Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Engaging the Crusades, Volume One

Mike Horswell, Jonathan Phillips, Mike Horswell, Jonathan Phillips, Mike Horswell, Jonathan Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351250429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes which offer windows into a newly emerging field of historical study: the memory and legacy of the crusades. Together these volumes examine the reasons behind the enduring resonance of the crusades and present the memory of crusading in the modern period as a productive, exciting and much needed area of investigation.

Perceptions of the Crusades from the Ninetenth to the Twenty-First Century explores the ways in which the crusades have been used in the last two centuries, including the varying deployment of crusading rhetoric and imagery in both the East and the West. It considers the scope and impact of crusading memory from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, engaging with nineteenth-century British lending libraries, literary uses of crusading tales, wartime postcard propaganda, memories of Saladin and crusades in the Near East and the works of modern crusade historians.

Demonstrating the breadth of material encompassed by this subject and offering methodological suggestions for continuing its progress, Perceptions of the Crusades from the Ninetenth to the Twenty-First Century is essential reading for modern historians, military historians and historians of memory and medievalism.

1 The crusades

Nineteenth-century readers’ perspectives

Elizabeth Siberry

Whilst the existence of a book does not necessarily mean that it was read or indeed influenced contemporary perceptions of the crusading movement, there are some sources that provide an indication of what was read and by whom in Britain during the nineteenth century, and these provide a glimpse of the variety of attitudes towards the crusades in this period and what shaped them. This is important in piecing together a jigsaw of how the crusades were seen and described at this time and the influence of particular works and perspectives.

A number of printed catalogues of major public and private libraries during this period have survived, and research has shown the wide range of other ways in which readers could access books, from coffee houses to booksellers, schools and universities, clubs and book groups.¹ Different libraries served different readers. There were public (free) libraries, subscription or circulating libraries and private libraries in many of the great houses, and private in this context did not necessarily mean for the exclusive use of the owners. Indeed by 1850, ‘any person could borrow any kind of literature and read it in his (or indeed her) own domestic space, or use an institutional library and socialise with like-minded people’.²

The records of the London Library in St James’ Square, London, provide a good starting point. A private subscription library founded in 1841 and still operating today, it included many prominent figures amongst its members. The prime mover behind its establishment was the historian and writer Thomas Carlyle, who summarised its aim as ‘A collection of standard books in various languages, calculated for the use of literary men and of all who prosecute self-instruction and rational entertainment by reading.’ Carlyle noted that there were public libraries in other towns in England and in major cities throughout Europe, but in London, there was no lending library capable of ‘supplying the intellectual wants of its inhabitants’. Carlyle even used language derived from the crusades to describe his project. In an essay, ‘Signs of the times’, he wrote of Peter the Hermit ‘rugged steel-clad Europe trembled beneath his words and followed him whither he listed’ and referred to himself as another Peter leading ‘the crusade for the foundation of the London Library’.³

By the beginning of 1841 the Library had some five hundred subscribers, including Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and William Ewart Gladstone. By 1852, membership had doubled, with a ‘lending circulation of about 40,000 volumes’. The intention was to be distinct from the more popular circulating libraries and to provide books ‘people will read and continue to read’. Carlyle accordingly marked in the catalogues of other libraries the books he understood to be ‘good’. Gladstone did the same for ecclesiastical history and Henry Hallam, whose View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages was published in 1827, drew up lists of classical and medieval history and literature.⁴ The printed catalogues of the London Library, which started in 1842 and were updated regularly throughout the nineteenth century, provide a good overview of which books met the committee’s criteria. In some cases, they also note the price paid for the book and the bookseller.

For the crusades, they show that from the beginning, there was a good selection of histories, printed primary sources and more modern literature inspired by the crusades. They included works published outside Britain and in various European languages, such as Joseph François Michaud’s Histoire des croisades (1811–22), the collection of sources Bibliothèque des croisades (1829) and in due course the Recueil des historiens des croisades (1844–1906). The library also had a copy of Heinrich von Sybel’s Geschichte des ersten kreuzzuge (1841) and essays by Arnold Heeren (1808) and Maxime de Choiseul-Daillecourt (1808) on the influence of the crusades. By 1875, the catalogue included a classified index with an entry on crusade-related texts, and some twenty-seven were listed.

There are also records of the books borrowed by members. The ledgers (Issue books), from May 1841 to March 1849 and March 1856 to August 1858, have been preserved and list the dates of issue and return, titles and borrowers of books during this period. They are not easy reading because the quality of handwriting varies, and their very purpose meant that details of books returned were crossed through. Moreover, library practice changed during the 1840s. In the early volumes, the information is organised by date of issue, whereas in the later volumes, the arrangement is alphabetical, by author. The effort involved in deciphering the ledgers is, however, worthwhile.

What do they reveal? A handful of works on the subject of the crusades stand out as the most borrowed during the 1840s. One of these is The Knights Templars by Charles Greenstreet Addison, acquired in 1842 (Figure 1.1). Addison had travelled to the Holy Land and Syria on pilgrimage in the 1830s and published (in London and Philadelphia) an account of his journey and observations entitled Damascus and Palmyra: A Journey to the East in 1838, with illustrations by the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, of whom more later. As a barrister in London, Addison was familiar with the Temple Church, which underwent major restoration in the 1840s. This, and his own visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and other Templar sites, prompted him to write a history of the Templars, first published in 1842, and dedicated to the Benchers of the Inner and Middle Temples as well as the restorers of the church. He wrote:

Figure 1.1 Frontispiece from Charles Addison’s History of the Knights Templar. By permission of The London Library.

The proud and powerful Knights Templars were succeeded in the occupation of the Temple by a body of learned lawyers, who took possession of the old Hall and the gloomy cells of the military monks and converted the chief house of their order into the great and most ancient Common Law University in England. For more than five centuries the retreats of the religious warriors have been devoted to ‘the studious and eloquent pleaders of causes’, a new kind of TEMPLARS, who, as Fuller [Thomas Fuller, author of The Holy Warre, 1639] quaintly observes, now ‘defend one Christian from another, as the old ones did Christians from Pagans.⁵

The book was well received, running to several editions in which Addison expanded his history of the Order. He also produced a shorter book on the Temple church itself (1843).

Addison had firm views on his subject, challenging some of the ‘more extraordinary and unfounded charges’ levelled against the order:

The vulgar notion that they were as wicked as they were fearless and brave, has not yet been entirely exploded; but it is hoped that the copious account of the proceedings against the order in this country given in the ensuing volume will dispel many unfounded prejudices still entertained against the fraternity, and excite emotions of admiration for their constancy and courage and or pity for their unmerited and cruel fate. […] I have endeavoured to write a fair and impartial account of the order, not slavishly adopting everything I find in ancient writers, but such matters only, as I believe, after careful examination of the best authorities, to be true.⁶

The book also included a rather romanticised engraving of Templars in action, and it is still available today. Returning to his day job, Addison also produced two significant legal works, A treatise on the law of torts (1860) and A treatise on the law of contracts (1845).

Another regularly borrowed and rather different work was George Payne Rainsford James’ history of the life of Richard Coeur de Lion, purchased for £2.2 shillings. James was a prolific author who turned out ‘historical romances with industrial speed and efficiency’.⁷ Appointed Historiographer Royal by William IV, in his later years, James combined his literary career with diplomacy, serving as British Consul in Norfolk, Virginia, and then the Adriatic before dying in Venice in 1860. James also had a wide range of acquaintances in both literary and political circles and was a friend and correspondent of Walter Scott, Gladstone and the Duke of Wellington.

His Richard, published in four volumes between 1842 and 1849, challenged the views of some contemporary crusade historians:

The affected philanthropy and assumed liberality of some modern historians, have led them to represent the crusade as altogether cruel and unnecessary; but so far from such being the case, it is evident that this warfare was […] as just as any that was ever waged by man.⁸

James was also satirised by Thackeray in his Barbazure (as G.P.R. Jeaumes in Novels by Eminent Hands published in 1847) which has the warrior Philibert de Coquelicot declare:

I stood by Richard of England at the gates of Ascalon, and drew the spear from the sainted King Louis in the tents of Damietta […] I have broken a lance with Solyman at Rhodes and smoked a chibouque with Saladin at Acre.⁹

He also wrote a History of Chivalry (1843) and a three-volume novel about Richard I’s French counterpart, Philip Augustus (1831).

Charles Mills, whose two-volume History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land (published in 1820 and purchased by the Library in 1842 for fourteen shillings) was also regularly borrowed by library readers, was a more ‘traditional’ historian of the crusades. Another lawyer, his real interest was history, and his biographer, Augustine Skottowe, who may not have been the most objective witness, noted that ‘no man was ever more punc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: engaging the crusades
• 1 The crusades: nineteenth-century readers’ perspectives
• 2 Creating chivalrous imperial crusaders: the crusades in juvenile literature from Scott to Newbolt, 1825–1917
• 3 ‘May God punish England!’: pseudo-crusading language and Holy War motifs in postcards of the First World War
• 4 ‘Unity! Unity between all the inhabitants of our lands!’: the memory and legacy of the crusades and Saladin in the Near East, c.1880 to c.1925
• 5 The dead, the revived and the recreated pasts: ‘structural amnesia’ in representations of crusade history
• Index