Sourcepack

History 285
The Crusades
Instructor: A. Mark Smith   SmithAM@missouri.edu

Reference sources for the Crusades

Atlas of Warfare: The Middle Ages  located at Reference G 1034.H6 1996.  Our best atlas for the Crusades.  As with many atlases, this one includes extensive narration of the conflicts it illustrates, not just the maps themselves.  

Dictionary of the Middle Ages  located at Reference D 114.D5 1982. This is really more like an encyclopedia, as it has twelve volumes plus an index, and the entries are several pages long.  "Crusade" and related entries encompass pp. 14-61.

Crusades: Articles and Citations

International Medieval Bibliography  Located at Reference Z 6203. I5234.  This multilingual index provides citations for articles in journals and in books, conference proceedings, and exhibition catalogs.  The content is classified according to 62 thematic topics, of which Crusades is one, and each topic is divided into geographic areas.  This is our most comprehensive source for articles about the Medieval period.

Online Indexes These online searches give you citations to articles that may be found in full text elsewhere (electronically, in print, or via interlibrary loan).  Academic Search Premier indexes twenty-two journals with the word "medieval" in the title.   A&H Search indexes several journals in medieval studies. The ARTFL Project contains full-text documents in French going back to the thirteenth century.  You may use these online databases off campus, but you will be asked for your PawPrint.  Access: http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/search/databases/main.asp.

Online (full-text) Journal searches  We receive a few journals dealing with the medieval period in online journal packages.  You may search them using JSTOR (full-text search possible; last few years of most journals are not in the database) and Project Muse (also full text, more recent issues; different journals). You may use these online databases off campus, but you will be asked for your PawPrint.  These journal packages are listed with the online index databases. Access: http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/search/databases/main.asp.

Crusades:  Books and interlibrary loan

Bibliography from The Crusades: A Short History  with links to the MERLIN Catalog, and a few updates to the 1987 original provided by R. Brekhus.  Use this linked list to find books, access a few full-text journal articles, and find some good subject headings to use in the MERLIN Catalog.

Merlin Catalog: by subject  Many subjects related to the Crusades have their own subject headings.  Type in the subject crusades, and notice the subdivisions.  You will also find books under the history of countries.  History subject headings tend to deal with either numerical time periods (spain history 711 1516), named eras (jerusalem history latin kingdom, 1099-1244), events (malta history siege 1565), or types of history (byzantine empire history military and its subdivisions).  If you are interested in a person, or the name of a military order, you can use the name as a subject, i.e. Innocent III, pope or hospitalers.  By all means, take advantage of the subject headings attached to the catalog records of books you are interested in, to find further books on the subject.

Merlin Catalog: by keyword  The keyword search generally searches subjects and titles, but for some recent books also searches the table of contents.  You can use a truncator (crusad* to retrieve crusade, crusades, crusading, crusaders), combine search terms with AND or OR, limit results by language, date or particular keywords, and sort results by "relevance" or year.

Interlibrary Loans  Before you fill out an Interlibrary Loan form for a book, first make sure you can't get the book from a MERLIN or MOBIUS library -- a faster process.  To get articles from journals we do not own, use the Article Request Form.

Crusades: internet sources

important note: if you see links to ARGOS, a search engine of the ancient & medieval internet, do not follow them.  ARGOS is no longer online, due to a lack of funding.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook
Contains full-text medieval and other sources.  Follow the links on the left margin to Select Sources to Crusades. Also take a look at the extensive links to full-text legal texts.

The American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain
The "Reference" section contains links to bibliographies of medieval Spain and Portugal, including some bibliographies of digitized documents. Their Archive contains several full-text documents in translation. The "library" section contains full-text, article-length secondary sources. The LIBRO section has book-length treatises on medieval-Spanish topics. There is also information on the organization and a short list of book reviews.

De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History
The site contains full-text articles republished with permission, as well as a good bibliography on medieval warfare. See especially the Crusades section.

Hospitaller Sources
"This Project aims at providing calendars and editions of sources relating to the history  of the Hospitallers on Rhodes (1310-1522), including some later documents." Full-text searchable.

Ancient and Medieval Atlas
Europe every 100 years from A.D. 0 to 1500, selected other maps, all labeled in French.

Crusades Bibliography (last update: October 2003)
Long and well organized, if not much annotated, list of books and articles on various topics with the Crusades. 

Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East
You can't access the full text of their journal from this page, but the Crusades FAQ is pretty good, though it is aimed at students and the interested public.  Answers are one or more paragraphs in length, and also contain citations to the relevant literature for more information. Sample question: "Why did  people go on crusade? Is there any material in existence written by some of the individual crusaders themselves as to WHY they went on crusade instead of us trying to interpret the reasons ourselves?" 

The Labyrinth: Crusades section
The list of links has mostly dead links, but the link to the Catholic Encyclopedia and the maps showing crusade routes are marginally helpful.    

The Orb: Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies has just moved to a new page, so its internal search doesn't work yet. The links to essays by historians, however, are fine.  See especially the sections on the Military Orders  and Jessica Byrd's "The Crusades: Eschatological lemmings, Younger sons, Papal hegemony and Colonialism" essay (and its bibliography).

For any academic search, you will also want to try out the Internet Scout Report Archives, which is well annotated as well as searchable.  

H-Net Content Searches allows you to search through scholarly discussions about various areas in the field of history, including ancient history.  Sometimes books and web sites are also reviewed here.

For information on how to evaluate the websites you find, please see: Evaluating Web Resources.

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