A History of the Crusades (3 page)

It must be admitted that crusading is not easy to define. The movement lasted a very long time and opinions and policies changed; for instance, the development of crusade leagues was an adaptation of crusading to suit the rise of the nation state. Crusading involved men and women from every region of western Europe and from all classes; attitudes can never have been homogeneous. And it appealed at the same time to intellectuals and to the general public, so that we are faced by a range of ideas from the most cerebral to the most primitive, from the peaks of moral theology to the troughs of anti-semitic blood-feuds. Ideas from different ends of the spectrum, moreover, interreacted. Because crusading was a voluntary activity, popes and preachers had to transmit the theology in a popular form, and it was not uncommon for popular conceptions to attach themselves to official Church preaching. For instance, crusades had technically to be defensive—Christians could not fight wars of conversion—but at grassroots’ level people perceived Christianity to be a muscular religion, and missionary elements again and again pervaded crusading thought and propaganda.

It was common ground among historians that a crusade was a holy war, proclaimed by the pope on Christ’s behalf, the fighters in which, or a substantial proportion of them, took vows of a special kind and enjoyed certain temporal and spiritual privileges, in particular the indulgence. But what was the status of crusading elsewhere than to the Holy Land? Crusades preached by the pope in Christ’s name, led by crusaders who had taken vows and enjoyed the privileges and indulgences, were fought, as we have seen, not only in the East but also in Europe, and not only against Muslims but also against pagans, heretics, and
schismatics, and even against Catholic opponents of the papacy. Were all of these true crusades? Or were those fought elsewhere than in the East perversions, or at least distortions, of an original ideal, which should be classified separately? Although many historians arbitrarily opted for one approach or the other without explanation, the issue was and is an important one. For one thing the pluralists (the holders of the broad view of crusading) took into consideration a range of sources which the traditionalists (the holders of the narrow view) would probably not have bothered to read. For another, the policies of the papacy towards crusading had a different complexion if one believed that the popes were juggling with a strategy involving various theatres of war which, if they did not carry equal weight— everyone accepted that the crusades to the East were the most prestigious and provided the scale against which the others were measured—were at least qualitatively similar. One way, perhaps the only way, forward was to ask another, deceptively simple, question and it is on that question that the debate has concentrated. What did the contemporaries of these crusades think? A crusade came into being when proclaimed by a pope, and it is undeniable that popes, at least officially, made little distinction between the validity of the various theatres of war. But it is arguable how far they were in touch with Christian public opinion. The trouble is that the evidence has proved itself to be elusive. There were critics of the crusades which were not directed to the East, but there were not very many of them and it is hard to say how representative they were, because almost every one of them had an axe to grind. There were occasional reports by senior churchmen, like the cardinal and canonist Hostiensis or the monk of St Albans, Matthew Paris, of discontent with the preaching of alternative crusades. But what weight should be given to this evidence? And how far is it counterbalanced by the large numbers of men and women who took the cross for them? How should one treat descriptions such as that provided by James of Vitry of the obsessive interest from afar of St Mary of Oignies in the Albigensian Crusade? Mary had visions of Christ sharing his concerns with her about the spread of heresy in Languedoc and, ‘although so
far away, she saw the holy angels rejoicing and taking the souls of the dead (crusaders) to heavenly bliss without any purgatory’. She developed such ardour that she could scarcely restrain herself from making the journey to south-western France.

In 1953 Giles Constable demonstrated that the armies of the Second Crusade, engaged in the East, in Spain, and across the Elbe, were regarded by contemporaries as detachments of a single host, but ten years later Hans Mayer questioned the treatment of alternative crusades as genuine expressions of the movement. He admitted that popes and canonists apparently considered them to be such, but he suggested that this was simply a diplomatic posture. And in his
The Crusades
(first published in German in 1965 and in English in 1972) he defined the crusade narrowly as ‘a war which is aimed at acquiring or preserving Christian domination over the Sepulchre of Our Lord in Jerusalem i.e. a clear-cut objective which can be geographically pinned down to a particular region’. Four years later Helmut Roscher came out in favour of the pluralist definition, as did Jonathan Riley-Smith in 1977; and in 1983 the issue was hotly debated at the first conference of
The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East
. Since then Elizabeth Siberry has shown that the twelfth-and thirteenth-century critics of alternative crusading were less representative than was supposed; and Norman Housley, who has become the leading apologist for pluralism, has provided a full-scale analysis of the political crusades in Italy, demonstrating how integrated they were into the movement. He has also written the first treatment of the whole range of crusading in the fourteenth century and the first comprehensive pluralist history of the later crusades.

The priority of the pluralists was originally to demonstrate that come what may the popes and the mass of the faithful treated all crusading as qualitatively the same. But as they have grown in confidence they have begun to suggest that the variations in the different expressions of the movement were just as important as the similarities, and they have started to draw a more nuanced picture. Along the Baltic coast in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Teutonic Knights developed the
‘perpetual crusade’, without the need for repeated and specific papal proclamations. In the Iberian peninsula crusading was much more under the control of the kings, especially the kings of Castile, than it was elsewhere.

At the same time as they were debating definition, an increasing number of historians began to look westwards. Interest in the European theatres of war may have been partly responsible for this, but two other factors seem to have been more important. The first was the realization that huge caches of source material—even for the much-worked twelfth and thirteenth centuries—had not been used. The European archives of the military orders had been generally ignored in favour of the more glamorous eastern ones, in spite of the obvious fact that the fighting convents in the East of the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights, and the later order-states of Rhodes, Prussia, and Malta, relied on money, material, and manpower channelled to them from western Europe, where at any time most of the brothers were to be found. Any consideration of the religious life of the orders had to start with the fact that the norm was not military or hospitaller service in Palestine or Rhodes but estatemanagement and conventual life in the European commanderies, priories, and provincial masterships, and that it was there that many brothers found fulfilment. It was natural that there should emerge a group of historians, led by Alan Forey, Michael Gervers, and Anne-Marie Legras, who have concentrated on the orders’ western estates. Then there was all the material on crusaders in charters and governmental records, which was generally overlooked until Giles Constable drew attention to it. It is massive. For instance, at least a third of the individuals who are so far known to have taken the cross for the First Crusade are not mentioned in the narrative accounts of the expedition, but are to be found referred to only in charters.

The second factor was a growing interest in motivation. It cannot be stressed often enough that crusades were arduous, disorientating, frightening, dangerous, and expensive for participants, and the continuing enthusiasm for them displayed over the centuries is not easy to explain. They grew out of the eleventh-century reform movement, which gave rise to forces
that probably would have found expression in wars of liberation whatever the situation in the East had been. Recruitment was certainly generated by the evangelization of churchmen, and the organization of crusade preaching, and the sermons preached—or at least the exemplars which have survived—are now being closely studied. But if many crusaders had been motivated by ideals, their ideals were certainly not the same as those of high churchmen, and what nobles and knights thought and what their aspirations were have become live issues. Some crusade historians, among them Marcus Bull, Simon Lloyd, James Powell, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and Christopher Tyerman, have been turning their minds to these questions, and a few directions for future research have been signposted. As we shall see, in the early stages of the movement the predisposition of families, and particularly of women in the kin groups, seems to have been an important factor; by the later thirteenth century local nexuses created by lordship, which had always been influential, were playing an even greater part. Popular religion, adapted to suit a society of extended families, was perhaps the major influence at first, but by 1300 it was being modified by chivalric ideas.

Changes in the direction of historians’ interests have been accompanied by a massive expansion of the time-scale in which they work. Runciman covered the period after 1291 in forty pages at the end of his third volume, concluding with the death of Pope Pius II at Ancona in 1464. In the latest English edition of his
Crusades
, Mayer devoted less than a page out of 288 to the movement after 1291. But recent crusade studies have ended in 1521, 1560, 1580, 1588, and 1798. To Kenneth Setton, above all, must be given the credit for this development. His
The Papacy and the Levant
, covering the centuries from the sack of Constantinople in 1204 to the battle of Lepanto in 1571, provided scholars with an entrée into the major collections of sources for later crusading. It is now clear that, far from being in decline, crusading was almost as active in the fourteenth century as it had been in the thirteenth. Even more startling has been the opening up of the sixteenth century. Early modern historians had occasionally referred to the grim Spanish struggle for
North Africa at that time as a crusade, although they seem to have been using the term loosely. Setton demonstrated that that is exactly what it was. He wrote a sequel for the seventeenth century, and scholars now have a guide to material, particularly the archives in Italy, up to 1700. Associated with the history of Spanish crusading in the Mediterranean was that of the orderstate of the Knights Hospitallers of St John on Malta, established by the Emperor Charles V as an advance post blocking the sea route from Constantinople to North Africa. The catalogues of the archives of the brother-knights in Valletta have been printed, uncovering the sources for the history of a remarkable little state, the last survivor of the crusading movement, which did not fall until 1798. It is certain that there will soon be a body of solid academic work on centuries of crusading which have been virtually ignored.

Whatever was going on beneath the surface forty years ago, the generally accepted history of the crusades related particularly to large-scale expeditions to the East and to the Latin settlements in Palestine and Syria. The interest of most historians evaporated after 1291, by which time crusading was believed to be in terminal decline. Since then the subject has expanded in time and space, as it has changed its nature to one extending over seven centuries and many different theatres of war. The prevailing interests used to be economic, proto-colonial, and military. Now they are religious, legal, and social, and there is a growing emphasis on the origins and endurance of the impulses to crusade.

MARCUS BULL

His thirst for blood was so unprecedented in recent times that those who are themselves thought cruel seem milder when slaughtering animals than he did when killing people. For he did not establish his victims’ guilt of a crime and then dispatch them cleanly with the sword, which is a routine occurrence. Rather he butchered them and inflicted ghastly tortures. When he forced his prisoners, whoever they were, to pay ransoms, he had them strung up by their testicles—sometimes he did this with his own hands—and often the weight was too much to bear, so that their bodies ruptured and the viscera spilled out. Others were suspended by their thumbs or private parts, and a stone was attached to their shoulders. He would pace underneath them and, when he could not extort from them what was not in fact theirs to give, he used to cudgel their bodies over and over again until they promised what he wanted or died from the punishment. No one knows the number of those who perished in his gaols from starvation, disease, and physical abuse as they languished in his chains.

This vivid description was written in 1115 by Guibert of Nogent, the abbot of a small monastery near Laon in northeastern France. It concerned a prominent local lord named Thomas of Marle. The passage quoted does not exhaust Guibert’s thoughts on Thomas: there is more in the same vein, a mixture of righteous indignation and wide-eyed fascination which veers between the grimly realistic and the anatomically
preposterous. From the point of view of the First Crusade, the description is of considerable interest because of the careers of the two men involved. Guibert was the author of a long chronicle of the crusade. The small number of surviving manuscripts suggests that it was less popular than some of the other histories produced by contemporaries, but it is nevertheless a valuable source for modern historians, not least because Guibert attempted to elaborate upon the facts—his information came to him second-hand—by explaining the crusaders’ experiences in learnedly theological terms. Thomas, for his part, was one of those who had taken part in the expedition. In the process he had earned himself a very favourable reputation, which Guibert attempted to twist around by claiming that he used to prey upon pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem.