A History of the Crusades (2 page)

Urban seems to have followed up his proclamation by preaching the cross wherever he went in France. By the following spring crusaders were assembling for what came to be known as the First Crusade (1096–1102), the climax of which was the capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, an achievement made all the greater for contemporaries by the catastrophic defeat by the Turks in Asia Minor two years later of the armies of a third wave of crusaders.

Jerusalem could not be held in isolation and its capture inevitably led to the establishment of western settlements in the Levant (which are known collectively as the Latin East). These soon came under pressure and military expeditions had to be organized, and military orders were founded, to assist them.

Crusades were in action in 1107–8—although this was diverted into a preliminary and disastrous invasion of the Byzantine empire—1120–5, 1128–9, 1139–40, and 1147–9; the last of these came to be known as the Second Crusade. Meanwhile, the movement had been extended to Spain, the reconquest of which from the Moors had already been equated with the liberation of Jerusalem by Pope Urban II. Crusades in the peninsula were preached in 1114, 1118, and 1122, when Pope Calixtus II proposed a war on two fronts with armed forces serving concurrently in Spain and in the East. Calixtus’s initiative was developed by Pope Eugenius III in 1147 when he authorized a crusade against the Wends across the northeastern German frontier at the same time as crusaders were being called to serve in Spain and Asia. The Second Crusade was a fiasco, and although there were three further crusades in Spain before 1187, one in northern Europe, and a few expeditions, notably that of 1177, to Palestine, the thirty years that followed were in many ways the lowest point the movement reached before the fifteenth century.

Everything changed, however, with the consternation that swept Europe at the news of the Muslim victory at Hattin, and the loss of Jerusalem and nearly all of Palestine to Saladin in 1187. The Third Crusade (1189–92) and the German Crusade (1197–8) recovered most of the coast, ensuring the survival of the Latin settlements for the time being, and enthusiasm was to be found at every level of society throughout the thirteenth century. Feelings among the masses were expressed in the Children’s Crusade (1212) and the Crusade of the Shepherds (1251), while military forces sailed to the East in 1202–4 (the Fourth Crusade, diverted to Constantinople, which the crusaders took, together with much of Greece), 1217–29 (the Fifth Crusade, which ended with the recovery of Jerusalem by treaty by the excommunicated Emperor Frederick II), 1239–41, 1248–54 (the first crusade of King Louis IX of France, inspired by the loss of Jerusalem in 1244), 1269–72 (Louis’s second crusade) and 1287–90; crusading armies invaded Egypt in 1218 and 1249, and Tunisia in 1270.

There was also a renewal of activity in Spain between 1187
and 1260, when the crusade was briefly extended to Africa; the highpoints were the victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) and the conquests of Valencia (1232–53), Córdoba (1236) and Seville (1248). Crusading in Spain resumed in the early fourteenth century and again in 1482–92, after which, with Granada and the entire Iberian peninsula in Christian hands, it spilled into North Africa and led to the establishment of beachheads as far east as Tripoli. In the Baltic region crusades were launched in support of Christian missions in Livonia between 1193 and 1230, after which the Teutonic Knights took over, and in Prussia, where the Teutonic Knights ran a ‘perpetual crusade’ from 1245 until early in the fifteenth century. Crusades were also waged in Estonia, Finland, and Poland. From 1199 onwards crusades were fought against political opponents of the papacy in Italy—they were endemic between 1255 and 1378—Germany, and Aragon, while the Papal Schism generated crusades in Flanders and Spain in the 1380s. The first crusade against heretics, the Albigensian Crusade, was in action in south-western France between 1209 and 1229; others were waged in Bosnia, Germany, Italy, and Bohemia, especially against the Hussites between 1420 and 1431. Crusades were also launched in 1231 and 1239 against the Greeks, who were trying to recover Constantinople; against the Mongols from 1241 onwards; against the Orthodox Russians in northern Europe from the thirteenth century and against the Protestant English in the sixteenth (the Armada of 1588).

But the chief field of activity remained the East. The loss of Acre and the last Christian toeholds in Palestine and Syria in 1291 gave rise to another wave of enthusiasm, finding expression in popular crusades in 1309 and 1320. Expeditions sailed regularly to the eastern Mediterranean region. One sent to Mahdia in North Africa in 1390 was followed, as the threat to Europe from the Ottoman Turks grew, by disastrous forays into the Balkans, the Crusades of Nicopolis (1396) and of Varna (1444), although the Turkish advance was temporarily halted at Belgrade in 1456. In 1332 a new expression of the movement—an alliance of interested powers in a crusade league—came into existence. There were to be many of these leagues, the most successful of which
were those which took Smyrna in 1344, won the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and recovered much of the Balkans from the Ottomans between 1684 and 1697, although there were also conventional crusades to North Africa in 1535, 1541, and 1578. Crusading, however, was petering out from the late sixteenth century, although the Hospital of St John still functioned as a military order in its order-state of Malta until that island fell to Napoleon in 1798.

The crusading movement had involved every country in Europe, touching almost every area of life—the Church and religious thought, politics, the economy, and society—as well as generating its own literature. It had an enduring influence on the history of the western Islamic world and the Baltic region. Although until comparatively recently it tended to be thought of as something exotic and peripheral, it has never lacked historians. The foundations of modern scholarship were laid in the second half of the nineteenth century. This golden age, which ended with the outbreak of the First World War, was followed by a period of consolidation; indeed, the multi-volume histories of Steven Runciman and the American team of scholars led by Kenneth Setton (commonly known as the Wisconsin History), which had appeared or had begun to appear by the middle 1950s, could only have been planned in a relatively stable environment.

By the early 1950s, however, there were signs that the pace of crusade history was beginning to quicken again. The first signs of renewed vigour came in the study of the Latin East, which a French historian, Jean Richard, and an Israeli, Joshua Prawer, set alight. Richard and Prawer broke new ground in the study of institutions, bringing to it a wide knowledge of developments outside the Latin East, a concern for the source material, particularly the charters and laws, and an intelligent analysis which put it a long way above the rather pedestrian work that had mostly gone before. But although in the long run this may have been their greatest achievement, much more excitement was generated at the time by another aspect of their research. A problem faced by all historians of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the most significant of the settlements, related to the
most important surviving source material, the
Assises de Jérusalem
, a collection of works of jurisprudence written in the thirteenth century, which portrayed a state in which a kind of ‘pure’ feudalism—if there could ever have been such a thing— had been imposed at the time of settlement around 1100 and had survived, archaic and fossilized, for a century and a half. In the 1920s a French scholar called Maurice Grandclaude had sifted through the
Assises
, extracting from them references to laws which he thought could be dated to the twelfth century. His conclusions had been almost entirely ignored, but it was on the basis of the evidence he had brought to light that Richard and Prawer rewrote the history of Jerusalem, because it became apparent that the ossified feudal state of the thirteenth-century law-books did not accord with the reality of the twelfth century, nor, it transpired, with that of the thirteenth century either. The law-books increasingly looked less like authorities and more like intelligent but tendentious political tracts, written by partisans in a constitutional battle which had been raging in Palestine in the decades before they were composed. And the kingdom of Jerusalem began to look more ‘normal’, although of course with its own peculiarities, and subject to political and constitutional developments not unlike those elsewhere.

The ‘constitutional’ approach to Jerusalem’s history introduced by Richard and Prawer held sway for about twenty years. In the mid-1970s, however, it began to give way to another way of looking at the politics of the Latin East, pioneered by Hans Mayer. In one sense this was a reaction not unlike that which took place among historians of medieval England in the 1930s, a move away from a bird’s-eye ‘constitutional’ approach to the grassroots and to the operation of lordship in practice; in this, of course, it drew close to institutional studies. It also seems to have been in tune with a mood which could be discerned in many branches of history, a disenchantment with the old conviction that the only successful states were centralized ones and a renewed interest in decentralized societies. A feature of recent work has been a concern with the way royal power operated in all sorts of small but subtle and effective ways in and through the fragmented feudal structures of the kingdom.

Meanwhile, advances were being made in the study of crusade ideology. One reason for the growth of scholarly interest in this field was to be found in developments in other disciplines. Combat psychiatry had made great strides during the Second World War and knowledge of the effects of stress on individuals and groups had begun to percolate through society. Since it was becoming harder to categorize behaviour in war in the old clear-cut terms of heroism or brutality, crusaders were themselves becoming more interesting. And the theories underlying the notion of a just war were being considered more intensively. The Nuremberg Trials, proceeding on the assumption that crimes could be committed against humanity, had revived interest in Natural Law, and the debate whether obedience to orders was justified had raised questions relating to the traditional just-war criterion of legitimate authority. The doctrine of nuclear deterrence and the beginnings of a concern with proportionality was bringing another of the just-war criteria, right intention, into the foreground.

But while intellectual developments may have been predisposing people to look more empathetically at crusaders, most explanations of the involvement of so many men and women in the movement were still that they had lacked sophistication or had desired material gain; and the latter view gained powerful support from a clever, but very narrowly based, suggestion that crusaders were generated by family strategies for economic survival. It was still possible for Runciman to end his
History
on a high note of moral outrage:

The triumphs of the Crusade were the triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing… In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode… There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

In fact it was hard to credit sincere men and women with an ideology as repugnant as crusading; it was easier to believe that
they had been too simple-minded to understand what they were doing or to argue that they had been motivated, whatever they might have said, by desire for land or booty, although the latter explanation should have been hard to sustain. Everybody knew that medieval warfare had been costly and a mass of material was already in print, even if unread, which demonstrated the financial sacrifices men and their families had to make to take part in crusading.

In other words, historians were blinded to facts and evidence by their abhorrence of ideological violence and their inability to comprehend that it really could have had a convincing appeal. They, and everyone else, had forgotten how intellectually respectable the Christian theory of positive violence was. No one seems to have been prepared for its revival in the 1960s in South American movements of Christian Liberation, some of which had militant wings justifying the use of force, in this case rebellion, as an act of charity in accordance with Christ’s intentions for mankind and as a moral imperative. Crusade historians suddenly discovered that there were sincere and devout contemporaries of theirs holding ideological positions very similar to those maintained by the medieval apologists they were studying. And with their eyes opened, the fundamental weakness of the arguments for a general materialistic motivation and the paucity of the evidence on which they rested became much clearer. The adventulrous younger sons began at last to ride off the scene. Few historians appear to believe in them any longer.

Prepared to accept that many, perhaps most, crusaders were motivated in other ways, including idealism, historians were forced to face up to and understand crusade ideas. The first expression of a new interest in ideology came with studies of the motivation of the poor, who made up a significant element in early crusades and occasionally came together in popular eruptions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But the interest in poor crusaders, itself of course also an expression of an enthusiasm for mass movements which was typical of the 1950s and 1960s, began to evaporate as it became apparent that very little could ever be known about them. Most work, therefore, began
to be concentrated where the evidence is: on the abstractions of the intellectuals, the canonists and theologians, on the hybrid notions and prejudices of the nobles and knights, and on the arguments of the popes and preachers who mediated between the two groups. It is in the nature of intellectual work that enhanced knowledge and understanding generate as many questions as they answer; and in crusade studies it did not take long for a major question, which had been dormant for some time, to re-emerge. What was a crusade?