Talk:Historical sources of the Crusades: pilgrimages and exploration

Focus

With great respect to the editor who has obviously put tremendous effort into the construction of this page, it is extremely ill conceived. It's not clear at all what the focus of the page is (medieval and early modern travel descriptions? Early modern and modern editions of medieval travel descriptions? Both?) nor why that would be the subject of a wikipedia entry. It is too long a list to be easily navigated by a general user, not organized by any principle that would be helpful to a user, and woefully incomplete for what it claims to set out to do. Moreover the whole framing of at least part of it is misleading: all crusades are widely recognized in scholarship to have been understood as pilgrimages, and were described as such. So why, for instance, wouldn't all narrative works describing the crusades be listed here? Conversely, many of the pilgrimages "During the crusader era" are actually just crusades. And there would be countless more examples (see for instance https://independentcrusadersproject.ace.fordham.edu/) This user recommends deletion and/or the creation of separate pages addressing much more specific bodies of material. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.69.3.100 (talk) 23:28, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you a talking about as this is part of a main, multi-part article Historians and histories of the Crusades created over multiple years and contributed to by many of those who regularly write on the Crusades. All narrative works about the Crusades are listed in the various articles in the main article and would not be repeated here. The pilgrimages in the "Pilgrimages as Crusades" section are exactly that, where historians have described them in one way or the other, and I don't believe that all crusades are generally understood as pilgrimages. If you are proposing that this article be deleted, there are processes when you can do this but I don't think that you can do it anonymously as you have posted this comment. The Fordham project you referenced is a different focus, and the works through the end of the 19th century referenced there are generally included here.Dr. Grampinator (talk) 02:34, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Primary sources and scope

Just like List of collections of Crusader sources and List of later historians of the Crusades, this article has great potential, but currently does not comply with WP:PRIMARY. References to primary sources themselves (WP:SELF) do not establish their notability, nor their relevance for inclusion in the list.

• Per WP:LOW, Complete lists of works, appropriately sourced to reliable scholarship (WP:V), are encouraged.
• Per WP:BIB, It should be possible to verify that each entry in a bibliography meets the inclusion criteria. If an entry has a Wikipedia article, merely wikilinking it to the article verifies it because the reader can navigate to the article and determine if the entry meets the inclusion criteria. If an entry does not have a Wikipedia article and there might be any doubt that it belongs in the bibliography, it should be cited with a reliable source that verifies its relevance.

Unlike, the two lists mentioned above, however, I am more in doubt how easy it would be to fix this problem, given that the current article does not have a clear focus or scope (already noted by 72.69.3.100 in December 2021). The title is strange and open to multiple contradictory interpretations and frames. There is no evident reason for inclusion of Christian European pilgrimages/explorations of the Holy Land before 1096 if the subject of the article is 'the Crusades'. The authors of these sources aren't always European Christians, however, but also plenty of adherents to other religions from elsewhere who just travelled through any place in the Middle East and Asia that are relevant to Crusader history (relevant according to whom?) and wrote about it, sometimes centuries after the Crusades were long over. E.g Evliya Çelebi. Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682), a Turkish explorer who traveled throughout the Ottoman Empire and surrounding lands over a period of 40 years. Or Baron Isidore Justin Séverin Taylor, L'Égypte (1857). An account of the author's travel to Egypt in 1828. How are these relevant to the Crusades? How are these 'pilgrimages'? If it's just 'exploration', I don't think we can assume a connection to the Crusades, or the Levant as "the Holy Land", as these people may just as happily go explore the lands around it without necessarily being religiously motivated, as 'pilgrimages' are. Evliya Çelebi was a devout non-fundamentalist Muslim who was essentially just passing through Palestine as one of many places he visited; he wasn't there on 'pilgrimage' and the Crusades were long gone. At any rate, I think 'exploration' is ill-suited anyway for a region that has known some of the longest continuous human settlement on Earth. It seems a bit akin to saying a boat of Europeans landing in the Carribean in 1492 was the 'Discovery of America' (which was already 'discovered' by non-Europeans millennia earlier). Neither would 'Christian' or 'European' or even 'Christian European exploration of the Levant / Holy Land' be an appropriate title. Is some 7th-century Byzantine merchant regularly sailing to some Palestinian port city in order to trade pottery, and writing a report about it when he returns to Constantinople, a 'European Christian explorer of the Levant / Holy Land' that we should include as a 'historical source relevant to the Crusades' in this list? I don't think so.

So, we've got some tough choices to make. I think 72.69.3.100 had a point when suggesting this article's scope should be limited to just travelogues written during (or very shortly after) the Crusades in the Holy Land (1096–1307) if the focus is the Crusades.

• In that case, how about List of travelogues about the Holy Land written during the Crusades as a title?
• If the focus is List of sources of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, why not just make that the title?
• If the focus is just purely travelogues about the region, why not List of travelogues about the Levant? Cheers,

Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 18:45, 18 January 2023 (UTC)