Usama ibn Munqidh

Also known as Osama ibn Munqidh

Syrian emir, courtier, poet, and author of the Kitab al-I'tibar — a memoir whose anecdotes give a rare Muslim eyewitness view of life among the Franks.

Usama ibn Munqidh was a member of the Banu Munqidh, the lords of the small upper-Orontes castle of Shaizar. He spent a long life as a soldier, courtier, and diplomat, serving in turn the Burids of Damascus, the Fatimids in Egypt, Nur al-Din in Aleppo, and finally Saladin himself, with whom he ended his days in honoured retirement.

His Book of Contemplation (Kitab al-I'tibar), written in old age, is a loosely organised collection of memoirs and reflections. Its detailed anecdotes about Frankish neighbours, his hunting trips on shared frontiers with Crusader knights, his observations of Frankish medicine, his exchanges with Templars over prayer practice in the Aqsa Mosque, and his sometimes wry comments on Frankish marriage customs make it one of the very few surviving sources to give us extended close-range portraits of individual Crusaders from a Muslim point of view. It is indispensable for any account of cultural contact in the 12th-century Latin East.

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