Online talk: A Colonial Project? Medieval Views of the Crusader Settlements in the East

An online evening lecture in partnership with the St John Historical Society.

In the late-twelfth century, an anonymous Jerusalemite penned a short history of the kings of Jerusalem that served as a call to action following the Holy City’s loss to Saladin in 1187, and as a statement of the legitimacy of the Frankish project in Outremer. This paper examines whether this is representative of wider processes of memorialisation and identity construction in historical writing produced in the Latin East and the ‘colonial’ nature of the Frankish settlements.

Dr Andrew Buck is Lecturer in Medieval History at Cardiff University. He has published widely on the history of the Crusades and the Latin East, particularly regarding the principality of Antioch, power relations, and the memorialisation of crusade and settlement in medieval historical writing. Currently he is preparing a monograph on William of Tyre’s account of the First Crusade and embarking on a project to consider medieval notions of colonialism.