Subject: فارس fāris knight

Culture: Arab, Kurdish

Setting: Ayyubid sultanate, Crusader war, Egypt/Syria late 12th-early 13thc

Event Photos

Primary Sources

* Hillenbrand 1999 p434

"There are ... significant problems in relating the evidence of works of art to the information found in written sources. It is again very tempting for scholars with a specific interest in costume, weapons, armour and the like to use the sources to develop categories of these objects and to propose a detailed evolution for some of them, or to suggest patterns of change in their typology or use. The difficulty with such procedures is that it is all too easy to read more into the sources than they actually say and to attribute to them fine distinctions which are simply not there in the original Arabic.

"Thus -- to take a single example -- the carefully fashioned prose of 'Imad al-Din-al-Isfahani with its balanced repetitions and antitheses, and with its carefully constructed climaxes, cannot be used as a concrete source for military technology. To put it more succinctly, if 'Imad al-Din gives us several different words for 'sword' it does not necessarily mean that all these words refer to different kinds of sword used in the Crusader-Muslim conflict. Indeed, quite often he is just showing us his vast repertoire of learned Arabic vocabulary. There is no point in modern scholars using such quotations to embroider a preconceived theory of how weapons of a specific type were used (or evolved) in a particular place or period.

"The obvious conclusion is that the Arabic chronicles are an unsatisfactory source for such information whereas works of art, if interpreted judiciously, are a still under-exploited mine of information for widening our knowledge of military aspects of the Crusades. This is especially true when they are used carefully in conjunction with the evidence of written sources. Such artifacts include coins, metalwork and pottery as well as arms and armour."

Secondary Sources

Field Notes