John S. Ott
Portland State University
HST 399 - Holy War in the Middle Ages

FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE
Wednesday, 5 December 2007, 12:30-2:20

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Overview of exam format

While I have not, as yet, settled entirely on the exam format, it will likely consist of term identifications, short essay questions, and a "mystery document" which I will ask you to try to identify and then analyze.  The exam will be scaled on 100 points, and assigned a letter grade according to the University's classification system.  (That is, 87-89 - B+, 90-92 - A-; 93-100 - A, etc.)

Preparing for the exam

If you have been regularly attending class, taking notes on the lectures, and keeping up on the readings and discussions, you should have an excellent base of material to begin preparing for the exam.  If you have missed class days, you may wish to borrow notes from a classmate.  To prepare for the document analysis, you might want to select readings from the Amt and Allen anthology that have not been assigned in class and use to conduct "dry runs" for the final..

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Part I.  Term identifications. 24 points

The list below contains 22 terms.  Terms will have been discussed in lecture and the readings, and/or will be found in the primary and secondary source documents.  You should be able to identify each term, whether relevant provide a date or dates, and explain its significance for the study of holy war in the Middle Ages.  I will select 12 terms at random from the list and ask you write brief responses to 8 of them (3 points each).

aristocratic diaspora
Erdmann thesis
"holy war"
just war
Peace and Truce of God
pilgrimage
primogeniture
Emicho of Flonheim/Leinigen
Pope Urban II (1088-1099)
Mohammed (c. 570-632)
haram
"jihad state"
'Imad al-Din Zengi (r. 1128-1145)
Nur al-Din (r. 1146-1174)
Fall of Edessa (1144)
"counter-crusade"
Salah al-Din (Saladin) (1138-1193, sultan of Egypt and Syria, 1175-1193)
Richard the Lionheart (r. 1189-1199)
Pope Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) and crusade
Albigensian crusade
Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Kamil (1219)
"Europeanization"

Part II.  Short essay questions. 26 points (13 points apiece)

I will present three questions meant to be answered briefly (about 2 pages, back and front, of a blue book exam), and ask students to write on 2 of them.  They will span the full extent of the course material this term, and will touch on the broad themes and ideas of the course.

Part III.  Mystery document analysis. 50 points

For this portion of the exam, students will be a given a brief (~ 2 pp.) primary source document that we have not read in class.  Students will then be expected to offer an historical analysis of the document and, to the best of their ability suggest a rough date (say +/- 50 years); who the author might be (i.e., a soldier on a crusade; a late medieval pope, a French king, etc.--not a personal name); who the audience might be; and what kind of document it is.  Students should then break down the contents of the document, assessing its themes, motifs, ideas, etc.  The grade will be determined on the care and precision with which the analysis is undertaken, based on the student's ability to offer reasonable analogs to or identifying features of the document itself.  The document will be drawn from the chronological period covered by the second half of the class, i.e., from 1099 forward.