In this chapter, I will use the Great Khan’s dreams of the white knight as the starting point to examine the problematic figurations of idolatry, fetishism, orality and whiteness within late medieval travel writing, especially Mandeville’s Travels and Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou monde. Seemingly unrelated among themselves or to whiteness, these material and performative manifestations of faith nonetheless intersect in important ways in medieval perceptions and representations of the Tartars. The kind of cultural and textual ‘whitening’ of Genghis Khan’s dreams that Hetoum and the Mandeville-author engage in points to the power of artistic manipulations. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, in his Poetria nova, argues that art ‘plays about almost like a magician, and brings it about that the last becomes first … black white, and vile precious’. Jacqueline de Weever argues that such a belief in art’s capacity to transform black into white (nigra candida) is also a belief in the possibility of erasing alterity through whitening. Whitening, in its attempt to mask anxieties and assimilate differences, ignores the origin of alterity. The act of whitening, in fact, posits a new origin.

Given the privileged position of anglophone literature, medieval travel writing from England has been covered more extensively than that originating in other literatures and traditions. This chapter will try to balance English and Scottish travel writing, while omitting three writers in particular that feature elsewhere in this volume: Sir John Mandeville, Margery Kempe, and William Wey. There is no shortage of travel writing situated in England and Scotland: Ohthere, The Stacions of Rome, or the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales are only some instances. English and Scottish pilgrims to the Continent and Palestine have left numerous accounts, the most striking early example of which is Saewulf’s voyage to Jerusalem in 1102. This chapter will offer an overview of several central and remarkable English and Scottish travel texts. Furthermore, I will look at texts for which travel is central yet that have not been typically considered as travel writing. In this sense, I continue the theme of this volume in embracing a capacious definition of ‘travel writing’ as not only texts that make travel their express subject, but that contain and offer accounts of multiple journeys. England

At the end of the eleventh century, European knowledge of a wider world was emerging from a period of relative ignorance. Patterns of long-distance trade across the Mediterranean, an increased impetus in pilgrimage, and the settlement of previously little-known regions had, by the 1090s, all contributed to a growing awareness of distant lands and peoples. Italians were regularly trading in north Africa and the Levant; Normans had established themselves in southern Italy; French-speaking knights participated in campaigns of Christian conquest in the Iberian peninsula; Scandinavians were a familiar sight in Constantinople, and western knights had even fought with the Seljuqs in Asia Minor. The response to the papal preaching of the First Crusade in 1095, however, stimulated travel to the eastern Mediterranean and Near East on a much larger scale than previously. Most crusaders were experiencing topographies and landscapes that were unfamiliar, and encountering peoples whose appearance, customs, and values challenged their preconceptions about the world.

Violent conflict was a feature of the early papacy as theological factions or Roman families contested the Throne of Saint Peter and as popes responded to the collapse of Roman authority by assuming responsibility for the defense of Rome. By 1000 CE, popes were temporal rulers, and like their secular counterparts they considered military force a legitimate instrument. The papacy participated in the Crusades, principally as propagandist and financier, and engaged militarily in the “Italian Wars” (1494–1559). Subsequently, papal military capabilities declined and during the Napoleonic Wars the papacy offered little resistance against French armies that twice seized Rome. Under Pius IX, serious efforts to improve the papal military were insufficient to prevent the absorption of Rome and the Papal States into the kingdom of Italy. Reduced to a handful of palace guards, subsequent pontiffs abandoned any martial posture, although these household guards protected the Vatican during World Wars I and II.

In the twelfth century AD, European elite warriors, knights, finding themselves in dire straits during battle, adopted the practice of surrendering themselves to adversaries who then guaranteed the safety of their prisoners. In turn, prisoners promised to pay a ransom to their captors, payment of which would free the prisoners and allow them to take up arms again. This practical transaction was considered honorable, even praiseworthy. Because ransoms could be substantial, it might be necessary for a prisoner to return to his lands to collect the funds. To do so, he would swear on his word of honor, parole d’honneur, to return with the required funds. The practices of honorable surrender, ransom, and parole were established in customary laws of war, and disputes between captors and their captives could be appealed to courts of honor. There were circumstances in which honorable surrender was not permitted. For example, military commanders could forbid their forces to accept surrenders until a battle was decided, lest their men disperse during battle to collect prisoners and ransoms. The recourse to honorable surrender was limited to the elites; common soldiers could be overwhelmed or killed outright in battle or siege.

Europe across the period from 1000–1500 was characterised by a multiplicity of polities, but the majority were unified by membership of the Catholic Church. Indeed Latin Christendom (those polities that recognised papal authority and followed the Latin liturgy) doubled in size by the end of the twelfth century, as frontiers were pushed forward in the Holy Land, Sicily, the Iberian peninsula and the Baltic. This was generally achieved by extraordinary multi-polity coalitions loosely under the direction of the papacy, which confronted enemies of another faith and culture who seemed to present a military and existential threat to Christendom itself. Inter-polity conflict was nevertheless waged within Latin Christendom throughout the period, and especially after the collapse of Latin power in the Holy Land in 1291. As rulers focused more attention on nearby adversaries, they increasingly raised armies by contract for pay, aided by systems of credit, enabling the professionalisation of armies, to a limited extent. Meanwhile, throughout the period, securing divine support was considered important as military means in achieving strategic goals. The strategy and means of political–military elites are revealed through an increasing abundance of sources, notably chronicles and, particularly from the turn of the thirteenth century, an abundance of government records.

One can divide sources regarding Byzantine strategy into three main categories: sources dedicated to the exposition of strategy, tactics and logistics, i.e. military manuals and administrative documents;' Byzantine historical narratives; and non-Byzantine historical accounts written in various dialects such as Slavic, Arabic and Armenian. Still, there is an ongoing debate whether military manuals reflected current tactical and strategic practise. Equally uncertain is the extent to which Byzantine historians employed military manuals or idealised biographies as models in order to present favoured figures in an ideal light. The emperor was usually the one who set priorities and objectives, assisted by advisers as well as by treatises on strategy and logistics. Sometimes, however, high-ranking military officers, the strategoi, local commanders who executed military and political authority over their districts, also took the initiative to undertake operations. The Byzantines faced various peoples: Slavic and Turkish peoples and polities threatened and occupied its Balkan frontier; Arabs, Turks and Armenians dominated the eastern frontier (Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia and Armenia), and the Normans, Crusaders and various pirates threatened Greece, Thrace and the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Gulf. The objectives of the Byzantines varied according to the period. Defence and survival were among the dominant ones; others included retaliation, devastation of the enemy’s potential through raiding and acquisition of booty, marching deep and showing the flag in order to achieve more favourable treaties, the reconquest of lost key cities and fortresses, and, rarely, the total elimination of enemy polities. The Byzantines relied greatly on money and diplomacy to achieve their goals. When these were not enough, they would mobilise their army and navy comprising indigenous professional and semi-professional troops, as well as foreign and allied troops. The main priority in terms of strategy was to conduct military operations, as far as possible, on only one front at a time. The latter was chosen with various goals in mind: the control of major cities, fortresses, routes and mountain passes; the establishment of a client ruler; acquiring of a quick victory in order to enhance the emperor’s image; and acquiring an acknowledgement of the emperor’s overlordship in order to adhere to Byzantine political ideology which saw the emperor as the supreme ruler of the world and the legitimate claimant to the Roman Empire. It is interesting to note that religion seems to have played a lesser role than realpolitik and political ideology. When fighting their wars, the Byzantines mostly adhered to the advice found in military treatises, but there were also occasions when the neglect of such matters brought devastating defeats.

The introduction sets the book’s agenda: to offer a novel account of crusade culture from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) drawing on Middle English romances and their contexts in various literary, historical, and legal documents (in English, French, Occitan, German, and Latin). The political culture to which post-1291 crusade romances belonged, I argue, was ambivalent, self-critical, and riddled with anxieties. These anxieties were about issues as fundamental and diverse as God’s endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of crusaders to Islam, sinfulness and divisions within the Christian community, and the morality of violence. After situating the book’s key claims within debates on Edward Said’s Orientalism and crusade literature, I present its methodology: engaged historicism, attention to how romance writers adapted their sources, and analysis of emotional rhetoric. The book’s contributions to the history of emotions and Middle English studies are discussed, as are the new insights it provides into the historical dimensions of the genre of romance.

This chapter witnesses the Crusades and forced conversions of Jews, disputations and expulsions, as well as blood libel charges. Even though Jews also disparaged Christianity, viewing it as idolatry, there were also periods of relatively easy Jewish–Christian coexistence, such as in Spain.

“Decolonizing the Medieval Literary Curriculum” shows why the critical teaching of the literatures of the deep past – in the form of a critical canon, and a countercanon – is essential today, at a moment when White supremacist and alt-right groups in the West are weaponizing the symbols, cultures, and histories of the European Middle Ages to assemble a spurious, fantasied past of White racial purity and superiority, prelapsarian Christian homogeneity, and religiopolitical supremacy so as to make this fantasied past the basis of authority for transforming today’s world. At the same time, changing population demographics in the West are creating cohorts of students in higher learning who have diversified substantially in terms of their race, class, countries of origin, sexualities, genders, and physical, cultural, and psychosocial composition. Students, even more than faculty, have called for curricular transformations that are responsive to the urgencies of our time. The pedagogical strategies and curricular offerings in this essay are thus an example of the efforts undertaken today by a community of largely premodernists of color who are working to teach a decolonizing curriculum, and who are profoundly engaged in transforming how the deep past is taught and studied in the twenty-first century academy.

Postclassical Muslim just war developments focused upon dealing with the twin challenges of the Crusades and the Mongols, both of which occupied substantial sections of the Muslim world as well as constituting religious challenges to Islam. These challenges were overcome by moving away from the earlier heroic manner of Muslim sacral warfare and adopting a more professional, technology-based military that at least attempted to assimilate standard Sunni Muslim norms (in terms of personal morality) into the military methodology. The expansion of Islam from the 13th to the 17th centuries demonstrated that this formula was a success.

The music in this chapter comes from a large area of what is now Southwest France, in which Occitan (or the langue d‘oc) was the principal vernacular language. From the network of courts and their noble rulers came the culture of the troubadours, poet-composers whose love songs in Occitan constitute the first large body of medieval vernacular literature to be written down. We explore the lives of a range of troubadours, considering the various positions they occupied in courtly society, and examine how the conventions and practicalities of courtly life informed the literary theme of ‘courtly love’ that they cultivated. The contemporary tradition of Latin song and polyphony from monasteries in the same area is then discussed. We look at the changes in Latin poetry that have been described as nova cantica (‘new song’), and the polyphonic techniques of Aquitanian composers. Lastly, the connections between these two traditions are charted, and a range of shared contexts, themes, and approaches are brought to light.

The conquest of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 marked the founding of a new Latin polity on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, known as the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This Kingdom, which would continue to exist, with changing borders, till 1291, was the home of a greatly varied population, which included speakers of a very wide range of languages. These circumstances make the Kingdom of Jerusalem a fascinating laboratory for the study of questions related to multilingualism. Against this background, the first part of this paper provides some basic comments concerning the multilingualism which characterized the Kingdom. The second part focuses on one particular issue within this wider theme: the development of an attitude toward the French vernacular which was, at the time, unusual and innovative in comparison to the perceptions of French and Latin that dominated the western Christendom.

With the new millennium, papal power sought to restore Christian rule in the Holy Land through a series of eight crusades, but these campaigns were military and political failures, especially at the expense of the Papacy. However, they did succeed in opening the way for the scholarship of the Islamic world to enter western European intellectual life. With the founding of universities, new scholarship slowly emerged. The pioneering teachings of Pierre Abélard, Roger Bacon, and Albertus Magnus led to a revival of interest in the ancient writers with their emphasis on rational thought to secure human knowledge. This movement, called Scholasticism, reached its pinnacle with the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas who sought a reconciliation of Aristotle’s rationalism and Christian theology. A major implication of Aquinas’ success was the acceptance by scholars within the universities and the Church that both reason and faith serve as sources of human knowledge. William of Ockham extended the Scholastic movement and his predecessor Roger Bacon by presented a law of parsimony in scientific explanation, which in turn laid the foundation of empirical science.