| Abstract | Paper -a:
This paper follows the completion of a dissertation examining the characteristics of siege warfare in the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily in the 11th century. Specifically, it will address the question of how siege tactics and technologies (poliorcetics) employed by Robert and Roger de Hautville, William of Capua and their peers were transmitted, and where from. The scant scholarship on this subject identifies Normandy and northern France as the source of the Italo-Normans' knowledge of warfare, but too readily dismisses the possibility of influence from Byzantine and Lombard Italy and adaptation throughout the course of the conquest.
Paper -b:
This paper centers on the story of shipwrecked sailors from the Mamluk Sultanate who were seized and imprisoned by the Franks of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1273. According to the account of Ibn al-Furat, while the rest of the survivors were ransomed or exchanged, the skilled pilots were held until the Sultan Baybars arranged for their prison break and rescue. Drawing from Frankish and Arab sources, my paper will put this unusual event into the context of both the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Mamluk Sultanate's need for skilled labor in their efforts at preservation and imperial expansion.
Paper -c:
It often has been argued that the crown of Jerusalem, which Charles I of Anjou (d.1285) acquired by purchase in 1277, was actually of little interest to him and that he was merely following the path suggested to him by his papal ally, Gregory X (d.1276), who believed the Holy Land's best hope for salvation lay with Charles and his imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean. Because the latter's power base was Sicily and his coveted prizes were Constantinople and Greece, Charles's regime in Jerusalem and its position in his emerging empire have remained a relatively dim corner, waiting to be illuminated, of the history the kingdom of Jerusalem. This paper proposes to explore that regime by using both the Angevin archives, partially reconstructed by R. Filangieri, and material from the Latin East.
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