The Crusader States

The Arabic name for the crusaders and their Levantine states, al-Ifranj, “the Franks,” with the settled lands as bilād al-Ifranj, the Franks’ country. The word itself was old, the name of Charlemagne’s people and their far country in the earlier geographers; what the crusades did was bring its referent to the next valley. From Ibn al-Athīr’s great chronicle to Usāma ibn Munqidh’s memoirs of a Syrian gentleman who hunted and argued with them for a lifetime, al-Ifranj is the standing term for the new neighbors, their kings, and their two centuries of kingdoms on the coast.

The entry pairs precisely with the Latin one beside it. The settlers’ own name for their home, partes transmarinae, “the lands across the sea,” located it from France looking east; al-Ifranj located the same states from Damascus looking west, as an extension of France that happened to be nearby. Both names agree on the essential point while disagreeing about everything else: that the states were fundamentally from somewhere else. In two centuries the crusader Levant never acquired, in the languages of the land around it, a name that was not a direction or an ethnonym; it was “overseas” to its settlers and “the Franks” to its neighbors, a country that existed for two hundred years without ever being a place.

Partes transmarinae, “the lands across the sea,” is the Medieval Latin name for the crusader Levant, and it stands in the title of the region’s own great history: William of Tyre, born in Jerusalem and its archbishop-chancellor, called his chronicle the Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, the history of deeds done in the lands across the sea. The phrase and its variants run through crusade documents and papal correspondence for two centuries, and its French twin, Outremer, “overseas,” became the settlers’ everyday word for their own country; the French form awaits its language’s arrival in this atlas and will join the page then.

As the first entry in the Medieval Latin file, the phrase shows what the new file exists to hold: a name classical Latin never needed, coined when Latin Christendom acquired, for the first time, provinces beyond the Mediterranean’s far shore. Its structure is the structure of Mā warāʾ al-Nahr on this phase’s eastern edge, a land defined entirely by the water between namer and named; the difference, and the entry’s payoff, is that here the named adopted the name, and a man born in Jerusalem titled his homeland’s history “overseas.” Two centuries of kings, native-born, ruled a country officially located on the far side of the sea from itself; when Acre fell in 1291 the name at last told the plain truth, and the lands across the sea were across the sea again.