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 perspective. Here is a very different voice, one with a more secular, Mediterranean tone. To see the similarities and differences with the mainstream sources offers an exciting new dimension to our understanding of the reception of crusading ideas in the Mediterranean and, given Genoa’s prominence in the commercial world, can help to illuminate the complex and controversial relationship between holy war and financial gain. Caffaro’s main composition, the ’Annals’ of Genoa, began with the First Crusade and extended down to 1163. It also covers the city’s dealings with the Papacy, the German Empire, Sicily, Muslim Spain, and Pisa, as well as the development of Genoa itself. Sections from Caffaro’s continuators take the story down to the Third Crusade. Caffaro’s two other texts are exclusively about the crusades: ’The Liberation of the Cities of the East’ and ’The Capture of Almería and Tortosa’, while associated with him but of a later date is the ’Short History of Jerusalem’. Alongside these narratives are a number of charters and letters that relate to, and complement, the main texts. These relate to matters such as Genoese privileges in the Holy Land and form a valuable resource in their own right. Placed alongside Caffaro’s narratives they can show the blend of commercial energy, civic pride and religious conviction that were the basis of Genoese activity in the complex world of the medieval Mediterranean.

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 perspective. Here is a very different voice, one with a more secular, Mediterranean tone. To see the similarities and differences with the mainstream sources offers an exciting new dimension to our understanding of the reception of crusading ideas in the Mediterranean and, given Genoa’s prominence in the commercial world, can help to illuminate the complex and controversial relationship between holy war and financial gain. Caffaro’s main composition, the ‘Annals’ of Genoa, began with the First Crusade and extended down to 1163. It also covers the city’s dealings with the Papacy, the German Empire, Sicily, Muslim Spain, and Pisa, as well as the development of Genoa itself. Sections from Caffaro’s continuators take the story down to the Third Crusade. Caffaro’s two other texts are exclusively about the crusades: ‘The Liberation of the Cities of the East’ and ‘The Capture of Almería and Tortosa’, while associated with him but of a later date is the ‘Short History of Jerusalem’. Alongside these narratives are a number of charters and letters that relate to, and complement, the main texts. These relate to matters such as Genoese privileges in the Holy Land and form a valuable resource in their own right. Placed alongside Caffaro’s narratives they can show the blend of commercial energy, civic pride and religious conviction that were the basis of Genoese activity in the complex world of the medieval Mediterranean.

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 perspective. Here is a very different voice, one with a more secular, Mediterranean tone. To see the similarities and differences with the mainstream sources offers an exciting new dimension to our understanding of the reception of crusading ideas in the Mediterranean and, given Genoa’s prominence in the commercial world, can help to illuminate the complex and controversial relationship between holy war and financial gain. Caffaro’s main composition, the ’Annals’ of Genoa, began with the First Crusade and extended down to 1163. It also covers the city’s dealings with the Papacy, the German Empire, Sicily, Muslim Spain, and Pisa, as well as the development of Genoa itself. Sections from Caffaro’s continuators take the story down to the Third Crusade. Caffaro’s two other texts are exclusively about the crusades: ’The Liberation of the Cities of the East’ and ’The Capture of Almería and Tortosa’, while associated with him but of a later date is the ’Short History of Jerusalem’. Alongside these narratives are a number of charters and letters that relate to, and complement, the main texts. These relate to matters such as Genoese privileges in the Holy Land and form a valuable resource in their own right. Placed alongside Caffaro’s narratives they can show the blend of commercial energy, civic pride and religious conviction that were the basis of Genoese activity in the complex world of the medieval Mediterranean.

Crusading in the twelfth century was less a series of discrete events than a manifestation of an endemic phenomenon that touched almost every aspect of life at that time. The defense of Christendom and the recovery of the Holy Land were widely-shared objectives. Thousands of men, and not a few women, participated in the crusades, including not only those who took the cross but many others who shared the costs and losses, as well as the triumphs of the crusaders. This volume contains not a narrative account of the crusades in the twelfth century, but a group of studies illustrating many aspects of crusading that are often passed over in narrative histories, including the courses and historiography of the crusades, their background, ideology, and finances, and how they were seen in Europe. Included are revised and updated versions of Giles Constable's classic essays on medieval crusading, along with two major new studies on the cross of the crusaders and the Fourth Crusade, and two excursuses on the terminology of crusading and the numbering of the crusades. They provide an opportunity to meet some individual crusaders, such as Odo Arpinus, whose remarkable career carried him from France to the east and back again, and whose legendary exploits in the Holy Land were recorded in the Old French crusade cycle. Other studies take the reader to the boundaries of Christendom in Spain and Portugal and in eastern Germany, where the campaigns against the Wends formed part of the wider crusading movement. Together they show the range and depth of crusading at that time and its influence on the broader history of the period.

In Artillery in the Era of the Crusades, Michael S. Fulton provides a detailed historical and archaeological study of the use and development of trebuchet technology in the Levant through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

In Conflict, Commerce, and an Aesthetic of Appropriation in the Italian Maritime Cities, 1000-1150, Karen Rose Mathews analyzes the relationship between war, trade, and the use of spolia (appropriated objects from past and foreign cultures) as architectural decoration in the public monuments of the Italian maritime republics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.