After the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the immediate threat of a Turkish invasion of central Europe had passed. It was therefore possible to take a more relaxed view of the Muslim East. The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689- 1762), wife of a British ambassador to the Ottoman court at Constantinople, which described details of Turkish life, proved popular when published in 1763, and there was a club known as the Divan Club, reserved for those such as the elegant Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-81), who had been to the Ottoman Empire. A portrait at Sir Francis’s home, West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, depicts him in oriental coat and turban, with the inscription, El Faquir Dashwood Pasha. The fashion for orientalism is exemplified by Mozart’s opera II Seraglio (1782) and the popularity of translations of the Arabian Nights. It even extended to garden design. Thus the eighteenth-century gardens at Painshill in Surrey featured a Turkish tent.
Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798 stimulated further interest in the East. His forces included engineers and scholars whose researches were published and there was soon a regular stream of topographers, artists, and writers who visited the famous sites mentioned in the Bible and recorded their impressions in their various mediums. The list is extensive, but examples are the French poets Alphonse de Lamartine and Gérard de Nerval; the English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who negotiated a treaty with Egypt on behalf of his employers the Post Office in 1858; and the artists David Roberts, Edward Lear, and Jean- Léon Gérôme. The interest in Muslim culture, history, and religion was reflected in a series of monographs and, from the 1820s onwards, in the foundation of a number of learned orientalist societies. As the nineteenth century progressed, travel became easier and safer and the flow of visitors armed with guidebooks increased; the era of the package tour had arrived.
This developing interest in the Near and Middle East has been researched and chronicled by others. One aspect, however, which has not been looked at in detail is the treatment of the crusades as an historical phenomenon and source of imagery. Eighteenth-century historians seem to have taken a rather sceptical view of the crusades, consistent with their attitude towards the Middle Ages and the concept of chivalry as a whole. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote that the crusades had ‘checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe’, diverting energies which would have been more profitably employed at home. Voltaire and David Hume were similarly dismissive and the Scottish historian William Robertson described the crusading movement as a ‘singular monument of human folly’, although he did allow that it had some beneficial consequences such as the development of commerce and the Italian cities.
Nineteenth-century commentators were not uncritical of aspects of the crusading movement, but overall saw it through rather more rose-coloured spectacles, as a manifestation of Christian chivalry engaged against an exotic Muslim foe. Whilst there is always a danger in drawing out a particular theme and thereby giving it undue prominence, an examination of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century images of the crusades, showing the development of this theme in a wide variety of ways and for a variety of purposes, is worthwhile. More generally, it illuminates modern perceptions of both the Middle East and the Middle Ages.
It is logical to start with those who observed the Holy Land at first hand. Whilst the main interest was undoubtedly in sites mentioned in the Bible, a number of travellers also seem to have been conscious of the crusading heritage. Not all were sympathetic towards the crusading movement. Thus Edward Daniel Clarke, in his Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, published in 1812, commented: ‘It is a very common error to suppose everything barbarous on the part of the mahometans, and to attribute to the Christians, in that period, more refinement than they really possessed. A due attention to history may show that the Saracens, as they were called, were in fact more enlightened than their invaders; nor is there any evidence for believing they ever delighted in works of destruction . . . The treachery and shameful conduct of the Christians, during their wars in the Holy Land, have seldom been surpassed.’ The crusades were, however, generally seen in a more favourable light. The French writer and historian Châteaubriand set out from Paris in July 1806, reaching Constantinople in the September and his ultimate goal, Jerusalem, on 7 October. On his return to France, he wrote an account of his travels, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, published in 1811, which has been described as the most widely read book on Palestine in the early nineteenth century. Within three years it had gone through twelve editions. As a child,Châteaubriand had been read tales of chivalry by his mother and told of his ancestor Geoffrey IV of Châteaubriand, who went on crusade with Louis IX, and his Journal is permeated with references to the crusading movement: ‘We travelled to Jerusalem under the banner of the cross. I will perhaps be the last Frenchman leaving my country to voyage to the Holy Land with the ideas, feelings, and aims of a pilgrim.’ Châteaubriand criticized those who questioned the morality or justice of the crusades and seems to have had little sympathy with or understanding of the Muslims. Whilst in Jerusalem, he read Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, a sixteenth-century epic poem on the First Crusade, which seems to have been extremely popular, running to numerous editions and translations and being treated almost as a primary source. The high point of Châteaubriand’spilgrimage was when he was made a knight of the Holy Sepulchre at the site of Christ’s tomb with the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon. As such, he vowed himself ready to join his fellow knights, fully armed, for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from the ‘dominion of the infidel’. Judging by the accounts of other nineteenth-century travellers to Jerusalem, this ceremony seems to have become almost a standard feature of visits by prominent Europeans, the key elements being Godfrey of Bouillon’s spur, chain, and sword, with a feast afterwards paid for by the new knights. In a Muslim city it was not without irony and a later observer commented that these emotive ceremonies took place ‘within earshot of the Muslim effendis who were sitting on the porch, calmly smoking chibooks, or drinking sherbet, in simple unconsciousness of the tenor of the vows and the promises made’.
The crusades also attracted the attention of the future prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. In 1831, when he was aged 27, and six years before he was elected to the House of Commons, Disraeli went on the Grand Tour, visiting Constantinople, Cairo, and Jerusalem. In the latter city, in addition to the more famous sites, he also visited the tombs of the crusader kings. After his return to England, Disraeli retained a fascination with the East, its sites, and history, and it formed the background to several of his books, including his apparent favourite Tancred (1847), the last of the Young England trilogy, subtitled The New Crusader. The hero of Tancred is a young nobleman who has all the advantages that wealth and power can provide. He decides however to reject the lure of earthly possessions and status in favour of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, following the example of one of his ancestors, who had taken part in the crusades and reputedly saved the life of Richard the Lionheart. In the novel, the crusader’s exploits are commemorated in a series of Gobelin tapestries displayed in a chamber at Tancred’s family home known as the crusaders’ gallery. Disraeli laments: ‘More than six hundred years before, it [England] had sent its king, and the flower of its peers and people, to rescue Jerusalem from those whom they considered infidels and now, instead of the third crusade, they expend their superfluous energies in the construction of railroads.’ References to the crusades also appear in some of his other novels. For example in Coningsby the fancy dress costumes at Eton’s Montem ceremony include ‘heroes of the holy sepulchre’ and the Marquis of Sidonia comments: ‘It was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades . . . Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.’
The American author Mark Twain visited the battlefield of Hattin during his tour of the Holy Land (The Innocents Abroad, 1869) and, although he might have been cynical about the wonders of Italian Renaissance art, he was much impressed by the reputed sword of Godfrey of Bouillon: ‘No blade in Christendom wields such enchantment as this—no blade of all that rust in the ancestral halls of Europe is able to invoke such visions of romance in the brain of him who looks upon it . . . It stirs within a man every memory of the holy wars that has been sleeping in his brain for years and peoples his thoughts with mail clad images . . . It speaks to him of Baldwin and Tancred, and princely Saladin and great Richard of the Lionheart.’
Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany also undertook a tour of the Holy Land, Egypt, and Syria, arranged by Thomas Cook, in 1898. The aim of the trip was to dedicate the church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem, which had been built by the German Protestants. In Jerusalem, however, the Kaiser also visited the newly founded German Templar colony and, visualizing himself as a crusader, or at least the heir of crusaders, he wished to enter the old city on horseback. Traditionally this form of entry was reserved for conquerors, and to enable the Kaiser to have his way the city wall near the Jaffa Gate was torn down and the moat filled in. He thus rode into the city, but not through a gate. To heighten the drama, the Kaiser wore a Field Marshal’s ceremonial white uniform. In Damascus, he placed a satin flag and a bronze laurel wreath, with the inscription ‘from one great emperor to another’ on Saladin’s tomb. The wreath was brought back to Britain as a trophy after the First World War by T. E. Lawrence and is now on display in the Imperial War Museum in London.
Lawrence was of course himself very conscious of the crusading past. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on crusader castles and one of his ancestors, Sir Robert Lawrence, was reputed to have accompanied Richard I at the siege of Acre. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence wrote: ‘I felt that one more sight of Syria would put straight the strategic ideas given me by the crusaders and the first Arab conquest, and adjust them to two new factors, the railways and Murray in Sinai.’ And in a tribute after his death, E. M. Forster referred to the notion of a crusade, of a body of men leaving one country to do noble deeds in another, which possessed Lawrence in Arabia and later in his airforce career.
The 1830s and 1840s saw the establishment of European consulates in the Holy Land—Britain (1838), France, Sardinia, and Prussia (1843), Austria (1849), and Spain (1854)—and the memoirs of the British Consul, James Finn, who held office from 1845 to 1863, provide an interesting illustration of national rivalries, some of which dated back to the time of the crusades. In fact the consuls used their countries’ crusading credentials to enhance their own positions. The French consul apparently insisted on precedence over his fellows, on the grounds that his royal master was ‘Protector of Christians in the East’, and his Sardinian counterpart wore the uniform of the representative of the King of Jerusalem, a title claimed by both his monarch and the Austrian Emperor. Finn observed of the French claims: ‘It is true that the French in Turkey have a high position to maintain, not only that they are by general consent Protectors of Christianity in the east, but in virtue of their claim to be regarded as the hereditary successors of the crusaders. In their views, other nations were then suffered to associate with them in the holy wars; but Peter the Hermit was a Frenchman; the Council of Clermont was a French Council and Godfrey of Bouillon with his brother Baldwin, were Frenchmen and the last crusade was headed by Saint Louis in person.’ There were a number of visits by European royalty to Jerusalem in the midnineteenth century and, in her reminiscences, Mrs Finn recorded that Edward, Prince of Wales and later Edward VII, pitched his tent in 1862 under the great pine tree where Godfrey of Bouillon had made camp in 1099, ‘though the Pasha did not know that’. It was also noted that Edward was the first heir to the British throne to set foot in Palestine since the crusade of the Lord Edward in 1270.
The Victorians were much attracted by the ideas and precepts of medieval chivalry and two of the four volumes of Kenelm Digby’s popular chivalric manual, The Broad Stone of Honour, were named after heroes of the First Crusade, Godefridus and Tancredus. Responding to some of the arguments advanced by eighteenth-century sceptics, Digby wrote that the crusades were ‘easily justified on every principle of justice and policy’; that the crusaders’ crimes had been ‘enormously overstated’; and that it was lawful for Christians to oblige the Saracens ‘not to injure religion by their persuasions or open persecutions’. Godfrey and Tancred were his particular crusading heroes, but he also praised the ordinary crusaders. ‘Germany, France and England poured forth the flower of their youth and nobility; men who were led by no base interest or selfish expectation, but who went with single hearts renouncing the dearest blessings of their country and station to defend the cause which was dear to them, and to protect from insult and wrong the persecuted servants of their saviour.’
Those who seemed to their contemporaries to epitomize the chivalrous ideal were sometimes described as crusaders. For example, in 1837 George Smythe, Lord Strangford, wrote of his friend Lord John Manners:
Thou shouldst have lived, dear friend, in those old days
When deeds of high and chivalrous enterprise
Were gendered by the sympathy of eyes
That smiled on valour—or by roundelays
Sung by the palmer minstrel to their praise
Then surely some Provençal tale of old
That spoke of Zion and Crusade, had told
Thy knightly name and thousand gentle ways.
And Charles Lister, son of Lord Ribblesdale and later a First World War casualty, who visited Constantinople with a group of friends, was, perhaps like Disraeli’s Tancred, ‘inspired with the spirit of the old crusaders’.
Somewhat later, John Buchan described Aubrey Herbert, who served as a British intelligence officer in the Near East, in similar terms as ‘a sort of survivor from crusading times’. Herbert, with a dash of T. E. Lawrence, another of Buchan’s friends, undoubtedly served as the model for Sandy Arbuthnot in the second of Buchan’s Hannay novels, Greenmantle. ‘In old days he would have led a crusade or discovered a new road to the Indies. Today he merely roamed as the spirit took him.’ And in a later novel, The Island of Sheep, Arbuthnot speaks on Near Eastern matters in the House of Lords. It seems likely that the denouement of Greenmantle was originally intended to take place in Constantinople, the action forming a kind of crusade against a German plot to foment Islamic revolution against the land routes to India, but the story had to be revised after the disastrous Dardanelles campaign. In a very different context, the Norwegian explorer Amundsen saw himself as ‘a kind of crusader in Arctic exploration. I wanted to suffer for a cause—not in the burning desert on the way to Jerusalem but in the frosty North.’
There was clearly great pride in any crusading ancestry and references to crusading forebears can be found in heraldic devices. For example, the motto of the Ward family, Viscounts of Bangor, is sub cruce salus and their heraldic supporters are a knight in armour with a red cross on his breast and a Turkish prince beturbaned with his hands in fetters. The de Vere family have a five pointed star (mullet), which is believed to mark their crusading credentials. In 1824, a translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata listed ‘such of the English nobility and gentry as went on the crusades’, including Roger de Clinton, an ancestor of the Earls of Lincoln and present Duke of Newcastle, slain in the battle of Antioch, and Ingelram de Fiennes, ancestor of the Lords Saye and Sele. Some families kept and displayed to visitors charm stones and mysterious objects which family history linked with the crusades. For example, the Macphersons of Cluny had a belt of red morocco leather, reputed to have been brought back from the Holy Land by a crusader, which was believed to assist the safe delivery of women in childbirth.
The same was true of nineteenth-century France. In his memoirs, King Louis Philippe wrote that crusade armorials became like ‘hereditary fiefs’, and there was fierce competition in the 1830s amongst French families to have their coats of arms included in the Salles des croisades at Versailles, reserved by the king for those whose ancestors had brought glory to France on crusade. In fact some families resorted to forged charters, purchased from the industrious Monsieur Courtois, in order to prove their case. Rather appropriately their claims were examined by the Prince de Joinville.
Crusading ancestors were also cited by the heroes of novels. G. A. Lawrence’s Guy Livingstone not only has the face of ‘one of those stone crusaders, who look up at us from their couches in the Round Church of the Temple’, but is the descendant of Sir Malise ‘Point de Fer’ Livingstone, a participant in the Third Crusade, who fought shoulder to shoulder with Richard I of England at Ascalon. And in his novel Guy Mannering, Sir Walter Scott makes a Galloway laird tell an English visitor: ‘I wish you could have heard my father’s stories about the old fights of the Macdingawaies . . . how they sailed to the Holy Land—that is to Jerusalem and Jericho . . . and how they brought hame relics, like those the catholics have, and a flag that’s up yonder in the garret.’
Given this background, it is not surprising that in England, for example, the nineteenth century saw attempts to revive the military orders and even to launch a crusade. The Knights Hospitallers of St John, now commonly called the Knights of Malta, had survived Napoleon’s capture of their base in 1798, and as we shall see there was after 1827 an attempt to revive the English langue, involving a colourful group of Victorian eccentrics. As for the Templars, the key players in an effort to revive the order in England were Sir Sidney Smith, the heroic defender of Acre against the French in 1799, who clearly saw himself as a latterday crusader and Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt, uncle of the poet Alfred Tennyson. Smith was associated with the French masonic neo-Templar Order and was recognized by them as grand prior of England. He ceded the title to George III’s son the Duke of Sussex, in an effort to promote the fortunes of the order, but few seem to have signed up and the English branch did not long survive its founders.
The chief promoter of the crusade was Sir William Hillary, a knight of the English langue and founder of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. When he heard the news in 1840 that Acre had returned to the control of the sultan of Turkey, he wrote a pamphlet Suggestions for the Christian reoccupation of the Holy Land as a sovereign state by the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Hillary noted: ‘The Christian occupation of the Holy Land has, for many centuries, been the most momentous of any subject which had ever engaged the attention of mankind.’ He envisaged the establishment of a protectorate, which would both secure Acre in Christian hands and restore the order of St John to its original splendour. In August 1841, he published an Address to the Knights of St. John on the Christian occupation of the Holy Land, which again uses language reminiscent of medieval crusade propaganda. ‘It only remains for me, with all deference, to entreat my brother knights . . . to form a new crusade, not as in days of yore, to convert the Holy Land into a field of carnage and of bloodshed, but a crusade of peace.’ The English langue did its best to promote Hillary’s scheme, but, given its own battle to achieve recognition and the political complexities of the time, all its efforts came to nought.
Crusade imagery was also used in relation to contemporary conflicts. Thus the Crimean war was seen as a form of crusade for the rescue of the Holy Places, although on this occasion the nations which had taken part in the original crusades were allied with the Muslim Turks. The British consul in Jerusalem during the war commented: ‘The acclamation “God wills it” which impelled the first crusade bore against the Muslim holders of the Holy Sepulchre; but the shouts of war we are now considering were directed by representatives of the same nations who fought in that first crusade: but now they were fighting in defence of the Muslim holders of that same treasure, against a power (Russia) which has only become fully Christian since the crusades and which equally covets possession of the Holy Sepulchre.’
The nineteenth century also saw the beginning of scholarly research and writing on the crusades. In 1806 the Institut de France held an essay competition on the subject of the influence of the crusades upon European liberty, civilization, commerce, and industry. It was won by A. H. L. Heeren,a professor of History at the University of Göttingen. As his source for primary texts, Heeren quoted Bongars’ Gesta Dei per Francos, published in Hanover in 1611. In the early nineteenth century, the task of collecting, editing, and translating the western accounts of the crusades was still in its infancy. A start had been made by the Benedictines, but was interrupted by the French Revolution. It was ultimately completed by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, which produced the Recueil des Historiens des Croisades—sixteen volumes of western, Arabic, Greek, and Armenian historians and two volumes of laws—between 1841 and 1906. In 1875 Count Paul Riant founded the Société de l’Orient Latin, the output of which included the two-volume Archives de l’Orient Latin and the Revue de l’Orient Latin. In addition to Riant, the litany of great nineteenth-century crusade historians includes Wilken, Röhricht, Hagenmeyer, and Michaud.
The career of Joseph Michaud (1767-1839) offers a flavour of nineteenth-century crusade historiography, which is of course a subject which deserves to be treated in its own right. Michaud’s three-volume Histoire des Croisades and four-volume Bibliothèque des Croisades—excerpts from translated texts—were published in 1829. In 1830-1, he travelled to Constantinople, Syria, Jerusalem, and Egypt. He explored the route of the First Crusade with two engineers and, like Châteaubriand, was made a knight of the Holy Sepulchre. On his return, Michaud revised his Histoire in the light of his experiences. Although he had criticisms of the crusaders’ behaviour and cruelty, he described the crusading movement as: ‘one of the most important sections of human history, not only instructive, but extraordinary, supplying abundance of edifying matter to the statesman, the philosopher, the poet, the novelist, and citizen.’
This analysis based upon primary sources does not, however, seem to have captured the popular or artistic imagination. Where it is possible to identify a source for the varied nineteenth-century interpretations of the crusades in music, art, and literature it is more likely to be the story of the First Crusade as told by Torquato Tasso and glimpses of crusades and crusaders in the novels of Sir Walter Scott than the history of Michaud or the first-hand accounts of a Fulcher of Chartres, John of Joinville, or Geoffrey of Villehardouin.
Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, published in 1581, tells the story of the First Crusade, inter-woven with three sub-plots involving thwarted love and with new characters such as the Christian knight Rinaldo and the enchantress Armida to enliven the basic plot. This combination of elements attracted composers and artists and the use of Tasso as a source can be traced from the early seventeenth century. An example of a nineteenth- century Tasso opera is Armide by Rossini, first performed in 1817, while Brahms composed a dramatic cantata entitled Rinaldo. There are also numerous nineteenth-century paintings on this theme, not least a Tasso room by the Austrian artist J. Führich at the Cassino Massimo in Rome. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and De Quincey read Gerusalemme in translation and, in The Broad Stone of Honour, Digby quotes it in the same breath as primary sources for the First Crusade.
The nineteenth-century English translations of Tasso included one by the librarian at Woburn Abbey, J. H. Wiffen. In his Introduction he referred to the recently published History of the Crusades by Charles Mills (1820), but noted: ‘Mr. Mills has . . . portrayed in real colours the nature of these singular expeditions; but who would not willingly continue the illusion which, whether derived from the songs of early minstrels, or the charming tale of Tasso, invests the character of the crusader with I know not what of devotion, generosity and love.’ Not all of Tasso’s admirers, however, saw the crusades through the same rose-coloured spectacles. One reviewer declared: ‘The grand objection to Tasso’s poem is the false view which it gives of the achievements which it celebrates . . . we must forget that the crimes and cruelties of the croisés as well as their fanaticism sank them below the Moslems and we must strive to believe that the delivery of Jerusalem was an object worthy of the interposition of the highest intelligence.’
Sir Walter Scott was, of course, the most popular historical novelist of the nineteenth century and four of his books refer to the crusades, either as background or as their central theme: Ivanhoe (1819), The Talisman and The Betrothed, published together as Tales of the Crusaders (1825), and Count Robert of Paris (1831). Of these Ivanhoe was by far the most popular and inspired composers, artists, and dramatists. Scott himself attended a performance of Rossini’s opera Ivanhoe in Paris in October 1826 and wrote in his Journal: ‘In the evening at the Odeon, where we saw Ivanhoe. It was superbly got up, the Norman soldiers wearing pointed helmets and what resembled much hauberks of mail, which looked very well . . . It was an opera and of course the story was greatly mangled and the dialogue in great part nonsense.’ Ivanhoe was also the subject of an opera by Sir Arthur Sullivan, better known as a composer of operettas with W. S. Gilbert. Paintings on this theme included Leon Cogniet’s Rebecca and Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert, now in the Wallace Collection in London. There were also operas and paintings based on The Talisman, which takes place during the Third Crusade itself, with Richard and Saladin as central characters. Whilst Scott was not an uncritical observer and indeed queried the value of the expeditions in his ‘Essay on Chivalry’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1818, overall he painted a romanticized picture of the crusading movement.
The crusades offered considerable scope to the romantic imagination and individual idiosyncratic interpretations of the basic historical events. Three very different paintings illustrate the range of imagery on offer. The German Carl Friedrich Lessing’s The Crusader’s Vigil, dated 1836, depicts a lone crusader, battered by the elements, in a manner reminiscent of the abandoned King Lear on the blasted heath. In fact the crusades seem to have been a favourite subject of Lessing and the Düsseldorf School, and Lessing was inspired indirectly by Walter Scott. The American artist George Inness had a rather different image of crusaders. His painting entitled The March of the Crusaders, now on display at the Fruitlands Museum near Boston, Massachussetts, shows a band of crusaders, identifiable by the red cross on their surcoats, crossing a bridge against a romanticized landscape backcloth. The Pre-Raphaelite painter William Bell Scott, a friend of Rossetti’s, sought to portray a crusader’s reunion with his family. In Return from a Long Crusade, he painted a crusader returning to his wife and son after a long absence. He is scarcely recognized by his astonished wife, who may well have given him up for dead; his son hides behind his mother, fearful of this oddly attired stranger.
More recently, in the 1930s, Richard Hollins Murray, the inventor of the road-safety feature cats’ eyes, who purchased the estate of Dinmore in Herefordshire, a former commandery of the Knights Hospitallers, built a music room and cloisters which are in effect a memorial to the crusades and the Hospitallers. They include stained-glass windows, sculpture, and paintings depicting Hospitallers and Templars, and a series of coats of arms of families from Herefordshire which took part in crusades. A set of murals in the cloisters depicts a young man departing on crusade and Godfrey of Bouillon entering Jerusalem; and the theme of a stained-glass window in the Music Room is the life of a knight during the time of the crusades.
In music, there was the idiosyncratic opera Count Ory by Rossini, first performed in 1828. Its plot concerns the sister of the count of Fourmoutiers, who is absent on crusade. In his absence, Count Ory and his friend Raimbaud try to seduce the young girl, first disguised as hermits and then as nuns, but before they have a chance to succeed the count returns. And Verdi’s Aroldo, first performed in 1857, tells the story of Aroldo, a crusader just returned from Palestine, where he had been a member of Richard I’s army, and his wife Mina, who had committed adultery during his absence. After the inevitable twists and turns, the opera ends with a reconciliation on the shores of Loch Lomond.
The crusades also inspired romantic playwrights, poets, and novelists. Scott’s crusading novels have already been discussed. An example of a play on a crusading theme is Charles Kingsley’s The Saint’s Tragedy in praise of St Elizabeth of Hungary, the wife of the crusader Louis of Thuringia. Kingsley wrote: ‘how our stout crusading fathers fought and died for God and not for gold; let their love, their faith, their boyish daring, distance mellowed
gild the days of old.’ And, as the royal couple take their leave of each other, there is a crusader chorus:
The tomb of God before us,
Our fatherland behind,
Our ships shall leap o’er billows steep,
Before a charmed wind.
The red cross knights and yeomen Throughout the holy town,
In Faith and might, on left and right,
Shall tread the paynim down.
A similarly romanticized view of the crusades can be found in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets. In his survey of the history of the Church, he devoted four sonnets to the crusades. One simply entitled Crusaders runs as follows:
Furl we the sails, and pass with tardy oars Through these bright regions, casting many a glance Upon the dream-like issues—the romance Of many coloured life that Fortune pours Round the crusaders, till on distant shores Their labours end; or they return to lie,
The vow performed, in cross legged effigy,
Devoutly stretched upon their chancel floors.
Am I deceived? Or is their requiem chanted By voices never mute when Heaven unties Her inmost, softest, tenderest harmonies;
Requiem which earth takes up with voice undaunted,
When she would tell how Brave, and Good, and Wise,
For their high guerdon not in vain have panted.
A further example of a crusade novel is Hubert’s Arthur, by Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, in which Rolfe weaves a complex tale involving Arthur, duke of Brittany, who sails for Acre, wages battle, and defeats the Saracens, and ultimately captures Jerusalem and the hand of its queen.
The crusades also lent themselves to the spectacular and in nineteenth-century England the place for this was Astley’s amphitheatre in London. In 1810 Astley’s featured a production entitled The Blood Red Knight, which ran for 175 nights and brought the proprietors a profit of £18,000. The plot concerned the attempts of the Blood Red Knight to seduce Isabella, wife of his brother Alphonso, the crusader. Alphonso returns, is defeated, but then calls in reinforcements, when, to quote the playbills, ‘The castle is taken by storm, the surrounding river is covered with boats filled with warriors, while the battlements are strongly contested by the Horse and Foot guards. Men and Horses are portrayed slain and dying in various directions, while other soldiers and horses are submerged in the river, forming an effect totally new and unprecedented in this or any other country whatever, and terminating in the total defeat of the Blood Red Knight.’
In 1835 the crusade subject was The Siege of Jerusalem, which took the audience, mixing fact and fantasy, through Saladin’s capture of the Holy City, a view of the Dead Sea, the arrival of the French and Austrian fleets, the burning sands of the desert, an appearance by Saladin’s White Bull Coraccio, a Grand Asiatic Ballet and Divertissement, the encounter between the Leopard Knight and the Templar (from Scott’s The Talisman), and ended with the riches of Saladin’s feast and the last days of the Third Crusade—a full evening’s entertainment. In 1843, another new production was Richard and Saladin or The Crusaders of Jerusalem, featuring an encounter between the protagonists of the Third Crusade.
Generally the theatre seems to have had less to offer in terms of nineteenth-century images of the crusades, although of course a number of operatic librettos were based on plays such as the German August von Kotzebue’s Die Kreuzfahrer, a tale of the First Crusade, which inspired Louis Spohr’s opera of the same name. The Crusaders was, however, the title of a play by Henry Arthur Jones about nineteenth-century social reform: ‘The banner of social reform serves as a rallying point for all that is the noblest and basest, wisest and foolishest in the world of today . . . This movement is in truth as dramatic an element in the life of the nineteenth century as were the crusades in that of the thirteenth.’
If romanticized and idiosyncratic interpretations prevailed, however, that does not mean that their authors were unaware of the historical context in which they were writing, painting, and composing. I have not been able to identify any clear correlation between events in the Near East such as the rise and defeat of Mehmet Ali and his son Ibrahim—whose defeat at Acre in 1840 prompted Sir William Hillary to call for a crusade—and peaks and troughs in the nineteenth-century use of crusade imagery. The Middle Ages and specifically the crusades were however undoubtedly used as a quarry for imagery to express particular ideas and ambitions. For example, Disraeli’s Tancred needs to be seen in the context of his plans for the eastern expansion of the British empire and control of the road to India. And a further variation on the crusade theme was the celebration of national crusade heroes or traditions.
Thus in England an obvious hero was Richard the Lionheart, the subject of numerous paintings and commemorated in a sculpture by Baron Marochetti which is now located outside the Houses of Parliament. France of course had St Louis and, as mentioned earlier, the Salles des croisades at Versailles formed a pictorial history of French participation in the crusades, with scenes from famous battles and sieges and portraits of national crusade heroes. Another example is Delacroix’s The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, a scene from the Fourth Crusade. Now in the Louvre in Paris, it portrays the noble conquerors of Constantinople exploring the city on horseback and receiving pleas for clemency from the inhabitants. Whether the crusaders would have been recognizable to Geoffrey of Villehardouin is, however, doubtful. In Belgium the national crusade hero was Godfrey of Bouillon, a sculpture of whom by Simonis was exhibited at Crystal Palace in 1851 and can now be seen in the Grand Place in Brussels. It shows a noble leader on horseback, but at Bouillon itself there is a statue of a more youthful Godfrey gazing wistfully across his home valley. At a rather more mundane level, a Catalogue of Furniture and Household Requisites, published in London in 1883, included bronze equestrian figures of Richard the Lionheart, Louis, and Godfrey of Bouillon, available by mail order.
In Italy Tomasso Grossi’s poem I Lombardi alla prima crociata stimulated pride in Italian crusade achievements. It inspired a number of painters of historical subjects, as well as Verdi, whose opera I Lombardi was first performed in Milan in 1843. Contemporary accounts note that the music touched a chord of Italian nationalism; the Milanese appear to have decided that they were the Lombards, the Holy Land which they were defending was Italy, and the Austrians were akin to the Saracens. The large set-piece scenes, such as the crusaders in sight of Jerusalem, allowed producers to give full rein to their imagination and romantic ideas of the Middle Ages. Ever adaptable, Verdi then produced a French version of the opera, entitled Jérusalem, which was performed before King Louis Philippe at the Tuileries and won its composer the award of the Légion d’Honneur.
Louis IX’s Egyptian campaign was the subject of an opera by Meyerbeer, although the plot, involving Knights Hospitallers of Rhodes, a Saracen princess, and Christian convert, might not have been recognized by John of Joinville. Again producers provided elaborate and exotic oriental costumes and backcloth, which probably bore little relation to thirteenth-century Egypt. Rather later, the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg composed the incidental music to the play Sigurd Jorsalfar (Sigurd the Crusader), about King Sigurd’s expedition to the Holy Land in 1107. It is not without significance that this piece was performed as part of the welcoming ceremonies for the new King Haakon of Norway in 1905.
A prime example of the use of crusade imagery in the twentieth century is in connection with the First World War, in accounts of the campaigns and in literature. Not all contemporaries focused on the heavy casualties and harsh realities of life in the trenches. Some, perhaps as an escape from immediate reality, took a more romanticized view and saw the war as a noble crusade, fought in defence of liberty, to prevent Prussian militarism dominating Europe and to free the Holy Places from Muslim domination.
In Britain, the idea of a holy war was developed in sermons by Anglican clergymen, two key players being the so-called bishop of the battlefields, Bishop Winnington-Ingram of London, and Basil Bourchier, Vicar of St Jude’s Hampstead and subsequently a chaplain to the forces. Bourchier wrote: ‘not only is this a holy war, it is the holiest war that has ever been waged . . . Odin is ranged against Christ. Berlin is seeking to prove its supremacy over Bethlehem. Every shot that is fired, every bayonet thrust that gets home, every life that is sacrificed is in truth for his name’s sake.’ Bourchier saw the Dardanelles campaign as the latest of the crusades, which would ultimately lead to the rescue of the Holy Land ‘from the defiling grip of the infidel’.
This imagery was not only used by the Church. In a speech delivered in May 1916 and entitled ‘Winning the War’, Lloyd George declared ‘Young men from every quarter of this country flocked to the standard of international right, as to a great crusade.’ And a collection of his speeches between 1915 and 1918 was published under the title The Great Crusade.
F. W. Orde Ward published a book of what he termed patriotic poems in 1917, entitled The Last Crusade; and Katherine Tynan, whose two sons served in the army, wrote:
Your son and my son, clean as new swords
Your man and my man and now the Lord’s
Your son and my son for the Great Crusade
With the banner of Christ over them—our knights new made.
The crusading theme is particularly marked in accounts of the campaigns at the Dardanelles and in Palestine. The poet Rupert Brooke described himself as a crusader in a letter to his friend Jacques Raverat and Major Vivian Gilbert wrote a book, published in 1923, entitled The Romance of the Last Crusade— with Allenby to Jerusalem, about his own experiences in Palestine. The book is dedicated to ‘the mothers of all the boys who fought for the freedom of the Holy Land’ and begins with Brian Gurnay, just down from his first year at Oxford in 1914, dreaming of the crusading exploits of his ancestor Sir Brian de Gurnay, a participant in the Third Crusade. The young Brian longs for another crusade which will recapture Jerusalem: ‘To fight in thy cause, to take part in that last crusade, I would willingly leave my bones in the Holy Land. Oh for the chance to do as one of those knights of old, to accomplish one thing in life really worthwhile.’ According to another veteran of Allenby’s campaign, orders were issued forbidding the soldiers to be called crusaders. But if they could not do so officially, it is quite clear that many saw themselves as following in the footsteps of the crusaders. Gilbert wrote of the soldiers in his own command: ‘What did it matter if we wore drab khaki instead of suits of glittering armour. The spirit of the crusaders was in all these men of mine who worked so cheerfully to prepare for the great adventure. And even if they wore ugly little peaked caps instead of helmets with waving plumes, was not their courage just as great, their idealism just as fine, as that of the knights of old who had set out with such dauntless faith under the leadership of Richard the Lionhearted to free the Holy Land.’ Gilbert noted that of all the crusades organized and equipped to free the Holy City, only two had been successful: ‘the first led by Godfrey of Bouillon and the last under Edmund Allenby’. There were even crusade cartoons in Punch. In December 1917, a cartoon entitled The Last Crusade depicted Richard the Lionheart gazing at Jerusalem with the text ‘At last my dream come true’.
Some First World War memorials illustrate this use of the crusading theme. The memorial at Sledmere in Yorkshire, the home of Sir Mark Sykes, of Sykes-Picot treaty fame, took the form of an Eleanor Cross. When Sir Mark died in 1919, by chance one panel remained unfilled. His memorial is a figure blazoned in brass, armoured and bearing a sword. Under his feet lies a Muslim, above him is a scroll inscribed Laetare Jerusalem and in the background is an outline of Jerusalem itself. The sculptor Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams entered a design entitled The Spirit of the Crusaders for a competition for the war memorial in Paisley. Now in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, it depicts a medieval knight in armour upon a horse and flanked by four soldiers in First World War battledress.
Memories of the crusades were also evoked at the peace conference at Versailles which followed the end of the war. After one of the French representatives had rehearsed the claims of France in Syria dating back to the crusades, the Emir Faisal commented, ‘Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the crusades?’
Both sides in the Spanish Civil War also used crusade imagery to describe and promote their cause. Thus on the one hand Franco fought a ‘crusade of liberation’ to save Spain from communism and atheism and is portrayed as a crusader fighting God’s war in posters and paintings produced under his regime. On the other, the members of the International Brigades were hailed as ‘crusaders for freedom’. A multi-volume history of the civil war, published in Madrid between 1940 and 1943, was entitled Historia de la cruzada espanola, and the word crusade appears in the title of a number of autobiographical accounts of the campaign and civil war novels. For example, Jason Gurney, a member of the International Brigades, wounded in 1937, wrote in his Crusade in Spain, published in 1974, the ‘crusade was against the Fascists, who were the Saracens of our generation’. Indeed it was ‘one of the most deeply felt ideological crusades in the history of Western Europe’.
Crusade imagery re-emerged in the Second World War. General Eisenhower’s account of the campaign, published in 1948, was entitled Crusade in Europe and he clearly saw the war as a form of personal crusade. ‘Only by the destruction of the Axis was a decent world possible; the war became for me a crusade in the traditional sense of that often misused word.’ In November 1941, an operation to raise the siege of Tobruk was codenamed Operation Crusader and Eisenhower’s Order of the Day for 6 June 1944 ran as follows: ‘Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the allied expeditionary forces, you are about to embark on a great crusade . . . the hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you.’ Another example of the use of crusade imagery can be found in Stefan Heym’s novel The Crusaders, published in 1950. Heym, who fled the Nazis in 1933, described the Second World War as a ‘necessary and holy crusade’ to stop a tyrant.
The range of images of the crusades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is therefore varied. While the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of scholarly research on the crusading movement, the popular image was a highly romanticized one and bore little relation to the reality of crusading as described in eyewitness narrative accounts. Composers, artists, and writers allowed their imaginations to run freely and their principal sources were not medieval chroniclers but Torquato Tasso and Walter Scott. This is hardly surprising since they were seeking to satisfy the demands of an audience which had romantic notions of life in the Middle Ages and the exploits of Christian chivalry and was attracted by travellers’ tales of the exotic East. There was a great pride in crusading heroes such as England’s Richard the Lionheart and Belgium’s Godfrey of Bouillon. Crusade imagery was also employed in contemporary conflicts, most notably in the First World War in general and with regard to Allenby’s campaign in Palestine in particular. The most startling example of its misuse was when the Crimean War, in which the western European powers were in alliance with the Muslim Turks, was described as a crusade.