Crusading and Masculinities

Natasha R. Hodgson, Katherine J. Lewis, Matthew M. Mesley, Natasha R. Hodgson, Katherine J. Lewis, Matthew M. Mesley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138054677
• eBook ISBN: 9781351680141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This volume presents the first substantial exploration of crusading and masculinity, focusing on the varied ways in which the symbiotic relationship between the two was made manifest in a range of medieval settings and sources, and to what ends. Ideas about masculinity formed an inherent part of the mindset of societies in which crusading happened, and of the conceptual framework informing both those who recorded the events and those who participated. Examination and interrogation of these ideas enables a better contextualised analysis of how those events were experienced, comprehended and portrayed. The collection is structured around five themes: sources and models; contrasting masculinities; emasculation and transgression; masculinity and religiosity and kingship and chivalry. By incorporating masculinity within their analysis of the crusades and of crusaders the contributors demonstrate how such approaches greatly enhance our understanding of crusading as an ideal, an institution and an experience. Individual essays consider western campaigns to the Middle East and Islamic responses; events and sources from the Iberian peninsula and Prussia are also interrogated and re-examined, thus enabling cross-cultural comparison of the meanings attached to medieval manhood. The collection also highlights the value of employing gender as a vital means of assessing relationships between different groups of men, whose values and standards of behaviour were socially and culturally constructed in distinct ways.

Masculinity and religiosity

12 Leading the people “as duke, count, and father”

The masculinities of Abbot Martin of Pairis in Gunther of Pairis’ Hystoria Constantinopolitana

Natasha R. Hodgson

The popes of the later eleventh century, key architects of the movement which became known as crusading, were strongly influenced by monastic principles. These helped to shape their new vision of the Church. Successive pontiffs strove to redesign the masculine identities of secular clerics – priests and bishops – along monastic lines, emphasising strictures in dress, activities, associations, and sexual behaviours.¹ However, their reforms were not solely directed at the clergy; they ultimately sought to improve Christian society as a whole. Crusading, which offered salvific rewards to secular society through the medium of armed pilgrimage, formed a part of that process. As Guibert of Nogent asserted, this was a new route to salvation for those who were not clergy:

[S]o that without having chosen from the very beginning, as has become customary, life in the monastery or some kind of religious profession, they were compelled to leave the world, although still subject to their traditional freedom of practice and habits, [and] to a certain extent they sought the grace of God by their own deeds.²

As many chroniclers attested, however, crusading stimulated an enthusiastic response from a range of men (and women) including secular and religious clergy. It was recognised that priests were needed to minister to the army on this religious endeavour but, from the time of the First Crusade, monks were discouraged from taking the cross. Travel outside the monastery was problematic as it contravened the core Benedictine principle of stabilitas, which required monks to remain within their communities.³ As the crusade movement progressed, however, the increasing involvement of monks in preaching, financing, and organising expeditions meant that the presence of some monastic participants on crusade was gradually accepted and, by the end of the twelfth century, even deliberately sought.

Historians have approached the relationship between crusade and monasticism in a variety of ways. In the early seventies Brundage explored canonical perspectives on the crusading monk, establishing the juridical permissions for their participation.⁴ Riley-Smith famously ascribed monastic values to the crusade army as whole, calling it “a military monastery on the move”. This notion was also explored by Brundage.⁵ Considerable historical attention has focused on the Second Crusade and the pivotal role played by St Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians in preaching and promoting the crusade movement during the mid-twelfth century.⁶ Purkis argued convincingly for contemporaries viewing the crusade as spiritually equivalent to monasticism and established specific connections between Cistercian and crusader spirituality in the period up to 1187.⁷ St. Bernard also supported the newly created military orders, monastic institutions with a primary duty to engage in holy warfare.⁸ In the 1980s, Schmugge outlined the patterns of Cistercian participation in the crusade movement, which he viewed as central to the whole structure and organisation of papal crusading policy in the twelfth century.⁹ Kienzle has established changing Cistercian attitudes towards and strategies for preaching crusades. She highlighted their significant involvement in counteracting heresy in southern France into the thirteenth century.¹⁰ From a crusader studies perspective, however, masculinity has not yet played a significant role in evaluating perceptions of monks on crusade. Conversely, works that engage with gender and medieval monasticism have tended to focus on life within the cloister, the regulation of monastic life and bodies, and the struggle to maintain chastity rather than examining opportunities for the expression of gendered identity in external activities.¹¹ This essay seeks to develop new perspectives on the relationship between monasticism and crusading by exploring ideas about gender, authority, and legitimacy in a text which catalogues the experiences of a Cistercian abbot outside his community on the Fourth Crusade, the Hystoria Constantinopolitana.¹²

For the majority of this period, monastic participation in crusading was officially limited to preaching and financing except where special permissions were granted. However, both Kienzle and Brundage pinpoint a change in attitudes towards the turn of the twelfth century. Brundage associated this with the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216), and Kienzle extended the timescale to 1229.¹³ After this key period, Cistercians continued to be involved in crusading, but preaching, recruitment, and participation began to fall more naturally to the Franciscans and Dominicans, whose mendicant role arguably rendered them more suitable for the negotium Christi. This article focuses specifically on the Fourth Crusade, an event at the crux of this shift in perceptions.¹⁴ During a controversial expedition that ended in the sack of the Christian City of Constantinople in 1204, the elite leaders, the rank and file, the papal architect Innocent III, and the religious and secular clergy who preached and accompanied the expedition all came into conflict with one another. Different sets of expectations about what constituted proper crusading behaviour caused internal discord, and as military targets shifted, perceptions about enemies also had to be realigned. Such tensions compelled those who recorded the Fourth Crusade to reflect on the nature of medieval masculinity from a variety of perspectives as they strove to come to terms with an astonishing chain of events, whether they saw the outcome as resulting from human decisions, divine intervention, or a combination of both.¹⁵ Within the substantial body of scholarly attention that the Hystoria Constantinopolitana has received, the wide range of masculine values and identities employed by the author, Gunther of Pairis, especially in relation to his main character, Abbot Martin, have yet to be examined. This essay highlights core themes relating to both secular and eccesiastial masculinities as they appear in the text, setting them in the context of contemporary attitudes towards both crusade and monasticism. It seeks not only to gain a deeper understanding of how contemporary monastic gender identities were constructed in relation to the crusade movement, but also to demonstrate how crusading as a literary topos had the potential to inform and develop those identities.

Context: the source and its author

The Hystoria Constantinopolitana was largely complete by 1205, and its author, Gunther (ca. 1150–1210?), probably hailed from near Basel. Much of the available information about him is compiled from the other works with which he is associated.¹⁶ One of these, the Solimarius, was dedicated to Conrad, son of Frederick Barbarossa, whom the author claimed was a pupil, creating a possible link to the imperial court. He is therefore thought to have been a secular priest or teacher before becoming a monk. He joined the Cistercian abbey at Pairis, in the Alsace region of north-east France at the very beginning of the thirteenth century, perhaps because he had failed to attract continuing patronage at court.¹⁷ When the abbot of Gunther’s community, Martin, commissioned a history to celebrate the events of the Fourth Crusade and his personal role in transmitting a number of relics from the captured city of Constantinople to Pairis, he chose Gunther, who was clearly a man of considerable literary skill, to compose it.

Gunther’s account takes us through Abbot Martin’s crusade experience in a sequence of narrative stages. He described Martin’s crusade sermon at Basel Münster in May 1200 in detail, ending with his pledge to take the cross.¹⁸ After a brief preaching tour, we are told that Martin went to Cîteaux to seek the blessing of the order for his pilgrimage.¹⁹ He then travelled with the crusaders through Italy to Verona and on to Venice. The organisers of the crusade had wildly overestimated the number of crusaders mustering there and were unable to pay for the ships and supplies they had commissioned. Ultimately, the Venetians agreed to join the crusade, but to recoup some of their financial losses they controversially directed the crusaders to attack their enemies in the Christian city of Zara on the nearby Dalmatian coast. Despite voicing misgivings, Martin continued with the German cohort to Zara at the behest of papal legate Peter Capuano.²⁰ After the attack, Martin went with the negotiators sent by the army to Rome to beg forgiveness from the pope.²¹ Ordered to continue with the crusade to the East, Martin abandoned the German cohort who went on to Constantinople, setting sail for Acre. In the Holy Land he encountered a terrible sickness that swept through the crusading community, and ministered to those on their deathbeds.²² He then rejoined the main army at Constantinople, purportedly to seek aid for the Holy Land after a peace treaty between Aimery of Lusignan and the sultan of Egypt was broken. He arrived in November 1203 in time for the attack on the city in April 1204. However, he played a limited role in these events and disappeared entirely from Gunther’s account of the capture of the city.²³ After the crusaders had successfully achieved their end, Gunther moved on to describing Martin’s theft of an impressive haul of relics from the abbey church of Christ Pantokrator.²⁴ Concealing his holy booty, Martin travelled first to Acre again where he updated the Germans with news from Constantinople, and then he set sail for home. En route both Martin and the priest with whom he shared quarters (Aegidius) experienced visions about the relics he carried, and faced perils over land and sea.²⁵ Finally, the abbot returned triumphant, distributing some relics in Basel before heading back to Pairis with the major part of his haul. The relics he stole are listed by Gunther in chapter 24, and included objects relating to the Passion, the Apostles, and martyrs as well as a significant number of saints.²⁶

The Hystoria’s importance as a Fourth Crusade narrative has been underestimated in the past because it ignored or misrepresented some of the key events highlighted by the lay eyewitness accounts of Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari.²⁷ It was also treated with suspicion because of its high literary style (prosimetry) and its glorification of Abbot Martin’s role on the crusade, both of which distorted the historical content. The definitive critical edition produced by Orth and a scholarly analysis and English translation provided by Andrea in the last twenty-five years have done much to re-establish its historical and literary significance.²⁸ The Hystoria utilised a highly symbolic format. The main body was constructed about twenty-four paired chapters, each comprising prose and poetry that reflected on matching themes as highlighted by Andrea.²⁹ It was also a deeply philosophical work that drew ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors’ biographies
• Crusading and masculinities: introduction
• Sources and models
• Contrasting masculinities
• Emasculation and transgression
• Masculinity and religiosity
• Chivalry and kingship
• Afterword
• Index