This is the first full English translation of Marino Sanudo Torsello's Secreta fidelium Crucis, a piece of crusading propaganda following the fall of Acre in 1291, written between 1300 and 1321 and based on the translation edited by Jacques Bongars in 1611. With references to 13th-century Mediterranean history, especially Louis IX of France and Charles of Anjou, it contains a vast amount of cartographical, ethnographical, geographical and nautical information, with unique insights into events and personalities not only in Outremer, but in Western Europe.

This is the first full translation of Marino Sanudo Torsello's Secreta fidelium Crucis to be made into English. The work itself is a piece of crusading propaganda following the fall of Acre in 1291, written between 1300 and 1321, but it includes much of historical relevance along with interesting observations on the early history of Jerusalem and the Crusader Kingdom. The translation is based upon the text edited by Jacques Bongars in 1611. There is an introduction that contextualises the book, its author, his sources and his audience. The notes provide essential information to clarify internal textual references and allusions, as well as the role of Biblical references in Sanudo's grand design. The index is designed to make this detailed text usable and accessible. In this, his major work, Sanudo advocated the conquest of Egypt as the means to regain Jerusalem for the Latins and worked through his points with considerable detail alongside references to 13th-century Mediterranean history, especially involving Louis IX of France and Charles of Anjou, king of Naples. Books I and II give considerable detailed discussion of the concept, plan and costs of his proposed crusade. Book III provides an outline history of the crusades and the crusader states. It is derived from a wide-reading of other sources especially of William of Tyre, and, for events after 1184 on the Eracles, the letters of James of Vitry, and Sanudo's own experiences in the east. Throughout, the work contains a staggering amount of cartographical, ethnographical, geographical, and nautical information, as well as numerous unique insights into historical events and personalities of the late 13th century, not only in Outremer but in Western Europe.

Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice offers the first book-length study of embargo in a pre-modern period and provides a unique exploration into the domestic implications of this tool of foreign policy. Based on a large and varied body of archival and printed, papal and secular sources, this inquiry covers Europe and the broader Mediterranean from c. 1150 to c. 1550. During this time of an increasing papal role within Christian society, the church employed restrictions on trade with Muslims, pagans, 'heretics', 'schismatics', disobedient Catholic communities and individual Jews in order to facilitate papally-endorsed warfare against external enemies and to discipline internal foes. Various trade bans were originally promulgated as individual responses to specific circumstances. These restrictions, however, were shaped by the premise that sin and the defense of the decorum of the faith and Christendom condoned, or even required, papal intervention into the lives of the laity and by the text-based approach of popes and canonists. Papal embargo, consequently, was not only the sum total of individual trade bans but also a legal and moral discourse that classified exchanges into legitimate and illegitimate ones, compelled merchants to distinguish clearly between themselves as (Roman) Christians and a multitude of others as non-Christians, and helped order symbolically both the relationships between the two groups and those between church and laity. Papal embargo's chief relevance thus lay within Christian society itself, where it functioned as an intangible pastoral staff. While sixteenth-century developments undermined it as a policy tool and a moral discourse alike, papal embargo inscribed the notion of the immorality of trade with the enemy into European thought.

Examines how Armenia has been represented and "imagined" in texts from two periods in its history: the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. Today most people who think of Armenia associate it with the genocide of 1915, the struggle Armenians waged after the First World War to reclaim their ancient lands in Anatolia, a struggle complicated by centuries of subordination to the Ottomans, by persistent Russian efforts to exert influence and claim territory, and by Western indecision manifested in plentiful words but few deeds. This book, however, tells a different story: one of geo-political importance, strength, struggle, and diminishment, narrated in texts largely created by and for Europeans and Americans. It asks how the West imagined, described, and presented Armenia over time in historical and fictional accounts during two periods of close Armenian-Western contact. The first period spans the twelfth to fourteenth centuries; it examines a variety of texts, including the travel narratives of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, William of Tyre's Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, and romances such as King of Tars, Bevis of Hampton and Le Roman de Mélusine. The second period is rooted in events during the nineteenth-century American missionary movement. It engages with a variety of popular and widely disseminated texts - books, pamphlets, newspapers - written and published in the United States from 1830 to the mid-1890s, detailing the encounters between the missionaries and the Armenians, frequently in the voices of women.

6 Mixed Feelings in the Middle English Charlemagne Romances: Emotional Reconfiguration and the Failures of Crusading Practices in the Otuel Texts -- 7 Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent Ballades of Jean le Seneschal -- 8 'What shal I calle thee? What is thy name?': Thomas Hoccleve and the Making of 'Chaucer'

The Cross and the Crescent is a brilliant account of the relations between Islam and Christianity from the time of Muhammad to the Reformation, by Englands leading mediaeval historian.

The internal diversity in Europe in the Middle Ages created communities with parallel interests across political divides. The links between these groups and their mobility across the Continent, creating international communities bound together by religion, profession, trade, skill or craft, are highlighted in the five chapters of this book.