Well argued and a pleasure to read, Christopher MacEvitt’s The Crusades and the Christian World of the East successfully introduces a new paradigm for the relations of the Crusaders with indigenous Christians in the twelfth-century Levant. Rejecting prior models of rigid segregation or multicultural accommodation, Rough Tolerance, the book’s subtitle, allows for autonomy, religious interaction, and permeable social boundaries between Latin and various groups of Eastern Christians. In the thirteenth century, new political expediencies transform the unique conditions that prevailed in the hundred years after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem and give rise to more sharply defined categories and identities. The book’s reliance on local perspectives permits new insights into well-known Crusader documents, especially for the northern Crusader communities, where for historical reasons Eastern Christians were more numerous. By deemphasizing the traditional binaries of Christian and Muslim or Europe and the Middle East, Crusades and the Christian World of the East describes the history of the newly arrived Christians from local contexts and thereby makes the Crusading states a part of Middle Eastern social and religious history.

Respectfully submitted,

Sara Lipton

Paolo Squatriti

Robert Nelson, Chair