Constructing the Muslim Adversary

Raymond of Aguilers’ Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem is one of the most distinctive yet understudied eyewitness accounts of the First Crusade. This book reassesses Raymond not as a credulous visionary or partisan propagandist, but as a learned author who transformed crusading experience into a coherent work of sacred history. It asks how his representation of Muslims functioned within a narrative shaped by theology, biblical exegesis, liturgy, and the political culture of the Provençal contingent. Combining textual criticism, intellectual history, literary analysis, and quantitative evidence, the book reconstructs Raymond’s biography, authorship, manuscript tradition, chronology, language, and relationship to other First Crusade narratives. It introduces “xenophany” as a framework for analysing how the Muslim adversary is made manifest through names, ethnic catalogues, accusations of paganism and blasphemy, depictions of warfare, and portraits of Muslim rulers. Rather than treating these images as failed ethnography, the study shows that they render the crusade intelligible as providential history: the enemy confirms Christian identity, divine judgement, and the justice of Frankish victory. The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of the crusades, medieval historiography, Latin literature, Christian–Muslim relations, religious violence, and the cultural history of the Mediterranean. Its close reading of a neglected eyewitness, combined with new arguments about authorship, reception, narrative technique, and theological meaning, offers a major reassessment of both Raymond of Aguilers and the textual construction of the First Crusade.