The two most influential books on the crusades written in the twentieth century could hardly have been more different, the one academic, conceptually seminal, the preserve of scholars; the other literary, conceptually nugatory and a world bestseller. The writer of the first died obscurely and young, in the unwelcome military service of a despotic, disapproving regime he despised; the writer of the second lived to be ninety-seven, bathed in golden opinions and laden with public honours, a multi-millionaire. Separated by less than twenty years but an intellectual universe, Carl Erdmann’s Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (The Origins of the Idea of Crusading, 1935) and Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades (1951–54) display the janus-like characteristics of crusade study, the contrasting, often contradictory interests and enthusiasms of the specialist scholar and of the intelligent browser. Erdmann reopened investigation into the nature and origins of the phenomenon, largely ignored or assumed by the functional materialist focus on the crusaders’ conquests. Runciman perpetuated the epic grand narrative, a drama of good and evil, heroism and villainy, civilisation and barbarism. Their perspectives could not be more different, a refined abstract study of ideas versus an almost filmic imaginative recreation of experiences and events. Yet both spoke directly to their own times, one analysing how wars become legitimate, the other suggesting their human cost.1
Carl Erdmann (1898–1945) was a historian of ideas and an expert on medieval letter writing, a form of literature central to the communication of intellectual arguments as much as information. Focusing on the eleventh century, Erdmann concentrated on material generated by the Investiture Contest and the reformed papacy. However, his somewhat unorthodox career lent him a perspective that differed from the many German scholars who tilled that rich field of political, institutional and ideological conflict. Born in Dorpat/Tartu, Estonia, and raised in Saxony, having abandoned plans to become a Lutheran pastor, Erdmann spent some years after university in Portugal as a private tutor. While there he conducted research on crusading in Portugal which formed the basis for his first doctorate. When he was later recruited by the Prussian Historical Institute in Rome, among other things he worked on papal correspondence with Portugal. There, too, he began work on the ideas behind the First Crusade. Already some of the elements that distinguished his great book were in place: a view of the instrumentality of the papacy in western society and thought; an understanding that ideas and practice of church-approved war concerned more than campaigns to the Holy Land; an awareness that the wars begun in 1095 formed part of a wider change of intellectual climate. Experience of the fringes of southern Europe, the early medieval frontline of Christendom against Islam, as well as his sharp (and apparently bitter) personal family memories of the problems of the German plantation in the north-eastern Baltic, encouraged a subtle view of conflict between and within societies. Shortly before his death, Erdmann declared himself a ‘true humanist’ who hoped he knew how to die ‘en philosophe’. This, combined with not coming from a Roman Catholic background, may have allowed Erdmann the freedom displayed in his unblinking assessment of the steps taken by succeeding popes, and especially Gregory VII (‘as much a warrior as a priest and politician’), in constructing the theory and practice of Christian holy war. Even Gregory the Great failed to avoid censure for promoting aggressive religious missionary wars, a ‘dubious direction’ (bedenklichen Schritt) for Christian doctrine.2
Erdmann, who had lost two brothers in the First World War, held no admiration or approval of the subject he chose for his Habilitationsschrift of 1932 that became the Entstehung in 1935. Behind the detailed study of the medieval texts suitable in a scholar now (from 1934) employed by the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, lay a much larger question, ‘the historical foundations of the Western ethic of war and soldiering’.3 Coupled with this was an understanding that the Christian warfare of the crusades was no sudden aberration, violence in the name of a good cause being as old as western European civilisation itself. Nor was it a consequence either of elite or of popular impulses alone, but a potent conjoining of the two, in this case the ideology of the church and the psychology of the knightly classes. Such issues were scarcely neutral or irrelevant in the Germany of the early years of the Third Reich, even if some modern attempts to cast the Entstehung as a coded critique of Nazi fanaticism and militarism underestimate the purely academic drive behind the work.4 It was less its coolness towards war that struck early readers than its departure from the usual objects of crusade study and its explicit challenge to the underlying assumptions of that prevailing orthodoxy. Erdmann turned decisively away from regarding the crusades as material exercises of foreign conquest and colonisation in favour of examining their western ideological roots. In doing so, he denied the cherished centrality of the Holy Land.
For all his unassuming scholarly style and tone, Erdmann was combative. An initial sally, ‘to regard the belief that Christianity was destined to world domination as the root of the crusading idea is an exaggeration’, is footnoted with reference to a paladin of German crusade scholarship, Hans Prutz.5 By locating a continuum of ecclesiastical responses to elite warrior culture that stretched back to the emperor Constantine and the doctrines of Augustine of Hippo, Erdmann reduced the uniqueness of crusading, depicting it as merely one form of holy war particularly developed by the eleventh-century papal reformers. The concentration was on holy war, not pilgrimage or the Holy Land which were only later ‘to fertilize the war upon the heathen’.6 Originally, wars fought as a religious act, or related to religion in some way, had taken the form of state wars against enemies or heathen, as in the wars of Charlemagne against the Saxons. Patristic teaching had allowed for warfare in defence against the church’s enemies, such as heretics. However, acknowledging a direct debt to Ranke, Erdmann distinguished between official state and church policy and the more popular generalised Christianisation of the Germanic Heldenethik, ‘ethics of heroism’, through the early middle ages, accelerating in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Thus, this populäre Kreuzzug developed in parallel with official policy.7 In the eleventh century, the reformed papacy, notably Gregory VII and the theorists in his circle, openly justified aggressive wars against enemies, both heathen and, during the Investiture Contest, political and doctrinal opponents, who could be characterised as heretics and schismatics. Conversely, supporters, such as the Milanese gang leader Erlembald in the 1060s, could be cast as saints, and papal soldiers promised spiritual rewards. ‘Pre-crusades’ were fought against Christian enemies of the papacy and the Moors in Spain. Knights were recruited through local Peace of God initiatives and directly by Gregory VII’s abortive militia sancti Petri. However, this holy war as a means of discipline and defence – the hierauchischen Kreuzzugsidee – was not widely attractive.8 It took Urban II’s association of ecclesiastical war with the popularity of pilgrimage and his use of Jerusalem as a secondary recruiting device, to harness the knightly ideas of the ritterlichen Kreuzzug – the chivalrous crusade – to the hierarchical to produce the First Crusade.9
In tracing the Christianisation of war, Erdmann subverted contemporary crusade orthodoxy. As he noted, his approach was not entirely original. In Die abendländisch-hierarchische Kreuzzugidee (The Western Hierarchical Idea of the Crusade, dissertation, Halle, 1905), O. Volk had used Ranke’s distinction between the hierarchical and the popular crusade and had broken with the Jerusalem/Holy Land-centred interpretation of the nineteenth-century Franco-German school. Erdmann went further. ‘The general idea of crusade, far from being confined to wars actually directed towards the Holy Land, could be found in the most varied theatres of combat.’ In a sense this was a revival of the old ‘feudal violence’ construct, except that Erdmann, in the tradition of German geistesgeschichte – history of ideas – had a clear view that ideologies underlie actions. Freed from any innate or necessary association with pilgrimage or Holy Land, Erdmann’s crusade was distinctive because ‘religion itself provided the specific cause of war, unencumbered by considerations of public welfare, territorial defence, national honour or interests of state’.10 The historical development of this form of holy war, an ‘aggressive war of religion’ deo auctore, led to a further, more precise inversion of orthodox thinking.11 Erdmann regarded the wars, debates and theories of war surrounding the Investiture Contest as crucial stages in the formation of the crusade idea of 1095, as significant as the contemporary campaigns against the infidel in southern Europe. These debates revolved around wars against deviant or dissident Christians, in an elaboration of Augustinian war theory. Thus ‘war against pagans was very rarely and only incidentally mentioned … the true war of the church was to be directed against heretics and schismatics, excommunicates and rebels within the church’. In case there should be any misunderstanding, Erdmann continued: ‘There is no truth to the common opinion that the idea of a crusade against heretics (Ketzerkreuzzugs) was a corruption of the Palestinian crusade. On the contrary, such a crusade against heretics was envisioned from the start.’12 The wars against pagans grew in clerical theory from those against heretics not vice versa.
Erdmann did not in fact pursue this reformulation consistently, partly because of his interest in the non-clerical popular crusade enthusiasm combined with a peculiar reluctance to stick to a simple, single working definition of ‘crusade’. While the 1095 war was described as distinctive, at other times Erdmann’s crusade seems a synonym for an amorphous range of religiously inspired war. His methodology imposed other constraints. In his reconstruction of Urban II’s plan, Jerusalem could never be more than the Marschziel, the physical goal of the campaign, rather than the object of the war, the Kriegsziel, which he identified as the liberation of the eastern church, a direct extension of the papal ideology of the Investiture Contest.13 However, the detail of Erdmann’s thesis was perhaps of less immediate historiographic importance than the topic and approach. The Franco-German model had taken the crusaders’ religious militarism somewhat for granted, as had eighteenth-century and earlier writers. Where recognised, the paradox of Christian warfare had escaped systematic study, being largely dismissed as hypocritical or deluded cover for fanaticism, greed and adventure. By contrast, Erdmann sought to explain crusade ideology as a genuine force. The narrative of the First Crusade had long attracted detailed scrutiny. Now its social, intellectual, political and psychological springs took centre stage. Erdmann gave the crusades back to the west and ideology back to the crusaders.
He was not entirely alone. He noted local debts, for example to Walther Holtzmann’s research into the reformed papacy’s policy towards Byzantium.14 In France, Etienne Delaruelle, a historian of religious life rather than simply ideas, had written a thesis at the Institut Catholique in 1935 on the formation of the crusade idea, although he did not start to publish his findings until 1941, and only then in instalments spread over more than a decade. Delaruelle’s Essai sur la formation de l’idée de croisade emphasised the religious context, as expressed in the liturgy and Christian art, and the spiritual power of Urban’s message offering a means of salvation. One standing criticism of Erdmann was his lack of emphasis on the penitential dimensions of the enterprise despite his association of the First Crusade with pilgrimage. Delaruelle also probed the social features, from the increasingly prominent role of the nobility in wars on the frontiers of Christendom to the crusade as a means through which the church reached out to the laity.15 The responses of the laity that Erdmann had explained in essentially top-down terms – the lead coming from church, state and nobility – had also been the subject of lectures by Paul Alphandéry at the Ecole des hautes études before his death in 1932. These were only edited, completed and published by Alphonse Dupront in 1954 and 1959, but show that Erdmann was not working in isolation in redefining the subject. Alphandéry sought to expose the crusaders’ psychology, even though, like others trying to do the same thing, he was forced to rely on the filtration of clerical chronicles, especially such loaded texts as Raymond of Aguilers’s miracle collection. In contrast to Erdmann, Alphandéry’s crusade was a mass popular movement inspired by intense eschatalogical enthusiasm centred on the image of Jerusalem. Here, the key to understanding lay in collective mass psychology.16
The extent to which Erdmann’s Entstehung, or the works of Delaruelle and Alphandéry, constituted tracts for their times is less clear. Erdmann dedicated his book to the memory of his father ‘who lost a professorship at Dorpat in 1893 for remaining true to his mother tongue’, and to his dead brothers ‘with unshaken faith in the future of the German spirit’. German nationalism and resentment occasionally peeps out from the Entstehung, as in the wistful contrasting of German bravery and Italian cowardice at the battle of Civitate in 1053 and the ironic comment that crusading seemed destined ‘not for the German Volk but only for their adversary’, that is, the French.17 Although denied promotion for his undisguised lack of enthusiasm for the Nazi regime, Erdmann was hardly an active dissident. He was even offered a professorial title, which he was able to decline without immediate drastic repercussions. Erdmann’s published work would have been scrutinised for seditious intent, not least by its publishers. Yet he was allowed to continue working for the MGH, until, despite his indifferent health, he was conscripted during the Second World War. On service as a translator in the Balkans he died of typhus in March 1945. The Entstehung can be read as a critique of the acceptance of militarist ideology by elites and society at large, as one later reviewer put it, ‘a protest of the human spirit against fanaticism and aggression in any age’. It is not a condemnation of Nazism per se but an analysis of how such ideologies could be constructed and disseminated, remaining studiously moderate in judgement. The treatment of ideology has been depicted by some as oddly un-ideological, perhaps reflecting the need for discretion.18 However, the contemporary issue for Erdmann, and perhaps for Delaruelle and Alphandéry, was not so much the fascism of the 1930s, but the ethics of militarism that had led to the First World War, ideologies of violence that had received overt and active promotion by churches and states with extensive public support. Erdmann discovered in the crusades the political workings of the clerical elite and the psychology of the ruling class; Delaruelle the force of collective faith; Alphandéry the power of popular culture. From each, contemporary parallels could be drawn, and personal political persuasions inferred, but far less crudely than some associated with the colonial crusade model. The central issue that Erdmann returned to the forefront of the debate was the one that had proved the most awkward, the problem of religious or ideological violence distinct from raisons d’état. While such phenomena challenged post-Renaissance and Enlightenment expectations, they spoke directly to the experience of the twentieth century.
While many admired Erdmann’s scholarship and recognised the ‘rich theme’ he had explored, a number quibbled over his emphases. The Byzantinist Louis Bréhier criticised both the psychological analysis and the very idea that the First Crusade possessed a long lineage. W. Holtzmann took issue with Erdmann’s opening distinction between holy war in general and crusading as a specific genre of religious violence. La Monte, who seemed flummoxed by the absence of traditional political history, adopted an unreflective supercilious condescension towards ‘German scholarship’, ending with one of the least prescient of comments: ‘both the content and the style forbid its ever becoming either popular or widely influential’.19 Yet increasingly, the old explanations of the First Crusade as a result of politics and diplomacy appeared inadequate. This mirrored a growing breadth in research into medieval canon law and religiosity, seen not simply in terms of ecclesiastical structures and politics but as systems of belief. It also perhaps reflected the contemporary mid-twentieth-century familiarity with wars of ideas, fought or threatened. Erdmann’s trail was followed by Paul Rousset’s Les origines et les caractères de la première croisade (Neuchâtel, 1945), that attempted to reconstruct – somewhat disapprovingly – the religious crusading mentality as revealed by sources in the fifty years after 1095. One reviewer drew a precise contemporary parallel. La Monte entirely rejected what he described as Rousset’s attempt ‘to re-establish the old thesis of the crusades as essentially a religious movement’, accusing Rousset of naivety in taking the religious language of his texts – such as militia Christi – as demonstrating that religion ‘was the essential cause of the crusade’. This was ‘like accepting the statements of Pravda that the USSR is only altruistically interested in establishing “truly democratic peoples’ governments”’.20 The date was 1948. By contrast, fifty years later, a leading British crusade historian could remark, apparently without irony, ‘all of us, although with different emphasis, now know that the subject of crusading is a religious one, whatever other elements were important to it’.21 La Monte believed in 1948 that ‘recent research has been steadily moving’ away from the religious interpretation. That this has not proved so owes much to Erdmann. His approach, however flawed in practice, encouraged others to overcome any distaste at the concept of religious war and to take the ideological origins and religious impulses seriously, regardless of the undoubted pitfalls in the evidence. While Rousset studied religious rhetoric, in La croisade: essai sur la formation d’une théorie juridique of 1942 Michel Villey, later a noted conservative, Roman Catholic legal historian and philosopher, pioneered the modern examination of the crusade as a juridical theory.22
Not that Erdmann’s analysis and conclusions have necessarily commanded agreement. As well as the contrasting perspectives of Delaruelle and Alphandéry, Rousset argued that the First Crusade differed from ‘pre-crusades’ before 1095 in Sicily, Spain or North Africa in certain key characteristics, such as the imagery of the Cross and the Jerusalem indulgence. Villey noted the absence of evidence for the legal acceptance of the new form of aggressive war against pagans. Further investigation of the policies and ideas of Gregory VII, Urban II and theorists of the Investiture Contest wholly modifies Erdmann’s sketch. The genesis of penitential war has been more precisely located in the 1080s. Erdmann’s relegation of Jerusalem to an incidental feature of Urban II’s scheme was effectively challenged by John Cowdrey in 1970. More sweepingly, Erdmann’s chronology of changing attitudes to holy war and his reading of the shift of opinion amongst canonists have both been demolished, for example in a series of articles by John Gilchrist. The Spanish ‘pre-crusade’ has been questioned and the role of the Peace of God widely dismissed.23 Since the 1930s, the nature and development of knighthood have grown almost into a separate sub-discipline. More recently new attention to charters has sought to exhume secular beliefs at a local level that contradict Erdmann’s rather hierarchic assumptions about the transmission of ideas, indicating less sophisticated levels of devotion and the desire for penance.24 Even admirers indulge in considerable modification. Thus Mayer stresses the part played by pilgrimage and the indulgence and Jean Flori, who has reasserted the Erdmann-esque centrality of holy war, nonetheless predates the church’s embrace of violence and ascribes to Jerusalem a key part in the creation of the crusade.25 In his biographical study of Urban II, Becker recasts the whole argument by rejecting the association with pilgrimage and locating Urban II’s conception of the First Crusade firmly in the pre-1095 eleventh-century tradition of Christian reconquest in Spain and especially Sicily. Yet, oddly, despite his disagreement with the characterisation of the First Crusade as an armed pilgrimage, Becker has been accused of being a neo-Erdmannite, presumably because of his lack of emphasis on spiritual ideology and his implication of continuity rather than innovation in Urban’s 1095 plan.26 Most fundamentally, if imprecisely, Erdmann has been criticised for misunderstanding or underestimating the very core of his own thesis, ideology. He is accused of adopting too rational and elitist a view of the spiritual fears, ideals and ambitions of knights and too political an interpretation of the ideas of the papacy; in short, of minimising the power and importance of faith.27
Yet amidst the rubble, Erdmann’s thesis survives. To dismiss it as of little value is to forget Bernard of Chartres’s hackneyed maxim of dwarfs on giants’ shoulders. As his translators said, he defined a subject. Unlike Prutz, Röhricht, Stevenson, Barker, Grousset, Munro or La Monte, the Entstehung continues to exert an influence and remains a necessary point of reference. The mere fact of its translation into English in 1977 is indicative. His interest in symbols, such as papal banners, and liturgies blessing violence, appears strikingly modern. Even its weaknesses have proved fruitful. His failure to define a crusade has helped inspire one of the livelier late twentieth-century debates on the crusades. Erdmann’s determination to place 1095 in a long social, political and intellectual perspective demythologised the crusade. It also persisted in shaping opinion. For example, Ernst-Dieter Hehl’s study of canon law and war in the twelfth century, Kirche und Krieg im 12 Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1980) is Erdmann-esque in arguing that theory follows practice and in adopting a very general view of the relationship of holy war and crusading. Three generations after his premature death, Erdmann’s ideas continue to arouse intense scholarly interest, even in criticism. Despite some attempts to belittle his continued importance, as John Cowdrey remarked, ‘all subsequent enquiry has in the last analysis sprung from’ Erdmann. American scholars such as Paul Chevedden are critically revisiting some of his views, on, for example, pre-crusades (or, as they may prefer, pre-1095 crusades) and Urban II’s Mediterranean policies.28 Most significant to the historiography of the crusades, Erdmann offered a contrasting method and substance to moralising assumptions about motives and to the obsession with superficial political narrative.
Nobody could accuse Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades (1951–54) of lacking either moralising or narrative. Even when published, dated in technique, style and content; derivative, misleading and tendentious; a polemic masquerading as epic; Runciman’s three volumes represent the most astonishing literary phenomenon in crusade historiography since Michaud. Almost sixty years after the publication of the first volume, in educated circles in Britain, if anyone talks about the crusades ‘Runciman’ is almost certain to be invoked. Across the Anglophone world he continues as a base reference for popular attitudes, evident in print, film, television and on the internet. However much scholars may grind their teeth, there are sound, non-academic reasons why this should be so.
Runciman himself explained: ‘I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man,’ adding, significantly, ‘Homer as well as Herodotus was a Father of History.’29 These certainties, value judgements and literary flourishes may grate, but they are carefully directed to illustrate central themes. Runciman, a Byzantinist, pitches his story on two parallel levels: the clash of civilisations – western European, Byzantine Greek and Muslim – at different stages of development; and the motives of people, individuals and groups. Each level is only properly understood in relation to the other. Individual participants are vividly portrayed in deft, if slightly predictable, character sketches, psychological stereotypes that illustrate their cultural progress; westerners brave, wilful, rough and rude; Greeks adult, sophisticated, touched with decadence; Muslims two-dimensional in their faith, martial vigour and oriental manners. The weaving of the overarching conflict of societies, Gibbon’s World’s Debate, with the dramas of immediate human experience renders the account both coherent and accessible. The narrative is lent a dimension of timelessness, as in the notorious summing up: ‘the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost’.30 The whole work is shot through with literary device, from imagining the thoughts of the actors to inventing fictitious scenes of action. In this, Runciman is the true heir of Michaud, but also of medieval chroniclers whose narratives never left the service of their didactic purpose.
This didacticism provides Runciman’s History with its lasting immediacy. In Gibbonian style, he discourses on the eternal foibles of human nature. The perspective is Olympian, speaking with the cultural confidence of a man of great wealth, high intellect and enormous curiosity. His approach and style were shaped by synthesising writers such as the nineteenth-century historian of Greece George Finlay and, especially, J. B. Bury (1861–1927), his mentor at Cambridge. Runciman claimed (inaccurately) to have been Bury’s first and only pupil. They shared a taste for scholarship over a wide period and space (in Bury’s case mainly in the later Roman Empire and Byzantium), sympathy with Victorian liberal values and a desire to write accessible prose. Nurtured in a cosmopolitan intellectual and cultural elite (his family money came from shipping; both his grandfathers were successful businessmen; both his parents were Liberal MPS, his father a Liberal Cabinet minister), his position as a private scholar from his early thirties allowed him complete academic freedom. He addressed himself to urgent contemporary issues in a very particular manner, spurning the ‘massed typewriters’ of the USA and attacking professional academic history, ‘where criticism has overpowered creation’, dominated by ‘the minutiae of knowledge’ (not seen by Runciman as a particularly good thing) in articles and theses, ‘small fortresses that are easy to defend’.31 Runciman’s view of the past rejected the dehumanised (and he would have thought dehumanising) theories of Marx, Freud or Weber, the statistical aggregate or the determinism of economics. Clad in the full cultural armour of his liberal classical education at Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, A History of the Crusades argues in defence of that culture and education, regarded as quintessentially civilised and humane. The mass movements of his own lifetime, which spanned almost the entire twentieth century (1903–2000), were not only personally anathema but had brought the world near to destruction. He had little time for the tyranny of numbers, the equality of the herd or horde. The responsibility and importance of the individual looms large. ‘By the inexorable laws of history, the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens.’32 To an audience gripped by the impersonal forces of the Cold War, this seemed to soften causation to the explicable, to human agency.
The message was clear. Once the values of moderation, learning, high culture and reason become overlaid or undermined by passion, ignorance, greed or violence, civilisation is imperilled. Look, Runciman says, at what the crusades did to those they first set out to assist, the eastern Christians and the cultivated world of Byzantium. These they destroyed through ignorance, allowing the Turks to subjugate half of Christendom. Good intentions are not enough; ‘faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing’ whether, the implication seems to be, that faith is in God, gods, Mammon, economic nostrums or political creeds.33 Unlike Michaud, Runciman betrays no nationalism or even a preference for western European ideals. It was not part of his intellectual milieu. Narrow national or cultural partisanship had reaped a dreadful harvest in his lifetime; his first Cambridge pupil was Guy Burgess (although they had a number of things in common, treachery he would have thought vulgar and dishonourable). For Runciman, the best of the west came from the east which the west wilfully and witlessly had cast down. In one of his most famous lines, anger touched his lament at Byzantium’s tragedy: ‘there never was a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’.34 Published in 1954, its message stood in sombre relief: it was less than a decade after Hiroshima; the concentration camps; the Holocaust; and the Nuremberg trials that first defined crimes against humanity. As an example of man’s avaricious inhumanity and as an episode with untold, unforeseen and, in Runciman’s eyes, catastrophic consequences, 1204 may appear a suitable subject for horrified sermonising. However, the hyperbole reaches beyond the author’s passionate Hellenophilia. Byzantium stands for western civilisation itself, inherited from the classical past, rational, tolerant and humane. The crusaders are the barbarians within: energetic, self-righteous, semi-educated, driven by appetites not reason. The unspoken relevance is loud.
If A History of the Crusades is a threnody for a lost world – Runciman’s as well as Byzantium – its compelling force is surprisingly crude in construction. Its concerns and assumptions are rigidly traditional: the Holy Land crusades, with excursions mainly restricted to related wars against Islam – Moors or Ottomans; Outremer a Frankish colony.35 The tone is consistently romantic in following the fates of nations through the actions of individuals. One caustic modern critic has commented that Runciman’s account ‘was almost what Walter Scott would have written had he been more knowledgeable’.36 There is a tendency to divide people into good and bad, to assume transparency of motive, however devious. Oddly, Runciman’s Greeks are as two-dimensional in their suave sophistication as are his Franks in their boorishness. His Muslims parade as figures from an orientalist’s sketch-pad. Shirkuh’s ‘features revealed his low birth’. The epithets showered on Saladin – cunning, ruthless, courteous, generous, considerate, tolerant, merciful, gentle in manner, simple in tastes, disliking coarseness and ostentation, well read, a lover of both hunting and intellectual discussion, modest – have the strange effect of sucking individuality from the sultan, reducing him to a catalogue of nineteenth-century English upper-class virtues.37 At times, Runciman comes close to self-parody, perhaps deliberately given his highly refined sense of humour. By the device of misplacing her famous physical description of Bohemund of Taranto from 1108 to 1097, he imagines the teenaged Anna Comnena admiring Bohemund of Taranto’s ‘good looks’ despite his sinister demeanour and fearsome reputation, Anna ‘being, like all Greeks down the ages, susceptible to human beauty’.38 Here, perhaps, the hidden text is not too hard to read.
These literary touches, more journalistic than novelistic, fit the almost unwavering avoidance of serious historical analysis. The complexity of the narrative comprises events sustained by a running commentary of judgement – fateful, tragic, evil etc. – that substitutes for reflective discussion of cause, motive and consequence. However, this is one reason why Runicman’s History survives. Readers are invited to think that they are seeing what actually happened, an exercise in imaginative transportation, their response unimpeded by the uncertainties of evidence and interpretation beyond a few throwaway comments suggesting Runciman’s almost personal acquaintance with the medieval writers. The absence of doubt is combined with the skilful creation of a convincingly fabricated world inhabited by his recognisable stereotype cast. Such was the conviction behind this literary performance that others have plundered it almost as a primary source. Runciman’s History is the last chronicle of the crusades.
Yet those passages that are not pure invention are often uncritically and occasionally unadmittedly derivative. The first volume, on the First Crusade, is heavily dependent for content and structure on Ferdinand Chalandon’s posthumously published Histoire de la Première Croisade jusqu’à l’élection de Godefroi de Bouillon (Paris, 1925). The narrative, largely following the Gesta Francorum, with accurate chronology provided by Hagenmeyer, treats the chronicle evidence as a sweetshop of good stories. Runciman’s method – the broad sweep, the summary generalisation and the memorable human cameo – is here displayed at its smoothest. It is no coincidence that it was later reissued as an autonomous book. The second volume, subtitled The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, takes the story to 1187 largely by copying William of Tyre, with shades of Stevenson’s Crusaders in the East. Despite his best prose, this volume lacks the coherence of the first or the set-piece dramas of the third and, like its model William of Tyre, can be rather hard to follow. The treatment displays little engagement with any fresh areas of research, although Cahen and Prawer feature in the footnotes and bibliographies. Runciman was widely read, even if he appears to have lacked the Arabic necessary to penetrate below the surface of the Recueil translations of the nineteenth century. The handling of Islam reflects this lack of sympathy or understanding of religion as other than an adornment of high (or low) culture. This appears to contradict Runciman’s stated purpose to ‘understand not only the circumstances in western Europe … but perhaps still more, the circumstances in the East that gave to the crusaders their opportunity and shaped their progress and their withdrawal’.39 Much of his secondary reading remained in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This suggested not a lack of industry but a rather optimistic view that the subject was settled and thus ripe for some definitive synthesis. The third volume, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades, contains the furious description of the Fourth Crusade, relying on Byzantine sources such as Nicetas Choniates. Otherwise, the continuations of William of Tyre and the Gestes des Chiprois provide the material, with Grousset’s own final volume lurking not far in the background. The central judgemental dynamic beats loudly: ‘the misguided crusades’; crimes and follies in Outremer and the west; the Latins castigated for failing to ally with the non-Muslim Mongols.40 A cursory nod is given to crusading after 1291 (as had Fuller and Gibbon). Runciman’s personal interests may lie behind the unexpectedly elaborate genealogies of the royal and noble families of Outremer that complete the final volume.
Nobody writes like Runciman today. Very few did even fifty years ago. The scholarship is wide but not deep; the literary technique effective in short stretches but taken in large doses tends to indigestion. A review by Erdmann might have been worth reading. Contemporary academic critics were not slow to cast aspersions, noting variously the lack of analysis, originality or concern for spiritual motives beyond the external manifestations of pilgrimage, jihad etc. Smail, after a positive welcome to the first volume, offered some very dry criticisms of the finished work, especially of Runciman’s prejudices, his exaggerated devotion to Byzantium, his caricature of Latin Christianity, the absence of analysis and his omission of any serious consideration of the crusade as a reflection of western religious life. Smail also questioned the timing of the book, along with the Pennsylvania project: ‘an odd time to halt and summarize’ given that new areas of research (not least Smail’s own) were being explored and many others awaited investigation. In the light of all this, how did Runciman’s History become such as public succès d’estime? Why is it still revered, with even a modern academic author describing the book – apparently without irony – as ‘an excellent starting point’? Smail hinted at an explanation. As a history for the ‘general reader’, he argued, it constituted: ‘a remarkable achievement of literature and scholarship … distinguished by its breadth of design and boldness of generalization’ which, combined with extensive reference to primary sources, made it ‘the best scholarly survey of the subject by a single author’, that ‘will always remain the first considerable work of its kind in the English language’. Even twenty years after the appearance of the first volume, Hans Mayer could, with justice, comment that for Anglophone readers Runciman was ‘indispensable for anyone who wishes to study the crusades at all seriously’, not least because there was no competition. However, Mayer’s description of it as a ‘tour de force of English historical writing’ perhaps contains just a suspicion of irony.41 Readable, opinionated but well-informed, engaging both in its style and in the coherent world it conjures into existence, what Smail wrote in 1953 was true: Runciman’s History was the first of its kind in English. It was also the last.
It would be unfair simply to ascribe Runciman’s success and influence to the literary tricks of an ersatz novelist alone, even though he himself insisted that ‘he was not a historian, but a writer of literature’.42 He certainly was a showman, in life as in words. However, all was not just trickery and verbal legerdemain. Like almost all the greatest or most significant crusade historians, he expressed a clear view of his subject. The crusades formed part of a process whereby western European civilisation became globally dominant through the transfer of power from Byzantium and the Arab caliphate. Far from the agent of beneficent exchange, the crusades acted as a destructive force. The (in Runciman’s eyes) civilised, tolerant empires of Abbasid Baghdad and Orthodox Byzantium were replaced by harsher regimes in east and west. He makes the whole subject easy by setting it up as a conflict between east and west, Christianity and Islam. In the service of clarity, he ignores the awkward issues of ideology raised by Erdmann or the complex tensions within Europe that made crusading a feature of the heartlands of western Europe not just its frontiers. Runciman presented a very English vision of history, avoiding triumphalism, self-deprecatory when discussing western society, the glamour of the past tempered by shafts of sceptical irony, the romance and passion coloured by an abidingly gloomy view of the human condition. The virtues of Runciman’s characters are almost invariably balanced by vices. He has no time for militarism, but accepts its historical importance.
Oddly for one hardly attuned to the age of the common man, his liberal cynicism resonated with modern, post-war prejudices. His characters are not really medieval at all, but recognisable modern, pre-Freudian people in medieval clothes. Consequently, they are not distanced from his audience. In language of sonorous high seriousness, great events are reduced to a human scale without ever diminishing their significance; Homer indeed. The closer his text resembles a novel, the more engaging it is. Above all, he panders to the two most potent sirens of popular history: the sense that people in the past were essentially just like people in the present; and that, partly as a consequence, the past can be judged according to hindsight and modern schemes of value, ethics and morality.
Despite this, Runciman’s History merits inclusion in any study of crusade historiography not simply as a final representative of a belles lettres tradition, but also because his book exerted a profound influence on the subject in the Anglophone world which, unexpectedly, came to occupy a leading position in the academic study of crusading. More than once, it has been posited that this explosion of research interest in Britain indirectly owes something to Runciman. Certainly few British historians of the crusades over the next half-century were not exposed to or brought up on Runciman; fewer still would have entirely escaped the excitement of his style, narrative and generalisations. Reading Runciman could be immensely enjoyable, not a charge that can be levelled at all works on the crusades. Irritation at his lingering influence beyond the academic world may be fuelled by envy, disdain at his patrician insouciance, or professional axe-grinding. Yet the subject as described by Runciman is now almost wholly unfamiliar except as a relic of past modes of thought and of an approach to the writing of history that has long since ceased to make much sense, not least his confident construction (invention might be a better word) of a historical narrative. For all his not entirely unsuccessful attempts to keep abreast of research literature, Runciman failed to predict or embrace the signs of wholly new directions in research. He may not have cared. The points he wished to make and the impact he sought to leave were of a different order.
In the more than half-century since Runciman’s History, the study of the crusades has been transformed. The weight of publications has been complemented by changes in how the subject has been understood and its integration into other areas of research, from psychohistory to gender studies. Whole new national traditions of crusade scholarship have sprung up, for example in parts of eastern and northern Europe. Parallel and antithetical to this renaissance of learning has been the association of the crusades with competing modern political discourses concerning relations between Islam and the First World, the establishment and development of the State of Israel, the relationship of the east Baltic with western Europe and tendentious theories of ‘the clash of civilisations’. The divergence between professional and popular history, witnessed by Runciman’s continued reputation and the ‘impotence of academic critics’ to influence public perceptions of the past, has never been so acute.43 Yet many of the familiar accounts – Michaud, Prutz, Grousset, Runciman – encourage a settled view of the crusades as culture wars. Similar impulses sustain both academic and popular concern; the interest in ideological warfare as a function of society; the ramifications of institutionalised belief systems; objective awareness of the sincerity and force of popular and individual spirituality; multi-culturalism; the historic divergence of the development of different faith communities; the condemnation of imperialism and colonialism; the efficacy, corruption or compromises of political idealism; the role of historical memory. In a violent century, fascination with war remained part of the cultural furniture, perhaps especially after 1945 in societies that experienced the luxury of peace. For all the freshness of new research, many of the broad interpretive schemes scarcely differed from earlier opinions: the colonial debate; the crusades as exemplars of medieval religion/fanaticism; the theme of economic opportunity; the balance sheet of waste. However, one difference has marked most modern scholars from their predecessors: a prevailing academic relativism that has tended to outlaw overt anachronistic judgementalism so prominent in previous historians and so beloved of the reading public.
The extent to which the new waves of crusader research after the 1950s had the potential to alter the geography of the subject can be illustrated by comparing two post-war surveys of the terrain less than a decade apart. In 1948, reviewing Rousset’s Origines, La Monte appeared wedded to the ‘political, military or social’ aspects. He listed four prominent explanations of the First Crusade – holy war, pilgrimage, the effect of Cluniac reform and papal policy – with three auxiliary influences: the reconquista, union of eastern and western churches and Byzantine policy. He explicitly rejected a return, as he saw it, to an outdated view of crusading as ‘essentially a religious movement’.44 By contrast, in his prescient 1957 joint review of Runciman’s History and of the first Pennsylvania volume, Smail pointed to three broadly defined areas of interest: the expeditions themselves; the Latin East; and the relation of crusading with western religious life. He also indicated possible subjects that needed exploring: the military orders, largely untouched since Delaville Le Roulx’s work on the Hospitallers and Prutz’s on the Templars; the Jerusalem Assises building on the pioneering work of Grandeclaude; and, following Erdmann and Rousset, the ideas and emotions that underpinned the whole phenomenon. His conspectus did not ignore traditional topics, reviving some and suggesting new perspectives on others.45 It now seemed possible to examine these issues free from confessional or, in western Europe at least, heavily nationalistic bias. To this catalogue could have been added new methods of economic history unfettered by moralising snobbery towards the motives and morality of those involved in trade; the use of new techniques of archaeology, anthropology, sociology; and a redefinition of cultural history to include the mass not just the articulate elite. No longer did the excesses of the colonial enthusiasts or the overblown disdain of Runciman convince.
From the mid-1950s, the subject was reshaped in a string of major reinterpretations. Some, such as Smail’s own Crusading Warfare of 1956, Prawer’s ‘apartheid’ or Mayer’s institutions, remapped familiar territory. Others, such as Giles Constable’s seminal 1953 article on ‘the Second Crusade as seen by contemporaries’, began to extend the conceptual as well as evidential scope of the subject, in this case beyond the focus on campaigns to and in the Holy Land.46 Long-standing assumptions regarding commercial exchange, western economic exploitation and colonial systems that reach back to Robertson and Heeren, were entirely recast by detailed and innovative use of the archives of Italian maritime cities, notably David Jacoby’s extraordinary sequence of studies of Romania and Venetian involvement in the eastern Mediterranean; and Michel Balard’s exploration of the Latin diaspora, in particular Genoese commerce and presence in Greece, Outremer and the Black Sea. Here, the crusades were located within a far wider scheme of reference regarding economic change and the development of urban western European mercantile communities and of their overseas comptoirs or trading posts.
What was true for commerce applied to war and chivalry. Knightly attitudes, of central concern at least since Sainte-Palaye in the eighteenth century, increasingly formed part of a much wider debate about the origins of western knighthood, its nature, impact and chronology. Beyond discussions of whether the association of crusading and chivalry was either complementary or contradictory, or whether chivalry as a code or social signifier could be said to have existed at all before the twelfth century, the crusades have been incorporated as symptoms of contested social change. These arguments bled into disputes over feudalism and the alleged radical changes in local power structures, especially the authority of lords and knights, in the years (or centuries even) around the year 1000, a so-called mutation that, its proponents argue, transformed the political, social, legal, fiscal and even geographic landscape in favour of regional seigneurs. The prominence of non-royal commanders and their milites has made the early crusades an obvious battleground in this debate, with clear potential implications for the origins of the crusade. Thus, Riley-Smith and his pupil Marcus Bull have identified the pressures that produced the enthusiasm for the First Crusade in the collapse of public, centralised authority in western Francia, the subsequent internecine violence producing a reaction of guilt and anxiety that could be channelled by the clergy or driven by the lay knights themselves towards penitential holy warfare. Others, such as Jean Flori, appear less convinced by this theory of disruption.47 While the certainties on the very concept of ‘feudalism’, let alone its application in Outremer, assumed by La Monte in the 1930s, have been fractured, largely by non-crusade historians, the relevance of such revisions is obvious.48 If there was no coded chivalry and no feudal system in 1095, the First Crusade could not have been the product of the former or exported the latter.
The centrality of war in medieval society has also kept attention on the concrete aspects of crusading: tactics, castles, sieges, recruitment and logistics. The old concerns with the exchange of tactics and military architecture across opposing frontlines and cultural differences have been refashioned. Smail’s ideas have been applied widely. John France’s military account of the First Crusade, Victory in the East (Cambridge, 1994) emphasises the adaptable eclecticism of crusade commanders and fighters. By contrast, Ronnie Ellenblum’s discussion of crusader castles is dominated by a challenge to a set of theoretical assumptions that portray castles primarily in terms of military defence.49 Much work has dwelt on preparations rather than fighting, using the crusade to illumine western society’s engagement with the wider economic, social, political and fiscal repercussions of war in western Europe. More widely still, crusading has been incorporated as one of the forces producing what has been called ‘the expansion of Catholic Christendom’ or even ‘the Making of Europe’.50 In such studies, tactics of individual battles, a staple of a certain type of military historian, assume a distinctly secondary role. However, elsewhere, study of numbers of troops, the ratio of casualties and the details of the conduct of campaigns have deepened understanding of what fighting a crusade may have been like. Highly innovative research on logistics, on land and, notably, at sea, by J. H. Pryor and others, has demonstrated that what happened on the march, sea voyage or battlefield cannot be seen as entirely discrete subjects. Pryor’s work on Mediterranean currents and winds as well as the ships themselves has provided concrete explanations for much that previously was taken for granted.51 Such studies tackle not just questions of supply and how armies operated over long distances, but reveal perhaps unexpected vistas on the determinants of strategy, the policies and mentalities of commanders, the level of military intelligence and expectations, even the geographical awareness of would-be leaders. What emerges is a picture of much greater complexity than the old models would allow. Images of optimistic ingénus blundering about a world they did not understand in a nearpermanent state of violent myopia now appear hopelessly crude.
This has also proved the case with an issue that concerned both Erdmann and Runciman: the role of Byzantium. The growth in Byzantine studies may have been stimulated by Runciman, although, even in English, he ‘was hardly a pioneer’.52 Much of the establishment of a distinct modern Byzantine historical identity was the work of French art and literary scholars, such as Charles Diehl (1859–1944) and Louis Bréhier (1868–1951), who also edited and translated the Gesta Francorum (Paris, 1924). The political cycles of Byzantine contraction and recovery became familiar through books that no longer treated Byzantium in the Gibbonian manner as an effete decadent mockery of its ancestor the Roman Empire, for example The History of the Byzantine State (first German edition 1940; English 1957) by the Russian-born Yugoslav scholar George Ostrogorsky (1902–76). The role of the crusades as agents of decline, and in 1204 destruction, rested on acceptance of a high political narrative largely the creation of Greek authors such as Anna Comnena and Nicetas Choniates and sustained by the persistent assumption of culture wars. This was lent added definition by a conceptual frame that showed civilisations being plotted on a graph of rise and decline set against some, presumably classical, standard of excellence. Traditionally, this essentially Enlightenment idea of cultural progress cast crusaders as bumptious destroyers of a decadent relic, an increasingly feeble guardian of classical heritage. While the Greeks tended to be described as in some senses superior to the crusaders, the future seemed to lie, through conflict as much as contacts, with the rise of the west. This formed a sort of subsidiary east versus west narrative to shadow that played out in the Levant. Despite a subtler understanding of Byzantium, crusaders continued to be cast as inevitable opponents, an interpretation reflected in studies bearing titles such as Byzantium Confronts the West.53
This combination of the teleology of hindsight, inherited stereotypes – cultivated Greeks, malign western thugs and avaricious Italian merchants – and a concentration on the surface of high politics only began to be undermined from the 1960s. With further research on the Byzantine economy, for example by Michael Hendy among others, and detailed investigation of trade, commercial links with Italian traders and western settlers in thirteenth-century Greece, as by Jacoby, Balard and Ralph-Johannes Lilie, the old image of conflict became seen as too simple, misleading or irrelevant.54 The trend to place Byzantine crusader relations in a wider context of multivalent contacts in time, space and circumstance has been matched by fresh scrutiny of the famous confrontations. The diplomacy of the twelfth century has been reviewed outside the traditional shadow of the inexorable path to 1204, as in Lilie’s Byzanz und die Kreuzfahrerstaaten (Munich, 1981, Eng. trans. Byzantium and the Crusader States, Oxford, 1988 and 1993). New interpretations of the First and Fourth Crusades, while not diminishing the misunderstanding, tensions and hostility generated by these events, escape the traditional paradigms. Jonathan Shepard has since the 1980s recast the First Crusade as in part a consequence of Byzantine diplomacy and pre-1095 Latin penetration of Byzantium, with Bohemund as a Greek-speaking enemy, turned potential ally, turned enemy; rather above the heads of those, like Runciman, merely content to gloss Anna Comnena.55 Similarly, the dominance of Nicetas Choniates in blaming the disaster of 1204 on western greed, Venetian duplicity and supercilious Byzantine imperial folly has been confounded on two fronts. The decline of Byzantium as a military force and cohesive polity now seems less inevitable and of shorter gestation; and the Fourth Crusade has been rebranded as a series of accidents rather than a concerted conspiracy of intent (the old idea of an actual formal plot – still pedalled by unwary students – being a curious nineteenth-century canard based on textual misreading). The Venetians, it is argued, were no less susceptible to crusade idealism than other Europeans and actually invested considerably more in it than they did.56
This reluctance of modern historians to adopt the confident cultural diagnoses of the past or accept the determinism of fate owes much to new techniques of textual scholarship that unravel and to a degree deconstruct the chronicle narratives. Suspicion of sources is also matched by an anxious secular relativism that denies forces of history as determining whether individuals or groups have been on winning or losing sides. Especially in those regions less in thrall to a Cold War Manichean outlook on life, in the second half of the twentieth century contingency and the equality of experience tended to replace the patterned, predictive and hierarchic schemes of Whigs or Marxists. It is true that recently in certain parts of the academic world, primarily but not exclusively North American, a fresh Whiggish scheme of Western Destiny has emerged in response to the end of the Cold War and the coming of effective Islamist terrorism, a new teleology that once again threatens to privilege certain elements of crusade history. However, the earlier fracturing of interpretive models has allowed greater prominence to aspects of the crusades that once appeared tangential to what theorists call the meta-narrative, the big issues of the rise and fall of civilisations. Two examples may suffice here: the history of the military orders; and the crusades of the later middle ages.
As Smail noted in 1957, for over fifty years little study had been devoted to the military orders, institutionally or ideologically, despite their being one of the most original, prominent, distinctive and adhesive consequences of the crusades. This may have been a function of unease at the overt institutionalisation of an apparent oxymoron of confessed religious dedicated to butchery. More specifically there perhaps existed a lingering suspicion of entrenched hypocrisy encouraged by literary slanders and the often misleading images of the lurid perjuries of the Trial of the Templars, the brutal conquests and regimes of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic, or the effete aristocratic Hospitaller rulers of eighteenth-century Malta swept away by Napoleon in 1798 in a gesture of apparently cleansing modernity. By the mid-1970s this reticence had changed completely. Surveys and monographs were appearing, by, among others, Jonathan Riley-Smith and Antony Luttrell (on the Hospitallers), Marie-Louise Bulst-Thiele, Alan Forey and Malcolm Barber (on the Templars) and William Urban (on the Teutonic Knights). Each of these and other studies, such as Werner Paravicini’s seminal work on the Teutonic Knights and the Baltic Crusade from the late 1980s, rehabilitated the study of the military orders as institutions of considerable significance in the development of religious orders, elite and popular spirituality and the relations between ecclesiastical corporations and society.57 In Britain, much of the impetus in studying the institutional history of military orders came from a circle of medievalists gathered as pupils and colleagues by a vigorous academic entrepreneur and Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews, Lionel Butler (1923–81), a group that included at various times Riley-Smith, Forey, Luttrell and Peter Edbury, historian of Frankish Cyprus, the Jerusalem Assises and the texts of the continuators of William of Tyre. Butler himself, although a spasmodically industrious archival scholar, published nothing of substance on his chosen area of the Hospitallers in Rhodes. However, he noted the riches and potential of the Maltese Hospitaller archives and drew others to them. The institutional approach was very characteristic of the secular post-war Oxford tradition in which Butler was raised, and was applied to ecclesiastical as to lay history. However, latterly, in the past twenty years or so, the ideological implications of the personal and religious commitment of the Military Knights have come to be integrated into their history, another sign of the greater willingness to confront the belief systems of the middle ages on their own terms.
Study of the military orders inevitably helped shift the geographical and chronological emphasis, as many of them survived as active political and ecclesiastical corporations for centuries after the loss of the Holy Land. The heyday of the Teutonic Knights’ Ordenstaat (‘Orderstate’) in the Baltic and of the Hospitallers’ in Rhodes belonged to the later middle ages. That crusading had continued long after the evacuation of mainland Palestine in 1291 was obvious to early modern and Enlightenment historians. Only with the emergence of the models of colonialism and culture wars did the focus narrow. The crusades of the later middle ages, tending to be localised affairs conducted by those on the frontiers of Christendom, scarcely fitted either. They also displayed a rather messy narrative, hard to weld into a clear story. If the crusades were regarded as the wars over the Holy Land, campaigns elsewhere, even if against Muslim enemies, simply did not fit; still less did the wars fought as crusades within Christendom against enemies of the papacy, notably in Italy. Later medieval conflicts with the Ottomans were hardly popular subjects for study. They highlighted Christian failure as well as raising issues that possessed awkward contemporary resonance well into the twentieth century, while simultaneously drawing attention away from the reassuring familiarity and distance of the Palestine wars. Yet the obvious presence of wars of the cross after 1291 had not been entirely ignored. Delaville le Roulx had written about campaigns in the fourteenth century, perhaps unsurprising for a historian of the Hospitallers.58 The abundance of surviving fourteenth-and fifteenth-century theoretical, technical and propagandist crusade texts stimulated interest from the Romanian Nicolai Iorga (Philippe de Mézières 1327–1405 et la croisade au XIVe siècle, Paris, 1896), the Italian Arturo Magnocallo (Marin Sanudo il Vecchio e il suo progetto di crociata, Bergamo, 1901) to the German G. Dürrholder (Die Kreuzzugspolitik unter Papst Johann XXII 1316–34, Strasbourg, 1913). Some of these texts had appeared in the Recueil des historiens des croisades: Documents Arméniens (vol. ii, Paris, 1906) – and indeed in Bongars’s Gesta Dei Per Francos in 1611 – as well as many published in the Revue de l’Orient Latin by luminaries such as Charles Kohler. However, such literary investigations could be incorporated into an argument of decline and decadence, ineffectual wishful imaginings compared with the central dramas played out in the Levant between 1097 and 1291. The west, fructified by its contact with the east and the experience of conquest and settlement, was imagined to have decisively turned its back on the crusades in preparation for the Renaissance.
However, it was apparent that these literary texts were matched by general later medieval action which, as Aziz Suryal Atiya (1898–1988) noted in his groundbreaking The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1938), altered the conception of the whole subject beyond its old chronological, Holy Land boundaries. Atiya, an Egyptian and exceptionally gifted linguist, had extensive experience of the academic world in Germany and England before going on to hold chairs in Egypt and the USA. His interests in the crusades went alongside pioneering research into Coptic history and eastern Christianity in general. His first book, on the Nicopolis crusade of 1396 (London, 1934), sought to place later medieval crusading practice, planning and propaganda in the wider setting of ‘relations between East and West’, including pilgrimages and missions to the Tartars as well as military campaigns. He was later to develop theories of counter-crusades.59 His perspective – and many of his sources – reflect his unusual personal and academic position straddling the cultural and linguistic divide that formed the core of his crusade research. The bulk of his evidence, as it had been for Delaville le Roulx and Iorga, remained literary. Only with new archival material could the later medieval crusade fully come into its own. One appeal of the earlier crusades for historians lay in the comparatively restricted range and type of source material, primarily chronicles. Few royal, seigneurial or urban archives survived from before the thirteenth century. With the exception of Gregory VII’s, only from Innocent III did the run of extant papal registers begin. Only later in the twentieth century was the substantial corpus of charters employed by crusade historians. Given that the later middle ages, with comparatively less rich chronicle material, have left far more archival documentation, sifting through it for the thread of crusading appeared daunting, especially before these archives were edited or calendered.
After the Second World War, Atiya’s conceptual inclusion of the later middle ages was matched by an explosion of archival work, especially on Italian mercantile cities and, crucially, the papacy. In the vanguard of this research was Kenneth Setton, whose interests, like those later of Jacoby or Balard, significantly were not constrained in a crusade model. In certain ways, his Catalan Domination of Athens 1311–1388 (Cambridge MA, 1948) continued the old tradition of William Miller, Latins in the Levant (London, 1908). More directly, his enormously erudite The Papacy and the Levant (Philadelphia PA, four volumes, 1976–84) was in many respects, especially in the early volumes, ‘essentially a history of the later crusades’. However, by adopting the fashionable US style of narrative history, the use of a huge range of Greek, Italian and papal documents placed the crusade in a dense weave of contemporary events; aptly Setton described himself as a ‘mosaicist’.60 What was incontestably demonstrated was that the subject existed on a scale far more extensive than previously explored, but one that could not be approached shackled by the old models that contrasted dramatically with Setton’s long, multi-volume account. In his third volume of nearly 500 pages in 1954, Runciman, heavily dependent on Atiya, produced a cursory survey of anti-Muslim warfare and planning, just over forty pages to cover 1291–1464. Given his Byzantinist perspective, this may appear peculiar, even on his own terms. Just over a decade later Hans Mayer deliberately ended his account in 1291, signalling a clear view that crusading properly delineated concerned the wars and settlement in, around and for the Holy Land, a position that he consistently maintained thereafter which inevitably excluded the later middle ages.
One incentive to extend the range of study came with a rejection of his assumption. Atiya’s broad definition in some ways represented a return to the Enlightenment model of generalised cultural contact. Another was the growing interest in their medieval pasts by historians of and from regions that had been on the periphery of Latin Christendom. One of the more subtly restrictive features of crusade historiography has always been its narrow geographic, often essentially Franco-centric bias. Medievalists of and from Scandinavia and the Baltic, some stimulated by the end of the Cold War and issues of national identity and relations with an apparently resurgent European community, could hardly avoid studying crusading in the later middle ages. In the territories of the Teutonic Knights, the emergence of Christian Finland and the consolidation of a royal and national Danish identity, the place of crusading institutions and motifs could not be ignored.61 Elsewhere, from the 1970s, a group, initially primarily of British historians, articulated refinements of the pre-nineteenth-century inclusive interpretation. Wherever a crusade, defined by its familiar panoply of privileges and ecclesiastical, propagandist and fiscal institutions, was discussed, proclaimed, organised and conducted it came within the legitimate ambit of crusade history.62 Some were pragmatically drawn to this simply by the evidence of continued active as well as passive interest in what later medieval contemporaries described and understood as crusades. For others this shift in emphasis betokened what was argued as being a more sensitive empathy with the aspirations of the time in a reassertion of the centrality of religious idealism. What pragmatists and idealists shared was a rejection of the orthodox historiography of decline that charted an increasing lack of popular enthusiasm and a rise in secularism, cynicism and indifference towards crusading amongst both rulers and subjects. Some regarded the argument about unpopularity as crudely configured; others as false. These new perceptions, while neither united in attitude nor universally accepted, produced a series of monographs and general surveys that extended the work of Setton and the historians of the later medieval military orders, prominently Norman Housley’s quartet of studies The Italian Crusades 1254–1343, The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades 1305–78, The Later Crusades: From Lyons to Alcazar 1274–1580 and Religious Warfare in Europe 1400–1536 (Oxford, 1982, 1986, 1992 and 2002 respectively).
From a rather different angle, the chronological limits of medieval crusading have been further extended by scholars of humanist literature, such as Robert Black, Robert Schwoebel, James Hankins and more recently Nancy Bisaha and Margaret Meserve, whose research decisively challenges one of the most cherished and venerable conventions of crusade scholarship. The crusades have been branded as quintessentially ‘medieval’; that is what gave them their diagnostic edge for their Enlightenment critics. Now it is clear that the subject obsessed humanist writers of the Renaissance just as seriously as their supposedly benighted medieval ancestors. The 400 or so humanist crusade texts by fifty different authors produced between 1451 and 1481 constitute a volume of work ‘at least equal to all the surviving crusade literature of the high Middle Ages’.63 This fact sits awkwardly with the construct of the crusades as a representative aspect of the culture that the Renaissance was supposed to have abandoned. It challenges the facile, crude demarcation of ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’, a pattern of historical progress and change that united most of the major influential writers on the crusades, from Grousset and Runciman back to Gibbon and Robertson. Just as study of the military orders raised issues of taking seriously medieval systems and institutions of belief, so the extension of scrutiny into the later middle ages seemingly discarded some of the strongest hoops that bound the subject together.
1 C. Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Stuttgart, 1935), trans. M. W. Baldwin and W. Goffart, The Origins of the Idea of Crusading (Princeton NJ, 1977); S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (3 vols. Cambridge, 1951–54).
2 Origins, pp. 10, 181, and for Gregory VII and war generally, pp. 147–81; Entstehung, p. 8 for bedenklichen Schritt; for Erdmann’s career, Origins, p. ix based on the memoir by F. Baethgen in his collection of Erdmann’s work, Forschungen zur Ideenwelt des Frühmittelalters (Berlin, 1953) and the author’s own comments, pp. xxxv–xxxvi; G. Constable, ‘The Historiography of the Crusades’, The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. A. Laiou and R. P. Mottahedeh (Washington DC, 2001), pp. 10–11; Erdmann’s self-description is quoted by H. E. J. Cowdrey in his review of Origins, International History Review, 1 (1979), 121–5. cf; the rather misleading account by N. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (New York NY, 1991), pp. 402–4.
3 Origins, p. xxxiv.
4 E.g. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, pp. 403–4.
5 Origins, p. 4
6 H. E. Mayer, The Crusades (Eng. trans. J. Gillingham, 2nd edn Oxford, 1988), p. 14; cf. Origins, p. 331.
7 Origins, pp. xxxv, 20, 269; Entstehung, pp. 17, 250.
8 Entstehung, p. 250.
9 Entstehung, p. 26.
10 Origins, p. 3.
11 Origins, pp. 9–10; Entstehung, p. 8.
12 Origins, p. 265; Entstehung, p. 246.
13 Origins, pp. 332, 368 and Appendix pp. 355–71; Entstehung, pp. 363–77.
14 See esp. the notes to chap. X on Urban II.
15 E. Delaruelle, ‘Essai sur la formation de l’idée de croisade’, Bulletin de litérature ecclésiastique, 42 (1941), 24–45, 86–103; 45 (1944), 13–46, 73–90; 54 (1953), 226–39; 55 (1954), 50–63; published as a book (Turin) 1980.
16 P. Alphandéry, La chrétienté et l’idée de croisade, ed. A. Dupront (Paris, 1954–59).
17 Origins, p. 125; Cantor’s tendentious reading of the book as a seditious tract fails to convince, Inventing the Middle Ages, pp. 402–3.
18 Cowdrey’s review of Origins, p. 125. J. Riley-Smith, ‘Erdmann and the Historiography of the Crusades 1935–1995’, in La primera cruzada, ed. L. Garcia-Guijarro Ramos (Madrid, 1997), pp. 17–29.
19 Reviews by T. Boase, History, 22 (1937), 112–14; L. Bréhier, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 32 (1936), 671–6; W. Holtzmann, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 56 (1937), 152–4; J. L. La Monte in Speculum, 12 (1937), 119–22; Z. N. Brooke, English Historical Review, 54 (1939), 108–10.
20 J. L. La Monte in Speculum, 23 (1948), 328–31, esp. 329–30.
21 Riley-Smith, ‘Erdmann’, p. 329.
22 M. Villey, La croisade: essai sur la formation d’une théorie juridique (Paris, 1942).
23 H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Pope Gregory VII and the Bearing of Arms’, in Montjoie: Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans Eberhard Mayer, ed. B. Z. Kedar et al. (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 21–35; idem, ‘Pope Urban II’s Preaching of the First Crusade’, Past and Present, 55 (1970), 177–88; J. Gilchrist, ‘The Erdmann Thesis and Canon Law’, in Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. Edbury (Cardiff, 1985), pp. 37–45; idem, ‘The Papacy and War against Saracens’, International History Review, 10 (1988), 174–97; idem, ‘The Lord’s War as a Proving Ground of Faith’, in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth Century Syria, ed. M. Shatzmiller (Leiden, 1993), pp. 65–83; M. Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade (Oxford, 1993), but cf. H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘From the Peace of God to the First Crusade’, in La primera cruzada, pp. 51–61.
24 G. Constable, ‘Medieval Charters as a Source for the History of the Crusades’, in Crusade and Settlement, ed. Edbury, pp. 73–89.
25 Mayer, Crusades, esp. pp. 23–37; J. Flori, La guerre sainte (Paris, 2001).
26 A. Becker, Papst Urban II (1088–99), ii, Der Papst, die greichische Christenheit und der Kreuzzug (Stuttgart, 1988); J. Riley-Smith’s review, Journal of Theological Studies, 41 (1990), 281–2; idem, ‘Erdmann’, p. 18.
27 Riley-Smith, ‘Erdmann’, pp. 17–29; cf. the comments on the fate of Erdmann’s ideas by N. Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford, 2006), pp. 30–6.
28 Riley-Smith, ‘Erdmann’; Cowdrey’s review of Origins, p. 125; P. Chevedden’s two articles on ‘Canon 2 of the Council of Clermont’, Annuarium historia Conciliorum, 37 (2005), 57–108, 253–322; idem, ‘The Islamic View and the Christian View of the Crusades: A New Synthesis’, History, 93 (2008), 181–200; cf. the implication in B. Bachrach, ‘From Nicaea to Dorylaion’, in Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, ed. J. H. Pryor (Aldershot, 2006), p. 51; in general cf. B. Hamilton’s review of the 1977 English translation, History, 64 (1979), 443–4.
29 History of the Crusades, i, xiii.
30 History of the Crusades, iii, 480; cf. p. 469: ‘Seen in the perspective of history, the whole Crusading movement was a vast fiasco.’
31 History of the Crusades, i, xii–xiii; the ‘massed typewriters’ referred to Setton’s Pennsylvania History to which Runciman unblushingly contributed; for Runciman’s career, see his own memoir, A Traveller’s Alphabet (London, 1991); Averil Cameron’s biographical entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. B. Harrison et al. (Oxford, 2004, online edition); G. Constable, ‘Sir Steven Runciman’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 147 (2003), 95–101. One of Bury’s other pupils was the Byzantinist, Norman Baynes.
32 History of the Crusades, iii, 480.
33 History of the Crusades, iii, 480 and, generally, pp. 469–80
34 History of the Crusades, iii, 130; perhaps significantly he altered the phrase in his memoirs (published in 1991) to ‘there is no greater tragedy in history than the Fourth Crusade’, as if to underline his awareness of the precise implications of his 1954 judgement, Traveller’s Alphabet, p. 90. He also conceded that the Frankish occupation of the Morea ‘had its compensations’.
35 History of the Crusades, esp. iii, 367–86.
36 J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades (2nd edn New Haven CT, 2005), p. 300; cf. the same authority’s rather grumpy review of yet another reissue of Runciman’s first volume, Crusades, 6 (2007), 216–17.
37 History of the Crusades, ii, 383; iii, 77–8.
38 History of the Crusades, i, 157–8.
39 History of the Crusades, i, xi.
40 The ‘misguided crusades’, the title of Book II of the third volume, included the Fourth, Children’s, Fifth, Frederick II’s, Theobald of Navarre’s and Richard of Cornwall’s crusades.
41 R. C. Smail’s reviews appeared in the English Historical Review, 68 (1953), 85–9 and 72 (1957), 680–7; cf. a similar trajectory from M. J. Tooley in History, 37 (1953), 67; 38 (1954), 104–5; 40 (1955), 330; C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh, 1999), p. 13; Mayer, Crusades, p. vii.
42 Quoted by Riley-Smith, Crusades, 6 (2007), 217.
43 Riley-Smith again, Crusades, 6 (2007), 216.
44 J. L. La Monte’s review of Rousset Speculum, 23 (1948), 328–31.
45 Smail, English Historical Review, 72 (1957), 687.
46 G. Constable, ‘The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries’, Traditio, 9 (1953), 213–79.
47 J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London, 1986), esp. pp. 9–12; Bull, Knightly Piety; idem, ‘The Roots of Lay Enthusiasm for the First Crusade’, History, 78 (1993), 353–72; Flori, La guerre sainte; Housley, Contesting the Crusades, pp. 24–38. For the feudalism debate, see, as an example, that conducted between T. Bisson, D. Barthélemy and C. Wickham in Past and Present, 142 (1994), 6–42; 152 (1997), 196–205; 155 (1997), 196–207 and 208–25.
48 E.g. E. A. R. Brown, ‘The Tyranny of a Construct’, American Historical Review, 79 (1974), 1063–88; S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford, 1994).
49 R. Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007).
50 Titles of books by J. France (London, 2005) and R. Bartlett (London, 1993).
51 E.g. J. H. Pryor, Geography, Technology and War (Cambridge, 1988); ed. Logistics of Warfare.
52 Constable, ‘Sir Steven Runciman’, p. 97.
53 By C. M. Brand (Cambridge MA, 1968).
54 E.g. M. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c. 300–1450 (Cambridge, 1985); D. Jacoby, ‘The Encounter of Two Societies’, American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 873–906; idem, Recherches sur la Méditerranée orientale du xiie au xve siècle (London, 1978); idem, Trade, Communities and Shipping in the Medieval Mediterranean (Aldershot, 1997); idem, Commercial Exchange across the Mediterranean (Aldershot, 2005); M. Balard, La mer Noire at la Romanie génoise (London, 1989); idem, La Romanie génoise (Rome, 1978); idem, Les Latins en Orient (Paris, 2006).
55 E.g. J. Shepard, ‘When Greek Meets Greek: Alexius Comenus and Bohemund in 1097–98’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 12 (1988), 185–277; idem, ‘Cross-Purposes: Alexius Comnenus and the First Crusade’, in The First Crusade: Origins and Impact, ed. J. Phillips (Manchester, 1997), pp. 107–29.
56 In general, D. Queller and T. Madden, The Fourth Crusade (2nd edn Philadelphia PA, 1997); M. Angold, The Fourth Crusade (London, 2003); J. Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades (London, 2003).
57 J. Riley-Smith, The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus c. 1050–1310 (London, 1967); A. Luttrell (whose pioneering work has appeared in myriad, often obscure journals), as, e.g., in collected studies, The Hospitallers in Cyprus, Rhodes and Greece and the West 1291–1440 (London, 1978); The Hospitallers of Rhodes and their Mediterranean World (Aldershot, 1992); Studies in the Hospitallers after 1306 (Aldershot, 2007); M. L. Bulst-Thiele, Sacrae Domus Militiae Templi Hierosolymitani Magistri: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Templeordens 1118/19–1314 (Göttingen, 1974); A. Forey, The Templars in the Corona de Aragon (Oxford, 1973); M. Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1978); W. Urban, The Baltic Crusade (DeKalb IL, 1975), the first of many; W. Paravicini, Die Preussenreisen des europäischen Adels (Sigmaringen, 1989–).
58 J. Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient au xive siècle (Paris, 1885).
59 A. S. Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1938), esp. pp. vi–vii; idem, Crusade, Commerce and Culture (London, 1962).
60 K. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (Philadelphia PA, 1976–84), i, p. vii.
61 E.g. A. V. Murray, ed., Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150–1500 (Aldershot, 2001), esp. K. V. Jensen’s introduction and the essays by Axel Ehlers on Lithuania and Thomas Linkvist on Sweden; K. V. Jensen, ‘Denmark and the Second Crusade: The Formation of a Crusader State?’, in The Second Crusade, ed. J. Phillips and M. Hoch (Manchester, 2001), pp. 164–79; S. Ekdahl, ‘Crusades and Conversion in the Baltic’, in Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. H. Nicholson (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 172–203; J. M. Jensen, Denmark and the Crusades 1400–1650 (Leiden, 2007); various articles in T. M. S. Lehtonen and K. V. Jensen, Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology (Helsinki, 2005).
62 Below, Chapter 8; the ur-text for this approach is J. Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades? (London, 1977; 3rd edn Basingstoke, 2002).
63 J. Hankins, ‘Renaissance Crusaders’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49 (1995), 112 and note 3 and 117, and generally 111–207; R. Black, Benedetto Accolti and the Florentine Renaissance (Cambridge, 1985); R. Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (Niewkoop, 1967); N. Bisaha, ‘Pope Pius II and the Crusade’, in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, ed. N. Housley (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 39–52; eadem, Creating East and West (Philadelphia PA, 2004); M. Meserve, ‘Italian Humanists and the Problem of the Crusade’, in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 13–38.