Some thoughts on warriors and war in Usāma ibn Munqidh's Kitāb al-Iʿtibār

This chapter is a modest contribution to the study of military history during the Crusading period, looking at one particular Arabic source that is well known, but bears further investigation. It utilizes the 1987 Riyad edition of Kitab al-I'tibar edited by Qasim al-Samara'i, and refers to its pagination, as well as the 1886 edition by Hartwig Derenbourg. Usama describes more than once that the army of Frankish Antioch campaigned in the region of Shayzar. Evidently, a lot of Franks were involved in these operations, but the descriptions of the actual fighting are usually small group actions. Usama was writing neither for twenty-first-century scholars nor their students, nor was he expecting tenure at a university. He could allow himself to be inconsistent, perhaps giving unwitting expression to the transition from ghulam to mamluk.