God's War: A New History of the Crusades

ruler; and the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the great European Thirty Years’ War by establishing an explicitly secular framework of international relations, a system of temporal nations in a secular Europe. Christianity thrived; Christendom was dead. With it died one of its most distinctive features, the crusade. Political and civil action now rested with secular states, civic justice a matter for laymen, not clergy, law and religion inhabiting different spheres of civil life, not even necessarily complementary or mutually dependent. Where civil justice was guaranteed by religious law and interpreted by religious scholars, the rational polity could remain the religious community not necessarily the secular state. Thus Islam’s holy war, the lesser jihad, remains a modern phenomenon. The Christian crusade, except in the mouths of certain meretricious academics and unthinking politicians, does not.

The post-history of crusading is a subject of itself, as David Hume suggested in the eighteenth century, ‘ever since engrossing the curiosity of mankind’. As opposed to polemicists for Reason, Colonialism, Imperialism, Medievalism, Nationalism, Capitalism, Freedom, Religion or Cultural Armageddon, who have severally and serially dominated popular interpretations of the crusades for much of the last four centuries, the historian is struck by the malleability of the crusade, its penetration into so many religious, political, social and personal interstices of medieval life. While the crusade did not define a society or a culture, it is impossible to grasp the nature or quality of the activity by looking at it in isolation, still less in relation to events centuries later. Few corners of Europe and the Mediterranean escaped entirely the touch of the wars of the cross. There are good grounds for associating crusading with some of the more intriguing developments of medieval western politics and society; the invention of Christendom, a European identity expressed in expansion and conquest; the acceptable rhetoric and performance of public violence with its consequent influence on the assertion of legitimate, sacralized, secular power; experiments in corporate government, of mechanisms in creating and ordering a wide political civil society; the growth of systems of public taxation. More obviously, crusading reflected aspects of attempts to establish a moral order in Europe run by a centralized church and the more successful efforts to expand the borders of the Latin Christian world. In providing an impetus to engage with far distant lands, the crusade both succeeded, as witnessed by the opening of the eastern Mediterranean to merchants and pilgrims, and spectacularly failed. Jerusalem was only briefly held, the politics of western Asia and the Near East only marginally inconvenienced.

As with any exercise in historical selectivity, which means all historical writing, extracting the thread of the crusade from the weave of the middle ages distorts both. Nonetheless, the experience of crusading is worth study if only because of the immediacy with which it addresses the observer. The world, assumptions and actions of crusaders and their contemporaries are irrecoverable but inescapable. Their deeds confront the historian directly, the sheer physical effort of so much of the endeavour; the inspirational idealism; utopianism armed with myopia; the elaborate, sincere intolerance; the diversity and complexity of motive and performance. Of equal if not greater power to move than the great set pieces of crusade history – Urban II at Clermont, the massacre at Jerusalem, Saladin at Hattin, Richard I at Acre, Louis IX at Mansourah – are the stories of the battered wives of absent crusaders, the evidence of ruined or enriched lives of veterans and survivors, the crosses etched into the stones of the church of the Holy Sepulchre or parish churches across Europe, intimate witnesses to the ambitions of those who sought to transform themselves and their world by taking the cross of their Saviour. As Josserand of Brancion prayed before he took the cross in 1248, ‘Lord, take me from wars between Christians in which I have spent much of my life; let me die in your service so I may share your kingdom in Paradise’. Although the central cliche of aristocratic engagement with crusading, echoed in sources from the First Crusade onwards, the poignancy of these sentiments comes from the testimony of tens of thousands of corpses of men and women of all social stations. However wasteful of life and treasure, however narrow the original and sustaining aspiration to physical possession of the Holy Places, this was an ideal that inspired sacrifice at times on an almost unimaginable scale and intensity.

Yet sentimentality will not do. It hardly encompasses the subject. Too many died in the pursuit of sectarian ambition. Yet motives, like actions, can contradict without hypocrisy. While it is usually fruitless for historians to pursue the will of the wisp of private emotions, the question of what caused so many to change their lives so decisively persists. It is a fond myth of the religious that piety excludes greed, coercion, conformity and lack of reflection, that it is freestanding. The language of transcendence should not distract or dupe. Neither should it insist on judgement. Fighting for the cross was not necessarily more glamorous than paying taxes for it, only more strenuous. Both activities are open to reductive interpretations of unavoidable cultural or social compulsion. However, there can be no clear or sonorous summing-up. Wars destroy and create, even if in unequal measures for participants, victims and home communities. Explicable in collective terms as an expression or expressions of belief, anxiety, religious or social obedience, moral and material self-advancement, corporate solidarity and identity, solipsistic intolerance and expansive aggression, for each individual any choice involved in the crusade may or may not have caught ‘the hidden wishes of God’. External manifestations can be observed. Yet the internal, personal decision to follow the cross, to inflict harm on others at great personal risk, at the cost of enormous privations, at the service of a consuming cause, cannot be explained, excused or dismissed either as virtue or sin. Rather, its very contradictions spelt its humanity.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used in the notes.

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hanover etc. 1826ff.)

MGHS

Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores, ed. G. H. Pertz et al. (Hanover 1826ff.)

MGH SS

MGH Scriptores in Folio et Quarto (Hanover etc. 1826–1934)

PL

Patrologia cursus completus. Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris 1844–64)

RHC

Recueil des historiens des croisades (Paris 1844–1906)

RHC Arm.

RHC Documents armeniens (Paris 1869–1906)

RHC Occ.

RHC Documents occidentaux (Paris 1844–95)

RHC Or.

Documents orientaux (Paris 1872–1906)

RHGF

Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (Paris 1738–1876)

1: The Origins of Christian Holy War

1. Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, ed. A. Bruel, v (Paris 1894), 51–3, no. 3703; Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor de Marseille, ed. M. Guerard (Paris 1857), i, 167–8, no. 143.

2. H. Hagenmeyer, Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088– 1100 (Innsbruck 1902), pp. 138–40, 141–2, 144, 146–9, 150, 151, 157, 160, 162; and pp. 136–7 for Urban’s letter to the Flemish, J. and L. Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality (London 1981), p. 38.

3. De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, ed. C. W. David (New York 1936; reprint 1976), p. 81, as part of a comprehensive justification for holy war put in the mouth of the bishop of Oporto; for the identity of the author, H. Livermore, ‘“The Conquest of Lisbon” and its Author’, Portuguese Studies, 6 (1990), 1–16.

4. From De laude novae militiae, Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq et al. (Rome 1963), pp. 214–15; J. and L. Riley-Smith, Crusades, p. 102.

5. S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge 1951– 4), iii, 480.