The ‘Emperor of Persia’

Abstract

From the late eleventh century onwards, the crusades brought Latin Christianity into direct contact with Muslim powers in the Near East. For the chroniclers of these events, the task of coping with the diversity of different Muslim actors the Christians faced was extremely challenging. Basically, they had two options to describe their respective political order: they could either use the rulers' titles in the version supplied by the original language (i.e., sultan or caliph) or they could refer to them by using Latin terms (i.e., rex or imperator). An analysis of the way in which different crusade chroniclers described the political landscape of Islam in the Near East reveals interesting insights: ethnic denominations such as 'Turks' or 'Saracens' alternated with classical terms such as 'Babylonians' and 'Persians' thereby evoking ancient empires that were part of the medieval theory of translatio imperii. The Seljuk Sultan, for example, was frequently presented as the 'emperor of Persia'. Thus, the Muslim states of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were at least to some extent presented as being part of the historical process of evolving and declining empires.