The Debate on the Crusades, 1099–2010

Christopher Tyerman

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719073212
• eBook ISBN: 9781847798992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first book-length study to chart how the dramatic events of 30 generations ago have been understood, shaped and manipulated by writers in successive periods since and to show how modern images of the crusades are as much a product of our own and intervening times as of the bloody wars of the cross themselves.

1

‘The greatest event since the Resurrection’: some medieval views of the crusades

The very first narrative accounts of the crusades were composed by participants on the First Crusade itself. They were contained in letters sent to the west in 1097–99, culminating in the carefully edited and pointed version prepared for the pope by the crusade leadership in September 1099, the first surviving history.¹ Although composed by eyewitnesses, these letters were formal exercises designed to construct didactic stories to explain to their audience the providential significance of the events experienced. They certainly did not contain simple or unadorned still less objective accounts of ‘what really happened’. The military campaign was insistently rendered as a divinely instigated and directed mission that operated in the double contexts of history and scripture, this world and the next. Setting the tone for much subsequent historicising, from the start the First Crusade was a literary construct.

Medieval writers knew from the classical past that history differed from annals or chronicles on the one side, and satire, drama or other literary genres on the other. History was deliberately stylish, interpretive and didactic. Specifically Christian historiography, a legacy of the late Roman Empire and writers such as Augustine of Hippo, concerned itself with the significance of terrestrial events in relation to divine providence, sin and the march of the world to the Day of Judgement. Individuals could become merely patterns of conduct and free will. The narrative of events contained a moral purpose, presented rhetorically, in order to persuade. The Biblical tradition differed in that it purported to present a divinely inspired account of God’s relations with his Creation, especially Man, culminating in the revelation of the Crucifixion and Resurrection and the prophecy of Christ’s return at the end of time. Its truth was many-layered, including literal, allegorical, metaphorical and mystical, but it was Revealed Truth, testament of Faith itself.

The First Crusade, Latin chronicles and their legacy

The drama of the First Crusade provoked a uniquely heavy literary response in the immediate production of histories trying to make sense of it. These shared some distinctive features. Whether conceived as Gesta (i.e. deeds, of an individual, such as Ralph of Caen’s Gesta Tancredi, or a people, the Gesta Francorum or Gesta Dei Per Francos) or Historia, the earliest written histories of the First Crusade are essays in interpretation, not mere recitation of events, not Annals or Chronicles. Despite often romantic wishful thinking of later readers, they are all compilations of memories of participants and other written accounts; there are no single-author memoirs. Each account is shot through with precise biblical allusions aimed at establishing specific interpretive parallels between the crusaders and the Israelites of Exodus or the Maccabees. Urban II’s call to arms evoked Christ’s own injunction to believers to take up their crosses and follow him. Events attracted biblical language; the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 could be recalled in words from the Book of Revelation. The great significance of the success of the first Jerusalem journey was unmistakable. In the words of the most popular history of the First Crusade, written within a decade of its conclusion, ‘since the creation of the world what more miraculous undertaking has there been (other than the mystery of the redeeming Cross) than what was achieved in our own time by the journey of our own people to Jerusalem?’² Just as the First Crusade was depicted as a sign of God’s immanence, so its story was crafted as if it were a continuation of holy scripture defining a new chapter in God’s revelation to man. From the start, the historiography of crusading was conceived as a branch of theology.

Although the First Crusade remained central to all later understanding of what crusading meant, its interpretation seemingly rested on a very narrow tradition. The dominant Latin version of the events of 1095–99 derived from a sequence of related texts, the most influential and possibly earliest of which was the anonymous Gesta Francorum (before 1104, possibly as early as 1099/1100, perhaps derived from a previous compilation in circulation). Although composed as if by a participant as a linear narrative, in an apparently artless style, the Gesta shows signs of careful construction. Embracing a number of simultaneous perspectives, evidently from different sources, its clear didactic intent reveals itself in albeit mangled scriptural references and, not least, in placing the most direct interpretation of this form of holy war in the mouth of the mother of the Muslim ruler of Mosul: ‘the Christians alone cannot fight with you … but their god fights for them every day’. The scene is close to vernacular epic.³ The Gesta provided or shared material used by three other veterans of the campaign, Raymond of Aguilers, canon of Le Puy (pre-1105), Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to Baldwin I of Jerusalem (first redaction pre-1105), and, most closely related, the Poitevin Peter Tudebode (before 1111).⁴ Although Raymond’s and Fulcher’s accounts were used by other writers, the primacy of the Gesta version was assured through its reworking, in particular by Robert of Rheims (c. 1106/7). The Gesta survives in seven medieval manuscripts; Raymond in at least ten; Fulcher in sixteen; Tudebode in four; Robert in ninety-four, thirty-seven from the twelfth century alone. Of the works of Robert’s two sophisticated Benedictine colleagues who also decided to improve the Gesta’s relatively unadorned account, Baldric of Bourgueil’s (c. 1107) and Guibert of Nogent’s (1109) survive respectively in seven and eight medieval manuscripts. The contrasting Rhineland Historia of Albert of Aachen (first six books possibly soon after 1102) survives in thirteen manuscripts, but is genuinely independent of both the Gesta tradition and its propagation by the northern French Benedictine mafia, although like them reliant on participants’ testimony. Among the Latin histories, Albert provided the only substantial challenge to the papalist, northern French tradition and only came into his own via the mediation of the cosmopolitan Jerusalemite historian, William of Tyre (c. 1130–86). The other Latin literary accounts and the scattered monastic and urban chronicles scarcely competed.⁵

At least for the twelfth century, Robert of Rheims was pervasive. Apart from the French version of William of Tyre’s Historia, Robert’s was the only medieval prose crusade history known to have been directly translated into a vernacular language (German) during the middle ages. With his embellishments, Robert’s use of the Gesta confirmed a specific narrative scheme: the fulfilment of God’s direct will; Urban II and papal authority; and the unity of crusaders as ‘Franks’, the new Chosen People. Others said much the same. Fulcher of Chartres has a Turk warn Kerboga of Mosul before the battle of Antioch in 1098: ‘Behold the Franks are coming; flee now or fight bravely for I see the banner of the mighty Pope advancing.’ Robert’s view was cemented by wide dissemination of manuscripts. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany received a copy before he embarked on the Third Crusade in 1189. It was put into Latin verse in Alsace, also in the 1180s. Many twelfth-century chroniclers and poets across Latin Christendom relied on Robert.⁶

The need for such an establishment view became clear, as the details of what had happened on the First Crusade were contested from the start. Writing in the very first years of the twelfth century, Raymond of Aguilers, possibly disingenuously, claimed to have been prompted to compose his account of the eastern expedition by the lies being spread by deserters.⁷ The weight of enthusiastic commentary suggests a desire to reconcile this new form of holy war with traditional ecclesiastical views on the sinfulness of violence, a task lent topicality by the contemporary controversies surrounding papally approved war against its opponents in western Europe. The earliest accounts of the First Crusade therefore adopted a tone of advocacy, a register that never entirely left medieval, and some modern, descriptions of crusading. Success needed to be justified with reference to God’s will; so too, and increasingly frequently, did failure. While both its sources and influence reached deep into lay society, the creation of a recognisable and generally accepted crusade myth rested with these clerical authors, most of whom circled a strongly self-referential core. They set the pattern of understanding of the events that subsequently defined the whole.

Their academic justification for this warfare covered a wide swathe of intellectual terrain that included more overtly secular interpretations of crusading to match the theological, legal and evangelical. The English monk William of Malmesbury, whose extensive account (c. 1125) was based on Fulcher of Chartres, chose classical virtues against which to assess the heroic crusaders. He avoided the language of penance and pilgrimage almost entirely and stressed secular motives. The First Crusade was ascribed to a deal between Urban II and Bohemund of Taranto designed to use the ensuing commotion to secure Rome for one and a Balkan principality for the other.⁸ Material incentives were recognised in some of the earliest reworkings of the eyewitness compilations, such as Robert of Rheims.⁹ The values and aspirations of the godly warrior appeared not just in vernacular poems, epics and romances, stories first sketched around the camp-fires of the First Crusade itself. Elite Latin writers as much as the authors of chansons balanced the will of God and the agency of man, terrestrial glamour, honour, bravery, profit and excitement, the worth of man, being set against a fairly two-dimensional backcloth of religious virtue; theology was dressed up as adventure – and vice versa.

This is unsurprising. Raymond of Aguilers’s original coauthor of his account of the First Crusade was a knight, Pons of Balazun, killed at the siege of Arqah in 1099.¹⁰ Many of the tales incorporated in the earliest accounts derived from participants in the fighting. The language and images of epic and romance are rarely far from the elbows of the clerical authors; histories and chansons shared common sources and common milieux. Baldric of Dol had Urban II urge his audience at Clermont to cast aside the ‘belt of knighthood’ (militiae cingulum) to become knights of Christ (milites Christi).¹¹ The qualities of the two knighthoods were clearly the same. The fusion of the sacred and profane is evident in the earliest histories: Raymond of Aguilers’s excited pride in describing battles; the breathless immediacy of the Gesta Francorum’s account of the daring night-time escalade that delivered Antioch to the crusaders in June 1098; or Albert of Aachen’s penchant for the exotic anecdote, such as Godfrey de Bouillon’s encounter with a bear in Anatolia or the heroic deaths of Sven of Denmark and his intended, Florina of Burgundy. Praise of battle was intrinsic to the whole concept of crusading; the letters of Stephen of Blois and Anselm of Ribemont from the crusader camps in 1097–98 make this very clear. So, too, did Urban II when writing to monks at Vallombrosa in October 1097: ‘we were stimulating the minds of knights to go on this expedition, since they might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms’. Ralph of Caen’s biography of one of the stars of the First Crusade, Tancred of Lecce (before 1118), contained the classic account of how the crusade released the young, violent Tancred from the burden of sin through the offer of penitential warfare. No longer need Tancred choose ‘the Gospels or the world? His experience in arms recalled him to the service of Christ.’¹² The martial flavour was picked up in all the earliest reconstructions of the pope’s Clermont speech and remained unavoidably prominent in all clerically composed Latin histories and chronicles of subsequent crusades, supported by substantial theological underpinning in works such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous 1130s apologia for the military order of the Templars, De Laude Novae Militiae.¹³

The vernacular relationship

The same traits coursed through the increasingly sophisticated and varied vernacular crusade literature in the twelfth century, particularly in Francophone regions, from Norman England to Languedoc. They were also vivid...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• General editor’s foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 ‘The greatest event since the Resurrection’: some medieval views of the crusades
• 2 ‘The rendez vous of cracked brains’? Reformation, revision, texts and nations 1500–1700
• 3 Reason, faith and progress: a disputed Enlightenment
• 4 Empathy and materialism: keeping the crusades up to date
• 5 Scholarship, politics and the ‘golden age’ of research
• 6 The end of colonial consensus
• 7 Erdmann, Runciman and the end of tradition?
• 8 Definitions and directions
• Epilogue
• Selective guide to further reading
• Index
• Backcover