A generation after Michaud’s death, the creation of an academic society devoted to crusade studies, La Société de l’Orient Latin, bore witness to a transformation of the subject. Founded by the wealthy gentleman scholar Paul Riant (1835–88), the Society produced two initial volumes of research materials, the Archives de l’Orient Latin, in 1881 and 1884 as well as later sponsoring publication of texts and producing a regular if short-lived Revue de l’Orient Latin (12 volumes, 1893–1911). Contributors to the Archives included historians from across Europe, including some of the most innovative and influential figures from what has been described as ‘the golden age of crusade studies’.1 These included pioneers such as the numismatist and sigillographer of the Latin East, the right-wing anti-semitic Alsatian medical doctor Gustav Schlumberger (1844–1929); the French nationalist professor of diplomatic and historian of Latin Cyprus, Louis de la Mas Latrie (1815–97), like Riant a papal count; and the innovative historian of Italian trade in the Levant, Wilhelm Heyd (1823–1906). French crusade studies were prominently on display. Alongside Riant himself were the colonial historian Emmanuel Rey (d. 1916), editors of literary texts such as Charles Schefer, Paul Meyer and Paul Viollet, and younger scholars such as Joseph Marie Delaville Le Roulx (1855–1911), historian of the military order of the Hospital of St John. True to Riant’s personal internationalist credo, other contributors came from across Europe (although significantly none from Great Britain). Notably, only a decade after the Franco-Prussian War, a powerful contingent came from Germany, including editors such as S. Löwenfeld and W. Wattenbach and the major crusade scholars Heinrich Hagenmeyer (1834–1915), ‘the first serious historian’ of the First Crusade,2 and the Prussian schoolmaster, indefatigable antiquarian and excavator of crusade references, Reinhard Röhricht (1842–1905). Such scholars represented the new range of historical study, based on fresh standards of textual criticism, serious interest in archival research, and the beginnings of the creation of an academic community of professional historians, sustained by feelings of national pride and supported by universities, private money and public funds.
However, this scholarly galaxy did not chart wholly fresh directions in the understanding of the nature or significance of the crusades, even if they transformed knowledge of the events and historical context. The dominant themes established earlier in the century persisted: the crusades as colonialism, commercial expansion, cultural exchange, enterprises of national endeavour or triumphs of the human (specifically white, Christian and European) spirit; admirable even if shocking in extreme physical religiosity, violence and futility. In the contest between Christianity and Islam, between ‘East’ and ‘West’ the crusades were assumed to be asserting as well as, in the Levant at least, defending western civilisation. Despite a methodological and scholarly revolution heralding myriad fresh nuances of interpretation and detail, the conceptual context remained remarkably static. Reviewing the historiography of the previous two centuries and more in 1935, the influential American crusade historian Dana C. Munro, while modifying emphases, concluded by essentially parroting the materialist functionalism of Heeren and Robertson. Similarly, twenty years later Steven Runciman revived a very traditional romantic disdain in a potent cocktail of Gibbon and Walter Scott.3 In a sense, the familiarity of the intellectual tropes allowed scholars to transform the substance of the subject without changing its apparent shape.
One feature of this transformation in the mid-nineteenth century was the cosmopolitan reach of the intellectual energy devoted to the crusades. Riant’s manifesto for the Société de l’Orient Latin in 1881 was explicitly international in tone. Given the increasingly proprietorial nationalist attitude towards the crusades exhibited by collaborators such as Mas Latrie, who eccentrically criticised Michaud for insufficient appreciation of the French nature of the crusader states, or the marquis de Vogüé, who as early as 1860 had defined crusader architectural remains in the Levant as ‘French’, Riant’s remarks appear delicately pointed. He noted that, although based in France, most of the Society’s subscribers and purchasers of its publications were foreigners. He roundly declared that ‘the history of the crusades is not national’, the French who went east were accompanied by other nationalities. The Holy Land was sacred to all Christians. To restrict the Society’s research to the French contribution would render its work ‘mediocre, sterile and incomplete’. Consequently, Riant had assembled an international team of collaborators. He also compared the Society’s ambitions and methods with national editorial projects elsewhere, such as the Rolls Series in England and, in particular, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series, edited by Georg Heinrich Pertz, himself a former pupil of Heeren; a number of MGH editors regularly contributed to the Society’s publications.4 Riant’s nod to German textual scholarship was both appropriate and an acknowledgement that even if the frame for much crusade study was that bequeathed by Michaud, not least interest in the Latin East, much of the impetus for new critical studies came not from France but from Germany.
German crusade scholarship precisely mirrored the contrast between methodological innovation and conceptual conservatism. Friedrich Wilken (1777–1840) established a narrative that exerted a similar influence in Germany as Michaud’s had in France. Ranke’s pupil von Sybel challenged traditional approaches to reading texts, even if he replaced them with his own somewhat illusory romantic vision of the genesis of narrative sources. In the following generation, focus on the discovery, appraisal and editing of primary evidence by professional textual scholars placed crusade history on a new, intellectually more secure footing, culminating in the harvesting of references and texts by Röhricht and a shoal of critical monographs, such as those on the sources for the First Crusade by Heinrich Hagenmeyer or the work of Bernhard Kugler (1837–98) on the Second Crusade and on Albert of Aachen, in which he effectively challenged much of von Sybel’s critique.5 With concurrent French scholarship, these works provided the basis for the serious academic study and discussion of crusading.
They also reflected contemporary and often competing political and cultural developments. Post-Enlightenment liberal traditions emphasised material, economic and political interpretations in the manner of Heeren of Göttingen. The Rankean search for an almost scientific historical truth moved debate away from narrow (or broad) confessional or anti-confessional diatribe. By contrast, the growth and assertion of German nationalism lent especial interest to relics, such as cathedrals and archaeological remains, and narratives of a supposedly ‘German’ medieval past of the first Reich of Frederick I and Frederick II. The influential Volk nationalism of Herder, while deploring the oppressive force of organised Christianity, nonetheless regarded the crusades as revealing ‘the spirit of northern knightly honour’ in the struggle for human progress.6 To avoid the matter of German identity amongst intellectuals in the German-speaking world of the nineteenth century was almost impossible. In this, medievalism, including the crusades, played its part as a seemingly neutral witness to a German spirit that attracted nationalists of all persuasions: conservatives, liberals, Catholics, Protestants, politicians, propagandists, romantics and intellectuals. One fruit of this concern was the establishment of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica founded by the Prussian politician, reformer and German nationalist Baron Karl von Stein in 1818–19 devoted to the editing and publication of medieval texts specifically on German history down to 1500. Within crusade studies, it was no coincidence that much academic impetus came from the study of those episodes that involved ‘Germans’, from the First Crusade stories of Albert of Aachen to the Hohenstaufen involvement in thirteenth-century Outremer to the Germanisation of the southern and eastern Baltic by the Teutonic Knights.
An early centre for German crusader scholarship was the liberal university of Göttingen. Stein studied there, as did his first MGH chief editor, G. H. Pertz, where he had been taught by A. H. L. Heeren (1760–1842). There Wilken produced his 1798 prize thesis on the chronicle of Abu al-Fida and began to plan his great Geschichte der Kreuzzüge nach morgenländischen und abendländischen Berichten (A History of the Crusade from Eastern and Western Sources, 7 volumes, Leipzig, 1807–32). Both Heeren’s economic and institutional interpretation of the middle ages and Wilken’s non-judgemental narrative, derived as much from non-Christian and non-European as from more familiar western sources, were directed at combating emotional responses to the past, especially those rooted in present prejudice. Wilken’s empathy lay in attempting to convey how medieval contemporaries viewed the crusades, a supposedly passive observation far removed from the heightened engaged empathy of Michaud. Although Wilken’s great work was less internationally influential even than Heeren’s technical study because of its length and being in German not French, it nonetheless formed the starting point for the great nineteenth-century German assault and conquest of crusade scholarship.
Wilken was perhaps the first major scholar of the crusades to earn his money from being a historian, in the modern sense the first professional. Robertson’s academic role as Principal of Edinburgh University was of a different order while Heeren was primarily an ancient historian, his interest in the crusades part of a wider focus on the economic and structural bases for the creation of states, development of civilisation and historical change. Wilken occupied a chair of History at Heidelberg (1805–17) before going to Berlin as professor and, more influentially, Librarian of the Prussian Royal Library. His professional rise can be traced on the title pages of succeeding volumes of his History, the work that secured his reputation. Alongside the Heidelberg professorship noted in Volume One (1807), by Volume Two (1813) he had become an associate of elite academic societies in France and Prussia. The publication of Volume Three (1817) coincided with his move to Berlin, appropriately perhaps as this volume introduced the Baltic crusades.7 By 1826, and Volume Four, Wilken had added the title of Prussian State Historiographer to that of Royal Librarian. By the time Volume Seven appeared in 1832, Wilken was very grand and internationally recognised by his fellow scholars. His eminence did not rest simply on honorific titles but on his research, writing and administrative skill in building up the Berlin collection. The years after the Napoleonic Wars were a golden age for bibliophiles and collectors as many private and institutional libraries, either looted or unsustainable by their displaced, ruined or impoverished owners, came onto the market. Wilken also used his position as Royal Librarian to gain access to foreign archives for his own work on the crusades, in 1829, for instance, visiting London, Oxford and Paris to consult oriental manuscripts as well as printed works. Wilken was especially impressed by the collection held in the King’s Library in the British Museum.8
Two features distinguish Wilken’s magnum opus: his eastern perspective and his attempt to allow the sources to speak for themselves. Both are reflected in the range and depth of the texts consulted, the more remarkable as the standard collections and editions of many of them still lay in the future. Unlike Michaud, Wilken eschewed flights of literary fancy. His method revolved around the comparison of sources to achieve the greatest accuracy; thus he tried to correct and make sense of William of Tyre’s often opaque chronology by reference to Arabic texts. Although hardly the sort of close internal textual criticism advocated by Ranke and his pupils, this represented an advance on the more capricious selection criteria of earlier writers or of Michaud, whose work appeared almost simultaneously (1811–22). Not only are the main, familiar Latin, French, Greek and Arabic chronicles and collections of documents paraded, but Wilken’s net catches less obvious morsels such as the poems of Theobald IV of Navarre and some works of theorists c. 1300. The whole apparatus is sustained by detailed academic footnotes, a weighty bibliography and an annexe of documents. Wilken’s coverage stretches beyond the Holy Land (and therefore Michaud’s), to include, for instance, the Baltic crusades from which the state he worked for ultimately derived. His inclusive use of sources permitted him to reconstruct coherent – often too coherent – accounts of previously obscure episodes, such as the Children’s Crusade of 1212.9 This could result in invention no less egregious than Michaud’s, but considerably less obvious as it rested on selection of sources served up in dry academic phrases rather than literary drama in purple prose. As a detailed narrative and a mine of references, Wilken’s History held a pre-eminent place for much of the rest of the nineteenth century. While Wilken’s method precluded flashy polemics, his approach confirmed, at least to readers such as von Sybel, the positive appreciation of the crusades shared by his old professor Heeren. His orientalist perspective prevented crude analysis of cultural wars or western supremacism. While sympathetic to the middle ages, he avoided grandstanding moralising, content to let conclusions emerge implicitly from the narrative. Yet his scholarship, as well as his gallery of German crusaders, allowed the crusade to be regarded as a subject worth continuing national interest.
Not that national interest ostensibly provided the initial spur to Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95) whose use of critical techniques helped reshape the study of the crusades. Von Sybel’s Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzüges (History of the First Crusade, Düsseldorf, 1841) loftily dismissed crusade histories ‘of a purely national or patriotic tendency’.10 At his seminar in Berlin in 1837, von Sybel’s mentor Leopold von Ranke (who was to succeed Wilken as Prussian royal historiographer in 1841) had suggested that William of Tyre was not an original source for the First Crusade as his account was clearly dependent on Albert of Aachen, Raymond of Aguilers and the Gesta Francorum. Given the historiographical primacy of William of Tyre since the thirteenth century, this was a radical insight which Ranke’s pupil, von Sybel, set about demonstrating in his book. This involved a reorienting of critical reading away from simply cobbling together the testimony of the different surviving sources to achieve some sort of coherent narrative, more or less as Wilken had done. Proper understanding only came from the scrutiny of the individual narrative sources in themselves to uncover the process whereby each one transmitted the memories of actual events through contemporary stories and later legends. No text, therefore, could be taken at face value. Although von Sybel’s own account of the First Crusade is no more accurate than those he attacked, his approach to the problem of assessing the respective value of the chronicles allowed for a wholly new level of subtlety in the use of evidence, based on critical editing and analysis rather than simple transcription and descriptive choice. The contrast with Michaud is apparent. The interpretive impact of von Sybel’s early work was plain, applying to the crusades the sort of textual rigour being employed by Pertz and the MGH. Subsequent serious accounts of the First Crusade derive in some way from von Sybel, even where they wholly reject his conclusions. At the very least, the dethroning of William of Tyre changed the landscape forever.
This is not to say that von Sybel’s method was unimpeachable. It was one thing to demonstrate the derivative content or flawed structure of a chronicle; quite another to explain the reason for this and its significance. Von Sybel, like Ranke, seemed wedded to the idea that acceptance of a chronicler’s testimony depended on his being ‘one certain and known person, whose character and position enable us to recognise the value of his work’, that is, presumably being an eyewitness of unimpeachably unbiased credentials.11 While establishing that the chroniclers of the First Crusade enshrined in varying degrees traditions and mentalities rather than objective facts, he wholly misses the significance of his own insight by unimaginatively denigrating the importance of such evidence. In fact his assessments of chroniclers appear at odds with Rankean obeisance to objectivity, at times appearing to rest on idiosyncratic caprice. While he carefully established the independence of the Gesta Francorum, ‘the most important authority for the true [sic?] history of the First Crusade’, he excoriates Fulcher of Chartres’s account as ‘in no way important’. He doubts the miraculous in Raymond of Aguilers as facts, but accepts ‘the truth of the impression they make on him’.12 The famous attack on Albert of Aachen and William of Tyre acknowledges that they both bear witness to different stages of living traditions, but this appears to render them useless as evidence. Thus the central role of Peter the Hermit cannot be entertained, an opinion cemented by Hagenmeyer’s Peter the Hermit (Leipzig, 1879) which thereafter went more or less unchallenged until the 1980s. While von Sybel’s methods may have lent a narrow and occasionally spurious critical austerity to handling evidence, they did produce one important historiographic consequence. By rejecting the witness of Albert of Aachen, von Sybel promoted the accuracy of the circle of French observers which came to dominate interpretations of the First Crusade for the next century and a half. This was doubly ironic. The young liberal von Sybel was fiercely anti-Roman Catholic, attributing to ‘religious excitement’ the failure of the crusades. The French chronicle tradition tended to place the papacy at the centre of their approving narrative. These chroniclers also privileged the role of the western Franks, Michaud’s Frenchmen, perhaps not entirely comfortable for the older von Sybel who became an increasingly outspoken advocate of German nationalism and of a powerful German nation state as a guarantor of secular liberal values.
Von Sybel’s book also offered an intriguing critique of post-medieval crusade historiography, a pendant to his demolition of William of Tyre, as historian after historian are judged on their use of the discredited text. Fuller was noted as being the first ‘to discuss the righteousness of the crusade’. Maimbourg is dismissed as a vain snob, with ‘a good opinion of himself … writing for great people and the best company’, although his moderation ‘between religious excitement and scepticism’ is commended. Voltaire, ‘very weak in point of research’, is compared unfavourably with de Guignes, while Mailly receives a more positive critique, ‘far better on all points’, despite his adherence to the baneful William of Tyre. Particular contempt is heaped on Friedrich Wilhelm Heller’s three-volume Geschichte der Kreuzzügge nach dem Heiligen Lande (1784) as representative of ill-informed hostility and bogus extravagant rhetoric. Characteristic of a confident young tyro, von Sybel was equally cutting about contemporary crusader writers. Mills and the popular French conservative historical hack Jean-Baptiste Capefigue (1802–72) are similarly branded as lacking critical method, the latter additionally corrupted by religiosity. Although accepting the crusades’ positive aspects, von Sybel was no admirer of the romantic school of enthusiasts. By contrast, Wilken is afforded considerable respect, ‘the first place in this province of history’, as he narrates ‘the history of those times in a spirit in accordance with their own’ based on admirably extensive learning. But even Wilken cannot entirely escape censure for his uncritical attempts to reconcile sources instead of distinguishing between them and separating fact from legend within them.13
Michaud, on the other hand, is savaged, his pretentions to scholarship thoroughly derided. His research on primary sources, even the collection Bibliothèque des croisades, although useful in quantity is contrasted unfavourably – ‘very inferior’ – with Wilken’s. With deft specific examples, Michaud is accused of sloppiness and trickery with evidence, failing to differentiate between primary and secondary sources and concealing his use of anachronistic, even unhistorical material, including Tasso. The usual complaints about reliance on Albert of Aachen and William of Tyre are repeated. Equally damning – and entirely fair – Michaud is accused of repeatedly embroidering his narrative with dramatic invention. Listing a few of the more obvious instances from the story of the First Crusade, von Sybel comments drily that ‘none of these interesting particulars are to be found in the original authorities’. Michaud is eviscerated with faint praise. ‘Great diligence’, ‘activity of thought’, ‘power of expression’ and ‘an active and enquiring spirit’ are undermined by ‘a lack of careful investigation and … of the sense of conscientious research in small matters’ in an unholy combination of Tasso and William of Tyre.14
Von Sybel’s self-confident methodological austerity, for all its novelty in crusader studies, formed just one part of the development of new critical techniques in assessing medieval texts. Perhaps of more immediate significance for general interpretations of the crusades was his acceptance of the positive nature and effects of aspects of the enterprises and a growing desire, as he moved into nationalist liberal politics, to associate the medieval past with issues relevant to nineteenth-century society and public affairs. His Munich lectures of 1855 on the crusades reflect this new dimension. While rehearsing his academic analysis of the parallel medieval histories of crusade events and crusade legends, he deliberately set his remarks in a wider, more publicly accessible context of world history. In ways he might not have consciously welcomed, von Sybel began to ape the once deplored cosmic generalisations of the previous century. This, too, can also be seen as following the lead of Ranke who, for all his concentration on forensic detail, promoted an overarching vision of world history, united by a providential or divine purpose that had seen successive cultures rise and fall to culminate in the conspicuous triumph of western civilisation, based on monotheism, classical learning and military power. Following this determinist line, the crusades were seen by von Sybel as ‘one of the greatest revolutions’ in human history, matching those of the Persian Wars of Antiquity, the Germanic invasions that brought down the Roman Empire, the Reformation and the French Revolution. They formed ‘one great portion’ of the contest between Christianity and Islam but, at the same time, provided ‘an agitation favourable to liberty and progress’. The very legends that von Sybel had identified as corrupting the witness of twelfth-century chroniclers were now seen as ‘the first stir of a vigorous new life, the first pulsation of renewed mental activity … a direction … never again lost by Europe [that] gradually carried along the whole hemisphere in its course’. Along with many nineteenth-century historians, von Sybel was attracted to the concept of transformational great men. Saladin was a ‘born ruler’. Pope Gregory VII possessed ‘a universal genius for ruling’ only matched since by ‘the two greatest self-made men of modern history – Cromwell and Bonaparte’. What the two post-medieval heroes possessed in common was their creation of new national political societies. The modern implications of this were revealed in von Sybel’s description of Frederick Barbarossa, a leader whose ‘ideas were beyond his time’. Opposed by troublesome independent-minded subjects and an over-mighty international church, Frederick ‘conceived the idea of a state complete within itself, and strong in the name of the common weal’. In short, Frederick, like von Sybel, was a nineteenth-century liberal anti-clerical German nationalist with a belief in the benefits of a powerful state under a strong leader. In painting a slightly chilling portrait of Frederick’s ruthless and unwavering pursuit of imperial right, the modern connection was plain as Frederick was depicted as ‘foreshadowing modern thoughts deep in the middle ages’.15 Whatever else, von Sybel asserted the relevance of the crusades.
Both academic and popular strands of scholarship flowed from such work. The process of editing texts to satisfy the highest demands of Quellenkritik (source criticism) vastly extended the range and accuracy of the textual basis of crusade scholarship. For the first time the layers of composition, derivation, originality and transmission could be observed, putting the nature of the texts themselves and the status of what they described into sharper focus. The stimulus to revisit familiar sources and to discover new ones allowed genuinely new histories of the crusades to be written. Whilst it is true that Michaud or Wilken had produced more evidence than their predecessors, nonetheless the basic narrative texts tended to be those on which Fuller and Maimbourg had relied. Now, German philologists and historians, along with similarly inclined scholars in France, provided a more secure basis for research and writing. Critical assessment of sources now drove the composition of history, not vice versa. The conceptual path from von Sybel’s 1841 book to, for example, Heinrich Hagenmeyer was unmistakable. It was also distinct from the previous three centuries of literary tradition. In a sense this new scholarship created almost an anti-literary genre. Thus Hagenmeyer rewrote and reshaped the history of the First Crusade through close scrutiny of the central texts and documents rather than fresh sweeping narratives or general theorising. He published new editions of the Gesta Francorum (1890; in which he agreed with von Sybel that the anonymous author was probably a southern Italian Norman knight), Fulcher of Chartres (1913), Ekkehard of Aura’s Hierosolymita (1877) and Walter the Chancellor’s Bella Antiocha (Antioch Wars, 1896). His edition of surviving contemporary letters concerning the First Crusade (1901) and meticulous reconstruction of its chronology (1898–1902) remain in scholarly use. His definitive examination (and demolition) of the role played by Peter the Hermit (Peter der Eremite: ein kritischer Beitrag zur Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges, Leipzig, 1879) developed the suggestions of Ranke and von Sybel and held sway for a century.
History through objective, passionless, themeless critical studies of the technical details of primary texts accelerated a notable feature of nineteenth-century and later debates on the crusades. No monographs of Quellenkritik could exert the same public, popular influence as had previous milestones in serious crusade literature, such as Michaud or even Wilken. The disconnection between the academic and the popular, or even between the academic and the reasonably well-informed and interested, became almost total, a position that has persisted to the present day. The classic example of this was to be found in one of the most generally erudite crusader historians of his or any generation, Reinhold Röhricht. A Berlin schoolmaster by profession, Röhricht managed to find time to amass a vast array of information, details and references chiefly on the crusades to the Holy Land and Outremer. Much of his earlier published work lay in editing texts, some still in use. His magna opera dealt with the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, the Geschichte des Königsreich Jerusalem (1898) and his until very recently indispensable collection of references to surviving charters and official documents, the Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani 1097–1291 (1893 and 1904). Röhricht’s contribution was his ‘incredible and inexhaustible accumulation of references’, providing a foundation for all subsequent research in these subjects.16 Yet he was chiefly an antiquarian, a collector of detail without thesis or even much analysis. As history, despite or perhaps partly because of the dense scholarly precision of his footnotes, his book on the kingdom of Jerusalem is mediocre and dreary, narrowly political, stultifyingly bland, the relentless, day-to-day chronological form managing to obscure rather than illumine the pattern of events. One reviewer, otherwise sympathetic, was forced to notice the deliberate removal of authorial personality, judgements or conclusions beyond the textual. The concentration was on politics alone. Religion, the economy, law or culture were excluded. So too, the reviewer silkenly added, was ‘all literary ambition’.17 Even his obituarist in the Revue de l’Orient Latin in 1905, who tried very hard to be polite to one of its most industrious contributors, admitted that Röhricht pushed objectivity to ‘extreme limits’, divorcing facts from causes or long-term consequences. A bibliographer, impartial annalist, a ‘veritable encyclopaedia’, ‘he always rebelled at the complicated work (travail complexe) of the historian’.18 Sadly his scholarship failed to endear him to his employers. In 1898, the Prussian Ministry of Education advised against an imperial proposal to subsidise Röhricht for a visit to Palestine after the patriotic writer had presented a copy of his newly published Geschichte to the Kaiser who was about to embark on his notoriously showy grand tour of the Levant. Six years later, when Röhricht was forced to retire early through ill-health (he was sixty-two), the Prussian Ministry of Education skimped on his modest pension entitlement.
Unfair and mean though the Berlin bureaucrats may have been, Röhricht’s brush with the eastern policies and fantasies of Wilhelm II pointed to the parallel consequence of the pioneering work of Wilken and von Sybel. If not in the form of Röhricht’s austere erudite pedantry, nonetheless German academic attention to the history of the crusades could reach out to popular and political interest. Frederick Barbarossa became a figurehead for competing visions of German nationalism, from the strong independent self-reliant secular state of von Sybel to visions, centred more on Catholic southern Germany, for a restored Christian empire. As elsewhere in Europe, there was a revival in aristocratic pilgrimages to the Holy Places in Palestine. The cult of Barbarossa was taken up by Prussian propagandists, seeking pan-German legitimacy even in spurious legends of some sort of mystical reincarnation, as well as by historians, notably at Berlin university. One of them, Hans Prutz (1843–1929), after producing a massive biography of Frederick Barbarossa (l871–74), was hired to lend academic credibility to a scheme Bismarck himself had been persuaded to fund. This sought to excavate a site in Tyre hoping to discover the medieval emperor’s remains. While dismissing fanciful claims that such relics had actually been unearthed, Prutz still promoted a Barbarossa connection with the Holy Land.19
Prutz’s other, less exotic academic studies on the crusades similarly exemplified the special status the crusades could achieve in nationalist interpretations of the middle ages. That the crusades acted as a central medium of cultural development and progress was axiomatic to the insistence on their contemporary relevance, an argument given weighty support in Prutz’s substantial Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge (Cultural History of the Crusades, 1883). By adopting a maximalist line, exaggerating the familiar instrumental view of the Robertson–Heeren tradition, Prutz was tacitly accepting that the crusades required absorption into a narrative of German destiny and unification. Such an important catalyst of change could not be left without a national element. Although the dedication to Crown Prince Frederick might be regarded as conventional, Prutz’s position by this time as professor at the University of Königsberg, itself a symbol of the role of crusading in the expansion of German power and culture, may have lent an added dimension to his emphasis on the wider ranging effects of the crusades. The great historian of Prussia and the Teutonic Knights, Johannes Voigt (1786–1863), had also been a professor there. Prutz acknowledged a specifically German dimension to crusade history. However, he also placed the cultural impact of the crusades in a Rankean context, in which all cultures and religions formed part of a single historical process. As if in support of this still fundamentally supremacist inclusive approach, as an appendix to the Kulturgeschichte Prutz published an edition of the Dominican William of Tripoli’s Tractatus de Statu Sarracenorum (Treatise on the Situation of the Saracens, c. 1270). In it the Dominican friar had avoided cheap polemics and demonisation in noting the similarities between Islam and Christianity while expressing the hope and expectation that Muslims would in the end peacefully accept ‘the baptism of Christ’, not through philosophical disputation or force of arms but by the simple word of God. It should not be forgotten that parallel to these studies of crusading, Germany led the way in Arabic scholarship, much of which dealt with similar and related issues of religion, culture and the progress of civilisation. Prutz himself was keen to note examples of direct east/west cultural exchange, while, in contrast with many of his French contemporaries, disapproving of aspects of the Franks’ behaviour in the Holy Land.20
Prutz’s approach encouraged the temptation to regard all developments in the middle ages as consequent on the crusades if they occurred at about the same time, the post hoc ergo propter hoc view of history and ‘the fallacy of the single cause’.21 Prutz was guilty of this, but less crudely than some subsequent popularisers, such as the Swiss journalist and cultural historian Otto Henne am Rhyn (1828–1914). Unsurprisingly, Henne am Rhyn’s Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzügge (Leipzig, 1900) proved much more popular than Prutz’s dense tome. It was illustrated and avoided either footnotes or bibliography. Clearly arranged, adopting a broad brush and seemingly based on the latest German scholarship, it aimed at a large readership and evidently proved sufficiently successful to attract the particular disapproval of the English academic Ernest Barker thirty years later. However, the resonance of the crusades, and the Rankean reconciliation of such events with a unified narrative of power and progress found perhaps unexpected non-literary manifestations. Even if Röhricht was excluded from the Imperial cavalcade to the Levant in 1898, on his tour the Kaiser – unflatteringly nicknamed in England ‘Cook’s Crusader’ after the London travel agent through whom the travel arrangements were made – demonstrated the availability of the crusades for German political exploitation. At Jerusalem he postured as a pilgrim and patron of Christian ecumenism in the Holy Land while parading into the city on his white horse as some latter-day holy warrior. At Damascus, by contrast, he laid a bronze wreath on the tomb of Saladin, von Sybel’s ‘born ruler’, bearing the legend ‘from one great emperor to another’.22 It is hard to see that any of these roles endeared him to his Turkish hosts. Whatever the diplomatic effect, such showy gestures projected certain public perceptions of the crusades: glamorous, exciting, significant for the development of western culture and German history, providing lessons for state-building and geopolitics.
If the learning of Wilken, the critical methods of von Sybel, the super-antiquarianism of Röhricht and the editorial precision of Hagenmeyer sired bizarre progeny, in places their efforts were still-born. For all the forensic erudition of the German school of crusade historians, critical method was often no match against entrenched assumptions, current prejudice, ignorance or lazy thought. Fifteen years after Hagenmeyer’s Peter the Hermit there appeared an English history of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, The Crusades (1894) by T. A. Archer, whose works apart from a collection of translated texts on the Third Crusade included titles such as A Book of Pussy Cats and The Frog’s Parish Clerk, and completed by C. L. Kingsford, who became a highly reputable later medievalist. This rather insouciantly reaffirmed the truth of Albert of Aachen’s account of Peter the Hermit as the ‘primus auctor’ of the First Crusade not through any fresh critical insight into the nature or extent of the admitted ‘taint of legend’ in Albert’s version but because ‘the story as it stands is more plausible than if we had to assume that tradition [a clear dig at the Germans] had transformed the credit of the First Crusade from a pope to a simple hermit’.23 Although tricked out with the trappings of scholarship with familiar source references and illustrations of seals and crusader artefacts, the text is a stew of sophistry, spurious invention and special pleading, laced with romantic sentiment and, as here, a piquant dash of snobbery. Not an unusual concoction among crusade historians, the fault lay in the lack of serious learning on the part of the authors. This confirmed the insignificant British contribution to the new crusade studies. More widely, the pursuit of research and the settled beliefs of its audience pulled in ever increasingly and awkwardly different directions.
Nowhere was this tension potentially more acute than in France. Yet nowhere did popular, academic and political enthusiasm combine so productively. The influence of Michaud was hard to avoid: the crusades were essentially French enterprises, demonstrating the vigour and spirit of western Christian society as revealed in their pioneering colonialism in the eastern Mediterranean, leading to a French version of Manifest Destiny. For a society that experienced two invasions (1814–15; 1870–71) and six different political regimes in less than sixty years (Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Orleanist Monarchy, Second Republic; Second Empire; Third Republic), the medieval past adorned with French heroes strutting the international stage offered a relatively neutral focus for national pride and identity, one eagerly exploited by successive governments and the academic community alike. To this essentially passive reception of convenient historical myth was added a dynamic reimagining of medieval French colonialism as a model not just for European conquest but for the creation of distinct, new colonial societies. These were presented as active fusions between the cultures of occupiers and occupied, a demonstration at once of western superiority and the beneficial leavening effects of western culture. Not all agreed. The arguments between those called by one observer in 1844 as ‘les fils des croisés et les fils de Voltaire’ persisted.24 The great historian of France and anti-clericalist Jules Michelet (1798–1874), amongst whose voluminous output were two volumes of edited documents on the trial of the Templars (1841 and 1851), regarded the crusades as violent and driven by fanaticism. Some crusade historians, such as Riant himself, were unpersuaded by nationalist appropriation. Yet fewer voices were raised against the increasing focus on the crusaders’ activities in the east which marked French crusade studies after Michaud. Even Michelet argued that the true result of the crusade lay in the rapprochement between Europe and Asia, invisible, intangible, but no less real.25
Concentration on campaigns and conquests deflected traditional philosophical or religious controversy over the nature of the crusades. Left and right, legitimists and republicans, believers and secularists could unite in being impressed by the material actions of their ancestors in foreign fields, whether they admired their motives or saw them as religious dupes. The wide academic as well as popular acceptance of this consensus, gaining ground as the century progressed, can be explained in part by the close relationship between power and learning. Crusade studies in Germany depended on a network of separate universities; in France on individual private funds and government patronage. While German crusade studies were recruited to help create a national identity, their French counterparts were employed to confirm one. The creation of the Recueil des historiens des croisades (1844–1906) provides one prime example of this process; Louis-Philippe’s Salles des croisades at Versailles (from 1837) another.
Attempts under the First Republic and First Empire to revive the Maurist plan for a collection of crusade sources failed. A suggestion from the ministry of Justice under the Restoration for an edition of the Assises de Jérusalem bore no immediate fruit. However, in 1833 the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres revived the Maurist idea, soon including the Assises project as well. The compelling reason advanced by Count Arthur Beugnot, spokesman of the advisory committee established to prepare the new venture and himself a legal historian and editor of the Jerusalem Assises, was both clear and not narrowly scholarly. ‘France has played such a glorious part in the wars of the crusades that the historical documents that contain the accounts of these memorable expeditions seem to enter her domain.’ The proposed collection would stand as a ‘monument’, accurately preserving the memory of the ‘greatest upheaval (ébranlement)’ of the Middle Ages. The popularity of accounts of the wars to recover and defend the Holy Land, the abundance of primary sources available and the ‘voice of Europe savante’ committed ‘France not to leave to others to clear the debt she has contracted’. Beugnot sketched the history of the project from the seventeenth century when the availability of more texts rendered Bongars’s Gesta Dei Per Francos inadequate. Now that the Académie des Inscriptions had undertaken the enterprise, it was conceived on the grandest scale to include all the important Latin, French, Greek, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian sources, mainly chronicles but also pilgrimage accounts; letters; and, taking it over from the government, the Assises. The resulting Recueil des historiens des croisades comprised the laws in two volumes, 1841 and 1843; six volumes of western historians, 1844–95; five of eastern texts with French translations, 1872–1906; two volumes of Greek sources, 1875 and 1881, and two of Armenian sources and other related matters, 1869 and 1906. It thus fulfilled much of Beugnot’s prospectus before the project ran out of steam in the early twentieth century, not coincidentally just as the generation of pioneering scholars was fading away. Many of the great names of French crusade scholarship were involved in some capacity, including Michaud, who gave early advice, and Riant. The quality of the editions was patchy, lacking the forensic intensity of the MGH, often too reliant on conveniently accessible rather than the best manuscripts. Nonetheless, as a research tool, the Recueil became indispensable. In conception, it had been more. As Beugnot described it at the end of his prospectus, the Recueil would not only give encouragement to historical research, it would stand as a ‘national monument’ and bear witness to the Académie des Inscriptions’ labours to encourage serious studies which contributed so much ‘to the glory and intellectual improvement of France’.26
Beside the general national agenda, the Recueil confirmed the focus on the ‘colonies chrétiens en Palestine’. There were no texts about crusades in Spain or the Baltic or on the Albigensian Crusade (a clearly less than irenic French historical memory). The perceived medieval French diaspora received official and popular approval. In 1856, the Committee for the Language, History and Arts of France announced a plan to publish its own Recueil des documents originaux sur la domination française en Orient pendant le moyen âge. A decade later a modern French version of Joinville’s Vie of Louis IX proved a publishing success.27 The well-attested habit of commentators on French foreign adventures in the Mediterranean, the Crimea, North Africa and the Far East to employ the language or even the historical parallel of the crusades indicated how ubiquitous this particular image had become in public discourse, one encouraged by political leaders from Charles X to Napoleon III. Under Louis-Philippe, almost overtly the crusades became government policy. The need to secure support for a monarchic regime that sat uneasily between royalist legitimacy and republican populism recruited the crusades both as a symbol of a shared history and as a mythic model for current action.
During the 1830s, the Orleanist government vigorously pursued the conquest of Algeria under the guise of a civilising Christian mission. All five of Louis-Philippe’s sons fought there. The wars were commemorated in the museum of French history established by the king in the palace of Versailles. There too, in deliberate association, were the five rooms of the Salles des croisades in which were displayed about 120 paintings depicting crusade and related subjects from the Norman conquests in southern Italy and Sicily in the early eleventh century to the siege of Malta in 1565. The rooms were decorated with cod medieval fittings (and a genuine door from the Hospitaller convent at Rhodes given to Louis-Philippe by the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II) and the coats of arms of known crusaders, a badge of honour that led to a thriving Parisian black market in forged documents bought by aspirant nobles eager to prove their ancient ancestry among the status-challenged parvenu nobility of the Orleanist monarchy.28 The message of the crusade gallery was carefully constructed, imposing a certain vision of the past on viewers in what has been described as a sort of history machine in which ‘spellbound visitors, enmeshed in the mechanics of narration deployed in the galleries, were systematically tranquillized by the unfolding spectacle of their historical selves’.29 That these supposed selves were a calculated invention scarcely detracted from the effect, as the aristocratic rush to find crusade ancestry indicated. Apart from prominent crusade leaders and heroes the emphasis was consistent – the battles of the French against other cultures: Saracens in southern Italy and Sicily; the Turks of Asia Minor and the Holy Land; the Ottomans of the later middle ages; and the decadent Byzantines of Constantinople, imagined for the gallery in Delacroix’s famous painting of the city’s fall in 1204 as enfeebled supplicants at the feet of their French conquerors. Heroism, conflict and a taste for the exoticism of an imaginary Orient were matched in the artistic scheme of the paintings by an insistence on religious inspiration, as in scenes of preaching and taking the cross as well as in certain battle pictures. In essence, the Salles des croisades were Michaud in pictures, as faithful to the writer as the great cycle of illustrations provided for the 1877 edition of his work by Gustave Doré. By sharing excitement and pride in the past, the gallery and its guide books sought a form of reconciliation in the present on at least two levels. The common inheritance of the crusades could help unite a bitterly divided society whilst at the same time pointing a current political parallel with the conquest and colonisation of Algeria.
Such an approach was not confined to government propaganda, but seeped into the very fabric of the French academic establishment’s attitude to the crusades: nationalist; colonial; an early litmus test of western cultural supremacy. François Guizot (1787–1874), writer, orator and politician, the leading liberal intellectual apologist for the Orleanist regime, as Minister of Public Instruction in the 1830s had enthusiastically promoted the crusades as part of a specifically French heritage. A decade earlier he had included a number of crusade texts in his vast collection of translated sources for medieval French history. One prominent advocate of the ‘Frenchness’ of the medieval western settlements in the Levant, Charles Jean Melchior, marquis de Vogüé (1829–1916), was so intent on claiming national ownership of the crusades that he recruited Riant to the flag – posthumously. Vogüé, an early member of the Société de l’Orient Latin, combined his academic interests and patronage with a public career that included becoming French ambassador at Constantinople and Vienna. In his obituary of Riant in the first volume of the Revue de l’Orient Latin in 1893, de Vogüé gave Riant’s work a nationalist tweak that the dead historian had rejected in life. De Vogüé insisted on the value of Riant’s work for those wishing to conserve ‘the cult (culte) of national traditions’ and the ‘memory of the great place France occupied in the history of the Latin East’.30 Riant’s 1881 internationalist manifesto was thus brushed aside by a colleague who devoted much of his time to arguing that the style of architecture in the crusader states was specifically French and, in slightly awkward conjunction, that the pointed arch of Gothic architecture was derived from France not the Arab world, as had become romantically fashionable to believe. What, in the 1830s, had been a particular, tendentious view of crusade history had become, by the end of the century, axiomatic.
In many ways, de Vogüé sketched the pattern of the French imperialists who went beyond the simple national categories of Michaud. As more and more work was conducted on the physical remains of crusader Syria and Palestine, and as more and more parts of the Mediterranean Islamic world and beyond fell under the sway of French rule or influence, the colonial question became more pressing. If medieval Outremer (or nineteenth-century Algeria) were French by occupation, how French were they in politics, culture and society? Clearly there existed a difference. To this question a succession of French scholars provided similar and increasingly elaborate and settled answers. Fired by his visits to the Levant, Emmanuel Rey created a vision of a Franco-Syrian society, dominated by wise and tolerant French rulers, virtuous colonisers who forged an efficient modus vivendi with indigenous people, in implicit contrast with the stories of mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman imperial excesses from Syria to Bulgaria. Rey noted examples of shared pilgrimage sites and suggested that Jacques de Vitry failed to appreciate Outremer culture because of his hostility to Islam.31 This idea was extended by younger generations of scholars. Gaston Dodu (b. 1863), while never forgetting the innate superiority of the westerners, argued that apart from the installation of a feudalised French elite that imposed certain systems for necessary fiscal and military exploitation, Frankish Outremer created a new civilisation based on religious tolerance and the blending of the societies of conquerors and conquered. While his picture of an ideal limited feudal monarchy was hopelessly flawed, a rehash of the legal fictions of thirteenth-century Jerusalemite lawyers, Dodu trawled the sources for illustrations of contact, cooperation and cultural exchange, such as washing, education, eating, clothing, ornaments as well as apparent evidence of mixed marriages and friendly social, religious and commercial relations. In part this account of religious co-existence, a harmony contrasted with the vicious religious persecution in sixteenth-century Spain or the New World, contained a coded anti-clericalism at odds with much French crusade historiography of the period. Yet, like his contemporaries, Dodu happily dressed up a fantasy of beneficent French colonialism in medieval crusading costumes. The anachronism and special pleading seemed largely to escape local notice, although at least one austere and later highly influential transatlantic critic, the young D. C. Munro (1866–1933), took sharp exception to Dodu’s historical method.32
This implicit politicisation of the crusades in support of a united French national identity and of the policy of colonial expansion received continuing succour from public events as well as academic agreement and complicity. French intervention in the Lebanon to assist Maronite Christians in the 1860s attracted explicit crusade rhetoric. Expansion in Africa was lent the language of crusading Christian liberation by Roman Catholic apologists, especially where it could be associated with combating the slave trade. Such a set of category confusions persuaded one energetic anti-slavery, anti-Muslim colonial cardinal, Archbishop Lavigerie of Algiers, to describe Leopold I of Belgium’s annexation and exploitation of tracts of central Africa as a crusade (as, indeed, did Leopold himself). The conquest of Tunisia in 1880–81 by the Third Republic demonstrated that imperialism, even if promoted by a political minority, could remain a national calling transcending politics or religion.33 This apparent consensus was reflected in the contributors to the Archives and the Revue de l’Orient Latin. The positions of de Vogüé, Mas Latrie or the anti-Dreyfusard Schlumberger were plain. Archaeologists as well as art historians and textual scholars also subscribed to versions of the national colonial myth. In the second volume of the Archives de l’Orient Latin (1884), Charles Clermont-Ganneau (1846–1923) talked of an inscription at Acre as of ‘rare interest both for the history of the crusades and for our national history’, as well as enjoying himself at German expense in describing the ‘French’ inscription unearthed at Tyre by the recent excavations there designed to promote ‘the greater glory of Germanism’.34 One of de Vogüé’s protégés was Camille Enlart (1862–1927), an expert on French medieval architecture who had studied French style in southern Italy, Greece and Cyprus before, in the last years of his life, being asked by the French Mandate government in Syria to survey crusader monuments in the Levant. Some of his views on style were revealing. He judged French Gothic in Cyprus with enthusiasm, the physical dimension to Mas Latrie’s nationalist take on Lusignan rule. By contrast, French-inspired architecture in Greece proved ‘feeble’. In an early piece on a church at Barletta in northern Apulia, he remarked that ‘the beauty of the sculpture reveals a French hand’.35
Another who acknowledged his debt to de Vogüé was Louis Madelin (1871–1956). A professor, historian (mainly of the Revolution and Napoleon) and far right-wing politician and activist, Madelin came from the Vosges region of Lorraine in eastern France. Like many from national peripheries, he possessed a heightened almost mystical sense of nation. While serving in the First World War, he wrote articles designed to demonstrate how French colonial rule flowed from some sort of racial ability or even destiny. In the tradition of Rey, he applied this to describe the benevolent rule of the Franks in Syria and Palestine, forcefully arguing for the existence of a Franco-Syrian society (‘La Syria franque’, Revue des deux mondes 38, 1916, and L’Expansion française de la Syrie au Rhin of 1918). Madelin combined a rehearsal of the now standard national and colonial academic orthodoxy with unmistakable present parallels. Recruits from the colonies fought alongside their French masters in the trenches, as he claimed local Syrians had in the Holy Land, and in the French crusaders themselves those fighting the Germans possessed a model. When a decade later, accepting election to the Académie Française, Madelin portrayed himself as de Vogüé’s heir, the concept of the crusades as French and crusader Outremer as prefiguring French colonialism had received seeming confirmation of events.36
The creation of French mandates in Syria and the Lebanon after the Treaty of Versailles produced a rush to draw comparisons with the medieval past. Whether or not General Henri Gouraud, first High Commissioner of the French mandate territories, declared on entering Damascus in 1920: ‘Behold, Saladin, we have returned,’ as was later believed by resentful Arab nationalists, he certainly invited Camille Enlart to record the crusader monuments in Syria. As Enlart’s pupil, successor and scholar of crusader castles Paul Deschamps (1888–1974) remarked, the First World War ‘brought our troops to those shores where so many good Frenchmen had previously fought’.37 The English scholar Ernest Barker, who had written a brilliantly compressed yet informed, intelligent and vivid essay on the crusades for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–11), commented in 1931 that ‘even today we may count the French mandate in Syria among the legacies of the Crusades’. The wishful association of past and present suffused works of apparent scholarship. One writer on Outremer laws in 1925, describing himself as ‘Lebanese and Christian’, looked for the day when all of Syria and its peoples would once more come under French law.38
The culmination of such attitudes can be found in the once influential, although now largely ignored, three volumes of René Grousset’s Histoire des croisades et du royaume français de Jérusalem (1934–36), described by one hostile critic on its publication as largely derived from Röhricht’s Geschichte but ‘longer, less accurate, more prejudiced, more contradictory’ although easier to read.39 Grousset, an orientalist, sought to place the crusades in an eastern context and tried to incorporate recent research by Arabic scholars such as Gaston Weit and by Jean Longnon and Louis Bréhier into the Latin and Greek eastern Mediterranean. Unlike The Crusaders in the East (Cambridge, 1907) by the biblical scholar and semitic philologist W. B. Stevenson, who also based his narrative account on eastern sources as well as providing a very neat but full conspectus of western motives, Grousset’s sympathies rested with the westerner settlers, even if his grasp of western texts appeared limited (chiefly to the thirteenth-century French version of William of Tyre). He developed further Madelin’s idea of the creation of a Franco-Syrian society. Indeed, taking his cue from the overused and usually misunderstood twelfth-century memoirs of Usamah ibn Munqidh of Shaizar, Grousset contrasted the enlightened attitudes of tolerance and rapprochement of the settlers with the boorish insensitivity of visiting crusaders, the colonial challenged by the crusading. It has been suggested that Grousset had in mind the tensions between French colonists in Algeria and the interference from metropolitan France, the medieval pullani standing in for the pieds-noirs of the 1930s. More generally, and like many before him, he compared the crusades’ mix of idealism and violence with that of the French Revolution. Whatever its historical merit, the ideological inheritance of Grousset’s work was plain. He talks of ‘New France’ and ‘La France du Levant’. The medieval Latin county of Tripoli is associated with Maronite appeals for French aid in 1860 and 1919. The peroration can stand for a century of French solipsism: ‘The Templars held on only to the islet of Ruad (until 1303) south of Tortosa through which one day – in 1914 – the Franks were to set foot once again (reprendre pied) in Syria.’ The ‘reprendre’ undermines the academic credibility of the rhetoric. Despite the horrors of nationalist wars and the collapse of empires of the following decades, Grousset’s pupil and apologist, Jean Richard, himself a towering figure of later twentieth-century crusade studies, still wrote in 1953 of Outremer and of the ‘Frankish, perhaps even French, state in the East’.40
Such views were not simply romantic musings or clever academic aperçus. French negotiators at Versailles had referred in their claim to Syrian and Lebanese mandates to their historic role in the region, despite it being pointed out by T. E. Lawrence and the Hashemite delegation that the westerners had actually lost the Levant crusades.41 Politics, scholarship and wishful thinking can form a toxic combination. Yet the French interpretation operated as the most comprehensive, flexible and dynamic interpretation of the crusades in the period between Napoleon and the Second World War. Its supposed relevance, while historically suspect, ensured attention and hence research. It came to be seen as the only way of regarding the phenomena, a dress rehearsal for the conquest of the Americas and the colonisation of Asia. It was the nineteenth-century French vision of the crusades as proto-colonising expeditions that penetrated the western Islamic world through later nineteenth-century translations, adaptations and criticisms, forming the basis for a local counter-rhetoric of anti-colonialism.42 Other European national traditions modified detail and perspective, but mostly tended to stay within the same conceptual terms. Thus research followed national enthusiasms everywhere. The earliest editions of the fullest eyewitness account of the capture of Lisbon by an Anglo-Flemish fleet during the Second Crusade were Portuguese and English (in 1861 and 1864). Johannes Voigt (1786–1863) pioneered not only the history of Prussia but also of the Teutonic Knights who, unsurprisingly, became symbols of German expansionism and state-building. The chief contribution of the English Rolls Series comprised editions of texts relating to the Third Crusade, seen through the prism of the deeds of Richard I. It has even been suggested that US academic engagement was encouraged by a shared interest in the processes of colonisation and the experience of frontiers. Even for those who for ideological or political reasons regarded the crusades with disgust, from the Polish antiquarian critic of the Teutonic Knights Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861) to the likes of Prebendary George Perry of Lincoln, whose ‘popular’ History of the Crusades (1910) repeated a Gibbonian disdain for medieval religiosity and suspicion at ‘what ever may be alleged in its excuse’, their starting point was a version of the positive reading exemplified by the French or perhaps Franco-German school.43
One effect of the politicisation of crusade studies was, perhaps paradoxically, the draining of ideological and confessional concern. This in itself permitted more generally positive responses. For German nationalists of whatever persuasion – secular, romantic, religious – or Frenchmen attempting to construct an inclusive national narrative and a model of benevolent imperialism, this drew the divisive sting of religion. Christian apologists still were able to point to the crusades’ defensive nature and the crusaders’ religious sincerity. However, acknowledgement of the civilising elements of cultural exchange or colonial interaction could operate apart from any insistence on religious superiority, although many did so insist. Islam could be presented as the enemy because it presented a secular political menace. Muslims could be conquered because of inherent virtues of western culture which could, but equally need not, include religion. If not entirely secularised, this interpretation of the crusades as expressions of western social developments, eastern politics and a movement to colonise emphasised the material above other constituent elements. In this, both French and German schools found common ground. The crusades became a matter of investigation into the material causes and consequences; the course of the expeditions and eastern wars as political narratives; and the nature and structure of the colonial conquests. To suggest, as has been recently, that in ‘neo-imperialist and materialistic’ interpretations ‘specialists have played no part’ is at best misleading.44 Rather it is against this consensus of materialism, racial supremacy, colonialism and progress that specialists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries launched some of their sternest attacks. These, in their turn, have on occasion owed more than a little to contemporary and personal circumstance.
1 E.g. by J. Riley-Smith, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford, 1995), pp. 4–5.
2 N. Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford, 2006), p. 38.
3 D. C. Munro, The Kingdom of the Crusaders (New York NY, 1935), esp. pp. 174–203; S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge, 1951–54).
4 P. Riant, Archives de l’Orient Latin, i (Paris, 1881), v–x. For the MGH and Rolls Series, D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises (London, 1963), pp. 64–97 and 101–34 is a place to start.
5 For Hagenmeyer and Röhricht, above pp. 136–8; B. Kugler, Studien zur Geschichte des zweiten Kreuzzugs (Stuttgart, 1866); idem, Analecten zur Geschichte des zweiten Kreuzzugs (Tübingen, 1877); idem, Albert von Aachen (Stuttgart, 1885).
6 J. G. Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. M. N. Foster (Cambridge, 2002), p. 306; quoted in A. Pagden, Worlds at War (Oxford, 2008), p. 200.
7 F. Wilken, Geschichte der Kreuzzüge nach morgenländischen und abendländischen Berichte (Leipzig, 1807–32), iii, 88–90
8 F. Krause, ‘The Royal Library, Berlin, and its Contacts with Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, The Library, 6th ser., 7 (1985), 211–17.
9 Wilken, Geschichte, vi, 71–83 (discussed by G. Dickson, The Children’s Crusade (London, 2008), pp. 176–7); for the poems, Geschichte, vi, 579, note 58; for the range of sources see the bibliography, Geschichte, vii, 55–74.
10 Trans. Lady Duff Gordon, The History and Literature of the Crusades (London, 1861), p. 312; pp. 131–356 for von Sybel’s historiographical excursus; p. iii for Ranke; cf. C. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (London, 1998), pp. 119–20 and note 63.
11 From his 1855 Munich lectures, trans. Duff Gordon, History and Literature, p. 237.
12 Trans. Duff Gordon, History and Literature, pp. 143, 148 et seq., 159, 186 and chaps 2 and 3 for Albert and William.
13 Trans. Duff Gordon, History and Literature, pp. 332–45, 353–6.
14 Trans. Duff Gordon, History and Literature, pp. 345–53.
15 Trans. Duff Gordon, History and Literature, pp. 1–127 for the lectures, esp. pp. 1–4, 13, 45, 62, 104–5; cf. the discussion by R. Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 23–6.
16 H. E. Mayer, ‘America and the Crusades’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 125 (1981), 41, note 21; more generally idem, ‘Der Prophet und sein Vaterland. Leben und Nachleben von Reinhold Röhricht’, in In Laudem Hierosolymitani, ed. I. Shagrir, R. Ellenblum and J. Riley-Smith (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 233–41.
17 A. Lamarche, Revue de l’Orient Latin, 6 (1898), 294–9.
18 A. Lamarche, ‘Reinhold Röhricht’, Revue de l’Orient Latin, 10 (1903–4), 543–8.
19 H. Prutz, Kaiser Friedrich I (Danzig, 1871–74); T. S. R. Boase, ‘Recent Developments in Crusading Historiography’, History, 22 (1937), 110–25; Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 35–6 and generally pp. 32–6.
20 H. Prutz, Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge (Berlin, 1883), esp. pp. v, 397–495, 575–98; on German Arabists, R. Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: Orientalists and their Enemies (London, 2006), esp. pp. 150–7, 185–8, 191–201.
21 E. Barker, ‘The Crusades’, in The Legacy of Islam, ed. T. Arnold and A. Guillaume (Oxford, 1931), pp. 50–1.
22 See, e.g., E. Siberry, The New Crusaders (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 67–8 and refs and fig. 8; Duff Gordon, History and Literature, p. 88.
23 Quoted, Tyerman, Invention, p. 120.
24 J. R. Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851–1900 (Oxford, 1973), p. 43; in general see refs in Chapter 4 note 19 above; J. Richard, ‘National Feeling and the Legacy of the Crusades’, in Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. H. Nicholson (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 208–19.
25 Cf. D. Denby, ‘Les croisades aux xviiie et xixe siècle: une historiographie engagéé’, in Les champenois et la croisade, ed. Y. Bellenger and D. Quéruel (Paris, 1989), p. 170; cf. C. Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism (London, 1993), p. 208.
26 A. Beugnot, ‘Rapport sur la publication du Recueil des historiens des croisades’, Recueil des historiens des croisades: Historiens occidentaux, I–i (Paris, 1844), i–xv; H. Dehéran, ‘Les origines du Recueil des historiens des croisades’, Journal des Savants, n.s. 17 (1919), 260; J. Richard ‘Le Recueil des historiens des croisades’ at www.aibl./fr/fr/travaux/medieval/croisade.html; Richard, ‘National Feeling’, pp. 213–14.
27 Dakyns, Middle Ages, p. 33; Jean de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, trans. Natalis de Wailly (Paris, 1865).
28 For the Salles des croisades, Chapter 4 note 19 above; for a list of the paintings, Siberry, New Crusaders, pp. 208–11 from Constant’s 1995 catalogue; for the Courtois forgeries, D. Abulafia, ‘Invented Italians in the Courtois Charters’, in Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. Edbury (Cardiff, 1985), pp. 135–47; Richard, ‘National Feeling’, pp. 210–13 and refs.
29 M. Marrinan, ‘Historical Vision and the Writing of History at Louis Philippe’s Versailles’, in The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, ed. P. Ten-Doesschate Chu and G. P. Weisburg (Princeton NJ, 1994), p. 143; generally pp. 113–43.
30 For Guizot, see Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 287–8 and his translations, Collections des mémoires relatives à l’histoire de France jusqu’à 13e siècle (Paris, 1823–35); Marquis de Vogüé, ‘Le Comte Riant’, Revue de l’Orient Latin, 1 (1893), 8; in general and for what follows, cf. Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 36–9, 43–9.
31 E. Rey, Les colonies franques de Syrie au XIIme et XIIIme siècles (Paris, 1883), pp. vi, 3, 186, 286–91 and chap. 5 passim.
32 G. Dodu, Histoire des institutions monarchiques dans le royaume latin de Jérusalem 1099–1291 (Paris, 1894); D. C. Munroe’s review, Annals of the American Academy of Poltiical and Social Sciences, 7 (1896), 137–9; Richard, ‘National Feeling’, p. 219; Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 45–6.
33 A. Knobler, ‘Saint Louis and French Political Culture’, in Studies in Medievalism, viii, ed. L. J. Workman and K. Verduin (Cambridge, 1996), passim; for a sympathetic account of Lavigerie’s schemes, J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam (New York NY, 2008), pp. 45–52. Cf. C. M. Andrew, ‘The French Colonial Movement during the Third Republic’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 26 (1976), 143–66.
34 Archives de l’Orient Latin, ii (Paris, 1884), 459.
35 C. Enlart, ‘L’église des chanoines du Saint-Sépulchre, à Barletta en Pouille’, Revue de l’Orient Latin, 1 (1893), 562; T. C. Papacostas, ‘Western Architecture in Byzantine Lands’, in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. C. Rudolph (Oxford, 2006), p. 516; cf. H. Kennedy, Crusader Castles (Cambridge, 1994), p. 5.
36 Cf. R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 40–6 and 62–3; Ellenblum, Castles, p. 46.
37 Knobler, ‘Saint Louis and French Political Culture’, p. 168; Kennedy, Crusader Castles, p. 5.
38 Barker, ‘Crusades’, p. 74. D. Hayek, Le droit franc en Syrie pendant les croisades (Paris, 1925), pp. 7, 157 cited in J. L. La Monte, Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge MA, 1932), p. 108, note 1.
39 J. L. La Monte, ‘Some problems in crusading historiography’, Speculum, 15 (1940), 57–8.
40 R. Grousset, Histoire des croisades (Paris, 1934–36), i, 287–8, 427; iii, xii, 763; Smail, Crusading Warfare, pp. 42–5; E. Sivan, contributing to a symposium in 1984 on ‘The Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem: The First European Colonial Society’, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 354, 356; J. Richard, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (English trans. Amsterdam, 1979; original French edn 1953), i, v, ix; ii, 463; idem, ‘National Feeling’, pp. 218–19; idem, The Crusades c. 1071–c. 1291 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. xii–xiii.
41 A. J. Toynbee, Acquaintances (Oxford, 1967), pp. 187–8.
42 On the development of Arab attitudes, E. Sivan, ‘Modern Arab Historiography of the Crusades’, Asian and African Studies, 8 (1972), 109–49.
43. De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi, ed. and trans. C. W. David (New York NY, 1976), p. 48 (Stubbs’s Rolls Series edition appeared with the Itinerarium Ricardi Regis concerning the Third Crusade, London, 1864); E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (2nd edn London, 1997), p. 4; La Monte, ‘Crusading Historiography’, 59; G. G. Perry, History of the Crusades (London, 1910), p. 73.
44 J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades (2nd edn New Haven CT, 2005), p. 304.