4
During a course of lectures delivered in Munich in 1855, Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95) reflected on writers on the crusades. He had made his name a decade and a half earlier demolishing the reputation of William of Tyre and Albert of Aachen as reliable sources for the First Crusade and now suggested that ‘every new commentator must find fresh subject for interest and instruction according to his own requirements and inclinations’.1 The legacy of the Enlightenment had established the crusades as a reference point for cultural commentary as much on contemporary as on medieval society. Writers responded in broadly two ways, complementing or contradicting the judgementalism of the philosophes. The essentially materialist analysis, that decried religious fanaticism while observing the crusades’ positive or negative contribution to the progress of civilisation, was challenged by a new eagerness to empathise with medieval attitudes, an emotional or political reaction to rational orderliness and disdain, even to the point of sentimental approval. This conflict was rarely neat, either between authors or within one writer’s own work. New, romantic enthusiasm for knightly piety and bravery could be tempered by dislike of violence and disappointment with arcane systems of belief and observance. Religious enthusiasm could play in favour of or against the crusaders’ reputation. Some keen to avoid anachronistic modern condemnation nevertheless drew parallels with contemporary developments in relations between Christian and Muslim powers in the Mediterranean. Materialism and empathy were thus not necessarily discrete interpretations but could combine together in new syntheses.
Nonetheless, the most striking feature of post-Enlightenment investigation of the crusades was, as von Sybel had hinted, a willingness to marry the crusades to contemporary obsessions and experience. Just as the Reformation had done, so the French and Industrial Revolutions fundamentally recast debates and understanding of crusading’s nature and significance. The crusades could be regarded as the antithesis of modernism, whether that was considered good or bad, matching an astonishing range of political and cultural developments: the idea, consequences and desirability of material progress; the place of religion in secular society; the tensions of nationalism and international community; extra-European conquest and colonialism; the dominance of western European culture; Christian missionaries; the aesthetics of romanticism and medievalism and the politics of reaction; the rise of popular mass movements; the emergence of critical scholarship and the academic professsion. Changes in education provided a large readership encouraging both fiction and popular and academic history. Small wonder novelists, painters, dramatists and musicians were attracted to the subject. More significantly, again as von Sybel, a Rhenish liberal later committed to a Prussian unification of Germany, observed, the crusades could be regarded as ‘one of the greatest revolutions that has ever taken place in the history of the human race’, a view essentially shared by Joseph-François Michaud, a conservative Roman Catholic romantic French nationalist whose uncritical history von Sybel nevertheless deplored.2 In nineteenth-century Europe, revolution was neither neutral in word nor deed. To it or from it historians were attracted or repelled, their responses to Jacobinism, anti-clericalism, atheism, Bonapartism, legitimism, counter-revolution or the Rights of Man colouring their attitude to the crusade. Dismissive disdain was replaced by protean identification with, in the words of a recent observer, ‘Crusading itself as a re-enactment of the past and a metaphor of the future’.3
Revolution and reaction: Bonaparte, Chateaubriand and crusade revival
While of very different stamp to von Sybel, François-René Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was more influential. Where von Sybel stands at the head of a tradition of critical textual scholarship, Chateaubriand inspired a new positive empathy with the beliefs and emotions of the crusaders that avoided the condescension of most commentators since the Reformation. His insights came from a complicated, some might argue confused set of responses to the events of his life: a rejection of the aridity of the philosophes that had produced the Jacobin Terror; a belief in the virtues and genuine uplifting power of religion for individuals and societies alike; an abhorrence of tyranny; respect for hierarchy and tradition; and a belief in liberty. These possibly divergent positions echoed the accommodations and rhetorical flexibility of the Bonapartist regime with which Chateaubriand had an equivocal and changing relationship, from exile, to protégé, to critic. However unwittingly, Chateaubriand and Bonaparte initiated two of the most influential nineteenth-century developments in nineteenth-century crusade studies: interest in the crusades as a Christian-cultural mission and a precursor of new direct western European political engagement with the Muslim world and the Near East.
Bonaparte’s Egyptian and Syrian campaign of 1798–99 was the first western invasion of the Levant since Louis IX’s in 1248–50. Although bizarrely portrayed as a war of liberation, an attempt to create a new brotherhood of man on the Nile, the French foray stimulated new fascination not only with the suitably distant and hence apolitical Ancient Egypt, but also in the scenes of the crusades, not least as Bonaparte led his troops to besiege Acre, and in colonisation. While Bonaparte expressly repudiated the legacy of crusading as morally decadent, the eastern opportunities his expedition revealed inevitably stimulated the search for historical parallels. Chateaubriand reported, provocatively, that during his visit to Jerusalem in 1806, the Armenian patriarch told him over coffee that ‘all Asia awaited the arrival of the French’ and that the reappearance of just a single French soldier would provoke a general uprising against the Turkish authorities.4 Although Bonaparte’s campaign incidentally ended the last crusader order-state, when the Knights of St John on Malta surrendered to the passing French armada, it encouraged observers to place the crusades in what some fondly believed was the inexorable ascent of civil society to liberty, equality and fraternity. Such attitudes were fuelled by the almost contemporaneous, and apparently fortuitous, rediscovery of Leibniz’s 1672 proposal for a French conquest of Egypt. This first resurfaced c. 1795 and was circulated among the French military top brass. Although it was forwarded to Bonaparte in August 1798, he does not seem to have read the abridged version until after his return from the east. It reached a wider audience through an English summary published as part of anti-Bonaparte agitation in 1803. Although not, as the English edition implied, part of a long-standing plan for French Mediterranean domination, the Leibniz rediscovery was timely. Reassessment of the crusades, reflecting the meeting of politics and history, now appeared under the guise of academic enquiry. One commentator, with an ear for contemporary resonance, summed up the results of the crusades in 1808 as the creation of a Third Estate, ‘le foyer de la vraie civilisation’, a conceit of more significance in Napoleon’s Europe than St Louis’s.5
In 1806, the French Institut in Paris offered a prize for a monograph on ‘the influence of the crusades on the civil liberty of the people of Europe, on their civilisation, on the progress of learning [lumières, literally ‘enlightenment’], commerce and industry’. While directly reflecting Enlightenment concerns, the issues also spoke to the self-proclaimed progressive political and cultural agenda of post-Revolutionary Napoleonic France. The influence of Robertson was implicit in the title and his work was mined by a number of entrants. However, this was not an isolated or uniquely French interest; other academies had offered similar or related prizes. In 1798 at Göttingen, the liberal university founded in 1734 by the elector of Hanover, King George II of England, a prize on the age of the crusades had been won by a precocious twenty-one-year-old German orientalist Friedrich Wilken with a thesis on Abu al-Fida’s account of the crusades. This later formed the kernel of his massive seven-volume history. One of the winners of the Paris 1806 prize, announced in 1808, Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren, was a Göttingen professor. Another candidate, whose entry got lost in the post, was a Dutchman and future professor of Theology at Leiden, Jan Hendrik Regenbogen, who, in search of regional colour, emphasised the role of Frisians in the enterprise. Given the state of general warfare at the time, it is perhaps surprising that only one entry got mislaid; Heeren’s reached Paris via Copenhagen and running the English blockade. The key to success, however, was not national affiliation, but the level of enthusiasm for the positive material effects of the crusades, a stance that united Heeren and his French co-winner, Maxime de Choiseul Daillecourt. Jacques-Joseph Lemoine’s more Gibbonian criticism may explain why he was only a runner-up. The entrants reflected the international appeal of the subject, Heeren’s orginal German having to be translated into French before submission, while the luckless Regenbogen wrote in Latin.6
Most of the entries subsequently published (1808–9) reveal the absorption of Robertson’s instrumental interpretation of the crusades evident in the prize’s title. Essentially they were continental versions of what became known in English historiography as ‘Whig’ history, a judgemental approach characterised by a teleological use of the past to illustrate or even vindicate the present, founded on an assumption of inexorable, usually material progress towards a better state than had previously existed. The value of events and people were gauged according to how far they served or hindered this ineluctable process. Choiseul Daillecourt, an aristocrat in his twenties who later served as a prefect under Louis Philippe and became a member of the Institut/Academy, was to write a highly Whiggish book (in 1844) comparing the English ‘revolution of 1688’ with that of 1830 in France. His 1806 essay was similarly Whiggish, avoiding debates on the morality of the crusades and confident in their utilitarian role in furthering the progress of western civilisation in commerce, culture and social change. However, he also noted their achievements of heroic belief, in a tradition that stretched back at least to Louis Maimbourg, thus combining two dominant motifs in future crusade histories: materialism and romanticism.
This cocktail of apparent scholarly objectivity spiked with somewhat formal doses of empathy was the formula pursued by other entrants. They regarded study of the crusades as part of a wider project aimed at charting the progress of European civilisation which had assumed a very different aspect after 1789. The lofty intellectual advocacy of abstract liberty by the philosophes was replaced with an analysis of the concrete social, political and economic bases for liberty in practice, an unavoidable commentary on the contemporary scene. The crusades were placed beside other moments or movements generating change, such as the Reformation. In this project the writers of 1806 were generally dependent less on their own original researches (of which there is almost no evidence in any of the prize essays) but on reorienting the information and conclusions of the historians of the previous centuries, authorities cited including Pasquier, Bongars, Fleury, Voltaire, Mailly, Sainte-Palaye, de Guignes and Gibbon as well as Robertson. There was almost unanimous agreement on the centrality of the crusades to the growth of trade; the development of urban life; the decline in feudal hierarchies; the end of serfdom; the rise, in France at least, of royal power; western access to eastern learning as well as goods; a new interest in and knowledge of Asia and an awareness of wide global geography that led to the impetus towards the discoveries of sea routes to southern Africa, the Far East and the New World. The crusades were regarded as helping transform western society, its manners as well as institutions, stimulating a greater civility. So much, so Robertson. In this account, the crusades inevitably possessed ‘a great practical interest’ for contemporaries (Heeren) and, in humanist vein, taught lessons for the both present and future (Lemoine).7 Even the one obviously dissenting voice, Lemoine, acknowledged the positive and broad influences of the crusades, although, in clear imitation of Gibbon, concluding that the balance sheet was negative, the crusades ‘an evil’, ‘without sufficient compensation for humanity’. However, the judges of the 1806 prize appeared to have been preconditioned by the newly fashionable Robertsonian view. Lemoine’s entry was not obviously less well written or well researched than the others. He was clearer than the others in his description of the historio-graphical traditions: medieval writers seeing the crusades in religious terms as legitimate and salutary; later writers regarding them as ‘pious follies’; and, latterly, others, such as Robertson, accepting them as ‘necessary’ and positive in result if not action. That his ultimately hostile assessment received only an ‘honourable mention’ is unsurprising as the 1806 competition was run against a backdrop of official academic concern to promote the history of the crusades.8
Although the Maurists had been swept away by the Revolution, their scheme for a collection of crusade texts was refloated at one of the earliest meetings of the post-Revolution Institut de France in 1796. Two years later, its proposer, the national archivist Armand Gaston Camus, returned to the idea, arguing that interest in the crusading period lay especially in the mutual influence between east and west, a hot topic in the year of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt. This was to be no parade of the crusades as a French national trophy. Arabic and Greek texts formed an integral part of Camus’s plan. The emphasis on eastern texts lay behind a resurrection of Camus’s proposal in 1807, at the very time the Institut was considering the crusade prize entries, when the orientalist Silvestre de Sacy reported on the state of Dom Berthereau’s surviving papers. However, despite a committee being established to consider a new crusade collection, nothing was done due to the hard bargaining over the price of Berthereau’s papers by his family; the labour of effecting new translations from the very few remotely competent Arabists available; and Napoleon’s indifference. By the time the plan was revived in the early 1830s not only was the political climate much altered, so too were attitudes towards the crusades, by then regarded as the especial preserve of France.9
The shift from regarding the crusades as a staging post in the development of European civilisation in general to an enterprise intrinsically and predominantly a glorious episode in French history represented an apparent break with the Enlightenment debates of Gibbon and Robertson. The new approach was characterised by three elements. It sought to understand the crusades on their own terms though an exercise in often imaginative, speculative or downright fanciful empathy, typical of the new romanticism of the period. Informed by an unembarrassed embrace of religion, it fundamentally rejected Enlightenment dismissal of faith as scarcely explicable superstition encouraging fanaticism. Finally, Islam in general and Turkish rule in particular were denigrated, even demonised as violent, corrupt, decadent and antithetical to freedom, progress and civilisation, a view by no means novel but which took on new force as western, especially French, rulers began to turn their political ambitions towards the lands of the Muslim Mediterranean.
Pivotal to this realignment of perspective was Chateaubriand. A royalist and reconvert to Roman Catholicism, Chateaubriand’s highly influential Génie de christianisme (published 1802) sought to refute and overturn Enlightenment analysis by arguing that Christianity was not only true and excellent in itself but essential to the progress of arts and learning. The Christian middle ages preserved and nurtured civilisation after the fall of Rome. The crusades and the military orders were exemplary manifestations of the strength and virtue of faith in defiance of ignorance and barbarism. Chateaubriand developed this argument in his account of his travels in Greece and the Near East in 1806, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, published in 1811. Chateaubriand imagines himself as a medieval pilgrim reborn. His responses to people, places and events are emotional, sentimental and empathetic. His virulent, rancid contempt for Islam and its destructive influence is rampant throughout. To underline his insistence that Islam preaches only hate and tyranny (Christianity, by contrast, apparently espousing only peace and tolerance), he compares Muslim despotism and greed to that of French republican soldiers and proconsuls. Turks are portrayed as savages (‘sauvages’) devastating the landscape; even the olive groves he found in Palestine he attributed to the crusaders of Godfrey de Bouillon. Cultural superiority of the western Christian is assumed and illustrated at every turn.10
Chateaubriand begins his account of the crusades themselves in typical style, reflecting on the tombs of the twelfth-century kings of Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: ‘these ashes are French ashes and the only ones buried in the shadow of the Tomb of Jesus Christ. What a title of honour for my homeland!’ Observing the so-called footprint of the ascending Jesus displayed to tourists in the Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, he imagined that Christ turned his face northwards as if in summons of the northerners who would in the future cleanse the Holy City of ‘temples of false gods … and plant that standard of the cross on the walls of Jerusalem’. Warming to his theme, he directly attacked Hume: ‘the crusades were not folly neither in principle nor result’. The crusaders were not the aggressors, merely responding (a few centuries late) to the Arab conquests of the seventh century. They were fighting not just for the Holy Land but against ‘a system of ignorance, despotism and slavery’, a defensive war to save the world from ‘an invasion of new barbarians’. ‘Who will dare to say that the cause of these holy wars was unjust?’ Not only did the crusaders take the fight to the Muslim heartlands of Asia but in so doing relieved the west of Malthusian population pressure and helped end internal conflict in Europe. They also, and here the debt to Robertson is explicitly acknowledged, promoted progress in learning and civilisation.11
Chateaubriand’s thesis was not simply nostalgic and retrospective. His sentimental empathy drew him to the present and even the future. He recalled his installation ceremony as a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, during which initiates were dubbed with the alleged sword of Godfrey de Bouillon; a touristic charade drained of all but snobbish value, more pretentious but no more serious than being photographed with a Beefeater at the Tower of London. ‘I was French; Godfrey de Bouillon was French; his own sword, in touching me, filled me with a new love for the glory and honour of my homeland.’ Observing the current state of Palestine, he asserted that the land was ripe for a new French invasion. Locals, leaderless and vulnerable, expected it. Bonaparte could have taken Jerusalem ‘as easily as a camel in a field of millet’. The grounds for conquest and colonisation were explicit: the tyranny, neglect, corruption and decadence of Turkish rule; the devastation they had wrought on the region; the cultural and moral superiority of western Christians; the depressed and enervated state of eastern Christians infected by the habits of ‘these stupid Musulmans’ who could not even manage to emulate the Ancient Egyptians in making the Nile valley prosper. Later, describing his visit to Tunis on his return journey, he drew a direct colonial parallel with the crusades and the memory of St Louis who had died there: ‘lucky the people who are able to glory in saying … he was the king of my fathers!’ Contemporary colonial experience was evoked, if playfully: ‘our sailors say that in new colonies the Spanish begin by building a church, the English a pub and the French a fort – to which I add a ballroom’. Despite this playfulness, the message was clear and echoed that of Leibniz’s recently rediscovered project: the crusades stood as a model for future western conquest of Muslim lands in the eastern Mediterranean, an enterprise at once beneficial, necessary and praiseworthy.12
Chateaubriand’s refashioning of the crusades was not entirely the product of his own sensibilities, prejudices or literary and religious fancies. His published pilgrimage account owed much to earlier or contemporary descriptions, studies and travelogues of the Near East, even if he did not always acknowledge his debt. In places, he deliberately falsified his originality, claiming that in 1806 Jerusalem had almost been forgotten, almost in an echo of Burke’s comment on the demise of Marie Antoinette: ‘as there are no more knights, it seems there is no more Palestine’. In fact, the eighteenth century produced over 300 published works on the Holy Land, fifty or so in French.13 Chateaubriand’s primary sources included both Robert of Rheims and, no less suited to his approach, Tasso, used indiscriminately as a historical document. Of more modern writers, he cited Maimbourg, a fellow patriot in matters crusading, and clearly had read the main Enlightenment texts. He may have read Robertson’s Progress, available in French since 1771, but certainly used the Scotsman’s later Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India (first published Edinburgh, 1791) which summarised his theory of the crusades, commerce and the advance of civilisation.14 It is possible that he became acquainted with the range of Anglophone Enlightenment commentary whilst in exile in England in the 1790s, at precisely the time that he was being drawn back to Roman Catholicism.
Not all were convinced by Chateaubriand’s sentimental empathy, glorification of past French heroics, assertion of western cultural superiority, bigoted dismissal of Islam and racist condemnation of the Turks. One reviewer took him to task for his insulting depiction of Islam, his selective scouring of the Koran for texts advocating violence and his crude attribution of bad government to religion rather than politics.15 Chateaubriand’s views were never universally accepted. The poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, who visited the eastern Mediterranean in 1832–33, rejected his predecessor’s combination of ‘Gospel and Crusades’ and became very impressed by the simplicity of Islamic theology, a sort of purified Christianity (‘un christianisme purifié’), and by the achievements of Muhammed.16 However, Chateaubriand’s central tenets of French glory, respect for the crusaders’ faith and the beneficence of their legacy convinced one journalist friend, literary entrepreneur and political ally who became, perhaps somewhat improbably, the most influential, although not universally admired, crusade authority of his time whose legacy still casts a not entirely benign shade on attitudes to the wars of the cross.
Michaud: romance, nation and empire
In 1805, the fashionable novelist, the genteel widow Sophie Cottin (1773–1807), published her fourth romantic novel, Mathilde ou Mémoires tirés de l’histoire des croisades, a laborious but very popular fiction set during the Third Crusade, a Tassoesque exotic tale of royal lovers across enemy lines and of faith-conquering love conquering all. One of the publishers, Joseph François Michaud (1767–1839), who had previously advised the author to consult Tasso, provided a substantial historical preface tracing the story of the crusades from the First to the Third Crusades. From this early sketch he developed a plan for a major new narrative of the crusades to the Holy Land, based on primary materials, shorn of Protestant or Enlightenment condescension and disdain. This grew into his monumental Histoire des croisades (1811–22 but under constant revision until his death and the definitive posthumous edition of 1841), a literary and academic achievement that led to his election to the French Academy. Parallel to his construction of an epic narrative, Michaud also presided over the production of four volumes of translated western and eastern sources, Bibliothèque des croisades (1829), including western texts largely derived uncritically from Bongars and others, and a fourth volume of Arabic translations by Joseph-Toussaint Reinaud (1795–1867). By the time he died, Michaud felt confident enough to proclaim that ‘more honest scholarship and the experience of great revolutions’ had exposed the ideas of the Enlightenment as ignorant and wrong. Now, he declared, ‘everybody agrees what the crusades were and what they produced’, that is, they agreed with him.17 While untrue, nonetheless Michaud transformed attitudes to the crusades, rendering them as fashionably acceptable to nineteenth-century audiences as they had been equally fashionably unacceptable the century before.
Michaud had enjoyed a chequered career as a royalist pamphleteer and journalist in the 1790s, twice condemned to death by the Republic and frequently imprisoned for his strongly legitimist Bourbon views, the last occasion as late as 1800. He had previously tried his hand at history with a book on India which included an account of the 1798–99 French invasion of Egypt, a pointer to his later interest in medieval colonialism. For Michaud, the crusades offered a familiar but apparently apolitical and safely distant subject with which to capture a lucrative audience while promoting his far from neutral ideas about western religion, culture, civilisation and France. Whilst by no means as uncritically enthusiastic as Chateaubriand, Michaud combined admiration for the crusaders’ idealism and condemnation of Islam with a novelist’s eye for empathetic romance and fictional narrative. His ideas developed over time. Experience of the east during a tour in 1830–31 sharpened the focus of his assertion of Christian European supremacy and his identification of the crusades as precedents, even justifications, for colonialism and cultural imperialism. Michaud’s Histoire attracted great popularity, going into four editions by 1830, a sixth by 1841, a ninth in 1856 and a total of nineteen by the end of the century, as well as translations into English, German, Italian and Russian.
Crusade writing of this period has been described as ‘une historiographie engagée’.18 Michaud’s project was immensely assisted by the use made of the medieval past by successive French regimes. Michaud, having received the Légion d’Honneur from Napoleon in 1812 and becoming a member of the Academy in 1814, served as a deputy after the Bourbon restoration. His vision of past French greatness under the benevolent leadership of a sainted Christian monarchy chimed precisely with Bourbon efforts to refashion a French past to obscure the trauma of Revolution and febrile glory of the empire. Louis XVIII revived the Order of St Louis. Charles X evoked the saintly crusaders in his propaganda before the Algerian invasion of 1830. Under the Orleanist government after 1830, the crusades, now seen in Michaud-esque terms as a particularly French achievement, were employed as an image binding together the different strands of French society and politics. Louis-Philippe’s government sought to promote a glorious common past that embraced rich and poor, merchants and knights, clergy and laity in a unique show of French spirit and potential. This received tangible visual form in the decoration and paintings in the elaborate Salles des croisades (from 1837) at Versailles. Michaud profitably exploited this fashion, enjoying royal patronage, even if his support for freedom of speech made him an awkward client for the increasingly repressive Bourbons in the late 1820s. By the time he came to the final revision of his Histoire in the 1830s, Michaud’s history and events of his own time seemed to have converged. At the start of his journey to the Near East in 1830, a trip subsidised by Charles X’s government, he saw the French Algerian invasion fleet at Toulon, later described by his travelling companion, along with the subsequent campaigns there, as ‘nothing other than crusades’.19 For Michaud, it can reasonably be claimed, with Benedetto Croce, that all history was contemporary history.
The crusades in early nineteenth-century France were politics. Michaud’s success cannot be understood without this context. Current debates repeatedly forced their way into his history: the Revolution, Bonaparte, the virtues of monarchy, the destiny of France. However, the crusades were not just hijacked by conservatives, reactionaries, royalists and those, like Michaud, on the Right. There existed a wider set of ideas inherited from the Enlightenment that Michaud also mined, one that operated beyond local political conflict and embraced more extensive cultural warfare. The medieval past could be appreciated both by conservatives as a model of an ordered Christian hierarchic community (the view attacked by the philosophes) and, by liberals, as a period of dynamism and progressive change, as in the 1806 prize. Michaud tried to resolve the tension inherent between these apparently contradictory views. Partly, this was achieved by falling back on a reshaped version of the old Enlightenment paradox of unintended good results from evil or malign causes. Michaud argued that calamitous events, such as revolutions, could, by providential design (i.e. God’s), ‘enlighten mankind to ensure the future prosperity of empires’.20 Thus the French Revolution and its consequences resulted in a strengthening of the French monarchy (not least by exposing the alternatives) and thus the crusades – seen by Michaud as revolutionary – although military failures, enhanced civilisation. While appreciative of faith, Michaud rejected slavish Roman Catholic devotion to superstitious practices, was sceptical of miracles and even-handedly critical of crusader atrocities. He preferred to draw attention to wider admiration of such intangible (or impenetrable) obscurities such as ‘l’esprit des croisés’ and, following Robertson, to stress consequences as much as causes. The action of the crusades encouraged empathy through a powerful narrative constructed on an uncritical and manipulative use of contemporary primary sources, reinforced by imaginative flights of invention and fancy.
However, when noting the results of the crusades, the account was elevated from the battlefield to a conceptual plane where moral value was assessed far above any crude balance sheet of victory or defeat. Here, the march of civilisation supplied its own positive verdict. The friction between the crusades as exemplars either of hierarchy or progress was removed by using the infinite elasticity of a central assertion. The enemy of civilisation was not Christian religion or institutions, moribund tradition, or, alternatively, revolutionary progress, but moral weakness producing social servility, despotism, decadence and a ‘politics of violence’.21 The enemy, Michaud relentlessly insisted, was Islam, no longer a metaphor for the ancien régime, but a past and present danger: stagnant, unchanging, menacing and barbaric. Against this enemy, the polemical quibbles of earlier historians melted away. The crusades were no longer either hindrances or encouragements to the progress of civilisation; they were the battle for civilisation itself. Nevertheless, few alert readers would miss the additional modern parallel between Muslims and republicans. The crusades were a time of revolution, the consequence of a time of ‘confusion and decadence that favoured the invasion of new ideas, especially when those ideas appear supported by the sword’.22 Although a description of the epoch of Arab conquests, this could just as easily be applied to the period of the Revolution and Napoleon. Thus crusaders were also good monarchists, heroic champions of the virtues of the ancien régime. Michaud’s casting of the crusades simultaneously as a battle against the barbarism of Islam, a demonstration of the superiority of western culture and a vindication of conservative religious and political values, placed crusade studies on a new footing, not entirely to their advantage. The idea of the crusades as a witness to western supremacy reflected and informed the creation of the colonial mentality in France. The portrait of crusading as mortal combat with a degraded almost demonised Islam, was one that when, literally, translated into Arabic produced ideological and rhetorical consequences still being played out in modern political conflicts. Michaud was never and is not neutral. Perhaps uniquely among crusade historians, his ideas, work and their transmission in Europe, America and the Muslim Near East over the following two centuries repay the serious attention of students of modern international affairs. A recent website commentary dedicated to crusader historians could not have been more wrong to say that ‘given Michaud’s ‘romantic’ approach to the subject, his works are now mostly of value to modern scholars of medievalism’.23 The author could, as easily, have added ‘and to students of al-Qaeda’.
Michaud may have transformed the reception of the crusades as glorious and exciting episodes of western, especially French, history, establishing them firmly in the popular literary imaginations (as well as sales). Yet he was tapping into existing interest and employing, even where condemning, previous scholarship and commentary. Shortly before his death, he claimed that he had studied ‘all the chronicles, all the documents’.24 This may be the case, and his appendices of documents are full and interesting. However, his narrative is founded on uncritical acceptance of the obvious chronicles, such as William of Tyre who looms large in the early volumes. The primary sources are largely those in Bongars, plus Tasso and some documentary material such as the Jersualem Assises. Even so, as von Sybel unkindly pointed out in 1841, Michaud lifted part of his account of the council of Clermont from a secondary, sixteenth-century text.25 Indeed, Michaud’s method was as much that of a novelist as of a historian, somewhere between the historical narrative of Thomas Macaulay and the evocative fiction of Walter Scott, as in dramatic episodes such as the scaling of the walls of Antioch. Here the primary sources are merely a starting point to construct an almost cinematic visual tableau: clouds scudding across the night sky, a howling wind deafening the sentries, a comet illuminating the sky, all inventions of Michaud.26 This willingness to embroider (such as placing Peter the Hermit at Clermont) makes Michaud readable but misleading. In his general analysis of the consequences of the crusades, he stays firmly wedded to the Robertsonian orthodoxy, hardly straying from the detailed schema established by the 1806 prize entrants in claiming the crusades’ centrality in the progress of European society from barbarism to manners, from violent anarchy to civil liberty. His general reading was similarly predictable: Maimbourg, Sainte-Palaye (whose corps of eternal knight errants make another appearance), ‘judicious’ Robertson, but also Francis Bacon and Leibniz’s Egyptian treatise, as well as contemporary authors, such as Henry Hallam’s A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818). Michaud’s erudition, such as it was, was conventional, antiquarian, designed to appeal to and appease the tastes of his customers. For Michaud the crusades constituted nothing less than ‘a vast and mysterious enterprise which had as its goal the conquest and civilisation of Asia’.27 However, beyond an exhaustive, vivid, coherent and compelling story well told, two features marked out his Histoire and secured its lasting significance: a contemporary agenda wrapped up in the concept of ‘la France en Orient’; and throughout a unifying concern with what he called ‘le monde moral’.28
In the final version of the Histoire, published in 1841 but largely complete by the time of Michaud’s death two years earlier, these elements reached mature refinement. In a neat inversion of previous historiography, Michaud presented himself as the rationalist in contrast to the ignorant prejudices of the philosophes. He traced his own intellectual journey to uncover what he claimed had been twenty-five years earlier a hidden and obscure historical episode. Instead of focusing on the nature of the crusades, Michaud, somewhat misleadingly, claimed to be more interested in events and consequences. Hence his eagerness to complement his researches with a physical journey to the scenes of the Holy Land crusades in 1830–31, an experience that informed his descriptions of past events, especially the establishment of western colonies. Not only did Michaud’s tour lead to changes in his accounts of the main military expeditions, it also confirmed his view of an unchanging east – ‘the same people, the same customs, the same languages as at the time of the crusades’ – ripe for present as for past colonisation.29
The frame of a clash of religions and civilisations was quickly established at the beginning of Book One, an account of the history of Palestine from New Testament times, through the Arab invasions, with its consequent ‘symptoms of decadence’, Byzantine wars and on to the western Holy Land pilgrims of the eleventh century. Location became a key literary device to lend clarity and force to the narrative. However, the conceptual drive was no less insistent. Comparing western Europeans to Byzantines and Near Eastern Muslims on the eve of the crusades, Michaud set out his theory of western supremacy: ‘the barbarism of western peoples in no way resembled that of the Turks, whose religion and customs denied all hope of civilisation or learning, nor that of the Greeks, who were nothing more than a corrupted people’.30 Westerners possessed honour and chivalry which encouraged justice and virtue; religious enthusiasm produced saints and heroes; western Christianity inspired good customs and laws and a fierce desire to defend the faith, especially in France, ‘une nation belliqueuse’.31 In a literary tradition that went back through writers such as Pasquier to contemporary commentators on the First Crusade itself, crusading was depicted as particularly the preserve of the French who provided the example followed by other nations. Equally, it was in France that most benefits from the crusades accrued. The crusades encouraged material progress of civilisation, perfected chivalry, civil liberties, the beneficent influence of the church and the power of the monarchy, significantly branded as ‘the only hope of peoples’ against the power of social and institutional elites, the essential focus of national identity. France, Michaud confidently asserted, became the ‘model and centre of European civilisation’, a ‘happy revolution’ (presumably in contrast to the unhappy one of 1789 or even 1830) to which, since their very start, the holy wars had contributed much. Thus the crusades were secured as determinant features of the ascent of Europe and the greatness of France.32
Michaud’s message transcended the Eurocentric navel-gazing of the philosophes, who, for all their self-conscious internationalism, globalism even, in fact were obsessively constrained by the history and culture of their own civilisation. Not only were Michaud’s crusades affairs not of Man but of God, and therefore not comparable to ordinary human events, they possessed an inescapable aggressive and acquisitive dimension. Wars between Christianity and Islam were wars ‘of extermination’. As well as being most bloody, the character of religious wars made the acquisition and maintenance of conquests more difficult. The material element in crusading was implicit from the start, the promise of earthly wealth and power matching the spiritual rewards. While defending Christianity wherever it was threatened ‘against those who rejected its laws and beneficence’, piety was always mingled with commerce and conquest. Specifically, the ‘Christian colonies’ of Outremer ‘were for the Franks like a new homeland … another France, dear to all Christians, which one might call La France en Orient’.33 Moreover, the ‘astonishing triumphs’ of the crusaders caused Muslims to believe what at times it seems Michaud himself did, that ‘the Franks were a race superior to the rest of mankind’. In an almost mystical trope, Michaud repeatedly referred to the design of providence in bringing together east and west, a direct nod at nineteenth- as much as twelfth- and thirteenth-century colonisation, Outremer becoming ‘the Christian empire in Asia’. By the end of his life, Michaud was explicit: ‘What has occurred at the time of writing has proved to us that the vows of St Louis were a form of prophetic revelation of the designs of providence which has thrust Christian Europe into this now worm-eaten Muslim East.’ Musing that crusading seemed to be beginning again, Michaud described the ultimate goal of this providence of which the crusades formed one part as holding ‘always the same moral aim: the civilisation of barbaric peoples and the reunion of West and East’ in a sort of resurrected version of the Roman Empire, speaking French not Latin and run by Frenchmen. ‘The attention of Christian Europe is now fixed on most of the eastern countries where the Frankish warriors planted the cross of Jesus Christ.’34
Faith, progress, nation, monarchy and empire were all evoked by Michaud. The upheavals of his own revolutionary era had helped him ‘paint with greater truth (‘avec plus de verité’) the troubles and passions of another period’. The verb is revealing: vivid, imaginative, empathetic. If in an Academician’s not Impressionist’s style, there is something very visual in Michaud’s prose, a dimension wonderfully captured by Gustave Doré’s illustrations to the 1877 edition. While new opinions tried to destroy the old France of heroism and religion, Michaud drew the contrast between their goal of an unknown future and the crusaders’ marching to conquer the east for Jesus Christ. The parallels were irresistible and Michaud is frank about drawing on the lessons of the evils he had witnessed the better to comprehend the past he wrote about because they revealed to him ‘the human heart always the same’.35 From this Michaud argued that, despite the long years of crusading failure, defeat and retreat, the moral force and superiority of western Christianity and civilisation ensured ultimate success. Religion held the key. In an aside that looked forward to many critical later nineteenth-century assessments of the crusades, Michaud even conceded that the medieval Christian missionary foundations among the ‘pagans’ and ‘savages’ proved more lasting that the crusader colonies.36 However, for Michaud, in contrast to his friend Chateaubriand, religion was important as much as a signifier of an ordered civilised society as for its transcendent claims. It was this superior, ordered, monarchical society that would advance now that the politics of Eurasia had turned, with the east offering fresh colonial opportunities for a restored Christian Europe.
Beside nostalgia for the ancien régime, Michaud’s vision was intellectually rooted in the past. His identification of the positive consequences of the crusades was almost wholly unoriginal, parroting the ideas and detail of Robertson, Heeren and Daillecourt Choiseul, as he did in his assumption of the almost ubiquitous influence the crusades exerted on the development of western society. His depiction of Islam could have been penned by his friend Chateaubriand. None of them, however, combined Michaud’s literary skills as a journalist and publisher of novels with his penchant for research, a writer who could weave source evidence and imaginative invention into a convincing and vivid whole. No little part of Michaud’s success was that, like Macaulay and Scott in Britain, or Jules Michelet in France, he could write. However, just as he fed on the preoccupations of his own times, he never escaped his own past or the legacy of the philosophes. The latter provided useful Aunt Sallys; through constant belabouring, they showed Michaud’s freshness of approach to advantage. Not the least of his achievements was to wrest from the philosophes the championing of progress and reason. They, not their anti-revolutionary, Christian opponents, were the real purveyors of bigotry, bias and ignorance. Michaud, by contrast, saw himself as standing for the rationality of source criticism, the objectivity of academic probity and the empirical observation of progress as the undeniable fruits of reasoned faith. This was a very neat reversal.
Michaud and the continuing debate
It was also very effective. Michaud set the tone for a modification, reversal even, of the universal condemnation of the crusades that Robertson’s materialist apologia had scarcely contradicted. After all, Robertson thought the crusades malign even if accidentally producing beneficial consequences. Michaud’s crusades, for all their horrors, follies and blunders, were in essence events to be wondered at, central to the development of the global supremacy of western European civilisation. An obvious academic challenge, this altered the terms of engagement. The crusades became politicised in an immediate partisan and national fashion inconceivable a century before. Concurrently, riding and encouraging the tide of popular medievalism, Michaud’s Histoire asked its readers to share the crusaders’ hopes, aspirations and fears, to enter their world. One of his cleverest tricks was to pretend that he was writing from an objective, carefully researched, contemporary medieval perspective; that his empathy stemmed from understanding not prejudice. In fact, purple passages of invented imaginative narrative and sculpted analysis according with early nineteenth-century sensibilities and politics drew readers in. Few western European writers on the crusades after the 1830s could entirely be free from a popular backdrop that owed something to Michaud, because his vision of holy war mirrored much of the prevailing self-image of western society. Even the austere young von Sybel had to spend time excoriating Michaud.37
This is not say that Michaud was universally accepted, but rather that his ideas became standard interpretations for or against which later writers responded. In particular, his themes of nationalism and colonialism redefined popular as well as academic debate on the crusades. Crusade heroes – St Louis in France, Frederick Barbarossa in Germany, Richard I in England, even Godfrey de Bouillon in newly created (1830) Belgium – were dragooned into the service of national identity. Previously, including in Michaud’s own early work, regarded as quintessentially international expressions of Catholic Christendom as a whole, crusading became increasingly nationalised. The new nationalisms of the nineteenth century invented appropriate characteristics derived from a freshly minted past, whether as part of movements for unification, as in Germany and Italy, or in recasting existing nationalities, as in France and Britain in the wake of revolution and industrialisation. Crusade leaders were recruited to symbolise these fresh aspirations. Thus von Sybel, by the 1850s a powerful advocate of strong Prussian leadership of a united Germany, could portray Frederick Barbarossa as a strong Hegelian ruler of vision with ‘ideas … beyond his time’, while in the 1870s Bismarck was persuaded to sponsor vain attempts to unearth Barbarossa’s grave at Tyre. In this case it was the medieval emperor’s heroic and charismatic leadership rather than specifically his crusading that appealed. But such was the prominence now afforded these paladins of holy war that Godfrey de Bouillon, now a ‘Belgian’, found himself on a plinth in Brussels, and Richard I, most incongruously, rode with raised sword outside the mock-Gothic Mother of Parliaments at Westminster. The virtues these crusaders represented were of generalised national spirit not precise political arrangements. Nonetheless, such reimagining securely incorporated the crusades into national histories and public consciousness.38
No less contemporary was Michaud’s other central thesis. The notion of European states planted in Asia and Africa reflected contemporary reality. French nineteenth-century colonialism, from Algeria to south-east Asia, under successive regimes from the Bourbon and Orleanist kings to the Second Empire and Third Republic, was consistently decorated with crusading rhetoric and the parallels of crusade history.39 The German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, lecturing on the philosophy of history in 1822–23, suggested that ‘it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to the Europeans’.40 So ubiquitous was the assumption of crusader colonialism that it came to be accepted even in circles that hardly shared Michaud’s enthusiasm. Thus, at the end of the century, the English military engineer and first great surveyor of Palestine, Claude Conder, compared Frankish rule in the kingdom of Jerusalem to British rule in India ‘under somewhat similar conditions’.41 Michaud’s phrases entered the academic lexicon. Joseph Delaville le Roulx’s pioneering study of crusading in the fourteenth century was titled La France en Orient au quatorzième siècle (Paris, 1885–86). In France, Michaud’s vision framed the approach of a new school of historians investigating what one of them, Emmanuel Rey, called ‘this distant national enterprise’. With one eye on promoting current French colonies around the Mediterranean, from the mid-1860s Rey presented a roseate view of Outremer as a ‘société franco-syrienne’ that embraced both settlers and locals. The new inhabitants ‘remained always French’, but they adopted some eastern customs and lived under the same legal system (‘même droit’) as the Syrians. While the Franks/French of Outremer retained an inherent cultural superiority, their rule was marked by paternalism, cooperation, accommodation, tolerance, cohabitation and the sharing of geographic, commercial, social and even religious space in ‘a blending of the two societies’. This picture of mutually beneficial colonial harmony was developed further over the next seventy years by other French scholars, notably Gaston Dodu, Louis Madelin and finally René Grousset. Rooted in a more or less uniquely French historiography, Rey’s theory nonetheless proved potent through the twentieth century, not least in providing a model to be criticised and dismantled once colonialism and empire ceased to attract intellectual approval. However, its essence derived directly from Michaud.42
Michaud’s ideas carried less weight outside France, despite the easy export of his nationalist interpretation and the attraction of Robertsonian progress. The German orientalist Friedrich Wilken’s massive Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (seven volumes, 1807–32) adopted a parallel but entirely different approach in assessing the crusades on their own terms. Basing his account firmly on medieval sources, he gave prominence to Arabic texts and avoided any implied or stated presentist polemic. Elsewhere, the hostile assessment of the Enlightenment persisted, even if in less austere guise, particularly in Protestant and Gibbonian Britain. An influential assessment in the North British Review of 1844 of the sixth edition of Michaud’s Histoire condemned his Roman Catholic ‘bigotry’, his Bourbon monarchism and his nationalist bias. Yet the debates were rarely as clear-cut as the reviewer imagined, between total ‘reprobation’ and complete admiration, Michaud versus Gibbon, or Robertson against Voltaire.43 For example, new Christian evangelical missionary expansionism produced a fresh critical reception both to the positive Robertsonian material gloss and to Enlightenment condemnation. Thus a Church of Ireland clergyman, Charles Foster, in his Mahometanism Unveiled (London, 1829), while accepting the fashionable anti-Islamic rhetoric as well as the conclusions of Robertson, Heeren and Daillecourt Choiseul for the importance of the crusades, argued for the agency of providence (i.e. the Christian God) not man. Yet he saw in the crusaders’ religious motives not fanaticism but ‘political expediency’ in resisting the tide of Islam, a ‘signal monument’, nodding to Hume’s famous phrase, of ‘divine wisdom’ as well as human folly.44 Conversion was Foster’s ideal, which he saw as a beneficial consequence of colonialism, such as British rule in India. Seeing this as based on commercial exploitation, he drew a tenuous link with the crusades not, like Conder, through a parallel with the kingdom of Jerusalem, but as a consequence of the crusades opening western geographic and economic horizons to Africa and Asia. The missionary context, both in Britain and on the continent, fuelled many later assessments. The reviewer in North Britain Review cast missionaries as the true modern crusaders, neither ruffians nor fanatics, prone neither to ‘sentimental sigh’ nor ‘romantic dream’.45 In his Sketches of the Crusades (1849), George Etell Sargent, a prolific writer of improving pamphlets, contrasted the depraved character of the medieval crusades with the new ‘crusading spirit’ of Christian missionaries, ‘Gospel crusaders’.46 The sense among Christian writers or students of the Christian church that the crusades were in some senses a distortion of the New Testament has a long pedigree, and formed and forms one antithetical constant in opposition to the empathetic relativism of the continuing Michaud tradition.
Nevertheless, the main early nineteenth-century battleground remained the competing interpretations represented by Robertson, Michaud and Gibbon, even in Britain, where intellectuals’ interest in the crusades was less intense than in France or Germany. Joseph Berington, an unorthodox Roman Catholic priest educated on the continent, was content to paraphrase Fuller, Hume and Gibbon in his Literary History of the Middle Ages (1814).The crusades, which ‘Europe had long reason to deplore’ were ‘utterly sterile’, their benefits marginal, in no way compensating for the waste of men and treasure. Only in the tangential conquest of Byzantium did the crusades contribute to the development of western culture.47 The Gibbonian anti-Michaud interpretation received its popular and possibly subtlest advocacy in this period in The History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land by Charles Mills (1788–1826), first published in 1820, into a fourth edition by 1828. Mills was an erudite autodidact who wrote one of the key texts for the medieval revival of the early nineteenth century, The History of Chivalry, or Knighthood and its Times (1825). Earlier, he had published a widely circulated and translated History of Muhammedanism (first edition, 1817) regarded by its non-Islamic readers as comprehensive and definitive, despite its title indicating a fundamental misunderstanding of its subject and its author being apparently unable to read Arabic. The context for Mills’s History of the Crusades was popular interest in crusading generated for example by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), later pursued in his Talisman (1825). Mills skilfully negotiates a path between Gibbonian condemnation and evocative sympathy or, to put it another way, he tries to have his cake and eat it. On the one hand, ‘the fair face of religion was besmirched’, the crusades ‘encouraging the most horrible violence of fanaticism’, ‘a frightful calamity on the world’. The crusades’ relationship to chivalry was a constant theme, crusaders being seen as ‘armed devotees’ (of a religious cause) not ‘gentle knights’, lacking the polish of knight errants (again the shadow of Sainte-Palaye). The ‘mixture of the apostle and the soldier was a union which reason abhors’, the ideal of relieving the Holy Sepulchre ‘a romantic superstition’. Yet, on the other hand, participants – ‘noble adventurers in arms’ – were merely ‘deluded’. Despite the enterprise being ‘the extremist idea of madness’, ‘the crusades were not a greater reproach to virtue and wisdom than most of those contests which in every age of the world pride and ambition have given rise to’.48
Sitting comfortably in an English tradition of crusade historiography, Gibbon and ‘honest Fuller’, Mills had read widely if unsystematically in primary sources, including Bongars, Muratori and Duchesne, the main, chiefly English chronicles, some in manuscript, but also translations of Beha al-Din’s biography of Saladin and Matthew of Edessa and more esoteric material such as the thirteenth-century French vernacular poet Rutebeuf. The obvious secondary works were also mastered, such as de Guignes.49 One of Mills’s targets was Michaud’s recently completed Histoire. He announces this at the very start by arguing that, while they may have formed a ‘theatre of English chivalry’, the crusader states in the Levant ‘were colonies of all the states of the west and not of any one in particular; a detail of the World’s Debate does not naturally form a portion of any single nation’, thus dismissing both of Michaud’s central insights. Whilst agreeing with Michaud’s identification of a holy cause – ‘the redemption of the Holy Land’ – he insisted that ‘no dangers hung over Christendom’ in the 1090s.50 He wholly rejected the Robertsonian thesis. Blood and treasure were wasted for no benefit. Advances in learning were chronologically coincidental. Mills even argued against the prevalent cherished idea that the crusades advanced urban civil liberties, thus going further even than Gibbon. The progress of Italian cities was dismissed as ‘insignificant’ when compared with the opening of the sea route to India. Confronting Michaud directly, Mills accepted that the crusades were inspired ‘for holy objects, not for civil or national ends’ but followed Gibbon in final condemnation:
The crusades retarded the march of civilisation, thickened the clouds of ignorance and superstition, and encouraged intolerance, cruelty and fierceness. Religion lost its mildness and charity, and war its mitigating qualities of honour and courtesy … We feel no sorrow at the final doom of the Crusades, because in its origin the war was iniquitous and unjust.51
Mills’s History occupied a prominent place in an increasingly extensive discussion of the crusades in Britain, some supposedly academic, others obviously romantic. Although his careful distinction between the virtues of chivalry and the vices of crusaders chimed in with the views of Walter Scott, other medievalist enthusiasts were far less convinced. Some, like the very popular hack writer G. P. R. James in his works on chivalry (1830) and Richard I (1842–49), accused Mills of ignoring the spirit of the medieval age and of judging the past in terms of modern sensibilities, a very Michaud-type call for empathy. Few took as wholly positive a view of the crusades as Kenelm Digby’s Broad Sword of Honour (1828–29).52 Some were content to see the crusades in Michaud’s context of cultural conflict and widespread hostility to Islam. Robert Southey, radical turned reactionary, declared that, but for the crusades, ‘Mahommedanism would have barbarized the world’.53 Much impetus to study the crusades in Britain stemmed from the desire to see in medieval chivalry a set of distinctive aristocratic values and behaviour to challenge the utilitarian ethos of industrialisation, the rise of the commercial classes and the emergence of popular politics, although in some ways the extreme violence and alien religiosity of the crusades confused this vision, the ‘grand but erring spirit’ as Henry Stebbing described it in his History of Chivalry and the Crusades (1830).54
The crusades’ role in the progress of civilisation remained of abiding interest. Frederick Oakeley won the Chancellor’s Essay prize in Oxford in 1827 with a meditation on this theme, The Influence of the Crusades upon the Arts and Literature of Europe, in focus very similar to the 1806 French prize entries. As late as 1854, The History of the Crusades by Major R. E. Proctor (RMA, Sandhurst) is largely a rehash of Mills and Robertson, the crusades at once being ‘thoroughly misguided and iniquitous’ yet, perhaps confusingly, ultimately and fortuitously, ‘very salutary to mankind’.55 In lectures in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the verdict of one of the most influential English medievalists of the nineteenth century, William Stubbs, Regius Professor of History at Oxford (1866–84) and editor of key English chronicles covering crusading, was far more positive. While admitting material motives of some, which he memorably dubbed ‘a sanctified experiment of vikingism’, he argued, in terms very similar to Michaud, that others were engaged in ‘a war of idea’. Elsewhere, again like Michaud, he drew contemporary parallels, in his case the Crimean War, and, with his French predecessor, assumed that ‘the state of Palestine’ in the 1860s differed little from the 1090s. For Stubbs, the crusades ‘with all their drawbacks were a trial feat of a new world … striving after a better ideal than that of piracy and fraternal bloodshed’. ‘That in the end they were a benefit to the world no one who reads can doubt.’56
Tension between material, sentimental, religious and political interpretations ensured intellectual and popular debate, while current affairs suggested a spurious continuing relevance. Academic and pseudo-academic commentators, novelists, polemicists, religious homilists and politicians all derived useful material. Remarkably, the patterns of analysis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have scarcely gone away: empathy; disapproval; relevance; the role of religion; materialist reductionism. Despite the explosion of literary attention, behind the empathetic romanticism of Michaud or the criticism of Mills and Scott, the themes identified by Fuller, Fleury, Hume, Gibbon and Robertson persisted. While the crusades’ manifestations in popular culture are beyond the immediate scope of this study, the connection with profound historical trends in the nineteenth century and beyond is not. The tradition of the crusades being of especial interest to conservative, even right-wing scholars and writers was born in the era of Michaud, precisely the period when such political characterisations were first emerging in European public life. The idea of the crusades as explicit precursors to modern events, either as features of teleological historical progress or as parallels to modern actions remains potent. The combination of ideology, action, change, European conquest and religious fanaticism acted as a contrast or a comparison with the tone of revolutionary and reactionary politics. Wars fought for ideas were far from alien concepts in nineteenth-century Europe; still less in the century and more thereafter. While much focus in nineteenth-century crusade historiography settled on nobles, knights and leaders, the involvement of people’s armies indicated to some ‘a new phase in social history’, a ‘new mass possibility in human affairs’, similar to contemporary democratisation.57 At the very least, as the issue of past, present and future social, political and economic change lay at the centre of much intellectual and historical debate in the nineteenth century, from Hegel to Macaulay to Marx, the crusades could not fail to attract attention not just of writers of belles lettres but also of their more self-consciously academic scholarly colleagues.
Notes
1 Trans. Lady Duff Gordon, The History and Literature of the Crusades (London, 1861), pp. 1–2.
2 Duff Gordon, History and Literature, p. 1; cf. J. F. Michaud, Histoire des croisades (4 vols in 2, Paris, 1857 reprint of the author’s final revision, the 6th edn published posthumously in 1841), iv, 199.
3 M. Brett, reviewing E. Siberry, The New Crusaders (Aldershot, 2000), www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/brettMichael.html, May 2001.
4 F.-R. Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, ed. E. Malaki (Baltimore MD, Oxford and Paris, 1946), ii, 146; for 1798–99, see, e.g., H. Laurens, L’expédition d’Egypte, 1798–1801 (Paris, 1997).
5 C. Villers’s introduction to A. H. L. Heeren, Essai sur l’influence des croisades (Paris, 1808), p. x. For Leibniz, above pp. xxxx and R. Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 11–12.
6 Gary Dickson seems to have been the first modern scholar to draw especial attention to this episode, in 1999, see J. Richard, ‘National Feeling and the Legacy of the Crusades’, in Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. H. Nicholson (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 209–10; more information in Heeren, Essai, pp. vii–xix; Choiseul Daillecourt’s essay was published in 1809, Lemoine’s Discours in 1808, both in Paris; Regenbogen’s Commentatio in Latin, in Amsterdam in 1809; cf. Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 3–4.
7 Heeren, Essai, p. 69; J. L. Lemoine, Discours sur cette question proposée par (’Institut de France (Paris, 1808), p. 3.
8 Lemoine, Discours, pp. 32–4, 36–77; pp. 146–65, esp. pp. 164–5.
9 H. Dehéran, ‘Les origines de Recueil des historiens des croisades’, Journal des Savants, n.s. 17 (1919), pp. 260, 262–5.
10 Itinéraire, i, 146, 329, 335, 336; ii, 35, 53, 130.
11 Itinéraire, ii, 103, 118, 129–30, 131.
12 Itinéraire, ii, 146, 199–200, 219, 247, 299.
13 Itinéraire, i, 1 and note 3.
14 Itinéraire, ii, 131.
15 Itinéraire, ii, 459, 463–5, 470.
16 The French Romantics, ed. D. G. Charlton (Cambridge, 1984), p. 52; Siberry, New Crusaders, p. 69.
17 Histoire, i, iii–iv. For Michaud’s Arabic sources, R. Irwin, ‘Orientalism and the Development of Crusader Studies’, in The Experience of Crusading, ii, Defining the Crusader Kingdom, ed. P. Edbury and J. Phillips (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 221–3. Cf. J. Richard, ‘De Jean-Baptiste Mailly à Joseph-François Michaud’, Crusades, 1 (2002), 1–12.
18 D. Denby, ‘Les croisades aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècle: une historiographie engagée’, in Les champenois et la croisade, ed. Y. Bellenger and D. Quéruel (Paris, 1989), pp. 163–70.
19 Histoire, i, iv–vi; ii, 173; iv, 343–4; K. Munholland, ‘Michaud’s History of the Crusades and the French Crusade in Algeria under Louis Philippe’, in The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, ed. P. Ten-Doesschate Chu and G. P. Weisburg (Princeton NJ, 1994), p. 154 and generally pp. 144–65; cf. M. Marrinan, ‘Historical Vision and the Writing of History at Louis Philippe’s Versailles’, in Popularization of Images, pp. 113–43; W. C. Jordan, ‘Saint Louis in French Epic and Drama’, in Studies in Medievalism, viii, ed. L. J. Workman and K. Verduin (Cambridge, 1996), 174–94; A. Knobler, ‘Saint Louis and French Political Culture’, in Studies in Medievalism, viii, 156–73; M. Glencross, ‘The Cradle and the Crucible: Envisioning the Middle Ages in French Romanticism’, in Studies in Medievalism, viii, 100–24; J. R. Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851–1900 (Oxford, 1973), pp. xiii, 13, 32–3, 43; Siberry, New Crusaders, esp. pp. 5–8, 18–20; Ellenblum, Castles, esp. pp. 18–23.
20 Quoted by Siberry, New Crusaders, p. 8.
21 Histoire, i, 8, 18, 41; ii, 2–3, 85; iv, 201–3.
22 Histoire, i, 7.
23 W. Purkis, ‘Joseph François Michaud’, in Resources for studying the Crusades at www.crusaderstudies.org.uk/resources/historians/profiles/michaud; and below, pp. xxxx.
24 Histoire, i, ii.
25 Histoire, i, 49–56; Duff Gordon, History and Literature, pp. 347, 350.
26 Histoire, i, 171.
27 Histoire, iv, 344.
28 Histoire, i, 374; ii, 172; iii, 297; iv, 202–3; 206.
29 Histoire, i, 5.
30 Histoire, i, 18, 41.
31 Histoire, i, 49.
32 Histoire, i, 57, 86, 273–6, 374; ii, 206; iii, 28, 51, 297, 352; iv, 206. Cf. the rejection of Michaud as a nationalist, Richard, ‘National Feeling’, pp. 209–11, 214.
33 Histoire, i, 59, 85, 270, 302, 331, 374, 412.
34 Histoire, ii, 206, 297, 338; iv, 200–1, 203, 344.
35 Histoire, ii, 173.
36 Histoire, iv, 266.
37 Duff Gordon, History and Literature, pp. 345–53.
38 In general, Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 23–37; Siberry, New Crusaders, passim but esp. chaps 1 and 2.
39 See note 19 above.
40 G. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York NY, 1956 edn), pp. 142–3; quoted in A. Pagden, Worlds at War (Oxford, 2008), p. 309.
41 C. R. Conder, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem 1099–1291 (London, 1897), p. 428.
42 E. Rey, Les colonies franques de Syrie au XIIme et XIIIme siècles (Paris, 1883), pp. i, vi, 3, 60, 78; cf. Ellenblum, Castles, pp. 44–9.
43 North British Review, i, 115; Siberry, New Crusaders, p. 19.
44 C. Foster, Mahometanism Unveiled (London, 1829), esp. pp. 145, 149–50.
45 Siberry, New Crusaders, p. 19.
46 G. E. Sargent, Sketches of the Crusades (London, 1849), pp. 1, 203.
47 J. Berington, A Literary History of the Middle Ages (London, 1814), pp. 268, 269, 607–8.
48 C. Mills, The History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land (2 vols. London, 1820), i, iv, vi, 33; ii, 218, 341, 342, 348–51, 371, 373–5.
49 Mills, History, i, 459–63; ii, 377–408 (pp. 399–402 for Rutebeuf).
50 Mills, History, i, iv; ii, 337.
51 Mills, History, ii, 351, 355, 368, 371, 373, 375–6.
52 See on this, K. L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London, 1984), p. 105 and, generally, chap. IV.
53 R. Southey, The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism (2 vols. London, 1820), i, 310.
54 Quoted in C. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (London, 1998), p. 115.
55 Major Proctor, R. E., The History of the Crusades (London and Glasgow, 1854), p. 200.
56 W. Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History and Kindred Subjects (Oxford, 1886), pp. 157, 222; Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, i, Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Ricardi Regis, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series (London, 1864), p. cxxxix.
57 H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (5th revision, London, 1930), pp. 667, 958.