A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  This imagery was not only used by the Church. In a speech delivered in May 1916 and entitled ‘Winning the War’, Lloyd George declared ‘Young men from every quarter of this country flocked to the standard of international right, as to a great crusade.’ And a collection of his speeches between 1915 and 1918 was published under the title The Great Crusade.

  F. W. Orde Ward published a book of what he termed patriotic poems in 1917, entitled The Last Crusade; and Katherine Tynan, whose two sons served in the army, wrote:

  Your son and my son, clean as new swords

  Your man and my man and now the Lord’s

  Your son and my son for the Great Crusade

  With the banner of Christ over them—our knights new made.

  The crusading theme is particularly marked in accounts of the campaigns at the Dardanelles and in Palestine. The poet Rupert Brooke described himself as a crusader in a letter to his friend Jacques Raverat and Major Vivian Gilbert wrote a book, published in 1923, entitled The Romance of the Last Crusade—with Allenby to Jerusalem, about his own experiences in Palestine. The book is dedicated to ‘the mothers of all the boys who fought for the freedom of the Holy Land’ and begins with Brian Gurnay, just down from his first year at Oxford in 1914, dreaming of the crusading exploits of his ancestor Sir Brian de Gurnay, a participant in the Third Crusade. The young Brian longs for another crusade which will recapture Jerusalem: ‘To fight in thy cause, to take part in that last crusade, I would willingly leave my bones in the Holy Land. Oh for the chance to do as one of those knights of old, to accomplish one thing in life really worthwhile.’ According to another veteran of Allenby’s campaign, orders were issued forbidding the soldiers to be called crusaders. But if they could not do so officially, it is quite clear that many saw themselves as following in the footsteps of the crusaders. Gilbert wrote of the soldiers in his own command: ‘What did it matter if we wore drab khaki instead of suits of glittering armour. The spirit of the crusaders was in all these men of mine who worked so cheerfully to prepare for the great adventure. And even if they wore ugly little peaked caps instead of helmets with waving plumes, was not their courage just as great, their idealism just as fine, as that of the knights of old who had set out with such dauntless faith under the leadership of Richard the Lionhearted to free the Holy Land.’ Gilbert noted that of all the crusades organized and equipped to free the Holy City, only two had been successful: ‘the first led by Godfrey of Bouillon and the last under Edmund Allenby’. There were even crusade cartoons in Punch. In December 1917, a cartoon entitled The Last Crusade depicted Richard the Lionheart gazing at Jerusalem with the text ‘At last my dream come true’.

  Some First World War memorials illustrate this use of the crusading theme. The memorial at Sledmere in Yorkshire, the home of Sir Mark Sykes, of Sykes-Picot treaty fame, took the form of an Eleanor Cross. When Sir Mark died in 1919, by chance one panel remained unfilled. His memorial is a figure blazoned in brass, armoured and bearing a sword. Under his feet lies a Muslim, above him is a scroll inscribed Laetare Jerusalem and in the background is an outline of Jerusalem itself. The sculptor Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams entered a design entitled The Spirit of the Crusaders for a competition for the war memorial in Paisley. Now in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, it depicts a medieval knight in armour upon a horse and flanked by four soldiers in First World War battledress.

  Memories of the crusades were also evoked at the peace conference at Versailles which followed the end of the war. After one of the French representatives had rehearsed the claims of France in Syria dating back to the crusades, the Emir Faisal commented, ‘Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the crusades?’

  Both sides in the Spanish Civil War also used crusade imagery to describe and promote their cause. Thus on the one hand Franco fought a ‘crusade of liberation’ to save Spain from communism and atheism and is portrayed as a crusader fighting God’s war in posters and paintings produced under his regime. On the other, the members of the International Brigades were hailed as ‘crusaders for freedom’. A multi-volume history of the civil war, published in Madrid between 1940 and 1943, was entitled Historia de la cruzada española, and the word crusade appears in the title of a number of autobiographical accounts of the campaign and civil war novels. For example, Jason Gurney, a member of the International Brigades, wounded in 1937, wrote in his Crusade in Spain, published in 1974, the ‘crusade was against the Fascists, who were the Saracens of our generation’. Indeed it was ‘one of the most deeply felt ideological crusades in the history of Western Europe’.

  Crusade imagery re-emerged in the Second World War. General Eisenhower’s account of the campaign, published in 1948, was entitled Crusade in Europe and he clearly saw the war as a form of personal crusade. ‘Only by the destruction of the Axis was a decent world possible; the war became for me a crusade in the traditional sense of that often misused word.’ In November 1941, an operation to raise the siege of Tobruk was codenamed Operation Crusader and Eisenhower’s Order of the Day for 6 June 1944 ran as follows: ‘Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the allied expeditionary forces, you are about to embark on a great crusade … the hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you.’ Another example of the use of crusade imagery can be found in Stefan Heym’s novel The Crusaders, published in 1950. Heym, who fled the Nazis in 1933, described the Second World War as a ‘necessary and holy crusade’ to stop a tyrant.

  The range of images of the crusades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is therefore varied. While the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of scholarly research on the crusading movement, the popular image was a highly romanticized one and bore little relation to the reality of crusading as described in eyewitness narrative accounts. Composers, artists, and writers allowed their imaginations to run freely and their principal sources were not medieval chroniclers but Torquato Tasso and Walter Scott. This is hardly surprising since they were seeking to satisfy the demands of an audience which had romantic notions of life in the Middle Ages and the exploits of Christian chivalry and was attracted by travellers’ tales of the exotic East. There was a great pride in crusading heroes such as England’s Richard the Lionheart and Belgium’s Godfrey of Bouillon. Crusade imagery was also employed in contemporary conflicts, most notably in the First World War in general and with regard to Allenby’s campaign in Palestine in particular. The most startling example of its misuse was when the Crimean War, in which the western European powers were in alliance with the Muslim Turks, was described as a crusade.

  15

  Revival and Survival

  JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

  THE crusades are remembered today wherever there is ideological conflict, and the images and language associated with them or their counter the jihad are regularly called to mind in violence which involves Christians and Muslims in the Balkans or the Near East. Indeed the Maronites in Lebanon, whose Church was united to Rome in 1181, have always retained a nostalgic attachment to the centuries of western settlement, an era their historians came to see as a golden age. In Europe the rhetoric has been largely the product of sentiment and, in spite of the parallels often perceived, is no closer to the original idea than were the effusions described in the previous chapter. In a surprising development, however, the theology of force that underpinned crusading has been revived, especially in Latin America, by a militant wing of Christian Liberation.

  All Christian justifications of positive violence are based partly on the belief that a particular religious or political system or course of political events is one in which Christ is intimately involved. His intentions for mankind are therefore bound up with its success or failure. To the modern apologists for Christian violence Christ’s wishes are associated with a course of political events which they call liberation. He is really present in this process, in the historical manifestations of man’s path forward. He is the Liberator, the fullest expression of liberation, which he offers to mankind as a gift.
If the only way to preserve the integrity of his intentions from those who stand in their way is to use force, then this is in accordance with his desires in the historical process and participation in Christ’s own violence is demanded of those qualified as a moral duty. This is why some members of a sub-committee of the World Council of Churches which reported in 1973 maintained that in certain circumstances participation in force of arms was a moral imperative, and why Camilo Torres, the most tragic figure of the Liberation movement, a Colombian priest and sociologist who resigned his orders, joined the guerrillas and was killed in February 1966, was reported saying that ‘The catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.’ That this really was his view is confirmed by his written statement in August 1965 that ‘the revolution is not only permissible but obligatory for those Christians who see it as the only effective and far-reaching way of making the love of all people a reality.’

  The commitment to revolution that love enjoins was a prominent theme in Torres’s writings and there can be little doubt that he was motivated by genuine and deeply felt charity. In June 1965, when he issued a statement on his resignation from the priesthood and must have been already contemplating taking part in violence, he wrote: ‘Only by revolution, by changing the concrete conditions of our country, can we enable men to practise love for each other … I have resolved to join the revolution myself, thus carrying out part of my work by teaching men to love God by loving each other. I consider this action essential as a Christian, as a priest, and as a Colombian.’ His violent death struck those who were in sympathy with his ideals as witnessing to the power of his love. To a guerrilla leader, ‘He united the scientific conception of the revolutionary war, considering it the only effective way to develop the fight for freedom, with a profound Christianity, which he extended and practised as a limitless love for the poor, the exploited and the oppressed and as a complete dedication to the battle for their liberation.’ An Argentinian priest was quoted saying, ‘Christ is love and I wanted to be a man of love; yet love cannot exist in a master–slave relationship. What Camilo’s death meant to me was that I had to dedicate myself to smash the master–slave relationship in Argentina. I had to fight with the slaves, the people, as they fought, not as an elitist teacher … but as a genuine participant, with them not for them, in their misery, their failings, their violence. If I could not do this, I was not a man of the people, that is, a man of God, that is, a believer in brotherhood, which is the meaning of love.’ And echoing crusading martyrdom, a Catholic theologian placed Camilo Torres among ‘the purest, the most noble, the most authentic exponents and martyrs of the new Christianity’. It has even been argued, in a way reminiscent of the traditional justification of severe measures against heretics, that in revolution, although not necessarily a violent one, love is shown not only to the oppressed, but also to the oppressors, since the aim is to release these oppressors from their sinful condition.

  But if holy violence, in this case armed rebellion, has returned to the Christian scene, those institutions which date from the crusades and have survived have long since rejected it. Of course the association with crusading of the Maronite and Armenian uniate Churches, many of the titular bishoprics of the Catholic Church, and some of twenty-six chivalric and religious orders, such as the Order of Preachers (the order of the Dominicans) is indirect, while others, like the Spanish military orders, have changed their functions so much that they are scarcely recognizable. But two orders are what they always were and the line to them from the crusades is clear, even if as living institutes they have developed in different ways. The first of these is the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (the Order of Malta). This is the same order of Knights Hospitallers which in Palestine and Syria, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Malta, played so important a part in the crusading movement’s history.

  After the loss of Malta to Napoleon in 1798, the demoralized and impoverished order fragmented, with its provinces, or what was left of them, functioning with little regard to the central government, which was anyway thrown into chaos by the election by a group of brothers of Tsar Paul I of Russia—not professed, Catholic, or celibate—as grand master. Paul’s mastership, which was tacitly recognized by the papacy, did not last long. After his assassination the order endured three decades of unsettled existence before establishing its head-quarters in Rome in 1834. It then gradually rebuilt itself, abandoned its ambition to re-establish itself as a military power on independent territory—a Greek island to be won from the Turks in the 1820s; Algeria, which was being suggested as an order-state in the 1830s—and reverted to its original and primary role, the care of the sick poor, at first in the Papal State and then throughout the world. Although the number of fully professed knights is relatively small, over 10,000 Catholics are associated with them as lay members of the order.

  Also associated, although less directly, are four other orders of St John which, being predominantly or solely Protestant confraternities, are not orders of the Church but orders of chivalry under the patronage of, or legitimized by, recognized founts of honours, the federal German parliament and the crowns of Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Three of them, Die Balley Brandenburg des Ritterlichen Ordens Sankt Johannis vom Spital zu Jerusalem (generally known as Der Johanniterorden), Johanniterorden i Sverige and Johanniter Orde in Nederland, are descended from the Bailiwick of Brandenburg, a Hospitaller province which became a Protestant confraternity and broke away from the rest of the order at the time of the Reformation, although it maintained a distant relationship with the government on Malta. The fourth, The Grand Priory of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, originated in an attempt by the French langues in 1827 to raise money on the London market and to equip a small naval expedition to sail from England to the assistance of the Greeks who were fighting for independence from the Turks. In return the langues had been promised an island in the Aegean which would serve as a stepping stone for a reconquest of Rhodes. All investors in the enterprise and all officers in the mercenary force were to become knights of Malta. The English order of St John that resulted was not recognized by the grand magistry in Rome, but the good work it undertook, which bore fruit in the St John Ambulance service, brought recognition from Queen Victoria, who took it over as an order of the British crown in 1888.

  The second surviving crusading institute is Der Deutsche Orden (The Teutonic Order), which has its headquarters in Vienna, although since 1923 it has been an order of priests. Teutonic knights are still to be found only in another interesting survival, Ridderlijke Duitse Orde Balije van Utrecht (The Bailiwick of Utrecht of the Teutonic Order). Like the Hospitaller Bailiwick of Brandenburg, this commandery turned itself into a noble Protestant confraternity at the time of the Reformation.

  These survivals are active Christian charitable institutes engaged in pastoral work or the care of the sick or the elderly. They had always combined fighting the infidel with ministering to the sick, showing how closely related in medieval thinking were war and nursing, and it was this tradition that enabled them to withdraw from their military functions while remaining true to their roots. In their present activities can be heard a distant echo of the medieval conviction that crusading was an act of love.

  Chronology

  1095

  (Mar.) Council of Piacenza

  (July–Sept. 1096) Pope Urban II’s preaching journey

  (27 Nov.) Proclamation of First Crusade at the Council of Clermont

  (Dec.–July 1096) Persecution of Jews in Europe

  1096–1102

  The First Crusade

  1096

  Pope Urban compares the Reconquista of Spain to the crusade

  1096–7

  Arrival of the armies of the second wave of the crusade at Constantinople

  1097

  (1 July) Battle of Dorylaeum

  (21 Oct.–3 June 1098) Siege of Antioch

  1098

 
; (10 Mar.) Baldwin of Boulogne takes control of Edessa

  (28 June) Battle of Antioch

  1099

  (15 July) Jerusalem falls to the crusaders

  (22 July) Godfrey of Bouillon elected first Latin ruler of Jerusalem

  1101

  (Aug.–Sept.) Final wave of armies of the First Crusade defeated by the Turks in Asia Minor

  1107–8

  Crusade of Bohemond of Taranto

  1108

  (Sept.) Bohemond surrenders to the Greeks

  1109

  (12 July) Capture of Tripoli

  1113

  First papal privilege for the Hospital of St John

  1114

  Catalan crusade to the Balearic Islands

  1118

  Crusade of Pope Gelasius II in Spain

  (19 Dec.) Saragossa falls to the crusaders

  1119

  (27 June) Battle of the Field of Blood

  1120–5

  Crusade of Pope Calixtus II to the East and in Spain

  1120

  Foundation of the Knights Templar

  1123

  (Mar.–Apr.) Crusade decree of First Lateran Council

  1124

  (7 July) Capture of Tyre by crusaders