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That William used texts which we no longer have is also significant: given the violent end of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, it is clear that many volumes that once circulated there were lost forever. Such contacts also brought updated knowledge and new intellectual trends, such as the rising popularity of academic Roman law, to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was this contact that triggered the writing of the Notitia, as well as other works, and it was also such an exchange that brought the Notitia to the West, where it was copied and re-edited. We can also see the importance of the contact between Latins who spent long years, even a lifetime, in the Latin East, and those who stayed there only briefly, both for the development of knowledge and learning in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and in the West. The circumstances of the Notitia’s writing show that certain milieus working in the Kingdom were considered as holding high-quality information about Islam and, indeed, that some groups, such as the Dominicans, were curious about the rival religion, and knew Arabic well enough to produce precise translations of Quranic sections. Beyond texts, William also made use of informants, at least some of whom were Eastern Christian, probably Copts. Carefully reading the Notitia, it becomes clear that William must have consulted various texts, some of which are no longer extant. This led him to produce an impressive survey of Islamic history, custom and theology, which includes numerous Quranic passages in (mostly accurate) Latin translation, as well as considerable information that was very hard to come by at the time in Latin Christendom, for example a precise account of the Muslim prayer. William writes that his reason for compiling this text was that he understood that Teobaldo was interested in Islam.
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It was dedicated to Teobaldo Visconti, a prominent churchman who arrived at Acre on pilgrimage, and, while in the city, was notified of his election as Pope Gregory X. This treatise was composed in 1271, also in Acre, by a Dominican named William of Tripoli. But the most surprising detail concerning this book is that it was produced thousands of kilometres from the contemporary centres of Western learning, in a port city that then served as the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: Acre.Īn additional text that is particularly useful in order to get a glimpse of the intellectual arena that developed in the Kingdom of Jerusalem is the Notitia de Machometo or ‘Information about Muhammed’. Furthermore, to these translations John appended one of the earliest vernacular treatises on logic. In the production of these translations, John was not only fulfilling the request of an important knight but also making a significant step in the history of the French language: at the time, translations from Latin into French were rare and innovative, and never before had a complete Latin text on rhetoric been translated into French. At the heart of the precious volume were French translations that John had prepared of two Latin works dating to the days of ancient Rome: Cicero’s De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium. In 1281, a certain John of Antioch gave a beautiful codex to a Hospitaller knight named William of Santo Stefano. And the German historian Hans E Mayer has argued that, except in the field of feudal customary law, ‘the Franks contributed little or nothing to the advancement of science and learning in the Middle Ages’.Īnd yet, it now seems that the Kingdom of Jerusalem did, in fact, make its own important cultural contributions. Thus, for example, the late British historian Steven Runciman wrote in his influential A History of the Crusades (1951-54) that the society of the Crusader states, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem, ‘consisted almost entirely of soldiers and merchants, was not fitted to create or maintain a high intellectual standard’. It is often assumed that the Western population that settled in the Holy Land had very little interest in learning. Latins arrived for a wide range of motives, contributing to the development of what is referred to in scholarly discourse as ‘Frankish society’. This marked the beginning of an almost 200-year period in which the Holy Land was ruled by a Latin Catholic elite. On 15 July 1099, the armies of the First Crusade, which departed from their European homelands about three years earlier, broke into Jerusalem and conquered it.