Thomas Ebendorfer (1388–1464) taught theology at the University of Vienna and was also a prolific historian. This short volume contains a definitive edition of Ebendorfer's somewhat eccentric contribution to crusading history, which he wrote between 1454 and 1458. Its eccentricity resides in Ebendorfer's curious approach to his topic, for he limited the scope of his narrative to the First and Third Crusades, adding a perfunctory treatment of the siege of Damietta during the Fifth. As Zimmermann comments, we can only speculate on why Ebendorfer made this decision, given that other works that he wrote show that he possessed the learning required to have written a more comprehensive treatment and to have taken it as far as Louis ix's two expeditions. It has to be said that what he wrote about the First and Third Crusades is hardly inspired. His narrative of the First was a reworking or paraphrase of Robert of Reims and for the Third Crusade he relied heavily on the ‘Itinerarium peregrinorum’, working in bits from Vincent of Beauvais's ‘Speculum historiale’. After noting the Castilian victory in the battle of Alarcos in 1195 and the death of Henry vii in 1197 the text comes to a sudden end, giving the impression of an incomplete work.

Why did Ebendorfer write this work? From the prologue it appears that he was briefly excited by contemporary events and plans for a new crusade: the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (pp. 96–7) and the imperial diet convened at Frankfurt in the autumn of 1454 (pp. 2–3). He prefaced his ‘Historia’ with a call to arms against the Turks and announced that he was writing ‘pro exemplo’. It is possible that his choice of the First and Third Crusades derived from the fact that they had been the most successful of the earlier expeditions; in addition, there had been substantial Austrian contingents at the sieges of Acre and Damietta. That said, Ebendorfer's treatment hardly bears comparison with another reworking of Robert of Reims that dated from this period, that by the Florentine humanist Benedetto Accolti. It is tempting to suggest that the author lost interest in his subject once the flurry of activity in 1454–6 died down following the Turkish defeat at Belgrade, though Zimmermann notes that Ebendorfer would claim in another work, completed in the summer of 1463, that he was awaiting an imminent ‘passagium contra Theucros’. As it stands, this edition of the Historia Jerusalemitana is a useful addition to the growing corpus of historical, exhortatory and advisory literature that was generated in response to the catastrophe of 1453. And it raises the tantalising question of whether there was any connection between Ebendorfer's efforts to revive enthusiasm for the crusade by evoking the example of history, and the 600 students from his university who, according to one contemporary source, fought for Giovanni da Capistrano at the siege of Belgrade in the summer of 1456.