Gestures of conciliation : peacemaking endeavors in the Latin East.

In principle, medieval Muslims and Christians alike believed that the encounter between them should be restricted to Holy War.1 Nonetheless, the period from 1098 to 1291 was in actuality punctuated by peaceful contacts and interludes of varying length, as Jean Richard has shown.2 Indeed, some 120 treaties are attested for the period.3 However, following the focus of the chronicles, research has been channelled more to the history of crusader warfare than to peacemaking efforts, notwithstanding Peter Holt’s work on Mamluk treaties and Michael Köhler’s work on the Seljuqs and Ayyubids.4 Among historians of the crusades and the Latin East, Professor Kedar is exceptional for directing attention to the extra-battlefield relations between the enemies and the resultant cultural convergence that emerged from their encounter in the East. Here, I build on his groundbreaking research to examine the function of gestures as bearers of better-or less-understood cultural messages in Christian-Muslim contacts, during, and in the aftermath of, battle.