Two of the mainstays of fifteenth-century writing on the crusades were challenged and recast in the century that followed. Responses to holy war, past and present, to regain Jerusalem or repulse the Ottoman, were compromised by new religious divisions that reconfigured much of the intellectual as well as political and confessional map of Christendom, leading, in Fernand Braudel’s terms, to a transition from a period of ‘external’ wars of faith, such as the crusades, to one of ‘internal’ wars of faith, such as the wars of religion and, later, the Thirty Years’ War. Braudel placed the key period of transformation as the 1570s, but the process was gradual and uneven.2 These developments were paralleled by and contributed to an undermining of the humanist approach to the study of history in general and of crusading in particular. The emphasis on classical style, rhetoric, the morality of individual actions and the great deeds of warriors and courtiers was increasingly complemented by a fragmentation of literary genres and a novel attempt to collect, collate and study the primary sources. Humanists had little time for textual, as opposed to philological, scholarship: Accolti’s history of the First Crusade, for all its learned classical elegance, had relied on a poor French translation of William of Tyre. A century and a half later, the often frustrating attempts by the great Huguenot editor, Jacques Bongars, to seek out manuscripts of William of Tyre’s Latin speak of a different world.3
Printing and new generations of antiquarian scholars revolutionised the availability of crusade texts and hence the range and depth of historical understanding. Attitudes to the continuing warfare against the Turks and interpretations of past conflicts fought under the Cross became adjuncts to antagonistic religious polemic. For the first time, a genuinely distinct social model of crusading was presented in which the motives of leaders and led were squeezed into fresh deterministic typologies. New romantic visions of the past, pre-eminently those of Torquato Tasso, while leading crusade fiction even further from historical let alone contemporary experience, established such a firm hold on the imaginative tradition as to provide almost a counter-history to the dry debates of the savants. Chivalry was not dead, but traditional knightly values stood increasingly as signifiers of cultural status and self-image rather than as drivers of public policy. Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528) might have seen the crusade still as the duty of princes, but by 1550 the very basis of crusading in papal authority and the Roman Catholic penitential system had been contested (and not just by evangelicals or Protestants) and widely rejected. By the early seventeenth century the whole idea of justifying war on religious grounds found powerful and increasingly influential critics. While wars for defence and recovery of lost territory never lost general approbation, the realpolitik of Catholic France, for many the cradle of crusading, and Protestant England forming alliances with the Turks stretched ideas of a specifically holy war beyond even sophistical resuscitation. And looming above and, literally, beyond debates on the merits of crusading, in unnerving commentary, part extension, part confutation of past crusading certainties, stood the European experience in confronting the pagan natives of the New World, the greatest conceptual as well as material revolution of the age.
Scholars from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first have noticed that at no time was crusade historiography free from confessional debate, sentimental approval or rational and ideological disdain. Most of these competing elements can be located in the period of the Reformation, driven not only by the radical and permanent fragmenting of religious orthodoxies but also by the need to cope with the actual and perceived threat of the Ottomans and the expansion of scholarly exchange and literary market consequent on the increasing use of the printing press. The continued context of a political conflict with the Turks cast an unavoidable shadow across all attitudes to the crusades, whether French and German Catholic apologists calling for a new holy war to resist the Ottomans, the English Protestant marty-rologist John Foxe including a History of the Turks in his great catalogue of persecution, or Francis Bacon casting his dialogue on holy war in the double mould of wars against infidels in the Mediterranean and against pagans in America. The sixteenth century, although not the last to see papally authorised crusades, was probably the last to witness popular – if local – enthusiasm for taking the cross and unforced familiarity with crusade institutions, language and physical trappings. From the defence of Hungary and Austria in the 1520s, the Pilgrimage of Grace in England in 1536, to the battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Spanish Armada in 1588 or the Toulousain Roman Catholic crucesignati receiving papal indulgences to kill Huguenots in 1568, the crusade was more than an engrossing image from the past or academic by-road, although it had become those as well.4
The umbilical link between current events and crusade history was amply demonstrated by the De Bello Sacro (1549) of Johannes Herold (1514–67), a continuation of William of Tyre that took the story of the crusades from the Third and Fourth Crusades, through the fall of Acre to events in the Mediterranean and Near East in the later middle ages, including the invasions of Tamburlaine (d. 1405), ending with the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim’s conquest of Syria and Egypt (1516–17) and the accession of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1520. The narrative has random appendages of a Florentine account of the fall of Acre, two letters regarding the Albigensian Crusade and one concerning the Spanish reconquista. The nod to the past was underscored by Herold’s history being bound and distributed together with an edition of William of Tyre’s original Historia (in the 1560 Basel edition). The awareness of the present was paraded in Herold’s preface (of 1549) which repeatedly alludes to contemporary circumstances, as well as drawing attention to the good humanist notion of history as a reservoir of edifying examples.
Herold lamented current religious divisions, ‘dissensione animorum’.5 Soon the crusades were being examined through that filter of religious controversy. However, the historiographical battle-lines were neither clear nor impermeable. In certain pre-Reformation reformist Catholic circles, the idea that wars could be lawful if possessed of religious motives such as conversion was challenged; only secular motives, such as defence of rightfully held lands, could justify fighting Muslims, an attitude that became standard among Lutherans and later Protestant intellectuals.6 This formed part of a general move towards the complete replacement of concepts of holy war with those of just war as criteria for legitimizing public warfare, a process that had begun in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and found fruition in the theories of Gentili and Grotius in the early seventeenth. Although papal bulls still thundered with the language of holy war and a united Christendom, some near the frontline with Islam were less tied to traditional rhetoric. Roman Catholics, well versed in crusade history, emphasised the necessity for those fighting to obey the legitimate authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, to hold the right intent, namely to defend Christians and Christendom, and to display humility. They praised the crusades not so much as demonstrations of faith but as ways of protecting Christianity, avoiding the traditional weight placed on indulgences. Many of these non-sectarian justifications for war were shared by Lutheran and other Protestant advocates of armed resistance to the Turks.7
A classic evangelical stance to the crusade was that adopted by John Foxe (1516–87) in his History of the Turks (1566), which included a brief conspectus of crusade history as well as sustained commentary on crusading ideology and effectiveness. The laudable desire and sincere efforts of the faithful to combat the infidel had been subverted by their own sins, the central explanatory device throughout the middle ages, and by ‘the impure idolatry and profanation’ of the Roman church. ‘We war against the Turk with our works, masses, traditions and ceremonies: but we fight not against him with Christ … He that bringeth St George or St Denis, as patrons, to the field … leaveth Christ, no doubt, at home.’ The crusades failed because of impure religion; the Turk will only be defeated if Catholics turn to ‘pure’ religion. The papacy was responsible for the failure of the crusades, the loss of Constantinople and the continuing rise of the Ottomans. The pope should devote his energies in uniting Christendom not attacking Protestants; Vienna was saved in 1529 through the presence of some good Lutherans among its defenders. However, Foxe holds out little hope. Historically, the Roman church had abandoned scriptural religion; ‘the pope’s crossed soldiers’ had even attacked those who, in the eyes of Foxe and most reformers, had maintained the purity of faith, the Albigensians and Waldensians (whose beliefs Protestant historians habitually lumped together).8
Foxe used crusade history as a weapon to further his wider polemical purpose. However, the crusades furnished convenient analogies for both sides. Just as Foxe charted the corruption of the western church through the failures of crusading, so a partisan equation regularly made by Catholic apologists, particularly when religious differences bled into rebellions and civil wars, identified evangelical reformers with Muslims and Turks. Thus, in his preface to his edition of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis of 1597, François Moschus of Armentières compared the wars against Islam and those against ‘Lutherans and other Evangelical pseudo-prophets’, explaining at length the similarities between the religions of Luther and Muhammed. However, Moschus was not just a polemical pamphleteer or sermoniser. In preparing his edition of Jacques de Vitry, he had searched for manuscripts, confessional pugilists on all sides seeking to lend such academic weight to their blows on their opponents.9 Increasingly, from the 1550s, as much interest was shown in the use of crusades or religious war against rival Christians as in struggles against Islam. In the competition to assert ownership of the medieval past to support Catholic or Protestant visions of the present and future, crusade history provided rich examples alternatively of the power of Catholic faith or the contradiction between popular devotion and ecclesiastical abuse. The survival of manuscripts and early printed editions of so many important and vivid primary sources in libraries across western Europe supplied unrivalled ammunition as well as a cover of academic respectability for the religious combatants. This helps explain the initially perhaps surprising popularity of crusade textual scholarship among opponents of the church of Rome who explicitly rejected crusading’s theology of penance and ecclesiastical trappings.
Foxe’s theme of the corruption of a good cause was pursued with greater learning and subtlety by the Lutheran scholar Matthew Dresser (1536–1607): ‘This war had a double cause: one by the Roman popes, the other by Christian soldiers.’ Dresser held a number of professorial chairs of classical languages, rhetoric and history in northern Germany. A protégé of the duke of Brunswick, he was also alert to the public potential of history as the official historiographer to the elector of Saxony. In his academic circle, the editing of classical and medieval texts was flourishing, allowing historians to write, as they thought authoritatively, about the remote past. One of his acquaintances, the editor, historian, genealogist and antiquarian Reiner Reineck (1541–95), persuaded him to write a commentary on the causes and course of the crusades for an edition of what he thought was an anonymous compendium of crusade texts, in fact Albert of Aachen’s account of the First Crusade and the reign of Baldwin I of Jerusalem, Chronicon Hierosolymitanum (Helmstedt, 1584). Dresser’s central interpretation revolved around the repeated contrast between the piety of the crusaders and the materialism of the papacy. The First Crusaders were compared to the classical Argonauts for their steadfast faith, but Urban II launched the expedition primarily as part of his campaign against Henry IV of Germany. Papal avarice and duplicity, buttressed by the profanity of monks and friars, negated the honesty of the ordinary crusaders. Dresser did extend his analysis to more mundane causation. Although Outremer may have been lost through papal pursuit of temporal power in Europe, it had nonetheless been undermined by lack of settlers and a high mortality rate. Crusaders may have been ignorant but were misled rather than mischievous. This extended into the sixteenth century, when, according to Dresser, Hungary was lost through ecclesiastical interference. At root, the very goals of the crusaders were flawed; despite the piety, virtue and just, honest effort of many, earthly Jerusalem was not, as their priests told them, blessed but cursed, the whole idea of restoring the physical Holy Places nothing but ‘detestable superstition’.10
Crucially for the continued study of the crusades, its critics did not dismiss them as irrelevant. Dresser conducted his commentary as a sort of dialogue with the medieval past to portray reformed evangelical Christianity as a continuum rather than, as his confessional adversaries would see it, a destructive break. Both sides vied for the essentials of crusade history, but the task for Protestants appeared even more urgent as they sought to establish bridges to the medieval Christian heritage, even as critics. The use of medieval texts, reflecting a cross-denominational fashion for antiquarianism, served their critique of contemporary Catholicism; thus Matthew Parker, Elizabeth I’s Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, collected insular writers such as the anti-papal thirteenth-century Matthew Paris. Dresser’s coadjutor, Reiner Reineck, was prominent in a similar endeavour. Although making his reputation as a historian of Ancient Greece in the 1570s, his editorial work on medieval texts in the 1580s and 1590s, like Parker’s collection of manuscripts, regularly focused the universal religious debate within a national frame, his editions including the Annals of Charlemagne, Helmold of Bosau’s Chronica Slavorum and the chronicles of Widukind of Corvey and Thietmar of Merseberg. His editor’s introduction to the Chronicon Hierosolymitanum, like Dresser’s commentary, reveals an unmistakable German bias, Reineck declaring to his patron, the duke, that the crusades brought glory to the house of Brunswick, an appeal to dynastic association that featured regularly in crusade historiography well into the nineteenth century. Apart from the Chronicon Hierosolymitanum, Reineck’s editions of crusade texts included Hayton’s Flowers of the East, an early fourteenth-century narrative of Near Eastern history and crusade advice widely popular in the sixteenth century. Reineck, who operated within an extensive network of antiquarians, collectors, scholars and historians, claimed he had collated and compared his Chronicon Hierosolymitanum with William of Tyre and Robert of Rheims, and made reference to Otto of Freising’s remarks on the Second Crusade and various Greek sources, including Nicetas Choniates.11
The desire to reconcile the present with a possibly controversial past was evident in the work of Jacques Bongars (1554–1612), one of the greatest editors of crusade texts. Bongars was a Huguenot bibliophile, historian and diplomat, employed from 1585 by King Henry of Navarre, later Henry IV of France (1589–1610). In his twenties he had visited the Vatican Library and began publishing texts in 1581. Usefully, his cousin Paul Petau (1568–1614) was a collector of medieval manuscripts, including crusade texts such as Albert of Aachen and the anonymous Gesta Francorum. Fluent in French, Latin, German and, unusually for this time, English, Bongars travelled widely across Europe from England (which he visited at least twice) to Constantinople. He had studied at Jena shortly before Dresser had taken the chair of rhetoric and history there and, at various times, had helped Reineck with his researches. When he came to publish his own collection of crusade chronicles, the only text Bongars was content to reprint rather than re-edit was Reineck’s Albert of Aachen. As resident ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire 1593–1610, he acted as Henry IV’s agent with the German Lutheran princes, including Dresser’s and Reineck’s patron, the duke of Brunswick. Wherever he went, Bongars searched archives and libraries, collecting material, corresponding with and meeting fellow scholars, such as the antiquarian Sir Henry Savile in England in 1608. At his death, Bongars left between five and six hundred manuscripts and a library of over three thousand printed books. As with his German associates, Bongars saw the past as informing the present. Not a violent sectarian, he nonetheless declined to follow his master in converting to Rome, retaining a dislike of ‘la superstition papistique’ which he described as contrary to God, the king and France: ‘contre la crainte et le service de Dieu, l’amour du roi et de la patrie’.12
Bongars’s great edition of crusade texts, in the light of his association of God, king and country, significantly appropriated Guibert of Nogent’s title Gesta Dei Per Francos (Hanau, 1611). It proved a milestone in crusade historiography, used until the early nineteenth century by most serious subsequent crusade historians – Gibbon possessed a copy – and, for some texts, still used today.13 Bongars’s was a Herculean achievement. The two parts comprised 1,500 closely printed pages, almost a million words, representing scrutiny of variant manuscripts in libraries from Rome to Cambridge. The thirteen texts and fragments in Part I include most of the main narratives of the First Crusade: Robert of Rheims, Baldric of Bourgueil, Raymond of Aguilers, Albert of Aachen, Guibert of Nogent and, for the first time, the anonymous Gesta Francorum (from a copy lent him by his cousin Petau) and Fulcher of Chartres; the histories of William of Tyre and Jacques de Vitry; Oliver of Paderborn’s account of the Fifth Crusade; a selection of papal bulls, letters; and, tellingly for the national frame Bongars sought to erect around the crusades, documents on the canonisation of Louis IX in 1297. Part 2 printed, from a unique Vatican manuscript, the strongly anti-papal, pro-French monarchy De Recuperatione Terra Sanctae of 1307 by the Norman legist Pierre Dubois and, from two manuscripts now in the Vatican, one probably supplied by Petau, a version of the bulky compendium of crusade advice, commercial analysis and Outremer history by the Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello, Secreta Fidelium Crucis (this redaction 1321), along with maps prepared for Sanudo by Pietro Vesconte and some of Sanudo’s correspondence. Bongars’s editions were far from perfect, being uncritical, for example not distinguishing the relationship between the content of First Crusade sources or their precise chronological sequence of composition; partial, in the employment of a limited range of manuscripts; and inaccurate in transcription and textual omissions, perhaps a function of haste or reliance on amanuenses. However, for all these faults, Bongars strove, in the words of one of his English associates, to produce ‘the most correct’ editions.14 In doing so, he offered what was, in effect, an exhaustively complete history of the Holy Land crusades from Urban II to the early fourteenth century told exclusively through primary sources, the most significant single contribution towards providing the foundations for writing crusade history before the nineteenth century.
However, as with other editors of crusade texts, such academic objectivity could also serve to deliver a pointed argument more subtly but perhaps more crushingly than the pyrotechnics of polemicists such as Foxe. Bongars’s prefatory remarks and dedications suggest a purpose not confined to academic purism. The diplomat, courtier and Calvinist compete for attention. Part 2’s dedication to Venice dwells not only on the Republic’s role in the crusades but on its contemporary independence and support for Henry IV. Bongars’s description of the crusades as ‘most dangerous and most glorious’ neatly summed up the tension between religious disapproval and historical admiration. He acknowledged that readers would find details of impiety, superstition and shame yet slid past crude confessional diatribe by commenting that such things are the common experience of mankind to which history is but a mirror. Calvin had argued that there was a difference between resistance to the Turks based on papal self-interest and legitimate opposition in the hands of divinely ordained lay magistrates. This neat equation of service to God and obedience to ruler echoed Bongars’s preferences, revealed in the title, Gesta Dei Per Francos, the prayer at the end of his introduction and the dedication to Part 1. In Bongars’s hands Guibert of Nogent’s title assumed a more explicitly national tinge; for the medieval abbot Franci meant western Europeans; for Bongars it meant Frenchmen. The prayer looked to princes to implement God’s commands as being next to Him in power. The dedication to Louis XIII associated the young king with his crusading ancestors, especially Louis IX, a line of kings pre-eminent in pursuing the crusade.
The intellectual context of Bongars’s work was hardly neutral, nor were his choice of texts. Pierre Dubois’s De Recuperatione Terra Sanctae, as well as talking of a grand scheme for a general attack on Islam, an idea circulating in France around 1600, argued that, as a prerequisite, Christendom needed radical reform, including ecclesiastical disendowment, an end to clerical celibacy and educational reform, with the French monarch controlling Europe through administration of papal temporalities and dominance over the empire.15 Much of this programme would have appeared precisely topical at the court of Henry IV. In the humanist tradition of using history to hold up moral examples, Bongars presented his crusade texts, rather in the manner of Dresser and Reineck, almost as commentaries on the power of faith and the consequences of abuse, sin and division. Avoiding direct religious polemic allowed Bongars to extract the good in holy war even where corrupted by papal dogma. In this way, both Catholic and Protestant could demonstrate their lineal descent from a medieval past that embraced both traditions, a process eased by associating crusading with national pride. The point was especially clear when made in a book published in Germany by a diplomat with a cosmopolitan background and career who considered himself almost a naturalised German. The national appeal – to France or, as in Book 2, Venice – allowed each region of Christendom to appropriate its own crusading past confessionally or ecumenically according to circumstance, a tradition that was to have a long history.
Bongars’s work was fashionable and, given the limits of such a bulky and expensive work, popular, judging from the number of copies still littered across European libraries. Interest in the crusade was a feature of the courts of Henry IV and Louis XIII, fuelled by a recrudescence of what has been described as Turcophobia bordering on mania, particularly in France at the time of the Turco-imperial war of 1593–1606. Amongst those who published works on crusading and the eastern question were two panegyrists of Henry IV, Jean-Aimes de Chavigny and Jean Godard, and Francois de la Noue, a relative of Bongars’s wife. The issue had clear continuing political resonance; Catholics in Toulouse became crucesignati and received papal indulgences to fight Huguenots as late as 1568. Some Roman Catholic writers, both lay and clerical, still equated Protestants with Turks well after the accession of Henry IV.16 By portraying crusading as a matter of national pride, Bongars was aping his master’s policy of attempting to escape the politically destructive vice of theological debate. His efforts found parallels in attempts on the other side of the confessional divide to create a form of Gallicanism, a distinctively French narrative of ecclesiastical history emphasising France’s special, providential quality and independence, for example from papal control, a strand in political commentary that reached back at least to Philip IV and writers such as Pierre Dubois.17 The title of a French translation of William of Tyre by Gabriel du Préau published in 1574 was unequivocal: Histoire de la Guerre Sainte, dite proprement, La Franciade orientale. Even where other nations’ involvement was acknowledged, as in Yves Duchet’s history published in Paris in 1620, precedence was obvious: Histoire de la guerre sainte faite par les francais et autres chrétiens. Prominent among such Gallican interpreters of France’s medieval past was the Catholic Parisian lawyer Etienne Pasquier (1529–1615) whose remarks on the crusades, written in the 1590s and incorporated into his massive historical compendium Recherches de la France (begun 1560) stands at the head of what would become a long procession of distinctively French writing on the crusades that stretched to the twentieth century. The relevance of his work was made clear: wars based on religious causes had devastated France for over thirty years (since 1562) persuading Pasquier that for all the zeal of the combatants, no benefit accrued for the church.18
Pasquier’s moderate Catholic stance (for instance, he was a hammer of the Jesuits’ attempts to infiltrate the university of Paris) provides the narrative obverse to Bongars’s textual antiquarianism: wide-ranging, critical, topical. He used and cited medieval sources, for example Guibert of Nogent and Nicetas Choniates. He was one of the earliest writers to number the Holy Land expeditions: he counted six, perhaps reflecting usage already commonplace. There were echoes of the Protestant critique in his central assertion that the piety of the first crusades was later diverted by popes to fight their enemies within Europe whom they declared heretics, offering indulgences and forgiveness of sins to those who helped fight them. Some have suggested that Pasquier may have had in mind papal hostility to Henry IV before his translation to Roman Catholicism. The victims of papal aggression down to the fourteenth century are listed, the wars against Frederick II coming in for especial criticism. The anti-papal tone is sustained throughout the chapter devoted to the crusades (Book VI, chapter 25) as well as in references elsewhere in the Recherches.19 The sale of indulgences and taxation of the church degenerated into money-making schemes for popes and those princes who appropriated the income. Pasquier was careful to deny direct papal control over French affairs, arguing that the First Crusade was the consequence of Peter the Hermit’s evangelism and Urban II acting in concert with the Council of Clermont comprised of French clerics. Philip I of France was seen as lending his approval via the council held in Paris where he authorised his brother Hugh’s involvement. Like Bongars, Pasquier associated the wars in the Holy Land with ‘la grandeur de nostre France’.20 (It is no coincidence that the Recherches, unusually for a contemporary academic work, was written in the vernacular not Latin.) Given the equivocal role he judged was played by religion, Pasquier took a consistently secular view of the impact of the crusades in trying to identify winners and losers. Those who gained were primarily those who stayed at home or acquired lands from the expeditions themselves or from their domestic consequences. The losers were the faithful, who were increasingly cast as dupes, most participants losing money, property or reputation. In pursuit of his secular theme, Pasquier considered the long-term social and political consequences of the crusades for France, which fitted his wider interests in the development of French social and legal institutions, an approach that formed a major element of crusade study during the Enlightenment. Pasquier argued that by draining France of many of its leading nobles, kings were better able to assert their power over lesser aristocrats thus beginning the rise of a strong monarchy in medieval France.
Pasquier’s critique was fundamentally hostile. The crusades to the Holy Land had comprehensively failed, making the Levant ‘the tomb of Christians’; Islam had emerged triumphantly more powerful than before.21 Thanks to abuse and corruption, primarily down to the papacy, the crusades had caused ruin and desolation to the church, Pasquier tracing a direct link from the sale of crusade indulgences to Martin Luther’s rebellion. His reconciliation of the contrast of genuine faithful zeal of the crusaders and the harm inflicted on themselves and their cause was bleak. Scarred by the experience of religious warfare in France, that contradicted religious belief, Pasquier concluded that religion could not be advanced through arms. Regarding the crusades as an enterprise aimed at converting the infidel, he cited Gregory I in rejecting the use of force to compel faith. This rejection of holy war and religious war looked forward to the ideas of Francis Bacon, Gentili and Grotius. Many of Pasquier’s other notions similarly anticipated later discussions as well as following current ones. Above all, in his search in the crusades for the origins of the modern world and particularly modern France, which was why he included them in the Recherches in the first place, Pasquier, like Bongars, subjected them to secular assay. He asked not just were they ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but precisely how and for whom and, escaping the Augustinian model of ratione peccati, why.
Pasquier and Bongars presaged the tone of the succeeding few generations of French crusade scholars for whom texts and national self-applause went arm in arm. The crusades became a favoured topic of Gallican writers, stimulating interest in their surviving memorials. Numerous editions of the vernacular French chronicles of Geoffrey de Villehardouin and Jean de Joinville were produced, beginning in 1601 and 1609 respectively, culminating in editions (1657, 1668) by the great medieval philologist and historian Charles du Fresne du Cange (1610–88), who also wrote a Histoire de l’empire de Constantinople (1657) and left an unpublished description of the noble (chiefly French) families of Outremer. Genealogy in a society in which nobility conveyed tangible benefits as well as elevated status soon became a staple support of crusade studies, encouraging the antiquarian and the forger in almost equal measure. The cult of St Louis spilt over from medieval texts, such as Joinville, to biographies (at least five in seventeenth-century France), to prose fiction and epic verse, such as Saint Louys by the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne (1602–71), a farrago of false history and anachronistic characters that went into eight editions between 1653 and 1672. Although his subject was ostensibly historical, Le Moyne’s point was cultural, the reverse of Pasquier’s; Christian and military virtues easily sat together, between the Devout and the Brave there existed no opposition or contradiction. Christian chivalry came once more to aid the reputation of the crusade.22
The debate between regarding the crusades as symbols of medieval superstition, barbarity and decadence or, alternatively, as a source of pride and witness to laudable Christian idealism and heroism had begun, fuelled largely by the contrast between academic dissection and popular invention. Here the highly influential, sentimental, fictive and romantic fantasies of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (first published in Italian in 1581) played a significant part in exciting popular interest and even determining public perceptions. The consequent slough of bad epics shed by the marriage of history and romance even included an unpublished and apparently execrable poem by César de Nostredame (1553–c. 1630), son of the ‘prophet’ Michel, with the unpromising title Hippiade ou Godefroi et les chevaliers.23
While a number of crusading heroes, notably Peter the Hermit and Godfrey de Bouillon but also including unlikely candidates such as Simon de Montfort the Elder, established lasting reputations, St Louis occupied a pinnacle of his own, the standard against which his successors were repeatedly judged. Although not exclusively because of his crusading exploits, St Louis’s devotion to a higher cause and his identification of his nation with it occupied a central element in his attraction. Kings from Henry III (1574–89) onwards were regularly compared (or contrasted) with the crusader saint, none more than Louis XIV (1643–1715) to whom, unsurprisingly from those in royal circles, such as du Cange, works on the crusade were frequently dedicated. Some of this crusading revivalism was associated with contemporary political issues in which Louis XIV held or was being persuaded to hold an interest, most obviously possible leadership of counter-attacks against the Turks. One of the more unusual associations of Louis, the crusades and the eastern problem came from the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).
Working for the elector of Mainz, in 1671–72 Leibniz forwarded to the French government a proposal for a new French conquest of Egypt. This, Leibniz claimed, would combine the benefits of dishing the Dutch, destroying the Ottoman Empire, giving mastery of the seas and international commerce to France, and make Louis XIV the arbiter of Christendom and an eastern emperor to challenge Alexander the Great. He may have hoped for a sympathetic hearing. In the same year as he wrote his project, the French Levant trading company was established, the beginning of the creation of French dominance over trade with the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. However, Leibniz’s real motive may have been more prosaically to relieve the Low Countries and the Rhineland of French aggression.24
Woven into the very essence of Leibniz’s plan was the history of the crusades, in particular the Egyptian strategy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, precedents for his new ‘holy war’. Three elements distinguished Leibniz’s scheme: France’s especial role in the crusades that translated into a continuing destiny; insistence that the crusades were and could again be conducted for the benefit of Christendom and even humanity; and the prophetic notion that a successful new conquest of Egypt could lead to western, mainly French colonisation of the Near East to ‘spread civilisation and ideas of humanity’; Christianity would be extended to Asia and Africa.25 To back up his colonising theme he drew comparisons with European expansion in North America and India. The crusades failed, Leibniz argued, chiefly because of the crusaders’ divisions and mistakes. To support the prospects for Louis XIV’s success, Leibniz emphasised, in a manner later made very familiar by European Mediterranean imperialists and colonists, that the Ottoman system was decadent (harems, sodomy, drugs etc.), tyrannical and primitive. More sweeping still, Leibniz drew the contrast between ‘the European life, full of calm and dignity and the barbarism (moeurs barbares) of Asia’.26 Morally and materially, holy war itself was admirable and efficacious, even in the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. Of his own project and by implication its medieval predecessors he remarked that ‘no more just or more holy scheme has entered human thought’.27 The recipients of Leibniz’s plan seemed less impressed: ‘un peu chimérique’, ‘un peu extravagant’ reported one to Louis XIV; the difficulties surprising and ‘quasi-insurmontables’ commented another. Louis XIV’s foreign minister neatly summed it up with a rather different take on the crusades to the French ambassador to Leibniz’s master, the elector of Mainz: ‘I say nothing about the schemes for a holy war: but you know that they have ceased to be à la mode since St Louis.’28
Unsurprisingly, the Leibniz scheme was left to moulder in archives and libraries until rediscovered in 1795, just in time for Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt (1798–99) and the re-emergence of views uncannily similar to Leibniz’s on the crusades, Christian colonialism, the superiority of the west and the decadence of the east. Far more popular, far more representative even, if far less unequivocally positive, was the Histoire des croisades (1675) of Louis Maimbourg (1610–86). A Jesuit, later expelled from his order in 1682 for his strident Gallicanism, Maimbourg aimed his work at noble patrons and a general educated readership. His success was witnessed by the many contemporary editions and translations in France and abroad; the 1682 French edition even crossed the Atlantic later to find a place in the library of Thomas Jefferson. Although hedging his bets over enthusiasm and disapproval, Maimbourg avoids confessional dialectics. The crusades were lit by ‘heroic actions’ (particularly by Frenchmen), ‘scarcely to be outdone’ (except perhaps by his royal patron), deeds that revealed Christian values of steadfastness and courage with French values of honour. From sycophantic praise of Louis XIV, inevitably compared with Louis IX, the national and royal bias is clear. Like Leibniz, there is a hint that Louis XIV is expected to emulate or out-do the great deeds of his predecessors. More commercially, perhaps, Maimbourg insists he had included all the names of nobles mentioned in the primary texts but would welcome information about others, supported by evidence (‘des bonnes mémoires’).
Despite its nationalist, royalist deference and accessible style, Maimbourg’s reading embraced many of the main sources, even if they had been mined uncritically: Robert of Rheims; Guibert of Nogent; Suger of St Denis; William of Tyre; Nicetas Choniates; Matthew Paris; Jean of Joinville. Maimbourg did not doubt that his audience would recognise his subject as ‘noble and agreeable’, touching the ‘Great Concerns and the Principal Estates of Europe and Asia’, a cosmic frame rarely missing from general crusade histories. Maimbourg sharpened the point by following the usual pattern of early modern histories in bringing his story into his own age, mentioning resurgent fears of the Ottomans and the plans to combat them, precisely the context of Leibniz’s proposal. Above all, Maimbourg’s approach was marked by a not untypical vicarious French triumphalism; large-scale narrative based on original sources; and an eye for temporal causation not divine will. His English translator (English edition 1685) and fellow royal enthusiast, John Nalson, paid him what he saw as the compliment of remarking that Maimbourg ‘hath the least of that foolish Bigotry, which never fails to render any Profession of Religion ridiculous’, a very Anglican sentiment.29
However, the attention paid in France to the crusades produced more than eccentric schemes for world domination, grovelling apologia for monarchy, bad verse or populist national history. The temporal emphasis in interpretation produced new conceptual frameworks within which the crusades could be reassessed, ideas that were taken up but hardly discovered or invented by the philosophical historians of the eighteenth century. The Gallicanism that allowed French crusade historians to escape the flail of religious controversy produced a whole new set of interpretive models. Perhaps the most influential writer in the circulation of these ideas was the lawyer turned priest and theologian Claude Fleury (1640–1723), whose massive Histoire ecclésiastique (20 volumes, 1691–1737) and his more conceptually concise summary Discours sur l’histoire ecclésiastique (1691) directly influenced prominent eighteenth-century writers on the crusades such as Voltaire, Robertson and Gibbon (who owned one copy of the Histoire and two of the Discours).30 Like many who wrote on the crusades in seventeenth-century France, Fleury was a royal pensioner, tutor to members of Louis XIV’s extended family, an ecclesiastical moderate, or courtly trimmer who largely hid behind academic theology rather than engage in church politics, a position more easily maintained as his magnum opus only reached 1414. Yet his views on the crusades were clear enough. Fleury tempered the extravagance of Leibniz’s positive vision of crusading by a thoughtful analysis that combined traditional consideration of religious motives and status with a precise assessment of material consequences. Unusually, Fleury employed a modern-seeming historical relativism, when, for instance, having outlined papal justifications for the enterprise, he commented that now in later, calmer times, he found in them neither solid nor just reasoning.31 In general, Fleury’s criticisms of the crusades were temperate, unrhetorical, founded on the discussion of evidence rather than first principles.
In common with many of his predecessors, Fleury typified the crusades as having begun in a spirit of justified spiritual enthusiasm only for the ideal to be corrupted by bad discipline, poor morals and inept leadership. Materialism began to predominate, citing the familiar evidence of papal direction, the Italian crusades, taxes and the sale of indulgences, until the crusades on all fronts degenerated into ‘temporal affairs for which religion acted only as pretext’.32 One of Fleury’s bolder strokes, aligning him more with Protestant than Catholic historians, was to criticise the concentration inherent in crusade ideology on associating Christianity with locations rather than the spirit. His analysis of the course and consequences of crusading was refreshingly acute and measured, rehearsing many themes that later become standard interpretations. He attributed the original idea for a crusade to Gregory VII, a feature of early modern historiography that oddly slipped from prominence in later centuries. Saladin’s reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187 was conducted in a manner ‘plus digne’ than the Christians’.33 The kingdom of Jerusalem was too tiny to be considered an especially fruitful result of the First Crusade. Using the thirteenth-century Gesta Innocenti, he noticed that Innocent III had tried to stop the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, but that Byzantium’s fall had ultimately led to the success of the Ottomans. The expansion of crusading theatres had weakened attempts to defend the Holy Land in the thirteenth century. In the Baltic, the initial drive to convert had been subverted by the material ambitions of the Teutonic Knights. Not unlike his fellow lawyer Pasquier, Fleury argued for the conversion not destruction of Muslims.
Fleury’s historical analysis is moderate, less heated and more academic than Maimbourg, in many ways similar to the stance of the English divine Thomas Fuller’s popular Historie of the Holy Warre (1639). However, in one crucial respect Fleury goes beyond his contemporaries. He shared with Leibniz a low view of Islamic culture, but went further than the German polymath to trace a precise course in which the crusades contributed directly to the progress of European civilisation and superiority. ‘Beyond the conquests of kingdoms and principalities, these enterprises produced results less eye-catching but more solid, the growth of navigation and commerce that enriched Venice, Genoa and the other maritime cities of Italy.’ The crusades led to western control of Mediterranean trade. Armed with this ‘freedom of trade’ (‘liberté du commerce’), merchants from Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Florence capitalised on the flow of goods from Greece, Syria and Egypt and, hence, ultimately from the Indies, to the material benefit of their cities and the flourishing of arts and manufactures.34 In the context of the long-standing legal and academic debate in France about the fate of the medieval ‘feudal’ regime, the development of trade and industry provided an antithesis to the old rural society and marked a step towards a more modern world. This was the implication of Leibniz’s scheme; it is Fleury’s clear conclusion. This idea of cultural and social progress based on commerce and economic power became a staple of eighteenth-century thought, whether in the hands of Voltaire or Adam Smith. Touching on the interpretation of history, economics and social change, it led directly to the positive reinterpretations of the crusades in the later eighteenth century. Usually seen as a distinctive development of the Enlightenment, the idea of progress and the crusades’ role in it had been current long before. It was fitting that Fleury cited, in support of these theories, the great work on the commercial implications of the crusade by the fourteenth-century Venetian Marino Sanudo, which he had found in Bongars’s Gesta Dei Per Francos.35
One of the most striking features of crusade historiography over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the manner in which the confessional differences of the early part of the period gave way, on the one hand, to national epics (mainly in France) and, on the other, to a cosmopolitan debate across national and religious boundaries as to the moral or material merits or demerits of the phenomena. Few managed the philosophical detachment of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in his unfinished fragment Advertisement Touching an Holy Warre (1622). According to Thomas Fuller writing a decade and a half after his death, Bacon had planned a full history of the crusades.36 The surviving fragment is part of an incomplete mock-classical dialogue on holy war conducted by constructed archetypes of opinion: a moderate divine; Protestant and Catholic zealots; a soldier; a courtier; and a politician. The debate turned on whether ‘the propagation of the Faith by arms’ was legitimate or not. Bacon then uses his characters’ discussion of past and contemporary history, from Urban II to the Ottomans and the Incas, to display the contrasting perspectives: the traditional Catholic defence of religious war; nostalgia for wars fought for noble causes; demands for an end to internecine Christian conflict in the greater task of combating infidels; severe Protestant denial of the concept of religious warfare; and cynical dismissal of the whole idea: ‘the Philosopher’s Stone and an Holy War were but the rendez vous of cracked brains that wore their feather in their head instead of their hat’. For Bacon, as he wrote in 1624, offensive religious wars could not be approved unless supported by lawful temporal justification. More obviously than many who considered the crusades, Bacon acknowledged the impact on attitudes to holy and just wars of the experience of the conquest of the Americas, and the debates about the status of native Americans as targets for aggression, conquest and conversion.37 Prudence and law appeared preferable to religious faith as justification for war.
English writers on the crusades provide a revealing parallel to their French contemporaries in refashioning the medieval conflicts. As in France, contemporary politics and theological debate determined much of the historical commentary. Late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England shared the continental tradition of interest in the crusading past. In 1481 William Caxton had printed the earliest English translation of William of Tyre (like Accolti basing it on a French version), his introduction encapsulating the three selling points of crusade history: relevance to the current Turkish threat; models of good and bad behaviour, in good humanist manner; and tales of chivalric adventure and fame. This combined history as entertainment and political tract, as Caxton urged a new crusade on Edward IV and his court. Other texts related to crusading translated into English and printed included Richard Pynson’s 1520 edition of Prince Hayton’s Flowers of the History of the East (1307).38 There was also a market for new crusading texts, such as the Middle English romance poem Capystranus, a fictionalised description of the events surrounding the successful defence of Belgrade by crusaders in 1456, which survives in three printed fragments dating from 1515, 1517 and 1520.39 Scholarly and ecclesiastical libraries retained numerous manuscripts of crusade texts, some of which were more widely disseminated among collectors and antiquarians after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. For example, at least three manuscripts of William of Tyre seem to have been in circulation by the end of the century. The antiquary William Camden (1551–1623) possessed a chronicle based on the Gesta Francorum which he lent to Bongars.40 This was an international market. Most of the relevant books and editions were in Latin, still the universal western language of learning.
However, a local tinge was lent to crusade studies by force of circumstances. England, though concerned, was more detached from the Turkish menace than continental Europe, tending to see it in secular or cultural not faith terms. The establishment of state Protestantism under Elizabeth I consigned overt sympathy for the theology of crusading to Catholics, ipso facto enemies of the state for much of the later sixteenth century. The cult of national providential exceptionalism encouraged serious historical writing in the vernacular, which made such works unreadable outside England as very few foreigners learnt English, while equally relegating the crusades to a less prominent place in historical imagination than in France or parts of western Germany. Long periods of deliberate international neutrality, especially under the first two Stuarts (with the brief exception of the late 1620s), made crusading even less appealing as a model or a memory. Take the case of Richard I, with Edward I, the only plausible candidates for ‘English’ crusade heroes. Traditionally, Richard had been taken at his high medieval repute. However, in his Collection of the History of England (1612–18) Samuel Daniel (1562/63–1619), poet, courtier and historian, accused Richard of highhandedly impoverishing England to pursue a ‘remote and consuming war’ at a time when the English government was trying hard to avoid continental entanglements. ‘During this businesse abroade in the East, the state of England suffered much at home.’41 Such was the popularity and influence of Daniel’s history that this disparaging judgement became standard. Even the bankrupt religious writer and historian Sir Richard Baker (c. 1568–1645), who composed his Chronicle of the Kings of England (1643) while incarcerated in the Fleet debtor’s prison in London, tempered his praise for Richard (‘valiant … wise, liberal, merciful, just’ etc.) with some slightly ambiguous asides about the raising of the required money: ‘of taxations properly so called there were never fewer in any king’s Raigne; but of ways to draw money from the subject, never more’.42 The idea of the crusade’s wastefulness of European domestic resources became a central ingredient of historical criticism.
Baker acknowledged that the crusades were an important feature on the medieval landscape: ‘it may well passe, if not for a work of Devotion, at least worthy to be remembered’. In general, Baker, who had read widely if uncritically and advanced some strange notions (such as Henry I being a Cambridge man; Baker himself had been at Hart Hall, Oxford), adopted a neutral or rather admiring stance regarding the heroism of the crusaders, notably the future Edward I, an especial hero of his (as he was of Fuller’s).43 Daniel, by contrast, pursues a consistently hostile line in assessing the phenomenon as a whole. He dismisses the crusades as a ‘humour’ that persisted despite difficult journeys, defeats, illnesses brought on by the alien climate, and vast numerical odds cast against them. ‘It consumed infinite Treasure and most of the bravest men of our west world, and especially France.’ The Germans and Italians were preoccupied in the wars of popes against emperors. Above all, Daniel argued, the ‘great effect’ of the crusades lay in the Ottoman invasions of Europe by showing how even when combined the west was weak: ‘the Christians who were out to seeke an enemy in Asia brought one thence’. Papal power corrupted whatever initial idealism there had been and, by encouraging rulers to depart on crusade, popes ruined them in order to extend their power. Daniel affected bewilderment but also admiration at how crusade enthusiasm caused people to ignore ‘worldly respects’, even commenting on crusaders’ psychology: ‘so powerful are the operations of the mind as they made men neglect the ease of their bodies’.44
However, both Daniel and Baker studied the crusades only as part of national history. More comprehensive, systematic and influential was Richard Knolles’s massive The Generall Historie of the Turkes (first edition 1603 of over 1,150 folio pages). Knolles, a schoolmaster in Sandwich for most of his career, was chiefly concerned with Ottoman history, part information, part background briefing for a plea for Christian unity and a counter-attack against the Turks who, still immensely powerful, nonetheless appeared to be in decline. Although clearly influenced by the backwash of continental Turcophobia around the turn of the century, Knolles was almost entirely non-judgemental about the crusades. His detailed but lively and readable narrative of the Holy Land crusades that prefaces the account of the rise and triumphs of the Ottomans appears to take the holy wars more or less at the assessment of contemporary sources. Individual crusades are called the ‘great and most sacred’, ‘most honourable’, ‘devout’. Crusaders were ‘Christian champions’, ‘religious and venterous’, the whole enterprise ‘worthie eternal memorie’. While insisting that in Christendom ‘questions of religion’ are ‘never by the sword to be determined’, Knolles concluded with the hope that ‘the Mahometane superstition, by the sword begun, and by the sword maintained, shall at length by the Christian sword also be dethroned’. No serious consideration let alone criticism of the theology of crusading or the role of church and papacy interrupts the narrative that in places can be genuinely and movingly empathetic, as in the description of the different ways the First Crusaders expressed their feelings on first espying the walls of Jerusalem in June 1099. As well as conveying a huge weight of information, Knolles sought literary impact, as in his highly dramatic rendering of the battle of Lepanto, which some allege provided Shakespeare with the basis for a description of a battle against the Turks in Othello. In two central interpretations, Knolles argues that divisions among the Christians on crusade and in Europe led to their failure and the rise of the Turks, and that the diversion of the Fourth Crusade weakened Christendom and advantaged ‘the common enemies’, drawing a direct implicit parallel between the hostilities between Roman and Greek Christians in the thirteenth century and the divided Christendom of his own day.45
Despite Knolles’s elegance and erudition, the first full investigation in English on the causes, course and nature of the crusades that adopted the critical academic approach familiar from continental historians came from a friend of Baker, The Historie of the Holy Warre (1639), by the Cambridge career cleric and historian Thomas Fuller (1607/8–61). Fuller made his name as a vocal advocate of moderation in church and state, opposing extremism and radicalism whether from the crown or its opponents. Like many who cling to the middle of the road, he was swept aside. During the Civil War his espousal of a balanced monarchical constitution and a comprehensive not exclusive episcopal church found little favour, and none with the victors. However, if thwarted in the church, Fuller developed into an original and innovative historian, pioneering detached study of the English Reformation and of the years before 1640. His History of the Worthies of England (1662) was also the first English biographical dictionary.
Fuller’s Historie of the Holy Warre was his first book and, like his later work, is marked by a cool, detached, judgemental style, studded with memorable aphorisms. Based on extensive reading in medieval chronicles, such as Matthew Paris, William of Tyre and Nicetas Choniates, Fuller’s Historie approaches the crusades from two angles, looking at the possible theoretical justifications for the enterprise but also at its practical causes and consequences. His general position appears that of a moderate Calvinist, hostile to the theology of the crusade and the role played by the papacy. Fuller cast a critical eye on his sources; thus, on Nicetas Choniates’s account of the Fourth Crusade, ‘hitherto an historian, now a plaintiff’. For all his lively uninhibited censoriousness, he did not condescend towards the past: ‘Let us not raise the opinion of our own pietie by trampling on our predecessors, as if this age had monopolized all goodnesse to itself.’ Although he regarded the crusades as the product of ‘horrible superstition’ that ‘not only tainted the rind, but rotted the core of the whole action’, lamenting that ‘most of the pottage of that age tasted of that wild gourd’, he refused to deliver a universal condemnation: ‘no doubt there was a mixture of much good metal in them which God the good refiner knoweth how to sever’. While lambasting papal ambition and clerical exploitation of the laity (they ‘had the conscience to buy earth cheap and sell heaven dear’) and denouncing the idea of seeking the physical Holy Land as ‘in their nature … wholly superstitious’ of pious crusaders, he remarked ‘I could only wish that their zeal herein had either had more light or lesse heat.’46
Fuller helped secure an audience by his attention to the prospects for a modern crusade against the Turks (none, without church unity) and by weaving the medieval past into the story of contemporary religion. Thus the Albigensians, who, like Foxe, he equates with Waldensians, are depicted as crypto-Protestants who despite their persecution ‘continued to the days of Luther when this morning-starre willingly surrendered his place to him a brighter sunne’.47 For the wider educated readership at whom Fuller aimed the book, The Historie acted as a sort of correction to the pervasive romanticism of Tasso. Fuller himself was not immune to Tasso’s influence, as suggested by his attention to alleged Amazon crusaders (although Tasso’s tended to be Muslims).48 One of Fuller’s friends put it neatly in a commendatory verse that prefaced the book: ‘Tasso, be silent, my friend speaks; his storie/Hath robb’d thy poem of its long-liv’d glory./So rich his vein, his lines of so high state,/Thou canst not feigne so well as he relate.’ The point was proved: by 1651 The Historie had gone into four editions.
The themes Fuller examined embodied most of the debates on the crusades that characterized its study from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. He was hardly original, except perhaps in the clarity of organisation and lucidity of prose, possibly the most elegant history of the crusades in English before Steven Runciman. The emphasis on waste and the role of the crusades in provoking the Ottoman invasions was shared with, for example, Daniel, whose views on Richard I seemed to have left a mark as well (‘farre-fetched, dear-bought honour’).49 His concluding remarks about the need for Christian unity before any counter-offensive against the Turks had become a commonplace, not least from Knolles’s Generall Historie, which Fuller used extensively. In places the debt seems very close. Both in the frontispiece to the first edition and in the text, Fuller refers admiringly to the simplicity of Saladin’s funeral, his corpse preceded by a simply black cloth, a story prominent in Knolles. In his praise of Saladin, Fuller’s borrowing from Knolles becomes plagiarist: Saladin ‘wanted nothing to his eternal happinesse but the knowledge of Christ’ (Fuller); Saladin ‘wanted nothing to his eternall commendation more than the true knowledge of his salvation in Christ Iesu’ (Knolles).50
The scheme of Fuller’s work is deliberately grandiose, beginning with the crucifixion and the capture of Jerusalem by Titus in AD 70, allowing Fuller to indulge in some anti-Jewish polemic. His account of Islam is brutal: ‘the scumme of Judaisme and Paganisme sod together and here and there strewed over with a spice of Christianitie’. Among the Turks ‘it is a sinne to be learned’.51 Before embarking on his narrative, Fuller confronts the intellectual arguments for or against the crusades. In its favour, he adduces the secular just war concept that has a jarringly modern ring: ‘a preventative warre grounded on a just fear of an invasion is lawfull’.52 But Fuller demolishes the traditional supports of crusading by pointing out that there was no real legality in Christian claims to the geographic Holy Land as the Muslims possessed rights of long occupancy and any claims transferred from the Jewish covenant of the Old Testament had long since gone the same way as Jewish rule. More fundamentally, visiting terrestrial Jerusalem was to succumb to superstition by ‘placing transcendent holinesse in the place and with a wooden devotion to the material Crosse’. More practically, the crusades did not work; they provoked Muslim aggression and were destructively wasteful; ‘the warre was a quicksand to swallow treasure and a hot digestion to devoure valiant men’.53 This idea of material and financial loss in a pointless cause found clear expression in the frontispiece to the first edition where the ravaged crusaders, victims of God, disease and the Turks, return, if at all, ‘empty’. Fuller was too good a historian simply to assert his ideas; he presented them at length supported by evidence, as in his long concluding discourse (Book V) on the reasons why the crusades failed: superstitious purpose; bad behaviour of crusaders and other Christians; the intrigues of popes and Greek emperors; the clergy assuming command; divided leadership; the climate of the Near East; the vices of the crusaders; the treachery of the Templars; the small extent of the kingdom of Jerusalem; the size of armies; and heavy casualties. He accepts that the French were the primary movers, coining the phrase ‘merchant-pilgrimes’ for what he saw as the mercenary Italians.54 A brief sketch of post-1291 crusade schemes and the Hospitallers on Rhodes introduces the discussion about the Ottomans in the seventeenth century, the book ending, as did Knolles’s, with a description of current Ottoman power.
Fuller’s Historie thus appears as a portmanteau of early modern scholarship; textual, presentist, judgemental, seeking secular explanations, a humanist mine of uplifting or admonitory stories laced with an apparently distancing objectivity sustained by a concern with the pathology of belief. Whether seen as quaint, a model of religious war to be embraced or rejected, a lesson in how not to fight the Turks or as a feature in the progress of western European civilisation, through the work of these scholars, editors and writers, the crusades were recognised as a common inheritance across political, geographic and confessional division in Europe, ensuring, as David Hume was imperishably to record a century after Fuller’s death in one of crusade historiography’s most attractive clichés, that the crusades that had ‘engrossed the attention of Europe … have ever since engaged the curiosity of man kind’.55
1 F. Bacon, Advertisement Touching an Holy Warre, Works, ed. J. Spedding et al., vii (London, 1859), 24.
2 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Eng. trans. S. Reynolds. London, 1973), ii, 842–4.
3 C. Tyerman, ‘Holy War, Roman Popes and Christian Soldiers: Some Early Modern Views on Medieval Christendom’, in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy and the Religious Life, ed. P. Biller and B. Dobson (Woodbridge, 1999), esp. p. 293. In general, C. Tyerman, The Invention of Crusades (London, 1998), pp. 100–9; J. Burrow, A History of Histories (London, 2007), esp. pp. 299–305.
4 In general, R. Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (Nieuwkoop, 1967); J. W Bohnstedt, The Infidel Scourge of God: The Turkish Menace as seen by German Pamphleteers of the Reformation Era (Philadelphia PA, 1968); M. J. Heath, Crusading Commonplaces: La Noue, Lucinge and Rhetoric (Geneva, 1986); N. Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe 1400–1536 (Oxford, 2002); C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago IL, 1988), pp. 343–70; Tyerman, Invention, pp. 100–9.
5 J. Herold, De Bello Sacro (Basel, 1560), p. ii.
6 J. Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and Infidels (Liverpool, 1979); Schwoebel, Shadow, p. 223.
7 E.g. Bohnstedt, Infidel Scourge, pp. 12, 14, 20, 32, 34–5, 41–51; Tyerman, ‘Holy War’, p. 295 note 4.
8 J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. S. R. Cattley (London, 1837–41), iv, 18–21, 27–8, 33–4, 38, 52–4, 69, 113, 120–1.
9 Jacques de Vitry, Historia Orientalis, ed. F. Moschus (Douai, 1597), Preface to Reader.
10 Reinerius Reineccus Steinhemius, Chronicon Hierosolymitanum (Helmstedt, 1584; part II [1585] contains Dresser’s commentary), ii, fols 2v and 5v for quotations. In general, see O. Harding, ‘Heinrich Meibon und Reiner Reineccus’, Westfaelische Forschungen, 18 (1965), 3–22; A. Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 123–4, 142–65.
11 Chronicon Hierosolymitanum, i, Introduction, fols 1v–6v.
12 Tyerman, ‘Holy War’, pp. 293–4, 301–6; for Petau and his Albert of Aachen manuscripts, Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana, ed. and trans. S. Edgington (Oxford, 2007), p. xl.
13 Most obviously, Sanudo’s Secreta (e.g. facsimile reprint, Toronto, 1972) and correspondence; The Library of Edward Gibbon, ed. G. Keynes (London, 1980), p. 133.
14 MS letter of William Walter of 1608, at fol. 6 of Bodleian Library copy of Gesta Dei Per Francos, E.2.8.Art.Seld.; for the Petau loan, Gesta Francorum et Aliorum Hierosolymitanorum, ed. R. Hill (London, 1962), pp. xxxix, xli.
15 For an English translation, Pierre Dubois, The Recovery of the Holy Land, trans. W. I. Brandt (New York NY, 1956).
16 Braudel, Mediterranean, ii, 842–4; Heath, Crusading Commonplaces, passim; Housley, Religious Warfare, pp. 195–8; cf. Moschus in 1597, note 9 above.
17 See Burrow’s discussion, History of Histories, p. 311; for a contrasting view minimising national emphasis until the nineteenth century, J. Richard, ‘National Feeling and the Legacy of the Crusades’, in Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. H. Nicholson (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 204–22, esp. pp. 207–9.
18 E. Pasquier, Les Recherches de la France, ed. M.-M. Fragonard and F. Roudaut et al. (Paris, 1996), ii, 1279.
19 Pasquier, Recherches, i, 623–5; ii, 1272–80 (see p. 1277, note 416 for papal animus against Henry IV); i, 657 and ii, 1272 for the six crusades.
20 Pasquier, Recherches, ii, 1270.
21 Pasquier, Recherches, ii, 1277.
22 N. Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France toward the Middle Ages (New York NY, 1946), passim, but esp. pp. 8, 47–55, 64–96, 102–3, 240–4, 315, 395.
23 Edelman, Attitudes, pp. 202–3.
24 G. W. Leibniz, Projet de conquete de l’Égypte présenté à Louis XIV, Oeuvres, ed. A. Foucher de Careil, v (Paris, 1864), 1–28, for Leibniz’s own summary, pp. 29–265 for the full project.
25 Leibniz, Projet, p. 57.
26 Leibniz, Projet, pp. 126–7, 178.
27 Leibniz, Projet, p. 27; cf. p. 29.
28 Leibniz, Projet, pp. 302, 304, 313, 359.
29 Tyerman, Invention, pp. 110–11; R. Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007), p. 8; for Jefferson’s copy, H. E. Mayer, ‘America and the Crusades’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 125 (1981), 38.
30 Library of Edward Gibbon, p. 125; Fleury devotes his sixth discourse to the crusades, Discours au l’histoire ecclésiastique (1691, Paris, 1763 edn), pp. 234–74.
31 Fleury, Discours, p. 246.
32 Fleury, Discours, p. 266.
33 Fleury, Discours, p. 244.
34 Fleury, Discours, p. 267; for seventeenth-century French ideas of progress in literary views of the past, Edelman, Attitudes, pp. 18–19.
35 Fleury, Discours, pp. 267–8.
36 T. Fuller, The Historie of the Holy Warre (Cambridge, 1639), p. 242.
37 Bacon, Advertisement, pp. 1–36.
38 Tyerman, England and the Crusades, pp. 304–6, 346–7.
39 Middle English Romances, ed. S. H. A. Shepherd (New York NY and London, 1985), pp. 391–408.
40 William of Tyre, Historia, ed. R. B. C. Huygens as Chronicon (Turnhout, 1986), i, 19–22; Gesta Francorum, ed. Hill, p. xli.
41 S. Daniel, The Collection of the History of England (London, 1621), pp. 100, 141; the significance of Daniel’s view of Richard I was demonstrated by J. Gillingham, Richard I (London, 1999), pp. 10–12.
42 Sir Richard Baker, Chronicle of the Kings of England (London, 1643), pp. 90, 92.
43 Baker, Chronicle, pp. 48, 51, 85–91, 127–8; Fuller, Historie, p. 221.
44 Daniel, Collection, pp. 49–50, 98–101, 107, 141, 155–7.
45 R. Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (London, 1603), esp. Introduction and Conclusion (unpaginated) and pp. 12–83, 88–95, 98–9, 101–6, 119–21, 132; pp. 878–85 for Lepanto (see Tyerman, England and the Crusades, pp. 347 and 439 note 16 refs for supposed Othello connection); p. 1153 for hope of military destruction of Islam.
46 Fuller, Historie, pp. 18, 137, 242, 243–4, 256 for quotations.
47 Fuller, Historie, p. 145.
48 Fuller, Historie, author’s prefatory poem and p. 18.
49 Fuller, Historie, pp. 128–9.
50 Fuller, Historie, p. 133; Knolles, Turkes, p. 73.
51 Fuller, Historie, pp. 7, 133.
52 Fuller, Historie, p. 14.
53 Fuller, Historie, p. 15.
54 Fuller, Historie, p. 266.
55 D. Hume, History of Great Britain (London, 1761), i, 209; cf. p. 211.