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Book Reviews Medieval Medieval Encounters �0 (�0�4) �6�–�75 Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture Encounters in Confluence and Dialogue brill.com/me Book Reviews Giles Constable, ed. and trans. in collaboration with Ranabir Chakravarti, Olivia Remie Constable, Tia Kolbaba and Janet M. Martin William of Adam: How to Defeat the Saracens—Guillelmus de Ade: Tractatus quomodo Sarraceni sunt expugnandi. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2012. xii + 138 pp. ISBN 978–0884023760 The recovery treatises written after the fall of Acre in 1291 are tempting texts. Odd, but tempting. To most medievalists they are a body of writing that is little known and hardly ever read. Economic historians, who might be expected to mine these treatises for data about trade routes, harbor capabilities, urban layouts, or commercial networks, can, and usually do, learn the same infor- mation from more reliable, because less polemical, sources. And the treatises generally contain little that is of interest to social and cultural historians. Most historians, in sum, regard the recovery texts with as little real interest as the treatises’ contemporary audiences did. The treatises, after all, address a world that has largely turned against the idea of continued crusades to the Holy Land; by the end of the thirteenth century most Latin Christians regarded campaigns to the Levant as either ill-fated endeavors unlikely ever to succeed or as matters of secondary importance. Better by far to root out heretics, crush Ghibellines, push the Christian-Muslim border in Spain further to the south and the Christian-pagan frontier within Europe deeper into the Baltic regions. The treatises, being polemical, are exercises in temptation, urging reluctant readers to give the Holy Land one last effort. And as one of the great bodies of unread medieval material, they can be tempting to scholars looking for fresh fields to plow. Many of the treatises were written by merchants who either had or desired commercial interests in the eastern Mediterranean. Their familiar- ity with the physical and human geography of the Levant gave their writings a tone of real-world specificity that both promoted renewed efforts and, impor- tantly, soothed the egos of the leaders of Latin Europe’s military caste by pre- senting their repeated defeats not as failures of military ability but as heroic efforts undermined by poor intel. The interplay of their real-world expertise and their appeal to chivalric ideals makes fascinating reading. At the same time, there is an element of the poseur in the recovery authors in the pre-Renaissance era, a whiff of the cable-news talking-heads of our © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi �0.��63/�5700674–��34��7� 262 book reviews own day, whose brusque demeanor and rehearsed gravitas often mask a deep and dangerous naïveté. Of the authors who come first to mind—Haiton of Corycus (d. 1307–1308), Guillaume de Nogaret (d. 1313), Ramon Llull (d. 1315), Pierre Dubois (d. 1321) and Marino Sanuto Torsello (d. 1338)—none ever faced a company of grim-faced Mamluk infantry or a lightning-fast strike by Turkish cavalry-archers. It must be said with emphasis: none of them knew what they were talking about, when it came to warfare. Haiton was a Praemonstratensian monk of Cilician-Armenian heritage who urged a crusade as a means to lib- erate his homeland from the Tatars. Nogaret was the Machiavellian courtier who persuaded Philip IV of France to issue an arrest warrant for Pope Boniface VIII and craved a crusade primarily as a means of asserting Philip’s control over the new Avignon papacy Llull’s vision of a crusade made even less sense than his famous combinatorial Art—a supposed logic-machine that would lead the way to the universal conversion of all Jews and Muslims. Dubois, a Gaullist before his time, saw a new crusade as an excuse for the royal seizure of all monastic estates and Templar holdings across France. He confidently predicted that Philip IV, flush with confiscated cash, could not only regain the Holy Land but install his vile brother, Charles of Valois, on the throne in Constantinople. As a courtier, Dubois never sullied himself with commerce; he dreamt of a high magistracy; promoting a crusade was a career-strategem for him. Sanuto Torsello was the most energetic, analytical, and detailed of the recovery authors, much the most interesting of the lot, and his book offers a wealth of information about the human and physical geography of the eastern Mediterranean. Because of the in-depth nature of his book, he seems more serious and realistic about his approach, but his strategic ideas differ little from any of the other writers. His distinctiveness lay in the comprehensive detail of his approach. William of Adam’s (d. 1338) treatise is the briefest and pithiest of all the recovery texts. It is also the most straightforward. In naming his book Tractatus quomodo Sarraceni sunt expugnandi (Treatise on How to Defeat the Saracens) he makes his aim plain and sounds like the no-nonsense “big thinker” he wants to be perceived to be. As a strategist, though, he offers little that is original. He lays out a five-point grand plan, suitable to be summarized on PowerPoint slides and elucidated in a smoothly confident TED-Talk. What are his Five Steps to Success? Stop all Western merchants from trading with Egypt; interdict the movement of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land; prevent the Byzantine emperor from continuing his trade and diplomatic relations with the Turkish sultan (and, toward that end, seize the city of Constantinople); establish an alliance with the Tatar Īl-Khān to mount a two-front campaign against the Muslims; and establish a blockade of the Gulf of Aden to prevent Indian medieval encounters 20 (2014) 261–275.
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