A few months after the capture of Antioch (3 June 1098), the leaders of the First Crusade wrote a letter to Pope Urban II, on whose urging they had embarked on their long, strange journey across Europe and Byzantium. The rigors of nearly two years on the march, the exhausting eight-month siege of Antioch, the euphoria of its capture, the miraculous discovery of the relic of the Holy Lance, and the astonishing victory over yet another Turkish army had left the crusaders dazed and overwhelmed. The last straw came on 1 August with the death of Adhemar of LePuy, the...

When the Armenian communities of the Kingdom of Ani, located in the highlands of what is now eastern Turkey, experienced an eclipse and an earthquake simultaneously in 1036/7, they knew that something beyond the ken of ordinary men had occurred. King Hovhannes and the katʿolikos Petros, the leader of the Armenian church, seeking the significance of these omens, sent an embassy of eminent men to consult Hovhannes Kozern, a venerable vardapet¹ whose wisdom and piety wreathed him with the stature of an Old Testament prophet. When the emissaries from the king and katʿolikos arrived at the hermit’s cell, they found...

According to the twelfth-century Jacobite chronicler and bishop Basil bar Shumana, his city of Edessa—Urhay in Syriac—was none other than Ur of the Chaldees, founded by Nimrod and birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham. “Ur,” Basil recognized, was merely an ancient word for “city,” and “hay” signified the Chaldeans.¹ The bishop was justifiably proud of Edessa, a city whose people, according to a well-known legend dating to Late Antiquity, believed in the divinity of Jesus before his death and before the citizens of any other city. While western eyes kept Jerusalem in sharp focus, for many eastern Christians...

In the early fall of 1100, Baldwin I of Edessa learned that his elder brother, Godfrey of Bouillon, first ruler of Frankish Jerusalem, had died of “a violent and incurable disease.” A group of knights held Jerusalem for Baldwin, in defiance of the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Daibert of Pisa, who had hoped that on Godfrey’s death he would gain control of the city.¹ Having visited Jerusalem just a year earlier to complete his crusader vow, Baldwin was familiar with his brother’s territory as well as with the patriarch, to whom he had sworn fealty for his lands in Edessa....

For the chronicler Albert of Aachen, the triumph of the armies of the First Crusade at Antioch found its clearest expression not on the battlefield but in the religious ceremonies that followed the defeat of Kerbogha’s army on 28 June 1098. The fifth book of his Historia Hierosolymitana began with the description of the cleansing of the cathedral church of St. Peter of the “iniquities” of the Turks, the rebuilding of ruined altars, and the rediscovery of hidden icons and statues of Jesus and the saints. The restoration of physical buildings and sacred objects was only preparation for the spiritual...

In 1175, Baldwin, lord of Rames (Ramla), donated a local Christian peasant to the Hospitallers. He was to remain “with all things of his and of his heirs of either sex, forever in the authority of, and under the power of, the Hospital alone.”¹ Johannes Syrianus, as the charter calls him, was distinguished by a blemish in one eye, and evidently was once in charge of the cisterns of Caffer [Kafr ed-Dik], a small village tucked away in the olive groves southwest of Nablus. The ancient pools John might have cared for can still be found on the outskirts of...

In 1169, the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem received on its nave, transepts, and bema a new cycle of wall mosaics. The church was one of the oldest still standing in the Holy Land; built under Justinian, it escaped destruction during the invasions and persecutions that destroyed other Christian shrines. As the birthplace of Jesus, it was holy to Christians and Muslims alike, but its thick Roman walls enclosed a host of other tombs and sacred associations: the remains of the irascible church father Jerome lay in its crypt alongside those of his lifelong companion, the Roman noblewoman Paula,...