence for Norman origins and links among the settler families of the largest of the Crusader States. ‘Crusader States’, incidentally, is a term which, as Murray explains with characteristic precision in the Preface to this volume, he prefers no longer to use on account of its inaccuracy: few Frankish inhabitants of the East were in fact crusaders in the twelfth century

Ancient history · Monarchy · Nobility · Political science · Politics · Prosopography · Settlement (finance · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · History · Law · Medieval History and Crusades