Tiny Flying Dinosaurs

“ On top of all this, Henry [Hugh III] duke of Burgundy, prompted by a spirit of worthless arrogance of perhaps led on by the most unbecoming malicious envy, composed the words of a song to be sung in public. Such shameful words should never have been made public if its composers had retained any sense of propriety, for they were revealed not so much as men but men beyond raping women [editor’s note: ‘unclear passage; this makes best sense but assumes the Latin is corrupt.’].
Those who applied their efforts to such shocking and silly activities certainly made themselves conspicuous and revaled the hidden inentions of their hearts, for streams must be like their spring, cloudy or clear. This invidious composition was sung all through the army. The king was extremely annoyed about it, and thought that he should punish them by paying them back in their own coin. So he also sang something about them, and it was little trouble to compose because there was plenty of material at hand. So what if he responded to so many fictions and taunts with some truths? The reputation of King Richard’s exceptional exploits remained undoubted; but since his rivals despaired of equalling his valour, they attacked it freely with all the hatred they could.

—

The Itinerarium Peregrinorum on the relationship between the French and English contingents of crusaders towards the end of the Third Crusade.

Richard I seems to have taken this in pretty good humour and given as good as he got, but man, there is pretty much no word to describe how the author of the Itinerarium felt about it but “butthurt”.

History

Itinerarium Peregrinorum

Medieval History

Crusades

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“ Saladin had summoned the Frankish king and the master of the Templars from Damascus and he said to them, “If you surrender the city to me, you can have safe-conduct”, so they sent to the Franks in Ascalon, ordering them to surrender the city. However, they did not obey the order but gave them a very insolent reply and called them cowards in a hurtful way.

—

The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir.

Look, sometimes it’s pretty obvious that something is only funny because it got a little mangled in translation, but this is still hilarious.

Now go away or we shall taunt you a second time

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“ [A Templar knight holds off ‘thousands’ of Saladin’s men after his companions have been killed or captured, refuses to surrender, and is martyred.] It is said that there were some who sprinkled the body of the dead man with dust and placed the dust on their heads, believing that they would draw courage from the contact. In fact, rumour has it that one person was moved with more fervour than the rest. He cut off the man’s genitals, and kept them safely for begetting children so that even when dead the man’s members – if such a thing were possible – would produce an heir with courage as great as his.

—

The Itinerarium Peregrinorum (“Journey of the Pilgrims”), one of the main sources for the Third Crusade.

Nothing to add to this, really, just a pretty ridiculous story.

Itinerarium Peregrinorum

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“ A number of Muslims boarded the bus in Beirut and dressed up as Franks, even shaving their beards. They also placed pigs on the deck, so that they could be seen from a distance, and flew crosses.

—

From Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad’s account of the Third Crusade.

I.. just… the mental image, here, of them shaving their beards, flying cross banners, and then throwing a few pigs around the place just in case. That is something cartoon characters would do.

To be fair, though, it worked.

(oh, but, in this context, a bus is a type of ship, so it’s not that surreal)

Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad

Baha al-Din

Ibn Shaddad

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“ Such hunger followed such gluttony that their teeth scarcely spared their fingers when their hands offered their gullets less than they were accustomed to eating.

—

Richard of Devizes describing famine at Acre during the third crusade.

Nothing particularly amusing about this one, I just like it as a phrase.

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“ They made themselves targets for men’s darts, they were permitted territory for forbidden acts, they offered themselves to lances’ blows and humiliated themselves to their lovers. They put up the tent and loosed the girdle after agreement had been reached. They were the places where tent-pegs are driven in, they invited swords to enter their sheaths, they razed their terrain for planting, they made javelins rise towards shields, excited the plough to plough, gave the birds a place to peck with their beaks, allowed heads to enter their ante-chambers and raced whoever bestrode them at the spur’s blow. They took the parched man’s sinews to the well, fitted arrows to the bow’s handle, cut off sword-belts, engraved coins, welcomed birds into the nest of their thighs, caught in their nets the horns of butting rams, removed the interdict from what is protected, withdrew the veil from what is hidden. They interwove leg with leg, slaked their lovers’ thirst, caught lizard after lizard in their holes, disregarded the wickedness of their intimacies, guided pens to inkwells, torrents to the valley bottom, streams to pools, swords to scabbards, gold ingots to crucibles, infidel girdles to women’s zones, firewood to the stove, guilty men to low dungeons, money-changers to dinar, necks to bellies, motes to eyes.

—

So much innuendo.

Seriously, ‘Imad ad-Din. We get it. This is just getting embarrassing.

From ‘Imad ad-Din’s account of the Third Crusade in Francesco Gabrielli (ed. and trans.), Arab Historians of the Crusades, (trans. from Italian E. J. Costello) (London, 1969).

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“ There arrived by ship three hundred lovely Frankish women, full of youth and beauty, assembled from beyond the sea and offering themselves for sin. They were expatriates come to help expatriates, ready to cheer the fallen and sustained in turn to give support and assistance, they glowed with ardour for carnal intercourse. They were licentious harlots, proud and scornful, who took and gave, foul-fleshed and sinful, singers and coquettes, appearing proudly in public, ardent and inflamed, tinted and painted, desirable and appetizing, exquisite and graceful, who ripped open and patched up, lacerated and mended, erred and ogled, urged and seduced, consoled and solicited, seductive and languid, desired and desiring, amused and amusing, versatile and cunning, like tipsy adolescents, making love and selling themselves for gold, bold and ardent, loving and passionate, pink-faced and unblushing, black-eyed and bullying, callypigian and graceful, with nasal voices and fleshy thighs, blue-eyed and grey-eyed, broken-down little fools.

—

This is mainly to give context for what I’m going to post next. It’s pretty blatant anti-crusader propaganda, but if you’re thinking ‘wow, he sure is lingering over the mental image of those European women,’ then just you wait.

From ‘Imad ad-Din’s account of the Third Crusade in Francesco Gabrielli (ed. and trans.), Arab Historians of the Crusades, (trans. from Italian E. J. Costello) (London, 1969).

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“ The Scottish king’s alleged desire to unite the princes of Europe in a great crusade rests on little more authority than the pub gossip of a discredited Venetian ambassador, together with a collective determination among historians to deny King James any intelligence.

— Norman MacDougall gets so hilariously bitter about the historiographical treatment of James IV.

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