Third Crusade

12 Key excerpts on "Third Crusade"

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  Medieval Weapons

  An Illustrated History of Their Impact

  • Robert D. Smith, Kelly DeVries(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  All prisoners who would renounce the crusade and promise not to fight further against Saladin were freed; the 130 Templars, whom Saladin regarded as fanatics, were executed. After this victory, THE CRUSADES, 1050–1300 106 Saladin moved against the now largely undefended city of Jerusalem, which he conquered on 2 October 1187. Remembering the shocking massacre of all the town’s inhabitants by the first crusaders nearly a century before, Saladin allowed all Christians there to be ransomed or, if they could not afford a ransom, freed. The fall of Jerusalem to Saladin shocked Christian Europe, and a Third Crusade was quickly called. This crusade attracted soldiers from throughout Europe, but especially those in the armies of three kings: Frederick I Barbarossa of Germany, Philip II Augustus of France, and Richard I, the Lionheart, of England. Frederick Bar- barossa left in 1189, traveling over land, but few of his force, deci- mated by disease, fatigue, and apathy, ever reached the Holy Land. Many returned home after the 67-year-old Frederick died when he fell off his horse into the river Salaph in Asia Minor and drowned. The other two kings traveled by ship and arrived safely, but began to quarrel over their respective roles in the fighting. Although the par- ticipants in the Third Crusade succeeded in retaking Acre and Jaffa and even defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf on 11 September 1191, they could never achieve the unified attack necessary to re- capture Jerusalem. Finally, in October 1191, Philip returned to France and began attacking Richard’s territory there. A year later, in October 1192, Richard also returned to Europe, but on his route home he was captured, imprisoned, and held for ransom by Leopold, the Duke of Austria, whose banner he had insulted at the siege of Acre. The Third Crusade failed to accomplish nearly all that its lead- ers initially set out to do, although it included the best warriors in all Europe.

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  Fighting for the Cross

  • Jaroslav Pelikan(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Richard toyed with the idea of invading Egypt but he also conducted lengthy negotiations with Saladin to try to work out a compromise. These were the most detailed talks that had ever been held between crusaders and Muslims and some imaginative ideas were tabled - at one point it was even suggested that Richard's sister Joan might marry Saladin's brother al-Adil. In the event all that proved possible was a truce. This was concluded in September 1192 and was painful for both sides: the Muslims retained Jerusalem, the Christians their string of ports along the Mediterranean coast. From these ports, as Saladin well knew, the Christians could both consolidate and expand their position whenever fresh help arrived from the West. This they did almost immediately, when a German crusade despatched by Barbarossa's son Henry VI in 1197 succeeded in reoccupying Sidon and Beirut. Diversion - the Fourth Crusade and the Latin conquest of Constantinople As crusading entered its second century, its success increasingly came to depend on two preconditions. One was its appeal to the Catholic faithful, because in the end everything depended on their willingness to contribute blood and treasure to the Holy Land's cause. The other was the ability and readiness of society's great lords, the authorities of Church and state, to provide an array of initiative, leadership and support. This was structure, without which zeal was helpless. Of course the two preconditions enmeshed with each other. Individuals would 14 FIGHTING FOR THE CROSS 3 Krak des Chevaliers, the great Hospitaller castle in Syria. respond much more spontaneously to crusade preaching if they were optimistic about their chances of discharging their vows, while rulers (as after Hattin) could be pushed into action by public opinion and lobbying. The trouble was that warfare between those rulers always stood in the way of crusading. Despite this, for several decades the level of activity remained astonishing.

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  Early Modern Europe

  Facts and Fictions

  • Brian Jeffrey Maxson(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  9 The Crusades Ended in the Middle Ages What People Think Happened

  In 1095, Pope Urban II announced the First Crusade to knights at the Council of Clermont. The men in attendance raised their swords in jubilation. After some preparations, heavily armored men marched through Islamic lands before arriving at the doors of Jerusalem. Soon the city fell and the Holy Land returned to Christian hands. However, European successes did not last for long; and a series of distinct armies descended upon the Middle East from Europe. Today, these distinct armies are known as the numbered crusades. Some of them are still famous. In the Third Crusade, for example, King Richard of England fought against noble Saladin. Their mutual military brilliance made gains difficult on either side, but their stalemate led to a surprising, even unprecedented respect between the Christian king and the Islamic sultan. Back in England, Robin Hood helped ensure the well-being of the English and the security of Richard’s throne during the king’s absence.

  The myth goes that the Crusades consisted of nine distinct events spread out over a bit more than 200 years of history. Over time, it became clear that the land route from Europe to the Holy Land was not working. Thus, Crusaders began sailing to Egypt and then trying the shorter land passage to Jerusalem. These different Crusades often sought both to retake lands from Islam and to provide aid to the Crusader Kingdoms established after the First Crusade. Those Crusader Kingdoms were Christian bulwarks in Islamic lands. Each heavily fortified kingdom fought never-ending wars against bellicose people who simply viewed the world differently than they did. The fall of the last Christian outposts at Acre in 1291 ended the Crusades. From that point onward, Europeans lacked a foothold in the east. Additionally, their conflicts became simply different than the Crusades had been. During the Crusades, according to the myth, big armies had fought huge campaigns aimed at conquering the Holy Land. They had adopted the Cross as their symbol. They had fought for religious purposes. The myth goes that all of that ended in 1291. Armies stopped seeking the Holy Land or wearing the cross. A stalemate began between the Islamic East and the Christian West.

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  The Cambridge History of War: Volume 2, War and the Medieval World

  • David A. Graff, Anne Curry(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Third Crusade was provoked by the fall of Jerusalem after H ˙ at ˙ t ˙ ı ¯n in 1187, but it consisted of a number of armies and contingents arriving at various times between 1187 and 1191. The German army of Frederick Barbarossa is thought to have numbered between 12,000 and 15,000 and to have had a very large proportion of mounted knights, while discouraging non-combatants. 12 Philip II of France (1180–1223) embarked for the East in 1190 after arranging passage with the Genoese for 650 knights and 1,300 squires (who would have been mounted), but many of the French princes had preceded him and when he left the Holy Land in July 1191 he is said to have left 10,000 French behind. Richard of England (1189–99) had an army of 17,000 soldiers and seamen by the time of his arrival at Acre in 1191. Many other contingents, including some Germans who continued their crusade after the death of Barbarossa, were already at Acre, but losses due to sickness and heavy fighting in the last stages of the siege, reduced the army. When Richard faced Saladin in battle at Arsuf, on 7 September 1191, he commanded 20,000 men, of whom something like a quarter were knights. Saladin’s army was as numerous but entirely mounted. 13 Overall it is clear that large numbers of soldiers participated in the Third Crusade, but few figures are given and many contingents had no chroniclers. For the Fourth Crusade we have remarkably accurate numbers. Its leaders had no fleet of their own, and in the winter of 1200/1 they despatched six plenipotentiaries charged with hiring a fleet at their 11 Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 168–9. 12 Walter Eickhoff, Friedrich Barbarossa im Orient: Kreuzzug und Tod Friedrichs I (Tübingen, Wasmuth, 1977), p. 77. 13 John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999), pp.

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  Bullies and Saints

  An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History

  • John Dickson(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan

    (Publisher)

  Holy Wars from the 1000s to the 1200s Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. —PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, 2015

  I

  have already talked about the First Crusade in some detail. Its themes and aims can, to some degree, stand as the model for later Crusades. It also represents a pivot point in the history of Christianity.

  First Crusade (1096–99)

  Before Pope Urban II’s preaching campaign of 1095–96, warfare had an ambiguous status in Christian teaching. It was sometimes viewed as a necessary evil in a fallen world. And sometimes—especially in the early centuries—it was

  wholly rejected as a contradiction of the Gospel demand: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27). I will discuss the backstory to Christian “sacred violence” later. For now, it is perhaps worth noting that historians typically speak about five different Crusades. This is, of course, a matter of convenience, an easy way to organise our thoughts on this subject. People in, say, the year 1203 did not talk about “Heading off to the Fourth Crusade”! Still, it is sometimes helpful to make our thoughts about history neater than the history itself.

  Several armies of European volunteers, amounting to something like one hundred thousand men, heeded the call of Pope Urban II to assist the Christian Byzantine emperor Alexius I against Muslim aggression. They hoped to protect Constantinople and win back Jerusalem for Christ. The campaign was a stunning success, from the Crusaders’ point of view. Even though only ten to fifteen thousand men reached Jerusalem in 1099, they were able to recapture the Holy City in a matter of weeks.

  Part of the First Crusade’s spiritual force, if I can call it that, came from a charismatic monk known as Peter the Hermit. His dishevelled appearance obscured a keen talent for recruitment and the management of soldiers, as well as a fiery preaching style. It is unclear whether he was the pope’s appointee or just a successful independent zealot who supported the cause. He rallied up to thirty thousand men from France and Germany, both peasants and some elites. He personally led them toward the Holy Land, across the Rhineland in central Germany, down the Danube River to the Balkans, across to Constantinople, and then on toward Jerusalem via Syria. “His message was revivalist,” explains Oxford’s Christopher Tyerman, “peppered with visions and atrocity stories.”1 Peter himself was the source of several atrocities. As he marched through the Rhineland, he and his men slaughtered Jewish communities, partly for their supposed responsibility for the death of Christ centuries earlier and partly for their alleged complicity in recent Muslim attacks on Christian sites in Jerusalem (more perversely, it may also have just been fighting practice).2 Anti-Semitism had a long history in Christianity, going back at least as far as the fourth century, but it rarely took the form of Peter’s full-scale pogroms in 1096. There were massacres and/or forced conversions in Mainz, Cologne, Regensburg, and Prague. The majority of armies organised by Pope Urban apparently did not participate in such violent persecutions of Jews. And, curiously, various other

  Christian armies attacked and defeated some of Peter’s men for their indiscriminate violence.3 But Peter remained a major figure in the First Crusade, even preaching a sermon—a pregame pep talk—on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem on the eve of the sacking of the city.4

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  The Crusades: A History

  • Jonathan Riley-Smith(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The Third Crusade and the crusade of 1197 demonstrated that the movement could inspire real enthusiasm in Europe when there was a crisis in the Levant and that large forces could be put into the field at such a time. The record of these years, if judged in terms of the men and matériel channelled to the East, is remarkable. And after a slow start the crusaders’ achievements were outstanding. In 1188 the Christians had been left only with the city of Tyre and one or two isolated fortresses inland. By 1198 they held nearly the whole of the Palestinian coast. This ensured that the kingdom would last for another century, because it removed any threat from a Muslim fleet in the Nile Delta to the sea-lanes to Europe at precisely the time when Acre was becoming the chief commercial port in the eastern Mediterranean region. The crusade seems to have been the first to make use of paid soldiery on a really large scale. In 1191–2 these must have been employed in Palestine, which was always awash with them, but in 1197 Henry VI intended to export an impressive mercenary force from the West. The invasion of Egypt, which had been on the minds of crusaders and settlers in the Levant from the start, had also moved to the forefront of thinking. In June 1192, with his sojourn in the East coming to an end, Richard of England had initiated a discussion on the choice of a final goal. A committee, made up of brothers of the military orders, Western settlers and crusaders, had decided on Egypt, but this had not been acceptable to the contingent that had been left behind by Philip of France. The crusaders had shown a new realism in their decision not to risk all in the Judaean hills, but the result was that Jerusalem had eluded them. This helps to explain the obsessive concern with crusading that continued to be displayed at all levels of society.

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  Western Warfare In The Age Of The Crusades, 1000-1300

  • John France(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Uncertain and often divided leadership was inevitably accompanied by uncertain purpose. Much of the success of the First Crusade was due to the limited but specific objective – Jerusalem. When its leaders were at their most ignorant and hesitant, their army was large enough to overcome by sheer weight of numbers the Sultanate of Nicaea. Very quickly, they took the measure of their enemies and maximized their strength by an adroit diplomacy, winning allies and buying off enemies by pacts of friendship which they were perfectly prepared to break. This diplomatic aspect to their crusade was vital, for although the Middle East was fragmented, many of its component parts were more than a match in military terms for the invaders. What the Muslim powers did not understand was that the invaders posed a threat to their very existence. Once that was understood, the scale and quality of their resistance to new crusades was enormously enhanced.

  The Second Crusade simply had no clear purpose: the occasion of its calling was the fall of Edessa to Zengi, but this had not in itself stirred the West; it was only the incredible activity of St Bernard that created what became a general onslaught upon the non-Catholics who confronted Europe. This vast concept never generated any central control and Louis VII, the only leader to arrive in Jerusalem with an army, had little idea what to do with it. Richard of England, as we have noted, had a crusading strategy – to seize Egypt, the real heart of Saladin’s power – but the religious goal of the expedition (and probably the personal animosity which Richard so obviously generated) proved too strong. But the problems of the Third Crusade were pondered. The union of Syria and Egypt under Saladin had caused the fall of the Latin Kingdom, but the quarrels of his descendants, the Ayyubids, created opportunities which could be exploited. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade made a secret decision to attack Egypt. This was actually carried out by the Fifth Crusade, probably acting in accord with the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council, although it was their decision to attack Damietta rather than Alexandria. Once the city had fallen, the crusade was for long paralysed by failures of command, and it was probably popular demand for action that led to its ultimate failure near Mansourah.11

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  Power and Faith

  Politics and Religion in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century

  • Richard Huscroft(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The remarkable coda to the Fifth Crusade followed a few years later. Frederick II had taken the cross when he was crowned king of Germany in 1215, and he had restated his desire to go on crusade after his imperial coronation in 1220. But his failure to join the armies of the Fifth Crusade in Palestine or Egypt had been a major factor in that expedition’s collapse, and in the end, Frederick did not give serious attention to his crusading promises until 1225 when he married Yolanda de Brienne, the daughter and heir of King John of Jerusalem. Having then had himself crowned king of Jerusalem on Sicily whilst his new father-in-law was still alive and well, Frederick set off for the Holy Land in 1227 only to fall ill and delay his expedition once again. This was too much for the exasperated Pope Gregory IX (1227–41), who excommunicated the emperor. Having recovered, however, Frederick pressed on and arrived at Acre in September 1228. A few months later, in February 1229, he reached a negotiated settlement known as the Treaty of Jaffa with the sultan al-Kamil. A ten-year truce was agreed, and al-Kamil conceded that the Christians could retake control over Jerusalem (except Temple Mount), Bethlehem and the corridor of land linking them both to the sea, Nazareth and parts of Galilee, Toron and Sidon. On 18 March 1229, Frederick solemnly wore his imperial crown in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. On the face of it, Frederick had achieved by diplomacy what the great armies of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Crusades had failed to achieve by force. But matters were not as simple as this. Frederick’s actions and motives were seriously questioned by the pope, the barons of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Military Orders, all of whom had expected Frederick to challenge al-Kamil much more forcefully. At the same time, Frederick’s status as an excommunicated king only further clouded assessments of what he had done, whilst his behaviour during the crusade was perceived as high-handed by many: as he left Acre in May 1229 he was pelted with offal by abusive crowds. More broadly, the lands he had gained, particularly Jerusalem itself, could easily be retaken by al-Kamil’s forces whenever the sultan thought of doing so, and they were indefensible without long-term political and military commitment from the west. There was no sign Frederick was interested in giving this kind of support. Indeed, his reasons for acting as he did derived more from a desire to embellish his imperial prestige and bolster his authority in the west than they did from an urge to recover the Holy Land for Christianity. There appeared to be little either spiritual or penitential in Frederick’s approach, and more expeditions to the East would be needed to add substance to his hollow victory.

  Closer to Home: Crusading in Europe and the Battle with Heresy

  For nearly 50 years after the capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusaders in 1099, crusading was all about the Holy Land. The papacy acknowledged the religious importance of what was happening in Iberia, but it was above all armed pilgrimages to Outremer which were needed to reclaim and then protect the Christian territories which had been seized by Muslim invaders – they were acts of self-defence. From the 1140s onwards, however, these views began to evolve, and the original crusading ideal of fighting as a soldier of Christ in the East for the remission of sins was redefined. Soon, military campaigns intended to conquer lands in north-eastern Europe were officially transformed into wars of conversion, and eventually Christian armies were being deployed within Europe against those categorised as heretics. In the second half of the twelfth century, mainstream Christianity became more muscular, more aggressively militant and more associated with armies and war. Issues of faith were certainly at stake in these conflicts, but increasingly they also contributed to the formation of a new political order in Europe as secular and ecclesiastical rulers used the war against heresy to increase their own power and prestige.

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  Medieval History For Dummies

  • Stephen Batchelor(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  Richard suffered a shipwreck off the coast of Italy on his way home and was forced to journey over land. He travelled in disguise but near Vienna was captured by Leopold of Austria, who hadn’t forgotten Richard’s insults at Acre (remember him from the earlier section ‘Dealing with diplomatic baggage’?). Leopold imprisoned Richard and set a massive ransom of 150,000 marks. Richard’s mother eventually raised the capital, but Richard was to stay in captivity for the next 12 months before it could be paid. Chapter 17 has more on how this situation played out.

  Saladin fared no better. Having fallen ill in the aftermath of the battle at Jaffa, he never really recovered. He died on 3 March 1193 in Damascus at the age of 67. His empire quickly dissolved into in-fighting between his sons, but Outremer was too weak to take advantage.

  In the following years, European religious and military leaders tried again to recruit fresh Crusade armies, but none of these efforts were particularly successful. For the time being, both the Muslim and Christian sides remained content with what they had.

  Passage contains an image

  Chapter 16 Following the Fourth Crusade and Other Failures In This Chapter Taking Constantinople with the Fourth Crusade Attacking heretics and carrying out Crusades at home Assessing the later Crusades Charting the end of Crusading

  T

  he Third Crusade didn’t turn out as the Western European powers expected. Despite some notable victories, the contest between the Christian and Muslim forces ended up in a draw. As Chapter 15 describes, the kings of England and France took massive armies to the Christian states of Outremer in the Middle East and came back without a great deal to show for the effort.

  The idea of Crusading may have lost some of its allure, but from the late twelfth century, and throughout the thirteenth century, various groups again ventured eastwards or engaged in Crusades within Europe against people whom the Church decided were enemies.

  In this chapter, I discuss the end of the Crusading period and cover the truly bizarre events that took place in Europe and elsewhere. Playing a Game of Smash ’n’ Grab: The Fourth Crusade

  After the chaos of assembling and coordinating the Third Crusade (which I cover in detail in Chapter 15), the papacy initially struggled to drum up interest in a new expedition. Between 1195–1198, a group of German troops led by Emperor Henry VI did venture eastwards but met with little success. In fact, Henry never made it to Jerusalem, dying at Messina, Italy.

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  The Crusader States

  • Malcolm Barber(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  939 C H A P T E R 1 3 The Third Crusade A fter Saladin had taken Latakia on 22 July 1188, Margaritus of Brindisi, commander of the Sicilian fleet which lay off the coast, requested a safe-conduct. ‘Imad al-Din must have been present when he came ashore. Having obtained it, he arrived, presented himself in a humble and suppliant atti-tude and, after a moment of reflection and meditation, expressed himself as follows. ‘You are a great sultan, a generous king, your justice is known to all, your merit is spread afar, your power is redoubtable, manifest is your goodness. If you pardon the fearful people who live along these shores, if you render this country to them, they will become for you a servant people submissive to your laws both near and far. But, if you refuse, legions will rise up from beyond the sea, as numerous as the waves. The kings of the Christians will march against you from every country. But, since you can easily do this, let the people of this country free and grant them your pardon.’ The sultan replied: ‘It is God who has ordered the submission of the land to us: it is our obligation to obey him and to devote ourselves to the holy war; it is He who has made us master of this country. When all the nations of the world unite against us, we will invoke the power of God and we will combat them, without caring about the number of our enemies.’ 1 These enemies were already gathering. Although Pope Urban III had died on 20 October 1187, soon after receiving the news of Hattin, nine days later his successor, Gregory VIII, issued the encyclical Audita tremendi , in which he blamed all Christians for what had happened, not simply those directly involved in the battle or those who lived in the crusader states. ‘Faced by such great distress concerning that land, moreover, we ought to consider not only the sins of its inhabitants but also our own and those of the whole Christian people, and we ought also to fear lest what is left of that land will be lost and

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  John of Brienne

  King of Jerusalem, Emperor of Constantinople, c.1175–1237

  • Guy Perry(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 The Fifth Crusade What we now call the ‘Fifth Crusade’ was formally launched by Pope Innocent III in April 1213. Then followed long years of planning and preparation across Latin Christendom, under papal leadership. The cru- sade actually began in the Holy Land in the autumn of 1217. In spring the next year it switched to target Egypt, where it soon became bogged down in a lengthy and taxing siege of the port-city of Damietta. During this period the new Egyptian sultan, al-Kamil, made at least one peace offer to the Christians. There was a further round of negotiations just before the crusade’s end. It was the eventual capture of Damietta, though, that really brought the latent tensions in the crusader host to a head. A serious dispute broke open, above all between King John, as the leader of the crusade, and the papal legate Pelagius, standing for the distant ‘great powers’ of the pope and the emperor-elect, Frederick II. John managed to win the lordship of Damietta, at least for the present. However, soon after this, he and many followers quit Egypt altogether, heading back to the Holy Land. They remained there for more than a year. Eventually John was summoned back to participate in a great advance south from Damietta, towards Cairo. But it led to disaster. The Fifth Crusade ended with the crusaders evacuating Egypt altogether in September 1221. This is not the place for a comprehensive treatment of the whole expedition. Instead, our focus is solely on the crusade from John’s per- spective – that is, on those aspects of it that affected him most profoundly. The Fifth Crusade was the hinge of John’s reign as king. Everything had been leading up to it, certainly since 1213, and its ultimate failure dictated the course of the rest of John’s rule.

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  Encountering Islam on the First Crusade

  • Nicholas Morton(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The second contextual point is that Jerusalem itself had changed hands repeatedly during the late eleventh century. Prior to the arrival of the First Crusade it was conquered on at least three – possibly four – occasions by Turks, Fatimids, and local factions. 323 The 1077 conquest in particular seems to have been very bloody. 324 Perhaps the brevity of the early Arabic chronicles simply reflects a hardened familiarity with an ongoing cycle of conquests of this period. The crusade was not the only bitter campaign waged in the Levantine region during the eleventh century. There had been Turcoman depredations, Bedouin attacks, infighting among Arab tribes, and dynastic squabbles between the Turks. Most of the cities taken by the crusaders in the Holy Land had fallen to at least one other power at some point within two decades of the Franks’ arrival. Perhaps their rather terse descriptions of Jerusalem’s fall in 1099 should guide us not to dial down the intensity of the crusader conquest, but to dial up the intensity of the Fatimid-Seljuk-Turcoman-Bedouin-Arab conflicts of the previous half century; creating an environment in which yet another massacre did not stand out as an exceptional event. Synthesising the above, the line-of-best-fit here seems to be as fol- lows. Most importantly, the crusaders did indeed commit a substantial and bitter series of massacres which began immediately after they broke through the wall on 15 July 1099. The correlation on this point between the Frankish and eastern Christian sources cannot be overlooked. More- over, as Kedar has observed, these massacres were of such intensity that the crusaders surprised even themselves; the participant authors pre- sented the intensity of the slaughter as ‘totally unprecedented’ and their exceptionality is revealed by the fact that their authors felt the need to justify them.

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