One of the key developments of Crusades historiography this millennium is a greater use of non-Western sources in scholarly research. The fact remains that most students of the Crusades are, just as their mentors before them, trained in programs focused on Western European medieval history. This has meant that the study of the Crusades is overwhelmingly focused on primary source texts in Latin and vernacular Western European languages. Thus, aside from a few well-known texts easily accessible in translation—Anna Comnena being the most obvious example— most students and faculty do not know where to begin when it comes to looking at texts from non-Western authors.

This book is the second part of Dr. Alex Mallett's attempt to fix this deficiency in the field. Franks and Crusaders is the spiritual successor of Mallett's 2014 book, Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant, which provided critical biographies of seven medieval Muslim historians. This book does the same thing for eleven Eastern Christian historical sources from the 12th and 13th centuries. The book divides these eleven texts into four sections, based on the language of the authors. Each section takes a traditional European medievalist slightly further from their comfort zone, from relatively well-known Greek historians to the still familiar Armenian ones, and then into areas normally unknown in the West, namely Syrian and, finally, Coptic texts.

The texts this book covers includes the works of Greek historians Anna Comnena, John Kinnamos, Niketas Choniates, and George Akropolites, and the Armenian historians Matthew of Edessa and Smbat the Constable. The book then turns to three Syriac sources, Michael the Syrian, the Anonymous Chronicle to 1234, and Bar Hebraeus. Finally, the book concludes with studies on two Copto-Arabic texts, the work of Al-Makin Ibn al-Amid and the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church. The authors they find to guide the readers through these texts are a who's who of the field. All have a published track record with their texts; some (such as Alicia Simpson) have written entire monographs on their subject, and others (such as Tara Andrews and Ruth Macrides) have worked on translations and critical editions of these texts. Their expertise shows through in the quality of the work.

Each chapter follows a standard but flexible format. It starts with a discussion of the author, then the text itself, and a section on what it has to say specifically for historians interested in the Crusades and the era of Frankish rule in the Levant. Finally, it has an extensive bibliography of editions, translations for each text, as well as useful primary and secondary sources texts about the chapter's subject. This format helps structure each chapter, but the book does not have a “cookie-cutter” feel and authors are free to reshape the chapter structure around useful historiographic discussions that help explain their text—for example, Tara Andrews includes a discussion of the use of prophecy and how it is crucial to understanding her author, Matthew of Edessa. It is also extremely useful how each author guides the reader through how their text is useful for historians of the period with a particular focus on how they discuss “the Franks.” This is especially true for the Syriac and Coptic texts, none more than Drs. Mallett and den Hiejer's contribution on the history of the patriarchs of the Egyptian church where they point out exactly which of the many lives explicitly mention the Franks and cite the key passages therein.

I am not Dr. Mallett's assignments editor, but I do hope he continues to facilitate volumes in the spirit of this book and Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant. This volume leaves a great deal of material on the table for historians of Eastern Christendom to fill a second volume. Certainly works like the Syriac History of Patriarch Mar Yahballaha III (including the famous story of Rabban bar Sauma) and the histories of the Greek chroniclers George Pachymeres, Michael Psellos, and Nicephorus Gregoras deserve consideration, as do those of Armenian historians Kirakos Gandzaketsi, Vardan Areveltsi, and Hethum the Historian. Another future volume should also focus on Jewish sources and the Franks, comprising the works of Benjamin of Tudela, Moses Maimonides, and the records of the Cairo Genizah, perhaps combined with the chroniclers of the Rhineland massacres during the First Crusade.

In conclusion, I cannot praise the quality and the overall necessity of this volume highly enough. In the era of Wikipedia, where encyclopedic writing seems hopelessly antiquated and doomed to remain unread in an era dominated by that open-source behemoth—Alex Mallett and his team of experts have found a way to create a truly expert and modern reference work that will stand the test of time. This book should be put in the hands of every graduate student studying the Crusades and on the shelf of every professional Crusades historian. In fact, If I were in charge of a major educational non-profit, I would purchase the copyright for this book, give each of the authors a generous honorarium, and then upload each of these chapters to Wikipedia. I would then commission dozens of other works done in this style and open them to the public as well. This is the kind of introduction that should be out there for everyone coming to these texts.