The Military Orders, the Muslim World, and the Dilemmas of Conviviality: Connected Histories as a Critical Approach to the History of the Crusades

Abstract

This article explores the potentialities of the Connected Histories method for the study of the Crusades, and more specifically of the Military Orders. The corpus initially takes shape in a papal document of 1179 that listed the disputes between the Templars and the Hospitallers. In it, we find itinerant Islamic communities under the care of the Temple. We also turn to the agreement between Baybars and the Hospitallers, dated 1267, which established a co-dominium between the Sultan and the Order. Included in this agreement was the control over Bedouins and Turkmen. Both documents can serve as a laboratory for the application of the assumptions concerning the Connected Histories method. In addition, the paper goes on to outline the recent historiographical positions about the relationships between the Military Orders, the Muslim communities, and the established powers in the Levant. The central idea is to analyze both forced and consensual movements within a play of scales that brings together the displacement of captives, the itinerancy of Bedouins, and the Mongol advance. Then the paper explains how the intensification of movements would put the historical subjects before the dilemmas of conviviality, whose answers made the interactions relentless to mere fierce opposition or to the idea contained in the Geography of Fear hypothesis.