God's War: A New History of the Crusades

tradition helped sustain French propaganda through the darkest days of defeat during the Hundred Years’ War. In 1429, Christine de Pisan prophesied that Joan of Arc’s recent victories over the English presaged her leading Charles VII to reconquer the Holy Land because God specially favoured the royal house of France. Joan, like Moses, would lead God’s new people, the French, out of defeat and occupation.⁷⁸ In the manner of earlier crusaders, Charles was declared to be the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Last Emperor, whose career of world conquest would end with the laying down of his crown on the Mount of Olives in preparation for the Last Days. God directs the destiny of France; those who die in her cause will gain paradise. With or without the formal trappings, the ideology and mentality of crusading here permeated nationalist propaganda. This cocktail of prophecy, eschatology, holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem enlivened the rhetoric surrounding Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494. Such justifications acted both as cover for political ambition and genuine inspiration. The potency of the identification of crusading with ‘the Most Christian Kings’ of France (a twelfth-century courtesy title bestowed by a grateful pope) was such that it survived the destructive Wars of Religion (1562–98) to find new literary expression from both Roman Catholic and Huguenot apologists of Henry IV (1589–1610).⁷⁹

However, the appropriation of crusading mentalities did not lead to the application of formal crusade institutions to French wars. Popes consistently refused to elevate French conflicts with Flanders or England into crusades. Here the contrast with the otherwise closely parallel experience of late medieval Spain, in particular Castile, is most notable. An indigenous Iberian prophetic tradition nurtured by the reconquista encouraged a belief that the Iberian holy wars required ultimate fulfilment in the recovery of Jerusalem. Unlike the French, whose immediate enemies were fellow Christians, the Spanish faced Muslims, allowing papal grants of crusade privileges, especially taxation and indulgences, to flow more or less on demand. The expulsion of the Moors from Granada led to north African forays by Ferdinand of Aragon and his grandson Charles V (I of Spain). These not only attracted crusading privileges, but were cast by royal polemicists as preludes to the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. Whatever the religious dimension, these were national campaigns in pursuit of local strategic conquest, political aggression and commercial advantage. However, for Charles’s son, Philip II, the synergy of God’s war and Spain’s war occupied the centre of his world-view. The crusade, in the Mediterranean, north Africa, Europe or the Americas, imposed a specifically national responsibility in fulfilment of Spain’s providential mission to lead the redemption of Christendom, whether the rest of Christendom approved or not.

While such conflation of the temporal and transcendent proved harder to pull off elsewhere, others played the same game. Reflecting on English success in the French wars, Chancellor Adam Haughton, bishop of St David’s, insisted to Parliament in 1377 that ‘God would never have honoured this land in the same way as he did Israel… if it were not that He had chosen it as His heritage’. A popular verse at the time reinforced the message; the pope had become French, but Jesus had become English. God’s career as an Englishman lasted for centuries.⁸⁰ Such fancies and scriptural references connected with pre- and non-crusading traditions of the Old Testament and providential precedents for the defence of homelands. However, the congruence of language used to sacralize national warfare with concurrent crusade rhetoric made neat distinctions unconvincing. The intent of those English sources in describing crusaders against rebels in 1216–17 or the Montfortian crucesignati in 1263–5 as fighting ‘pro patria’ was clear. So, too, were the motives of writers such as Henry Knighton or the Scottish propaganda that equated their war of independence in the early fourteenth century with the Holy Land crusade. In England, liturgy, church processions and prayers similar to those devoted to the recovery of the Holy Land were directed in support of royal wars.⁸¹ In the 1340s, those in royal service received the temporal privileges of essoin of court, exemption from taxation, moratorium on debt and pardon for crimes. It seems only the indulgences could not be transferred from crusading to national war. Even that may not have made too much difference, if Froissart, a close observer of the Anglo-French nobility, can be believed: ‘Men at arms cannot live on pardons, nor do they pay much attention to them except at the point of death.’⁸²

While numerous examples can be found of writers throwing a crusading mantle over secular warfare, the more powerful and lasting transference came where national wars were portrayed as of equal worth as crusading, as holy wars in their own right, independent of the Holy Land tradition. Just as the Hundred Years War fatally undermined practical efforts to raise a new eastern crusade, so it went far to replace crusading as the central public meritorious military act, even if many still hankered after the easy certainties of wars of the cross against infidels on far foreign fields. The construction of non-crusading holy war was a feature of fifteenth-century Europe where not all national wars were linked to the crusade tradition. While rejecting the theology and institutions of crusading, the Hussites in Bohemia self-consciously created their own holy land, renaming cult sites after places in Palestine, such as Mount Tabor or Mount Horeb. Within the pale of Catholic Christendom, similar reinventions were equally possible and plausible. In his description of the battle of Agincourt (25 October 1415), Henry V’s chaplain had the king call the English ‘God’s people’ as they donned ‘the armour of penitence’, exhorting them to follow the example of Judas Maccabeus.⁸³ Confession, absolution and taking Communion were familiar pre-battle morale-raising techniques, but the focus in this account is unambiguous. King Henry was God’s soldier as well as the Lord’s anointed. On his return to London after his victory, he was greeted by patriotic displays in praise of the blessed kingdom of England, its patron saints and holy kings.⁸⁴ While the crusade mentality and images infected the sacralization of political rule and patriotic identities in the later middle ages, national holy lands and holy wars acquired and projected an independent vitality. National crusades became the nations’ wars.

THE WIDER WORLD

Medieval prophets and some post-medieval historians have not been shy to attribute sweeping consequences for the crusade, from a role in the Apocalypse to the opening of the west to new scholarly learning and fresh commercial markets. Such claims have prompted one modern historian to react by reducing crusading’s contribution to western culture to the introduction of the apricot.⁸⁵ Yet it is undeniable that both practically and intellectually the traditional western European ambition of occupying Palestine encouraged sensitivity to Christendom’s place in the wider world of the three classical continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. In turn this contributed to an inquisitive and acquisitive expansionism that characterized high and late medieval western European approaches to other peoples and regions near and distant. The extension of western European Christian culture and power to all other parts of the globe provided one of the major features of world history after 1500. In the origins of this process, which formed such as marked contrast to, say, the Chinese experience after 1400, the idealism and activity of crusaders in the four centuries after 1095 played a part.

The intellectual and physical, geographic aspects of the crusade’s influence on European expansion cannot neatly be separated. Neither should it be exaggerated. The creation of Asiatic empires and the altering of trade routes; the development of the European economy, technology and commerce; or the transmission of classical and Arabic texts via Spain, Sicily, southern Italy and Byzantium ran distinct and parallel to the effect of the wars of the cross. However, crusading idealism led to significant political settlements of Latin Christians in the Near East and, in places, an obsessive European concern for western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean that would not have developed in the way it did without the distinctive dynamism of the crusade mentality and tradition. Politically, the nature of the Muslim powers of the Near East mattered to Frankish rulers and warriors. The acute interest in events further east during the Fifth Crusade stood as an extreme example of a more general concern, evinced, for example, in William of Tyre’s lost history of the Muslim east. Although the irruption of the Mongols into western Asia and eastern Europe owed nothing to crusading, the European response did, in so far as successive missions were despatched to Mongol rulers in the thirteenth century at least in part to test prospects for an anti-Muslim alliance.

The Latin presence in the eastern Mediterranean and the need of prospective western crusaders for information stimulated a small industry of written information about Asia and north Africa from the thirteenth century. This sense of place and desire to acquire knowledge of it was encouraged and sustained by the increasing volume of Holy Land and Near East pilgrimage accounts after 1300, supplemented by memoirs of released captives or western spies, many of which were widely circulated and, in the fifteenth century, printed. While much of the writing about Asia and Africa was fanciful, non-empirical, inaccurate, hidebound by classical texts or vitiated by wishful thinking, it provided a way of looking at the non-Christian, non-European world that transcended mere tales of wonder (although these remained very popular throughout the later middle ages). Asiatic, Muslim and Mongol geography, politics, economy, sociology and demography came under increasingly familiar scrutiny, especially in the large numbers of ‘recovery’ treatises composed between the 1270s and 1330s.⁸⁶ These works, by such disparate figures as the Armenian Prince Hayton, who wrote about the Tartars (1307) or the French provincial