The crusading movement, which originated in the 11th century and lasted beyond the 16th, bequeathed to its future historians a legacy of sources which are unrivalled in their range and variety. These sources document in fascinating detail the motivations and viewpoints, military efforts and spiritual lives, of the participants in the crusades. They also narrate the internal histories of the states and societies which crusaders established or supported in the many regions where they fought. Some of these sources have been translated in the past but the vast majority have been available only in their original language. The goal of this series is to provide a wide ranging corpus of texts, most of them translated for the first time, which will illuminate the history of the crusades and the crusader-states from every angle, including that of their principal adversaries, the Muslim powers of the Middle East.
For further information about contributing to the series please contact Michael Greenwood at Routledge ([email protected])
Edited
By James H. Kane, Keagan J. Brewer
August 07, 2024
William of Tyre’s monumental twelfth-century history of the First Crusade and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem inspired a rich series of interrelated Old French continuations that proved very popular in the later Middle Ages. In contrast to the thriving literary afterlife that William’s work enjoyed ...
By Francesca Petrizzo
December 22, 2023
This is the first translation of the Hystoria de via or ‘Monte Cassino Chronicle,’ one of the few surviving crusader sources from Southern Italy, where it was probably compiled (partly from known sources) between the 1130s and 1140s. The chronicle’s original sections offer new and fresh insight on...
By Jonathan Wilson
January 09, 2023
Achieved at the height of the Crusades, the Christian conquests of Santarém in 1147 by King Afonso I, and of Alcácer do Sal in 1217 by Portuguese forces and northern European warriors on their way by sea to Palestine, were crucial events in the creation of the independent kingdom of Portugal. The ...
By John Cotts
December 30, 2022
This volume will provide the first English translation of Ralph Niger’s critical reflection on military pilgrimage, written in the late 1180s in response to the calling of the Third Crusade. Long known to scholars as early and highly idiosyncratic critique of crusading, On Warfare and the Threefold...
Edited
By Paul Webster
August 29, 2022
In the first quarter of the thirteenth century, an anonymous Flemish writer set in writing, in Old French, a chronicle of Normandy, England, Flanders and northern France. It ranged from the arrival of the Vikings in Normandy to the early years of the reign of King Henry III of England, ending with ...
By David Cook
August 01, 2022
This book is the first translated and annotated edition of Ibn Naẓīf’s Al-Tā’rīkh al-Manṣūrī. Totalling 227 folios, the manuscript is a unique and valuable source full of historical accounts and anecdotes. The documents include two letters by the Emperor Frederick II in Arabic, as well as the only ...
Edited
By Susan B. Edgington
July 30, 1999
Walter the Chancellor's vivid first-hand account of the wars between the Muslims and the principality of Antioch in the early 12th century describes a less well-known period in the history of the Crusades, and provides a useful counterpart to the usual focus on Jerusalem. It is here presented for ...
By Translated by David Cook
December 13, 2021
Ibn al-Furat (d. 1405) is an understudied Mamluk historian, whose materials for the period of the later Crusades is unique. While sections of his history for the period prior to 1277 have been translated, later sections have not. His text provides both an overview and a critique of earlier ...
Edited
By Janet Shirley
September 30, 2021
The Old French ’Rothelin’ Continuation of William of Tyre’s Historia provides one of the best contemporary narratives of the history of the crusades and of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the mid-thirteenth century. Covering the period 1229-61, it has vivid accounts of the disastrous expeditions...
Edited
By Janet Shirley, Peter W. Edbury
May 21, 2001
Guillaume de Machaut, a man famous for both his poetry and his musical compositions, wrote his Prise d’Alexandrie (or Capture of Alexandria) just a few years after the death of his hero, King Peter I of Cyprus (1359-69). It is a verse history of Peter’s reign, and was Machaut’s last major literary ...
By Keagan Brewer, James Kane
December 18, 2020
The Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum (or Little Book about the Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ 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 ...
By Martin Hall, Jonathan Phillips
September 30, 2020
This volume provides the first comprehensive English translation, with a substantial introduction and notes, of the writings of Caffaro of Genoa, as well as related texts and documents on Genoa and the crusades. The majority of early crusading historiography is from a northern European and clerical...