The period of the crusades and the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean was an important one for medieval historical writing. Indeed, it has been recently suggested that the chroniclers of the First Crusade (1095–99), faced with the need to couch events in a more overtly exegetical register, ‘pioneered a new way of writing about the recent past’. Whether or not one accepts the notion that such writers adopted a fundamentally new mode of composition, there can be little doubt that this initial expedition left a significant imprint on medieval literary cultures. For a start, the vast number of extant narratives is unusual by medieval standards. More than this, though, the enterprise is renowned for popularising the medieval monograph format, with many writers electing to compose standalone histories characterised by a narrow focus on the crusade. As the crusading movement progressed, some embedded crusade accounts into works with wider chronological and geographical scopes, but the free-standing ‘crusade’ history was an outcome of nearly all subsequent expeditions (or at least the major ‘numbered’ ones). It is perhaps a by-product of this textual tradition – among other factors, such as modern historians’ propensity to compartmentalise evidence to facilitate historical analysis and the hangover of nineteenth-century scholarly conventions – that crusading expeditions are often treated in isolation: a discrete series of holy wars related to, but somehow distinct from, the Latin Christian settlements established in the wake of the First Crusade, known collectively as the crusader states, the Latin East or, when viewed from the West, Outremer (‘the land across the sea’). One need only cast an eye over the many modern general histories of the crusades to appreciate that most devote comparatively little space to the crusader states. Instead, the history of those polities on the fringes of Latin Christendom has usually been detailed separately, so much so that even the validity of the long-standing descriptor ‘crusader states’ has been disputed.

Consequently, the historiography of the crusades and the crusader states has developed along slightly different contours. For the purposes of this volume, the most significant difference, to be discussed in greater detail below, is that whereas texts – especially historical narratives – pertaining to the crusades have been subjected to an unparalleled degree of literary scrutiny in recent years, the textual evidence for the Latin East has less frequently been examined through the same interpretative lens.

The constitution of any state, whether written or unwritten, is the set of political, governmental and legal structures and shared values within which the business of everyday politics and governance operate. In fourteenth-century England there occurred the first two depositions in post-Conquest English history, which were precipitated by ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour by the monarchs in question and were effected by ‘unconstitutional’ legal devices on the part of the community of the realm. It was a century of cataclysmic demographic transformation brought about by the Black Death, of almost constant warfare with Scotland and France and of spectacular governmental growth and legal change. It is therefore ironic that, when English constitutional history was at its height, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourteenth century, parliamentary developments apart, was regarded as a sorry backwater. It was useful only to reflect on how a wrong turning had been taken. ‘We pass’, Bishop Stubbs lamented, ‘from an age of heroism to the age of chivalry, from a century ennobled by devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness and moral degradation’.1

Thirteenth Century England 2019 brought together scholars from the UK and beyond, giving rise to papers that responded in varied ways to the conference's theme, the provocation ‘Exceptional England?’. It is a counterpart to the 2017 conference, which asked scholars to think explicitly about England in Europe. This pair of conferences were responding to long-term historiographical trends among British medievalists, one of which strove to Europeanise England and Britain and the other which sought instead, either explicitly or implicitly, to emphasise the differences between developments in England and those elsewhere. Both conferences took place within that window of British history between the EU referendum in 2016 and the Covid Pandemic of 2020, when talk of ‘Brexit’ dominated Westminster, the media, and university common rooms. While politics moves on, we hope that these two volumes provide a contribution by new and established scholars on issues that remain pertinent to any study of medieval Europe.

Scholars have long observed the perils of an insular outlook. The late Susan Reynolds, as Agata Zielinska notes in her essay, sounded a warning at the Thirteenth Century England Conference held in 1997 about the dangers of thinking and writing, consciously or not, within national frameworks. And yet, more than two decades later, Nicholas Vincent makes a similar point in the present volume about the ongoing ‘tendency of historians, on both sides of the Channel, to focus upon sources confined chiefly within (future) national bound¬aries’. Many of the essays collected respond to the challenge to think beyond those bounds. In so doing, they also help to set a new course for future confer¬ences. The 2019 iteration was also the first ‘Thirteenth Century’ conference, a title the gathering will continue to bear in future years. This institutionalises the broadened horizons reflected in this collection of essays, though the numbering from the Thirteenth Century England Series will be retained, recognising a vital continuity with the very significant corpus of scholarship accumulated during almost forty years of the conference's existence.