2

Knowing Nubia and Ethiopia on the Eve of the Crusades

On the eve of the Crusades, nothing is known about Nubian or Ethiopian knowledge of the contemporary affairs of the Latin Christians. Comparatively, the Latin Christian recording of contemporary African affairs had been largely stagnant for some time. At the turn of the second millennium, multiple Latin Christian writers lamented the inactivity of their predecessors in producing new works of knowledge more generally. Even well into the twelfth century, such ignorance was bemoaned by Richard of Poitiers (d. c. 1174), a Benedictine monk at Cluny, who explained the reason for the writing of his chronicle with the following statement:

Whilst I may seem foolish to write juvenile things, that is in copying, compiling, and the collecting of passages of the histories of the ancients in a single work, yet nothing would be more profitable in our time, especially since the scarcity or the inactivity of writers has almost rendered the deeds of the last four hundred years into obscurity.¹

A picture of intellectual deterioration was similarly painted in 1146 by abbot Macarius of Fleury who ordered the focus of an annual payment to address the abbey’s manuscripts which were in a state of decay because of moths and worms.² Whether reflecting reality or relaying an intellectual trope, early second-millennium Latin Christian writers desired to highlight a perceived decline of knowledge production in their time. In the case of Africa, this was certainly true and almost nothing was recorded by any Latin Christian regarding contemporary events in either Nubia or Ethiopia between the seventh and eleventh centuries. For example, even though the famous supposed alliance against the Jewish king of Ḥimyar between the nǝguś of ʾAksum, ʾƎllä ʾAṣbəḥa (also known as Kalēb), and the Byzantine emperor, Justin I, sometime around c. 520–5 – which some also fabled the Christian conversion of the nǝguś of ʾAksum to as a result of his Christian-inspired victory – did, albeit rarely, reappear during these centuries in Latin Europe, such as by the famous ninth-century papal librarian and translator, Anastasius, no known surviving sources suggest that any later updates on affairs or events, whether detailing Ethiopia or Nubia, were recorded.³ Latin texts produced during the centuries immediately prior to the launching of the Crusades present a picture of a Christian African hinterland now disconnected from the northern Mediterranean; a stark contrast to before the end of (late) antiquity. The current African evidence portrays just as limited a picture. In the absence of comparative Nubian and Ethiopian evidence, this chapter aims to contextualise the Latin Christian knowledge of Christian Nubia and Ethiopia leading up to and during the First Crusade before the developments of the twelfth century witnessed the production of Latin Christian knowledge which began to provide a complete opposite narrative of Nubia and Ethiopia – namely, their ‘reacknowledgement’ as powerful and influential regional Christian north-east African kingdoms.

Between Late Antiquity and the First Crusade: An Intellectual Rupture?

It is clear that Greco-Latin writers writing in the first half of the first millennium detail a much greater awareness of contemporary Nubian and Ethiopian affairs, not least on account of flourishing direct and indirect connectivity. Prior to the source silence of the late first millennium, various African groups, particularly economic, religious, military, and political diasporas – not to forget enslaved and manumitted diasporas (and their descendants) – were central to informing many Latin and Greek writers’ understanding of Africa. The populations of Lower Nubia were known by their own chosen ethnonyms, such as the Nobades and the Blemmyes, for instance.⁴ There is also the rare example of John of Biclar writing in his Chronica of an embassy sent to Emperor Justin II in Constantinople by the Makuritans (Maccurritarum) in 573, the central of the three Nubian kingdoms at the time.⁵ Likewise, this is also true of the use of the Ethiopian toponym of ʾAksum, as well as the historic references to Meroë, both indigenous toponyms of their respective peoples (ʾksm/Medewi). Certainly, there had been a long history of the African etymologies of Greco-Latin toponyms for African geographies being explicitly stated by classical authors too. One set of such examples are the Nilotic tributary rivers the Astaboras, Astapus, and the Astasobas, which appear in Strabo and subsequent Greco-Latin writings.⁶ Often, these rivers merely appeared for their geographic nature, but Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) highlights the Meroitic origin of the toponyms. He specifically described the Astaboras as a river ‘which in their language means water flowing from the darkness’ (quod illarum gentium lingua significat aquam e tenebris profluentem), with similar ‘water’ etymologies for the Astapus (‘branch of water coming out of the darkness’: ramus aquae venientis e tenebris) and the Astusapes (‘which signifies side [branch of water]’: quod lateris significationem adicit).⁷ The first half of these toponyms of the rivers reflect the Proto-Meroitic word asta (‘river/water’; Meroitic ato, ‘water’), with the origin of the second half of each still up for debate, whether signifying local groups or other Meroitic nouns that are yet to be understood, particularly if a literal understanding of Pliny’s etymologies is to be taken. The dissemination of such toponyms and ethnonyms highlights how Nubians and Ethiopians often informed Greco-Latin writers of (late) antiquity of their geography and, on occasion, political affairs. One intimate example of the latter can be further illustrated by the contemporary referencing of nǝguś Kalēb in relation to his invasion of Ḥimyar by his throne name, Ǝllä Aṣbäḥa, as either ʾElesbaas (Ἐλεσβαὰς), Hellesthaeos, or a similar variant. This detail has interesting contrasts with earlier texts which only note ʾAksum’s fourth-century conversion to Christianity under ʿEzana by the ruler’s personal name (for example, Ἀιζανᾷ), rather than his throne name.⁸ Greco-Latin knowledge of Kalēb’s throne name almost certainly attests to direct Ethiopian informants in the dissemination of information whereas the seemingly less intimate chronicling of ʿEzana’s more generally well-known personal name may suggest an acquisition of knowledge via indirect non-Ethiopian sources. In any case, the evidence for the active role of Nubians and Ethiopians informing Greco-Latin writers finds numerous examples like those noted here which all but stop by the latter half of the first millennium.

The more immediate predecessors of the Latin Christian writers who produced works around the time of the First Crusade appear to not have had similar intimate knowledge networks for writing about either Nubia or Ethiopia. Clear contemporary evidence for the continued Nubian or Ethiopian informing of Latin European knowledge regarding Christian Africa at the turn of the second millennium, such as the appearance of indigenous ethnonyms, toponyms, or names (personal, throne, or otherwise) is currently lacking. The most immediate explanation would appear to be the Byzantine losses of its African provinces in the seventh century and the potential disruption of previous networks. There is certainly some indicative evidence of this. For example, the prior highly integrated exchanges between Nubia, Egypt, and sometimes places further afield across the Mediterranean, are represented in the thousands of fragments of pottery found at Qasr Ibrim in Lower Nubia, dating from the fourth century, though, significantly, Mediterranean connections in the ceramic evidence appears to end in the seventh century.⁹ Equally in the case of Ethiopia, the diffusion of Latin words, either as a result of direct contact or via Greek, dramatically declines in Gəʿəz by the seventh century, suggesting disruptions to religious diasporas who largely directed the nature and dissemination of these words in addition to commercial connectivity.¹⁰ There appears to have been some sort of physical and intellectual rupture in the seventh century, but was it terminal? In the case of post-seventh-century Greek writers, Vassilios Christides has framed the works of latter centuries as reflecting an increasing Byzantine ignorance of, notably north-east, Africa.¹¹ Yet, it cannot be escaped that the surviving Greek sources are primarily written by influential Constantinopolitans who naturally would have a primary focus on their city and internal politics, rather than events now outside of the empire in Africa.¹² Indeed, ‘Ethiopians’ continued to be portrayed in a variety of ways within Byzantium in art, literature, and performance. How far these portrayals represent the presence of African diasporas, however, is more difficult to ascertain from the available evidence.¹³ As for Latin Europe, there is limited suggestive evidence of some post-seventh-century continuation of physical continuity, even if it was not seemingly associated with intellectual production.

Whilst archaeology always offers hope for the uncovering of new material to enlighten the case for the avenues for continued connectivity, there are currently some examples which support the fact in relation to Nubia and, to a more limited degree, Ethiopia for the centuries immediately prior to the turn of the second millennium. Firstly, it has been posited by Bent Juel-Jensen and Stuart Munro-Hay that the striking resemblance of eighth-century coins of King Offa to the sixth-century ʾAksumite coin which was reportedly excavated near Hastings in England is potentially significant and may be suggestive of a positive correlation between the designs of ʾAksumite coins and those of King Offa.¹⁴ Dating the life activity, or indeed afterlife, of coins is notoriously difficult, yet the ʾAksumite coin poses many more questions than it answers. No other evidence for such an assertion has come to light, and the ʾAksumite coin has instead been described as a stray Byzantine find; indicating that England’s connections to ʾAksum may have been, at best, secondary, tertiary, or even further removed.¹⁵ Too little else is currently known to support any greater picture of potential late-ʾAksumite, or even post-ʾAksumite, inter-regional connectivity with Latin Europe. A similar circumstantial example has been argued for Nubian-Italian connectivity in the latter centuries of the first millennium. Bogdan Żurawski has described the Anastasis scene at Banganarti in Nubia, which dates to between c. 850 and c. 1050, as having striking similarities to certain examples found in Rome, particularly for its dark contrasting background – specifically the contemporary Anastasis’ at the churches of San Clemente and San Giovanni e Paulo – especially when compared with the traditional Byzantine or Coptic versions of the scene, including the one other known Nubian example at Faras. This has led Żurawski to suggest that an artistic import from Rome is the most plausible explanation for the scene’s style, which would offer evidence for otherwise undocumented connectivity between Nubia and Latin Europe, whether an Italian painted the Anastasis at Banganarti or a Nubian artist imported this style themselves after residing for a time in the Italian peninsula.¹⁶

More questions are posed when we consider religious diasporas, notably those who travelled to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. In 1203, the Nubian ‘king’ witnessed in Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders (1202–4) was said to have desired to continue his travels towards Santiago de Compostela via Rome. However, current evidence indicates a lack of a strong cult of St. James in Nubia to explain the desire of the ‘king’ in 1203.¹⁷ This would then appear to be rhetoric employed by the Latin Christian author, Robert of Clari, but Nubians were said elsewhere to be present at the shrine in the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus, which also contains a guide to the Santiago pilgrimage, whilst Ibn Marrākušī in the early fourteenth century noted the presence of Christian Nubians (al-Nūbah), seemingly undertaking pilgrimage, just south of the shrine in 997 during the expedition of al-Manṣūr (r. 978–1002).¹⁸ Very little else exists to illuminate any such presence, yet the question of any presence addresses issues far beyond a simple matter of its existence. For example, given that Nubia’s Christianity was fundamentally shaped by Byzantine missionaries, not only is it important that Byzantine Christians showed an overwhelming disinterest in Santiago for a plausible explanation of cultural adoption by the Nubians, but it is also significant that the shrine only developed from the ninth century, long after Nubia’s conversion and during a period of apparent disconnect with the wider Mediterranean.¹⁹ It then stands to reason that the most plausible explanation for Nubian interest in the shrine was seemingly inspired by continued interactions with Latin Christian Europe in an otherwise currently unknown capacity which resulted in the Nubian adoption of Santiago de Compostela as a pilgrimage destination sometime in the ninth or tenth centuries. We may tentatively add here Ethiopians, too, but they are only recorded at the shrine from the fifteenth century and were not noted by Ibn Marrākušī – their appearance in the Codex Calixtinus is inconclusive – so no more can be said. Why, then, if some degree of connectivity possibly, if not likely, remained, did the apparent absence of knowledge displayed in the texts soon to be discussed occur?

Before moving to the First Crusade, it is also important to highlight that the question of apparent Latin Christian ignorance versus actual connectivity also applies elsewhere in Africa and was not specific to either Nubia or Ethiopia. This disparity between connectivity and knowledge production is perhaps most striking when we consider Latin Christian sources for West Africa. For example, there is also almost a complete absence of any surviving Latin Christian recorded knowledge of the largest West African kingdom prior to the First Crusade, the Wangaran kingdom of Ghāna, which encompassed large tracts of land in modern Mali and Mauritania.²⁰ The history of Ghāna before the ninth century, when the earliest surviving Arabic texts discuss the kingdom, is obscure, though archaeology reveals regional urbanisation and inter-regional connectivity, including with the Mediterranean, by the mid-first millennium, both including Ghāna and neighbouring centres, such as Gao.²¹ The sixteenth-century text of the Timbuktu-based Maḥmūd Kaʿti, the Taʾrῑkh al-Fattāš, which was subsequently expanded by Ibn al-Mukhtār in the following century, declares that Ghāna was ruled by 20 kings before the time of the Prophet Muḥammad and declined in the eighth century.²² The early date for the kingdom’s decline would appear to conflict earlier Muslim writers who continued to mention it from the ninth century, though it is possible that there was a dynastic change which explains both notions of an end and a continuation. The influence of the authorial motive within the Taʾrῑkh al-Fattāš, which was designed to legitimise the historic nature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mali’s Islamic past, cannot be overlooked when considering this supposed chronology.²³ The Taʾrῑkh al-Fattāš does, however, potentially highlight the dichotomy between northern Mediterranean material connectivity with Africa and the lack of a correlation with intellectual discourse. For instance, the Taʾrῑkh al-Fattāš describes Ghāna as the kingdom of the Kayamaga (كيمع), explicitly stating that this title meant the ‘king of gold’ in Wangaran, further giving the exact etymology of kaya (كيهو), ‘gold’, and magha[n] (مع), ‘king’ (malik).²⁴ The absence of Byzantine references to Ghāna is potentially surprising if, as David Phillipson has argued, Saharan gold was used in the mints of Byzantine North Africa, thus indicating routes of contact, either directly or via Imazighen intermediaries.²⁵ Similar observations could be made for Latin Europe. References to gold are so frequent in Muslim accounts of the kingdom throughout the period in question that it would suggest that any northern Mediterranean connection to this trade would have spurred intellectual inquisitiveness similar to the post-fourteenth-century Latin European ideas of the wealth of West Africa. Gold had long been associated with the existence of a great lake in West Africa from where it was supposedly traded – an historical understanding of the flooding of the Niger delta – but this does not appear to have resulted in Latin European knowledge of Ghāna during the centuries of its primacy.²⁶ Even on the eve of the First Crusade, there appears to have been no recorded Latin Christian awareness of the supposed Almoravid ‘conquest’ of Ghāna of 1076 despite the Almoravids facilitating many interactions with Latin Christendom following their conquests in the Iberian Peninsula from 1086.²⁷

In the case of Ghāna, its documenting in Latin Europe would also appear to have suffered from the activity of writers as decried by Richard of Poitiers. Yet, evidence for connectivity between the region and the Mediterranean into the early second millennium does appear.²⁸ One notable example is recalled by al-Bakrī (d. 1094), who related a story that King Ferdinand I of Castile and León (r. 1035/37–65) had been brought a mandīl (‘hankerchief’) by a merchant from the land of the Sūdān of West Africa made from a material found in the region which could not burn and which was said to have belonged to one of the Apostles. After showering the merchant with great riches, Ferdinand was then said to have sent this ‘relic’ to the emperor in Constantinople for its display in the Hagia Sophia (?, lit. ‘their [the Byzantine’s] great church’, kanīsatahum al-ʿuẓmā:كنيستهم العظمى) who then sent a crown in return for Ferdinand to be invested with.²⁹ The arrival of other West African cloth in Latin Europe at this time, known as bouracan/bougran, also illustrates the diversity of West Afro-European connectivity in addition to the foundational trades of gold, ivory, and slaves.³⁰ No Latin European sources validate al-Bakrī’s anecdote, but it is clear that the absence of recorded knowledge may not necessarily translate as being indicative of a lack of interaction. Largely coincidently, and without any accompanying narrative information, the toponym of Ghāna only first appears as Gana in a translation of geographical Arabic tables in 1141 in the work of Raymond of Marseille, as contemporary West Africa remained obscure for over another century.³¹ The Latin Christian perceived ignorance of West Africa, despite evidence for connectivity, highlights the importance of the role of the author, and of their discourse, in knowledge production which underpins the temporal focuses of Latin Christian writers between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries which will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Even though it would appear that there was a lack of contemporary knowledge in circulation regarding various regions of Africa in Latin Europe between the seventh and eleventh centuries, it may actually reflect an absence of perceived importance awarded to these regions by Latin Christian writers, rather than an absence of knowledge or connectivity. This framing would also explain why Nubia and Ethiopia gained primary importance in the Latin Christian texts of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries as they gained the significance of being desired potential allies.

Whilst the eleventh century may paint a picture of a disconnected Africa and Latin Europe, such a view may actually be unreflective of reality and is the product of source survival and authorial motives which commonly focused on other issues. Whatever may be said about the degrees of direct and indirect connectivity, certainly any awareness of the contemporary affairs of either Nubia or Ethiopia by the Latin Christians upon the launch of the First Crusade (1095–9) does not feature in the surviving textual corpus. An inconsistent or lack of knowledge by Latin Christian writers of Muslim West Africa may be understandable but even Nubia’s and Ethiopia’s Christianity, a uniting force in the connections of late antiquity, was a distant memory in the rhetoric of the First Crusade. Neither Nubia nor Ethiopia were of concern to the First Crusaders and instead primarily featured initially in observations of their inclusion in the enemy Fāṭimid armies. As far as the intellectual textual corpus reveals, Africa and Latin Europe were worlds apart, and any connectivity did not translate into any contemporary knowledge being recorded by either Latin Christians, Nubians, or Ethiopians of each other on either side of the Mediterranean in the surviving texts dating to the centuries immediately prior to 1095. So why did this change from the twelfth century following the First Crusade and the establishment of the Crusader States?

The Crusades’ Introduction to Nubia and Ethiopia in Context

Centuries of seeming stagnation in Latin European knowledge of a contemporary Africa would, at first, appear to have little in connection with the Crusades. After all, prior to the thirteenth century, the earliest Crusades were centred on the Holy Land, not focusing on any part of Africa at all. Yet, the (re)introduction of Nubia and Ethiopia to the Latin Christians serves to emphasise the increasing importance placed on them by the second half of the twelfth century following what would appear to have been a rather sudden re-emergence in Latin Christian intellectual discourse, due to their geographical proximity to the Crusader States, after centuries of neglect. Following the final loss of the Crusader States in 1291, Nubia and Ethiopia soon found themselves being key elements in Latin Christian recovery plans to reconquer the Holy Land and many Latin Christian hopes of victory over the Mamlūks hinged on the building of successful relationships with both of these kingdoms in the following decades and centuries. However, this was not at all the case for the earliest Crusaders who knew very little about the Christian African lands closest to the epicentre of the Crusades, particularly regarding the current situation of ‘Ethiopia’. The First Crusade continued the Latin tradition of textual ignorance of contemporary African affairs, both in its rhetoric and in its planning, but it was the catalyst for this whole process of later knowledge development. How and why, then, did Nubia and Ethiopia evolve from being seemingly obscure places to becoming central features of later Crusade discourses? Firstly, it is important to understand how these places were understood upon the launch of the First Crusade in 1095 prior to these later developments.

From the outset, the early First Crusade narrative was one that described the expedition as entering a vast region where Christianity was in decline. This depiction of the East, which included ‘Ethiopia’, was said to have been first born out of Pope Urban II’s famous speech at Clermont in 1095, which launched the initial Crusade. For example, Guibert of Nogent (wr. revised until c. 1121), abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Nogent, recalled Urban supposedly declaring very clearly the position of the ‘Ethiopians’ to the potential Crusaders at Clermont:

According to the prophet, [the Antichrist] will undoubtedly kill three kings pre-eminent for their faith in Christ, that is, the kings of Egypt, of [North] Africa, and of Ethiopiae. This cannot happen at all, unless Christianity is established where paganism now rules. Therefore if you are eager to carry out pious battles, and since you have accepted the seedbed of the knowledge of God from Jerusalem, then you may restore the grace that was borrowed there. Thus through you the name of Catholicism will be propagated, and it will defeat the perfidy of the Antichrist and of the Antichristians. Who can doubt that God, who surpasses every hope by means of his overflowing strength, may so destroy the reeds of paganism with your spark that he may gather Egypt, Africa and Ethiopiam, which no longer share our belief, into the rules of his law, and ‘sinful man, the son of perdition’, will find others resisting him?³²

Prior to that declaration, Urban was also said to have stated that Islam ‘first covered the name of Christ, but now it has wiped out his name from the furthest corners of the entire East, from Africa, Egypt, Ethiopiae, Libya, and even the remote coasts of Spain – a country near us’.³³ Clearly, at least rhetorically, the Christians of Nubia, and we could also add here Ethiopia, were now but a historical memory as far as the Latin Christians were concerned.

Despite such rhetoric, it was not as if the Latin Christians were disconnected from certain African Christian communities, even if not the Nubians and Ethiopians. For instance, despite Urban apparently also decrying the loss of Christianity in North Africa too, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) concerned himself greatly with North African Christians. In a letter to the bishop of Carthage in 1076, Gregory opened with

it has come to our attention … when old Christianity was flourishing [in North Africa] it was ruled by a very large number of bishops, [but it] has fallen into such dire straits that it does not have three bishops for the ordination of a bishop.

This new bishop was to be sent to Rome to be ordained so that he may return and provide much-needed pastoral oversight and alleviate the oppressive labour of North African Christians.³⁴ The situation may not have been thriving, but it was not disconnected. Contact between the Latin papacy and North Africa is not overly surprising, as the North African Church, unlike the Christians of Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia, remained under Rome’s jurisdiction throughout its existence.³⁵ Indeed, North African Christians maintained their links with Rome and other Latin Christian areas of the Mediterranean, and the population may not have been as in turmoil as Latin Christian sources would otherwise suggest, particularly prior to the twelfth century.³⁶ The exchanging of letters also reiterates the problems of tracing knowledge using only narrative sources. Chronicles, for example, shed little light on the matter but knowledge still flowed along the news networks of the wider Mediterranean, such as those which informed Gregory of the plight of Christianity in North Africa. Indeed, Isabelle Dolezalek has highlighted the textile exchanges between North African and Sicilian churches into the twelfth century, for example, suggesting that these communities were certainly not isolated, though there are, of course, questions over the strength of such connections in the previous century.³⁷ Notably, however, despite Gregory making ‘crusade’ plans as early as 1074 and concerning himself with the affairs of North African Christians, North African Christians became erased from the early crusade narrative as told by early writers and, like the Nubians and Ethiopians, became rhetorical spectres of the past.³⁸

If knowledge of North African Christianity could be erased by the rhetoric of absence, the same could easily have been applied to the more distant ‘Ethiopians’. More generally, a notable fact about the First Crusaders is that they largely remained as ignorant of details of other Christians as they were of the theology of the Muslims who they were being sent to fight. This was especially true in relation to the Christian African groups present in the Holy Land who were not subject to the Latin papacy, whether Nubians, Ethiopians, or, to a lesser extent, the Copts of Egypt.³⁹ Moreover, evidence of Latin contact with wider Eastern Christian groups, despite being the collective Christians the Crusaders hoped to ‘liberate’, is scant.⁴⁰ This was despite the fact that, to some contemporary Latin writers, the Latin papacy acted as the protector of all Christians in both the East and the West, even though this had the clear caveat that Latin Christianity maintained superiority.⁴¹ The centuries of schisms, with the most recent being the so-called Great Schism with the Greek Church in 1054, did little to facilitate favourable constant cordial and well-informed relations. Whilst it is not much of a surprise that no evidence for Latin correspondence with the churches of Nubia and Ethiopia exists as they were subordinate to the Patriarch of Alexandria, no eleventh-century letters survive between the Latin papacy and the Coptic papacy either. It is possible that news could have been gathered via Byzantium, whose own patriarch held a self-styled role as the ecumenical patriarch, though communication with either Nubia or Ethiopia is circumstantial, and evidence of contact between the Byzantine patriarch and Latin leaders is again lacking.⁴² Only limited eleventh-century evidence survives of contact between the Latin papacy and other eastern church leaders prior to the First Crusade.⁴³ In regards to Nubia and Ethiopia, the continuation of the History of the Patriarchs (originally started in the tenth century by Sāwīrus ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, the Coptic Bishop of Ashmunein, and added to over later centuries by various authors) records how the Coptic See moved from Alexandria further south to Cairo during the reign of Pope St. Christodoulos (r. 1046–77), apparently wanting to make it easier to receive the many messengers received from Nubia and Ethiopia.⁴⁴ Such an act highlights the importance of the relationship between the north-east African churches and the potential scope for the knowledge networks that Latin communication with the Coptic papacy, either directly or via Byzantine networks, would have enabled. Instead, such fractured networks only served to inhibit the reception and access to information.

The disconnect between the churches is apparent in the absence of Latin knowledge of the miaphysite ecumenical proclamation of faith between the churches of Egypt, Armenia, Syria, Nubia, and Ethiopia in 1088.⁴⁵ Unbeknown to the First Crusaders, they were arriving into a theologically united land which shared, at least rhetorically, their opposition to the Muslims. Whilst the shared proclamation did not result in conflict between Eastern Christians and Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean to warrant a special strategic interest by the Latins, the Latin ignorance of it further emphasises the mentality of the First Crusade. The Crusade was misguided by a flawed belief in its ultimate success and, despite the reported rhetoric of Urban’s speech at Clermont, at least as told by Guibert of Nogent, Eastern Christians were not needed to fulfil their objective – though some, such as the Armenians, were often significant allies of the Latin Christians – even though the ‘liberation’ of Eastern Christians more generally was maintained as one of the Crusade’s primary objectives.⁴⁶ Any attempts at intelligence gathering prior to the First Crusade on any matters, whether political or theological regarding the local Christian populations, appears to have been non-existent. Yet, whether the textual disconnect was truly the result of ignorance or is a product of source survival will remain a key question.⁴⁷

If the Crusaders had taken care to learn about the situation in the Holy Land and the surrounding region, they may have become aware of tensions between Ethiopia and Egypt which may have been worth trying to exploit regardless of whether this may actually have been a possibility. As narrated in the continuation of the History of the Patriarchs, Ethiopia required a new abun to be consecrated by the Coptic papacy during the reign of Pope St. Kyril II (r. 1078–92). The vizier of Egypt, Badr al-Jamālī, however, disapproved of Kyril’s original choice and pressured for the appointment of his own candidate. When al-Jamālī’s candidate was appointed to maintain good relations between Egypt and Ethiopia, tensions within Ethiopia quickly began to sour as their new abun built seven mosques for the use of Muslim merchants. The abun was imprisoned, and the mosques were destroyed, which led to similar retaliations towards Christians in Egypt, creating a relationship of increased tensions.⁴⁸ Additionally, on the eve of the First Crusade, between 1088 and 1091, the first known reference to the Egyptian fear of the Ethiopian ruler’s ability to control the Nile floods, giving him power over Egypt’s prosperity, which would become a key attribute to the later Latin attributions of Ethiopia being the kingdom of Prester John from the fourteenth century, appeared.⁴⁹ Equally, from the Nubian perspective, later Muslim historians, such as al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442) and al-ʿAynī (d. 1451), claim that the events which led to the Nubian ourou Solomon’s ‘retirement’ to Cairo in 1079 actually stemmed from his arrest following Solomon’s arrival in Aswan to visit some churches.⁵⁰ The reasons for his arrest are unclear, but the very act related by these later texts would suggest that relations between Nubia and Egypt on the eve of the Crusades may not have been entirely amicable either. Nothing about these events suggests that neither Nubia nor Ethiopia would necessarily have welcomed the Crusaders, however, but it is striking that the Latins did not appear to know about potentially important tensions and divisions in the Holy Land in which to attempt to exploit upon their arrival. Instead, ‘Ethiopians’ were only discussed in relation to the loss and enemies of Christianity in the Holy Land and the wider region. This was also despite both levels of trade and pilgrimage to the Holy Land increasing throughout the eleventh century, which otherwise should have facilitated avenues for knowledge dissemination back in Latin Europe regarding the Holy Land’s African Christian inhabitants, particularly their presence at shared Christian shrines.⁵¹

Negotiating ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Ethiopians’ on Crusade

The Latin ignorance of the Nubians and Ethiopians is epitomised by the rhetoric of the early Crusade writers. No reference to either contemporary kingdom is found in these texts, and ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Ethiopians’ only appear to serve the current absence of Christianity in the region. Beyond the arena of the First Crusade, works such as the Virtutes apostolorum (also known as the work of Pseudo-Abdias) were reproduced throughout the medieval period and continually reaffirmed St. Matthew’s successful proselytising, which led to ‘all the provinces of the Aethiopium [being] filled with Catholic churches until the present day’.⁵² Indeed, Ethiopia’s Christianity, too, was not unknown to the Latin Christians. Otto of Freising correctly noted in his Chronica (1157) how ulterior India (ʾAksum) had been converted by the missionaries Edesius and Frumentius in the fourth century.⁵³ Yet, according to Guibert of Nogent’s recollection of Pope Urban II’s famous speech, as noted earlier, Islam had now consumed ‘Ethiopia’ and replaced an ancient Christianity which dated back to the apostles themselves. Other writers, including those who went on the Crusade, such as Fulcher of Chartres (wr. continually from during the Crusade until c.1128), also echoed this view and claimed that ‘Ethiopia’ was a land adjacent to the Holy Land where Christianity was now absent.⁵⁴ No contemporary Latin Christian writer, though, made any similar claims regarding Ethiopia, which remained overlooked. Instead, it took the best part of the twelfth century to begin to witness Latin texts that not only associate both Nubia and Ethiopia with Christianity but also for Latin Christians to even directly acknowledge either place or their peoples at all beyond that of the vague region. The rhetoric of an un-Christian ‘Ethiopia’ was more important for those writing about and justifying the First Crusade than any attempt to document the reality or in exploring any potential significance that either Nubia or Ethiopia could hold as later generations of Latin Christians would do.

Notably, ‘Ethiopia’s’ role in the Latin Christian rhetoric of the early Crusades is in stark contrast to other former Christian regions, such as Spain. For example, despite its equal position alongside ‘Ethiopia’ and North Africa as a place no longer Christian according to First Crusade writers, the memory of a Christian Spain ab antiquo before the Arab invasions of 711 was a driving force for expeditions to the Iberian Peninsula during the Second Crusade (1147–9).⁵⁵ Yet, comparatively, there appears to have been much less initial Crusader appetite for Egyptian expeditions to reclaim Christian land based on a shared memory of a pre-642 Christian Egypt, or, by extension, its neighbours in ‘Ethiopia’. The Christian losses of Spain and Egypt were only separated by 69 years but were remembered very differently in early crusading mentality. Moreover, there appears to have been no acknowledgement by the Latin Christians that the population of contemporary Egypt may have been, according to the estimates of Tamer el-Leithy, still mostly Christian up until the fourteenth century, which in turn could have formed an early focus for Crusader strategy, whether this would have been successful or not.⁵⁶ This apparent absence in the rhetoric of Christianity in Africa is even more striking given that the title of King Baldwin I of Jerusalem (r. 1100–18) claimed that he was also rex Babylonie vel Asia. Baldwin’s full title suggests that there was an intent to conquer Egypt in the early years of the Crusader States, although extensive expeditions into Egypt only occurred later during the 1160s.⁵⁷ If an attempt at the conquest of Egypt was to be expected from an early date, a memory of Christian Egypt, like that of Spain, which would likely have included knowledge of its subordinate churches in Nubia and Ethiopia, would be presumed to have been more prominent in Latin Christian works. However, there appears to have been no early interest or concern in acknowledging the African Christian groups.

The rhetoric of ‘Ethiopia’ being subsumed by Muslims prior to the Crusades was further supported by the fact that many First Crusade writers described the presence of ‘Ethiopians’ in the enemy Muslim armies. In the texts, these ‘Ethiopians’ served to both highlight the alterity of the Muslim armies and to further paint the picture of the geographic vastness which the subjects of Islam came from. Furthermore, passages concerning enemy ‘Ethiopians’ primarily acted as a motif to embolden the Latin Christian reception of the courage and other deeds of the Franks in the eyes of each writer’s Latin Christian audience. Whilst the link is never made explicit in the texts, this image of fighting and defeating enemy ‘Ethiopians’ likely had an additional importance for a Latin Christian audience too. It represented a physical embodiment of the wider cultural traditional metaphysical conflict against sin, which was often depicted or embodied as an ‘Ethiopian’ demon and had been a common Christian literary trope for centuries.⁵⁸ As such, many Latin Christian readers may have understood the texts as both documenting the realities of the First Crusade and as reinforcing the specific spirituality of the First Crusaders. The witnessing of ‘Ethiopians’ in the Muslim armies by the Latin Christians was not just rhetoric, however, and such descriptions could have also reflected the widespread use of Africans in the Fāṭimid armies. ‘Ethiopian’, or specifically Nubian, soldiers formed core regiments in the Fāṭimid armies, so their appearance in Crusader texts should not be altogether surprising.⁵⁹ This is supported by the fact that the Latin Christian writers commonly describe the ‘Ethiopian’ soldiers in an observational matter-of-fact way and do not overtly employ their physical appearances in the texts to necessarily explicitly serve any obvious additional rhetorical purpose.

Enemy ‘Ethiopians’ appear in Latin Christian texts written by authors who both participated in the Crusade and who did not.⁶⁰ For instance, Fulcher of Chartres, who served as a chaplain on the First Crusade, made multiple mentions of ‘Ethiopians’ amongst the enemies of the Crusaders throughout his work.⁶¹ Fulcher even recounts in one episode how an ‘Ethiopian’ had actually injured King Baldwin sometime in 1103 after having waited stealthily in an attempt to ambush and kill him.⁶² Moreover, according to Fulcher, the threat from ‘Ethiopians’ was apparently so severe that those living around Jerusalem who strayed too far risked great danger of ambush in ravines and forests.⁶³ Fulcher’s text undoubtedly combined observation with some rhetoric when relating about the enemy ‘Ethiopians’, thus emphasising the entwined nature of both elements in his text’s production. More importantly, his descriptions influenced other writers, both in the East and in Latin Europe. For example, his description of ‘Ethiopians’ fighting in the Tower of David against the Crusaders was recycled by Bartolf of Nangis (d. c. 1109).⁶⁴ Little is known about Bartolf, but he made use of an early version of Fulcher’s text, suggesting that the enemy ‘Ethiopian’ motif was present in Fulcher’s text’s earliest incarnations long before the final version appeared in c. 1128.⁶⁵ Likewise, Fulcher’s anecdote regarding an ‘Ethiopian’ attacking King Baldwin is found in the work of the Armenian Matthew of Edessa, who appears to have directly lifted this bit of information directly from Fulcher, who did reside for a while in Edessa. Matthew of Edessa’s use of ‘Ethiopian’ (Et̕ovpatc̕i: Եթովպացի), would appear to be a clear attempted transliteration of the Latin Ethiopici, suggesting a copying of either Fulcher’s or another lost Latin text when contrasted against Matthew’s specific use of the Armenian ethnonym of ‘Nubian’ (Noubi, Նօւպի) elsewhere regarding Nubian soldiers in the Fāṭimid armies.⁶⁶ The Latin Christian narrative became entrenched enough that it also transferred beyond Latin Christendom and into an Armenian Christian text, whether Matthew was aware of the growing Latin significance of the topos or not. In addition to Fulcher, other eyewitnesses such as Guibert of Nogent also described ‘Ethiopians’ as enemies, along with a separate remark about ‘barbarians’ supposedly looking like ‘Ethiopians’ (Ethiopicis) on the slopes of Mount Sinai, highlighting the alterity of the non-Christian ‘Ethiopians’ and their perceived desecration of the Holy Land.⁶⁷ The narrative of the enemy ‘Ethiopian’ could be employed in multiple ways, both observationally and allegorically.

The circulation of texts featuring such narratives unsurprisingly influenced authors who did not travel to the East. For example, the Historia Hierosolymitana (wr. c. 1105) of Baldric of Dol, the abbot of Bourgeuil, was amongst the earliest texts of the First Crusade to note ‘Ethiopian’ soldiers despite Baldric not travelling to the East himself.⁶⁸ Baldric’s text, which remained the blueprint for generations of Crusade histories, was written to add authority to the theological reasoning and motivation of the First Crusade, further underlining the important rhetorical use of the non-Christian ‘Ethiopian’ in the early Crusade message. Notably, in contrast, the anonymous Gesta Francorum (wr. c.1100–1), an integral source for many First Crusade authors, did not mention enemy ‘Ethiopians’ at all, possibly suggesting that this detail was a conscious insertion during post-crusade discourse to emphasise a particular message.⁶⁹ Alternatively, indeed, the very first writers may not have deemed the presence of ‘Ethiopian’ soldiers to have been especially important information to note until later discourses developed. Whether influenced by first-hand accounts or following a particular topos, further experiences of ‘Ethiopians’ additionally began to infiltrate into works of other Latin Christian authors who equally did not travel to the East. For instance, Ralf of Caen, a Norman priest who wrote the Gesta Tancredi in expeditione Hierosolymitana (wr. c. 1118), also described an event regarding enemy ‘Ethiopians’ despite not likely travelling any further than the Principality of Antioch.⁷⁰ The inclusion of enemy ‘Ethiopians’ in texts written by authors who did not travel to the East may reflect their largely Norman background, in addition to fitting within a classical pre-Christian Roman tradition – a tradition which inevitably discussed these Africans as pagans.⁷¹ In the case of the possible importance of the writers having a shared Norman influence, Norman writers were known prior to the First Crusade to utilise an ‘enemy’ ‘Ethiopian’ topos, such as in Dudo’s Historia Normannorum (first circulated c.1015). Following its description of the peace between Duke Richard and King Lothair in the 960s, the text noted how the bodies of enemy ‘Ethiopians’ (Aethiopum) had turned white but, during attempts at looting the clothing of the dead who were remaining on the battlefield three days after the battle, they had remained black under their clothes.⁷² Using ‘Ethiopians’ as a rhetorical tool was not unique to the First Crusade. Nevertheless, as many of the First Crusade accounts relied on each other, this entwined textual tradition naturally resulted in many main details being copied, thus entrenching the existence of the enemy ‘Ethiopians’ whether as observational fact or as a rhetorical tool.⁷³

There was also a wider cultural phenomenon of ‘Ethiopians’ in Muslim ranks in Latin Christian chansons, which echoed many of the elements seen in the First Crusade texts. The Chanson de Roland, for instance, composed throughout the eleventh century, although the earliest manuscript dates to the second quarter of the twelfth century, tells of the ‘accursed land’ (une terre maldite) of ‘Ethiopia’ (Ethïope) being a dominion of the uncle of the Muslim king Marsilie.⁷⁴ The influence of literary traditions is also apparent in the use of the ethnonym of Açopart, a corruption of the French word Etiope, which, via speech and the subsequent rendering of the ‘-ti-’ to ‘-ç-’, became a specific poetic term for these ‘Ethiopians’ and was employed by some of the early First Crusade historians.⁷⁵ For example, Albert of Aachen, a canon who wrote a history of the First Crusade entitled the Historia Hierosolymitiana (wr. c. 1125–50), referred to ‘Ethiopians’ in this way.⁷⁶ Albert did not travel to the Holy Land himself, highlighting that the notion of enemy ‘Ethiopians’ could be informed by an array of sources, both literary and non-literary.⁷⁷ The use of Açopart was not restricted to those who did not travel to the East either. Even earlier, Peter Tudebode, a priest who accompanied the First Crusade, likewise mentioned enemy ‘Ethiopians’ (Asupatorum) amongst the emir’s force outside Ascalon which included Saracens, Arabs, Turks, Kurds, ‘Ethiopians’, Azymites, and other pagans in his Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere (c.1110).⁷⁸ Why Peter, as someone who did travel to the East, used the literary ethnonym in place of the more common Ethiopes is unknown. Poetic sources do appear to inform Peter’s Historia elsewhere in his text, suggesting that the use of Asupart was also a product of the use of literary sources, similarly to Albert, regardless of his first-hand experience.⁷⁹ In which case, the rhetoric of Latin authors, including those supposedly recording the words of the pope himself, narrating ideas of the ‘Ethiopian’ enemy were also building on a separate, yet sometimes entwined, body of popular literature which interwove this perception into multiple layers of society at the turn of the twelfth century. Yet, the negative image of a pagan ‘Ethiopia’ and enemy ‘Ethiopians’ which was disseminated in the more immediate works of the First Crusade was not engrained enough that it could not be removed.

Towards the Early Tides of Change

The topos of the enemy ‘Ethiopian’ may have been replicated by numerous authors but it was largely isolated to the texts associated with the First Crusade and references dramatically reduced in the following decades. Orderic Vitalis’ Historia Ecclesiastica (wr. c. 1141), for instance, also described ‘Ethiopian’ soldiers fighting the Crusaders, specifically against the Count of Flanders and Tancred, but such texts are the exception, and even Orderic’s text, significantly, only mentions such ‘Ethiopians’ in relation to the First Crusade and not subsequent events.⁸⁰ This late inclusion by Orderic can be explained by the fact that he is known to have used Baldric of Dol as his principal source for Book IX in which the enemy ‘Ethiopians’ appear.⁸¹ His text, therefore, does not necessarily show that the rhetorical or physical image of the ‘Ethiopian’ enemy held any particular longevity amongst his contemporary writers but can be understood as an example of mere direct copying. That said, Latin Christian writers continued to document what they observed. For example, an ‘Ethiopian’ presence within the Muslim armies was still noted into the second half of the twelfth century, such as by William, the Archbishop of Tyre (d. 1186), who described how he witnessed armed ‘Ethiopian’ (Ethiopum) guards who ‘eagerly made repeated salutations of reverence to the sultan’ (crebre salutationis officium certatim soldano exhibentes) whilst participating in an embassy to Cairo in 1167.⁸² With the exception of William of Tyre, it is notable that later writers overwhelmingly do not take care to commonly list ‘Ethiopians’ amongst Muslim armies in their works. Whilst `Black’ (Nigri/Mauros [italicise words in brackets]) soldiers were still encountered by the Latin Christians, such as in the armies fought by the Third Crusaders (1189–1192), they were reportedly from North Africa (Nadabares, Getuli, and Numide) and not associated with ‘Ethiopia’, possibly reflecting developing Latin Christian awareness.⁸³ One exception to this was in the work of Oliver of Paderborn (wr. 1220–2) which did, however, describe ‘Ethiopian’ soldiers in the Muslim armies of the Fifth Crusade (1217–21) in one passage, though his text also greatly portrayed the power of the Christian Nubian king which will be later related.⁸⁴ The decrease in references to ‘Ethiopians’ in Muslim armies would also have been impacted by the effect of Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn’s active policy to replace Nubians with Turkish and Arab soldiers upon his initial succession as Sultan of Egypt in 1171.⁸⁵ Whilst fewer ‘Ethiopian’ soldiers may have been observable, it is noticeable that narratives similar to those disseminated recording the First Crusade decreased as greater understanding of Christian Nubians and Ethiopians occurred.

Amidst the overwhelmingly negative image of the rhetoric of ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Ethiopians’ during the First Crusade, there was almost no specific mention of the toponym of ‘Nubia’ during the first decades of the Crusader States and no evidence of any direct Latin Christian understanding of the Ethiopian kingdom of Bǝg^wǝna. One direct reference to Nubians appears in the Chronica universale of Ekkehard of Aura, a Benedictine monk who died in 1125, in which the Novades (Nobades – the peoples of the northern Kingdom of Nubia prior to its annexation by Makuria in the early eighth century) from Aethiopia feature amongst the details of the troubles during the latter history of the Roman Empire.⁸⁶ Ekkehard’s reference to enemy Nubians is, however, coincidental as he used Jordanes’ sixth-century Romana as his source for his recollection of the Novades in relation to Roman imperial history rather than portraying any understanding of contemporary Nubia.⁸⁷ In fact, despite participating in the 1101 Crusade, Ekkehard did not make any note of enemy ‘Ethiopians’ or Nubians in the Muslim armies of the First Crusade in either his Chronica or separate Hierosolymita. His ‘Ethiopia’ and the Novades were historical entities unrelated to contemporary events in the East. Instead, any surviving textual awareness of a contemporary Nubia within Latin Europe first appeared in c. 1130. This brief appearance of Nubia was described in passing as a land below Egypt in Hugh of St. Victor’s Descriptio Mappe Mundi, but without any further details, including whether it was Christian or not.⁸⁸ The Descriptio did, though, provide the geographical foundations for subsequent Latin Christian knowledge of a specific ‘Nubia’, especially regarding cartographical sources, which developed from the twelfth century.⁸⁹ The disparity between the early development of Latin Christian knowledge concerning Nubia and the surviving contemporary sources is arguably best reflected in the chansons of the First and Second Crusade Cycles. Although the earliest manuscripts of the first cycle date towards the end of the twelfth century, the chansons are believed to have been first conceived relatively soon after the events of the First Crusade, which they describe. The first cycle includes Nubian (of Nubie) enemies who provide important Muslim characters. The use of Nubie may suggest that the toponym was known more widely in Latin Christendom despite the lack of surviving texts but nothing more can be said. Importantly, the later second cycle actively replaces these originally Muslim characters as Christian, often with scenes of conversion, and seemingly reflects the growing development of knowledge concerning Christian Nubia amongst Latin Christians.⁹⁰ The twelfth century clearly presents two different eras of intellectual productivity: an early period of chosen Latin Christian ignorance of Christian north-east Africa and a later more informed period which began to develop as a result of increasing interactions in the eastern Mediterranean.

Throughout the first half of the twelfth century, Latin Christian texts initially entrenched the view that ‘Ethiopians’ were enemies of the Crusaders and that ‘Ethiopia’ was a land absent of Christianity. The employment of the rhetoric of a non-Christian ‘Ethiopia’ aided the First Crusade’s message as the descriptions of ‘Ethiopians’ in the Muslim armies served to highlight the alterity of the enemy armies, whilst also almost certainly detailing the presence of Nubians, and other Africans, in the Fāṭimid armies. This would not, however, necessarily have resulted in a lack of knowledge regarding the Christianity of at least some of the ‘Ethiopians’, as the Crusaders were well aware of other Christian soldiers utilised by the Fāṭimids, such as Armenians.⁹¹ ‘Ethiopia’, at first, embodied the reasoning of the calling of the First Crusade by describing it as a former Christian land as reflected in both Crusader narratives and wider chanson culture. Yet, it is important to state that some influential texts, such as Robert the Monk’s (d. 1122) Historia Iherosolimitana, did not feature enemy ‘Ethiopians’ at all despite being amongst the most widely distributed First Crusade texts, thus providing difficulties for quantifying the extent of the audience who received this narrative.⁹² Nevertheless, the First Crusaders do not appear to show much knowledge, if any, of the contemporary lands below Egypt and certainly do not appear to show any great awareness of any events happening elsewhere in Africa. Within a few generations, however, the Crusader presence in the East and their engagement with various Eastern knowledge networks reintroduced Latin Christian writers to the lands of Christian Nubia and Ethiopia – the latter as ‘Abyssinia’ – importantly laying the foundations for subsequent Latin Christian desires to enhance their engagement with the Christian north-east African powers, beginning with Nubia.

Notes

1. Licet stulticiam simulaverim scribens puerilia, hoc est hystorias veterum replicando, compilando, in unum congerendo, tamen presenti tempori nil utilius retractandum fore perspexerim, presertim cum aut inopia aut inercia scriptorium fere que a quadringentis annis gesta sunt oblivioni tradita esse non sit dubium: Ricardi Pictaviensis, ‘Chronica’, in MGH SS, XXVI, 76. Other influential contemporary writers made similar claims regarding the inactivity of previous writers, such as those of the eleventh-century historian Rodulphus Glaber: Rodulphi Glabri, Historiarum libri quinque: The Five Books of the Histories, ed. and trans. J. France (Oxford, 1989), Book I Ch. 1, pp. 2–3 (text and trans.).

2. Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Saint-Benoît-sur Loire, eds. M. Prou, A.  Vidier, and H.  Stein, 2 vols. (Paris, 1907–32), pp. 1:343–7.

3. Anastasius compiled a chronicle based on Byzantine sources which told of these actions of the rex Azumitensium, though erroneously attributing them to the sixteenth year of Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–65): Theophanes, Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor, 2 vols. (Hildesheim, 1980), II:142.

4. For an overview, see J. H. F. Dijkstra, ‘Blemmyes, Noubades and the Eastern Desert in Late Antiquity: Reassessing the Written Sources’, in The History of the Peoples of the Eastern Desert, eds. H. Barnard and K. Duistermaat (Los Angeles, 2012), pp. 238–47.

5. Iohannis Biclarensis, ‘Chronica’, in Victoris Tunnunensis Chronicon cum reliquiis ex Consularibus Caesaraugustanis et Iohannis Biclarensis Chronicon, ed. C. Cardelle de Hartmann (Turnhout, 2001), Ch. 28, 65.

6. Strabo, Geography, ed. and trans. Jones, 17.1.2, pp. VIII:4–5 (text and trans.).

7. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, eds. and trans. Rackham, Jones, and Eichholz, 5.10.53, pp. II:258–8 (text and trans.).

8. The sources regarding Kalēb’s expedition are summarised in Shahīd, The Martyrs of Najran. The earlier contemporary Greco-Latin recounting of the conversion of ʾAksum by Frumentius was often described in texts as the conversion of ‘India’, but the reference directly to ʿEzana highlights the intimacy of the knowledge networks at work: Sozomenus, Kirchengeschichte, eds. J. Bidez and G. C. Hansen (Berlin, 1995), Book II Ch. 24, pp. 82–4 (text); Sozomen, The Ecclesiastical History: Comprising a History of the Church from A.D. 324 to A.D. 440, trans. E. Walford (London, 1855), pp. 85–8 (trans.); Sokrates, Kirchengeschichte, ed. G. C. Hansen (Berlin, 1995), Book I Ch. 19, pp. 60–2 (text); Socrates Scholasticus, The Ecclesiastical History: Comprising a History of the Church in Seven Books from the Accession of Constantine, A.D. 305, to the 38th Year of Theodosius II, Including a Period of 140 Years, anon. trans. (London, 1853), pp. 51–2 (trans.); Theodoret, Kirchengeschichte, ed. L. Parmentier and G. C. Hansen (Berlin, 1998), Book I Ch. 23, pp. 73–4 (text); Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History: A History of the Church in Five Books from A.D. 322 to the Death of Theordore of Mopsuestia A.D. 427, trans. E. Walford (London, 1843), pp. 71–3 (trans.); Rufinus Aquileiensis, ‘Historia Ecclesiastica’, Book X Ch. 9, in PL 21.478–80 (text); Rufinus of Aquileia, History of the Church, trans. P. R. Amidon (Washington, DC, 2016), pp. 393–5 (trans.).

9. W. Y. Adams, with N. K. Adams, Qasr Ibrim: The Ballaña Phase (London, 2013), pp. 79, 82–3.

10. The corpus of Latin words in Gəʿəz is admittedly small: S. Weninger, ‘Lateinische Fremdwörter im Äthiopischen’, Biblische Notizen, 102 (2000), pp. 141–5. A similar decline appears to also have occurred in Syriac following the Islamic expansion suggesting that these disruptions were not localised to Africa either: A. M. Butts, ‘Latin Words in Classical Syriac’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 19.1 (2016), pp. 123–92. Regrettably, no comparable work on the opposite direction of linguistic diffusion is known to have been undertaken.

11. V. Christides, ‘The Image of the Sudanese in Byzantine Sources’, Byzantinoslavica, 43 (1982), 17.

12. On the middle Byzantine historians see W. Treadgold, The Middle Byzantine Historians (New York, 2013), 457–89, esp. 457.

13. For example, see A. Karpozilos, ‘Ἡ θέση τῶν μαύρων στὴ Βυζαντινὴ κοινωνία’, in Οι Περιθωριακοι στο Βυζάντιο, ed. C. Maltezou (Athens, 1993), pp. 67–81.

14. B. Juel-Jensen and S. Munro-Hay, ‘Further Examples of Coins of Offa Inspired by Aksumite Designs’, Spink Numismatic Circular, 102 (1994), pp. 256–7.

15. W. Hahn, ‘Aksumite Numismatics – A Critical Survey of Recent Research’, Revue numismatique, 155 (2000), 288n27.

16. B. Żurawski, ‘The Anastasis Scene from the Lower Church III at Banganarti (Upper Nubia)’, Études et travaux, 21 (2007), pp. 162–82.

17. B. Rostkowska, ‘The Visit of a Nubian King to Constantinople in AD. 1203’, in New Discoveries in Nubia: Proceedings of the Colloquium on Nubian Studies, The Hague, 1979, ed. P. van Moorsel (Leiden, 1982), 115.

18. Liber Sancti Jacobi: Codex Calixtinus, ed. W. M. Whitehill, 3 vols. (Santiago de Compostela, 1944), I:148–9 (text); Ibn ʿIdhārī al-Marrākushī, Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib fi akhbār al-Andalus wa-al-Maghrib = Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord et de l’Espagne musulmane intitulé Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib, eds. G. S. Colin and É. Lévi-Provençal, 2 vols. (Beirut, 1948–51), II:296 (text); Ibn ʿIdhārī al-Marrākushī, Histoire de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne intitulée al-Bayano’l-Mogrib, trans. E. Fagnan, 2 vols. (Algiers, 1901–4), II:494 (trans.).

19. For Byzantine disinterest in Santiago de Compostela, see D. Abrahamse, ‘Byzantine Views of the West in the Early Crusade Period: The Evidence of Hagiography’, in The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange Between East and West during the Period of the Crusades, ed. V. P. Goss (Kalamazoo, MI, 1986), 193.

20. For a recent assessment of Ghāna during the early period, see M. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton, 2018), pp. 30–42.

21. Scholarship on this question is ever increasing; for a representative sample of recent work, see T. R. Fenn et al., ‘Contacts Between West Africa and Roman North Africa: Archaeometallurgical Results from Kissi, Northeastern Burkina Faso’, in Crossroads/Carrefour Sahel: Cultural and Technological Developments in First Millennium BC/AD West Africa, eds. S. Magnavita, L. Koté, P. Breunig, and O. A. Idé (Frankfurt, 2009), pp. 119–46; K. C. MacDonald, ‘A View from the South: Sub-Saharan Evidence for Contacts between North Africa, Mauritania and the Niger, 1000 BC–AD 700’, in Money, Trade and Trade Routes in Pre-Islamic North Africa, eds. A. Dowler and E. R. Galvin (London, 2011), pp. 72–82; S. Magnavita, ‘Initial Encounters: Seeking Traces of Ancient Trade Connections between West Africa and the Wider World’, Afriques, 4 (2013), http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1145; D. J. Mattingly, V. Leitch, C. N. Duckworth, A. Cuénod, M. Sterry, and F. Cole, eds., Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond: Trans-Saharan Archaeology (Cambridge, 2017); S. Magnavita and C. Magnavita, ‘All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Facing the Myths of Ancient Trade between North- and Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Landscapes, Sources, and Intellectual Projects: Politics, History, and the West African Past, eds. T. Green and B. Rossi (Leiden, 2018), pp. 25–45.

22. Tarikh el-Fettach, eds. and trans. O. Houdas and M. Delafosse, 2 vols. (Paris, 1913), pp. I:41 (text), II:75–6 (trans.).

23. On the chronicle and its composition, see M. Nobili and M. S. Mathee, ‘Towards a New Study of the So-Called Tārīkh al-fattāsh’, History in Africa, 42 (2015), pp. 37–73.

24. Tarikh el-Fettach, eds. and trans. O. Houdas and M. Delafosse, pp. I:41 (text), II:75 (trans.).

25. D. W. Phillipson, ‘Trans-Saharan Gold Trade and Byzantine Coinage’, The Antiquaries Journal, 97 (2017), pp. 145–69. On Byzantine discussion of Africa in the second half of the first millennium more generally, see K. O’Bweng-Okwess, ‘L’attitude contrastée des Byzantins à l’égard des étrangers: le cas des peuples subsahariens du VIe au Xe siècle’, in Greece, Rome, Byzantium and Africa, eds. Henderson and Zacharopoulou, pp. 425–44.

26. S. K. McIntosh, ‘A Reconsideration of Wangara/Palolus, Island of Gold’, The Journal of African History, 22.2 (1981), pp. 145–58. Also see G. J. Rizzo, ‘The Patterns and Meaning of a Great Lake in West Africa’, Imago Mundi, 58.1 (2006), pp. 80–9.

27. The impact of the Almoravid interventions in Ghāna, whether violent or peaceful, is still debated, however. See D. Conrad and H. Fisher, ‘The Conquest That Never Was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076. I: The External Arabic Sources’, History in Africa, 9 (1982), pp. 21–59 and D. Conrad and H. Fisher, ‘The Conquest That Never Was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076. II: The Local Oral Sources’, History in Africa, 10 (1983), pp. 53–78; J. Hunwick, ‘Gao and the Almoravids Revisited: Ethnicity, Political Change and the Limits of Interpretation’, JAH, 35.2 (1994), pp. 251–73; D. Lange, ‘The Almoravid Expansion and the Downfall of Ghana’, Der Islam, 73 (1996), pp. 122–59; J. A. Miller, ‘Trading through Islam: The Interconnections of Sijilmasa, Ghana and the Almoravid Movement’, Journal of North African Studies, 6.1 (2001), pp. 29–58.

28. For example, see S. Nixon, T. Rehren, and M. Filomena Guerra, ‘New Light on the Early Islamic West African Gold Trade: Coin Moulds from Tadmekka, Mali’, Antiquity, 85.330 (2011), pp. 1353–68; S. M. Guérin, ‘Forgotten Routes? Italy, Ifrīqiya and the Trans-Saharan Ivory Trade’, Al-Masāq, 25.1 (2013), pp. 70–91. Connections were further facilitated by the arrival of the Fāṭimids in the early tenth century when they came to control large portions of Afro-Mediterranean trade, importantly illustrating a continued connectivity before and after the launch of the Crusades likely continuing intermediaries: Y. Lev, ‘A Mediterranean Encounter: The Fatimids and Europe, Tenth to Twelfth Centuries’, in Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of John Pryor, eds. R. Gertwagen and E. Jeffreys (Abingdon, 2016), pp. 137–40.

29. al-Bakrī, Kitāb al-masālik waʾl-mamālik, eds. A. P. van Leeuwen and A. Ferré, 2 vols. (Carthage, 1992), II:878 (text); N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, trans., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, 2000), 84 (trans.).

30. F.-J. Nicolas, ‘Le bouracan ou bougran, tissue soudanais du moyen âge’, Anthropos, 53.1 (1958), pp. 265–8.

31. Raymond de Marseille, Opera Omnia, Tome I: Traité de l’astrolabe, Liber cursuum planetarum, eds. M.-T. D’Alverny, C. Burnett, and E. Poulle (Paris, 2009), 198. The toponym reappears in Ramon Llull’s c. 1283 literary novel Blanquerna, for example, a scene in which the eponymous title character, after becoming pope, receives a pagan (gentil) at the Vatican following the reading of other business who had come from a place located further south than the city of Gana: Ramon Llull, Libre de Blanquerna, eds. S. Galmés and M. Ferrà (Palma de Mallorca, 1914), pp. 326–7 (text); Ramon Llull, Romance of Evast and Blaquerna, intro. by A. Soler and J. Santanach, trans. R. D. Hughes (Barcelona, 2016), pp. 374–59 (trans.).

32. Guibert de Nogent, Dei Gesta per Francos et cinq autres texts, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Turnhout, 1996), Book II Ch. 4, pp. 113–14 (text); Guibert of Nogent, The Deeds of God through the Franks: A Translation of Guibert de Nogent’s Gesta Dei per Francos, trans. R. Levine (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 43–4 (trans.).

33. Guibert de Nogent, Dei Gesta per Francos, ed. Huygens, Book I Ch. 4, pp. 98–9 (text); Guibert of Nogent, Deeds of God, trans. Levine, 35 (trans.).

34. Das Register Gregors VII, ed. E. Caspar, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1920–3), Book III, 19, I:285. See C. Courtois, ‘Grégoire VII et l’Afrique du Nord: remarques sur les communautés chrétiennes d’Afrique du Nord au XI siècle’, Revue Historique, 195 (1942), pp. 97–122, 193–226.

35. See J. Cuoq, L’Eglise d’Afrique du Nord du deuxième au douzième siècle (Paris, 1984).

36. For example, see D. Valérian, ‘La permanence du christianisme au Maghreb: l’apport problématique des sources latines’, in Islamisation et arabisation de l’occident musulman médiéval (VII^e-XII^e siècle), ed. D. Valérian (Paris, 2011), pp. 131–49.

37. I. Dolezalek, ‘Textile Connections? Two Ifrīqiyan Church Treasuries in Norman Sicily and the Problem of Continuity across Political Change’, Al-Masāq, 25.1 (2013), pp. 92–112.

38. H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Pope Gregory VII’s ‘Crusading’ Plans of 1074’, in Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem Presented to Joshua Prawer, eds. B. Z. Kedar, H. E. Mayer, and R. C. Smail (Jerusalem, 1982), pp. 27–40. Crusading beginnings can be dated even earlier, see B. Hamilton, ‘Pope John X (914–928) and the Antecedents of the First Crusade’, in In Laudem Hierosolymintani: Studies in Crusades and Medieval Culture in Honour of Benjamin Z. Kedar, eds. I. Shagrir, R. Ellenblum, and J. S. C. Riley-Smith (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 309–18.

39. B. Hamilton, ‘Knowing the Enemy: Western Understanding of Islam at the Time of the Crusades’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Third Series, 7.3 (1997), pp. 373–87; N. Morton, Encountering Islam on the First Crusade (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 42–56; MacEvitt, Crusades and the Christian World, pp. 45–9; Hamilton, ‘Lands of Prester John’; Hamilton, ‘The Crusades and North-East Africa’.

40. The liberation (liberatio) of Eastern Christians was celebrated by Urban’s successor Pope Paschal II (r. 1099–1118) in a letter to all those victorious in 1100 immediately following the First Crusade’s success, for instance, though without mentioning specific groups: Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100, ed. H. Hagenmeyer (Innsbruck, 1901), no. 22, 178. Indeed, the language of liberation was a consistent theme in Urban’s letters throughout the period of the Crusade; for instance, similar language can be found in letters to the people of Flanders and Bologna in 1095 and 1096, respectively, and in a letter to the monks of Vallombrosa in 1096 prior to the Crusade’s ultimate military success: Die Kreuzzugsbriefe, ed. Hagenmeyer, nos. 2–3, pp. 136–7; W. Wiederhold, ‘Papsturkunden in Florenz’, Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen philologisch-historische klasse (1901), 313.

41. B. Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London, 1980), pp. 1–17; A. Jotischky, ‘The Christians of Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre and the Origins of the First Crusade’, Crusades, 7 (2008), pp. 35–57.

42. The Patriarch of Constantinople had been seen as an ‘ecumenical patriarch’ since the late sixth century: V. Laurent, ‘Le titre de patriarche oecuménique et la signature patriarcale’, Revue des études byzantines, 6 (1948), pp. 5–26. As such, at least some periodic correspondence with Nubia and Ethiopia, at least via Egypt, should be expected despite the limited surviving evidence. Possible contemporary correspondences with the African churches can be found in V. Grumel, V. Laurent, and J. Darrouzès, eds., Les régestes des actes du Patriarcat de Constantinople, 7 vols. (Paris, 1971–91), no.814 (possibly as recipients amongst the Patriarchs of the East, but no direct evidence), pp. I.III:324–5 (see also no.820, pp. 330–1); no.871, no.873, I.III:368; no. 950, pp. I.III:418–9.

43. MacEvitt, Crusades and the Christian World, 48.

44. HPEC II.III, pp. 327–8. For the role of the Coptic patriarch in communications with Nubia and Ethiopia during the Fāṭimid period, see J. den Heijer, ‘Le patriarcat copte d’Alexandrie à l’époque fatimide’, in Alexandrie Médiévale, ed. C. Décobert, vol. 2 (Cairo, 2002), pp. 83–97, esp. 84–7; M. Brett, ‘Al-Karāza al-Marqusīya: The Coptic Church in the Fatimid Empire’, in Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras: Proceedings of the 9th and 10th International Colloquium organized at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in May 2000 and May 2001, eds. U. Vermeulen and J. van Steenbergen (Leuven, 2005), pp. 33–60.

45. HPEC II.III, 346.

46. On Armeno-Latin cooperation, see, for example, J. H. Forse, ‘Armenians and the First Crusade’, Journal of Medieval History, 17.1 (1991), pp. 13–22.

47. A similar example is the apparent ignorance of the ‘Turks’ prior to the First Crusade in comparison to its aftermath, which is suggestive of a sudden advancement in Latin Christian awareness and knowledge amongst the Crusade’s participants and associates: Morton, Encountering Islam, pp. 97–110.

48. HPEC II.III, 329. See M.-L. Derat, ‘L’affaire des mosquées: Interactions entre le vizirat fatimide, le patriarcat d’Alexandrie et les royaumes chrétiens d’Éthiopie et de Nubie à la fin du xi^e siècle’, Médiévales, 79 (2020), pp. 15–36.

49. HPEC II.III, 351. For a study of these events, see E. van Donzel, ‘Badr al-Jamālī. The Copts in Egypt and the Muslims in Ethiopia’, in Hunter of the East: Studies in Honor of Clifford Edmund Bosworth, vol. 1, ed. I. R. Netton (Leiden, 2000), pp. 297–309. The appearance of the Egyptian fear of the Ethiopian ruler’s control over the Nile also coincided with over a century of major droughts in Egypt, notably in the 1050s–70s, possibly further cementing this fear: R. Ellenblum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950–1072 (New York, 2012), pp. Table 2.1 on 31, 147–55. In the fourteenth century, this power was first described in the 1330s by Liber Peregrinationis di Jacopo da Verona, ed. U. Monneret de Villard (Rome, 1950), Ch. 2, 32.

50. B. I. Beshir, ‘New Light on Nubian-Fāṭimid Relations’, Arabica, 22.1 (1975), 19; S. Abd al-Hadi al-Hajeri, A Critical Edition of the Eleventh Volume of ʿIqd al-jumān fī tārīkh ahl al-zamān, with Particular Reference to the Historical Fragments from the Lost Book of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Hamadhānī Called: ʿUnwān al-siyar fī maḥāsin ahl al-Badū waʾl Ḥaḍar or al-Maʿārif al-mutaʾkhkhira (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2007), 399.

51. For example, see D. Jacoby, ‘Venetian Commercial Expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean, 8th–11th Centuries’, in Byzantine Trade, 4th–13th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange, Papers of the Thirty-Eighth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, March 2004, ed. M. M. Mango (Farnham, 2009), pp. 371–91; N. Jaspert, ‘Eleventh-century Pilgrimage from Catalonia to Jerusalem: New Sources on the Foundations of the First Crusade’, Crusades, 14 (2015), pp. 1–48.

52. Acta, Epistolae, Apocalypses: Aliaque scripta Apostolis falso inscripta sive Codicis Apocryphi Novi Testamenti, ed. J. A. Fabricius, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1703), II:668. On a new method of identification for the texts and a list of dated manuscripts, see E. Rose, ‘Abdias Scriptor Vitarum Sanctorum Apostolorum? The «Collection of Pseudo-Abias» Reconsidered’, Revue d’histoire des textes, n.s., 8 (2013), pp. 227–68.

53. Otto of Freising, ‘De Duabus Civitatibus’, Book IV Ch. 5, in MGH SS RGUS 45, 192 (text); Otto of Freising, The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.D., trans. C. C. Mierow et al. (New York, 2002), 284 (trans.).

54. Fulcheri Cartonensis, Historia, ed. Hagenmeyer, Pr.4, pp. 117–18 (text); Fulcher of Chartres, History, trans. Ryan with Fink, 58 (trans.).

55. See W. J. Purkis, ‘The Past as a Precedent: Crusade, Reconquest and Twelfth-Century Memories of a Christian Iberia’, in The Making of Memory in the Middles Ages, ed. L. Doležalová (Leiden, 2010), pp. 441–62; A. Forey, ‘Papal Claims to Authority Over Lands Gained from the Infidel in the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond the Straits of Gibraltar’, in La Papauté et les croisades/The Papacy and the Crusades: Actes du VIIe Congrès de la Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East/Proceedings of the VIIth Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, ed. M. Balard (Farnham, 2011), pp. 131–40.

56. The majority of studies tend to argue for the mass conversion of Copts to Islam during the last centuries of the first millennium. However, Tamer el-Leithy has argued that such mass conversions only truly occurred during the fourteenth century, which would suggest that there may have been a large Coptic presence in Egypt during the onset of the Crusades: T. el-Leithy, Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293–1524 A.D. (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Princeton University, 2005). For earlier datings of conversions, see D. P. Little, ‘Coptic Conversion to Islam Under the Baḥrī Mamlūks, 692–755/1293–1354’, BSOAS, 39.3 (1976), pp. 552–69; N. A. Malek, ‘The Copts: From an Ethnic Majority to a Religious Minority’, in Acts of the Fifth International Congress of Coptic Studies: Washington D.C., August 12–15, 1992, ed. D. W. Johnson, vol. 2 (Rome, 1993), pp. 299–311; S. O’Sullivan, ‘Coptic Conversion and the Islamization of Egypt’, Mamlūk Studies Review, 10.2 (2006), pp. 65–79.

57. Le Cartulaire du Chapitre du Saint-Sépulcre de Jérusalem, ed. G. Bresc-Bautier (Paris, 1984), no.19, 73. Baldwin had even promised to donate a third of Cairo in 1104 to the Genoese upon the pretence that it would be conquered with their help: RRH, no.43, 8. On evolving strategy towards Egypt, see A. V. Murray, ‘The Place of Egypt in the Military Strategy of the Crusades, 1099–1221’, in The Fifth Crusade in Context: The Crusading Movement in the Early Thirteenth Century, eds. E. J. Mylod, G. Perry, T. W. Smith, and J. Vandeburie (Abingdon, 2017), pp. 117–34.

58. Specifically on the use of the ‘Ethiopian’ demon in earlier Latin and Greek texts, see Karpozilos, ‘Ἡ θέση τῶν μαύρων στὴ Βυζαντινὴ κοινωνία’, pp. 74–7; A. Nugent, ‘Black Demons in the Desert’, American Benedictine Review, 49 (1998), pp. 209–21; D. Brakke, ‘Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10.3 (2001), pp. 501–35; Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference; Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, pp. 79–86; D. Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), pp. 157–81; D. G. Letsios, ‘Diabolus in figura Aethiopis tetri. Ethiopians as Demons in Hagiographic Sources. Literary Stereotypes Versus Social Reality and Historic Events’, in East and West: Essays on Byzantine and Arab Worlds in the Middle Ages, eds. J. P. Monferrer-Sala, V. Christides, and T. Papadopoullos (Piscatway, NJ, 2009), pp. 185–200.

59. For example, see J. L. Bacharach, ‘African Military Slaves in the Medieval Middle East. The Cases of Iraq (869–955) and Egypt (868–1171)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 13.4 (1981), pp. 486–95; W. J. Hamblin, The Fāṭimid Army During the Early Crusades (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Michigan, 1985), pp. 27–33, 51–5; K. O’Bweng-Okwess, ‘Le recrutement des soldats négros-africains par les Musulmans du viiie au xiiie siècle’, JOAS, 1 (1989), pp. 24–9; A. Zouache, ‘Remarks on the Blacks in the Fatimid Army, Tenth-Twelfth Century CE’, Northeast African Studies, 19.1 (2019), pp. 23–60. Though not specifically focused on Nubia and Ethiopia, Jacque Heers has highlighted the many interactions and portability of Africans within the Islamic world: J. Heers, Les négriers en terres d’islam: VII–XVI siècles (Paris, 2009). Particularly, see pp. 73–140 for East Africans and pp. 207–11 for Egyptian slave armies. Also see Y. Lev, ‘David Ayalon (1914–1998) and the History of Black Military Slavery in Medieval Islam’, Der Islam, 90.1 (2013), pp. 21–43.

60. For the differences between first-hand and second-hand sources by First Crusade historians, see C. Kostick, The Social Structure of the First Crusade (Leiden, 2008). For eyewitnesses, see pp. 9–50 and for the historians, see 51–94.

61. Fulcheri Cartonensis, Historia Hierosolymitana, ed. Hagenmeyer, pp. Book I Ch. 27, 300–1, Book I Ch. 30, 308–9, Book I Ch. 31, 311–12, Book II Ch. 11, 414, Book II Ch. 31, 489–90, Book II Ch. 32, 498–500, Book II Ch. 33, 503, Book III Ch. 17, 661–3 (text); Fulcher of Chartres, History, trans. Ryan with Fink, pp. 121, 124, 125, 158, 182–3, 186–7, 188, 241 (trans.).

62. Fulcheri Cartonensis, Historia Hierosolymitana, ed. Hagenmeyer, Book II Ch. 24, pp. 460–1 (text); Fulcher of Chartres, History, trans. Ryan with Fink, 175 (trans.).

63. Fulcheri Cartonensis, Historia Hierosolymitana, ed. Hagenmeyer, Book III Ch. 42, 763 (text); Fulcher of Chartres, History, trans. Ryan with Fink, 278 (trans.).

64. RHC HOcc III Ch. 35, 515.

65. On the relationship between the texts, see S. B. Edgington, ‘The Gesta Francorum Iherusalem expugnantium of “Bartolf of Nangis”’, Crusades, 13 (2014), pp. 21–35.

66. Matthieu d’Édesse, ‘Extraits de la chronique II’, in RHC Doc. Arm. I, Ch. 26, 68 (text); Armenia and the Crusades, Tenth to Twelfth Centuries: The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, trans. A. E. Dostourian (New York, 1993), Part III Ch. 12, 191 (trans.). For a comparative example for Nouba, see Matthieu d’Édesse, ‘Extraits de la chronique II’, in RHC Doc. Arm. I, Ch. 9, 45 (text); Armenia and the Crusades, trans. Dostourian, 1993), Part II Ch. 125, 173 (trans.).

67. Guibert of Nogent, Dei Gesta per Francos, ed. Huygens, Book VII Ch. 40, 340 (text); Guibert of Nogent, Deeds of God, trans. Levine, 160 (trans.). Other ‘Ethiopian’ enemies appear at: Guibert of Nogent, Dei Gesta per Francos, ed. Huygens, Book VII Ch. 20, 300, Book VII Ch. 44, pp. 344–5 (text); Guibert of Nogent, Deeds of God, trans. Levine, pp. 140 (translates ‘Ethiopians’ for ‘Egyptians’), 162 (trans.). There appears to be no acknowledgement of the Christian Africans who may have been resident at St. Catherine’s monastery at Mount Sinai. Regrettably, evidence for a contemporary Nubian presence is lacking, neither textual or material, and the earliest evidence for an Ethiopian presence comes from an unpublished c.twelfth-thirteenth-century Greek Horologion (ms Greek NF M90) with a Gəʿəz subscript located in the monastery’s library: A. Hatzopoulos, The New Finds of Sinai (Athens, 1999), 172.

68. The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, ed. S. J. Biddlecombe (Woodbridge, 2014), Book IV Chs. 19–20, pp. 116–18 (text); Baldric of Bourgueil, “History of the Jerusalemites”: A Translation of the Historia Ierosolimitana, trans. S. B. Edgington with intro. by S. J. Biddlecombe (Woodbridge, 2020), pp. 154–5 (trans.). More references to enemy ‘Ethiopians’ are also found in his Gestis Baldwini: Baldric of Dol, ‘Gesta’, in PL 155.854–6.

69. J. France, ‘The Use of the Anonymous Gesta Francorum in the Early Twelfth-Century Sources for the First Crusade’, in From Clermont to Jerusalem, ed. Murray, pp. 29–42.

70. Radulphi Cadomensis, Tancredus, ed. E. D’Angelo (Turnhout, 2011), Ch. 357, 101 (text); The Gesta Tancredi of Ralph of Caen: A History of the Normans on the First Crusade, trans. B. S. Bachrach and D. S. Bachrach (Aldershot, 2005), 137 (trans.).

71. On the idea of abiding to a shared tradition, see S. Ranković, ‘Communal Memory of the Distributed Author: Applicability of the Connectionist Model of Memory to the Study of Traditional Narratives’, in Making of Memory, ed. Doležalová, pp. 9–26. There have also been questions regarding how far First Crusade eyewitnesses wrote original narratives, see Y. N. Harari, ‘Eyewitnessing in Accounts of the First Crusade: The Gesta Francorum and Other Contemporary Narratives’, Crusades, 3 (2004), pp. 77–100.

72. Dudo, Historia Normannorum, in J. Lair, ed., ‘De moribus et actis primorum Normanniæ ducum’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie, 23 (Caen, 1865), Book II Ch. 124, pp. 287–8 (text); Dudo of St. Quentin, History of the Normans, trans. E. Christiansen (Woodbridge, 1998), 162 (trans.).

73. For example, see J. Rubenstein, ‘Guibert of Nogent, Albert of Aachen and Fulcher of Chartres: Three Crusade Chronicles Intersect’, in Writing the Early Crusades: Text Transmission and Memory, eds. M. Bull and D. Kempf (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 24–37.

74. La Chanson de Roland/The Song of Roland: The French Corpus, eds. J. J. Duggan et al., 3 vols. (Turnhout, 2005), laisse CLXIII, I:187 (text); The Song of Roland and Other Poems of Charlemagne, trans. S. Gaunt and K. Pratt (Oxford, 2016), 65 (trans.).

75. On the contrasting debates on the ethnonym of Azopart, see P. Meyer, ‘Butentrot-Les Achoparts-Les Canelius’, Romania, 7 (1878), pp. 435–40; E. C. Armstrong, ‘Old-French “Açopart”, “Ethiopian”’, Modern Philology, 38.3 (1941), pp. 243–50, esp. 244; Vantini, ‘Sur l’eventualite’, 342.

76. Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana: History of the Journey to Jerusalem, ed. and trans. S. B. Edgington (Oxford, 2007), pp. Book VI Ch. 41, 456–7, Book VI Ch. 46, 464–5, Book VI Ch. 50, 468–9, Book VII Chs. 10–11, 498–501, Book VII Ch. 39, 542–5, Book VII Ch. 56, 566–7, Book IX Ch. 3, 640–1, Book IX Ch. 6, 644–5, Book XII Ch. 18, 850–3 (text and trans.).

77. S. B. Edgington, ‘Albert of Aachen and the Chansons de Geste’, in The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays in Honour of Bernard Hamilton, eds. J. and W. Zajac (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 23–37. More generally, see C. Sweetenham, ‘Reflecting and Refracting Reality: The Use of Poetic Sources in Latin Accounts of the First Crusade’, in Literature of the Crusades, eds. S. T. Parsons and L. M. Paterson (Woodbridge, 2018), pp. 25–40.

78. Petrus Tudebodus, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere, ed. J. H. Hill and L. L. Hill (Philadelphia, 1977), Ch. 12, 147 (text); Peter Tudebode, Historia de hierosolymitano itinere, trans. J. H. Hill and L. L. Hill (Philadelphia, 1974), 126 (trans.).

79. Petrus Tudebodus, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere, eds. Hill and Hill, 14.

80. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1969–80), Book IX Ch. 17, pp. V:180–3 (text and trans.).

81. Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Chibnall, I:60.

82. Willelmi Tyrensis Archiepiscopi, Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, 2 vols. (Turnhout, 1986), Book XIX, Ch. 18, II:897 (text); William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. E. A. Babcock and A. C. Krey, 2 vols. (New York, 1943), II:319 (trans.).

83. ‘Itinerarium peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi’, in Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ed. W. Stubbs, vol. I (London, 1864), Bk 1 Ch 35, Bk 4 Ch 18, pp. 83, 262 (text); H. E. Mayer, Das Itinerarium peregrinorum: Eine zeitgenössische englische Chronik zum dritten Kreuzzug in ursprünglicher Gestalt (Stuttgart, 1962), pp. 327–8 (text); H. Nicholson, The Chronicle of the Third Crusade: The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 90, 247 (trans.).

84. Oliver of Paderborn, ‘Historia Damiatini’‚ in Die Schriften des Kölner Domscholasters, späteren Bischofs von Paderborn und Kardinal Bischofs von S. Sabina Oliverus, ed. H. Hoogeweg (Tübingen, 1894), Chs. 35, 75, pp. 231–2, 272–3 (text); Oliver of Paderborn, ‘The Capture of Damietta’, trans. J. J. Gavigan, in Christian Society and the Crusades, 1198–1229, ed. E. Peters (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 89–90, 128–9 (trans.).

85. Y. Lev, Saladin in Egypt (Leiden, 1999), pp. 141–57.

86. Ekkehard of Aura, ‘Chronicon’, De origine Hunorum, in PL 154.773.

87. Jordanes, Romana, Ch. 333, in MGH Aa, V.i, 43 (text); Jordanes: Romana and Getica, trans. P. Van Nuffelen and L. Van Hoof (Liverpool, 2020), 198 (trans.).

88. Descriptio Mappe Mundi, ed. Gautier-Dalché, Ch. XVI, pp. 147–8.

89. Hugh of St. Victor’s ideas have been long noted more generally for their influence on contemporaries and subsequent writers alike, see D. Terkla, ‘Hugh of St Victor (1096–1141) and Anglo-French Cartography’, Imago Mundi, 65.2 (2013), pp. 161–79. For Nubia in cartographical sources, see R. Seignobos, ‘Nubia and Nubians in Medieval Latin Culture: The Evidence of Maps (12th–14th Century)’, in The Fourth Cataract and Beyond: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference for Nubian Studies, eds. J. R. Anderson and D. A. Welsby (Leuven, 2014), pp. 989–1004.

90. See Simmons, ‘The Changing Depiction of the Nubian King’.

91. Hamblin, Fāṭimid Army, pp. 19–27; Lev, Saladin, pp. 185–6.

92. On the text’s popularity, see The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, eds. D. Kempf and M. G. Bull (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. ix–xii. For his sources as a possible explanation for this absence, see M. G. Bull, ‘Robert the Monk and His Source(s)’, in Writing the Early Crusades, eds. Bull and Kempf, pp. 127–39.