Crusader Castles and Modern Histories

Scholars of crusading have long been interested in the nature of the relationship between the western Europeans who settled in the Holy Land in the wake of the First Crusade and the indigenous Muslim and Christian peoples of the region. In this important book, Ronnie Ellenblum advances the debate about the tenor of cross-cultural encounters in the Frankish Levant by discussing how castles and castle-building have been used to support various approaches to the subject in the past, and by suggesting that historians should adopt a more nuanced approach to understanding the significance of the ‘crusader castle’. The book is divided into four parts, and begins with a fine consideration of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography of crusading and the western settlement of the Latin East. Ellenblum leads the reader through the ideas of nineteenth-century ‘nationalist’ writers such as Joseph-François Michaud and Heinrich von Sybel, who saw the crusades and subsequent Levantine settlement as ‘French’ or ‘German’ achievements respectively, before turning to the work of ‘colonialist’ historians, such as Emmanuel Guillaume Rey and Gaston Dodu, who argued that crusader society embodied ideals of integration and co-existence, and ‘anti-colonialists’, such as R.C. Smail and Joshua Prawer, who argued that the western settlers of the twelfth century were an exploitative élite who ruled over a segregated society. These opening chapters provide a useful synthesis (which in many respects complements other recent historiographical surveys of crusading and its consequences by scholars such as Christopher Tyerman, Elizabeth Siberry, Giles Constable, and Norman Housley) and provide the groundwork for Ellenblum's subsequent discussion of the way in which the construction and spatial distribution of crusader castles has been viewed by ‘colonialist’ and ‘anti-colonialist’ historians alike. For Rey, for example, the design of the ‘crusader castle’ was a good example of cross-cultural interaction, as it appeared to be the product of eastern influences on European architectural traditions, while for Prawer it was emblematic of a Frankish ruling class who lived in fear of its subject population and its Muslim neighbours, and thus chose to settle in fortified urban areas out of a desire for self-preservation

Ancient history · Archaeology · German · Historiography · Indigenous · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Settlement (finance · Subject (documents · Classics · History · Law · Medieval History and Crusades