ABSTRACT
The traditional image of the Middle Ages in Jordan is a far from attractive one: Jordan was colonized, first by the Crusaders in the 12th century, then by the Mamluks (a Cairo-based militaristic state of slave origin) in the following century, and finally by the Ottomans (an expansionist empire with firearms), who nominally held Jordan from 1516 until the end of World War I. Popular assessment of the long Ottoman period has been particularly critical: this was a ‘Dark Age’, when the state took from the people and their land, through military service and taxation, and gave nothing in return. Schools and medical clinics were built by local initiative, and the economy was revived through the vision and efforts of local entrepreneurs (Walker, under review c). According to these scenarios, medieval Jordan was little more than a corridor that foreign armies passed through and devastated, its villages regularly pillaged by Bedouin, and its land colonized and economically exploited.
