[WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Ray Saintonge wrote

> Nearly 600 years after the Battle of Acre is recent.

Yeah, well, I thought you'd argue that the nineteeth century is 'recent'. More of the subtle misdirection. Get with it, man. 

>Judging from 
> Maalouf's notes there does not appear to be any serious attempt to look 
> at the Arab perspective until the 1950s with Gabrieli (1957 not 1969) 
> and the French translations of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn al-Qalanisi. 

You were arguing about the availability of sources, not the will to look at them? Shifting your ground.

> Maalouf 
> (p.270) makes an interesting about the suppression of stories of 
> Frankish cannibalism: "In the twentieth century, however, these accounts 
> have generally been concealed - perhaps in the interests of the 
> West's'civilizing mission'?"

Let's have the full quote, shall we?

"The Frankish chronicles of the epoch contain numerous accounts of the acts of cannibalism committed by the Frankish armies in Ma'arra in 1098, and they all agree. Until the nineteenth century, the facts of these events were included in the works of European historians [...]" and goes on to cite one such, Michaud. Then on to the bit you gave.

So

(a) we are talking about European sources (Frankish)

and 

(b) this is entirely not your point, which was about whether non-European (you presumably took Byzantine as European) sources were available until 'recently', but is about whether there was a period of European historiography of the Crusades which was selective of the sources that it had always had.

Looking at Runciman's bibliography: Latin translations of Abu'l Feda started in 1789; Armenian sources before 1850; Latin translation of Syriac sources in the 1870s.

Charles

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