3
It served the didactic and rhetorical purposes of early nineteenth-century enthusiasts to characterise the previous century’s attitudes to the crusades as uniformly hostile or ignorant, at least until William Robertson’s reappraisal in his History of the Reign of Charles V (1769). Superficially, they had a point. Fashionable and influential eighteenth-century intellectuals, even more than their predecessors, tended to use the crusade not as a historical study in its own right but as a tool in conceptual arguments about religion and the progress of civilisation or manners (moeurs). However, most of what self-consciously philosophical historians such as Voltaire, Hume or Gibbon declaimed about the crusades was, in fact, old hat, rehashing earlier themes. Voltaire’s 1751 essay on the crusades identified them as wasteful, pointless, ruined by excessive papal ambition for worldly power, an example of the corrosive fanaticism of the middle ages. Fuller would have felt at home, so much so that such disdain for the crusades was wrongly attributed by the great early nineteenth-century crusade promoter Joseph François Michaud to a specifically Protestant tradition of criticism.1
Yet the philosophical critics held no monopoly on eighteenth-century attitudes to crusading. Chivalry was not as universally condemned as its later champions would claim. There was no unified rationalist response to the crusades. The ideas of Fleury and of Leibniz that cast the crusades as a stage in the improvement of European civilisation continued to be developed alongside root and branch evisceration of the whole enterprise. There was no simple or single Enlightenment view of the crusades. Moreover, those who later criticised philosophical condescension were as guilty as those they decried in using the crusades as mirrors to their own partisanship. Each generation of crusade scholars has claimed objectivity for itself and castigated the bias of its elders; each has been deluded.
Widening scholarship
Since the Renaissance humanists and Reformation controversialists, one attraction of the crusades had lain in their scope: recruited from all western nations, motivated by apparently transcendent belief systems and fought across three continents. From the perspective of western Europe’s engagement with the rest of the globe from the sixteenth century, the crusades provided the only post-classical example to hand of an ideological and military world war, providing a unique, distinctive parallel with the conquest of the Americas. This was not a new perception of the eighteenth century. However, the nationalism or localism that drove certain seventeenth-century scholarly examination of crusade sources, as in France, did give way to a wider conspectus, setting the crusades in a context of the secular history of the world, not least in the study of Asia and Arabic. Described by one modern scholar of the Enlightenment as part of a ‘ dechristianisation of history’, this process allowed the crusades to be fitted into a history of human progress in manners not faith, a logical step from the materialism of post-Reformation Protestant and Catholic sceptics.2
Interest in Asiatic sources in part stemmed from changing political and commercial circumstances. After the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), under which the Turks ceded large swathes of central, eastern and south-eastern Europe, the Ottomans seemed to western eyes to be in retreat. Already travellers’ tales had reported the shabbiness and destitution to be found within the Turkish Empire, encouraging contrasts between supposed western dynamism and eastern stagnation. Although the Ottoman Empire proved much more resourceful, resilient and lively than its denigrators imagined, nonetheless the impression of Ottoman decadence allowed for less heated assessment of relations between Christendom and Islam. Apparent confirmation of a shift in the balance of advantage came from increasingly extensive trading links, with western merchants, especially the French Levant company, establishing themselves as a permanent presence in ports along the Levantine coast, in Egypt and Asia Minor. Increasingly privileged and protected trading rights, while essentially peripheral to the economy of the Ottoman Empire, added to the appearance of eastern dependency and weakness. It also encouraged a limited interest among western scholars in Turkish, Persian and Arabic art, literature and history. This opened the possibility of an alternative western vision of the crusades that recognised a more diverse historical landscape than had been available to earlier generations. In a backhanded compliment to this process, acknowledging the importance of newly available Arabic sources while noting their peripheral impact on interpretation, Gibbon remarked of the Ayyubid prince, geographer and historian Abu al-Fida (1273–1331): ‘Had he not disdained the Latin language, how easily might the Syrian prince have found books and interpreters!’ Gibbon himself possessed at least seven Latin translations of Abu al-Fida’s historical and geographical work, most produced by the Dutch scholar Johann Jacob Reiske (1716–74), despite the Englishman’s dislike of his ‘petulant animadversions’.3
While the serious study of Arabic in Christian Europe was as yet idiosyncratic, patchy, incompetent or downright misleading, the importance of texts from the Islamic world was increasingly acknowledged. Bongars had planned a third volume to include Armenian and what he called ‘Tartar’ sources.4 Louis XIV’s finance minister Colbert collected Turkish and Arabic manuscripts and patronised orientalists and oriental studies, an adjunct to his schemes for French commercial domination in the Mediterranean. Among those encouraged were the scholars of the Benedictine congregation of St Maur, based at the abbey of St Germain des Prés in Paris. Maurist monks, who regarded historical scholarship as integral to their religious vocation, gathered an extraordinarily rich library and essayed a series of the grandest scholarly projects. This included an attempt, largely complete by 1739, to compile a comprehensive anthology of western texts on the crusades. In the event, the collection was editorially uncritical, derivative of earlier editions, lacked adequate manuscript research and was limited to French and Italian sources. So poor was it that the project was abandoned and disowned. However, a parallel scheme to collect Arab texts was initiated in 1740. The Maurists had a long tradition of interest in Arabic works, pursued by scholars such as Barthélémy d’Herbelot (1625–95), author of the encyclopaedic Bibliothèque orientalé; Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720), who wrote an unpublished life of Saladin; and Antoine Galland (1646–1715), first western translator of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights. In introducing Herbelot’s posthumously published Bibliothèque orientale in 1697, Galland suggested that Arabic sources should be used in studying the crusades. He later wrote, but did not publish, a history of the Ayyubids, like most other early European works on Islamic history largely a pot-pourri drawn directly from the few extant translated primary sources.5
By the 1750s, some of the main Arabic texts relevant to the crusades were appearing in translation, such as Beha al-Din ibn Shaddad’s life of Saladin (1732, with extracts from Imad al-Din’s biography appended). This formed a basis for the Histoire de Saladin (1758) by the conservative lawyer and royal censor François-Louis Claude Marin (1721–1809). Following the well-established and almost universal admiration for Saladin, Marin adopted the familiar critical opinion of the crusades: ‘more fanaticism than zeal’, ‘unfortunate enterprises that depopulated Europe, producing great deeds and even greater crimes’, representing the ‘barbarism and ignorance’ of their time. Crusaders’ motives were mixed. Nobles sought glory and possessions. The common people, the simpler driven by a sincere desire to liberate the Holy Land, wanted freedom and wealth. The secular clergy wished to gain respect and authority, while monks regarded the crusade vow as a means to evade their vows. In contrast to Saladin, Richard I received short shrift. One possible benefit of the crusade Marin unoriginally identified was the reduction of the power of lay lords to the advantage of the church.6 Elevation of Saladin as a hero served a number of purposes. To Christian sympathisers, such as Marin, he could stand as a moral exemplar to shame corrupt believers and a corrupt society, medieval or contemporary. Alternatively, for the non-believers or philosophes like Voltaire, his career could act as a metaphor for modern enlightened rule, civilised, tolerant, moderate, not fanatical, in contrast, by implication, to the Bourbons.
That the crusades formed an important part of French history was not in doubt, as witnessed by J. D. Schoeplin’s enthusiastic account De Sacris Galliae Regum in Orientem Expeditionibus (Holy Wars of the Kings of France in the East 1726). A similar assumption underlay the overt national pride in the meticulously researched Esprit des croisades begun in 1774 by Jean-Baptiste Mailly (1744–94).7 The Maurists’ historical researches enjoyed royal patronage and tended towards burnishing the fame of the kings of France. In 1740, Louis XV had granted permission for a Vatican librarian to assist the Maurists in translating Arab texts. However, only in 1770 was the Maurist project placed on a systematic footing under the direction of Georges François Berthereau (1732–94), who had to learn Arabic from scratch. Over the following quarter of a century, Berthereau collected and translated a mass of material from Arabic sources, leaving at his death 1,100 folio pages. However, almost nothing was published or arranged into coherent order. The Maurists were swept away by the French Revolution in 1792. However, almost as soon as the Institut de France was created (1795), the idea of a collection of the Latin, Greek and Arabic sources for the crusade was revived, if in less nationalistic terms. A few years later, a paper to the Institut in 1798, not coincidentally the year of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, spoke of the ‘reciprocal influence’ of Europe and ‘l’Orient’ on each other’s people. In 1807, a committee was established, that included the greatest Arabist of his time, Silvestre de Sacy, to investigate the possibility of reviving the scheme based on Berthereau’s surviving papers This, too, ran into the sands. The Recueil des historiens des croisades had to wait for the political will of Louis-Philippe’s government in the 1830s.8
More immediately influential than the costive antiquarianism of the Maurists was the Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongols et des autres Tartares occidentaux (4 volumes in 5, 1756–58) by Joseph de Guignes (1721–1800). De Guignes, who read both Arabic and Chinese, saw the Eurasian past in homogeneous terms. Huns, Turks, Mongols and Tartars were successive names for one ‘foule de barbares’, their interaction with other peoples and cultures providing a central dynamic of historical development. Influenced by a unitary biblical model of human history, some of his ideas were distinctly eccentric, as with his insistence that the Chinese had been colonised by the Egyptians, while others, such as the interaction between different faith systems, pointed to a more sophisticated acceptance of cultural exchange. Although the crusades appear as ‘un morceau’ in the wider scheme, they hold especial interest for ‘la Nation Française’. The account of the crusades, primarily in Books XI and XII, was innovative in relying more on eastern than western sources for tone, perspective and information, Arabic sources containing detail ‘beaucoup plus exacte’ than their western counterparts. In consequence of the slant of his eastern sources, de Guignes’s version of events is presented in a more dispassionate manner than those of some of his contemporaries. The crusades formed a ‘mélange bizarre de Religion et de Chevalerie’, essentially barbaric in their violence. The even-handed approach distinguishes de Guignes’s commentary from the standard tropes of crusade historiography. The Turks are considered as equally barbaric as the Franks. The Ayyubids are correctly branded as parvenus with a more recent title to rule in thirteenth-century Palestine even than the crusaders. However, the military leadership of Zengi receives high praise as does his son, Nur al-Din, ‘si juste’. Perhaps of wider historiographical significance, cultural exchange is assumed: new western horizons of trade, manufacture and technology were opened while the Franks of Jerusalem were corrupted by ‘les moeurs Asiatiques’. Not exclusively or chiefly concerned with the crusades, de Guignes included useful descriptions of the later medieval Mamluk regime in Egypt and a potted history of the Ottomans. Supported by marginal references and substantial bibliographies of primary sources, the Histoire des Huns challenged the customary Euro- even Francocentric stance of crusade history.9
While appealing to writers seeking a broad chronological and geographic vision of the past, such as Gibbon, de Guignes’s universalism ran into fierce opposition from Voltaire who challenged his neo-biblical unified interpretation of world culture. However, de Guignes’s insistence on the importance of his ‘Huns’ (i.e. invaders of sedentary cultures from the Eurasian steppes) in conquering China, parts of Europe, India, Persia and Syria and their role in the fall of the world empires of Rome and the caliphate, helped shift the terms of engagement in the academic controversy about the crusades. Beside old arguments about their religious, moral or practical efficacy, about cultural progress or retardation within Europe, de Guignes presented the crusades as an episode in secular world history devoid of a moral charge. He provided a refreshing – if somewhat fanciful and largely ignored – critique of Asiatic history, comparing the achievements and significance of the steppe peoples with those of Greece and Rome ‘well able to humiliate our own amour-propre’.10 De Guignes furnished more evidence in support of those who sought in the crusades signs of material change, for good or ill, most of it hard to contest by those ignorant of the sources he employed (although unsurprisingly this did not stop Voltaire). He also reduced the crusades to a side-show of Eurasian history, an invigorating interpretation that nonetheless failed to dampen contemporary interest.
The rebirth of chivalry?
Louis XV’s permission to allow a Vatican librarian to assist the Maurist crusade project in 1740 had been advised by the courtier, medieval historian and philologist Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1697–1781). An editor of texts for the Maurist Martin Bouquet’s Receuil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (published from 1738), Sainte-Palaye sought to understand the middle ages on what he deemed their own terms, collecting historical and literary manuscripts and preparing an encyclopaedic Glossaire de la langue française as well as, among other things, an edition of Froissart and a book on the French troubadours. He was an indefatigable researcher and copyist, providing, for instance, the Maurist crusade project with notices of relevant Italian manuscripts. His influence on crusade historiography rested on his Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie (first edition 1759 – both Hume and Gibbon had copies).11
In seventeenth-century France, chivalry, defined as the code of behaviour of medieval nobles and gentlemen, was used both to entertain and to serve as a model against which to chart a perceived decline in nobility and noble habits. Du Cange laid out details of the institutions of chivalry in his Latin Glossarium (1678). Crusade heroes featured prominently in nostalgic accounts which lauded chivalry’s supposed virtues of modesty, loyalty, generosity, humility and faith: ‘the only contradiction between the devout man and the brave one is in language not substance’. Chivalry and its poets, the troubadours, were regarded as civilising forces in a barbaric landscape, an association Sainte-Palaye was to reinforce. Over all lay the romanticism of Tasso. However, the origins and impact of chivalry became a matter of controversy when handled by historians and social commentators trying to identify progress from post-classical barbarism to modern enlightenment. Was chivalry an intrinsic feature of barbaric society, an ameliorating force mitigating the more destructive forces of a militarist, feudal society, or an agent in moving western European culture towards renewal and enlightenment? These considerations were tightly bound to the crusades that seemed to embody and promote many of chivalry’s most prominent characteristics: honour, faith, adventure, duty. As de Guignes remarked, the crusades combined religion and chivalry. Were the crusades therefore a consequence or a cause of the social order in warfare and manners attributed to the institutions of chivalry? Such arguments chimed in with interpretations of crusading as a product of human social, cultural and economic forces rather than as transcendent.
Sainte-Palaye traced the origins of chivalry to the Germanic world described by Tacitus, even though its formal ceremonies, such as oaths and dubbing, first appeared in the records of Charlemagne, and its full flowering only came with the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Building on the historico-philological work of du Cange, he saw the code of chivalry as a rigid set of rules, ‘the most sacred and honourable laws of ancient chivalry’, a formalism briskly dismissed by Voltaire as purely imaginary.12 Sainte-Palaye derived his theory from chronicles but also from poems and romances (he had taught himself Provençal to appreciate troubadour verse). He summed up his historical approach as being less interested in ‘the account of what happened than in the picture of how it was’. This led him to assign equal credibility to fiction as to histories, with bizarre effects, as in his discussion of knight errantry: ‘These heroes … resided principally in forests … they lived wholly on venison; and on flat stones, placed expressly for the purpose of those knights errant in the forests.’13 Such absurdities featured indiscriminately beside analysis of actual historical events such as John II of France’s foundation of the Order of the Star. Sainte-Palaye’s method was analytical not chronological, his Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie being organised according to the institutions of chivalry – squires, dubbing, knight errantry etc. The importance of Sainte-Palaye’s work lay in that it took the middle ages seriously (if fancifully), integrating chivalry into a thesis of social development and progress that suited the very different approaches of philosophical historians. Both Gibbon and Robertson based their commentaries on chivalry on Sainte-Palaye. Neo-medievalism was far from being the invention of post-French Revolution romanticism or reaction.
While acknowledging that it could produce ‘monsters’ and had led to abuses such as rashness, indiscipline and lack of unity on the battlefield, Sainte-Palaye saw in chivalry ‘the work of an enlightened policy and the glory of those nations among whom it flourished’. Chivalry, born of friendship and brotherhood ‘tended to promote order and good morals’ and ‘produced the most accomplished models of public valour’, ‘an institution founded solely for the public welfare, as in the most enlightened times have never been surpassed, and very rarely equalled’. Thus chivalry tempered the anarchic and violent tendencies inherent in feudalism. For the crusaders, the ceremonies of chivalry ‘were the necessary spur to animate the knights, who would otherwise have been discouraged by the miseries of the crusades and the vast conquests of the Turks’. In the wider context of the origins of modern European nation-state politics that so occupied many Enlightenment thinkers, Sainte-Palaye noted that chivalry, with its emphasis on individual honour and the bonds of nobility, militated against loyalty to monarchs or nations, although kings later assumed prominent roles in chivalric orders and promoting chivalric values.14
The significance of Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie in the historiography of the crusades rests on locating past manners in concrete external social rituals recoverable from original sources. Establishing the nature of chivalry in such clear terms allowed Sainte-Palaye, despite his social conservatism, to hold up past values in scarcely disguised criticism of later habits while avoiding both nostalgic sentimentality and the rhetoric of contemptuous superiority that fuelled the philosophes. Sainte-Palaye lent precision to contest vague libels about medieval barbarism and fanaticism. This, in turn, secured the crusades a more measured hearing. By taking chivalry as a social phenomenon of itself, born of a secular warlike culture allied to but not synonymous with medieval Christianity, Sainte-Palaye’s views challenged writers across the ideological spectrum.
Voltaire was dismissive. Hume, although possessing a copy, tacitly but firmly rejected Sainte-Palaye’s positive view of medieval noble mores.15 By contrast, William Robertson’s description of chivalry in the introduction to his book on Charles V, The Progress of Society in Europe (1769), echoes the theme of its refining influence on manners. Like Sainte-Palaye, Robertson accepted the reality of chivalry’s literary claims to oppose oppressors, redress wrongs and succour the distressed, the imprisoned and the weak. Valour, humanity, courtesy, justice, honesty, honour and generosity tempered the anarchy and ‘military fanaticism’ of the feudal system. The clear implication is that chivalry formed one of the positive consequences of the crusade and the contact with the more sophisticated manners of the east and thus fitted Robertson’s grand conception of social progress. Chivalry, through its tenets of humanity, gallantry and honour in war, directly influenced modern manners.16 Gibbon, although less convinced of chivalry’s beneficent or lasting quality, was heavily dependent on Sainte-Palaye for his somewhat mechanistic portrayal of the character of the knights of the First Crusade, not least because the Frenchman separated chivalry from religion. Associating the ‘virtue of a perfect knight’ improbably with Tancred of Lecce, Gibbon talked of ‘the true spirit of chivalry which inspired the generous sentiments and social offices of man far better than the base philosophy, or the baser religion, of the times’. Gibbon remained firmly on the fence as regards the relationship of chivalry to crusading, ‘at once an effect and a cause of this memorable institution’.17 In his View of Society in Europe (1778), the Scottish journalist, historian and notorious alcoholic Gilbert Stuart (1743–86), eager to contradict Robertson’s progressive interpretation of the crusades, insisted that chivalry gave rise to the crusades not as some (i.e. Robertson) imagined vice versa. Stuart embraced Sainte-Palaye’s secularism to the extent of arguing that religion ‘interfered’ with chivalry. Thus, any progressive refinements to medieval barbarism were due to chivalry not crusading.18 This conflict over the effect of the crusades within the progressive pattern imposed by Enlightenment historians provided a springboard for the very different attitudes adopted by writers after the French Revolution. Sainte-Palaye’s work on chivalry was central to this controversy because it provided a pathology of knighthood and knightly society against which the role of religion could be assessed with greater nuance if not greater objectivity. Sainte-Palaye had shown, or had tried to show, that medieval knights were not simply barbaric thugs inflamed by greed and manipulated by false superstition or misplaced piety.
Manners and materialism: French philosophes
The greater emphasis on social structures, cultural attitudes and material development in assessing the medieval past scarcely reduced historians’ massive condescension to the crusades. Yet because crusading could be placed in more or less any discussion of the development of European civilisation, it gained greater definition as a historical phenomenon and, consequentially, linguistically. In academic circles, from the early sixteenth century the phrase ‘holy war’ had tended to prevail, despite or because of its ideological baggage. More neutral terms entered the vernacular, the German term Kreuzzug (war of the cross) and the French croisade becoming well established. In English, it was only in the eighteenth century that the particular word ‘crusade’, a hybrid word derived from Spanish, French and Latin, became the accepted term. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) includes four variants: crusade, crusado, croisade and croisado (the word used by Francis Bacon). ‘Crusade’, perhaps first coined in 1706, certainly in vogue by 1753, when it was used in the English translation of Voltaire’s essay (published as History of the Crusades; the following year as part of The General History and State of Europe), was popularised through its use by Hume (1761) and Gibbon. Within a generation, ‘crusade’ had become so familiar as to be used as a synonym for a vigorous campaign in a good cause or issue of principle, thus the counter-Enlightenment ‘Magus of the North’ Johann Georg Hamann’s Die Kreuzzüge des Philologen (Crusades of the Philologian, 1762); Voltaire’s unexpectedly positive use of the croisade in describing combating smallpox (1767–68); or Thomas Jefferson’s ‘crusade against ignorance’ (1786).19 It was ironic that this recognition was born out of a sustained and far from unsuccessful campaign of vilification.
The classic statement of Enlightenment disdain for the crusades appeared in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–72). Olympian condescension was underscored by rhetorical amazement at the quest for ‘a piece of rock not worth a single drop of blood’, a consequence of emotional and intellectual ‘vertigo’, its participants moved variously by ‘imbecility and false zeal’, political self-interest, intolerance, ignorance, violence and the church. The consequences of the crusades were unremittingly negative: the Inquisition; vast loss of life; the impoverishment of the nobility; a decline in agriculture; a dearth of bullion; the collapse of ecclesiastical discipline; and an ill-deserved increase in monastic wealth.20 While few if any of these criticisms were original, their force derived from their political not historical purpose. Any positive gloss, such as the honour and glory that characterised many popular accounts, was rejected not because it was bad history but because it pandered to the values and self-image of the ancien régime, one of the immediate targets of the Encyclopédie. The potency of the root and branch condemnation of crusading lay in its contemporary resonance as a metaphor for a morally corrupt, intellectually decadent, religiously obscurantist and irrationally oppressive absolute monarchical system. However, the touchstone of reason Diderot and his collaborators insisted upon so loftily was no less partisan or more impartial than the mocked conservatism of their opponents.
The austerity of the Encyclopédie rested on rationalism not research, a precarious basis for the study of history. Voltaire’s Histoire, although no less sceptically hostile, was more nuanced and more informed. From Anna Comnena, he drew a flattering portrait of Alexius I Comnenus, while Joinville provided the basis for his startling praise of Louis IX: despite ignoring the ‘voice of reason’ and misled by the ‘madness of the crusades’, ‘it is not in the power of man to carry virtue to a greater height’ than the sainted monarch. In detail, much of Voltaire’s commentary was unoriginal. He plagiarised Pasquier’s image of the Levant as a tomb for westerners and depended on Fleury for information. Depopulation; economic ruin; the abuse of papal power; the irresponsibility of crusade leaders and the barbaric irrationality of crusading (likened, in a casually racist aside, to the actions of ‘Hottentots or Negroes’) are all vigorously rehearsed. The crusaders boasted ‘giddy, furious, debauched and cruel minds’, their enterprise likened to an epidemic illness.
However, approval of certain protagonists pointed to a subtler message. While accepting the general theme of crusading fanaticism, Voltaire weaves into his disapproval a discussion of liberty as well as reason. Saladin, for long a western hero and moral exemplar, is depicted as ‘at once a good man, a hero and a philosopher’ who promoted the idea that ‘all men are brethren’ delivering charity for what they suffer not what they believe: liberty and reason. It was the lack of reason that misled Louis IX into an unjust attack on Egypt. Papal and ecclesiastical abuse of power ‘must sooner or later have irritated the minds of mankind who are naturally fond of liberty’. Free from the thrall of superstition and reluctant to accept papal authority, the conduct of Frederick II, who had negotiated rather than fought for the restoration of Jerusalem to Christian rule in 1229, earned the accolade of ‘a model of the most perfect policy’. The irrational pointlessness and lack of justification of the crusades is undimmed in Voltaire’s critique: there was no more reason in attacking Egypt because it was inhabited by Muslims than it would have been to attack the Chinese for following Confucianism. The theme of liberty repeatedly intrudes, reminding readers that Voltaire’s target was more eighteenth than thirteenth century. Thus the sole advantage produced by the crusades ‘was the liberty which many boroughs purchased of the lords’, impoverished by crusading. This resulted in municipal government growing ‘out of the ruins of the possession of fiefs’. It was axiomatic for philosophical historians that towns were the cradles of civilised rational manners. Fleury had pointed to the growth of Italian cities nurturing the renewal of European civilisation. Voltaire’s target was more parochial and political, the supposed beneficial result of the crusades of free boroughs supplying another barb directed at the creaking edifice of the ancien régime.21
Voltaire’s general reputation assured his opinions on the crusade wider currency than the stature of his historical sketch by itself merited. The much read and translated Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (first edition, 1770) by G. T. F. Raynal, although derided by Voltaire as old hat and bombast, nevertheless employed the same idea of the crusades as an epidemic, while more empathetically than Voltaire noting the apocalyptic dimension and, in a nod to Fleury, acknowledging the effect of contact with the east on western tastes and manners.22 Whether the crusades fitted the narrative of progress either as a spur or a hindrance, an issue skirted around by Diderot and Voltaire, became a central issue when addressed by their colleagues and correspondents further north whose conclusions were to set the study of the crusades into fresh channels.
Progress? Hume, Smith and Robertson: the Scottish debate
In a celebrated footnote to his discussion of the ‘General consequences of the crusades’ in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in the final instalment 1788), Edward Gibbon commented:
On the interesting subject, the progress of society in Europe, a strong ray of philosophic light has broke from Scotland in our own times; and it is with private, as well as public regard, that I repeat the names of Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith.23
This was typically and doubly disingenuous. The remark in fact appended a flat rejection of Robertson’s and Smith’s idea that the crusades exerted a ‘propitious influence’ and concealed a fundamental interpretive division among these well-acquainted Scottish writers. The disagreement mattered because to a degree the opposing positions framed much subsequent debate on the effects of the crusade.
David Hume (1711–76), philosopher turned historian, was not centrally concerned with the crusades, but was crushingly dismissive of them nonetheless as ‘the most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. In detail, his references to the crusades in his History of England (1761 for the medieval sections) suggest hack work, with a smattering of Voltaire (particularly obvious in the comments on Louis IX) and Diderot (with both of whom he subsequently corresponded). There are some errors of basic information, such as calling Urban II ‘Martin’. In general, the middle ages are condemned as ignorant, violent, priest-ridden. The crusades, profligate of lives and treasure, manifested motives of ‘effeminate superstition’, ‘heroic courage’ and ‘fiercest barbarity’, testimony to the inconsistency of human nature. Hume stressed the superiority of the Muslims in ‘science, moderation, humanity’ not just as demonstrated by the paragon Saladin, but by Islam itself. In Hume’s view, the Koran, while displaying some ‘violent precepts’, in its absence of bigotry and persecution compared well with Greek, let alone Latin, Christians of the time. Hume was clearly unmoved by the virtues of chivalry, as expounded by Sainte-Palaye, whose book on the subject he possessed, or the progressive theory of Fleury. Given his attitude to organised religion, Hume’s stance on the crusades is unsurprising.24 Perhaps more notable was the way his attitudes and phrases seeped into the common perception of crusading. His History was popular and contained instantly memorable aphorisms. Even William Robertson, whose views on the crusades differed markedly from Hume’s, nonetheless quoted his views and plagiarised his language (‘a singular monument of human folly’), as did the vociferous critic of Robertson, Gilbert Stuart.25
Hume’s empiricism made him wary of historical determinism. He nevertheless subscribed to the humanist idea of cycles of cultural renewal. From the low points of civilisation (e.g., in his view, the middle ages), the only way forward was upwards towards more enlightenment. How this process was initiated elicited various arguments. Hume’s successor as librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), in his widely consulted Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), attempted to establish a non-determinist, non-legalistic ‘natural’ account of the creation and development of civil society and civilised manners. In his discussion of the ‘History of Arts’, Ferguson proposed that improvement in manners came from emulation and exchange: ‘Ages are generally supposed to have borrowed from those who went before and nations to have received their portion of learning and art from abroad.’ This idea of cultural borrowing had clear implications for the crusades, as did Ferguson’s insistence on wealth as the basic building block of polite as well as political society. One of Ferguson’s earliest local readers took up both these themes in radically refashioning both the perception and reputation of the crusades.26
William Robertson (1721–93), sometime principal of Edinburgh University and Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, has been described as one of the first modern historians, despite Gibbon’s rather belittling comparison of him with Hume in 1773 as ‘another animal of great, though not perhaps of equal and certainly not of similar merit’.27 Robertson’s Charles V eschewed simple narrative and partisan polemic, trying to base its commentary on primary sources, despite its author’s ignorance of German, while employing the intellectual scheme of philosophical writers and a grand literary style. It sought to explain a grand theme, the creation of the system of nation states, and took as its evidence material from across society, the arts and the economy as well as political history. Robertson sought to give a history of the progress of society founded not on theory but evidence, much of it contained in learned appendices to each chapter. Despite his own confessional allegiance, he avoided cheap shots at the papacy or Catholicism. Discussing the crusade in his introductory chapter, he placed it firmly in a secular frame and, despite recognising the ‘superstition, frenzy and extravagance’ of the enterprise, avoided the distracting condescension of his peers. To Robertson has been attributed the beginning of the positive reading of crusade history that places it within a narrative of progress, in particular expanding on the ideas of Fleury regarding the cultural consequences of the growth of trade and the rise of the Italian cities. In support of his interpretation, Robertson used Sainte-Palaye’s arguments about the refinement brought by chivalry, which he saw as a result of the crusades, thus transforming them into agents of modernity. By placing this idea of progress in the context of commerce, manners, the arts and manufacture, rather than generalities about barbarism and superstition, Robertson established the subject on a new, apparently empirical and objective footing.28
Robertson did not come to his theories without assistance. The legacies of Fleury and Sainte-Palaye are clear, as is his acknowledgement of Hume, whom coincidentally he consistently defended against the religious bigots of the General Assembly. The footnotes relevant to the crusades in the analytical introductory conspectus of European history c. 400–1500, The Progress of Society in Europe, include references to du Cange’s Glossarium Latinitatis and his edition of Villehardouin; Bongars’s Gesta Dei Per Francos; Muratori’s great collection of Italian evidence; as well as secondary works including Hume, Ferguson and Etienne Pasquier.29 One influence not specified but possibly so pervasive that it has attracted scarce modern comment, was that of Adam Smith. This may appear at first sight unlikely. Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) appeared seven years after Charles V. The passage in it on the beneficent if accidental effects of the crusades, appears simply to mimic Robertson in attributing the increase in the wealth of the Italian maritime cities to their role in transporting crusaders. After admitting that ‘the cruzades … must necessarily have retarded the progress of the greater part of Europe’, Smith nonetheless concludes that ‘the most destructive frenzy that ever befell the European nations was a source of opulence to these republics’, thus providing the conditions for civility.30 However, by 1766, Smith had already touched on the crusades in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, following Sainte-Palaye in attributing to the crusades the introduction of ‘a greater degree of humanity’ in the conduct of war.31 Robertson had been associated with Smith in the mid-1750s as fellow members of an Edinburgh debating society and as a co-collaborator on the short-lived Edinburgh Review of 1755–56. The relationship between commerce, economic development, social progress and the refinement of manners, central to the thought of Smith, heavily influenced Robertson. According to someone who had heard Smith’s lectures on Jurisprudence c.1750–51, ‘Dr Robertson had borrowed the first volume of his History of Charles V from them as every student could testify.’32 Whatever the precise intellectual gestation of Robertson’s Charles V, the pivotal idea that civilisation benefited from the growth of commerce leading to the increase in the wealth of towns and cities and the fostering of civic values was shared and developed by members of his intellectual circle, including Smith and Ferguson. This went beyond Hume and was to incur the disapproval of Gibbon.
Robertson’s Progress of Society traced the transformation ‘from barbarism to refinement’, to ‘observe the first dawnings of returning light’. The crusades were ‘the first event that roused Europe from its lethargy … that tended to introduce any change in government or in manners’. The crusades provided a classic illustration of an unintended benefit from a malign cause, a favoured trope of philosophical historians anxious to square the circle of the progress of civilisation from barbarity: ‘to these wild expeditions, the effect of superstition and folly, we owe the first gleams of light which tended to dispel barbarity and ignorance’. The agent of change lay in the crusaders’ contacts with Byzantium and the Near East: ‘their views enlarged, their prejudices wore off; new ideas crowded into their minds’ through exposure to ‘a more polished people’. Before the wider cultural exchange could take effect, the loss of noble property through the expense of crusading and the absence of nobles on crusade led to a shift of power towards monarchs, a point made by Pasquier two centuries earlier. The peace in western Europe imposed by the church during crusades also gave rise to a more even administration of justice, the beginning of regular government. Of far greater significance was the increase in commerce and the rise of the Italian cities which led directly to the growth of communes supported by civic liberty and independence, producing in these cities ‘free and equal government as would render property secure and industry flourishing’, almost a manifesto for the Hanoverian settlement and the Act of Union. (Appropriately, Robertson had joined the forces of the government against the Jacobite rebels in 1745.) While chivalry mitigated the barbarism of the rural aristocracy, so the communal movement spread from Italy to the rest of western Europe, undermining feudalism and noble privileges while improving public manners and the exercise of rule and law. The central benefit lay not in wealth alone but, as Ferguson argued, in the advance of civil society and public virtue through ‘a general passion for liberty and independence’, a theme that not only brought the argument back to the basic tenets of philosophes such as Voltaire, but foreshadowed what was to be one of the central concerns of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.33
Gibbon
Edward Gibbon’s sonorous judgements on the crusades have become something of a historical and literary cliché. ‘At the voice of their pastor, the robber, the incendiary, the homicide, arose by their thousands to redeem their souls by repeating on the infidels the same deeds which they had exercised against their Christian brethren; and the terms of atonement were eagerly embraced by offenders of every rank and denomination. None were pure; none were exempt from the guilt and penalty of sin; and those who were the least amenable to the justice of God and the church were the best entitled to the temporal and eternal recompense of their pious courage.’34 To rescue Gibbon from his own prose, his comments should be located both in the immediate intellectual context and in the longer perspective of earlier historians he had read.
Edward Gibbon (1737–94) was highly unusual; an Englishman with extended cosmopolitan experience not just tastes and a writer of European vision who wrote in English. His theme of the decline and fall of classical Rome was the grandest imaginable. Conceived on the largest canvas, and intended to display the author’s massive, if self-satisfied erudition, his limpidly sonorous prose and his delight in combative intellectual polemics, The Decline and Fall examined some of the central pillars of western European history and culture. Gibbon set out to make a name for himself not only by the huge scale of the work but by challenging a host of accepted orthodoxies about the Roman Empire, the role of early Christianity and, most unusually, the middle ages, the long hiatus, as he saw it, before the new enlightenment began in the Renaissance. Gibbon’s general approach to religion, like Fleury’s, was institutional not confessional, marking him as one of the inventors of serious ecclesiastical history. His own brush with faith, an adolescent conversion to Roman Catholicism and a subsequent return to uninvolved Anglicanism, perhaps allowed him, in contrast to some philosophe contemporaries, more insight, if no greater enthusiasm, for the complications and contradictions of belief. However, subtlety hardly characterised his account of the crusades.
The chapters Gibbon devoted to the crusades, published in 1788, show a close dependence on previous writers in part to engage and frequently to refute their arguments. The organisation of his crusade material indicates a lack of interest in the crusades as a medieval phenomenon except in so far as they illustrated Gibbon’s wider themes: the loss and rediscovery of civil liberty; the corrosively irrational and oppressive nature of organised religion; anti-clericalism; the transmission and continuity of classical culture. His treatment of the crusades to the Holy Land is presented in two unequal chapters.35 The first dealt with the origins and nature of the enterprise coupled with an account of the First Crusade and a summary of the internal organisation of the kingdom of Jerusalem, which Gibbon significantly if rather eccentrically viewed as a model of constitutional liberties and a cradle of pioneering urban freedom. The second chapter takes the form of a brisk canter through a narrative of 1099 to 1291, the main emphasis being on the moral quality of crusade leaders. The content scarcely matches the rhetoric. The famous peroration on the loss of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, ‘a mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with the WORLD’S DEBATE’, is hardly supported by the preceding analysis.36 More central, perhaps, to Gibbon’s interests was the Fourth Crusade and the relations between the Latins and Greeks, covered in two further chapters which lead to a brief final summary of the general consequences of the crusades.37 Gibbon is keen to denigrate Byzantium as the preserver and conduit of classical reason, chiefly because of the lack of the ‘free spirit’ which Gibbon attributed to western Europeans. With Byzantium as with the crusaders, Gibbon appears determined to marginalise their role in the progress of civilisation, in so doing allying himself unequivocally with those opposed to the Fleury–Smith– Robertson revamping of the history of progress in the middle ages.
Gibbon acts as a guide to two centuries of discussion of the crusades. His primary sources included Bongars’s collection of Latin texts; du Cange’s Villehardouin; Odo of Deuil; Jacques de Vitry; Joinville; the Jewish twelfth-century traveller Benjamin of Tudela; the national collections of source extracts by Muratori (Italian) and Bouquet (French); Mansi’s series of documents from church councils and synods; the Assizes (i.e. laws) of Jerusalem; English chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury, Roger of Howden and Matthew Paris; the Greek writers Anna Comnena, Nicetas Choniates and John Kinnamos; and the Arabic texts Abu al-Fida and the biographies of Saladin by Imad al-Din ibn Shaddad and Beha al-Din. His secondary reading appeared comprehensive: Voltaire, Hume, de Guignes, Mailly’s Esprit des croisades, Sainte-Palaye, Fleury’s Discours (‘an accurate and rational view of the causes and effects of the crusades’), Maimbourg, Robertson, and Vertot’s 1762 history of Hospitallers. Directly or indirectly, Gibbon’s comments share the legacy of Pasquier and Fuller. His disdain echoed that of the influential (if unoriginal) anti-Catholic barbs in the recently translated Ecclesiastical History (1726, Eng. trans. 1764) of the German Lutheran Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1693/94–1755).38 Despite, or perhaps because of, this erudition, genuine and pretended, Gibbon’s reflections on the crusades are best regarded as polemic not history as, with a highly selective use of his primary sources, the arguments of his fellow commentators were picked up or picked off.
Following Fuller, Gibbon began his discussion by considering the justice of crusading. He dismissed the idea that the crusades were legitimate defence and resistance because they were disproportionate to the threat. Palestine was only a proper military goal because of fanaticism and superstition, not reason. The whole concept of holy war – ‘from Egypt to Livonia and from Peru to Hindostan’ – was derided as hypocritical by a neat reversal of perspective; the secular conquests by the Germanic barbarians in the west were regarded by succeeding generations of Christians as legitimate whereas those of Islam were rejected by Christian subjects and neighbours alike. The religious motivation of the crusades was at once accepted but derided through a critique of the penitential system of indulgences which, Gibbon insisted, acted for many as a sop to baser motives, arguing that religion is ‘feeble to stem’ but ‘strong and irresistible to impel’ social manners, in this case superstitious, fanatical, violent and mercenary. Yet within this hostile critique, Gibbon allowed place for his view of the active energy inherent in the culture of western Europe: ‘the love of freedom was a powerful incitement to the multitudes’. This underlying myth of pristine Germanic vigour was popular among northern European intellectuals who saw it revealed in crusading, from Gibbon’s Scottish contemporary Gilbert Stuart to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).39 Following writers at least since Pasquier, Gibbon concluded that the material consequences of this mass action – alienation of property by princes, nobles and even peasants at rock-bottom prices caused by the sudden glut of sales led to an increase in the power of both monarchs and the church, who bought up the cheap lands and goods.
This close awareness of the ideas of previous historians permeates Gibbon’s subsequent detailed discussion of the First Crusade. Du Cange, Sainte-Palaye and the seventeenth-century English legal historian John Selden inform his account of chivalry; de Guignes provides the ballast of eastern sources while Mailly supplies a sometimes rejected commentary on the western texts. Hume and Voltaire are constant reference points, if only occasionally explicit. Whereas Gibbon shared their solid anti-clericalism, he seeks to adjudicate their interpretations of miracles (preferring Hume) and crusaders’ psychology when contemplating the blood-soaked victorious crusaders praying at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on 15 July 1099. Hume, reflecting his unsentimental view of human nature, saw the mingling of ‘the fiercest and most tender passions’ in individual crusaders as easy and natural; Voltaire, more polemically superficial, insisted such emotional contradictions were absurd and incredible.40 Gibbon sought to argue that different crusaders held different balances of motive, those most violent not being among those leading the way to the Holy Sepulchre. In fact, this may be seen as a rather feeble quibble, hardly worth the precisely noted disagreement with his two distinguished predecessors. However, it is typical of Gibbon’s whole account of the crusades, a somewhat meretricious attempt at novelty and difference which amounts to very little of original interpretive substance. Thus, his account of the ‘political liberty’ inherent in institutions of the kingdom of Jerusalem, is framed by the increasingly common trope of condescension regarding the surrounding ‘slaves of Asia’. His singling out of the rise of cities and corporations in Outremer as early evidence of the movement that would destroy feudalism derives from Fleury, Voltaire and Robertson, as does his general conclusion that almost the sole advantage derived from the crusades was, as Voltaire had argued, the rise in free boroughs in the west. Gibbon used Voltaire’s very words in describing Louis IX, a victim of ‘holy madness’. Even his unusual criticisms of Saladin (‘a royal saint’, ‘in a fanatic age himself a fanatic’) seem forced, designed simply to be different rather than offering a new judgement based on critical consideration of the sources; literary knock-about not measured argument.
However, in his summing up ‘the General Consequences of the Crusades’, Gibbon is compelled to take a clear position between what could be called a Humean and a Robertsonian position. If anything, he is even more negative than Hume, who at least accepted the crusades were part of a process as well as period in which civilisation began to recover. In rejecting Robertson, Gibbon may have been influenced by the sustained critique of Gilbert Stuart in his popular View of Society in Europe (1778; many editions thereafter – Gibbon certainly had the 1782 one – and translations into German 1779 and French 1789). Stuart rejected the idea that the crusades spawned the civilising force of chivalry and relegated their role in positive cultural exchange to neither the first nor ‘very powerful cause of refinement in Europe’. Rather, ‘they drained Europe of rulers, inhabitants and wealth thus [a direct dig at Robertson] discouraging trade and the arts’, causing disorder, the rise of papal power and the promotion of ‘every pious impertinence’, advancing ‘the most abject superstition’.41 Gibbon hardly put it better.
The crusades, Gibbon argued, had little impact on Islam. In a characteristic reversal of accepted wisdom, the Greeks learnt from the Latins, not philosophy, industry or art, but western freedom of spirit and ‘the rights of man’. However, any cultural benefit derived by the crusaders’ presence in the Near East and Greece in trade or manufacture (e.g. windmills, silk, sugar) was wholly accidental and peripheral. Although some Arabic knowledge of medicine and mathematics may have been spread, the crusaders who settled in the east or transmitted ideas back to the west did not learn Arabic or Greek. Greek philosophy reached the west, Gibbon insisted, via the Arabs and Jews of Andalusia not Outremer. The most important effects of the crusades were ‘analogous to the cause’ which was ‘a savage fanaticism’. Thus, ‘from the baleful fountain of the holy war’, flowed relics, legends, the Inquisition, friars, indulgences and ‘the final progress of idolatry’. Here, the use of the word ‘progress’ was carefully calculated to presage a direct assault on the progressive interpretations of Smith and Robertson. ‘If the ninth and tenth centuries were times of darkness, the thirteenth and fourteenth were the age of absurdity and fable.’42 Although after the irruption of ‘anarchy and barbarism’ from Vikings, Saracens and Magyars, the ‘tide of civilisation … began to flow with a steady and accelerated course’ from the eleventh century, this was not a conscious, direct or even, in the cherished philosophical model of the unintended consequences, accidental result of the crusades. Gibbon takes care not to be misunderstood either in thesis or target.
Great was the increase and rapid progress, during the two hundred years of the crusades; and some philosophers have applauded the propitious influences of these holy wars, which appear to me to have checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe. The lives and labours of millions which were buried in the East could have been more profitably employed in the improvement of their native country; the accumulated stock of industry and wealth would have overflowed in navigation and trade; and the Latins would have been enriched and enlightened by a pure and friendly correspondence with the climates of the east.43
Thus, in a typically Gibbonian flourish, the economic determinism of Fleury, Smith and Robertson is embraced in the same instant as their application of it is denied, leaving us, essentially, with Fuller’s theory of waste. Whether Gibbon came to this conclusion out of reason, competitive argumentativeness or aesthetic preference for the aphorisms of his seventeenth-century predecessor must remain a matter of conjecture. He rubbed in his disapproval of the Smith–Robertson line by proceeding to underline his traditionalist views while adopting a key conceptual element from the Smith–Robertson line. Admitting the ‘accidental operation of the crusades’, Gibbon adopts the Voltaire line that stretched back to Pasquier that the crusades undermined the stultifying oppression of feudalism through causing the poverty of the nobility that produced charters of freedom that liberated people, industry and communities. Yet even as he completed his assessment of the crusades, Gibbon failed to resolve the contradiction inherent in his lack of originality. He wished to say the crusades were a regressive not progressive force and yet he admitted they led, in some measure at least, to the growth of liberty which he regarded as the prerequisite for civilised manners, whether in the classical or modern age.
For all his elevated tergiversation, Gibbon’s opinion was not to influence the greatest change in attitudes towards the crusade since the sixteenth century. Long before Gibbon pronounced, Robertson’s Charles V had been translated into French (in 1771). It was read by, among others, Chateaubriand, the apostle of a sympathetic reading of the middle ages whose advocacy of respect for the crusades on their own terms helped fundamentally recast French attitudes towards them. Robertson’s economic ideas became so widely accepted that in 1806 the Institut de France offered a prize for an essay on the subject of the influence of the crusades on European civil liberty, civilisation and the progress of learning, commerce and industry, the latter assumption hardly suggesting neutrality, let alone hostility.44 As it transpired, far more influential to the subsequent transformation of the rational into an empathetic response to the medieval past and the crusades, was one of Robertson’s own Edinburgh pupils: Walter Scott.45
Notes
1 On this Protestant angle, see now R. Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 4–5.
2 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge, 1999–2005), ii, chap. 7 title and passim for transformations in the writing of history.
3 E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. W. Smith (London 1862), chap. LXI, note 63; The Library of Edward Gibbon, ed. G. Keynes (London, 1980), pp. 43–4; R. Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: Orientalists and their Enemies (London, 2006), p. 120 and generally pp. 109–40 for this and what follows.
4 Marino Sanudo Torsello, Secreta Fidelium Crucis, ed. J. Bongars, Gesta Dei Per Francos (Hanau, 1611), i, fol. 28v.
5 Comte Riant, ‘Inventaire des matérieux rassemblés par les Bénédictines au XVIIIe siècles pour la publication des Historiens des croisades’, Archives de l’Orient Latin, ii (Paris, 1884), 105–30; H. Dehéran, ‘Les origines du Recueil des historiens des croisades’, Journal des Savants, n.s. 17 (1919), 260–6.
6 F.-L. C. Marin, Histoire de Saladin, sulthan d’Egypte et de Syrie (2 vols. Paris, 1758), esp. i, ix, 43–4, 48, 63; ii, 11–12, 262–3.
7 J. Richard, ‘Jean-Baptiste Mailly et l’Esprit des croisades’, Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belles lettres de Dijon, 136 (1997–98), 349–59.
8 Dehéran, ‘Origines’, pp. 261–5; A. Beugnot, ‘Rapport sur la publication du Recueil des historiens des croisades’, RHC Occ., i–i, i–xv.
9 J. de Guignes, Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongols et des autres Tartares occidentaux (Paris, 1756–58, 4 vols in 5), esp. i, vi-vii, xv, xvi; ii, 14, 220 and Books XI and XII passim; iv, 337–8 and 363–75 for bibliography; cf. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, ii, 114.
10 De Guignes, Huns, i, vi–vii.
11 Dehéran, ‘Origines’, p. 261; Riant, ‘Inventaire’, p. 118; D. F and M. J. Norton, The David Hume Library (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 127; Library of Gibbon, p. 170; in general, L. Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (Baltimore MD, 1968).
12 Translation by Mrs S. Dobson from English edition, Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry (London, 1784), p. 336.
13 Gossman, Medievalism, p. 169; Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry, p. 317.
14 Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry, esp. pp. 1–2, 69, 78, 165, 305–7, 310, 312–17, 336, 339.
15 Gossman, Medievalism, pp. 291–3, 327 et seq.
16 W. Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe: A Historical Outline from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century. [The introduction to The History of the Reign of Charles V (1st edn Edinburgh, 1769)], ed. F. Gilbert (Chicago IL, 1972), pp. 26, 57–9; despite not citing Sainte-Palaye in his footnotes, the debt is direct, Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, p. 281, note 72.
17 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, 199–201 and note 58.
18 Gilbert Stuart, A View of Society in Europe in its Progress from Rudeness to Refinement or Inquiries concerning the History of Laws, Government and Manners (Edinburgh, 1778), esp. pp. 46, 50, 57, 64, 70–1, 306–7.
19 Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner), iv (Oxford, 1989), 85; S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755; facsimile edn Harlow, 1990), i, sub croisade, croisade, crusade; C. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades, (London, 1998) pp. 112, 155; , G. Dickson, The Children’s Crusade (London, 2008), pp. 171, 234, note 52.
20 D. Diderot, Dictionnaire encyclopédique, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1821), xiv, 496–511.
21 Voltaire, History of the Crusades (trans. London, 1753), pp. 49, 52, 54, 57, 59, 66, 74, 76, 84–5, 88, 91–2, 95, 108–10, 114, 119, 127; idem, The General History and State of Europe (Eng. trans. London, 1754), Of the East and the Crusades, pp. 189, 258–307, 315, 322; L. Albina, ‘Voltaire et ses sources historiques’, Dix-Huitième Siècle, 13 (1981), 349–59; J. M. Brumfitt, Voltaire: Historian (Oxford, 1970), esp. pp. 4, 6, 37, 45, 68, 72, 82–4.
22 G. T. F. Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Geneva, 1780 [1st edn Amsterdam, 1770]), vol. 10, esp. 334, 415–16, 458–9; the work was heavily influenced by Diderot, who collaborated in some of the text.
23 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, 349, note 69 (cf. p. 188 and the teasing comment on the empathetic limits of ‘the cold philosophy of modern times’).
24 David Hume, History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (1st published London, 1754–61, medieval vol. 1761; edition used London, 1796), esp. pp. 186–90, 197–9, 291–2, 301–14, 442–3. For Hume’s books touching on the crusades, Hume Library, pp. 35, 41, 91, 112, 125, 127, 131, 135.
25 Robertson, Progress, p. 25; Stuart, View of Society, p. 64.
26 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), Part III, section VII (‘On the History of Arts’); Part V, ‘On the Decline of Nations’, section II, ‘Of the temporary efforts and relaxations of the National Spirit’ and section V; for Robertson using Ferguson by 1769, Progress, p. 170.
27 Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. North (London, 1956), Gibbon to J. B. Holroyd, 7 August 1773; J. Burrow, A History of Histories (London, 2007), p. 339.
28 Robertson, Progress, pp. 21–8.
29 Robertson, Progress, p. 170.
30 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell et al. (Oxford, 1976), i, 406.
31 Adam Smith, Lectures in Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek et al. (Oxford, 1978), p. 549.
32 John Callander of Craigforth, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Oxford, 1987), p. 191, note 2; he also alleged that Smith had said that Robertson ‘was able to form a good outline but he wanted industry to fill up the plan’.
33 Robertson, Progress, pp. 21–31, 64.
34 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, 188.
35 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, chaps LVIII and LIX, 178–277.
36 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, 277.
37 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, chaps LX and LXI, 278–357.
38 For the assessment of Fleury, Decline and Fall, vii, 186, note 21 and in general Gibbon’s notes to chapters LVIII–LXI; cf. Library of Gibbon, pp. 43–4, 63, 67, 77, 85, 125, 133, 141, 144, 147, 156, 158, 162, 169, 170, 179, 189, 200, 202, 203, 239, 252–3, 259, 262, 275, 279.
39 F. Schiller, Über Volkwänderung, Kreuzzüge und Mittelalter, Werke, ed. R. Roxberger (Berlin and Stuttgart, 1886).
40 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, 228.
41 Stuart, View of Society, pp. 306–7; Library of Gibbon, p. 259.
42 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, 348.
43 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii, 349 (cf. the echo of Smith, note 30 above); see David Womersley’s edition of Decline and Fall (London, 1994), introduction, pp. xcviii–ci for a relevant discussion.
44 Below, Chapter 4.
45 Burrow, History of Histories, p. 349.