Crusader Castles And Modern Histories

摘要

In 1874 Johannes Sepp and Hans Prutz conducted an excavation in the ancient port of Tyre. Funded by Otto von Bismarck, the project at Tyre aimed to locate the tomb of Frederick I Barbarossa. Sepp proposed to Bismarck that, once found, the remains of the emperor could be transferred from Tyre for reburial in the cathedral of Cologne. The tomb was never discovered however, and acrimony between Sepp and Prutz led the two scholars to publish separate accounts of the excavation. These events are discussed in Ronnie Ellenblum's intriguing book on Crusader castles. That both archaeology and the historical appreciation of the Crusades should be so closely intertwined with nineteenth-century European nationalism is well illustrated by the unfulfilled goals of the Tyre excavation. Indeed, there seems to be no aspect of Crusader studies through the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century that was not, in some way, affected by the politics of nationalism and colonialism. It is also apt that Sepp and Prutz should have disagreed so vehemently about the interpretation of the results; a recurrent theme explored by Ellenblum is the way in which eminent scholars have reached highly divergent opinions based on the same body of architectural and historical data.