The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Herold’s hardly penetrating observation that religious divisions were obstructing resistance to the Turks became a common motif across confessional boundaries, as in the massive but popular Generall Historie of the Turks (1603) by the English Protestant schoolmaster Richard Knolles.43 Such common ground identified an aspect of Christian universalism that survived changing patterns of devotion. Although the crusades no longer dominated Ottoman wars or infra-religious Christian conflict, the fight against the Turks retained a generalised religious dimension in popular perceptions of Islam as more alien than other Christian confessions. Recognition of the moral as well as political benefits of war against the Turks was shared by Protestant and Roman Catholics alike, but shorn of the formal trappings of the crusade. Thus the great Roman Catholic victory at Lepanto in 1571, with all its hallmarks of crusading, could be welcomed by the young Calvinist James VI of Scotland in a long Virgilian epic (1585) as a ‘wondrous worke of God’, and was celebrated at the time by Protestant commentators and Londoners as a victory ‘against the common enemy of our faith . . . of so great importance unto the whole state of Christian commonwealth’.44

  The often laudatory concern with the crusades shown by non-Catholic scholars indicates a final irony. Detoxified by its irrelevance to fighting the Turks or Protestants, study of the crusades was used to suggest cultural continuity across the confessional caesura of the Reformation either, by Bongars, in weaving the crusades into the national epic or, by Knolles, in projecting a view of Christian Europe as a ‘commonweale’ of princes defined not by religious disagreements but by collective opposition to Muslims. Even the English reformist polemicist John Foxe’s excoriating anti-Roman Catholic account of the crusades, History of the Turks (1566), noted the courage and religious devotion of ordinary Catholic believers in the wars against common enemies of Christ and Christendom, even if he insisted that ‘the Turks . . . were never so repulsed and foiled as at the present time in encountering with the protestants and defenders of sincere religion’.45 The Protestant challenge had destroyed universal acceptance of the religious systems behind traditional crusading but not the emotional attraction. Confessionally neutral concepts of holy war were fashioned that avoided arguments over crusading.

  This did not mean universal agreement that holy war was any more justified than crusading, a point underlined in the English lawyer, scholar and politician Francis Bacon’s fragmentary Advertisement Touching an Holy Warre (1622–3; published 1629) on the legitimacy of ‘the propagation of the Faith by arms’.46 Bacon’s discussion, presented as a debate between contending intellectuals, rested on history and the new perspectives provided by the conquests of natives in the Americas. While famously having one of his protagonists describe the crusade as ‘a rendez-vous of cracked brains that wore their feather in their head instead of their hat’, Bacon’s treatment – what there is of it – is notably balanced.47 Rejecting wars for profit and crusading’s religious dogma, and suspicious of arguments based on necessity, prudence and law, Bacon’s presentation of the idea of a just war against the Turks nonetheless displayed familiarity with the legacy of the crusade. Religious wars continued to excite massive bloodshed far into the seventeenth century, in Germany, Britain and on frontiers with the Turk, but, despite an equivalence of emotional and psychological dynamics, it was not conditioned by the apparatus of the crusade. While individual crusaders still fought in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe for another century, and the Hospitallers maintained an increasingly lordly hold on Malta until expelled by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798, crusading as a vital element of public policy and private ambition dimmed into the margins of European experience, a gilded or reviled memory.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEEN

  CRUSADING: OUR CONTEMPORARY?

  No medieval events have possessed a more contested afterlife than the crusades. Few are more recognisable to modern audiences, in rhetoric and visual imagery. Later debates have become part of crusade history, classic examples of past events being shaped in retrospect. In western Europe and North America, the crusades have been perceived variously through the filters of Roman Catholic apologia, Protestant condemnation, nationalist appropriation, humanist materialism, Enlightenment disgust, Romantic empathy, imperial enthusiasm, modernist condescension and post-colonial disquiet. They have been seen as barbaric invasions, conduits of economic development and cultural exchange, transmitters of European supremacy, witnesses to spiritual devotion, expressions of religious bigotry, acts in a cosmic clash of civilisations or squalid self-interested land-grabs. The heirs of victims and opponents share some of these opinions, but add particular elements of inherited outrage, anger, bitterness, disgust and sadness. The crusades have transcended historiography to find a place in popular culture, in operas, novels, elite art and public monuments, but also in children’s books and folklore, Arabic as well as western. From literature and art to entertainment and politics, the crusades have long possessed power to inspire or appal.

  The crusades attracted, in David Hume’s phrase, ‘the curiosity of mankind’ both for their role in international mayhem and for the startling emotional paradox of religious violence presented as an act of charitable love.1 The duopoly of materialism and idealism has provoked judgemental assessments: were the crusades aberrant, malign, eccentric or, in some ways, central to the European experience, of ‘limitless effect’?2 Interpretations since 1600 have mixed admiration, revulsion and astonishment. Words for the crusades became lodged in modern vernaculars. By the eighteenth century, descriptive terms Kreuzzug or croisade replaced the generically neutral ‘holy war’ in Germany and France, while in Spain, the bula de cruzada remained a living part of the fiscal system. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) included four words for the phenomenon – crusade (of early eighteenth-century coinage, later popularised by Hume and Gibbon), crusado, croisade and croisado. By the mid-eighteenth century, ‘crusade’ also began to be applied analogically to campaigns for good causes or issues of principle (e.g. J. G. Hamann’s Die Kreuzzüge des Philologen [Crusades of the Philologian], 1762; Voltaire’s croisade against smallpox, 1767–8; Thomas Jefferson’s ‘crusade against ignorance’, 1786). Such awareness owed more to imaginative literature than to academic disputes or scholarly accuracy, as does much modern appreciation.3

  Accounts of the crusades had always straddled the fine line between history and fiction. Probably the most influential early modern work was Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1580–1), which translated the story of the First Crusade and Godfrey of Bouillon into an epic of chivalric romance and magic, creating an exotic never-never land of amorous crusaders and Muslim warrior maidens ripe for love, death and conversion. Although hardly liable to be confused with the sober historical accounts being written at the time, Tasso’s work, regularly republished and translated, distanced the image of crusading from its involvement in urgent contemporary concerns with papal authority or the Ottoman threat. Placed in a fantastical space available to imaginations free from historical, confessional or political constraints, owing as much to Renaissance classicism as to medieval religious war, Tasso’s romance, by taking the crusades out of the council chamber, scholar’s library and pedant’s schoolroom, offered a sentimental perception that reduced the crusades to exotic (and often erotic) adventure stories seen through a soft-focus western lens. The impact was immediate and far reaching. By 1639, the Englishman Thomas Fuller’s influential, critical Historie of the Holy Warre was seen by one enthusiast as robbing Tasso’s poem ‘of its long-liv’ed glory . . . Thou canst not feigne so well as he relate.’4 This proved optimistic. Tasso’s legacy penetrated far into the mortar of European high culture, inspiring music by Monteverdi, Lully, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, Haydn, Rossini, Brahms and Dvořák, and paintings by Tintoretto, Poussin, van Dyck, Tiepolo and Delacroix. In literature and, later, film, Tasso’s influence was profound, part of a lasting unequal exchange between the popular and the learned.

  151. The crusades through Tasso’s lens: Poussin’
s Rinaldo and Arminda.

  Crusades and Progress

  Given such dramatic raw material, it is unsurprising that historians have incorporated the crusades into wider patterns of European experience. For Thomas Fuller and savants of the earlier seventeenth century, the crusades addressed issues of immediate significance: the expression or corruption of faith; the materialism behind the crusade’s emphasis on possession of physical space; the advance of the Turks. Waste formed a common theme, the crusades being blamed for a dissipation of resources that led to the decline in traditional aristocratic power and the rise of national monarchies. Perspectives shifted with the decline of the Ottomans as a political threat after the repulse of the siege of Vienna in 1683 and confirmation of Ottoman retreat at the end of the Turkish war in 1699. The eradication of religion as a stated cause of European war after the end of the Thirty Years War; the expansion of European trading and colonial empires from the Americas to the East Indies; and increased European commercial penetration of the Mediterranean and Levant – led to a reformulation of the crusades into a story of contact and exchange. This materialist turn was signalled in the influential Discourse on Ecclesiastical History (1691) by the French lawyer, priest, theologian and church historian Claude Fleury. Avoiding confessional point scoring or patronising the past, Fleury identified, beneath the wars and conquests, the growth of navigation and commerce. This afforded Italian merchants in the Mediterranean ‘freedom of trade’ (liberté du commerce), starting a commercial revolution that led to an urban renaissance in arts, manufacture and industry.5 This positive if accidental material consequence allowed the crusades a place in the construction of progressive modernity and European global hegemony.

  Subsequent intellectual debates pursued Fleury’s themes in contrasting ways. The new European global reach and the retreat of Ottoman power inspired greater interest in Arabic and non-European sources in confident accounts of the rise of Christian Europe and their opponents; accounts of the crusades using Arabic texts were integrated into a much wider materialist narrative of Eurasian invasions and cultural exchange devoid of nationalist or moralising charge. Within a general materialist consensus, no united ‘Enlightenment’ view of the crusades existed. The French philosophes, Denis Diderot and Voltaire, decried the crusades’ superstition and irrationality, using them as oblique criticism of the manners, culture and pretensions of the ancien régime. Implicitly, crusaders’ superstition, hypocrisy, greed and imposition of social inequality were analogous to the conduct of their modern aristocratic heirs. This negative assessment was far from unchallenged. Although few were more acidly hostile to the whole crusade phenomenon than David Hume, his Scottish associates, William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, integrated the crusades into a persuasive account of the rise of western Europe. In the introductory chapter to his History of the Reign of Charles V (1769), ‘The Progress of Society in Europe’, Robertson, like Fleury, argued that the crusades, despite their superstition and folly, inadvertently produced increased international commerce, cultural exchange with the sophisticated east and the growth of western cities, which fostered civic values fundamental to the improvement of civilisation. Thus to the crusades ‘we owe the first gleams of light which tended to dispel barbarity and ignorance’.6 Robertson apparently derived this idea of economically determined progress directly from Adam Smith’s lectures, just as his observations on beneficial cultural borrowing were taken from Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). The contrast with the French philosophes lay in the different contemporary targets. In France, Voltaire and Diderot were confronting an illiberal, reactionary hierarchy under a divine-right monarchy whereas in Scotland Robertson and Smith were analysing a society that had seen rapid and, they would have argued, positive developments in the economy and legal, religious and political freedom, seen by them as the fruits of the Act of Union with England (1707).

  However, this Smithian concept of progress was not universally accepted even by anglophone writers. Gilbert Stuart’s View of Society in Europe (1778) turned Robertson’s economic argument on its head by insisting that the material and human waste in Europe caused by the crusades actually discouraged trade and the development of the civilising arts while simultaneously pro-moting superstition. The Robertsonian scheme of progress was similarly rejected by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (the chapters on the crusades were published in 1788). In a pointed phrase, Gibbon insisted that the crusades marked ‘the final progress of idolatry’, the material advances that came in their wake insignificant and peripheral.7 Yet Gibbon accepted the orthodoxy that the crusades in some measure contributed to the rise of independent cities and hence to a growth of liberty. The idea that the crusades contributed positively to the development of European civilisation and its global dominance became an academic orthodoxy across western Europe by the end of the eighteenth century, helped by the absence of any serious attempt to analyse, still less empathise or understand the religious motivations. Academic prizes were offered for theses supporting positive materialist interpretations, which were lent apparent credence by the consolidation of European world empires, and the American, French and early industrial revolutions. Each appeared to demonstrate a progressive tendency in the historical process from which the crusades could not be excluded. Moral judgements were relegated to a series of Enlightenment or neo-Protestant clichés of bewilderment or disapproval only balanced by recognition of the crusaders’ commitment and bravery, however misguided.

  French Romance and Empire

  Such academic discussions, aimed at using history instrumentally to explain the modern world, operated in parallel to a very different approach. Even before the French Revolution exposed for many the aridity and cost of the cult of Reason and its Enlightenment apologists, a very different literary response to the Middle Ages had flourished. Beyond the intellectual salon, customary religion still played a central role in popular attitudes to history. Interest in the social aspects of the medieval past, such as chivalry, remained lively in aristocratic circles on many levels from the literary and antiquarian to the nostalgic and snobbish. Study of medieval literature produced fanciful pictures of chivalric hierarchy, codes of honour, valour and public service, with bold and selfless knights errant defending the weak or embarking on crusade. Chivalry could be depicted as tempering the barbarism of a violent militarist society, an agent of progress towards post-medieval civility, a secular code of moral behaviour contrasted with the supposedly ignoble materialism of modern society. Such sentimental evocations of medievalism were more closely attuned to public impressions than rarefied academic debates. The imagined Middle Ages offered an escape, an antithesis to modernity. At the same time, the crusades touched current concerns: empire; the relative cultural power of Europe; religion in secular society; mass support for popular political causes. The branding of the crusades as central to the development of European society could thus ally with conservative empathy for a lost world of social and religious certainties.

  This combination of materialist and empathetic assessments of the crusades directed the revival of interest in the nineteenth century. One of the most influential champions of the crusades, François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) had read Robertson’s Charles V essay on progress (translated into French in 1771). The context was propitious for a revival of crusade enthusiasm as Napoleon’s extravagant campaign in the Levant in 1798–9 led to renewed interest in the crusading past. A Roman Catholic re-convert and royalist, Chateaubriand’s romantic evocation of the crusades in his account of his Near Eastern travels in 1806 (Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, 1811) combined religious empathy with pride in ‘French’ crusader achievements. In his Génie de christianisme (1802), Chateaubriand had insisted that Christianity itself, pace Enlightenment thinkers, played a central role in furthering the progress of arts and learning. Chateaubriand expressed a visceral, patronising dislike of Islam, offering a clear message that the crusade presented an adm
irable precedent for new western conquests in a decadent and impoverished Levant. The crusade soon became a central event for conservatives as well as progressives, widely accepted as ‘one of the greatest revolutions that has ever taken place in the history of the human race’.8

  This view was shared by another French conservative, the former publisher Joseph-François Michaud (1767–1839), whose monumental epic narrative Histoire des croisades (1811–22, revised until a final posthumous edition in 1841), supplemented by his collection of translated sources Bibliothèque des croisades (1829), recast the crusades as moral exemplars of devotion and heroism, of Christian values and European cultural dynamism. A populariser with an ear for historical romance (he was not above using Tasso as a primary source) and eye for political uses of history, Michaud, like Chateaubriand, wrapped his francophile analysis in a sheen of cultural supremacism. Islam was cast as the eternal enemy, the Near East as ripe for new French colonisation and the crusades as part of an age-old conflict between civilisation (Christian Europe) and barbarism (the Muslim east). Armed with the appeal of an exciting story, extensive if uncritical and sometimes distorting employment of primary sources, a novelist’s power of credible invention, a clear moral tone and an attractive conservative political agenda, Michaud’s influence spread beyond Imperial and Restoration France. His Histoire ran into nineteen editions in the nineteenth century as well as translations into English, German, Italian and Russian. His vivid prose, along with Gustave Doré’s wonderfully powerful illustrations to the 1877 edition and the crusade paintings – essentially illustrations of Michaud – commissioned from 1837 by Louis Philippe for his Salle des croisades at Versailles, could be said to have provided the modern image of the crusades and crusaders, recognisable two centuries after Michaud began to mine the crusades for publishing profits.