This book began by insisting on rationality in the crusading enterprise and ended by observing its unreasonable objectives. The paradox was inherent in transcendent conviction seeking expression in temporal practice. The premise of the Jerusalem war and its surrogates insisted that extreme physical action could redeem dutiful Christians and restore order to a divinely created world forced out of joint by sin. God’s immanence was assumed, not conditioned by intuitive caprice but explored through empirical reasoning in attempts to understand not just what but why natural phenomena were as they were. What might appear to some modern eyes a sequence of category confusions struck crusaders as no such thing. Faith was manifest, not abstract in a religious culture dominated by concrete expressions of belief: in stone and glass, liturgies, rituals, alms-giving, charitable patronage, commitment to the cloister, convent and friary, fasting, sexual abstinence or pilgrimage. A system of penitential mitigation was developed that offered believers the chance to improve their prospects of salvation through accessible and comprehensible temporal exercises: physical hardship, material charity, oral confession, receiving the sacraments, buying remissions of sins. Crusading occupied an iconic position in this relay of spiritual obligations, bargains and balance sheets. Unique in scope and ambition, crusades were represented as religious precept made flesh. In the twenty-first century violent political enterprises framed by religious and secular ideology may not appear alien or incomprehensible.
The crusades can be dismissed as bullying, destructive, wasteful, unnecessary, paranoid, indulgent, and, in most theatres of action, ultimately ephemeral except for the scars left on popular memory. They can also be explained as expressions of idealism, earnest devotion and practical intelligence, products of a society of increasing material wealth and cultural self-confidence. Perspectives are as numerous as observers and there is evidence for all of these views. Historical assessment need not require moral judgment. Were crusades successful; or, a rather different question, was crusading successful? Answering the former involves arguments centred on politics; the latter, consideration of theology, culture or psychology.
A different lens of scrutiny is provided here. By studying their preparation and realization, crusade schemes are revealed as functionally effective, grounded in practical programmes of promotion, recruitment, planning and finance, less Don Quixote, more Dwight Eisenhower. Whatever their outcome, long-distance campaigns of the Cross reached battlefields across Europe, North Africa and western Asia, from Damascus to the Algarve, the Nile to the Gulf of Finland. Those planned predominantly from Europe west of a line from the Elbe to the Adriatic achieved striking success in reshaping the territories they invaded. In Prussia, Livonia and al-Andalus, their impact permanently redirected social as well as political developments. While internal crusades, in France, Italy or Germany for example, reflected more obviously local habits of organizing and conducting war, their propaganda and funding devices borrowed directly from those aimed beyond Christendom. The projected re-ordering of the Mediterranean, the chief focus of this book, was only imperfectly realized, as ambition outran resources. Yet, regarded away from a crude model of impermeable contest, there too crusades exerted lasting influence. Within a wider process of expanding commercial markets, political diversification, social co-operation and cultural exchange, the contribution of crusades in channelling western European interest, resources, men and treasure cannot be ignored.
Practical achievements were many, even on crusaders’ terms. Cyprus was pulled into the orbit of western Christendom for four centuries. Venetian colonies were established that lasted even longer. The Latin Christian presence in the Aegean persisted into the sixteenth century, securing western investment, however modest, on the frontline against the Ottoman advance. Crusading forced the politics of the eastern Mediterranean and Levant into the consciousness and actions of western Europeans. Some of this would have occurred with or without crusading. Besides conflict came accommodation, in trade, diplomacy, shared space. The transmission of information about different and distant people and places was accelerated. None of this should be accepted as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, nor as the exclusive consequence of crusading. The crusades did not create the wars of Christian conquest in Spain or the Baltic. They complemented rather than caused the commercial penetration of western traders into the eastern Mediterranean. Jacques le Goff’s famous quip that the crusades produced nothing for western Europe except the apricot had the virtue of locating the enterprise in a context of exchange and contact, not just of ideology and war.
Viewed objectively, the ambition for western Europeans to occupy Palestine and rule Jerusalem defied political, military and financial sense, a dream from an imagined world. Except it worked. The capture of Antioch and Jerusalem in 1098–9 might have owed much to luck, as do most successful military campaigns. The presence of the Christian army and the subsequent conquests in Palestine and Syria did not. The failures of 1148, 1191–2, 1221 or 1250 belied the complexity and sophistication of preparations but do not invalidate them. Neither was the idealism behind the projects necessarily irrational. To cohere, ideology requires reasoned argument, its implementation rational behaviour. Wars attract idealism, spontaneous, confected or a combination of both. Yet rational engagement with the practical problems of men, treasure, supplies and strategy was necessary for them to be fought at all. These efforts in turn stimulated innovation and enquiry, from geography to income tax.
If this book has shown anything, it is that those who planned crusades knew what they wished to achieve and devised pragmatic ways to achieve it. Crusaders may in the elevated gaze of retrospect appear as bigots, their value system possibly alien in its insouciant sadism, elitism, exclusivity and self-righteousness, although such a view itself seems tinged with not-a-little modern self-satisfaction. However, those who planned and fought crusades were neither ignorant nor idiotic. As the First Crusade veteran William Grassegals urged Louis VII to do in studying the collection of crusade chronicles he had given the king in 1137, they regarded holy war ‘with the eye of reason’. Disbelief, disapproval or disgust at either the inspiration or performance of crusading should not admit accusations of unreason. The miles Christi that emerges from this study, zealot, professional or waged drudge, was not, just by virtue of his calling, especially irrational, a dolt, foolish, reckless, misguided or uninformed. Crusade commanders and knights were men of affairs, literate or surrounded by literacy and numeracy in business, law, religion, entertainment and the profession of arms. A crusader’s terms of reference were of his time, not ours. Violence operated as a cultural norm and signifier, from public and private warfare to draconian legal punishments. For adherents, God’s wars may have appeared more rational than any other. In pursuing the ideal, even if simply following orders, crusaders displayed ingenuity, invention and an unsentimental grasp of the practical essentials of politics, propaganda, finance, logistics and war. Reason made religious war possible, a conclusion that might give anyone pause in the twenty-first century.