Assizes of Jerusalem

The Assizes of Jerusalem are a collection of numerous medieval legal treatises written in

As Peter Edbury says: "one group of sources from the Latin East that have long excited the attention of scholars are the legal treatises often known collectively, if somewhat misleadingly, as the Assises of Jerusalem." (Peter W. Edbury, John of Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, pref.)

The

Some of the treatises are said to represent Western feudal law, as interpreted by baronial jurists to weaken royal power, but later scholarship argues that the works present an idealized legal model rather than proof of an existing feudal structure.[1]^[2]

Texts

The surviving collections of laws are:

• The Livre au Roi. This is the earliest surviving text, dating from approximately 1200. It was written for
  Haute Cour
  . Otherwise its contents are very similar to the other authors.
• Le Livre de Forme de Plait. Philip of Novara's legal treatise, written from a more aristocratic viewpoint, was written in the 1250s. He also wrote a history of the conflict between the
  Acre
  .
• count of Jaffa and Ascalon
  and regent of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in Acre, was a participant in the struggle that Philip recorded elsewhere. From 1264 to 1266 he wrote Livre des assises, the longest legal treatise from the Latin East, and indeed from anywhere in medieval Europe.
• Geoffrey La Tor or Geoffrey le Tort, and James of Ibelin, John's son, independently wrote very small treatises, much less important than the larger works of Philip and John.
• The Livre des Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois. This is a lengthy work detailing the assizes the lower court of the kingdom, the burgess court, established for the non-noble class. Their author is anonymous, but they were also written in the mid-13th century. According to Joshua Prawer they derive from Lo Codi, a Provençal law code itself based on Roman law.

Also important on its own, although found in the Livre au Roi, Philip, and John, is the

In the judgement of all later editors, from Maurice Grandclaude in the early 20th century to Edbury today, Beugnot was a very poor editor; fortunately, some, but not all, of these works have been edited separately. A French critical edition of the Livre au Roi was published by Myriam Greilshammer in 1995, and in 2003 Edbury published a critical edition of John of Ibelin's text. No new edition of the Old French assizes of the burgess court has been published since Beugnot's publication in 1843, but in the 15th century they were translated into Greek, and from the Greek manuscripts an English translation has recently been made by Nicholas Coureas.

Modern historians generally recognize the dangers in attributing 13th-century laws to the 12th-century kingdom, although earlier it was believed that these assizes represented the purest form of

As mentioned above, it is somewhat misleading to call all of these texts the "Assizes of Jerusalem" as if they were written together at the same time; they often contradict one another or omit information that another text has. Together, however, they are the largest collection of laws written in a medieval European state for this period.

Sources and further reading

• M. Le Comte Beugnot, ed., Livre de Philippe de Navarre. Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Lois, tome premier. Paris: Académie Royal des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1841.
• M. Le Comte Beugnot, ed., Livre des Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois. Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Lois, tome deuxième. Paris: Académie Royal des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1843.
• Nicholas Coureas, trans., The Assizes of the Lusignan Kingdom of Cyprus. Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 2002.
• Kωνσταντίνος Σάθας. Ασίζαι του Βασιλείου των Ιεροσολύμων και της Κύπρου. Μεσαιωνική Βιβλιοθήκη Τόμος ΣΤ΄. Εν Βενετία: Τύποις του Φοίνικος (1877).
• Philip of Novara, Le Livre de forme de plait, ed. and trans. Peter W. Edbury. Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 2009.
• John of Ibelin, Le Livre des Assises, ed. Peter W. Edbury. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
• Peter W. Edbury, "Law and Custom in the Latin East: Les Letres dou Sepulcre," Mediterranean Historical Review 10 (1995).
• Peter W. Edbury, "Feudal Obligation in the Latin East," Byzantion 47 (1977).
• Peter W. Edbury, John of Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1997.
• Maurice Grandclaude, "Liste des assises remontant au premier royaume de Jérusalem (1099-1187)," in Mélanges Paul Fournier. Paris: Société d'Histoire du Droit, 1929.
• Myriam Greilsammer, ed., Le Livre au Roi. Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1995.
• Joshua Prawer, Crusader Institutions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
• Reinhold Röhricht, ed., Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani (MXCVII-MCCXCI), with Additamentum. New York: 1893–1904.

References

External links

• Recueil des historians des croisades: Lois, vol. 1 (at Google Books)
• Recueil des historians des croisades: Lois, vol. 2 (at Google Books)

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