Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem

Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem is a revelatory portrait of the Frankish Levant at the time of the Crusades. Following victory in the First Crusade in 1099, the newcomers from Europe, or Franks, ruled a Christian kingdom in Jerusalem, then Acre, until 1291. Historians have written off this kingdom as a derivative cultural backwater. In this new social and cultural history, however, Benjamin Z. Kedar uncovers the striking inventiveness of the Frankish clerics and knights who settled in the kingdom and lived in it.

Across an array of languages and archives, from textual and artistic to material and archaeological, Kedar maps the contours of the kingdom's cultureor, more accurately, its cultures. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was small, but the diversity of its population had no counterpart anywhere in the medieval West. Kedar explores how Franks, eastern Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Samaritans lived side by side in contentious times, each group developing or preserving its specific culture.

Through stories of the lives of the kingdom's inhabitants, Kedar presents the remarkable creativity of the Franks in various fields as they faced challenges in new surroundings thousands of miles from their countries of origin. Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem, the culmination of Kedar's half century of scholarship on the Crusades and the medieval Levant, is an innovative history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Benjamin Z. Kedar is Professor Emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a former president of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and the founding editor of its journal, Crusades. Among his many books are Crusade and Mission and The Changing Land Between the Jordan and the Sea. He is a recipient of the Israel Prize in History and the Prix Gustave Schlumberger of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem is a book of unwavering rigor, precision, and originality, peppered with wisdom and dry wit. Kedar undertakes modern scholarship's first systematic examination of the culture of the Latin East with a remarkable breadth of research and tremendous range of intellectual enquiry.

Jessalynn Bird, editor of Papacy, Crusade, and Christian-Muslim Relations:

Kedar's magisterial study argues for a vibrant commingling of cultures in the Latin-occupied Levant, whose mutual influence and rivalry profoundly affected not only the Mediterranean but adjoining regions. It does justice to the political, religious, military, artistic, theological, and intellectual developments that transformed individuals and societies inhabiting the Holy Land.

Jay Rubenstein, author of Nebuchadnezzar's Dream:

Benjamin Z. Kedar has opened a richly textured, vibrant, complex, and very human world, a Frankish Jerusalem profoundly shaped by regular encounters with non-Latin cultures and by the sheer weight of the spiritual legacy over which it claimed guardianship. A witty and erudite book that is, like its subject matter, endlessly inventive.

Yuval Noah Harari, historian and author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and Nexus:

The eminent historian of the Crusades and the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem brings a lifetime of experience and knowledge to this erudite book—the first comprehensive history of the kingdom's social and cultural developments. It is a broad synthesis, but is also full of fascinating anecdotes, which together change our understanding of the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem and of the entire Crusader movement.