Jacques de Vitry

Also known as James of Vitry, Jacobus de Vitriaco

Bishop of Acre during the Fifth Crusade, later cardinal, and author of the Historia Orientalis — the most ambitious and most quoted thirteenth-century western description of the Latin East.

Jacques de Vitry was a French theologian and famous preacher of the school of Paris who was elected bishop of Acre in 1214 and consecrated two years later. He arrived to find his diocese in the disordered state which his Historia later made notorious — Italian merchant communes at each other's throats in the streets, parishioners speaking a babel of European tongues, and what he saw as a worldly Frankish nobility that had lost the crusading edge of its grandparents.

He preached the Fifth Crusade across Italy and France, marched with the army to Damietta in 1218, witnessed Francis of Assisi's celebrated visit to the camp of the Sultan al-Kamil, and is the source for many of the best stories of that strange and unsuccessful expedition. His vivid Latin letters from Acre and Damietta, addressed to friends in Europe, are themselves among the most readable primary sources of the thirteenth-century east.

The Historia Orientalis, written in two main books in the years after his return, is part history of the Holy Land from the rise of Islam, part ethnographic survey of its peoples — Franks, Greeks, Syrians, Pullani, Bedouin, the eastern Christian sects — and part moral indictment of the failures of the kingdom. It became one of the most widely read western texts on the Levant in the later Middle Ages and is the principal thirteenth-century narrative source for the Latin East before the loss of Acre in 1291.

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