God's War: A New History of the Crusades

lawyer Pierre Dubois, who worried about the demographic inequalities of Latins and Saracens (1306–8), reflected both pragmatic and academic concerns about the nature of the outside world that went far beyond crusade planning.⁸⁷ The missions to the Mongols and the opening-up of China to western visitors after the Mongol conquest of 1276 added new geographic horizons, new intellectual challenges and, for some, a new crusading urgency. The introspective idealism of the need to recover Christ’s heritage for Christendom was matched or replaced by a new understanding of the world context of the Holy Land, Christendom and Christianity itself. Such perceptions led directly to the development from the thirteenth century of the idea of crusading for the extension (dilatio) of the faith, not just its defence, a concept eagerly embraced and promoted by Iberian crusaders expanding their conquests along the shore of the Maghrib and into the north Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The effect of this aggressive concept of holy war, which even tolerated de facto wars of conversion previously outlawed, was powerfully displayed from the 1490s in the conquests in the Americas.⁸⁸

Jerusalem and the Americas may appear opposite ends of the conceptual as well as geographic map. In fact the road to one led straight to the other. Christopher Columbus was an enthusiast for the recovery of Jerusalem. In later life, he construed his voyages to what he stubbornly viewed as part of the old world as fulfilling biblical prophecies of the reconquest of Jerusalem, notably Isaiah 60:9. In 1501, he wrote to his patrons, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, ‘Our Lord wished to manifest a most evident miracle in this voyage to the Indies in order to console me and others in the matter of the Holy Sepulchre.’⁸⁹ Columbus, here and in his own work of prophecy, the Libro de las profecias (Book of Prophecies), a decade after his first voyage, was casting himself in an almost messianic role as the deliverer of Jerusalem. Such delusional hubris may have startled his royal sponsors, but it sprang from a lively current Spanish interest in outreprophecy, nationalism, the Holy Land and the crusade that the court and policies of Ferdinand and Isabella had done much to excite and foster. Columbus’s interest was grounded on more than apocalyptic dreaming. His will of 1498 provided for a fund to be established in his home city of Genoa for the recovery of Jerusalem.⁹⁰

Crusading, far from an anachronism, provided one impetus for the European age of discovery. One of the texts that Columbus may have consulted, and was certainly well known to members of his circle and people he met, was the pseudonymous John Mandeville’s Travels. Its Prologue was unambiguous about the status of the Holy Land, Christ’s heritage, as the centre of the world and about the Christian obligation to recover it by force. ‘Mandeville’s’ account of his supposed travels to Jerusalem, the Near East, Asia and the fabulous Orient provided a rich mine of romance, history, theology, topography and geography. From the original as well as the many contrasting variants, different audiences could extract whatever they desired to inform their own interests, tolerant, bigoted, fanciful or topographical. For Columbus’s circle, the focus on the crusade, which set the frame for ‘Mandeville’, would be of equal attraction as one of the book’s most unequivocal claims: ‘I say with certainty that one could travel around all the lands of the world, both below and above, and return to one’s country’.⁹¹ This assumption of the possibility of circumnavigation was supported by measurements. ‘Mandeville’ rejected the standard medieval calculation of the circumference of the earth, derived from Ptolemy of Alexandria, 20,245 miles, in favour of the more accurate 31,500 miles, Eratosthenes’s figure included in the university textbook De Spaera (1230?45) by John of Sacrobosco.⁹² For Columbus, even if not directly influenced by ‘Mandeville’, which he may have been, science, cosmology and the crusade were complementary, not aspects of antagonistic cultures or hostile systems of thought. In contemplating ways of fulfilling the injunction to recover Christ’s heritage, Columbus, like so many of his would-be crusader predecessors stretching back to Urban II’s call to arms at Clermont, first sought to understand the world better, its natural phenomena, its diversity and its breadth as much as its eschatalogical destiny. Crusading remained embedded in western European culture for so long precisely for this reason. In presenting a spiritualized vision of reality, it recognized the temporal world and the actual experience of man while offering to transform both.

1. Jerusalem and its environs c.1100: the Holy City in the eyes of western Christendom.

2. Urban II consecrating the high altar at Cluny during his preaching tour of France, October 1095; see p. 63.

3. Peter the Hermit leading his crusaders.

4. Alexius I Comnenus, emperor of Byzantium 1081–1118.

5. The church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem idealized in later medieval western imagination.

6. The front cover of the Psalter of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem (1131–52); see p. 210.

7. Saladin: a contemporary Arab view.

8. The battle of Hattin, 4 July 1187: Saladin seizing the True Cross, a fictional scene visualized by the monk Matthew Paris of St Alban’s (d. 1259).

9. Frederick I Barbarossa, emperor of Germany, dressed as a crusader c.1188, receiving a copy of Robert of Rheims’s popular history of the First Crusade. The inscription exhorts Frederick to fight the ‘Saracens’. See pp. 245, 418.

10. Embarking on crusade, showing, among others, the banners of the kings of France and England, from the statutes of the fourteenth-century chivalric Order of the Knot, dedicated to the Holy Spirit; see p. 855.

11. Women helping besiege a city, as at the siege of Acre 1190; see pp. 396–7, 415, 428.

12. The western image of war in the Holy Land: Joshua, in the guise of a Frankish knight, liberates Gibeon from the Five Kings, an episode in the Book of Joshua (10:6–13) from an illuminated Bible commissioned for the crusading court of Louis IX of France c.1244–54.

13. Military orchestra of the kind employed by Turkish, Kurdish and Mamluk commanders, see p. 821.

14. Pope Innocent III (1198–1216).

15. Venice c.1400.

16. Innocent III and the Albigensian Crusade.

17. Neighbours at war: Moors fighting Christians in thirteenth-century Spain.

18. The Fifth Crusade: a clash between Frankish and Egyptian forces outside Damietta, June 1218, from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, c.1255.

19. The Fifth Crusade: the capture of the Tower of Chains by Oliver of Paderborn’s floating fortress, August 1218 (left), and the fall of Damietta, November 1219 (right), from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, c.1255.

20. Frederick II, emperor, king of Germany 1212–50, ruler, crusader, polymath and falconry expert.