This book sets out to challenge this perception by tracking interlaced spatial and socio-economic aspects of urban development in the twelfth century. It aims to investigate the urban transformation of Frankish Jerusalem as a multifaceted and dynamic process that was shaped by a complex mosaic of religious aspirations as well as social, institutional and economic mechanisms that developed in the city after the Crusader conquest.
The study examines the formation of these mechanisms and their correspondence with broader processes that were shaping socio-economic structures in the Latin East at the time, but also looks at how these processes corresponded with concomitant trends in medieval urbanisation.
This analysis relies primarily on the extant corpus of Frankish documents, supplemented by pilgrimage accounts, chronicles and archaeological evidence. Building on methodologies widely applied in the study of medieval urban environments, this study attempts to tease out of the corpus patterns that reflect socio-economic interactions and their spatial manifestations in the city and its hinterland.
Moreover, this synchronous reading of the evidence sheds new light on individual documents, thus providing a glimpse into everyday life in the city through property disputes, neighbourly interactions and the formation of social bonds in an immigrant population.
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