The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean

2018

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Languages of Love and Hate: Conflict, Communication, and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean, 2012

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The main purpose and object of the British and French Mediterranean Empires was trade in its proto-national mercantilist competition. But they needed, searched for and produced also a certain general historical knowledge. There has been done several research on individual actors or on the printed works (Barbary and Enlightenment and beyond). Here more attention will be paid to the steady administrative production of general historical (non)knowledge about the Levant in mémoires historiques, descriptions of ‘the present state and the history of…’ given regions within the French and British imperial communication. The administrators and decision-makers in London and Paris/Versailles, from the kings down to the simple clerk, constantly tried to be oriented in the best possible way about the specifities and particularities of the Mediterranean realities (as of the other outposts and markets of the world). But the ‘best possible’ information of the French and British was full of lacunae from our ex-post point of view. A look on the contents of the libraries owned by Europeans in the Levant suggests likewise that they cultivated very much their own home culture in the échelles. The microhistory on the everyday work of cultural brokers, drogmen, enfants de langues, on the know-how of economic exchange between ‘Europeans’ and ‘Levantines’ (Ottomans, Armenians, Greeks, Jews…) up to a degree that the old dichotomy of European/non-European has vanished with good reasons. This contribution tries nevertheless to show that a distinction of levels of interaction and epistemic exchange might be useful, and that on that level of general knowledge about the historia (in the early modern wider sense), we might call that what is visible parallel societies, despite their highly effective exchange and coexistence. Sources come from the usual archives (PRO, BL, AN, AE, Bodleian, CUL). The contribution draws on the third of four chapters of book manuscript which will be circulated.

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This project asks: What can the documents of Jewish Syrians teach us about the ways medieval Near Easterners experienced the conquest and regime change of the First Crusade? It analyzes the conquest’s impact on five spheres of Jewish communal life: demographics, minority-state relations, commerce, the law and religious authority. Most of the existing literature on the First Crusade has assumed that the Franks eliminated Greater Syria’s Jewish and Muslim communities. The Cairo Genizah documents, however, demonstrate that large numbers of Jews remained in the Latin ports after the First Crusade. Moreover, these Jewish Syrians were neither segregated from European Christians nor limited to specific professions (with some very rare exceptions). They traded with Frankish merchants and served as tax-collectors and physicians for Latin lords. The Jews of Latin Syria are a particularly helpful case-study because they adhered to a different religion from either the conquering Christians or the vanquished Muslims. But far from embracing Latin-Christian culture, Jews continued to speak and write Arabic and issue Arabic legal documents throughout the nearly two-centuries of Frankish rule of the Levant (1098-1291). This seems paradoxical: Why would a community integrated into the economic and social life of its kingdom decline to adopt the language of its rulers? The answer I have found is practical necessity: After the First Crusade, the Jews of the Latin-ruled Levant continued to seek out commercial partnerships with Arabophone merchants from Cairo, Damascus and Palermo; they continued to solicit religious guidance from clergymen in Baghdad, Mosul and Fustat; and they continued to patronize religious institutions in Iraq, Islamic Syria and Egypt. In other words, they remained part of a broader, Eastern Mediterranean koinē.

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Mediterranean Studies Association 26 th Annual International Congress, 2024

Military propaganda–if any–haunts war narratives of the crusades in the Mediterranean basin, starting with medieval Christian recovery treatises, like Marino Sanudo’s Liber secretorum fidelium crucis de Marino Sanudo (Venice, 1321), produced to fuel the western rulers’ appetite to launch new crusade projects to recover the Holy Land, celebrating war narratives as a prelude to action. Lebanese novelist and jurist Nabil Saleh, on the contrary, plays with the literary codes of today’s counterfactual history in his novel Outremer (1998)–set in Acre in the thirteenth century–to denounce any form of propaganda, whatever shore of the Mediterranean it comes from. After his The Qadi and the Fortune Teller (1996) set in nineteenth-century Ottoman Beirut and before his The Curse of Ezechiel (2009) set in Phoenician Tyre besieged by Alexandre, he depicts the Mediterranean crusading heritage as the theatre of varied political agendas, hardline fanaticism, heresies and persecutions of all kinds./La propagande - militaire s’il en est - hante les textes se rapportant aux croisades dans le bassin Méditerranéen, à commencer par les traités de recouvrement chrétiens de la fin du Moyen Âge, tel le Liber secretorum fidelium crucis du Vénitien Marino Sanudo (1321), destinés à relancer l’effort des souverains occidentaux dans de nouveaux projets de croisades pour reconquérir la Terre sainte par l’exaltation du récit de guerre comme prélude à l’action. Jouant avec les codes des fictions contrefactuelles d’aujourd’hui, le roman Outremer du libanais Nabil Saleh - par ailleurs juriste - situé à Acre au XIIIe siècle, dénonce au contraire toute forme de propagande, de quelque rive de la Méditerranée qu’elle vienne. Après The Qadi and the Fortune Teller (1996) situé dans la Beyrouth du XIXe siècle sous le joug ottoman, et avant The Curse of Ezechiel (2009) situé dans la cité phénicienne de Tyr assiégée par Alexandre, il décrit l’héritage de la Méditerranée au temps de croisades comme le théâtre d’agendas politiques variés, de fanatisme pur et dur, d’hérésies et de persécutions en tous genres.

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Al-Masaq 24 (3), pp. 309-312, 2012

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'Atiqot/עתיקות – special issue Inscriptions and Writing, 110 (The Ancient Written Wor(l)d), 2023

Epigraphic transition to writing in the vernacular languages was one of the most striking phenomena in the sociocultural history of medieval Europe from the twelfth century onward, affecting all domains of written culture and progressing at different paces in different places. This transition took place in the Crusader states, as in France, in the midthirteenth century, but here with a radical turn from medieval Latin to Outremer Frenchan Old French dialect used in the Latin East. This paper examines isolated French words (names) in the extant inscriptions from the Kingdom of Jerusalem, tracing the transitional stages and identifying the actors and events instrumental in this shift. Is this transition simply a reflection of the limited preserved corpus of inscriptions? or can it be related to the history of the Crusader Kingdom, specifically the sojourn of the French King Louis IX in the Holy Land? This paper subsequently focuses on how the Outremer French inscriptions were viewed by the nineteenth-century orientalists and relates to the role that the inscriptions played in the conception of language in terms of national identity, and their place in the museums of France.

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The article analyzes aspects of French trade in the Levant during the eighteenth century by tracing the link between commercial exchange, institutions, and socio-cultural interaction within the system of French échelles in the Eastern Mediterranean. As the paper argues, this trade not only acquired a primary relevance within Ottoman and French economies but also created institutional and social interdependencies that prefigured nineteenth-century developments. The study discusses how economic, institutional, and social aspects are highly intertwined, each of them playing a core role in explaining the relevance of the French presence in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean.

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