Crusading and the Crusader States

Andrew Jotischky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351983914
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Crusading and the Crusader States explores how the idea of holy war emerged from the troubled society of the eleventh century, and why Jerusalem and the Holy Land were so important to Europeans. It follows the progress of the major crusading expeditions, offering insights into initial success and subsequent failure, charts the development of new attitudes towards Islam and its followers, and shows the effects of the Crusades on society and culture in the Near East.

Providing analysis and discussion of this vital period of medieval history, Andrew Jotischky discusses key questions such as how crusading evolved in theory and practice, how crusading expeditions were planned and carried out, why they were considered such an essential part of medieval society, and why their popularity endured despite military failures.

This new edition takes into account the wealth of rich and varied recent research to show why crusading should be seen as central to the European experience in the Middle Ages. It engages with key historiographical debates of the past decade, including how Crusades were formed, the political culture and social networks of crusading, and the effects of crusading on western religious and aristocratic culture. It now extends into the fifteenth century to discuss the lasting ramifications of the Crusades, and illustrate their legacy into the early modern period.

It is essential reading for all students of the Crusades and medieval history.

1 Problems in crusading historiography

Crusading is a perennially attractive subject for students of History. The difficulty posed by understanding the mindset of medieval popes, bishops and knights is tempered by the vivid colour of many of the surviving sources, and the illusion of closeness in time lent by the relevance of much of the subject matter to the contemporary world. It is also a subject of vital importance for a modern audience, arguably even more now than when the first edition of this book was published in 2004.

Since a large number of general studies of the Crusades already exist, it may be worth laying before the reader what this book sets out to do, and what it does not propose to attempt. First, this is a book designed with undergraduate historians in mind. I have therefore tried to approach the subject from the point of view of the student by posing – and trying as far as possible to answer – the kinds of questions that my own students over about twenty-five years of teaching the subject at university have themselves asked and debated in seminars. This means that I have given priority to analysis and interpretation over the narrative of events. Some degree of narrative is of course inevitable, if only to provide a context for analysis, but the story has been told so many times and in so many books that it has not seemed worthwhile to tell it again. There are, therefore, no set-piece descriptions of individual Crusades, let alone battles. The best scholarly surveys of the Crusades are still invaluable for the detail that they provide to superimpose on the sketch in the following pages. Despite this set of priorities, however, I hope that this book will also appeal to the general reader, who perhaps comes to the Crusades already knowing something of the story and its chief personalities, but would like an accessible yet sharply focused discussion of how the Crusades came about, what they attempted to achieve, and how they shaped the history of the East Mediterranean in the Middle Ages.

The study of the Crusades has expanded so rapidly in recent years that the parameters of the subject are much wider than they were a generation ago. This has made for some difficult choices in judging the scope of this book. One consequence of the growth of interest in the Crusades among historians has been that they are now almost open-ended. A convenient, if in some respects misleading, starting date is provided by the appeal that launched the First Crusade in 1095. Few historians believe that the Crusades began with a ‘big bang’ moment, at which Urban II presented a revolutionary idea for holy war fully fledged to an astonished Christendom. All historians more or less acknowledge that holy war as an idea embedded within Christian society had been current for many generations, even centuries; moreover, that the concept of spiritual merits or privileges for conducting such war was also well understood. These were not simply abstract ideas. Wars undertaken by Christian rulers against pagans, for example by the Franks against the Saxons in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, or by Wessex against the Danes in the late ninth century, had been articulated as the defence of Christendom against its enemies, and as such spiritually meritorious activities, even in some cases constituting a moral obligation. Nor was war against Muslims a new idea at the end of the eleventh century. The Arab conquest of Sicily in the ninth century, and subsequent raiding on the south coast of France, in Calabria and even as far north in Italy as Rome itself, had produced a body of literary responses to Muslim aggression. Both those who suffered from such raids, and those who resisted the raiders, were celebrated in hagiographical literature. These themes can be found in saints’ lives in Greek – deriving from the Greek-speaking communities in Sicily and southern Italy – and Latin, from Italy, France and Spain. Furthermore, they continue to be deployed in hagiography and other genres long after the Arab threat had ended, because by the mid-eleventh century it was Christians who had become the aggressors in the western Mediterranean, in the Norman conquest of Sicily from the 1060s to the 1090s, and in the campaigns of reconquest of Arab-held territory in the Iberian peninsula at the same time.

There was thus both a stock of literary models and a palpable memory on which promotors of holy war against the Muslim world could draw in the 1090s. This does not mean, however, that nothing Urban II advocated in 1095 was new. It is not the case that any and all anti-Muslim sentiments or military action against Islamic powers qualify as the same thing as ‘crusading’, and thus that there was no essential distinction between what took place between 1095 and 1099 and previous instances of Christian– Muslim warfare.

Nor does it mean, as one historian has recently suggested, that the First Crusade was simply an episode in a long-running war between ‘the Christian world’ and ‘the Islamic world’ (Chevedden 2015). The problem with such an approach is twofold. First, the implication it gives is that Islam and Christianity comprised two mutually exclusive worlds with a propensity to conflict, and this simply does not accord with historical facts. Very large Christian populations lived, usually in peace, under the rule of Muslim regimes in much of the Near East, North Africa and the western Mediterranean for centuries – in some cases, until within living memory. To be sure, dominant regimes sometimes subjected their minorities to harassment or even persecution, but there was no structural or systematic attempt to create ‘an Islamic world’ in which Christians, or for that matter Jews, had no place. Likewise, there is little evidence for any corresponding attack on Muslim powers by ‘Christian Europe’ by virtue of the fact that they were Muslim. As we shall see, the holy war launched by Urban II was specifically aimed at a racial group – the Turks – because of their occupation of the holy places in Jerusalem. A second, and related point concerns the notion of a wider geopolitical framework in which Urban was operating in 1095. Urban was certainly aware of the implications of other wars against Muslim powers that had already begun before 1095: specifically the Norman conquest of Sicily and the ongoing territorial wars against Arab states in Spain. These, however, were wars prosecuted by secular rulers for territorial gains, and while they were certainly supported and encouraged by a succession of popes who saw them as meritorious, they neither provided a template for future Christian–Muslim warfare nor initiated a wider conflict that spilled over into the Near East. In other words, the expedition launched in 1095 was not a direct consequence of earlier conflicts between Christian and Muslim powers. It had its own causes, the participants had quite a different motivation, and it had its own theological underpinning.

Despite changing political and economic situations both in the Near East and in the West, both the causes and the ideological underpinning remained remarkably constant for hundreds of years. In looking for the end of crusading, historians tend to follow their own preferences. Although the fall of the last western possession on the mainland of the Crusader States in 1291 is still accepted by many as a sensible end-point (e.g. Richard 1999), this is in many ways an artifice. Crusades continued to be launched along exactly the same lines of organisation and with the same aspirations for another fifty years or so after 1291, and even after the emphasis shifted from the recovery of the Holy Land to the more generalised struggle against the Ottomans who by the end of the fourteenth century were threatening Constantinople itself, crusading ideals as promoted and expressed by the European nobility continued to be recognisable as part of the same tradition that had inspired the generation of 1095. The last of the Crusader States, the kingdom of Cyprus, did not fall until the second half of the sixteenth century, but one can go further still. Even the seventeenth-century defence of Christendom against the Turks might easily be included in crusading history, even though the underlying theological principles behind crusading no longer applied in the same way. Recently, historians have emphasised how much the alliances created among European powers to wage war against the Turks in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries owed to the holy war tradition of earlier centuries, and how even Protestant powers such as England, in whose Church the theological assumptions about spiritual benefits no longer applied, supported such wars as both necessary and virtuous (Tyerman 2011).

My ending point in this book is the fifteenth century: not because crusading as a practice or a concept ended then, but because after the fifteenth century western society developed in ways that mean that the premises and assumptions one can make about infrastructures and institutions, let alone mentalities, were so changed as to mean that one is talking about very different starting-points. I recognise, however, that there is much to be said about crusading in the later Middle Ages that for reasons of length can find no place in this book.

Geographical parameters are also more problematic than they might at first appear. Everyone knows that the Crusades were wars of the Cross against the Crescent, but only comparatively recently have historians from outside Spain included the Iberian peninsula in their horizons when considering crusading. Equally, the Crusades against pagans in the Baltic region have largely been understood within the context of the western colonisation of north-eastern Europe rather than of crusading. There are good reasons for emphasising the particularities of the northern Crusades and the Spanish Reconquista, for in both cases these were wars whose inception cannot be explained solely by the development of crusading ideals. Some historians are still reluctant to see these wars as occupying the same place in the mindset of participants or contemporary commentators. Nevertheless, I have included discussion of both in this book because the course of warfare and Christian settlement in Iberia and the Baltic was shaped by largely the same aspirations and ideologies as in the East Mediterranean. For similar reasons I have also found space for brief accounts of Crusades against heretics within western Europe and against Christian enemies of the papacy. Beyond the discussion in the Introduction, however, I have not attempted to broach the question of what constituted a crusade.

The selection of what to include and what to omit largely represents trends in crusading historiography. One benefit of this book will, I hope, be to guide readers to the most recent treatments of different aspects of the subject. For this reason the references in the text are mostly to secondary literature that provides systematic discussion of topics in greater depth than this book can allow. Because I have in mind a readership whose proficiency is largely limited to English, I have restricted myself as far as possible to references to works in English. This may perhaps be the moment to stress that many substantial and important contributions to crusading scholarship have also been made by scholars writing in French, German, Italian, Spanish and other languages.

What does it mean to study the Crusades?

There is scarcely any need in the present day to justify writing a book about the Crusades. A subject that a generation ago was seen by many professional historians as peripheral to their concerns with the political and social development of Europe has in the past generation seen an explosion of interest and new research. In part, this is because the subject itself has changed; even more, perhaps, because the world has changed. The durability of conflicts inspired by religious ideology and fuelled by a growing sense of religious and racial hatred can no longer appear foreign to present-day concerns or political discourse. In an age of increasing extremism in political and religious values – both in the western world and in the regions traditionally associated with crusading, but expressed with increasing violence in the latter – the actions of crusaders and their opponents can appear not as the exotic expressions of a more violent world in the distant past, but as a phase in a cycle of conflict. It would be understandable to see the Crusades of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries as echoes of present-day conflicts. As the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun put it, ‘the past resembles the present more than one drop of water resembles another’. Such a view, however, would also be misleading. The Crusades came about for specific reasons and in a specific set of circumstances. Although it may be true that the East Mediterranean still suffers from the legacy of the wars initiated by the western Church and knighthood in 1095, the circumstances in which those conflicts began reflect developments in European and West Asian societies during the eleventh century. To repeat what has already been said above, there is no historical inevitability about war between Cross and Crescent, or between the values of Christian and Islamic cultures.

This may be one good reason for studying the Crusades today. Another is that crusading historiography has become increasingly sophisticated and wide-ranging. This means that the student who wants to know how medieval society worked on a number of different levels can do so through a study of crusading. Learning about the Crusades entails the study of the structures of western society as it developed from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. Crusading naturally evolved over this period. The expeditions of a thirteenth-century prince such as Louis IX of France or Edward I of England differed markedly from the First Crusade of 1096–9 in organisation, method, and to some extent even in aspiration. It could scarcely be otherwise, for every facet of crusade planning and execution was affected by advances in governmental procedure, in the increasingly complex organisation of the Church, in military technology and in changing ideologies that governed Christian conceptions of Islam. But this was not one-way traffic. The continuing aspiration in the West to recover Jerusalem itself brought about many of the changes in medieval society that constitutional historians have hailed as advances. An example is the introduction of the first income tax in Europe in 1183 to finance crusading. In ecclesiastical structures too, aspirations concerned with the Holy Land were pervasive. The wide-ranging reform of the Church envisaged by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was articulated by the papacy by the need to make crusading more efficient; thus, fundamental changes to the ways in which bishops ran their dioceses all over Christendom were brought about in order to provide more systematic preaching of the Cross.

Crusading, then, teaches us about how and why medieval society evolved in the ways that it did. But crusading was above all a religious activity, governed by the expectation of a spiritual reward. This expectation, loosely articulated by Pope Urban II in 1095, was by c.1200 to be defined as a legalistic exchange between the participant and the Church, as the mediator of God’s will, and articulated in a legally binding vow. The circumstances and experiences of crusading itself brought about this change. Crusaders, their dependants and those to whom they owed services, wanted to know what they could expect in the event of death, injury or the loss of property as a result of crusading. This is not to say that the Crusades by themselves brought about the growth of a more systematic theology of penance or a more complex canon law, but rather that crusading was one of the experiences that made possible such evolutions in the workings of the Church. Changes in the way the Church celebrated its liturgy also came about as a result of crusading. New feasts, such as that to celebrate the capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, entered the Church’s liturgical calendar, and new prayers and chants were composed for them. Besides these, existing feasts such as the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September) took on new significance after 1099, once the chapel of Helena, where the True Cross had been found, came into the hands of the Latin Church. After the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, such feasts took on an added poignancy as their celebration came to be linked to new crusade appeals.

Historians of the Crusades have always been concerned with the apparent paradox of holy war. To understand what Urban II meant in 1095 when he preached an armed pilgrimage for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, we must approach the Crusade from long range, by tracing the evolution of a theory of penitential violence through the social and political turbulence accompanying the papal reform movement of the eleventh century. Urban II’s message would have been impossible without the development of a papal office with a clearly defined ideology. This is an eleventh-century story. Equally, however, Urban II’s preaching only took on significance in the ears of his listeners, and in the ways in which they retold what they had heard. This means that we must understand what it was about Urban’s appeal that was so resonant to late eleventh-century society. Crusading, therefore, takes us backwards into the workings of knightly families: how they learned and expressed their piety, how ideals of devotion and social responsibility became fused with the habits of warfare.

The western settlement in the Levant came about because of a particular combination of circumstances in the East as well as in the West. One of the most significant developments in crusading historiography in recent years has been the progress made in understanding the physical and human environment created by the settlement. This has also extended conceptual boundaries. Our knowledge of how western settlers lived in their new lands is expanding all the time, and this knowledge has helped both to complement and to challenge older assumptions about the mentalité of the western knighthood. Disciplinary boundaries have also been crossed, bringing into the study of crusading new genres and sources. One field in which this has been most notable is art history. Study of the visual culture of the Crusader States has posed old questions in new ways, by examining the cross-fertilisation of ideas and taste among artists and patrons in the East Mediterranean. This in turn has reinvigorated an old debate about the ‘colonialism’ of the western settlement. As yet, crusade historians have been wary of exploring the possibilities of postcolonial theory in order to reshape the debate, but recent studies of interaction of settlers with indigenous peoples have suggested new approaches.

Crusading studies today are genuinely interdisciplinary. The contributions of literary scholars, art historians, archaeologists, canon lawyers, liturgists, theologians and codicologists have all helped to sharpen awareness of the central role that crusading played in the lives of Europeans from the end of the eleventh century to the middle of the fourteenth. This book cannot include more than a selection of this new work, but I hope that it will at least convey how important crusading as an ideal and a set of practices was to the development of Europe. In so doing, I trust it will also demonstrate how complex Crusades were for contemporaries, and why answers to even the most apparently simple of questions – what were the Crusades? – are so difficult to reach today.

Three historiographical themes

The following brief discussions are designed to raise a few of the conceptual questions that have dominated crusading studies. I make no attempt to provide systematic answers, but simply to make readers aware of the distinct lines of argument, the related questions raised by each and the overall significance of each theme to the broader subject of crusading.

What was a crusade?

The first difficulty in determining what medieval people – whether literate or illiterate – meant by ‘the Crusades’ is that there was no single word or phrase to describe either the ideal or the practice. For one historian, ‘crusading’ is in itself a misleading term before the reign of Innocent III (1198–1216): ‘There was holy war in the twelfth century which attracted spiritual benefits of various sorts. For some of these wars, randomly except in the case of those to the Holy Land, warriors adopted the cross’ (Tyerman 1998: 19). Two premises underlie this view: first, that there was no systematic process according to which the Church or the knighthood classified holy wars or the spiritual rewards accruing from them; and second, that in the absence of any such system, the expeditions to the Holy Land still occupied a different place from any others. Few could argue with this as an account of the situation in 1095–9, but it becomes a controversial argument when pushed as far as the end of the twelfth century.

This view, if pushed to its logical conclusion, ends by resisting all definition, at least up to a point when it can be established that medieval society had, through canon law, constructed such a definition for itself. There is much to commend such an approach, at least in so far as it forces us to confront the fact that the word ‘crusade’ is not known in any source until almost a hundred years after 1095. The danger, however, is that it can lead to a kind of relativism that either includes any and all holy wars as Crusades on the grounds that there was no litmus test by which contemporaries could distinguish one from another, or that resists the use of the word altogether. The argument over how to define Crusades is in fact analogous to the controversy over universals in the twelfth-century cathedral schools. The nominalist approach resists defining the crusade closely because the word did not exist: if people had agreed on what constituted a crusade, they would have invented a word for it. In contrast, the rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Chronology of main events
• 1 Problems in crusading historiography
• 2 The papacy, the knighthood and the eastern Mediterranean
• 3 Crusade and settlement, 1095–c.1118
• 4 Politics and war in the Crusader States, 1118–87
• 5 The Islamic reaction, 1097–1193
• 6 Crusader society
• 7 Recovery in the East, new challenges in Europe: crusading, 1187–1216
• 8 Varieties of crusading from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries
• 9 Crusading and the Crusader States in the thirteenth century, 1217–74
• 10 Crusading and the Holy Land in the later Middle Ages
• Bibliography
• Index