On October 23rd, 2025, for the second lecture of the Fordham Medieval Studies Fall 2025 Lecture Series, Christopher MacEvitt presented his newest project, Jerusalem Lost. MacEvitt, a professor of Religious History at Dartmouth and a Princeton History PhD graduate, is an accomplished scholar of the crusades, religious history, the medieval Mediterranean, monasticism, and inter-religious interactions. He wrote his first book about tolerance in the twelfth-century Crusader state principalities of Syria and Palestine and his second book about Franciscan martyrdom and identity (2008 and 2020 respectively). In his lecture, MacEvitt shared his current research about identity in the Mediterranean East after the fall of Acre in 1291. Today, he spoke about his findings on Frankish Jerusalem identity in the fourteenth-century.
Through his project, MacEvitt seeks to de-emphasize the centrality of the fall of Acre within historiography and reconceive the broader history of the eastern Mediterranean. He explains that traditionally historians have demarcated the fall of Acre as the end of the Mediterranean within Latin-Christian grand narratives, while subsequent periods are relegated to regional history. MacEvitt intervenes by arguing that Frankish Jerusalem identity persisted after the fall of the crusader states in a diaspora across the Mediterranean. He argues that after 1291, Frankish Jerusalem entered a period of transformation, creativity, and reconception in which their identity was mobile and thus anchored to community rather than the territoriality of the Crusader-states.
In his lecture, MacEvitt focuses on how Frankish-Jerusalem aristocrats self-identified with judicial culture when they emigrated to Cyprus. These aristocrats anchored their identity within customary, oral legal traditions and juridical texts: such as John of Jaffa’s 1260 legal treatise and the Lignages d’Outremer. The Franks reimagined their displaced community through the historical genealogies of the Lignages. The Lusignan dynasty of Cyprus symbiotically accepted these migrants who translated their Crusader state ecclesiastical and political hierarchies to Cyprus. In the fourteenth-century the Cypriot city of Famagusta became a mercantile hub and the city of Nicaea became a hub for military orders and knights. However, the Frankish aristocracy did not fully assimilate; they retained their Crusader state identity through the retention of titles and traditions of juridical texts. MacEvitt says that “The dignity of Jerusalem along with its symbols were transported to Famagusta.” This Cypriot case study is just the beginning of MacEvitt’s project; we eagerly await what he will uncover next.
A Q/A followed the lecture, which displayed the intellectual responses provoked from MacEvitt’s interesting talk. Audience members asked about feelings of “nostalgia for an aristocratic past” and “senses of failure” among the displaced Frankish-Jerusalem population. One audience member questioned if Frankish genealogical identity contrasted the lineage of enslaved Mamluk identity. An astute member paralleled the lingering identity of the Crusader states with phenomena after the Fall of Rome. The big question of the night was how did certain peoples and institutions adapt and preserve aspects of their previous world?
