IMC 2024: Sessions

As a military, religious, geographical, and socio-cultural phenomenon the crusades were, from the beginning, closely linked to cities. Jerusalem with its loca sancta became the goal, both as a physical place and as a metaphysical concept. Ancient cities like Antioch, Tripoli, or Edessa became the centres of, however short-lived, crusading polities. Ancient ports like Tyre or Acre became maritime hubs as well as battlegrounds between East and West. Cities ruled by various Muslim power groups like Damascus, Bagdad, Konya, or Cairo figured at times as either allies or enemies to the crusader states. Often the impact of the crusades on those cities pushed them into various states of crisis: they were besieged, destroyed, conquered, sacked, depleted of their populations, razed, occupied, plundered, rebuilt, reorganised. This did not only affect cities in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, but also, to varying degrees, cities across Europe: the cities on the Rhine were affected by atrocities against their Jewish communities, crusading movements affected cities like Lisbon and Toledo, Toulouse and Athens, Zara and Constantinople. Equally the crises affecting these cities were not exclusively of military nature: usually the upheaval was just as much of economic, demographic, and religious nature. And in the realm of literature and art too, cities were plunged into crisis by the crusades; be it by the chivalrous struggle for Antioch and Jerusalem in the Old French Cycle de la croisade, through the depiction or burning and destroyed Levantine cities in German prose chronicles from the later Middle Ages, or through the lamentation for the lost cities of Al-Andalus in the Arabic Ritha' al-Andalus by the Sevillian author Abu al-Baqa ar-Rundi.