The medieval crusades are both well known and much misunderstood. For almost a thousand years, the startling narratives of disruptive ideological commitment, military conflict and international conquest have excited, disturbed, intrigued and repelled. In mobilising, over many generations, hundreds of thousands of recruits to fight for causes physically distant and emotionally transcendent, the crusades appear extraordinary while simultaneously exposing in sharp relief the psychological and material resources of the distant societies from which they sprang and on which they preyed. With violence in the name of religion no longer appearing as outdated, eccentric or alien as it did only half a generation ago, the crusades persist in giving pause for thought. Yet they were of their time not ours. Modern fascination with the motivating force of religion has tended to simplify the crusades as ‘wars of faith’. This misleads most obviously in two ways. It imposes a false binary cohesion on the identities and incentives of the warring parties, as in ‘Christians versus Muslims’, when the reality was more confused, cooperative as well as coercive, a matter of contact as well as competition. It also discounts the realities of warfare. Like religion, public violence is social and cultural. Crusaders’ involvement varied from the devout to the forced, from free choice to the demands of employment, from enthusiasm to indifference to resentment. The crusades were wars fought under the banner of religious belief and are inexplicable without recognising that. However, they were also both more and less than that: more, in that they fitted wider general patterns of cultural and territorial aggression; less, in that, as wars, they were fought like any other, a matter of money and men, tactics and technology, castles and carpentry.
A third misconception is to see the crusades only in the context of a unique concern with the Holy Land. A useful and often effective means to recruit, fund and justify military enterprises across half a millennium of Eurasian history, the crusades operated as part of a material, political and cultural expansion of medieval western Europe, a path of connection and contact as well as alienation and conflict. The crusades did not initiate contacts with the Islamic world, for these had been growing in the decades before the First Crusade through pilgrimages; shared frontiers and conquests in Iberia and Sicily; and, especially, increased commerce, particularly with north Africa. While the original incentive to control Jerusalem and the Holy Land remained the defining inspiration, crusades, as proclaimed by church authorities, were not confined to wars and conquests in the Near East. They contributed to the political re-ordering of Iberia and the radical cultural transformation of the Baltic. Just one aspect of the penetration by western Europeans into the eastern Mediterranean, they played a part in the creation of an idea of distinctive European identity. The ideological legacy extended into the Atlantic and to the Americas while, at home, helping to sharpen intolerance towards social and religious minorities and dissidents. Despite an intrinsic supranational dimension, the crusading mentality of providential exceptionalism and divine favour bled into emerging national identities, sometimes, as with the Danish national flag, visibly so. The crusaders’ reach straddled continents. Victims included Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Balts, Livs, Spanish Moors, Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Russians, Finns, Bosnians, west German peasants, English rebels, Bohemian nationalists, political enemies of popes in Germany, Italy and Aragon, French and Savoyard dissenters, and Jews. However, the special influence of crusading can be exaggerated. In almost all cases, the crusades formed part of wider processes of engagement, competition and conflict, a makeweight not the pivot. Even the iconic First Crusade to Jerusalem owed its inception to existing western involvement in the Mediterranean and developments in the politics of Asia Minor and the Levant.
Crusades were wars; not all were fought by earnest idealists or for altruistic ideals, or, for that matter, by cynical opportunists. For most involved, their intentions, ambitions and choices were mixed and inevitably constrained by social and economic circumstances, not dictated by unfettered enthusiasm. The world of the crusades was the world of non-crusaders. The gloss of clerical idealism covers much of the surviving evidence with a distractingly coherent sheen. One aim of this book is to peer behind the constructed contemporary images to explore how the ideas and practice of the wars of the cross reflected and influenced the society that produced them. Much continued interest in the crusades has been sustained by the inclination to project current concerns – from the allure of religious or ideological warfare to the political fate of Palestine – onto the crusading past, paradoxically viewed as simultaneously alien and instructive, a habit that has been around since the Renaissance. The crusades even find themselves corralled into the self-serving unhistorical polemical myth of an immutable clash of civilisations. Yet the crusades do not hold up a mirror to the modern world so much as a window into remote past experience. What follows, therefore, seeks to examine crusading in its own muddied and muddling political, social, economic and cultural setting, not as a dimension of some inevitable cosmic struggle.
In recent decades, particularly in anglophone scholarship, there has been a renewed emphasis on the ideological dimension of crusading and the piety of participants. This came in reaction to previous economic and social interpretations that tended to relegate faith claims as cover for more temporal incentives and causes. Concentration on religious motives attempts to understand medieval crusaders – or, perhaps more accurately, those who wrote about them – on their own terms, through empathy not judgement. Material and visual evidence help ground the exploration of the subject. Tangible objects can be as eloquent of beliefs as written texts. The crusades were neither aberrations nor universal obsessions. They depended on material and physical resources as much as on popular and elite mentalities. People create objects – clothing, armour, weapons, utensils, buildings, ships – which then condition their creators. Crusaders may have been motivated by idealism or compulsion; but their actions rested on things not slogans. These are what will be illustrated.
The physicality of crusading did not deny its religiosity. It has been said that religion in medieval Christianity represented the physical body of believers rather than, since the Reformation, an abstract body of doctrine. While, as in all periods, individual conviction varied in degree from devotion to indifference to scepticism, faith, in medieval Christian communities, was openly enacted and performed, a matter of demonstrative acts, deeds not words. Faith acts included modes of living: celibacy, chastity, or entering enclosed communities; ritual behaviour such as participation in the Christian liturgy, observing church festivals, attending sermons, joining church processions, attending confession, fasting, performing public penance or going on pilgrimages; and charitable gestures such as alms giving and ecclesiastical donations. Performance, ritual and charity: crusading drew on all three. In theory, crusaders offered their lives to help fellow Christians in a penitential exercise during which they were expected to lead exemplary lives. The reality may have been less ideal. Crusading existed in public, from taking the cross to the conventions of leave-taking to the celebrations of return. Crusading was defined by physical trappings. Ideological in justification and publicised incentive, its objectives were concrete: conquest and defence of territory or people, accompanied by the customary detritus of war – armour, weapons, banners, tents, horses, mules, carts, wagons, ships, rations, siege machines, castles. Crusaders relied on provisions and pay. Their defining symbol was a physical cross worn on their clothes. Conquests required economic exploitation and governing through written bureaucracy; laws; commercial regulations; coinage; secular, ecclesiastical and military buildings. Individual crusaders travelled with possessions, which, for noble crusaders, could be lavish and luxurious. Campaigns necessarily generated plunder, booty, tribute, trade and gifts – between allies, patrons and comrades or in diplomatic exchange. Remembrance was constructed in glass, stone, paint and manuscript. In material terms, crusading created little original or exclusive to it, endowing familiar objects and activities with especial relevance or resonance. This book is partly about how the ordinary became extraordinary.
THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
With the help of local tradition, the alleged site of the burial and resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem was identified by Christian Roman authorities in 325/6, encouraged by the Christian emperor Constantine (306–37), who had just united the eastern as well as western Roman Empire under his rule. Around an excavated rock-cut tomb, a pilgrim church was constructed, the Martyrion, consecrated in 335. The site of the Crucifixion and the supposed burial place of Adam were also conveniently included in its complex. The tomb itself was incorporated into a small building known as the Edicule. The creation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre coincided with the gradual emergence of Christian reverence for holy places and relics in general, a devotional development that made Jerusalem a major goal for wealthy pilgrims from across the Christian world, some of whose accounts of their visits became widely circulated. The physical image of the site was disseminated through such pilgrim descriptions and by visual representations in mosaics, manuscripts and commemorative religious artefacts. With the seventh-century Arab conquest, pilgrimage from western Europe became more difficult, expensive and rare, adding to the sense already implicit in the status of its holy sites that the Jerusalem pilgrimage possessed uniquely great penitential value. Understanding of the mystical importance of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre was sustained through the prominence of the Holy Places in familiar scripture and repeated liturgy as the scenes of man’s Redemption and of the coming Apocalypse, at once terrestrial and celestial, the empty tomb divine territory and a metaphor for a Christian life and God’s promise of salvation.
From the late ninth and tenth centuries pilgrimages from western Europe increased as Mediterranean trade picked up and land routes became more accessible through Hungary’s conversion to Christianity c. 1000 and Byzantine territorial advances in the Balkans, Asia Minor and northern Syria. By the early eleventh century, pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre were more frequent and increasingly fashionable, the bellicose Count Fulk Nerra of Anjou (987–1040) even going three times ‘for fear of hell’, while the Holy Sepulchre itself attracted donations, such as 100 gold pounds from Duke Richard II of Normandy (996–1026).1 This was needed. In 1009 the church and edicule of the Holy Sepulchre were wrecked on the orders of the fundamentalist Fatimid Caliph Hakim. Both were rebuilt with impressive magnificence largely with Byzantine money and completed in the reign of Emperor Michael IV Paphlagon (1034–41). This was the church the crusaders found on 15 July 1099 and which they proved cautious in altering. The edicule was embellished but remained more or less the same, while the rest of the church was gradually remodelled and expanded in European romanesque style to accommodate the increased numbers and liturgical expectations of western pilgrims. The rebuilding was finished by the late 1160s. Despite conquest by Saladin in 1187 and sacking by the Khwarazmians in 1244, the crusaders’ main church structure still stands, while the edicule has been rebuilt twice, in 1555 and 1809–10.
Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, for all its popularity, was never a mass activity. To satisfy and stimulate popular desire to be associated with the Holy Sepulchre, replicas of the church or edicule were erected widely across western Christendom, a tradition that long pre-dated the crusades but which gained momentum after 1099, while churches and chapels were dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre. Some may have provided settings for liturgical dramas such as Easter plays. Others may have operated more generally as visual contexts for sacramental liturgy focused on the Passion and Resurrection. In such tangible ways, that ‘remotest place’ as it was described at the time of the First Crusade, became embedded in the daily devotions of distant western Christendom, visible reminders of what the crusades were originally all about.2