A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  Crusade imagery was also used in relation to contemporary conflicts. Thus the Crimean war was seen as a form of crusade for the rescue of the Holy Places, although on this occasion the nations which had taken part in the original crusades were allied with the Muslim Turks. The British consul in Jerusalem during the war commented: ‘The acclamation “God wills it” which impelled the first crusade bore against the Muslim holders of the Holy Sepulchre; but the shouts of war we are now considering were directed by representatives of the same nations who fought in that first crusade: but now they were fighting in defence of the Muslim holders of that same treasure, against a power (Russia) which has only become fully Christian since the crusades and which equally covets possession of the Holy Sepulchre.’

  The nineteenth century also saw the beginning of scholarly research and writing on the crusades. In 1806 the Institut de France held an essay competition on the subject of the influence of the crusades upon European liberty, civilization, commerce, and industry. It was won by A. H. L. Heeren, a professor of History at the University of Göttingen. As his source for primary texts, Heeren quoted Bongars’ Gesta Dei per Francos, published in Hanover in 1611. In the early nineteenth century, the task of collecting, editing, and translating the western accounts of the crusades was still in its infancy. A start had been made by the Benedictines, but was interrupted by the French Revolution. It was ultimately completed by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, which produced the Recueil des Historiens des Croisades —sixteen volumes of western, Arabic, Greek, and Armenian historians and two volumes of laws—between 1841 and 1906. In 1875 Count Paul Riant founded the Société de l’Orient Latin, the output of which included the two-volume Archives de l’Orient Latin and the Revue de l’Orient Latin. In addition to Riant, the litany of great nineteenth-century crusade historians includes Wilken, Röhricht, Hagenmeyer, and Michaud.

  The career of Joseph Michaud (1767–1839) offers a flavour of nineteenth-century crusade historiography, which is of course a subject which deserves to be treated in its own right. Michaud’s three-volume Histoire des Croisades and four-volume Bibliothèque des Croisades —excerpts from translated texts—were published in 1829. In 1830–1, he travelled to Constantinople, Syria, Jerusalem, and Egypt. He explored the route of the First Crusade with two engineers and, like Châteaubriand, was made a knight of the Holy Sepulchre. On his return, Michaud revised his Histoire in the light of his experiences. Although he had criticisms of the crusaders’ behaviour and cruelty, he described the crusading movement as: ‘one of the most important sections of human history, not only instructive, but extraordinary, supplying abundance of edifying matter to the statesman, the philosopher, the poet, the novelist, and citizen.’

  This analysis based upon primary sources does not, however, seem to have captured the popular or artistic imagination. Where it is possible to identify a source for the varied nineteenth-century interpretations of the crusades in music, art, and literature it is more likely to be the story of the First Crusade as told by Torquato Tasso and glimpses of crusades and crusaders in the novels of Sir Walter Scott than the history of Michaud or the first-hand accounts of a Fulcher of Chartres, John of Joinville, or Geoffrey of Villehardouin.

  Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, published in 1581, tells the story of the First Crusade, inter-woven with three sub-plots involving thwarted love and with new characters such as the Christian knight Rinaldo and the enchantress Armida to enliven the basic plot. This combination of elements attracted composers and artists and the use of Tasso as a source can be traced from the early seventeenth century. An example of a nineteenthcentury Tasso opera is Armide by Rossini, first performed in 1817, while Brahms composed a dramatic cantata entitled Rinaldo. There are also numerous nineteenth-century paintings on this theme, not least a Tasso room by the Austrian artist J. Führich at the Cassino Massimo in Rome. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and De Quincey read Gerusalemme in translation and, in The Broad Stone of Honour, Digby quotes it in the same breath as primary sources for the First Crusade.

  The nineteenth-century English translations of Tasso included one by the librarian at Woburn Abbey, J. H. Wiffen. In his Introduction he referred to the recently published History of the Crusades by Charles Mills (1820), but noted: ‘Mr. Mills has … portrayed in real colours the nature of these singular expeditions; but who would not willingly continue the illusion which, whether derived from the songs of early minstrels, or the charming tale of Tasso, invests the character of the crusader with I know not what of devotion, generosity and love.’ Not all of Tasso’s admirers, however, saw the crusades through the same rose-coloured spectacles. One reviewer declared: ‘The grand objection to Tasso’s poem is the false view which it gives of the achievements which it celebrates … we must forget that the crimes and cruelties of the croisés as well as their fanaticism sank them below the Moslems and we must strive to believe that the delivery of Jerusalem was an object worthy of the interposition of the highest intelligence.’

  Sir Walter Scott was, of course, the most popular historical novelist of the nineteenth century and four of his books refer to the crusades, either as background or as their central theme: Ivanhoe (1819), The Talisman and The Betrothed, published together as Tales of the Crusaders (1825), and Count Robert of Paris (1831). Of these Ivanhoe was by far the most popular and inspired composers, artists, and dramatists. Scott himself attended a performance of Rossini’s opera Ivanhoe in Paris in October 1826 and wrote in his Journal: ‘In the evening at the Odeon, where we saw Ivanhoe. It was superbly got up, the Norman soldiers wearing pointed helmets and what resembled much hauberks of mail, which looked very well … It was an opera and of course the story was greatly mangled and the dialogue in great part nonsense.’ Ivanhoe was also the subject of an opera by Sir Arthur Sullivan, better known as a composer of operettas with W. S. Gilbert. Paintings on this theme included Leon Cogniet’s Rebecca and Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert, now in the Wallace Collection in London. There were also operas and paintings based on The Talisman, which takes place during the Third Crusade itself, with Richard and Saladin as central characters. Whilst Scott was not an uncritical observer and indeed queried the value of the expeditions in his ‘Essay on Chivalry’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1818, overall he painted a romanticized picture of the crusading movement.

  The crusades offered considerable scope to the romantic imagination and individual idiosyncratic interpretations of the basic historical events. Three very different paintings illustrate the range of imagery on offer. The German Carl Friedrich Lessing’s The Crusader’s Vigil, dated 1836, depicts a lone crusader, battered by the elements, in a manner reminiscent of the abandoned King Lear on the blasted heath. In fact the crusades seem to have been a favourite subject of Lessing and the Düsseldorf School, and Lessing was inspired indirectly by Walter Scott. The American artist George Inness had a rather different image of crusaders. His painting entitled The March of the Crusaders, now on display at the Fruitlands Museum near Boston, Massachussetts, shows a band of crusaders, identifiable by the red cross on their surcoats, crossing a bridge against a romanticized landscape backcloth. The Pre-Raphaelite painter William Bell Scott, a friend of Rossetti’s, sought to portray a crusader’s reunion with his family. In Return from a Long Crusade, he painted a crusader returning to his wife and son after a long absence. He is scarcely recognized by his astonished wife, who may well have given him up for dead; his son hides behind his mother, fearful of this oddly attired stranger.

  More recently, in the 1930s, Richard Hollins Murray, the inventor of the road-safety feature cats’ eyes, who purchased the estate of Dinmore in Herefordshire, a former commandery of the Knights Hospitallers, built a music room and cloisters which are in effect a memorial to the crusades and the Hospitallers. They include stained-glass windows, sculpture, and paintings depicting Hospitallers and Templars, and a series of coats of arms of families from Herefordshire which took part in crusades. A set of murals in the cloisters
depicts a young man departing on crusade and Godfrey of Bouillon entering Jerusalem; and the theme of a stained-glass window in the Music Room is the life of a knight during the time of the crusades.

  In music, there was the idiosyncratic opera Count Ory by Rossini, first performed in 1828. Its plot concerns the sister of the count of Fourmoutiers, who is absent on crusade. In his absence, Count Ory and his friend Raimbaud try to seduce the young girl, first disguised as hermits and then as nuns, but before they have a chance to succeed the count returns. And Verdi’s Aroldo, first performed in 1857, tells the story of Aroldo, a crusader just returned from Palestine, where he had been a member of Richard I’s army, and his wife Mina, who had committed adultery during his absence. After the inevitable twists and turns, the opera ends with a reconciliation on the shores of Loch Lomond.

  The crusades also inspired romantic playwrights, poets, and novelists. Scott’s crusading novels have already been discussed. An example of a play on a crusading theme is Charles Kingsley’s The Saint’s Tragedy in praise of St Elizabeth of Hungary, the wife of the crusader Louis of Thuringia. Kingsley wrote: ‘how our stout crusading fathers fought and died for God and not for gold; let their love, their faith, their boyish daring, distance mellowed gild the days of old.’ And, as the royal couple take their leave of each other, there is a crusader chorus:

  The tomb of God before us,

  Our fatherland behind,

  Our ships shall leap o’er billows steep,

  Before a charmed wind.

  The red cross knights and yeomen

  Throughout the holy town,

  In Faith and might, on left and right,

  Shall tread the paynim down.

  A similarly romanticized view of the crusades can be found in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets. In his survey of the history of the Church, he devoted four sonnets to the crusades. One simply entitled Crusaders runs as follows:

  Furl we the sails, and pass with tardy oars

  Through these bright regions, casting many a glance

  Upon the dream-like issues—the romance

  Of many coloured life that Fortune pours

  Round the crusaders, till on distant shores

  Their labours end; or they return to lie,

  The vow performed, in cross legged effigy,

  Devoutly stretched upon their chancel floors.

  Am I deceived? Or is their requiem chanted

  By voices never mute when Heaven unties

  Her inmost, softest, tenderest harmonies;

  Requiem which earth takes up with voice undaunted,

  When she would tell how Brave, and Good, and Wise,

  For their high guerdon not in vain have panted.

  A further example of a crusade novel is Hubert’s Arthur, by Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, in which Rolfe weaves a complex tale involving Arthur, duke of Brittany, who sails for Acre, wages battle, and defeats the Saracens, and ultimately captures Jerusalem and the hand of its queen.

  The crusades also lent themselves to the spectacular and in nineteenth-century England the place for this was Astley’s amphitheatre in London. In 1810 Astley’s featured a production entitled The Blood Red Knight, which ran for 175 nights and brought the proprietors a profit of £18,000. The plot concerned the attempts of the Blood Red Knight to seduce Isabella, wife of his brother Alphonso, the crusader. Alphonso returns, is defeated, but then calls in reinforcements, when, to quote the playbills, ‘The castle is taken by storm, the surrounding river is covered with boats filled with warriors, while the battlements are strongly contested by the Horse and Foot guards. Men and Horses are portrayed slain and dying in various directions, while other soldiers and horses are submerged in the river, forming an effect totally new and unprecedented in this or any other country whatever, and terminating in the total defeat of the Blood Red Knight.’

  In 1835 the crusade subject was The Siege of Jerusalem, which took the audience, mixing fact and fantasy, through Saladin’s capture of the Holy City, a view of the Dead Sea, the arrival of the French and Austrian fleets, the burning sands of the desert, an appearance by Saladin’s White Bull Coraccio, a Grand Asiatic Ballet and Divertissement, the encounter between the Leopard Knight and the Templar (from Scott’s The Talisman), and ended with the riches of Saladin’s feast and the last days of the Third Crusade—a full evening’s entertainment. In 1843, another new production was Richard and Saladin or The Crusaders of Jerusalem, featuring an encounter between the protagonists of the Third Crusade.

  Generally the theatre seems to have had less to offer in terms of nineteenth-century images of the crusades, although of course a number of operatic librettos were based on plays such as the German August von Kotzebue’s Die Kreuzfahrer, a tale of the First Crusade, which inspired Louis Spöhr’s opera of the same name. The Crusaders was, however, the title of a play by Henry Arthur Jones about nineteenth-century social reform: ‘The banner of social reform serves as a rallying point for all that is the noblest and basest, wisest and foolishest in the world of today … This movement is in truth as dramatic an element in the life of the nineteenth century as were the crusades in that of the thirteenth.’

  If romanticized and idiosyncratic interpretations prevailed, however, that does not mean that their authors were unaware of the historical context in which they were writing, painting, and composing. I have not been able to identify any clear correlation between events in the Near East such as the rise and defeat of Mehmet Ali and his son Ibrahim—whose defeat at Acre in 1840 prompted Sir William Hillary to call for a crusade—and peaks and troughs in the nineteenth-century use of crusade imagery. The Middle Ages and specifically the crusades were however undoubtedly used as a quarry for imagery to express particular ideas and ambitions. For example, Disraeli’s Tancred needs to be seen in the context of his plans for the eastern expansion of the British empire and control of the road to India. And a further variation on the crusade theme was the celebration of national crusade heroes or traditions.

  Thus in England an obvious hero was Richard the Lionheart, the subject of numerous paintings and commemorated in a sculpture by Baron Marochetti which is now located outside the Houses of Parliament. France of course had St Louis and, as mentioned earlier, the Salles des croisades at Versailles formed a pictorial history of French participation in the crusades, with scenes from famous battles and sieges and portraits of national crusade heroes. Another example is Delacroix’s The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, a scene from the Fourth Crusade. Now in the Louvre in Paris, it portrays the noble conquerors of Constantinople exploring the city on horseback and receiving pleas for clemency from the inhabitants. Whether the crusaders would have been recognizable to Geoffrey of Villehardouin is, however, doubtful. In Belgium the national crusade hero was Godfrey of Bouillon, a sculpture of whom by Simonis was exhibited at Crystal Palace in 1851 and can now be seen in the Grand Place in Brussels. It shows a noble leader on horseback, but at Bouillon itself there is a statue of a more youthful Godfrey gazing wistfully across his home valley. At a rather more mundane level, a Catalogue of Furniture and Household Requisites, published in London in 1883, included bronze equestrian figures of Richard the Lionheart, Louis, and Godfrey of Bouillon, available by mail order.

  In Italy Tomasso Grossi’s poem I Lombardi alla prima croci-ata stimulated pride in Italian crusade achievements. It inspired a number of painters of historical subjects, as well as Verdi, whose opera I Lombardi was first performed in Milan in 1843. Contemporary accounts note that the music touched a chord of Italian nationalism; the Milanese appear to have decided that they were the Lombards, the Holy Land which they were defending was Italy, and the Austrians were akin to the Saracens. The large set-piece scenes, such as the crusaders in sight of Jerusalem, allowed producers to give full rein to their imagination and romantic ideas of the Middle Ages. Ever adaptable, Verdi then produced a French version of the opera, entitled Jérusalem, which was performed before King Louis Philippe at the Tuileries and won its comp
oser the award of the Légion d’Honneur.

  Louis IX’s Egyptian campaign was the subject of an opera by Meyerbeer, although the plot, involving Knights Hospitallers of Rhodes, a Saracen princess, and Christian convert, might not have been recognized by John of Joinville. Again producers provided elaborate and exotic oriental costumes and backcloth, which probably bore little relation to thirteenth-century Egypt. Rather later, the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg composed the incidental music to the play Sigurd Jorsalfar (Sigurd the Crusader), about King Sigurd’s expedition to the Holy Land in 1107. It is not without significance that this piece was performed as part of the welcoming ceremonies for the new King Haakon of Norway in 1905.

  A prime example of the use of crusade imagery in the twentieth century is in connection with the First World War, in accounts of the campaigns and in literature. Not all contemporaries focused on the heavy casualties and harsh realities of life in the trenches. Some, perhaps as an escape from immediate reality, took a more romanticized view and saw the war as a noble crusade, fought in defence of liberty, to prevent Prussian militarism dominating Europe and to free the Holy Places from Muslim domination.

  In Britain, the idea of a holy war was developed in sermons by Anglican clergymen, two key players being the so-called bishop of the battlefields, Bishop Winnington-Ingram of London, and Basil Bourchier, Vicar of St Jude’s Hampstead and subsequently a chaplain to the forces. Bourchier wrote: ‘not only is this a holy war, it is the holiest war that has ever been waged … Odin is ranged against Christ. Berlin is seeking to prove its supremacy over Bethlehem. Every shot that is fired, every bayonet thrust that gets home, every life that is sacrificed is in truth for his name’s sake.’ Bourchier saw the Dardanelles campaign as the latest of the crusades, which would ultimately lead to the rescue of the Holy Land ‘from the defiling grip of the infidel’.