This is a new critical edition of the legal treatise by John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa and Ascalon (died 1266). John was a leading magnate in the Latin East, and his first-hand experience of the courts meant that he was well-placed to write authoritatively on his subject. His work is in French and describes in detail the procedures of the High Court of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and the law as administered there. The treatise has long been recognized as being of fundamental importance for the legal, institutional and social history of the Latin settlements in the Levant, and this is the first...

William, archbishop of Tyre from 1175 to c.1184, was a churchman, royal servant and scholar who lived in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Born in Jerusalem around 1130, he studied in western Europe for almost twenty years until 1165, when he returned to the East to begin his career in public life. He left to posterity a monumental history in which he described the events of the First Crusade (1095 9) and recorded the fortunes of the western rulers of the states subsequently founded in Syria and the Holy Land down to his own day. The value of his work as an example of twelfth-century...