Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century

Giles Constable

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351947084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Crusading in the twelfth century was less a series of discrete events than a manifestation of an endemic phenomenon that touched almost every aspect of life at that time. The defense of Christendom and the recovery of the Holy Land were widely-shared objectives. Thousands of men, and not a few women, participated in the crusades, including not only those who took the cross but many others who shared the costs and losses, as well as the triumphs of the crusaders. This volume contains not a narrative account of the crusades in the twelfth century, but a group of studies illustrating many aspects of crusading that are often passed over in narrative histories, including the courses and historiography of the crusades, their background, ideology, and finances, and how they were seen in Europe. Included are revised and updated versions of Giles Constable's classic essays on medieval crusading, along with two major new studies on the cross of the crusaders and the Fourth Crusade, and two excursuses on the terminology of crusading and the numbering of the crusades. They provide an opportunity to meet some individual crusaders, such as Odo Arpinus, whose remarkable career carried him from France to the east and back again, and whose legendary exploits in the Holy Land were recorded in the Old French crusade cycle. Other studies take the reader to the boundaries of Christendom in Spain and Portugal and in eastern Germany, where the campaigns against the Wends formed part of the wider crusading movement. Together they show the range and depth of crusading at that time and its influence on the broader history of the period.

Chapter 1
The Historiography of the Crusades

Periodizing the Historiography of the Crusades

The crusades have from their inception been seen from many different points of view. Every account and reference in the sources must therefore be interpreted in the light of where, when, by whom, and in whose interests it was written. Each participant made his – and in a few cases her – own crusade, and the leaders had their own interests, motives, and objectives, which often put them at odds with one another. They were all distrusted by the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenos, whose point of view is presented in the Alexiad written in the middle of the twelfth century by his daughter Anna Comnena. The Turkish sultan Kilij Arslan naturally saw things from another perspective, as did the indigenous Christian populations in the east, especially the Armenians, and the peoples of the Muslim principalities of the eastern Mediterranean. The rulers of Edessa, Antioch, Aleppo, and Damascus, and beyond them Cairo and Baghdad, each had their own attitudes towards the crusades, which are reflected in the sources. To these must be added the peoples through whose lands the crusaders passed on their way to the east, and in particular the Jews who suffered at the hands of the followers of Peter the Hermit.¹

The historiography of the crusades thus begins with the earliest accounts of their origins and history. Aside from some studies of individual sources, however, and a number of bibliographies and bibliographical articles,² it has received comparatively little attention from scholars. The only general works are a long and still useful appendix to the first (but not the second) edition of Heinrich von Sybel’s Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzugs, which appeared in 1841 and was translated into English in 1861, and the two volumes (in Russian) by M. A. Zaborov entitled Introduction to the Historiography of the Crusades, which deals with the medieval sources, and Historiography of the Crusades (15th-19th century), which were published in 1966 and 1971 respectively.³ To these can be added a long article, partly historiographical and partly bibliographical, by Laetitia Boehm entitled ‘ “Gesta Dei per Francos” - oder “Gesta Francorum”? Die Kreuzzüge als historiographisches Problem’ and a chapter by Jonathan Riley-Smith on ‘The crusading movement and historians’ in the Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades.⁴ It is interesting, and perhaps significant, that there is no sustained treatment of historiography in the general histories of the crusades by Grousset, Runciman, and Mayer, nor in the six-volume cooperative History of the Crusades edited by Kenneth Setton.⁵

The historiography of the crusades as seen from the west, with which this chapter is concerned, can be divided into four periods, of which the first, and longest, went from 1095 until the end of the sixteenth century; the second covered the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the third went from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth; and the fourth comes down to the present. There was some overlap between the periods, but broadly speaking, during the first, the Muslims were a continuing threat to western Europe and the defense of Christendom was seen as a pressing concern. In the second period, the crusades moved increasingly from the present time into the past, but a past that was colored by confessional or rationalist values, which changed in the third period, when the crusades were subjected to serious, though not always impartial, scholarly investigation. This third period breaks down into the nineteenth century, when the crusades were generally well regarded, and the twentieth century, when there was a rising tide of criticism. In the fourth period there has been a growing division between scholarly and popular views of the crusades.

Interest in the crusades today is deeply influenced by political and ideological interests, including the consequences of European colonialism, the tensions between western and non-western societies, especially in the Middle East, and, more broadly, the legitimacy of using force to promote even worthy and legitimate causes.⁶ These concerns contributed to the change from the comparatively favorable attitude towards the crusades that prevailed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a more critical, and even hostile, view. Steven Runciman in his influential History of the Crusades concluded that ‘The Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.’⁷ Geoffrey Barraclough echoed this view in 1970:

1. We no longer regard the crusades ... as a great movement in defense of Western Christendom, but rather as the manifestation of a new, driving, aggressive spirit which now became the mark of Western civilization. We no longer regard the Latin states of Asia Minor as outposts of civilization in a world of unbelievers, but rather as radically unstable centers of colonial exploitation.

He attributed this change in ‘our verdict on the Crusades’ to ‘our experience of total war and the hazards of living in a thermonuclear age. War is always evil, if sometimes an inescapable evil; Holy War is the evil of evils’.⁸ And John Ward described the crusades as ‘a movement of violent white supremacist colonialism’.⁹

This view is now common in works addressed to the general public, including popular presentations and movies. A leaflet distributed in Clermont during the conference held in 1995 to commemorate the summons to the first crusade was headed ‘The Crusades – did God will it?’, echoing the crusading cry of ‘Deus le volt’. It went on to ask ‘Can the Church memorialize the crusades without asking forgiveness?’ and called on the pope to deny that any war can be holy and that sins can be forgiven by killing pagans. According to this view, the crusaders were inspired by greed and religious fanaticism and the Muslims were the innocent victims of expansionist aggression. Many scholars today, however, reject this hostile judgment and emphasize the defensive character of the crusades as they were seen by contemporaries, who believed that Christianity was endangered by enemies who had already overrun much of the traditional Christian world, including Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and who threatened to take over the remainder.

Almost all the historians and chroniclers of the expeditions that were later called the first crusade considered them a response to the Muslim threats to Christian holy places and peoples in the east.¹⁰ They wrote from several points of view, however, used varying terminology and cited different biblical passages.¹¹ Guibert of Nogent stressed the apocalyptic and millenarian aspects, and Ekkehard of Aura the supernatural and physical phenomena that preceded and accompanied the crusade. Many writers had their own heroes. The roles of Godfrey of Bouillon and Peter the Hermit were central for Albert of Aachen; Bohemund of Taranto in the anonymous Gesta Francorum; his nephew Tancred for Ralph of Caen; Raymond of St Gilles for Raymond of Aguilers; Baldwin of Boulogne for Fulcher of Chartres; and Godfrey of Bouillon again in the crusader epics, which dominated the popular perception of the crusades down to the nineteenth century. Odo of Deuil in his history of the second crusade concentrated on the activities of Louis VII of France, and the accounts of the third crusade in the Estoire de la guerre sainte of Ambroise and the Itinerarium regis Ricardi glorified the role of Richard I of England. The greatest of all crusader historians, William of Tyre, wrote his Chronicon from the point of view of a Latin Christian born and living in the east in order, he said, to record ‘for the everlasting memory of the faithful of Christ’ the way in which God ‘wanted to relieve the long-lasting oppression of His people’.¹²

Innocent III in his crusading bull Quia maior of 1213 asked how anyone could

know that his brothers, Christian in faith and name, are held in dire imprisonment among the perfidious Saracens and most profoundly subjected by the yoke of servitude, and not take effective action for their liberation ... And indeed the Christian peoples held almost all the provinces of the Saracens until the times of the blessed Gregory.¹³

Even more strikingly the fourteenth-century Castilian magnate don Juan Manuel wrote in his Libro de los estados that the Muslims had conquered and held many lands that had belonged to Christians

who had been converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by the apostles. And on this account there is war between the Christians and the Muslims, and will be war until the Christians have recovered the lands that the Muslims seized from them, since there would be no war between them with regard to the law nor the religion (secta) that they hold.¹⁴

While the accuracy and realism of these views can be questioned, they reflect the attitude of most Christians in the middle ages and throughout the first period of crusading historiography. The importance of irredentism in motivating the crusades has been emphasized by many scholars, including Islamists like Norman Daniel, who said that ‘every Christian reference to lands that had once been Christian, and particularly to the Holy Land, must be understood to have been made on the assumption that these were lost provinces belonging by right to the Latin Church.’¹⁵

The process of what has been called the affabulation of the first crusade, by which it became a ‘work of collective imagination’ rather than historical reality,¹⁶ can be seen already in the earliest accounts, which reflected the view of the crusade as it developed, and perhaps as it should have been, rather than as it actually was. They were influenced in particular by the capture of Jerusalem and the establishment of the Latin kingdom and crusader states, which were marks respectively of the success and the permanence of the undertaking.¹⁷ This can be seen in the use made of the Gesta Francorum by Guibert of Nogent, Baldric of Bourgeuil, and Robert of Rheims, and of Fulcher of Chartres by William of Malmesbury, and also in Albert of Aachen’s Book on the Christian expedition for the capture, cleansing, and restitution of holy church of Jerusalem, which was written about 1130 and was long considered the most reliable account of the crusa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The Historiography of the Crusades
• 2 The Cross of the Crusaders
• 3 Medieval Charters as a Source for the History of the Crusades
• 4 The Financing of the Crusades
• 5 The Place of the Crusader in Medieval Society
• 6 The Military Orders
• 7 Cluny and the First Crusade
• 8 Early Crusading in Eastern Germany: The Magdeburg Charter of 1107/8
• 9 The Three Lives of Odo Arpinus
• 10 The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries
• 11 Two Notes on the Anglo-Flemish Crusaders of 1147-8
• 12 The Crusading Project of 1150
• 13 The Fourth Crusade
• Appendix AThe Terminology of Crusading
• Appendix BThe Numbering of the Crusades
• General Index
• Index of Biblical Citations
• Index of Papal Documents listed in JL