The Crusades
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THE CRUSADES
Christopher Tyerman
New York / London
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© 2007 Christopher Tyerman
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Frontispiece: An armored knight from the time of the Crusades is depicted in this detail from a twelfth-century fresco decorating the Chapel of St. Gilles, in Montoire-sur-le-Loir, France.
For
P.P.A.B.
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CONTENTS
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Preface
List of Maps
Introduction
ONE Definition
TWO Crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean
THREE Crusades in the West
FOUR The Impact of the Crusades
FIVE Holy War
SIX The Business of the Cross
SEVEN Holy Lands
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chronology
Picture Credits
PREFACE
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WHILE THE EIGHTH-CENTURY Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume thought the Crusades “the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation,” he admitted they “engrossed the attention of Europe and have ever since engrossed the curiosity of mankind.” The reasons for this are not hard to find. The twin themes of judgment on past violence and fascination with its causes have ensured the survival of the Crusades as more than an inert subject for antiquarians. Since Pope Urban II (1088–99) in 1095 answered a call for military help from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118), by summoning a vast army to fight in the name of God to liberate eastern Christianity and recover the Holy City of Jerusalem, there have been few periods when the consequences of this act have not gripped minds and imaginations, primarily in western society but increasingly, since the nineteenth century, among communities that have seen themselves as heirs to the victims of this form of religious violence. With the history of the Crusades, modern interest is compounded by spurious topicality and inescapable familiarity. Ideological warfare and the pathology of acceptable communal violence are embedded in the historical experience of civilization. Justification for war and killing for a noble cause never cease to find modern manifestations. The Crusades present a phenomenon so dramatic and extreme in aspiration and execution and yet so rebarbative to modern sensibilities, that they cannot fail to move both as a story and as an expression of a society remote in time and attitudes yet apparently so abundantly recognizable. Spread over five hundred years and across three continents, the Crusades may not have defined medieval Christian Europe, yet they provide a most extraordinary feature that retains the power to excite, appall, and disturb. They remain one of the great subjects of European history. What follows is an attempt to explain why.
The phenomenon of violence justified by religious faith has ebbed and flowed, sometimes nearing the center, sometimes retreating to the margins of historical and contemporary consciousness. When I was asked to write this short introduction to the Crusades, holy war, Christian or otherwise, was not high on the public or political agenda. Now when I have finished, it is. So this work conforms to a pattern traced in what follows, of historical study relating to current events. My views on that relationship will, I hope, become clear enough. What remain hidden except to the lynx-eyed are the debts to many other scholars, colleagues, and friends from whom I have learnt so much and should have remembered so much more. They must forgive a collective thanks. The faults in this libellus are mine not theirs. The dedication is a very small recompense for incalculable munificence of advice, support, and friendship over so many years, in dark days as well as bright evenings of exhausting but inexhaustible hospitality.
C.J. T.
OXFORD
MAY 22, 2005
LIST OF MAPS
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Medieval Europe and Its Frontiers
Europe and the Mediterranean:
Christianity and Its Non-Christian Neighbors
The Near East in the Twelfth Century
The Crusader States of Outremer
The Spanish Reconquista
The Baltic
The Aegean in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
The Castles of Outremer
Pope Urban II, immortalized here in a sculpture in Champagne, France, appealed for a crusade to the East.
INTRODUCTION
BETWEEN 1189 AND 1191, a cosmopolitan army of western invaders besieged the Palestinian coastal city of Acre, modern Akko. Their camp resembled the trenches of the Western Front during the First World War, fetid, disease-ridden, and dangerous. One story circulated to boost morale concerned the heroic death in battle a few years earlier of a knight from Touraine in France, Jakelin de Mailly. A member of the Military Order of Knights Templar, a soldier who had taken religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in order to devote his life to protecting Christians and their conquests in Syria and Palestine, Jakelin had been killed fighting a Muslim raiding party in Galilee on May 1, 1187. In describing what proved to be a massacre of the Christians, the story had Jakelin fighting on alone, hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded. The chronicler who recorded the story before 1192, possibly an Englishman and certainly a veteran of the siege of Acre, is worth quoting in full:
He was not afraid to die for Christ. At long last, crushed rather than conquered by spears, stones and lances, he sank to the ground and joyfully passed to heaven with the martyr’s crown, triumphant. It was indeed a gentle death with no place for sorrow, when one man’s sword had constructed such a great crown for himself from the crowd laid all around him. Death is sweet when the victor lies encircled by the impious people he has slain with his victorious right hand… The place where he fought was covered with the stubble which the reapers had left standing when they had cut the grain shortly before. Such a great number of Turks had rushed in to attack, and this one man had fought for so long against so many battalions, that the field in which they stood was completely reduced to dust and there was not a trace of the crop to be seen. It is said that there were some who sprinkled the body of the dead man with dust and placed dust on their heads, believing that they would draw courage from the contact. In fact, rumor has it that one person was moved with more fervor than the rest. He cut off the man’s genitals, and kept them safe for begetting children so that even when dead the man’s members—if such a thing were possible—would produce an heir with courage as great as his.
Except possibly for the suggestion of sexual fetishism, this story, which would not have convinced all who heard it by any mean
s, represented a standard piece of crusade propaganda. Crusading, fighting for God in return for a promise of salvation, placed a premium on courage, physical prowess, martial skill, and religious conviction. As such, little separated it from other forms of organized violence. Yet the tale of Jakelin de Mailly emphasized certain features particularly characteristic of the Crusades, especially the belief or assertion that violence for the faith will earn heavenly reward. The killer, already a professed religious, becomes a holy man, a martyr, a witness for his God. Such is the hero’s spiritual potency that his physical remains retain a powerful material charge to confer his human qualities to others, even posthumously through his sexual organs. His horrible, violent death was interpreted as “gentle” and “sweet”; his memory provided inspiration; his remains were thought to convey virtue. Death was a completion but no conclusion.
On the face of it, few mentalities—enthusiastic for violence, fixed on an afterlife—could be less accessible to modern observers in the western cultural tradition than this. Yet no aspect of Christian medieval history enjoys clearer modern recognition than the Crusades, nor has been more subject to egregious distortion. Most of what passes in public as knowledge of the Crusades is either misleading or false. The Crusades were not solely wars against Islam in Palestine. They were not chiefly conducted by land-hungry younger sons, nor were they part of some early attempt to impose western economic hegemony on the world. More fundamentally, they did not represent an aberration from Christian teaching. Nonetheless, interest and invention exist as two sides of the same historical coin. That in part explains why the world of Jakelin de Mailly and his eulogist has not been consigned to the same obscurity as that of medieval scholastics or flagellants; that and the drama of the events themselves. Jakelin’s death in a desperate and foolhardy skirmish in the Galilean hills may arouse only modest interest. But his presence two thousand miles from his homeland; the cause for which he swore religious vows, fought, and died; the region for which he battled; and the memorable historical figures drawn into the conflict in which he served have ensured his endeavor and sacrifice can still touch a nerve. That is the excuse for this book.
The word “crusade,” a non-medieval Franco-Spanish hybrid only popularized in English since the eighteenth century, has entered the Anglo-American language as a synonym for a good cause vigorously pursued, from pacific Christian evangelism to militant temperance. However floridly and misleadingly romantic, the image of mailed knights bearing crosses on surcoats and banners, fighting for their faith under an alien sun, occupies a familiar niche in the façade of modern western perceptions of the past. Despite, or perhaps because of, its lack of context, it remains the indelible image of crusading in popular culture, shared even by the sculptors of the late President Assad of Syria. Iconography is never innocent. Assad’s Damascus Saladin is defeating the Christians at their own imperialist game as surely as the Ladybird’s Saladin and Richard I are playing out some nineteenth-century cultural minuet. Polemicists and politicians know—or should know—that to invoke the Crusades is to stir deep cultural myths, assumptions, and prejudices, a fact recognized by Pope John Paul II’s apology to Jews, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox Christians for the intolerance and violence inflicted by Catholic warriors of the cross. Although it is difficult to see how even Christ’s Vicar on earth can apologize for events in which he did not participate, over which he had no control, and for which he bore no responsibility, this intellectually muddled gesture acknowledged the continued inherent potency of crusading, a story that can still move, outrage, and inflame. One of the groups led by the fundamentalist religious terrorist Usama bin Laden was known as “The World Islamic Front for Crusade against Jews and Crusaders.” To understand medieval crusading for itself and to explain its survival may be regarded as an urgent contemporary task, one for which historians must take responsibility. To this dual study of history and historiography, of the Crusades and what could be called their post-history, this is a brief introduction.
This statue of Saladin, commissioned by Damascus, Syria, in 1992, depicts him as the victor of the Battle of Hattin; at his side are an infantryman and a sufi—sword and faith.
The violent legacy of the Crusades was apparent when Pope John Paul II issued an apology from the Vatican to Jews, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Casual modern acquaintance with the Crusades stems from the wide dissemination of crusading motifs from the early nineteenth century, a rather precious, sentimental vision of an invented medieval past, as in Walter Scott’s popular and influential Ivanhoe and The Talisman, the latter actually set during the Third Crusade. A similar sentimentality infected continental responses; romantic images of crusaders became a stock in trade for artists and poets. The cultural familiarity on which the force of these I works relied was maintained into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries chiefly by the popular media of Hollywood, television, and imaginative literature, not all of it describing itself as fiction. Crossovers between history and entertainment at least suggest a market, if only for what the great American crusader scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, J. La Monte, forensically described as “worthless pseudo-historical trash.”
In the nineteenth century, artists and writers, including Scottish novelist, Sir Walter Scott, romanticized the Crusades with an invented history.
Crusading has left a physical imprint on Europe. Most obviously, impressive sites associated with crusading or the military orders remain, such as Aigues Mortes in the Rhone Delta, from where Louis IX of France embarked for Egypt in 1248, or the fourteenth-century headquarters of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg in Prussia (now Malbork in Poland). Some reminders invoke a somber message: the plaque at Clifford’s Tower in York commemorates the Jews who died there in March 1190, victims by murder and suicide of Yorkshire crusaders. More intimate evocation of personal responses and the strenuous conviction of individuals thirty to fifty generations ago can be found in quiet corners like the eleventh-century church at Bosham, Hampshire, on the edge of Chichester Harbor, whose great chancel arch saw Harold Godwineson on his way across the Channel to a fateful meeting with Duke William of Normandy in 1064 and earned a place in the Bayeux Tapestry. Crosses etched deep in the stone of the door jambs and a cross of Jerusalem more lightly scratched on a nearby pillar, whether marks of anxious hope on departure or of thankful relief at a safe return, speak directly of a physical ideal, witness in almost the ultimate degree of devotion to a belief in the tangibility of the divine that allowed ordinary, faithful laymen, through their own action and the material relics of their God and His Saints, to touch Paradise. That identical crosses can also be seen incised on the walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem emphasizes both the startling reality of the experience of pilgrims and crusaders and the gulf between their age and our own. Yet, such memorials leave a trace in the mind.
A scene from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe is illustrated in The Abduction of Rebecca, an 1846 painting by Eugène Delacroix. Saracen slaves are kidnapping the novel’s heroine.
Depicted here in the Bayeux Tapestry, future king of England Harold Godwineson crosses the English Channel on a diplomatic mission to Normandy.
Visible reminders are strewn across the modern landscape. In London alone, without the Crusades there would be no shopping in Knightsbridge, no cricket at St. John’s Wood, no law at the Temple—all places that derive their names from the medieval landlords of these suburbs, the Military Orders of the Temple and of the Hospital of St. John, religious orders originally established to succor and protect pilgrims to Jerusalem in the aftermath of its conquest by the first crusaders in 1099. Linguistic and material survivals are matched by a more urgent and in some cases more insidious recognition that has woven the memory of crusading into some of the more intractable modern political problems, the Arab—Israeli conflict, responses to Terrorism, religious inter-faith conflict, the origins of western racism and anti-Semitism, and the nature of and reaction to E
uropean and American political and cultural imperialism.
Yet here lurks a paradox. The continuing popular and political resonance of crusading feeds on an historical phenomenon that, both in its own time and later, has lacked objective precision in definition, practice, perception, or approval. In the Middle Ages there existed no single word for what are now known as the Crusades. While those who took the cross were described as crucesignati—people (not exclusively male) signed with the cross—their activities tended to be described by analogy, euphemism, metaphor, or generality: peregrinatio, pilgrimage; via or iter, way or journey; crux, literally cross; negotium, business. This allowed for a flexibility of target and ideology that was matched by a concentration in canon law (the law of the church) on the behavior of the crusader and the implications of the various privileges associated with the activity rather than any general theoretical formula specifically defining a legal concept of a crusade. Thus at the heart of this form of Christian warfare lay a possibly convenient ambiguity of ideas and action that spawned a wide diversity of responses. The wars of the cross, initiated to regain Jerusalem for Christianity in 1095 and extended over the next few generations to encompass a wide variety of violence against the Catholic Church’s perceived external and internal foes, have been understood by participants, contemporaries, and later observers in a protean variety of ways.
By turns, crusading has been variously interpreted. It has been presented as warfare to defend a beleaguered Faith or the ultimate expression of secular piety. Alternatively, some have regarded it as a decisive ecclesiastical compromise with base secular habits; a defining commitment of the church to accommodate the spiritual aspirations of the laity. As the admired pinnacle of ambition for a ruling military elite, crusading is portrayed as an agent as well as symbol of religious, cultural, or ethnic identity or even superiority; a vehicle for personal or communal aggrandizement, commercial expansion, or political conquest. More narrowly, the Crusades appear as an expression of the authority of the papacy in imposing order and uniformity within Christendom as well as securing its external frontiers. Conflicting assessments of the Crusades have described them as manifestations of religious love, by Christians for fellow believers and by God for His people; an experiment in European colonialism; an example of recrudescent western racism; an excuse and incentive for religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, and acts of barbarism; or a noble cause. Steven Runciman, the best-known and most influential anglophone Crusade historian of the twentieth century, imperishably condemned the whole enterprise as “one long act of intolerance in the name of God which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”