Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem: Frontier Inventiveness in the Age of the Crusades

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.