This chapter turns to the third UN mediator in Syria, Staffan de Mistura, and has the same two objectives as the preceding case studies in this book – to delineate the mediator’s agency as a decision-maker and to elucidate the strategic dynamics behind his decision-making. It is split into two sections dedicated to each objective. The first section investigates the mediator’s input to the main mediation policies during the period studied. Of which there are six – the Aleppo Freeze, sanctioning military action against ISIS, the Geneva Consultations, the intra-Syrian Talks, the Astana Process, and the mediator’s resignation. Building on these findings, the section uncovers the dynamics behind the mediator’s decision-making using the categories of perceptions drawn from the contingency model. This analysis also helps produce more generalizable knowledge concerning associations between mediation perceptions and behaviors.

Although a battle zone from early in its history, the Roman province of Hispania began to undergo external military pressure in the fifth century ce with the invasions of the Visigoths, Suevi, and Vandals.1 Within a century, the Visigoths had come to dominate the Peninsula, establishing their capital at Toledo and exchanging their Arian brand of Christianity for Roman Catholicism.2 Like its Roman imperial predecessor, the Visigothic kingdom was structurally weak and revealed this instability each time a sovereign died. Rulers were seldom replaced without a civil war in which members of the royal family and their supporters fought for the throne. In the last of these struggles, Roderick (710–11) was opposed by the heirs of his predecessor, Watiza (701–10), led by Count Julian of Ceuta on the African litoral. Gathering a small army of Berber tribesmen, many of who had recently converted to Islam, Julian led an assault against Roderick in the late spring of 711. He was eventually disposed by Tarik ibn Zīyad, an agent of the Muslim governor of Tangier.3

In popular perceptions, the later Middle Ages loom large as the apogee of medieval chivalry, epitomised by the foundation of chivalric orders, such as the Order of the Garter, by instructional texts such as the Livre de Chevalerie of Geoffroi de Charny, and by the chronicles of Jean Froissart (c.1337–c.1405), written

The Crusades have always been a focus of historical attention. William of Tyre (c.1130–86) wrote a great history of the crusades in Latin which was so well received that in the early thirteenth century it was translated into French and extended in many versions to cover the period after 1186. The French version was so popular that the Renaissance scholar, Francesco Pipino, unaware of the original, translated it back into Latin, while Caxton produced an English version in the fifteenth century.1 Many of the earlier crusader chronicles, notably Robert the Monk’s account of the First Crusade, were also very popular in the Middle Ages and were edited very early in the age of print, notably in the great collection by Jacques Bongars in 1611.2 In modern times the crusades have always been a contentious subject, as President George Bush discovered when he referred to a ‘crusade against terrorism’ shortly after 9/11.

From the late fourth century onwards, Christendom was assailed by a succession of invaders. The first wave consisted of Germanic tribes – Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals – and their irruptions brought down the West Roman Empire. During the sixth century, Slavonic groups emerged in the territory north of the Danube that the Germanic tribes had evacuated and began incursions into the South-East European lands of the Byzantine empire. In the late ninth century, the old Roman province of Pannonia together with the Hungarian Great Plain was occupied by the Magyars, a Finno-Ugrian group, originally from Siberia, that had over the preceding centuries made its home on the western steppes. The Magyar settlement destroyed several nascent Slavonic principalities and was accompanied by extensive raids into the Balkans and Western Europe.