A History of the Crusades (58 page)

Thus in England an obvious hero was Richard the Lionheart, the subject of numerous paintings and commemorated in a sculpture by Baron Marochetti which is now located outside the Houses of Parliament. France of course had St Louis and, as mentioned earlier, the
Salles des croisades
at Versailles formed a pictorial history of French participation in the crusades, with scenes from famous battles and sieges and portraits of national crusade heroes. Another example is Delacroix’s
The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople
, a scene from the Fourth Crusade. Now in the Louvre in Paris, it portrays the noble conquerors of Constantinople exploring the city on horseback and receiving pleas for clemency from the inhabitants. Whether the crusaders would have been recognizable to Geoffrey of Villehardouin is, however, doubtful. In Belgium the national crusade hero was Godfrey of Bouillon, a sculpture of whom by Simonis was exhibited at Crystal Palace in 1851 and can now be seen in the Grand Place in Brussels. It shows a noble leader on horseback, but at Bouillon itself there is a statue of a more youthful Godfrey gazing wistfully across his home valley. At a rather more mundane level, a
Catalogue of Furniture and Household Requisites
, published in London in 1883, included bronze equestrian figures of Richard the Lionheart, Louis, and Godfrey of Bouillon, available by mail order.

In Italy Tomasso Grossi’s poem
I Lombardi alla prima croci-ata
stimulated pride in Italian crusade achievements. It inspired
a number of painters of historical subjects, as well as Verdi, whose opera
I Lombardi
was first performed in Milan in 1843. Contemporary accounts note that the music touched a chord of Italian nationalism; the Milanese appear to have decided that they were the Lombards, the Holy Land which they were defending was Italy, and the Austrians were akin to the Saracens. The large set-piece scenes, such as the crusaders in sight of Jerusalem, allowed producers to give full rein to their imagination and romantic ideas of the Middle Ages. Ever adaptable, Verdi then produced a French version of the opera, entitled
Jérusalem
, which was performed before King Louis Philippe at the Tuileries and won its composer the award of the Légion d’Honneur.

Louis IX’s Egyptian campaign was the subject of an opera by Meyerbeer, although the plot, involving Knights Hospitallers of Rhodes, a Saracen princess, and Christian convert, might not have been recognized by John of Joinville. Again producers provided elaborate and exotic oriental costumes and backcloth, which probably bore little relation to thirteenth-century Egypt. Rather later, the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg composed the incidental music to the play
Sigurd Jorsalfar
(Sigurd the Crusader), about King Sigurd’s expedition to the Holy Land in 1107. It is not without significance that this piece was performed as part of the welcoming ceremonies for the new King Haakon of Norway in 1905.

A prime example of the use of crusade imagery in the twentieth century is in connection with the First World War, in accounts of the campaigns and in literature. Not all contemporaries focused on the heavy casualties and harsh realities of life in the trenches. Some, perhaps as an escape from immediate reality, took a more romanticized view and saw the war as a noble crusade, fought in defence of liberty, to prevent Prussian militarism dominating Europe and to free the Holy Places from Muslim domination.

In Britain, the idea of a holy war was developed in sermons by Anglican clergymen, two key players being the so-called bishop of the battlefields, Bishop Winnington-Ingram of London, and Basil Bourchier, Vicar of St Jude’s Hampstead and
subsequently a chaplain to the forces. Bourchier wrote: ‘not only is this a holy war, it is the holiest war that has ever been waged … Odin is ranged against Christ. Berlin is seeking to prove its supremacy over Bethlehem. Every shot that is fired, every bayonet thrust that gets home, every life that is sacrificed is in truth for his name’s sake.’ Bourchier saw the Dardanelles campaign as the latest of the crusades, which would ultimately lead to the rescue of the Holy Land ‘from the defiling grip of the infidel’.

This imagery was not only used by the Church. In a speech delivered in May 1916 and entitled ‘Winning the War’, Lloyd George declared ‘Young men from every quarter of this country flocked to the standard of international right, as to a great crusade.’ And a collection of his speeches between 1915 and 1918 was published under the title
The Great Crusade
.

F. W. Orde Ward published a book of what he termed patriotic poems in 1917, entitled
The Last Crusade
; and Katherine Tynan, whose two sons served in the army, wrote:

Your son and my son, clean as new swords
Your man and my man and now the Lord’s
Your son and my son for the Great Crusade
With the banner of Christ over them—our knights new made.

The crusading theme is particularly marked in accounts of the campaigns at the Dardanelles and in Palestine. The poet Rupert Brooke described himself as a crusader in a letter to his friend Jacques Raverat and Major Vivian Gilbert wrote a book, published in 1923, entitled
The Romance of the Last Crusade—with Allenby to Jerusalem
, about his own experiences in Palestine. The book is dedicated to ‘the mothers of all the boys who fought for the freedom of the Holy Land’ and begins with Brian Gurnay, just down from his first year at Oxford in 1914, dreaming of the crusading exploits of his ancestor Sir Brian de Gurnay, a participant in the Third Crusade. The young Brian longs for another crusade which will recapture Jerusalem: ‘To fight in thy cause, to take part in that last crusade, I would willingly leave my bones in the Holy Land. Oh for the chance to do as one of those knights of old, to accomplish one thing in life
really worthwhile.’ According to another veteran of Allenby’s campaign, orders were issued forbidding the soldiers to be called crusaders. But if they could not do so officially, it is quite clear that many saw themselves as following in the footsteps of the crusaders. Gilbert wrote of the soldiers in his own command: ‘What did it matter if we wore drab khaki instead of suits of glittering armour. The spirit of the crusaders was in all these men of mine who worked so cheerfully to prepare for the great adventure. And even if they wore ugly little peaked caps instead of helmets with waving plumes, was not their courage just as great, their idealism just as fine, as that of the knights of old who had set out with such dauntless faith under the leadership of Richard the Lionhearted to free the Holy Land.’ Gilbert noted that of all the crusades organized and equipped to free the Holy City, only two had been successful: ‘the first led by Godfrey of Bouillon and the last under Edmund Allenby’. There were even crusade cartoons in
Punch
. In December 1917, a cartoon entitled
The Last Crusade
depicted Richard the Lionheart gazing at Jerusalem with the text ‘At last my dream come true’.

Some First World War memorials illustrate this use of the crusading theme. The memorial at Sledmere in Yorkshire, the home of Sir Mark Sykes, of Sykes-Picot treaty fame, took the form of an Eleanor Cross. When Sir Mark died in 1919, by chance one panel remained unfilled. His memorial is a figure blazoned in brass, armoured and bearing a sword. Under his feet lies a Muslim, above him is a scroll inscribed
Laetare Jerusalem
and in the background is an outline of Jerusalem itself. The sculptor Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams entered a design entitled
The Spirit of the Crusaders
for a competition for the war memorial in Paisley. Now in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, it depicts a medieval knight in armour upon a horse and flanked by four soldiers in First World War battledress.

Memories of the crusades were also evoked at the peace conference at Versailles which followed the end of the war. After one of the French representatives had rehearsed the claims of France in Syria dating back to the crusades, the Emir Faisal commented, ‘Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the crusades?’

Both sides in the Spanish Civil War also used crusade imagery to describe and promote their cause. Thus on the one hand Franco fought a ‘crusade of liberation’ to save Spain from communism and atheism and is portrayed as a crusader fighting God’s war in posters and paintings produced under his regime. On the other, the members of the International Brigades were hailed as ‘crusaders for freedom’. A multi-volume history of the civil war, published in Madrid between 1940 and 1943, was entitled
Historia de la cruzada española
, and the word crusade appears in the title of a number of autobiographical accounts of the campaign and civil war novels. For example, Jason Gurney, a member of the International Brigades, wounded in 1937, wrote in his
Crusade in Spain
, published in 1974, the ‘crusade was against the Fascists, who were the Saracens of our generation’. Indeed it was ‘one of the most deeply felt ideological crusades in the history of Western Europe’.

Crusade imagery re-emerged in the Second World War. General Eisenhower’s account of the campaign, published in 1948, was entitled
Crusade in Europe
and he clearly saw the war as a form of personal crusade. ‘Only by the destruction of the Axis was a decent world possible; the war became for me a crusade in the traditional sense of that often misused word.’ In November 1941, an operation to raise the siege of Tobruk was codenamed Operation Crusader and Eisenhower’s Order of the Day for 6 June 1944 ran as follows: ‘Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the allied expeditionary forces, you are about to embark on a great crusade … the hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you.’ Another example of the use of crusade imagery can be found in Stefan Heym’s novel
The Crusaders
, published in 1950. Heym, who fled the Nazis in 1933, described the Second World War as a ‘necessary and holy crusade’ to stop a tyrant.

The range of images of the crusades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is therefore varied. While the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of scholarly research on the crusading movement, the popular image was a highly romanticized one and bore little relation to the reality of crusading as described in eyewitness narrative accounts. Composers, artists,
and writers allowed their imaginations to run freely and their principal sources were not medieval chroniclers but Torquato Tasso and Walter Scott. This is hardly surprising since they were seeking to satisfy the demands of an audience which had romantic notions of life in the Middle Ages and the exploits of Christian chivalry and was attracted by travellers’ tales of the exotic East. There was a great pride in crusading heroes such as England’s Richard the Lionheart and Belgium’s Godfrey of Bouillon. Crusade imagery was also employed in contemporary conflicts, most notably in the First World War in general and with regard to Allenby’s campaign in Palestine in particular. The most startling example of its misuse was when the Crimean War, in which the western European powers were in alliance with the Muslim Turks, was described as a crusade.

JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

T
HE
crusades are remembered today wherever there is ideological conflict, and the images and language associated with them or their counter the jihad are regularly called to mind in violence which involves Christians and Muslims in the Balkans or the Near East. Indeed the Maronites in Lebanon, whose Church was united to Rome in 1181, have always retained a nostalgic attachment to the centuries of western settlement, an era their historians came to see as a golden age. In Europe the rhetoric has been largely the product of sentiment and, in spite of the parallels often perceived, is no closer to the original idea than were the effusions described in the previous chapter. In a surprising development, however, the theology of force that underpinned crusading has been revived, especially in Latin America, by a militant wing of Christian Liberation.

All Christian justifications of positive violence are based partly on the belief that a particular religious or political system or course of political events is one in which Christ is intimately involved. His intentions for mankind are therefore bound up with its success or failure. To the modern apologists for Christian violence Christ’s wishes are associated with a course of political events which they call liberation. He is really present in this process, in the historical manifestations of man’s path forward. He is the Liberator, the fullest expression of liberation, which he offers to mankind as a gift. If the only way to preserve the integrity of his intentions from those who stand in their way is to use force, then this is in accordance with his desires in the
historical process and participation in Christ’s own violence is demanded of those qualified as a moral duty. This is why some members of a sub-committee of the World Council of Churches which reported in 1973 maintained that in certain circumstances participation in force of arms was a moral imperative, and why Camilo Torres, the most tragic figure of the Liberation movement, a Colombian priest and sociologist who resigned his orders, joined the guerrillas and was killed in February 1966, was reported saying that ‘The catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.’ That this really was his view is confirmed by his written statement in August 1965 that ‘the revolution is not only permissible but obligatory for those Christians who see it as the only effective and far-reaching way of making the love of all people a reality.’

The commitment to revolution that love enjoins was a prominent theme in Torres’s writings and there can be little doubt that he was motivated by genuine and deeply felt charity. In June 1965, when he issued a statement on his resignation from the priesthood and must have been already contemplating taking part in violence, he wrote: ‘Only by revolution, by changing the concrete conditions of our country, can we enable men to practise love for each other … I have resolved to join the revolution myself, thus carrying out part of my work by teaching men to love God by loving each other. I consider this action essential as a Christian, as a priest, and as a Colombian.’ His violent death struck those who were in sympathy with his ideals as witnessing to the power of his love. To a guerrilla leader, ‘He united the scientific conception of the revolutionary war, considering it the only effective way to develop the fight for freedom, with a profound Christianity, which he extended and practised as a limitless love for the poor, the exploited and the oppressed and as a complete dedication to the battle for their liberation.’ An Argentinian priest was quoted saying, ‘Christ is love and I wanted to be a man of love; yet love cannot exist in a master–slave relationship. What Camilo’s death meant to me was that I had to dedicate myself to smash the master–slave relationship in Argentina. I had to fight
with
the slaves, the people, as
they
fought, not as an elitist teacher … but as a genuine
participant,
with
them not
for
them, in their misery, their failings, their violence. If I could not do this, I was not a man of the people, that is, a man of God, that is, a believer in brotherhood, which is the meaning of love.’ And echoing crusading martyrdom, a Catholic theologian placed Camilo Torres among ‘the purest, the most noble, the most authentic exponents and martyrs of the new Christianity’. It has even been argued, in a way reminiscent of the traditional justification of severe measures against heretics, that in revolution, although not necessarily a violent one, love is shown not only to the oppressed, but also to the oppressors, since the aim is to release these oppressors from their sinful condition.