Reinhold Röhricht (1842–1905)

Career Notes

Röhricht did not hold a position in a University; he taught at a high school in Berlin.

Interests, Influences and Methodologies

One scholar has written that Röhricht was ‘an antiquarian rather than a historian’ (Mayer: p 41, n 21).

Contribution to Crusader Studies

Röhricht produced several works on the history of crusading and the Latin East, most of which are now significantly dated but that remain of some value nonetheless; as Hans Eberhard Mayer put it in 1981, Röhricht’s Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem was ‘of mediocre quality ... purely narrative and not analytical at all’. However, Mayer went on to note that ‘in this book as well as in his others ... [Röhricht laid] the foundation of all modern crusade research simply by an incredible and inexhaustible accumulation of references’ (Mayer: p 41, n 21).

Röhricht’s most long-standing contribution to the field, however, was his collating and editing of the surviving charters of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, published in 1893 as Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani, 1097–1291(with additional material being published in 1904). This work remains of immense value to scholars of the Latin East to this day. As Tyerman put it, Röhricht should be regarded amongst a group of nineteenth-century crusading historians who ‘set new scholarly standards in the discovery, appraisal and editing of old and new sources, thereby transforming both content and interpretation of the subject’ (Tyerman: p 120).

Select Publications

Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, 2 vols (Berlin and Leipzig, 1874–8).

‘Lettres sur la prise d’Acre, 1291’, Archives d’Orient latin, 2 (1884), pp 258-96.

Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae (Berlin, 1890).

Kleine Studien zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (Berlin, 1890).

Studien zur Geschichte des Fünften Kreuzzuges (Innsbruck, 1891).

Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem (Innsbruck, 1898).

Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges (Innsbruck, 1901).

Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani, 1097–1291 (Innsbruck, 1893); Additamentum (1904).

Sources

R Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007).

HE Mayer, ‘America and the Crusades’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol 125.1 (1981), pp 38-45.

E Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Aldershot, 2000).

C Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke, 1998).

 

Written by: Dr William Purkis

Top