The chapter explores what type of sources can help us understand multilingualism in the past. Since direct observation and elicitation techniques are not available, tackling the “poor data problem” is one of the key issues in the study of historic multilingualism. The chapter focuses on the late Habsburg Monarchy and its linguistically exceptionally diverse populations. Scholars frequently draw on the ethnographic maps, demographic data, and language laws that have come down to us from historic times to make sense of this diversity. Important as these sources are, they only offer a bird’s eye view of the realm’s multilingualism. Other sources are needed to explore its functioning in day-to-day life in particular communities. The chapter argues that memoirs, late-Habsburg satirical magazines, and criminal court records can all serve this purpose. They afford unique glimpses into everyday life in the past and allow us to reconstruct the workings of historical multilingualism in terms of its social underpinnings and linguistic outcomes.

The conquest of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 marked the founding of a new Latin polity on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, known as the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This Kingdom, which would continue to exist, with changing borders, till 1291, was the home of a greatly varied population, which included speakers of a very wide range of languages. These circumstances make the Kingdom of Jerusalem a fascinating laboratory for the study of questions related to multilingualism. Against this background, the first part of this paper provides some basic comments concerning the multilingualism which characterized the Kingdom. The second part focuses on one particular issue within this wider theme: the development of an attitude toward the French vernacular which was, at the time, unusual and innovative in comparison to the perceptions of French and Latin that dominated the western Christendom.