The Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1291), also referred to as the Latin Kingdom, was one of four Middle Eastern territories created after the First Crusade (1096-1099). The kingdom fulfilled several of the crusader's goals by administering some of the holiest Christian shrines and cities, securing the territory from reconquest, and overseeing the protection of Latin pilgrims and settlers. Accounts written by pilgrims to the kingdom provide firsthand knowledge of their journey, experiences, and worldview. These travel narratives form an integral part of European knowledge about the Holy Land and its peoples even after the Latin Kingdom's collapse. Descriptio Terrae Sanctae is one such narrative, written in the 13th century by a German Dominican named Burchard of Mount Sion. In part this paper serves as a contribution to the emerging field of scholarship around Descriptio. Since the 1970s scholars have debated the extent to which the Latin Kingdom constituted an early form of European colonialism, largely in response to the influential work of Joshua Prawer. This paper mediates and enters that discourse before turning to a theoretical discussion of medieval travel narratives as sources of colonial worldviews and knowledge. That historiographical and theoretical foundation is then applied to Descriptio through contextualizing Burchard's dual role as a friar and pilgrim and examining his work's ethnographic and propagandistic elements. This thesis argues that Descriptio is an ideal narrative to explore the coloniality of the Latin Kingdom and the Crusades within the context of thirteenth century European thought.
John Beavers (Sun,) studied this question.