God's War: A New History of the Crusades

With the fall of Seville in 1248, the main thrust of the Reconquest had been completed. Thereafter, and arguably for years before, the crusade in Spain was almost entirely subsumed in the mainstream of Spanish life, distinguishable largely in name only as a separate exercise of religious devotion, military enterprise or financial expedient. The occasional recrudescence of war, such as the campaign against the Marinid invaders from Morocco, which ended with their defeat by Alfonso XI of Castile at the river Salado in 1340, still elicited crusade bulls. The religious mentality crusading fostered and bequeathed to the conquerors was more truly reflected in the fiscal and penitential instruments it had created, such as the bula de la cruzada. These became obstinately cherished elements of Spanish public life, especially in Castile, after the early thirteenth century the only Christian kingdom with a land border with the Moors of Granada. The ideology of crusade and Reconquest, reflected in the continued material prominence of the military orders, induced a providential tinge to the rhetoric of state power and national identity.

Although the decline in active frontier militarism after c.1300 may be traced in the fading of the cult of Santiago before that of the Virgin Mary, the holy war tradition remained available in its crusading wrapping. Despite intimate social and economic exchange across confessional divides in Andalucia, Murcia and Valencia, for the knightly and noble classes and their royal and ecclesiastical sponsors engaged in wars against infidels – Muslim or heathen – in Granada, the Mediterranean, north Africa or the Atlantic, identification with the crusade remained a living cultural force as well as a stereotype. While his captains were observing west Africans outside the straitjacket of crusading aesthetics, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) embraced crusading aspirations and campaigned in north Africa.⁴⁰ As late as 1578, a Portuguese king, Sebastian, died commanding an international force, armed with indulgences and papal legates, fighting the Moors of Morocco at the battle of Alcazar. The penetration of Latin Christendom into the islands of the eastern Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attracted papal grants for the extension of Christianity.⁴¹ The Iberian tradition ensured a sympathetic hearing for the Genoese crusade enthusiast Christopher Columbus. The crusade provided one strand in the conceptual justification for the conquest of the Americas and, more tenuously, in the mentality of the slave trade, which some saw as a vehicle for expanding Christianity. This was made possible by the idea popular by c.1500 that Spain itself constituted a Holy Land, its Christian inhabitants new Israelites, tempered and proved in the fire of the Reconquest, champions of God’s cause against infidels outside Christendom or heretics within.⁴²

In the later fifteenth century, a revival of the crusading mission, with papal bulls for the war against Granada in 1485, depended as heavily on this recasting of, in particular, Castile, as itself a new Holy Land with a providential task as it did on genuine Aragonese and Castilian crusading traditions. The fall of Granada in 1492 and persistent attempts in the sixteenth century to conquer the coast of Morocco and Tunisia breathed new life into the myth of the Reconquest and the manifest destiny of Catholic Spain. Domestically, this was turned to justify the expulsions of Moors, Jews and moriscos and underpinned the development of an openly exclusive and racist sectarian society. Externally, the appropriation of crusading into the projection of national identity informed the creation of the Spanish empire, sometimes with bizarre consequences. In faraway central America, local allies of the conquistadors at Tlaxcala, a city state east of Mexico, marked the treaty of Aigues Mortes between Charles V and the French king Francis I in 1538 with a lavish pageant showing the anticipated conquest of Jerusalem by the king of Spain. On Corpus Christi Day 1539, in the presence of the consecrated host, a lavish display included two Christian ‘armies’ laying siege to the Holy City, one comprising Europeans, the other commanded by the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, with the Tlaxcalans and other ‘New Spaniards’ in their own war costumes, complete with ‘feathers, devices and shields’. Seemingly, a good time was had by all. A few weeks earlier, the Mexicans to the east had laid on a similar show depicting the Turkish siege of Rhodes.⁴³ Through these traditional images of past and future crusading, New Spain was being assimilated into the culture and faith of the old. The association was not accidental. Peace between the great Christian powers of early sixteenth-century Europe habitually came with hopes of a new holy war against the Turks. For some Spanish propagandists, the duty to defend and extend Christendom had devolved uniquely on to Spain, ‘Mother of the heroes of war, confidant of Catholic soldiers, crucible in which the love of God is purified, land where it is seen that Heaven buries those who to Heaven will be borne as defenders of the purest faith’.⁴⁴ The words are those of Miguel de Cervantes. The crusade and Reconquest fed a new national messianism that became inextricably bound into Spanish imperial ideology and, more diffusely, into cultural identity. Further in time than Mexico was in space from the medieval battlefields of the cross, but oddly closer in sentiment, the power and longevity of the Spanish crusade myth, and its practical social and political implications, still found mighty confirmation in the twentieth century through its insidious but effective appropriation by General Franco and his fascist apologists.

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Frontier Crusades 2: the Baltic and the North

‘They shall either be converted or wiped out.’¹ So Bernard of Clairvaux announced the extension of Jerusalem indulgences to the summer campaign of 1147 against the pagan Slavs, or Wends, between the rivers Elbe and Oder. This decision, reached at the Diet of Frankfurt in March 1147, set the tone for perhaps the most radical and effective association of holy war and territorial expansion. Crusading in the Baltic touched the destinies of every region east of the Elbe in a great arc stretching along the coast eastwards and northwards to Livonia, Estonia, Finland and the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia. Bernard’s analogy with wars fought for the Holy Land of Palestine provided ethnic cleansing, commercial exploitation and political aggrandizement with a religious gloss, a potent, lasting and, for some, sincerely believed justification for the cruel process of land-grabbing, Christianization and Germanization that brought the pagan communities of the eastern and northern Baltic littoral into the pale of Christianity and western European culture.

BEGINNINGS

Yet Bernard had not invented the religious excuse for conquest in the Baltic. He had been anticipated by the Magdeburg appeal of 1108, encouraging support for an attack on the Wends, probably composed by a Flemish clerk in the archbishop’s household. The campaign being urged was to liberate ‘our Jerusalem’, an ambiguous reference to the vulnerable Christian lands along the Elbe frontier and the lost ecclesiastical provinces beyond, briefly established by the tenth-century Ottonian kings of Germany before being abandoned after the Slav rising of 983. This challenging analogy prefigured the way crusading influenced

20. The Baltic

German eastward expansion by exploiting the new impetus and definition given to holy war by the eastern Jerusalem campaigns in emphasizing the need to defend all Christian frontiers and by implying that, in the Baltic, as in Palestine, the battle was for the recovery of Christian lands. In a mood of realism no less prophetic of the future Baltic crusades, the Magdeburg clerk augmented these emotional triggers and legal niceties with the harsher attractions of blatant materialism and spiritual reward:

These gentiles are most wicked, but their land is the best, rich in meat, honey, corn and birds; and if it were well cultivated none could be compared to it for wealth of its produce… And so, most renowned Saxons, French, Lorrainers and Flemings and conquerors of the world, this is an occasion for you to save your souls and, if you wish it, acquire the best land in which to live. May He who with the strength of his arm led the men of Gaul on their march from the far West in triumph against his enemies in the farthest East give you the will and power to conquer those most inhuman gentiles who are nearby and to prosper well in all things.²

The material greed of Christian Saxon lords in their dealings with the pagan Slavs stood as an uncontested if lamented commonplace amongst even the most sympathetic regional Christian apologists.

As much as in the Christian territories of the region, religion helped define cultural, social and political identity across the frontiers in the pagan lands that stretched along the Baltic shore to the Gulf of Finland and beyond. Although subdivided into numerous principalities, tribes or groups of extended families, the most prominent general division among the pagan peoples remained linguistic. Between Kiel and the Vistula lived the western Slavs, known