Shaizar of the Banu Munqidh

Shaizar was a castle and small lordship on a rocky spur above the Orontes river in inland Syria, held through the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the Banu Munqidh, an Arab dynasty who ruled it as a virtually independent principality. In the age of the Crusades it sat on the frontier between the Muslim lands and the Crusader Principality of Antioch, whose territory ran close to the west, and the life of the Munqidh emirs mixed border warfare, raiding and skirmish, ransom and the occasional truce, with hunting, learning and the courtly life of a small Arab dynasty. Shaizar is famous above all as the home of Usama ibn Munqidh (1095-1188), warrior, courtier, poet and man of letters, whose Book of Learning by Example, the Kitab al-I'tibar, written in his old age, is one of the most vivid and humane sources we possess for the world of the Crusades from the Muslim side. It is a memoir full of the hunt and the battlefield, of the Franks he fought and sometimes befriended, of their courage and their strange customs and their crude medicine, all observed with curiosity, irony and a deep sense of how God orders the span of a life, for the book's whole theme is i'tibar, the taking of a lesson from what one has seen. Usama writes warmly of the gatherings, the books and the table of his family's castle, the very world this scene shows: a lord and his companions on a carpet spread over the terrace, with open volumes, food and drink, the keep and its banner above and the river valley falling away below. The Munqidh dynasty came to a sudden end in 1157, when a great earthquake threw down the castle and killed almost the whole family, gathered there for a celebration; Usama, away at the time, was spared, and lived on to write his memoir decades later. This scene depicts Shaizar on its spur above the Orontes in the age of the Banu Munqidh and the Crusades. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.