From the late eleventh century onwards, the crusades brought Latin Christianity into direct contact with Muslim powers in the Near East. For the chroniclers of these events, the task of coping with the diversity of different Muslim actors the Christians faced was extremely challenging. Basically, they had two options to describe their respective political order: they could either use the rulers’ titles in the version supplied by the original language (i.e., sultan or caliph) or they could refer to them by using Latin terms (i.e., rex or imperator). An analysis of the way in which different crusade chroniclers described the political landscape of Islam in the Near East reveals interesting insights: ethnic denominations such as ‘Turks’ or ‘Saracens’ alternated with classical terms such as ‘Babylonians’ and ‘Persians’ thereby evoking ancient empires that were part of the medieval theory of translatio imperii. The Seljuk Sultan, for example, was frequently presented as the ‘emperor of Persia’. Thus, the Muslim states of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were at least to some extent presented as being part of the historical process of evolving and declining empires. The present article asks first how different chroniclers coped with the difficulty of naming and defining foreign political orders and thus developed distinctive interpretations of the history of these empires. Second, the article traces the way in which these models could be adopted by ‘non-crusade’ historiography: the example of William of Malmesbury shows that the English chronicler used the account by Fulcher of Chartres, but developed a remarkably distinctive version. Underlying his accounts is an overall theory of a continuing presence of eastern empires against the changing nature of politics in Christian Europe.

中文翻译：

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“波斯皇帝”

从 11 世纪后期开始，十字军东征使拉丁基督教与近东的穆斯林势力直接接触。对于这些事件的编年史者来说，应对基督徒面临的不同穆斯林行为者的多样性的任务极具挑战性。基本上，他们有两种选择来描述各自的政治秩序：他们可以使用原始语言（即苏丹或哈里发）提供的版本中的统治者头衔，也可以使用拉丁语术语（即 rex或皇帝）。对不同十字军编年史家描述近东伊斯兰教政治格局的方式的分析揭示了有趣的见解：诸如“土耳其人”或“撒拉逊人”之类的民族教派与诸如“巴比伦人”和“波斯人”之类的古典术语交替出现，从而唤起了作为中世纪帝国翻译理论一部分的古代帝国。例如，塞尔柱苏丹经常被称为“波斯皇帝”。因此，11 和 12 世纪的穆斯林国家至少在某种程度上被描述为帝国演变和衰落的历史进程的一部分。本文首先询问不同的编年史家如何应对命名和定义外国政治秩序的困难，从而对这些帝国的历史做出独特的解释。其次，文章追溯了“非十字军”史学可以采用这些模型的方式：马姆斯伯里的威廉的例子表明，这位英国编年史家使用了沙特尔的富尔彻 (Fulcher of Chartres) 的记载，但开发了一个非常独特的版本。他的叙述背后是一个整体理论，即东方帝国的持续存在与基督教欧洲不断变化的政治性质相反。