God's War: A New History of the Crusades (2 page)

27
. Charles V of France entertains Charles IV of Germany during a banquet in Paris in 1378 (
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
[Ms Fr. 2813 Fol. 473v])

28
. Andrea Bonaiuti’s fresco ‘The Church Militant’, in Santa Maria Novella, Florence (
Scala, Florence
)

29
. The failed Ottoman Turkish siege of Rhodes, 1480 (
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
[Ms Lat. 6067 Fol. 80v])

30
. Mehmed II the Conqueror, by Gentile Bellini, 1480/81 (
National Gallery, London
)

31
. The battle of Lepanto, 1571 (
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
)

List of Maps

1. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the First Crusade and Preaching Tour of Pope Urban II 1095–6

2. Asia Minor and Syria 1097–99

3. The Siege of Antioch, October 1097–June 1098

4. Palestine 1099

5. The Siege of Jerusalem, June – July 1099

6. Syria in the Twelfth Century

7. Palestine and Egypt in the Twelfth Century

8. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Second Crusade and Bernard’s Preaching Tour 1146–7

9. The Hattin Campaign, July 1187

10. Saladin Captures Jerusalem, September – October 1187

11. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Third Crusade

12. Syria at the Time of the Third Crusade

13. The Siege of Acre 1189

14. Richard I Captures Cyprus, May 1191

15. Palestine with the Campaigns of 1191–2

16. Europe and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century

17. Constantinople at the Time of the Fourth Crusade

18. Languedoc, France and the Albigensian Crusade

19. The Spanish
Reconquista

20. The Baltic

21. Syria in the Thirteenth Century

22. Palestine and Egypt in the Thirteenth Century

23. Acre in 1291

24. Crusades in Europe

Acknowledgements

This book has taken longer than even the most sluggish crusade to prepare and complete. I must record my thanks and gratitude to the Trustees of the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship for the year 1998–9, which allowed me to begin to marshal evidence and ideas for this project. My agent Jonathan Lloyd has proved a tactful and potent warrior in my interests. The invitation to write this sort of book came from Simon Winder, who could not have imagined how long, in many senses, it would turn out to be. His patience and encouragement have been wonderfully sustaining. Indirectly, I have been thinking, working, teaching and writing towards this book for thirty years. Inevitably the debts to friends, colleagues, pupils and other scholars are legion and irredeemable. In particular, I should like to register my obligation for discussion, ideas, criticism and opportunities to air views to Malcolm Barber, Toby Barnard, Peter Biller, Jessalynin Bird, the late Lionel Butler, Jeremy Catto, Eric Christiansen, Gary Dickson, Barrie Dobson, Jean Dunbabin, Peter Edbury, Geoffrey Ellis, L.S. Ettre, the late Richard Fletcher, John Gillingham, Timothy Guard, Bernard Hamilton, Ruth Harris, Catherine Holmes, Norman Housley, Colin Imber, Kurt Villads Jensen, Jeremy Johns, Andrew Jotischky, Maurice Keen, Anthony Luttrell, Simon Lloyd, Jose-Juan Lopez-Portillo, Dominic Luckett, John Maddicott, Hans Mayer, James Morwood, Alan Murray, Sandy Murray, Torben Nielsen, the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education Crusades class of the summer of 2003, David Parrott, Jonathan Phillips, the late John Prestwich, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Miri Rubin, Jonathan Shepard and Mark Whittow. The intellectual vibrancy of my colleagues and pupils in Hertford College and New College provide the most stimulating of creative environments. The Principal and Fellows of Hertford gave me academic shelter for many
locust years. Toby Barnard and Peter Biller have long provided personal support and intellectual stimulus with rare companionability. The responsibility for introducing me to the crusades rests with the improbable quintet of the late Ralph Bathurst, David Parry, Eric Christiansen, Maurice Keen and the late Lionel Butler, alike in little except inspiration and civility. I alone can be held accountable for the errors that stubbornly remain like mouse hairs in medieval bread. Simon Winder, editor nonpareil, and his team at Penguin UK have proved a revelation of amenable, intelligent and efficient publishing. I am grateful to those who have pointed out errata in the First Edition, in particular Paul Cobb and Eric Christiansen. For tolerating the distraction of what must at times have seemed another sibling, the book is dedicated to those most healthily but supportively sceptical of the virtues and merits of this work and its author, Elizabeth, Edward and Thomas, with love.

CJT
Oxford
15 June 2007

Preface

‘The Lord is a man of war.’
(Exodus 15:3)

Violence, approved by society and supported by religion, has proved a commonplace of civilized communities. What are now known as the crusades represent one manifestation of this phenomenon, distinctive to western European culture over 500 years from the late eleventh century of the Christian Era. The crusades were wars justified by faith conducted against real or imagined enemies defined by religious and political elites as perceived threats to the Christian faithful. The religious beliefs crucial to such warfare placed enormous significance on imagined awesome but reassuring supernatural forces of overwhelming power and proximity that were nevertheless expressed in hard concrete physical acts: prayer, penance, giving alms, attending church, pilgrimage, violence. Crusading reflected a social mentality grounded in war as a central force of protection, arbitration, social discipline, political expression and material gain. The crusades confirmed a communal identity comprising aggression, paranoia, nostalgia, wishful thinking and invented history. Understood by participants at once as a statement of Christian charity, religious devotion and godly savagery, the ‘wars of the cross’ helped fashion for adherents a shared sense of belonging to a Christian society,
societas christiana
, Christendom, and contributed to setting its human and geographic frontiers. In these ways, the crusades helped define the nature of Europe.

By forcing an otherwise improbably intimate contact with western Asia through centuries of contest over the Christian Holy Places in Palestine, the crusades encouraged European inquiry and experience beyond traditional horizons. One path to the thought-world of Christopher Columbus stretched back to Pope Urban II’s first call to arms for the Christian reconquest of Jerusalem in 1095. The moral certainties
fostered by crusading left physical or cultural monuments and scars from the Arctic Circle to the Nile, from the synagogues of the Rhineland to the mosques of Andalusia, from the vocabulary of value to the awkward hinterland of historic Christian pride, guilt and responsibility. Whether admired, with a contemporary of the First Crusade in the 1090s, as ‘the greatest event since the Resurrection’, or mocked, with Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century, as a ‘rendezvous of cracked brains that wore their feather in their head instead of their hat’, or condemned, with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, as ‘the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’, the crusades remain one of the great subjects of European history.

A familiar but baneful response to history is to configure the past as comfortingly different from the present day. Previous societies are caricatured as less sophisticated, more primitive, cruder, alien. Such attitudes reveal nothing so much as a collective desire to reassure the modern observer by demeaning the experience of the past. Within the cultural traditions of Europe and western Asia, since the sixteenth century the crusades have regularly attracted precisely such condescension from hostile religious, cultural or ideological partisans. The crusades have been dismissed as a symptom of a credulous, superstitious and backward civilization in order openly or covertly to elevate a supposedly more advanced and enlightened modern society. Yet this hardly helps understanding of past events. Another contrary vision, no less distorted, regards the past as a mirror to the present. Thus the battles of the cross are held to presage the conflicts of European imperialism, colonialism and western cultural supremacism. Yet many of the supposed links between past events and current problems are modern, not historical, constructs, invented to lend spurious legitimacy to wholly unconnected current political, social, economic and religious problems. So the crusades have been presented as symbols both of the past’s inferiority and relevance. It is, by contrast, perhaps worthwhile to attempt to explore the phenomenon as far as possible on its own terms. That is the purpose of what follows.

More than half a century ago, Steven Runciman, with typical style and false modesty, imperishably pitted his pen against the ‘massed typewriters of the United States’. He won. His
History of the Crusades
, published in three volumes between 1951 and 1954, became the classic twentieth-century account of the subject and remains a remarkable work
of literature as much as history. It would be folly and hubris to pretend to compete, to match, as it were, my clunking computer keyboard with his pen, at once a rapier and a paintbrush; to pit one volume, however substantial, with the breadth, scope and elegance of his three. Yet scholarship and the world have moved since 1954: the former in part directly due to Runciman’s inspiration; the latter in contradiction to the civilized and humane principles of faith and reason that shine from his great work. The crusades are no longer understood in quite the way they were in the 1950s either by scholars, informed by the new insights of research, or a wider public who imagine a largely spurious relevance to the twenty-first century. On these grounds, an attempt to describe again what is now perhaps the most familiar, if misunderstood, of all medieval phenomena may be justified.

The exercise is hardly straightforward. The judgemental confidence of a Macaulay – or a Runciman – is warranted neither by modern fashion nor by the discipline of the subject. All historical investigations remain contingent on surviving evidence. One of the regular temptations seducing historians and their audience is to imagine knowledge of the past. Most has been lost, by nature, accident or design. The muddle of existence is simplified both by the historians’ craft, which is at root that of selection, and by the gaps in evidence. To illustrate the tenuous links that inform our knowledge, two of the most vivid, full and important contemporary narratives of the Second Crusade (1146–8) survive in a single manuscript each. Without them, our view of that remarkable event would be entirely different. Most of the evidence that once existed for the history of the crusades has been lost. Conversely, what does survive inevitably favours certain perspectives over others for which less evidence has survived. The story of the most familiar episode of all, the First Crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem (1095–9), is based on a remarkably narrow twelfth-century historiographical tradition which may, but equally may not, reveal what was of greater or lesser importance at the time. Thus any modern historical account can only be to some degree tentative. If the requirements of the narrative obscure the delicacy of the interpretive choices reached here, this in no way suggests they were easy, simple, straightforward, necessarily incontrovertible or even conclusive. They merely represent what the author, to the best of his understanding, now thinks.

The crusades were and are controversial and contentious far beyond
the academic community. More than any other incident of medieval European history they have entered the sphere of public history, where the past is captured in abiding cultural myths of inheritance, self-image and identity. Many groups and nations find their memory awkward, even distressing. The massacres of Palestinian Muslims and Jews at Jerusalem in 1099 or of Greeks at Constantinople in 1204; the butchery of Rhineland Jews in 1096 or 1146, or English Jews in 1190; the defeats of Latin Christians by great Islamic leaders, Saladin and Baibars; the expulsion of western conquerors from the mainland of western Asia in 1291; the long triumphs of the Christians in Iberia, of the Germans in the eastern Baltic or the Turks in Asia Minor, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean; all these aspects of crusading history have left a residue of resentment, pain, anger, guilt and pride, depending on which legacy, if any, modern observers wish to claim for themselves. Therefore, for any historian the perspective taken is of importance. Yet to look at a subject from a particular vantage point is to adopt a position in order to more clearly inspect the view. It does not mean taking sides.

My perspective is western European. This accords best with my own research experience. More importantly, it matches the origins, development, continuance and nature of the phenomenon. Although having an impact far beyond western Europe, the crusade as an ideal and human activity began and remained rooted in western European culture. By adopting this stance in no way implies approval of crusading. It does not ignore the sources generated by the opponents and victims of crusading. Nor does it privilege the value or importance of the experience of western Europeans over others involved, as will be apparent in what follows. However, it is a necessary device to see the subject clearly through the fog of ignorance, obscurity, the passage of time and the complexity of surviving sources. A history of the crusades could be very different in structure if composed from the viewpoint of medieval Syrian, Egyptian or Andalusian Muslims, or European or Near Eastern Jews, or Balts, Livs or Prussians. However, the essential contours of the subject would, if observed dispassionately, look much the same, because this study is intended as a history, not a polemic, an account not a judgement, an exploration of an important episode of world history of enormous imaginative as well as intellectual fascination, not a confessional apologia or witness statement in some cosmic law suit. Readers will decide whether the view is worth the journey.