In addition, Christian and Muslim sources utilized these perceptions on divine causality to criticize the failings of political leaders and rival religious communities. Chroniclers perceived earthquakes as omens of future disaster or the apocalypse, and associated them with a need for repentance due to their belief that seismic disasters were divine punishment for moral failings. Medieval writers believed that natural phenomena were indicative of important world events and imbued with spiritual significance. Examining the perceived causes, effects, and significance of cataclysmic seismic events provides insight into shared elements of faith perspectives, the role of nature in medieval worldviews, and how chroniclers framed accounts of natural disasters to reflect their religious and political prejudices.
This thesis explores perceptions of earthquake causality in the accounts of twelfth-century Syria and the ways that medieval views of natural disasters influenced historical writing. William’s history therefore provides a sense of the complex ways in which the Franks of the Latin East positioned themselves within the long histories of the cities in which they lived. Nonetheless, a close reading of the work reveals William’s inability to completely efface the Byzantine and Islamic histories of the cities, disrupting and confusing his orderly account of the urban past. William frequently chose to focus on the ancient past of these cities, privileging a reading of the urban landscape that was biblical and classical, to which the crusaders were the natural heirs. This paper will investigate the way in which William’s self-identification as a Latin and his extensive education in the universities of Western Europe at the height of the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ shaped his treatment of the cities of the land in which he was born and raised. When writing the history of his native Kingdom of Jerusalem, Archbishop William of Tyre (c.1130-1186) frequently included extended descriptions of the cities encountered by Crusaders in the Eastern Mediterranean.