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Tuley Submission IV.pdf (1.84 MB)

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The Personal and the Political: Marriage Alliances in Antioch and Edessa

Tuley, Katherine Anne
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1400115284

Abstract Details

2014, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.
The field of research on the Crusades and the Latin East has historically been dominated by a divide between Latin and Arabic specialists, with few historians able to work comfortably with both, and translations focused on the major Crusade movements of 1198-99, the 1140s, and 1190s. Such a split in access to primary sources, as well as the centrality of the western-driven military movements both in modern interest and available historical texts, resulted in a secondary canon equally focused, with interest in settlement and Christian-Muslim interaction in the Levant largely sidelined until relatively recently. The most impressive work to not so much break as ignore the academic barrier between Muslim-Arabic and Latin-Christian sources, as well as the pervasive image of Frankish Crusaders against Arab-Turkic warriors, divided by ideology and language, is Michael Kohler's Alliances and Treaties Between Frankish and Muslim Rulers in the Middle East: Cross-Cultural Diplomacy in the period of the Crusades, published in English just this year. Kohler, using an impressive array of sources, many of them untranslated from either Latin or Arabic, argues that the Franks who came as Crusading outsiders, rapidly settled into the local milieu; particularly in northern Syria, where a number of relatively autonomous Muslim leaders ruled, they were able to establish themselves as just another set of local potentates. Within ten years of the First Crusade, and with it the establishment of the Latin-ruled Principality of Antioch and County of Edessa, Kohler depicts Syrian Franks and Muslims standing together against incursions from outsiders, Latin and Muslim, preferring to maintain the delicate balance of power in the region themselves. The chief weakness of Kohler's attempt to situate the Latin principalities within the Levantine/Near Eastern sphere is his lack of discussion of the Armenians, both as a subject population in Antioch and Edessa (very few were present in the southern Kingdom of Jerusalem or County of Tripoli), and as an independent polity in Cilicia. My thesis addresses this gap, arguing that the first several Latin rulers in Antioch and Edessa used different strategies to cement their presence in northern Syria, with the Edessans cultivating close personal relationships with the neighboring populations, both Muslim and Armenian. Intermarriage with Armenian women was one element of this strategy, which had repercussions on Latin relationships both with Armenians and with the Byzantine Empire, tangible forty years after the initial settlement of Outremer.
Nada Moumtaz, Prof. (Advisor)
Kevin van Bladel, Prof. (Committee Member)
86 p.
History

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Citations

  • Tuley, K. A. (2014). The Personal and the Political: Marriage Alliances in Antioch and Edessa [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1400115284

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Tuley, Katherine. The Personal and the Political: Marriage Alliances in Antioch and Edessa. 2014. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1400115284.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Tuley, Katherine. "The Personal and the Political: Marriage Alliances in Antioch and Edessa." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1400115284

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1400115284
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.