The stones of Damietta : Remembering the Fifth Crusade

[Extract] This article examines how ideas about the transformation of Damietta’s sacred space shifted across time and context. In so doing, it shows how places were used by medieval commentators to convey particular stories about the past and how those stories underpinned contemporary ambitions. These stories, told both by eyewitnesses and by those far removed from the events of the crusades, also reveal something of how the Fifth Crusade itself was remembered across the decades after the early thirteenth century.