Curses, foiled again!' Further research on early use of the hadalahum Allah invocation during the crusading period

This article explores further the question of when the Muslims began to use suffixed invocations of God's curse on the Franks (Crusaders), a topic that we have addressed previously in this journal.1 The common use of such invocations took some time to develop after the Franks' arrival in the Levant, and previously we argued that this was primarily due to the suffixed invocation used by our earliest source failing to `catch on' with contemporaries, while later forms spoke more directly to the needs of the people of the time. Since the publication of that article we have had the opportunity to work with the original manuscript of our earliest source, which has revealed that the author did use a form of suffixed invocation that became popular later, but the manner in which he did so was sufficiently ambiguous to hinder its adoption by other writers. Reprinted by permission of Brill Academic Publishers