The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  152. King Louis Philippe and family visiting the Salle des Croisades at Versailles in 1844, with Merry-Joseph Blondel’s Surrender of Acre to Philip Augustus and Richard I in the background.

  153. Blondel’s Surrender of Ptolemais [Acre] to King Philip II Augustus of France and Richard Lionheart on 13th July 1191.

  Partly thanks to Michaud, the marshalling of the crusades to create patriotic myth was especially prevalent in France. The irony of using a quintessentially supranational cause to promote national identity was largely lost. One less meretricious consequence of the nationalist turn was the encouragement given to academic study of crusade texts, notably the monumental collection of western and eastern sources published as the Recueil des historiens des croisades (1841–1906). The purpose was explicitly nationalist: ‘France has played such a glorious part in the wars of the crusades that the historical documents that contain the accounts of these memorable expeditions seem to enter her domain.’9 The focus on the ‘colonies chrétiens en Palestine’ was equally deliberate: Spain, the Baltic or the Albigensian crusades were absent. The crusades were harnessed to the chariot of French cultural and political imperialism, Outremer – ‘La France du Levant’ – studied by French scholars for the next century and more as a precursor to modern colonisation. The tradition of imagining the crusaders as prototype French colonists reached a zenith under the Third Republic (1870–1940), eager to assert an imperial destiny to distract and unite a fractious, divided political nation. French historians identified supposedly typical ‘French’ elements in the buildings and social systems of Outremer. The post-First World War French mandates in Syria and Lebanon invited further parallels. Academic arguments for the existence of a Franco-Syrian society in Outremer reflected concurrent French settlement in Algeria as much as anything medieval. Into the twentieth century in France, as elsewhere, the crusades attracted writers of nationalist, conservative, Roman Catholic or right-wing persuasion. It took a Marxist, Claude Cahen, to debunk the westernised approach to Outremer history in his monograph using Arabic as well as western sources, La Syrie du Nord à l’époque des croisades (1940).

  154. Gustave Doré’s extraordinary 1888 image of angelic support for Louis IX embarking on crusade in 1248.

  155. The headline of L’Epoque, 10 June 1945, reads ‘France will not renounce its thousand-year influence in the states of the Levant’.

  German Variations

  A distinct German tradition in many ways paralleled the French. A definitive German crusades narrative had been provided by Friedrich Wilken (1777–1840), Geschichte des Kreuzzüge nach morgenländische und abendländische Berichten (A History of the Crusade from Eastern and Western Sources, 7 volumes, 1807–32). Wilken’s history, as its title indicated, rested on Arabic as well as western sources, lending his account a neutral air, far removed from Michaud’s triumphalist clash of civilisations. However, Wilken’s survey implicitly subscribed to the positive materialist interpretation, sustained by the inclusion of the Baltic crusades to which his employer, the kingdom of Prussia, owed its existence. This allowed his history to be mined for a positive German legacy which, in extreme form, became almost as anachronistically nationalist as its French equivalent, the crusading feats of Frederick Barbarossa being harnessed in the creation of a mythic national hero. The crusades were respectably integrated into a German narrative of development, ‘an agitation favourable to liberty and progress’. This fitted a wider project of identifying a unifying German spirit in medieval sources, demonstrated in the editing of specifically German texts under the auspices of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (founded in 1818–19).

  In parallel, the German academic tradition transformed study of the crusades through forensic critical study of sources (Quellenkritik) pioneered by Leopold von Ranke. Building on one of Ranke’s insights, his pupil Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95) in his Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzüges (History of the First Crusade, 1841) placed crusade scholarship on a wholly new footing in using textual analysis to challenge the primacy of the account of the First Crusade by William of Tyre that had largely held sway since the thirteenth century. Von Sybel saw that no text could be taken at face value without interrogating its sources, origins and context. In the process he demolished the intellectual credentials of almost all previous supposed experts on the crusades, being notably harsh on Michaud. Yet while ostensibly setting the crusades free from uncritical histories ‘of a purely national or patriotic tendency’, von Sybel’s work did not release the subject from nationalist appropriation.10 The identification of a distinctive German dimension within a scheme that saw the crusades as furthering cultural progress towards a destined national unification was not politically neutral. While von Sybel’s work led to the forensic scrutiny of texts, it also cast a legitimising penumbra around wilder nationalist fancies, such as state-sponsored attempts to unearth Barbarossa’s remains in Tyre or the excesses of Wilhelm II’s much -publicised visit to Palestine and Syria in 1898 during which he essayed the remarkable trick of posing both as a neo-crusader and as an admirer of Saladin. Study of the Baltic crusades and the Teutonic Knights sharpened awareness of the roots of German cultural and political imperialism. This fed a strand of aggressive German nationalism that found its most grotesque manifestation in Heinrich Himmler’s promotion of SS admiration for the Teutonic Knights. A more positive consequence saw the lengthy nineteenth-century restoration of the former Teutonic Knights’ castle at Marienburg/Marlbork. The fate of the other great Teutonic Knights’ castle, at Königsberg/Kaliningrad, capital of the Teutonic Order and later of East Prussia, confirmed the powerful symbolism of crusade history. In 1968 the castle ruins, which had survived bombardment by the RAF and the Russians in the Second World War and were now in the centre of Russian Kaliningrad, were blown up on the orders of the Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev.

  156. The ruins of Königsberg Castle, 1944.

  Popular Fictions

  Of greater public impact than scholarship were the recreations of crusades and crusaders provided by a former pupil of William Robertson, the Scottish novelist Walter Scott (1771–1832). In the early nineteenth century, anglophone responses to the world of the crusades were couched in terms of the Protestant scepticism of Fuller, the Enlightenment disdain of Gibbon, and the insular view popular since the beginning of the seventeenth century that the crusades, in the guise of Richard I, represented a diversion from the national mission of reconciling Normans and Saxons to create the united world power of Scott’s day. In Scott’s novels Ivanhoe (1819) and The Betrothed (1825) the crusades provide a distant backdrop for the action while The Talisman (1825) is set in Palestine during the Third Crusade and Count Robert of Paris (1831) at the Byzantine court during the passage of the First Crusade. Scott’s crusaders were pre-Michaud and Wilken, more Tasso than Fuller. While the focus of each is on adventure, character, plot and, in the last two, extravagant romantic fantasy, Scott’s verdict on the crusades is clearly expressed in his essay on chivalry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1818 edition). The enterprise was flawed, an expensive, futile, if individually heroic, distraction. While encouraging noble deeds, the worth of Scott’s crusades may be assessed in the stiff-necked and morally compromised villains of Ivanhoe and The Talisman, the Templars. Unlike Michaud, Scott avoids demonising Muslims (or Jews); Saladin is the moral exemplar in The Talisman. Scott’s historical fiction became wildly popular across Europe, the vivid evocation of setting and character, despite the unreal plots, providing a sort of alternative history, one that inspired artists and musicians even more than Michaud did.

  Scott’s view that the crusades were not admirable, while crusaders often were, influenced a whole non-Roman Catholic tradition. The emphasis on crusaders’ devotion, tenacity and self-sacrifice allowed the crusades to be seen as totems for both neo-colonialists and political reactionaries, nervous about the social and economic forces unleashed by early industrialisation. The crusades occupied a conspicuous place in the nineteenth-century cult of medieva
lism that emphasised religion, social hierarchy and moral discipline, cherishing an essentially aristocratic and rural lost world in contrast to the commercial, increasingly urban and socially mobile, disruptive realities of the early nineteenth century. Medievalism’s glamorous escapism provided a canvas on which reactionaries and reformers alike could sketch their critiques of the moral and social ills of the new industrial world: the political reactionary’s selfless idealist knight errant, the social reformer’s honest artisan or worker in touch with the process and fruits of production. Escapism it remained. Despite being presented as precursors of colonial expansion, such as the French conquest of Algeria after 1830, there were no serious attempts to revive actual crusades, a few eccentric dreams apart. Even the Hospitallers, exiled from Malta in 1798, abandoned any military role once they were established in Rome after 1834. The crusade’s appeal as a symbol of nostalgia in the face of the perceived mercenary tawdriness of material progress attracted romantic reactionaries and social critics, like the young Benjamin Disraeli in Tancred: The New Crusader (1847), who affected to be both.11 For the actual or parvenu aristocrat, the crusades also paid snobbish dividends: to boast a crusading ancestor – real or invented – conferred an aura of distinction both in fiction and in certain social circles into the modern era.12 For most, the crusades became entertainment, the vogue for medievalism securing their recognition in theatrical re-enactments, operas, paintings and popular novels. Impressionist images, not details, of the crusades remained embedded in popular culture across Europe. Even John Wisden reached for a list of the eight main eastern crusades to pad out his first edition of the Cricketers’ Almanack of 1864. Such cultural penetration was underpinned by continued analogous use of crusading language in religious settings, such as Christian youth associations or Sabine Baring-Gould’s hymn Onward Christian Soldiers of 1865 (music by Arthur Sullivan, 1871; Sullivan also composed music for an opera based on Ivanhoe in 1891), and in secular application to vigorous campaigning, military or not.

  157. J.A. Atkinson’s 1775–1831 depiction of the death of the Templar Brian de Bois-Gilbert in Ivanhoe.

  Religion and War

  The two elements that most characterised the crusades supplied the trickiest legacies: religion and war. While certain Roman Catholic devotees in Europe and the colonies sought and found inspiration in the crusades,13 for liberal, Protestant or secular nationalists, colonialists and imperialists the attraction lay in what they imagined the crusade taught of human endeavour, economic development and social progress. Although obviously seen as anti-Islamic, the crusades tended to be placed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century observers in a cultural not religious context. Specifically religious aspects could be rendered secular – the desire to conquer the Holy Places becoming a form of early colonialism, or merely eccentrically archaic and baffling – such as pilgrimages and relics. Religion cut across nineteenth-century nationalism and vice versa. In the new, religiously divided nation of Belgium, created in 1830, Godfrey de Bouillon could only act as a national symbol, and his statue placed in the Grand Place in Brussels in 1851, by ignoring the religious specifics of his crusading. The emphasis fell on crusaders’ ‘spirit’, not their spirituality. Crusading also provided rhetorical cover for racist imperialism: the Belgian conquest and exploitation of central Africa was described as a crusade by its instigators.

  158. Statue of Godfrey of Bouillon, Brussels.

  The violence of crusader warfare was discreetly transmuted into adventure stories of heroism and suffering, with little empathy for the victims, similar to how colonial wars were reported in home countries. When war came to western Europe, crusade analogies were paraded but soon exposed as threadbare. During the Crimean War (1854–6), fought in part over control of the Holy Places, crusader parallels fell foul of the inconvenience that the western ‘crusading’ powers were in alliance with the Ottomans against Christian Russians. Both the First and Second World Wars drew excited comparisons with crusades, as sacred national causes, or contests with barbarians, generalised right versus specific, secular evil (as in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s war memoirs, Crusade in Europe), not as specifically religious conflicts even if God was an early recruit. The chivalric overtones in sentimental enthusiasm for the First World War choked in the blood and mud of Flanders and Gallipoli. The only modern war that adopted the crusade as a clear religious parallel was General Franco’s revolt and successful civil war in Spain (1936–9), which to the Fascists was a cruzada española. By comparison, the use of the crusade as a motif by Franco’s republican and communists opponents, ‘crusaders for freedom’, while ideological, was wholly secular, a crusade by literary analogy not emotional emulation. In the 1960s, faced with the neo-crusading ideology of South American Liberation theology that urged the faithful to fight social and political oppression as a religious duty, the Roman Catholic church hierarchy declined to endorse it, and not just because it was often in cahoots with the repressive regimes that Liberation Theology was designed to challenge. To those historically alert, the notion of holy war no longer appeared attractive.

  159. Continuing parallels: ‘Pershings Crusaders’, a poster for an official US First World War film.

  New Lamps for Old

  With the withdrawal from empire after 1945, French politicised academic interest in the crusades slackened, and the French model of an integrated Outremer society was systematically dismantled, contradicted by the primary evidence of a social structure harshly stratified on religious, racial and cultural grounds, and by closer scrutiny of other theatres of crusading and the crusaders’ own inspirations. Yet critics of the French model were no less politically engaged. The Israeli historian Joshua Prawer (1917–90), the leading post-1945 scholar of Outremer, in pointedly describing society in the kingdom of Jerusalem as characterised by a system of ‘apartheid’, was keen to establish how the Zionist settlement in Israel differed fundamentally from that of the crusaders in depth and permanence of occupation, while also asserting the impossibility of social and cultural merging of settler and indigenous communities. Prawer’s crusaders became part of continuing debates over the nature of modern Zionism.14 More broadly, the mid-twentieth-century intellectual as well as political retreat from western imperialism changed how historians examined the nature of the crusaders’ conquests and their cultural and economic impact, in the Levant and in the Baltic, eroding the idea of the crusades as instrumental in a ‘rise of Europe’.

  If changing geopolitics refocused views on the material consequences of the crusades, they also stimulated a renewed interest in their ideology. In 1935, Carl Erdmann (1989–1945), a German scholar of medieval political ideas and an expert on eleventh-century papal correspondence, published Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (The Origins of the Idea of Crusading), the single most original monograph on the crusades in the twentieth century. This tackled the central issue of the alliance of religion with war and the background to its application by Urban II. The crusades are placed in the long perspective of Christian acceptance of the military values of the ruling elites. Erdmann’s exploration of the parallel impulses of official church policy and popular knightly mores set the crusades firmly within the general orbit of European culture. By exploring the pathology of early medieval Church-sanctioned public violence, Erdmann, while far from offering a direct critique of the militarism of German National Socialism, addressed a subject of obvious contemporary and not just German relevance: the communal mobilisation of violence in support of ideologies, religious or secular. His unsentimental approach to church history and ecclesiastical leaders was matched by coolness towards the whole concept of holy war and crusading, more informed by the experience of the popular militarism of the Second Reich before the First World War than the immediate challenge of the Nazis. Erdmann took the intellectual and psychological forces behind crusade ideology seriously on their own terms not as a disguise for something else – fanaticism, adventurism, greed, hysteria or escapism. In rejecting the crude material and econo
mic reductionism of the previous Franco-German model, Erdmann restored the crusades as an aspect of internal European culture and as a religious enterprise.

  Erdmann was not alone in rebalancing of crusader studies in sympathy with the twentieth-century experience of ideological conflict and popular political movements. However, some historians still clung to the old idea that religion was a cover, one prominent American crusade expert suggesting that to argue for the religious cause of the crusade was ‘like accepting the statements of Pravda that the USSR is only altruistically interested in establishing “truly democratic peoples’ governments”’.15 This was written in 1948, in the early years of the Cold War. However, other scholars in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in France, followed the same path as Erdmann, studying crusading mentalities, rhetoric, liturgy, art, canon law, popular religion, mass psychology and the means of transmitting church doctrine to the laity.16 This tradition of treating the religious motivations of lay crusaders seriously and framing the crusade within medieval developments in doctrine and canon law underpinned much of the anglophone recrudescence of crusade scholarship in the later twentieth century. This religious turn co-incided with similar approaches adopted by scholars of Arabic and Hebrew sources, shadowed by the rise of new militant Islamism in the Near East and the Christian religious Right in the United States, Europe and Russia.