Abu Muin Nâsir, son of Khusrau, was born near Balkh, and journeyed through Media and Armenia by Palestine to Cairo, thence to Mecca and Basrah, and back through Persia to Merv and Balkh, the whole time spent being seven years. He gives good general accounts of Jerusalem, Hebron, and other places, though his description does not materially add to our information.
The rise of the Seljuks boded little good to Syria. Melek Shah in 1073 A.D. conquered Damascus, and by the end of the century Jerusalem groaned under the Turkish tyranny. It was at this time--just before the conquest of the Holy City, which had been wrested from the Turks by the Egyptians--that Foucher of Chartres began his chronicle of the first Crusade, which contains useful topographical notes. The great history of the Latin Kingdom by William of Tyre is full of interesting information as to the condition of the country under its Norman rulers (1182-85 A.D.), and to this we must add the Chronicles of Raymond d’Agiles and Albert of Aix, which belong to the time of the first Crusade.[11]
Two other early works of the Crusading period are of special value. Sæwulf[12] visited the Holy Land in 1102 A.D., before the building of most of the Norman castles and cathedrals; and the Russian Abbot Daniel, whose account has only recently been translated into English,[13] is believed to have arrived as early as 1106 A.D. From Ephesus he went to Patmos and Cyprus, and thence to Jerusalem and all over Western Palestine. His account is one of the fullest that we possess for the earliest Crusading period. In the middle of the twelfth century we have the topographical account by Fetellus,[14] which refers to places not generally described; and rather later we have the valuable descriptions by Theodoricus and John of Wirzburg,[15] while only two years before Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem, John Phocas[16] wrote a shorter account in Greek upon silk, which is interesting as the work of a Greek ecclesiastic at a time when the Latins were the dominant sect. The names of monasteries in the Jordan Valley, otherwise unnoticed, are recoverable in his account.
Much interesting topographical information of this period is to be found in the Cartulary of the Holy Sepulchre,[17] which gives striking evidence of the rapidly increasing possessions of the Latin Church, due to the gifts and legacies of kings and barons. The cartularies of the great orders and the laws contained in the Assizes of Jerusalem are equally important to an understanding of Palestine under the rule of its feudal monarchs. It is possible to reconstruct the map of the country at this period in a very complete manner from such material.[18]