ABSTRACT
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem has been the subject of innumerable studies over the years, resulting in a vast body of scholarship that covers a wide variety of subjects, including pilgrimage, military clashes, sieges, economics, political relations and contracts. For this reason, new contributions to the scholarship are only warranted if, instead of being concerned with details, names and episodes, they provide us with new insight. This chapter, therefore, neither narrates the history of events or fighting nor engages in the historical reconstruction of the diplomacy, commerce or ideology of the period. Instead, it explores several aspects of the Muslims’ complex reaction to the Frankish dominion in the Near East as it evolved over time, between the conquest of Jerusalem in 10991 and the fall of Acre in 1291,2 in an effort to shed new light on the subject.
