GENERAL EDITOR’S FOREWORD
History without historiography is a contradiction in terms. The study of the past cannot be separated from a linked study of its practitioners and intermediaries. No historian writes in isolation from the work of his or her predecessors nor can the commentator – however clinically objective or professional – stand aloof from the insistent pressures, priorities and demands of the ever-changing present. In truth there are no self-contained academic ‘ivory towers’. Historians’ writings are an extension of who they are and where they are placed. Though historians address the past as their subject they always do so in ways that are shaped – consciously or unconsciously as the case may be – by the society, cultural ethos, politics and systems of their own day, and they communicate their findings in ways which are specifically intelligible and relevant to a reading public consisting initially of their own contemporaries. For these reasons the study of history is concerned most fundamentally not with dead facts and sterile, permanent verdicts but with highly charged dialogues, disagreements, controversies and shifting centres of interest among its presenters, with the changing methodologies and discourse of the subject over time, and with audience reception. Issues in Historiography is a series designed to explore such matters by means of case studies of key moments in world history and the interpretations, reinterpretations, debates and disagreements they have engendered.
Tyerman’s subject – the crusades – is only the second medieval topic to join the Issues series. Like its predecessor on the Norman Conquest by Marjorie Chibnall it has a long and complex historiography. In Christopher Tyerman’s densely crowded but clearly argued pages the reader will find a perceptive and challenging survey which brings out the shifting centres of interest among the many writers who have engaged with this subject, the different agendas which underpinned their various offerings, the kind of sources they used and relied on, and the impact of their particular religious, political and cultural contexts. Early chroniclers such as William of Tyre and his changing posthumous reputation come under scrutiny. Reformation perspectives such as John Foxe’s History of the Turks (1566) are examined and as Tyerman’s survey progresses through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries writers such as Thomas Fuller, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon are drawn into the discussion. The cultural as well as political significance of Napoleon’s late eighteenth-century Egyptian and Syrian campaigns is considered as is a nineteenth-century predilection to view crusaders as well-intentioned missionaries. When we reach the twentieth century Lawrence of Arabia receives a passing mention. Sir Steven Runciman’s multi-volume history of the crusades, however, is accorded a full, but certainly not reverential, treatment. Modern American contributions to crusade historiography – some of them far from illuminating – are rehearsed. Claude Cahen, ‘a rare marxist’, and the Egyptian Aziz Suryal Atiya find a place here. Tyerman casts his net very widely; his subject dictates that he should.
Present-day relations between the West and Islam help to make Tyerman’s book a highly relevant text for students and their teachers. The author’s account of the historiography of the crusades emphatically rejects easy modern parallels. Nonetheless by virtue of its subject matter this volume does more than unpack the many layers of a particular topic which has continued to exert its fascination on generations of commentators over the centuries. Revealingly this study opens a window on to a broader landscape of deep-rooted, uneasy and often brutal international relations.
R. C. Richardson
July 2010
PREFACE
The history of history is increasingly fashionable. All history is revisionist, a response to what others have written. Thus, at its simplest, reading other historians will help any writer of history clarify their own views of the past. Writing history is not a neutral revelation but a malleable, personal, contingent, cultural activity. History examines the past by translating it into the present. The role of the translator – the historian – is thus instrumental, never a passive recorder or neutral interrogator but always a controlling producer. Study of the work of historians – historiography – becomes part of the way any historical subject is apprehended. Consequently, this book acts as a necessary pendant to my previous work on the crusades themselves. It is a negotiable analysis of predecessors and contemporaries.
This is not an entirely abstract exercise. Attitudes to the past are often conditioned by early perceptions, even, perhaps especially, if these are subsequently revised or rejected. My acquaintance with crusading began with images of heroic but misguided knights in the marvellously vivid, tendentious, but far from unintelligent, illustrated Ladybird History series of the 1950s and 1960s. Such pictures stay etched on the retina of memory. Intellectual engagement was later stimulated at school by exposure to the set-piece rhetorical arias of Edward Gibbon, Ernest Barker and Steven Runciman, embodiments of the very English tradition of astonished rational condescension that, although I did not then know it, reached back to Thomas Fuller in the seventeenth century. The bruising literary power of their historical imaginations failed to disguise that these were no objective summings up. From the very start, it was clear that the crusades were and remained controversial. They and their interpretations continue to be so in circles both academic and not. Why this should and continues to be so is a question that has long engaged me and provides the excuse for this book.
Inevitably, surveying historians across almost a thousand years is the labour of the magpie inviting error, superficiality and omission. No doubt the alert reader will spot examples of all three, for which I alone am responsible. That there are not more can be attributed to the work of other scholars, not least some of those discussed in what follows. The enterprise has been equally dependent on the resources and friendliness of the libraries in Oxford where I have principally worked on the book, the still incomparable Bodleian, the History Faculty and those of my two colleges. To my colleagues at Hertford and New College, I owe a continuing debt of companionship and intellectual stimulation. I have tried out some of these ideas on my pupils in Oxford and on audiences in Oxford and Dublin. I thank them for their comments, generosity and tolerance as I do the MUP’s anonymous reader. The editor and publishers of this series have combined patience and encouragement in rare measure. Lest proper perspective not be lost, the book is dedicated to two as yet innocent of the strange games historians play.
CJT
Oxford
7 July 2010
Few events of European history have captured the sentiments of contemporaries and the imaginations of later observers more vividly than the series of Christian wars now known as the crusades. At least from the capture of Jerusalem by an army of western Europeans in July 1099, if not before, this particular exercise in holy violence has attracted diverse interpretations from promoters, historians and theologians, from religious enthusiasts and from their critics. As wars regarded by their instigators as religious acts nonetheless directed at securing temporal space for Christendom and Christianity, they inescapably exposed the compromises of pragmatic idealism, the tension between rhetoric and experience, transcendent hope with present fear, the promise of eternal rewards with the immediacy of military conflict. Consequently, crusading was always controversial, a forum where moral absolutes jostled with material contingency.
There have been no centuries since the eleventh when books on the crusades have not been published and secured wide readership. At its simplest this has reflected crusading’s protean nature. Over more than five centuries after the First Crusade (1095–99), armies under the banners of the cross and sustained by special offers of forgiveness of sins associated with that first campaign to win Jerusalem, reached all corners of Europe and the littoral of the Near East, touching some seminal political events of the age: the reordering of the Near East and the frontiers between Islamic and Christian rulers in the Mediterranean; the German and Christian conquest of the southern and eastern Baltic; the repression of religious dissent in Christendom; the assertion of papal authority. Although this book is not about the historical crusades as such, the briefest of surveys may help set the scene.
Large armies from western Europe attacked Syria, Palestine and Egypt in a series of massive campaigns by land and sea to some of which later commentators attached numbers: the First (1095–99 with a second wave 1101–2); Second (1146–49); Third (1187–92); Fourth (1198–1204); Fifth (1217–21). Other substantial assaults on the eastern Mediterranean included the crusades of Frederick II of Germany (1228–29) and Louis IX of France (1248–54) who also briefly invaded Tunisia (1270). Louis’s invasion of Egypt in 1249 was the last such from western Europe until Bonaparte’s in 1798. Between grand assaults, many substantial but lesser expeditions followed similar routes, such as the crusades of the count of Champagne and the earl of Cornwall in 1239–41. Settlements were established along the Levantine littoral that lasted in various guises and extent from 1098 to 1291. Cyprus was captured in 1191 and held by western rulers until 1571. Jerusalem was in western Christian hands from 1099 to 1187 and, less securely, 1229–44. The next western European conqueror in the Holy City was General Allenby in December 1917 at the head of a polyglot army including a significant proportion of Muslims. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade had been diverted to capture the Greek capital of Constantinople (lost in 1261), an outrage for Greek Christians that irrevocably sealed the church schism with the Latin church of the west.
Traditions, ideology and institutions grew up thickly around these wars. Distinctive among these were the wearing of a cross to signal the taking of a vow; the consequent grant of spiritual privileges, remission of penalties of sins and later full indulgences for sin; the perception of this war as a sort of armed pilgrimage; temporal privileges such as avoidance of law suits or repayment of debts; and the protection of crusaders’ families and property by the church. From the late twelfth century, taxes on laymen and especially the clergy were instituted to pay for these expeditions. Specific techniques and systems of propaganda and recruitment were honed to raise troops. While rhetorically, legally and emotionally retaining a connection with the Jerusalem war, if only as a reference point, this form of warfare proved easily exportable to other areas of conflict that involved the perceived interests of the official Latin church. These included the conquest of Muslim al-Andalus by the Christian kingdoms of Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the German penetration and annexation of the pagan eastern Baltic from the mid-twelfth to the fifteenth centuries; the suppression of heresy, notably in Languedoc in southern France in wars known as the Albigensian crusades (1209–29); the defence of papal temporal interests in Germany and Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the so-called political crusades. Together, these wars produced their own literature, liturgy and religious communities, notably the military orders, such as the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights. Clearly associated, if lacking official support, were popular uprisings ostensibly aimed at the recovery of Jerusalem, such as the Children’s Crusade (1212) and the Shepherds’ Crusades (1251 and 1320). In places, even those attacked by crusaders countered by adopting the cross – such as anti-papalists in Germany in 1240 or rebels in England in 1263–65.
Crusading became culturally normative, even if active participation always remained a minority activity. The practice, aspiration and ideals of crusading persisted throughout the later middle ages, on occasion igniting military action, as against the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans in 1396, 1444 or 1456. The dying fall of active crusading, even if more in word than deed, lingered long into the sixteenth century and beyond. The attendant religious propaganda and economic necessities reached far beyond military recruitment into parish churches and taxpayers’ pockets throughout the Latin Christian world; into the mechanics of salvation, the liturgy of penance and the ideology of kingship. At once a symptom and an encouragement of western Europe’s engagement with its neighbours, crusading promoted the interests of international commerce while defining cultural differences, notably in the alienation of the Greek orthodox tradition. Alternatively or simultaneously imagined as wading through blood to the foot of the Cross, as an assertion of Christian identity, or as a moral and morale-boosting focus for resistance to enemies of church, faith or nation, the crusades coloured the texture of medieval politics, religion and society. Even after the reality of these wars faded into collective memory from the sixteenth century, their particular quality continued to exert a hold, on confessional and rationalist critics no less than religious or sentimental supporters.
However, unlike other familiar aspects of the medieval past, such as the Vikings, Charlemagne’s empire, or the Norman Conquest, the crusades never fitted easily into later cultural patterns. As historians from the seventeenth century increasingly rejected religiously inspired providential interpretations of past events, they looked in the crusades for the origins of their own times in the development of nations, institutions of government, the growth of commerce and, above all, the progress of ‘manners’ or civilisation. The crusades sat awkwardly between secular and religious history in periods when the distinction was taken as axiomatic. They received the lofty condescension of the Enlightenment as they had the doctrinal disapproval of Protestants. Their inextricable weave of idealism and materialism, inconvenient for materialist and idealist historians alike, produced a near-ubiquitous rush to judgement, one of the most persistent and prominent features in histories of the crusades. Even today, writers on the crusades are routinely interrogated by reviewers and readers as to whether they regard the crusades in a positive or negative light. While some still oblige, experts on few other medieval events are expected to provide such moral opinions.
This uniqueness also represented a challenge to the tradition of historians seeking to chronicle national development, especially after the Reformation. Except in special cases such as early modern or Franco’s Spain, the crusades rarely conformed to any straightforward projection of nationalism or national identity, their role in the emergence of nation states, for long of deep historical and cultural interest, apparently obscure or equivocal. The intrinsic internationalism of crusading rendered the spatch-cocking of the crusades into narratives of national progress or pride an uneasy business. Richard I, good crusader but absent king, provided one classic example of the difficulties; the embarrassment of Philip II of France abandoning the Third Crusade and the pious failures of Louis IX two more. This did not result in the crusades being ignored in cultic national histories. Rather they were incongruously recruited to serve under national flags. In the nineteenth century, the simultaneous developments of colonial politics and critical history combined with its spurious nationalism to consolidate crusading’s popularity as a subject for entertainment and moralising. The European dash for empire happily recruited the crusades as exemplars of cultural virtues, occasionally vices, or superiority over conquered peoples and societies. Where Enlightenment critics had concentrated their fire on the moral, religious and cultural aspects of crusading, the debate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revolved around essentially materialist interpretations, the crusades as wars of conquest, motors of economic expansion and expressions of colonialism. Thus crusading became reconciled with prevailing politico-historical fashions.
The twentieth century appeared to reinforce this. The creation of the State of Israel (1948) seemed initially to feed into the colonial model, certainly stimulating research into the westerners’ settlement of Syria and Palestine. In Israel itself, new forms of national perspective were developed while the state’s very existence ignited new forms of malign historical parallelism that continue to resonate loudly across contemporary political and cultural debates. Away from the Near East, the ideological wars that engulfed or threatened twentieth-century Europe encouraged new engagement with the ideology of crusading. At the same time, the intellectual as well as physical retreat from European imperialism was matched by root and branch critical reappraisal of the old model of crusading colonialism. Historians continue to mould the subject according to their own interests. Yet however viewed, the crusades constitute one of the great subjects of European history. They conjure issues of the manifestation of systems of transcendent belief; cultural and religious identity; economic and political expansion; imperialism and colonisation; the ideology, legitimacy and pathology of public violence; the experience of war; the impact of militarism on non-combatants, host societies and victim communities; inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations; the nature of popular political and religious action; state-building; and the use of propaganda. The crusades remain one of the few subjects of professional history that carry wide popular recognition even if little serious understanding.
This alone would merit examination. However, perhaps to the surprise of those who regarded the crusades as merely a clash of arms for remote, ultimately futile, inexplicable or hypocritical territorial or ideological goals, in the past half-century the crusades have become an increasingly prominent aspect of serious medieval study and research around the academic world, embracing some of the newest historiographical, techniques. This development also deserves study. The object of this book is to give some account of how such interest has been created, developed and sustained. It investigates the ways in which the crusades have been observed by historians from the 1090s to the present day. Especial emphasis is placed on the academic after-life of the crusades from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries.
This will not be another contribution to the debates on the nature of the phenomenon or to the major interpretive problems that continue to arouse professional controversy and research. It merely attempts to describe the history of these different opinions, how they have been adopted and their historical contexts. It is a book about books. Unlike some recent scholarship, this will not include detailed consideration of the wider post-medieval cultural reception of the crusades and the use of the images and language of crusading in art, literature and popular culture except insofar as these affected historians’ approaches to the subject and what they wrote. Over thirty generations and more, the crusades have occupied simultaneous parallel worlds of past events and present imagination, a duality that provides the substance for what follows.