1412: al-Qalqašandī Historicises the Crusades

Abstract

Upon closer inspection, the geographical section on Syria in al-Qalqašandī’s famous manual and encyclopaedia of the secretarial arts contains a short history of the crusades. It begins with the earliest arrival of “the Franks” at the end of the eleventh century and ends with the fall of Acre in 1291. Scholarship of the twentieth century claimed that Arabic-Islamic historiography did not conceptualise the crusades as a historical phenomenon until the late nineteenth century. Against this backdrop, the article discusses when, and to what degree, Arabic-Islamic historiographers born after the fall of Acre began treating the crusades as a self-contained historical phenomenon.