The Holy Land as a network, the ports

What you are looking at

Four ports: Jaffa, where a pilgrim bound for Jerusalem actually landed; Acre, which the kingdom of Jerusalem was administered from for most of the thirteenth century; Alexandria, the Egyptian trade the fourteenth-century recovery treatises proposed to cut; and Famagusta, where the eastern traffic went after 1291.

How to read this layer

This layer is four records out of twelve. The dataset behind it also holds a Damascene chronicler’s account of the city’s loss in 1099, Baha’ al-Din’s account of its recovery in 1187, Jerusalem at the centre of two world images, the destination an itinerary points at without drawing, a Holy Land described in divisions taken from Acre, that land ruled into squares for an expedition nobody mounted, and a printed clover leaf from 1581 that centres Jerusalem anyway.

None of those eight is here, and their absence is the argument rather than a gap. The middle of a mappa mundi is not at 31.78° N. Pinning it there would convert a claim about what the world is arranged around into a claim about where a city is, which is exactly the substitution the essay is about.

Historical scope

1099 to 1372 - from the capture of Jerusalem to the century after Acre fell. The register deliberately outlives the kingdom, because the network did.

Sources and evidence

Burchard of Mount Sion’s description of the Holy Land and Marino Sanudo Torsello’s recovery treatise, both read here through nineteenth- and seventeenth-century printed editions that are out of copyright. Neither has been read at the page: every locator reads pending, and the two records resting on Sanudo carry low confidence for that reason.

Ibn al-Qalanisi’s Damascus chronicle (via Gibb’s 1932 translation, for 1099) and Baha’ al-Din’s biography of Saladin (via Conder and Wilson’s 1897 translation, for 1187) are the two Muslim-authored sources in the Holy Land register - added after an audit of the register’s language coverage, which found the other sources here were all Latin. Neither record is on this layer (both are contemporary_narrative, not ports). Unlike the rest of this corpus, both have been read at the page - pp. 47-48 and pp. 118-120 respectively, the only two non-pending locators anywhere in the Crusades dataset. Reading the second one caught a fabricated “transcription” offered before the real pages arrived; the scoping note has the specifics.

Reconstruction and uncertainty

Positions are the modern towns’, as everywhere in this corpus. The Arabic name forms on the place records are romanisations taken from published reference works rather than readings of an Arabic source, and that is recorded as an open item rather than left as an impression of thoroughness.

Editorial decisions

Acre and Alexandria point at Venetian Maritime Network layers rather than re-authoring what those layers already publish with their own evidence.

The 1581 clover leaf is in the dataset and carries no source record at all. An early-modern woodcut is a witness to the sixteenth century; letting it into the source corpus would quietly make it a witness to the twelfth.

Data fields

See the Crusades data fields.

Data and downloads

CC BY 4.0 for the compiled records. In review; not citable as established evidence.