In a collection of essays published in 2015 entitled Seven Myths of the Crusades, Corliss Slack posed the question ‘Were the First Crusaders Proto-Colonists?’ To ask this question, particularly in a book dedicated to popular crusade ‘myth-busting’, was to engage with one of the longest-standing debates in the historiography of the medieval crusading movement – albeit one that, for many scholars, might now have seemed to have run its course. Taking this apparent historiographical stasis as its point of departure, this paper seeks to examine afresh some of the issues relating to the question whether the medieval Latin settlements in the Holy Land might, in some way, be regarded as ‘colonial’ societies. It begins by offering a brief survey of some of the most relevant scholarship on the subject and introducing some of the key advocates for the colonialism thesis, before summarizing some of the main reasons why an association between medieval crusading and modern colonial movements has generally been rejected. The paper then turns to examine a range of textual, visual and material evidence that suggests colonialism might still be useful for thinking with when considering medieval attitudes towards the Latin settlements in the Holy Land. The particular aim of the paper is to show how a study of the relationship between crusading, settlement and the extraction of sacred matter from the Near East might fruitfully be understood through a colonialist lens; and thus to reinvigorate and chart a new course for discussion of the ‘colonial’ status of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and the other medieval crusader lordships.

Within the rich historiography of the crusades and the Latin East, the one scholar most closely associated with research on medieval colonialism is, surely, the Israeli historian Joshua Prawer. In the latter half of the twentieth century Prawer offered an extensive treatment of the colonial nature of the crusader states, as argued most famously in his 1972 book The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages. Here, Prawer began his study by identifying the Latin kingdom as ‘the first European colonial society’, which he argued was characterized by segregation and exploitation; by extension, he framed the crusades as ‘a colonial movement’.