A History of the Crusades (55 page)

In 1658 there was a scheme for joint action with Venice and Malta, and another in 1662 for a Teutonic galley fleet on the Danube. In 1664 the master, Johann Kaspar von Ampringen, led a contingent against the Turks in Hungary and in 1668 he took a small and unsuccessful expedition to fight them in Crete. Some brethren fulfilled their
exercitium militare
in garrison towns on the Ottoman border, and a few lost their lives in the Turkish wars. From 1696 the master financed a regiment in which the brethren, who were paid both from their commanderies and as Austrian officers, served as a unit of the imperial army; in 1740 they fought in the Austro-Prussian war, but as representatives of a German princely state and not as members of a religious order. The Teutonic brethren’s military activities had become a very minor matter. In 1699 there were only ninety-four knights and fifty-eight priests; in the 192 years between 1618 and 1809, of 717 known knight-brethren, 184 of them from Franconia, at least 362 or about half were at some point serving army officers, eighty-nine of whom became generals. The order survived at Mergentheim until 1809 and then transferred its existence to Austrian territory at Vienna. Though to a lesser extent than Santo Stefano and the Spanish orders, it too had been absorbed into an essentially secular army, but its German base, with resources and manpower outside Austria, had ensured it a certain degree of independence.

The Spanish orders became much less active militarily. In 1625 the three orders still totalled 1,452 brethren, 949 or nearly two-thirds of whom belonged to Santiago. Between 1637 and 1645 Felipe IV, faced with a French war, repeatedly convoked the brethren to fulfil their military obligations, but the nobility had abandoned its warlike habits and the crown, having granted
memberships to totally unsuitable candidates, met widespread evasions, protests, and excuses. In 1640, 1,543 combatants assembled to form a battalion of the military orders including Montesa, but only 169, or 11 per cent, of them were professed knights; the rest of the brethren were too young, too old, too ill, or unwilling to fight in defence of their own country. They sent substitutes at their own expense, paid fines, or simply evaded conscription. In the end, the battalion was sent to fight rebel Catalans within the Spanish borders. Thereafter the duty to serve was largely commuted into a payment. The service of the orders’ battalion was not really that of a group of corporate religious; rather, as with the Teutonic knights who fought against the Christian enemies of the house of Austria, it was an obligation to defend its secular ruler’s domains. In 1775 the three regiments maintained by Alcántara, Santiago, and Montesa provided a miserly 468 men for the siege of Algiers. The Castilian orders survived as an important source of income and patronage, which provided a livelihood for a number of royal servants and which served, as elsewhere, to define a noble caste in institutional form, the Royal Council of the Orders continuing to defend a certain monopoly of birth and honour through the system of rigorous entry proofs. The Spanish orders became archaic; their structure no longer corresponded to any useful function. The Portuguese orders were extinguished between 1820 and 1834, and the property of all three Castilian orders was eventually confiscated in 1835.

The contribution of the military orders to the holy war between 1312 and 1798 depended on the quality and efficiency of their performance rather than on the quantity of their brethren. For example, they provided only a few of the 208 Christian galleys at Lepanto in 1571. Yet the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II wrote in about 1409: ‘Let no one assume by looking at their few galleys stationed at Rhodes that the strength of the Hospitallers is weak and feeble; when they wish to do so, a great number of them can assemble from all over the world where they are scattered.’ There were naturally those who were reluctant to serve. When in 1411 six Hospitallers of the priory of Venice met at
Treviso to choose four names from which their prior was to select one to be sent to Rhodes, Angelo Rossi sought to excuse himself on the multiple grounds that he had already served the prior for ten years in Rome, that he was involved in a lengthy lawsuit which would harm the order should it be lost on account of his absence, that his brother had a large family which needed his protection, and that he himself was too poor to go. If the orders’ participation in occasional crusading expeditions and in the Spanish
Reconquista
was limited in scope, and if the successes of the Teutonic Order, important as they were in colonizing and Christianizing the German East, eventually evaporated, the defence of Rhodes and Malta, and their resistance to the Turks, were major achievements. National interests had always tended to override crusading ideals, and in the more modern world the military orders survived only where they could secure and maintain a territorial base of their own as curious semi-secular theocracies, and when they could find the military justifications which permitted them to retain the estates elsewhere which ultimately supported them. Towards the end that was the case only for the Hospital and, to a very minor extent, for the Teutonic Order.

After the sixteenth century the Hospital alone maintained a positive military strategy determined by its own ruling body, though Santo Stefano showed how a regional order could, with intelligent and firm direction, successfully exploit crusading tradition and aristocratic sensibilities for military and naval ends. Only the Hospital could claim that it underwent no essential change between 1312 and 1798. The other orders made minor or indirect contributions to the activities of the local rulers who controlled them. For the rest they were mostly concerned with their own survival as aristocratic corporations which continued to exist largely for their own sake. Purely national orders, and some national priories or other local sections of multinational orders, were absorbed and overwhelmed by the lay state, though the Teutonic brethren and the Spanish and Portuguese orders continued to make limited contributions through their participation in national armies and fleets. The Hospitaller solution, a naval one based on an island order-state, proved the
most successful, but it still depended on its western priories. That had been clear in 1413, when the brethren threatened to abandon Rhodes unless they received financial support and changed their minds only upon the fortunate arrival of the English responsions, and it was again evident following the terminal confiscations which began in 1792.

The military orders were part of an
ancien régime
condemned to extinction and their military existence disappeared with it. Though Malta in particular still had some attraction to the warlike, the orders were scarcely channelling the aggressive instincts of a military class into a religious form of warfare. Except very marginally within the Habsburg empire, the confiscations and suppressions imposed after 1792 by the revolution and by Napoleon virtually brought an end to the orders as military bodies. The orders’ priests and their female convents sometimes survived and there were countless schemes for restorations and revivals, sometimes merely as aristocratic fraternities, sometimes in bogus form or as masonic and esoteric groups pretending to a Templar succession. The military orders had done something to maintain a corporate ideal of Christian holy warfare, and the Hospital was well ahead of its time in its activities both as a supranational police force drawn from different states and as a cosmopolitan medical organization. After 1798 the orders lived on in non-military ways through their buildings and works of art, through their archives and chronicles, and above all through their welfare and medical activities.

ELIZABETH SIBERRY

A
FTER
the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the immediate threat of a Turkish invasion of central Europe had passed. It was therefore possible to take a more relaxed view of the Muslim East. The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689– 1762), wife of a British ambassador to the Ottoman court at Constantinople, which described details of Turkish life, proved popular when published in 1763, and there was a club known as the Divan Club, reserved for those such as the elegant Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–81), who had been to the Ottoman Empire. A portrait at Sir Francis’s home, West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, depicts him in oriental coat and turban, with the inscription, El Faquir Dashwood Pasha. The fashion for orientalism is exemplified by Mozart’s opera
Il Seraglio
(1782) and the popularity of translations of the Arabian Nights. It even extended to garden design. Thus the eighteenth-century gardens at Painshill in Surrey featured a Turkish tent.

Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798 stimulated further interest in the East. His forces included engineers and scholars whose researches were published and there was soon a regular stream of topographers, artists, and writers who visited the famous sites mentioned in the Bible and recorded their impressions in their various mediums. The list is extensive, but examples
are the French poets Alphonse de Lamartine and Gérard de Nerval; the English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who negotiated a treaty with Egypt on behalf of his employers the Post Office in 1858; and the artists David Roberts, Edward Lear, and Jean-Léon Gérôme. The interest in Muslim culture, history, and religion was reflected in a series of monographs and, from the 1820s onwards, in the foundation of a number of learned orientalist societies. As the nineteenth century progressed, travel became easier and safer and the flow of visitors armed with guidebooks increased; the era of the package tour had arrived.

This developing interest in the Near and Middle East has been researched and chronicled by others. One aspect, however, which has not been looked at in detail is the treatment of the crusades as an historical phenomenon and source of imagery. Eighteenth-century historians seem to have taken a rather sceptical view of the crusades, consistent with their attitude towards the Middle Ages and the concept of chivalry as a whole. In his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Edward Gibbon wrote that the crusades had ‘checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe’, diverting energies which would have been more profitably employed at home. Voltaire and David Hume were similarly dismissive and the Scottish historian William Robertson described the crusading movement as a ‘singular monument of human folly’, although he did allow that it had some beneficial consequences such as the development of commerce and the Italian cities.

Nineteenth-century commentators were not uncritical of aspects of the crusading movement, but overall saw it through rather more rose-coloured spectacles, as a manifestation of Christian chivalry engaged against an exotic Muslim foe. Whilst there is always a danger in drawing out a particular theme and thereby giving it undue prominence, an examination of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century images of the crusades, showing the development of this theme in a wide variety of ways and for a variety of purposes, is worthwhile. More generally, it illuminates modern perceptions of both the Middle East and the Middle Ages.

It is logical to start with those who observed the Holy Land
at first hand. Whilst the main interest was undoubtedly in sites mentioned in the Bible, a number of travellers also seem to have been conscious of the crusading heritage. Not all were sympathetic towards the crusading movement. Thus Edward Daniel Clarke, in his
Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa
, published in 1812, commented: ‘It is a very common error to suppose everything barbarous on the part of the mahometans, and to attribute to the Christians, in that period, more refinement than they really possessed. A due attention to history may show that the Saracens, as they were called, were in fact more enlightened than their invaders; nor is there any evidence for believing they ever delighted in works of destruction … The treachery and shameful conduct of the Christians, during their wars in the Holy Land, have seldom been surpassed.’

The crusades were, however, generally seen in a more favourable light. The French writer and historian Châteaubriand set out from Paris in July 1806, reaching Constantinople in the September and his ultimate goal, Jerusalem, on 7 October. On his return to France, he wrote an account of his travels,
Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem
, published in 1811, which has been described as the most widely read book on Palestine in the early nineteenth century. Within three years it had gone through twelve editions. As a child, Châteaubriand had been read tales of chivalry by his mother and told of his ancestor Geoffrey IV of Châteaubriand, who went on crusade with Louis IX, and his Journal is permeated with references to the crusading movement: ‘We travelled to Jerusalem under the banner of the cross. I will perhaps be the last Frenchman leaving my country to voyage to the Holy Land with the ideas, feelings, and aims of a pilgrim.’ Châteaubriand criticized those who questioned the morality or justice of the crusades and seems to have had little sympathy with or understanding of the Muslims. Whilst in Jerusalem, he read Tasso’s
Gerusalemme Liberata
, a sixteenth-century epic poem on the First Crusade, which seems to have been extremely popular, running to numerous editions and translations and being treated almost as a primary source. The high point of Châteaubriand’s pilgrimage was when he was made a knight of the Holy Sepulchre at the site of Christ’s tomb
with the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon. As such, he vowed himself ready to join his fellow knights, fully armed, for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from the ‘dominion of the infidel’. Judging by the accounts of other nineteenth-century travellers to Jerusalem, this ceremony seems to have become almost a standard feature of visits by prominent Europeans, the key elements being Godfrey of Bouillon’s spur, chain, and sword, with a feast afterwards paid for by the new knights. In a Muslim city it was not without irony and a later observer commented that these emotive ceremonies took place ‘within earshot of the Muslim effendis who were sitting on the porch, calmly smoking chibooks, or drinking sherbet, in simple unconsciousness of the tenor of the vows and the promises made’.