The Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Holy Lands within Fortress Christendom

  The image of Christendom as a beleaguered fortress, with bastions or antemurales opposing the advance of the infidel, had a long history. In 1089, Urban II so described the projected rebuilding of Tarragona on the Spanish coast south of Barcelona. From the fourteenth century, the whole concept of antemurales gained wide currency along the frontier with the Ottomans from Poland, through Hungary to the Adriatic. As defense of these bastions clearly formed one aspect of holy war, rulers along these frontiers themselves adopted holy war rhetoric and promoted the sacralization of their individual territories, thereby engendering a strong sense of national exceptionalism.

  Away from the front line, participation in crusading also became a central feature of emergent myths and rituals of corporate or national identity. Pisa, Genoa, and especially Venice proudly proclaimed their civic involvement in the eastern crusades in art, literature, and civic ceremony. In Florence, where the cross acted as a sign both for the crusade and the city’s popolo, or populace, participation in crusading provided opportunities to reinforce civic exceptionalism; the banner borne at Damietta in 1219 became a revered relic in the Church of San Giovanni. Similar attention to their role in crusading, especially in the east, came from the cities of northern Europe, such as Cologne and London. The Danish kings adopted the cross as their symbol around 1200. The canonization of royal holy warriors and crusaders became widespread: Charlemagne, regarded as a proto-crusader (canonized in 1166); St. Eric IX of Sweden (d.1160, canonized 1167), scourge of the Finnish “enemies of the faith”; Ferdinand III of Castile (d.1252, a recognized cult figure from the thirteenth century, officially canonized 1671); and Louis IX of France (d.1270, canonized 1297). Some of the legends circulated after the canonization of King Ladislas of Hungary (d.1095, canonized 1192) portrayed him as the lost leader of the First Crusade, in fact evoking the career of Bela III (d.1196) who had sponsored Ladislas’ sanctification. Politically and diplomatically having pulled Hungary, like Denmark and later Poland, toward Latin Christendom, the crusades were then recruited to sanctify local royal dynasticism.

  This association was most evident in France. The French kings’ habit of crusading helped create what has been called the “religion of monarchy” with its elevation of the kingdom by royal propagandists from c.1300 into a Holy Land, and the French as God’s Chosen People. A striking illuminated manuscript produced at Acre c.1280 depicted Louis IX at Damietta in 1249 emblazoned with fleurs de lis; there is not a cross in sight. The crusade and the providential destiny of France and its ruling dynasty merged in the later Middle Ages into a form of apocalyptic royal or national messianism. One contemporary prophesied that Joan of Arc’s victories over the English in 1429 would result in her leading King Charles VII (1422-61) to conquer the Holy Land, a theme recalled in 1494 when Charles VIII of France (1483-98) launched his invasion of Italy by declaring his intention to recover Jerusalem. Even after the French religious polity had been shattered by the Reformation and the destructive Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, the image of crusading as the special preserve and responsibility of “the Most Christian Kings” of France (a twelfth-century courtesy title) survived among both Catholic and Huguenot apologists of Henry IV (1589-1610). This French experience found a close parallel in late medieval Spain, in particular Castile, where a prophetic tradition nurtured by the Reconquista inspired a sense that the Iberian holy wars required ultimate fulfillment in the recovery of Jerusalem. The expulsion of the Moors from Granada led to North African forays by Ferdinand and his grandson Charles V (1516—55) which were cast by royal polemicists as preludes to the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. For Charles’s son, Philip II (1555—98), the synergy of God’s war and Spain’s war occupied the center of his worldview.

  This transformation of lands of crusaders into crusading kingdoms and thus into holy lands went one step further by harnessing the model of the Old Testament Israelites and the Maccabees defending God’s heritage, which had occupied a prominent place in traditional crusade semiotics. If the Holy Land or Christendom were patria, why not the crusaders’ own kingdoms or city states? Pope Clement V’s answer in 1311 was clear: “Just as the Israelites are known to have been granted the Lord’s inheritance by the election of Heaven, to perform the hidden wishes of God, so the kingdom of France has been chosen as the Lord’s special people.” Others could play the same game. Reflecting on English victories in the Hundred Years’ War to parliament in 1377, Chancellor Haughton, bishop of St. David’s, commented that “God would never have honored this land in the same way as he did Israel… if it were not that He had chosen it as his heritage.” One popular verse of the time even suggested that “the pope had become French, but Jesus had become English.” God’s career as an Englishman had many centuries to run.

  This nineteenth-century painting by Sir John Gilbert shows the morning of the Battle of Agincourt, as Henry V’s chaplain uses the language of the crusades to bless soldiers dressed “in the armor of penitence.”

  These Scriptural borrowings operated within a pre-crusading tradition of finding Old Testament precedents for the defense of homelands, and cannot necessarily be linked directly with crusading. However, the language employed by those attempting to sacralize national warfare was so congruent to current crusade rhetoric as to make neat distinctions impossible; propagandists probably deliberately elided the two. Of course, not all national holy wars were associated with crusading. The Hussites in fifteenth-century Bohemia self-consciously created their own holy land, renaming cult sites after places in Palestine, such as Mount Tabor or Mount Horeb, while rejecting utterly the crusade tradition that fuelled the campaigns launched against them. By contrast, within Catholic Christendom, from the fourteenth century crusading motifs were increasingly recruited to national causes, such as the conflicts between France and Flanders, England and Scotland, and, most pervasively, England and France. Occasionally, as in 1383 or 1386, actual crusade grants were applied to campaigns in the Hundred Years’ War. More frequently, language and images of holy war made familiar by crusading were inserted into descriptions or justifications of events. Henry V’s chaplain presented the English at Agincourt (1415) as “God’s people,” dressed “in the armor of penitence,” encouraged by their king to follow the example of Judas Maccabeus. Such transference was eased by the ubiquitous appropriation of the cross as national uniform across Europe in the later Middle Ages (for example, the red cross of the English), a symbol that spoke more loudly than legal or canonical logic-chopping. There were many influences on the creation of national holy lands and the sacralizing of political rule and identity in the later Middle Ages. In so far as self-defining civic, dynastic, or national conflicts adopted some ideological and rhetorical features derived from the most charismatic expression of medieval holy war, the crusade was one of them.

  The Lutheran Frauenkirche rises over Dresden, Germany. The Protestant Reformation, sparked by Martin Luther, questioned the legacy of the Crusades, since Protestants did not consider the holy wars as being exclusively Catholic efforts.

  CONCLUSION

  Crusading Our Contemporary

  LONG BEFORE THE LAST ROMAN Catholic took the cross, perhaps in the early eighteenth century for the Habsburgs against the Ottomans in central Europe or the kings of Spain against Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, the history and legends of the Crusades had entered the mythic memory of Christian Europe.

  From the First Crusade, the wars of the cross had been sustained, developed, and refined by concurrent description and interpretation, popular and academic. By the fifteenth century, appreciation of what passed for crusade history underpinned all serious discussion of future projects. Provoked by immediate political concerns, such studies tended to polemic and self-interest, blind to the distinction between legend and evidence. From humanist scholarship and theological hostility in the sixteenth century emerged a more independent historiography. The academic study of crusading�
��or holy war as it was generally called—was encouraged and distorted by the two great crises that threatened to tear Christendom apart: the advance of the Ottomans and the Protestant reformations.

  The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries secured the continued cultural prominence of the Crusades. Much of the responsibility for this lay with Protestant scholars in Germany and France. Despite Roman Catholics seeking crusading privileges when fighting Protestants, admiration for the faith and heroism of the crusaders crossed confessional divides, as did fear of the Ottoman Turks. The refusal of certain Protestant scholars to dismiss crusading simply as a papal corruption provided a bridge between the Roman Catholic past and what they imagined as the Protestant future. The Crusades were rendered as national achievements, ecumenical even, at a time when religious passions still burned violently. Elevating the Crusades away from partisan religious ownership allowed the past to be reconciled with the present through inherited national identities, a process that contributed to the creation of a secular concept of Europe.

  As long as the Catholic Church attached crusading apparatus to wars against the Turks and confessional enemies, and political and social radicalism were articulated in religious terms, some still found it controversial. For others, crusading slipped into the quiet reaches of history, settling into channels of moral and religious disapproval or admiration for distant heroism, often tinged with nationalism. With the evaporation of the Ottoman threat in the eighteenth century, past wars against Islam could be viewed with detached rather than engaged prejudice. Observers of the apparently defeated culture could indulge their tastes for the exotic and the alien with the frisson of danger replaced by a thrill of superiority lent intellectual respectability by emerging concepts of change and progress. Fear of the Turks gave way to contempt, fascination, and a sort of cultural and historical tourism. Muslims in the Near East, increasingly accessible as the sea-lanes became passable, were transformed from demons to curiosities. Such concerns produced an inevitable narrowing of focus onto crusades to the Holy Land and Christian Outremer. They also made the emotions behind crusading seem even more remote.

  The prevalent eighteenth-century intellectual attitude, lit by anti-clericalism, was set in a disdainful grimace at what was caricatured as the ignorance, fanaticism, and violence of earlier times. Yet Gibbon’s “World’s Debate” appeared to have been won by the west, with European successes in Mogul India supplying further consolation and confirmation of superiority. External stimulus to shifting perceptions came from the elite fashion for Oriental and Near Eastern artifacts and the direct contact with the Levant following Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt and Syria in 1798-99 and the opening up of the region to upper-class tourists, from Chateaubriand to Benjamin Disraeli, whose romantic instincts were stirred by what they saw or imagined. The past required re-arrangement to suit these new enthusiasms and assumptions. Thus discussion of the Crusades to the east had to dwell more on the motives and behavior of the crusaders rather than the dismal outcome of their exertions, on cultural values and potential rather than undoubted failure. The Crusades were refashioned into a symbol of western valor and cultural endeavor, a process encouraged by the growing popularity of another form of “otherness” to contrast with the self-perceived modernity of Enlightenment Europe—medievalism. The early nineteenth century saw the combination of Orientalism and medievalism revive crusading as a set of literary references. As an example of passion over pragmatism, the Crusade became an analogy for romantic or escapist policies of those troubled by creeping capitalism and industrialization. The political exploitation of the history of the Crusades possessed a sharper edge in continental Europe, where it became a tool of reaction against the ideals and practices both of the French Revolution and liberalism. The new cult of neo-chivalry supplied moral, religious, and cultural as well as actual architectural buttresses for an aristocratic ancien régime losing much of its exclusivity if not power.

  From the late eighteenth century, the word “crusade” was applied metaphorically or analogously to any vigorous good cause. More precisely, in the absence of devastating general conflicts after 1815, nineteenth-century Europe spawned a cult of war which could be projected back onto the Crusades. The association of just causes and sanctified violence, sealed with the confused sentimentality of Romantic neo-chivalry, found stark concrete form in war memorials across western Europe after the First World War, a conflict regularly described by clergy as well as by politicians as “a great crusade”; bishops might have been expected to know better. More scrupulous observers caviled at such meretricious rhetoric, yet the imagery persisted even when the idealism had drowned in Flanders mud; General Eisenhower’s Order for the Day of June 6, 1944, described the D-Day offensive as “a great crusade.” The connection with spiritually redemptive holy warfare had become drained of much meaning. Any conflict promoted as transcending territorial or other material aims could attract the crusade epithet, increasingly a lazy synonym for ideological conflict or, worse, a sloppy but highly charged metaphor for political conflicts between protagonists from contrasting cultures and faiths. In ways unimaginable when Runciman denounced the morality of crusading in the mid-twentieth century, the Crusades no longer just haunt the memory but stalk the streets of twenty-first-century international politics, in particular in the Near East. In an irony often lost on protagonists, these public perceptions of the Crusades that underpin confrontational rhetoric derive from a common source. The Near Eastern radical or terrorist who rails against “western” neo-crusaders is operating in exactly the same conceptual and academic tradition as those in the west who continue to insinuate the language of the crusade into their approach to the problems of the region. This is by no means a universal set of mentalities, as demonstrated from the literary and academic cliché of a civilized medieval Islamic world brutalized by western barbarians, to the almost studiously anti-crusading rhetoric and policies of NATO and others in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, to opposition to the crude caricaturing of Islam after September 2001. The re-entry of the Crusades into the politics of the Near East is baleful and intellectually bogus.

  This 1915 German World War I poster by Fritz Boehle (after an Albrecht Dürer woodcut) is titled In Deo Gratia (Thanks Be to God). The poster, promoting the German war effort, reads: “Giv’st thou a mite. Be it e’er so small. Thou shalt be blessed by God.”

  President Bush II and Usama bin Laden are co-heirs to the legacy of a nineteenth-century European construct. Here, one of the most influential historians of the Crusades was Joseph François Michaud (1767-1839). A publishing entrepreneur, Michaud combined uncritical antiquarianism with a keen sense of the market and prevailing popular sentiment. A monarchist, nationalist, and anti-Revolutionary Christian, Michaud allied admiration for the Crusades’ ideals with a supremacist triumphalism over Islam. He helped provide apparent historical legitimacy for colonialism and cultural imperialism, increasingly the litmus test of European hegemony and national status. Thus crusading could be transmuted into a precursor of Christian European superiority and ascendancy, taking its place in what was proclaimed as the march of western progress. Michaud’s convenient and seductive vision left an indelible stain.

  Yet Arab, Arabist, and Islamic outrage ignored the uncomfortable fact that Michaud’s construct played its part in setting their own agenda too. In rallying opinion against European intrusion, the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) labeled their imperialism as a crusade, his remark that “Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us in the form of a political campaign.” Much subsequent Islamic discourse on western attitudes to the Crusades and the Near East has been colored by a negative acceptance of the Michaud version of history as if this were the immutable western response or historically accurate. No continuity exists in Arabic responses to western aggression between medieval crusading and modern political hostility, any more than there is between medieval and modern jihad, except in rhetoric and an ahistorical appeal to the past. Assumption
s of an inherent conflict of power and victimization that elevates a wholly unhistorical link between modern colonialism and medieval crusading. It is Michaud in a mirror. Occidentalism and Orientalism share the same western frame. The idea that the modern political conflicts in the Near East or elsewhere derive from the legacy of the Crusades or are being conducted as neo-crusades in anything except extremist diatribe is deceitful.

  All sides seem reluctant to accept that the images of crusade and jihad introduced into late twentieth- and twenty-first-century conflicts are not time-venerated traditions of action or abuse, but modern imports.

  Battle between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land is depicted in this illumination from the fourteenth-century French manuscript, History of Godfrey of Bouillon. Modern politicians still sometimes invoke the Crusades, whether in reference to the Western-led “War on Terror” against Islamic extremists, or to a struggle against Western aggressors by aggrieved Muslim nations.

  It has been observed that no Islamic state has formally launched a jihad against a non-Muslim opponent since the demise of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Even that Islamic holy war had been sponsored and encouraged by the Turks’ German allies. Most African and Near Eastern jihads proclaimed in the nineteenth century and since were not against infidel imperialists but Islamic rivals, oppressors, and heretics or for religious reform. This is not to deny the presence of jihad language and theory, as in the propaganda of states at war with the State of Israel in 1948, 1967, or 1973. However, there is nothing old-fashioned, still less “medieval,” about the techniques, recruitment, or ideology of al-Qaeda. The devious polemical association between “crusaders” and “Jews” is historical nonsense. Al-Qaeda’s international reach is a creation of modernity and globalization as surely as the World Wide Web. Many states most disliked by those who claim to be fearful of Islam are explicitly secular. Yet fanciful analogies with crusading have accompanied most major conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean from the First World War onwards, including unlikely associations such as the siege of Beirut in 1982 with the siege of Acre in 1189-91. The Arabic propaganda transmuting Israelis into crusaders is a direct consequence of this. While on their side some Israeli extremists hark back to an older tradition of almost Maccabean revivalism, others are content to re-fashion their landscape to exclude, in place names or archaeological designation, Arabic traces, seeing the State of Israel as a liberation not an occupation. There are obvious historic parallels with Christian Outremer, but also with Umayyad Palestine or Roman Syria—conquerors imposing their own space. However, Israelis are not the new crusaders, any more than the Americans. Saddam Hussein was not the new Saladin, even though they shared a birthplace.