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The Crusader States. By malcolm barber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. 356 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $32.50 (paper).
The last fifteen years have seen a flood of books about the history of the Crusades. The tendency in many of these surveys is to focus primarily on the crusading expeditions, while offering only a cursory consideration of the states that Western Europeans established in the wake of the First Crusade. Thankfully, one of the more versatile medieval scholars over the past three decades has rectified this trend. In The Crusader States, Malcolm Barber has produced a work that is stimulating and illuminating, though also a bit conceptually puzzling.
For Professor Barber, the creation and maintenance of the crusader states is "one of the most extraordinary achievements" of the medieval period (p. 356). The crusader states consisted of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa. After the First Crusade, most of the participants returned to Europe. The few Latin Christians who remained, called the "Franks" by contemporaries in the region, tended to be the leaders of the now completed crusade, along with their households, retainers, and kinsmen. However, Barber reminds us that a number of peasants also remained in the East, as they oft en lacked the res ources to finance their return trip and these new states off ered appeali ng opport unit ies that might not have been present back in France.
With such limited manpower, maintaining and consolidating the control of the crusader states would prove to be an especially demanding endeavor. Barber excels at conveying the tenuous position of the crusader states from their very outset, emphasizi ng that...