Organiser: MSCA CITYFALL, Institute of Classical Philology, University of Bern, Switzerland
As a military, religious, geographical, and socio-culturalphenomenon the crusades were, from the beginning, closely linked to cities. Jerusalem with its loca sancta became the goal, both as a physical place and as a metaphysical concept. Ancient cities like Antioch, Tripoli, or Edessa became the centres of, however short-lived, crusading polities. Ancient ports like Tyre or Acre became maritime hubs as well as battlegrounds between East and West. Cities ruled by various Muslim power groups like Damascus, Bagdad, Konya, or Cairo figured at times as either allies or enemies to the crusader states. Often the impact of the crusades on those cities pushed them into various states of crisis: they were besieged, destroyed, conquered, sacked, depleted of their populations, razed, occupied, plundered, rebuilt, reorganised. This did not only affect cities in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, but also, to varying degrees, cities across Europe: the cities on the Rhine were affected by atrocities against their Jewish communities, crusading movements affected cities like Lisbon and Toledo, Toulouse and Athens, Zara and Constantinople. Equally the crises affecting these cities were not exclusively of military nature: usually the upheaval was just as much of economic, demographic, and religious nature. And in the realm of literature and art too, cities were plunged into crisis by the crusades; be it by the chivalrous struggle for Antioch and Jerusalem in the Old French Cycle de la croisade, through the depiction or burning and destroyed Levantine cities in German prose chronicles from the later Middle Ages, or through the lamentation for the lost cities of Al-Andalus in the Arabic Ritha‘ al-Andalus by the Sevillian author Abu al-Baqa ar-Rundi.
We invite scholars at all career stages to submit proposals for twenty-minute papers examining how cities in the context of the crusades were affected by crisis. Potential speakers are invited to understand all three terms in the broadest possible terms and to explore wide-ranging diachronic and synchronic links across time and space, drawing on a variety of sources, like narrative texts, including literature, archival and documentary sources, or archeological, epigraphical, art-historical, and other material evidence.
Please send paper proposals of no more than 300 words in English, accompanied by a short CV including affiliation, position, and contact details by September 28 2023 to Christoph Pretzer: christoph.pretzer@unibe.ch
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101028770.
Cityfall 