1968–80
PL
J.P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, Paris: Migne, 1844–66
RA
Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt
Iherusalem, RHC Oc. , III.235–309
RC
Ralph of Caen, Gesta Tancredi in expeditione Hierosolymitana
auctore Radulfo Cadomensi, RHC Oc. , IV.587–716
RCEA
Repertoire Chronologique d’Epigraphie Arabe
Regesta Regni
Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani: 1097–1291, Reinhold Röhricht
(ed.), Innsbruck: Wagner, 1893
RH
Roger of Howden, Chronica magistri Rogeri de Houedene,
William Stubbs (ed.), Rolls Series 51, 4, London: Longman,
1868–71
RHC Arm.
Recueil des historiens des croisades: documents armeniens, 2, Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1869–1906
RHC Lois
Recueil des historiens des croisades: les Assises de Jérusalem, 2, Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1841–3
RHC Oc.
Recueil des historiens des croisades, Historiens occidentaux, 5, Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1841–95
RHC Or.
Recueil des historiens des croisades, Historiens orientuax, 5, Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1872–1906
RM
Robert the Monk, Historia Iherosolimitana, RHC Oc. , III.717–882
WT
William of Tyre, Chronique, R.B.C. Huygens (ed.), CCCM, 63, Turnhout: Brepols, 1986
xvi
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Conor Kostick
Modern conflicts in the Middle East and the War on Terror have created enormous interest in the history of the region and in the origins of Christian–Muslim conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of crusading has come under intense scrutiny as increasing numbers of modern historians have turned their attention to the subject, producing a flurry of studies to meet the demands of readers and students wanting to understand the medieval origins of conflict between the West and the Near East. There has also been a huge increase in the numbers of researchers investigating narrower and narrower aspects of the crusades, as well as a noticeable increase in the availability of modern editions of source materials. The level of discussion around the subject, as reflected in the growing number of papers concerning the crusades read at history conferences, has also grown rapidly.
And it is from this wave of scholarship that I have solicited the essays contained in this book on the grounds that they were original, that they enhanced our understanding of the Near East in the era of the crusades, and that they were investigations of previously unresolved assumptions concerning the practice of crusading in the Near East.
Broadly speaking, these are cultural studies, and the conscious assembly of a volume of cultural histories concerning the crusades is unusual for the discipline.
But with so much work having been done on the political history of the crusades and also on the question of the motivation of the crusaders, it seemed to me that the priority for a new anthology was to look for areas of study that were relatively underdeveloped, but were also fertile in their possibilities. As a result, this book is a step towards a dialogue between crusading historians and practitioners of Cultural Studies in its narrow sense: that inchoate discipline which (deliberately) eludes succinct definition but which has taken a sharp turn from its origins in the work of historians such as E.P. Thompson and the Annales school, to embrace post-modernism, post-colonialism, gender studies and self-reflexivity. Cultural Studies is a discipline that above all mistrusts generalisations and perhaps for this reason has not particularly appealed to practitioners of medieval history, despite the importance of the writings of Marc Bloch to its origins. But it is also a discipline that has revolutionised the humanities, most obviously in the field of Literature, but even a subject like Archaeology – so much more rooted in the 1
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materials rather than the ideas of society – has benefited from its interaction with proponents of Cultural Studies.
If this volume does represent a methodological step by crusade historians in the direction of Cultural Studies, it has to be said that the step is a very small one. The main difficulty in developing a strong dialogue between studies of the crusades and Cultural Studies is that the latter has evolved from its roots in history to be a discipline that today shares more with philosophy. While there is an overlap between the two disciplines, it is the same kind of overlap as that, say, between physics and botany, or mathematics and chemistry: that is, there is an overlap – and potentially a very interesting one – but the area where the disciplines can usefully communicate to one another is relatively small. Just as there would be limited scope for a specialist in botany to contribute to a conference on quantum physics, so it would be very hard for a follower of Foucault or Derrida to add value to a history conference wanting to understand the world of the crusader. If such a person were to study a classic crusading text, say the Gesta Francorum, there is no doubt their findings would be of interest to the historian. But what the proponent of Cultural Studies would find very difficult – and they would probably not desire to do so anyway – is to say something about the society and events that led to the production of the manuscript and which in turn are illuminated by the historian’s analysis of the text.
This anthology is very much a collection of history essays; and insofar as it is a collection that is focused on culture in the broader sense, this is a result of my raising particular questions with those historians whom I believed had the expertise to answer them. I have no idea of the philosophical outlook of the contributors and the extent to which they have an interest in Cultural Studies. But they all, whether long-established professors or relatively early career researchers, are splendid historians, and as a result I hope the reader will find here crusading studies that are clear, erudite and fresh.
The anthology opens with something of a keynote essay, by John France, on warfare in the Mediterranean region in the age of the crusades. For all that the meeting of crusaders with Muslims in the Near East led to fascinating cultural exchanges, these need to be framed by a recognition that Muslim armies and Muslim citizens in the path of the crusaders first encountered one another in battle and that, despite periods of détente, major conflicts between the rulers of the rival states flared repeatedly in the period that the crusaders had a presence in the region (1098–1291). The evolution of the pattern of warfare over such a long period has its own dynamics worth understanding, especially when the conflicting forces differ not only in their religions, but in their fundamentally different approaches to the art of war. This essay is the work someone who has devoted decades of research to the subject and, moreover, has taken the trouble to explore the geography of the region, including areas where it is difficult for a Western scholar to travel today. As a result, it is rich in comparative assessments and lucid generalisations that a historian of less experience would hardly dare formulate.
Despite the rapid growth of research into the subject of the crusades, it is widely recognised that there exists a noticeable lacuna in the use of medieval Arabic 2
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sources. Researchers with the appropriate language skills are in a small minority and a great number of important medieval Arabic texts lack modern editions and reliable translations. Discussion of topics such as the evolution of jihad in the era of the crusades has been hampered by this difficulty, and although since 1999
readers of the English language have been able to avail themselves of the seminal work by Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, further advances in this area have been slow to emerge. The second essay in this volume was commissioned in recognition of this problem and I consider myself fortunate that a scholar so thoroughl
y conversant with medieval Arabic sources as Yehoshua Frenkel was willing to address the question of how the theory and practice of the counter-crusade developed in the Muslim Near East.
Through a thematic – rather than chronological – approach, Yehoshua Frenkel has been able to develop a number of insights here. Above all, the essay carries the argument that while Muslim jurists and theologians responded to the crusades with clear invocations of the duty of Muslims to declare jihad against the invaders, Muslim rulers found means to adopt more flexible and pragmatic policies that suited the complexities of their position: complexities that included a recognition of the dangers posed by the ambitions of fellow Muslim princes; the dissatisfaction of Muslim merchants if trade faltered; and, in some instances, the need for temporary military alliances with Christian neighbours.
The phenomenon of the crusades fundamentally altered the political map of the Near East and, ironically, given their adherence to Christianity, the most dramatic of these changes was the significant weakening of the Byzantine Empire and Armenian lordships in Cilicia. The process by which this happened is assessed here by Chris Wright with respect to the Byzantine Empire and Natasha Hodgson with respect to Cilician Armenia. The theme that runs through Chris Wright’s analysis is that of marginalisation. The Byzantine state, he argues, lost its ability to act as a coherent authority for the affairs of its citizens partly for material reasons – the catastrophic Fourth Crusade and sack of Constantinople severely disrupted the mechanisms of imperial rule – but also for ideological reasons: the whole crusading project had a tendency to marginalise the empire with regard to Mediterranean affairs despite the fact that a call from Constantinople for military aid against the Turks was one of the factors that triggered the appearance of crusading armies in the Near East.
Natasha Hodgson’s focus is on the marriages that took place between crusading Latin Christian princes and the Armenian lords of Cilicia. Intermarriages between these two cultures took place throughout the period that the crusaders had a presence in the region and by paying careful attention to the patterns of marriage alliances Natasha Hodgson is able to piece together the dynamics of the ambitions of both groups as well as to assess the respective effectiveness of these alliances.
One of many conclusions that can be drawn from this chapter is that while at times such marriage alliances assisted both Latin Christian and Armenian rulers to maintain their autonomy from the Byzantine Empire and strengthened their ability to resist attacks from neighbouring Muslim powers, these intermarriages 3
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also created cross-cultural dynastic ambitions that led to conflicts that drained the resources of both sides.
The subject of the origins of modern European national identity is a large one and one to which a study of the crusades can make an important contribution.
For the crusades took place at a time when national structures were beginning to coalesce in Europe, typically around royal authority. More importantly, crusading was a phenomenon that was almost unique in the Middle Ages in bringing together large numbers of people of all social classes in bands that formed up into even greater amalgamations of people from all the regions of Europe. The question of national identity in these crusading armies very much came to the fore, as rival princes manoeuvred for hegemony at the same time as a sense of common purpose and religion cut across regional interests.
In an important essay for those interested in the wider topic of national identity as well as crusading history, Alan V. Murray focuses on the crusades to the Near East between 1096 and 1192, to reveal the expressions of nationality within the crusading armies. Additionally, he makes the notable point that near-contemporary medieval historians attempted to appropriate successful crusaders to their own emerging nations and thus crusade-related sources provide us with good evidence for the development of a nationalistic spirit from the twelfth century onwards, one that was to develop more powerfully in the early modern period.
The following essay by Sini Kangas also concerns the history of ideas. Her investigation is into the important and very sensitive topic of medieval Latin Christian writings on Islam. Again, crusading expertise is valuable in opening up a line of investigation for this much wider topic, for four crusade-related texts form the basis for this study. What they reveal is a great interest in the Muslim religion, not so much – in the eyes of these authors – as a theology worthy of serious intellectual engagement, but as a ‘heresy’ that could be caricatured and polemicised against in order to provide warning examples for the Christian population. The crude and insulting language that the Christian polemicists directed against Muhammad and his followers served to send a message about the superiority and correctness of the Christian Church. A secondary, but notable, observation made by Sini Kangas is that despite the hostility of these authors towards Islam, they did not entirely fabricate the material from which they fashioned their attacks. It may well have been that as a consequence of the crusades and Latin Christian settlement in the Near East, there was a flow of information about Islam arriving in Europe that did communicate the basic history and tenets of the religion.
In a third essay concerned with mentalities, Léan Ní Chléirigh undertakes a close reading of two very early Latin crusading histories: those of Fulcher of Chartres and Guibert of Nogent. The point of her investigation is to assess whether the growth of hostility in the Latin Christian world towards the Byzantines was necessarily accelerated as a result of the experience of crusades to the Near East. While Guibert’s Dei Gesta Per Francos is an early example of a crusading history that vigorously pursues an anti-Byzantine theme, Fulcher 4
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provides a stark contrast and it is this contrast that leads Léan Ní Chléirigh to talk of a polarisation of Western opinion, rather than a one-sided development of anti-Byzantine feeling. As with some of the earlier chapters, this is an essay with a very important secondary observation. For nearly a century, modern historians have considered Fulcher of Chartres to have been an eyewitness to the launching of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, but Léan Ní Chléirigh’s examination of Fulcher’s language in his account of the council leads her to a different conclusion. Fulcher was indeed close to the thinking of Pope Urban, whom he met during the course of his journey east. But this familiarity with the papal message is more likely to have arisen from his having access to written sources, such as the decrees of the council, rather than from his presence at Clermont.
In raising the issue of inter-cultural exchanges between Christian and Muslim society in the Near East in the era of the crusades, one distinct topic worthy of proper investigation is that of medicine. When I learned that Susan B. Edgington was carrying out research in this area I immediately sought an essay from her for this book, thinking that such a chapter would provide a case study of how Christian medical practices benefited from the more advanced Muslim traditions and that as these new practices were incorporated more generally into Latin Christian culture they came westwards from the crusader states. In her extremely thorough analysis of the sources and of recent scholarship, however, Susan B.
Edgington gives us a much more sophisticated view of the subject.
Crusading armies brought with them very competent battle surgeons; and insofar as the wider body of crusading medics learned from Oriental practices, they seem to have done so from native Christians rather than directly from Muslim society. The development of the theory and practice of medicine in Western society benefited from Oriental knowledge, but the flow of ideas and treatments was not one way, nor can these developments be crudely attributed to the crusades, as in the same era important Arabic medical texts were independently being translated in centres of Christian intellectual activity, such as the great monastery of Monte Cassino.
Another discipline whose evolution was shaped by cultural exchange between the Christian West and the Muslim Near East in the era of the crusades is architecture
. Again, a lot of assumptions are often made about the flow of influences: in particular, in the 1990s it was stated that Gothic architecture in the West derived from innovations begun in the crusader states and this style – crudely, pointed arches – subsequently found its way to Europe. By taking as a case study the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Jürgen Krüger addresses these assumptions, because the history of the building and its many reconstructions allow us to identify a succession of distinct architectural influences. This chapter presents a great deal of new and original material, the result of Jürgen Krüger’s research at the church. He is able to draw a number of conclusions, two of which stand out as highly significant: first, that Western traditions influenced construction at the church until the middle of the twelfth century, when more local 5
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influences came to dominate; and second, the exchange of architectural culture, such as the Gothic style, took place in both directions.
If the cross-cultural exchanges between Christian and Muslim neighbouring societies tended to be mediated through Arab-speaking Christian residents of the Near East, so that the direct contact between them proves hard to establish in fields such as medicine and architecture, there was one area of activity where direct encounters were a necessity: establishing peace treaties. The final essay in this volume comes from Yvonne Friedman, who has long devoted her expertise in crusading history to the issue of peace treaties. For this book, she analyses the 120
or so treaties mentioned in the sources between Christian and Muslim lords (1096–1291), to demonstrate the evolution of a mutual understanding of the stages of peacemaking out of an initial lack of comprehension – in both mentality and practice – of their respective views on how to conduct and conclude peace agreements.
Framing the book in this way, between John France’s discussion of warfare between crusading and Muslim armies and Yvonne Friedman’s focus on peace between the rival lords, serves to emphasise the curious dialectic of the phenomenon of the crusades. The huge Christian army of the First Crusade set out to defeat Muslim forces in the Near East and establish new states, in particular at Jerusalem. But having done so, in order to survive, crusading settlers found themselves adjusting to a necessary engagement with the politics and culture of the region. Never stable, always prone to renewed outbreaks of warfare and the arrival of new waves of crusading armies, the consequences of this engagement were simultaneously a strengthening of the ideology of Holy War on both sides and a growing level of cultural interaction between the religious rivals.
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