Indiana University ILS Digital Humanities Course Book

David Kloster Data Set Description Phase I and Phase II

Phase I

I have decided to go back to my roots for my digital humanities project. ​I am working with the two volume work by William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea. It is translated from the Latin into English by Emily Babcock and A.C. Krey.

William of Tyre was born in 1130 and died in 1186, just before the battle of Hattin which led to the eventual capture of Jerusalem by Saladin. He was elected the Archbishop of Tyre on June 6th, 1175. In 1170 it is believed that King Amalric tasked William with writing a history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Many believe that the two volume work that we have today is a result of this requested endeavor. A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea is the most complete and comprehensive history we have of what transpired in the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem during the period that Jerusalem was under Christian rule.

There are digital editions of this work, the most notable at the University of Michigan. However, there are no interactive editions that include maps and information about people and places mentioned within William of Tyre's magnum opus. ​

Given the length of time the history covers there are quite a few events and geographic locations that are mentioned and will be focused on for this project. Examples include:​There are also many images of these events and locations, some medieval and some modern. Examples of these include: 
Phase II
 
The materials assembled help to paint a picture of the world which William of Tyre describes in his history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The events and locations chosen are all important either because they are mentioned specifically by William of Tyre, or because they play an important role in shaping the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem that William describes or because William was directly involved in the event (such as his own birth). The battles fought, fortresses built, and treaties signed all shaped the Kingdom of Jerusalem in some way.
 
The data assembled shows that most battles happened on the outskirts of the Kingdom, or outside the Kingdom altogether. While affairs of state seem to mostly occur in Jerusalem itself. However, several of these, including the Council of Nablus, take place elsewhere. In addition, many of the primary source images seem to have been created by people who had not been to the Holy Land to see the architecture or the culture. Many depict Latin or Western European style walls and fortresses, not Arab or Byzantine or Eastern Orthodox. They also leave out the fact that many of the armies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem used Turcopoles (a unit of mounted archers who were often native to the area and were usually hired to fight).
 
Most of the data regarding the events and locations comes straight from William's History. Some of them come from other primary or secondary source material such as Fulcher of Charter's chronicle or Steven Runciman's HIstory of the Crusades. The images mostly come from Wikipedia with a couple coming from medievalist.net or the croisades.espaceweb which is a site sepcifically about the Crusades.
 
Overall, the data is related in some manner to William of Tyre's A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea. Most comes directly from the pages of his history while the rest is derived from other eyewitness accounts or scholarly monographs regarding the Crusades. The data and sources show that the Kingdom of Jerusalem was a diverse place that was ruled by a Latin European elite who generally did not speak the Greek and Arabic of the native inhabitants, nor did they follow the same faith, and yet they tried to create cohesion and unity. Many Muslim chronicles of the time often state that the Europeans who had been in the Holy Land for a while or who were born and raised there were far wiser and more gracious than those newly arrived from Europe. I think William's history agrees with this.

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