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Reinventing Race, Colonization, and Globalisms across Deep Time: Lessons from the Longue Durée

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Geraldine Heng
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Extract

In July 1099, after three years of levantine military adventure during which new latin christian colonies were fashioned at edessa and Antioch, the transnational forces from Europe later known as the First Crusade finally captured their principal target: Jerusalem. Three eyewitness chronicles attest to the bloodbath that followed. Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to one of the foremost Crusade leaders, estimated that “ten thousand were beheaded” at the Temple of Solomon alone (Chronicle 77). The anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum (The Deeds of the Franks) averred, “No-one has ever seen or heard of such a slaughter of pagans” (92). Raymond d'Aguiliers, chaplain to another Crusade leader, was effusive:

Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet lay in the houses and streets, and indeed there was a running to and fro of men and knights over the corpses…. [T]hese are few and petty details…. Shall we relate what took place there? If we told you, you would not believe us. So it is sufficient to relate that in the Temple of Solomon and the portico crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses. In my opinion, this was poetic justice…. Jerusalem was now littered with bodies. (Historia 127-28)

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 358 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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