Download PDF | Conor Kostick (ed.) - The Crusades and the Near East-Routledge (2011).
288 Pages
THE CRUSADES AND THE NEAR EAST
The crusades are often seen as epitomising a period when hostility between the Christian West and the Muslim Near East reached an all-time high. As this edited volume reveals, however, the era was one which saw both conflict and cohabitation. Tackling such questions as whether medicinal and architectural innovations came to Europe as a direct result of the crusades, and why and how peace treaties and intermarriages were formed between the different cultures, a distinguished group of contributors reveals how the Holy Wars led on the one hand to a reinforcement of the beliefs and identities of each side, but on the other to a growing level of cultural exchange and interaction.
This volume breaks new ground in exploring not only the conflict between the Christian and the Muslim worlds, but the impact of this conflict on the cultural evolution of European and Near Eastern thought and practices. Utilising the latest scholarship and original studies of the sources, this survey sheds new light on the cultural realities of East–West relations and marks a new departure for studies of the crusades. Contributors include Léan Ní Chléirigh, Susan B. Edgington, John France, Yehoshua Frenkel, Yvonne Friedman, Bernard Hamilton, Natasha Hodgson, Sini Kangas, Jürgen Krüger, Alan V. Murray and Chris Wright.
Conor Kostick teaches on the crusades at Trinity College Dublin. A former winner of the Dublinia Medieval Essay Competition and holder of a Trinity College Gold Medal, his historical works include The Social Structure of the First Crusade (2008) and The Siege of Jerusalem (2009).
CONTRIBUTORS
Léan Ni Chleéirigh is currently researching the collective and ethnic terminology of the early Latin chronicles of the First Crusade. The Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences funds this doctoral research. She has recently published a chapter entitled ‘Anti-Byzantine polemic in the Dez Gesta per Francos of Guibert, Abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy’ in Savvas Neocleous (ed.), Sailing to Byzantium (Newcastle: CSP, 2009).
Susan B. Edgington teaches Latin and medieval history at Queen Mary College, University of London, where she is an honorary research fellow. She has a BA and Ph.D. from the University of London, and recently added a postgraduate Diploma in the History of Medicine. Her magnum opus, an edition and translation of the crusade history of Albert of Aachen, was published in 2007 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), and she is also the co-author of Walter the Chancellor’s Antiochene Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) and co-editor of Gendering the Crusades (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), as well as the author of many articles and essays on aspects of the crusades and the history of medicine.
John France is Professor Emeritus, Swansea University and former director of the James Callaghan Institute for Conflict Studies. His main works are The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom 1000-1714 (London: Routledge, 2005); Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades 1000-1300 (London: UCL Press, 1999); and Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Yehoshua Frenkel is Senior Lecturer at the University of Haifa, teaching medieval history of the Arab Middle East. His recent publications include: ‘Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria’, in Miriam Frenkel and Yaacov Lev (eds), Charity and Giving in Monotheistic Religions (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009); ‘Dream Accounts in the Chronicles of the Mamluk Period’, in Louise Marlow (ed.), Dreaming across Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Land (Cambridge, MA: Ilex Foundation/Harvard University Press, 2008); and ‘Public Projection of Power in Mamluk Bilad alSham’, Mamluk Studies Review, 11.1 (2007).
Yvonne Friedman of Bar-Ilan Unversity was recently Visiting Fellow, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Her many publications include the monograph Encounter between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Leiden: Brill, 2002); as co-editor, Medieval Studies in Honour of Avrom Saltman (Jerusalem: Bar-Ilan Press, 1995); ‘Captivity and Ransom: The Experience of Women’ in S.B. Edgington and S. Lambert (eds), Gendering the Crusades; and ‘Gestures of Conciliation: Peacemaking Endeavours in the Latin East’ in Iris Shagrir, Ronnie Ellenblum and Jonathan Riley-Smith (eds), In Laudem Hierosolymitani (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Bernard Hamilton is Professor Emeritus of Crusading History, University of Nottingham. He is president of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. His publications include The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Religzon in the Medieval West (London: Arnold, 2003 [1986]); and The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London: Variorum, 1980). A collection of his articles is available in Monastic Reform, Catharism, and the Crusades (900-1300) (London: Variorum, 1979).
Natasha Hodgson is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History in the Department of History, Heritage and Geography at Nottingham Trent University. Her Ph.D. thesis considered the perception of women in the narratives of crusade and settlement, and led to the publication of a number of articles. Her monograph was published in 2007 as Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative (Woodbridge: Boydell). Her current research focuses the relationship between crusading and ideals of masculinity and chivalry, and she is currently working on a book-length study entitled Gender and the Crusades.
Sini Kangas is a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Her present research project concerns the role of children within the crusading movement between the years 1100 and 1300. Her publications include the forthcoming monograph The Concept of Crusader Violence (Leiden: Brill 2011); and as co-editor: Sini Kangas, Marjatta Hietala and Heikki Ylikangas (eds), Historia eilen ja tinddin. Historiantutkimuksen ja arkeologian suunnat Suomessa 1908-2008 (Helsinki: Suomen Tiedeseura, 2009).
Conor Kostick teaches on the subject of the crusades at Trinity College Dublin. His publications include the monographs The Siege of Jerusalem: Conquest and Crusade in 1099 (London: Hambledon, 2009) and The Social Structure of the First Crusade (Leiden: Brill, 2008), as well as the anthology, as editor, Medieval Italy, Medieval and Early Modern Women: Essays in Honour of Christine Meek (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010). His most recent crusade-related article is ‘Social Unrest and the Failure of Conrad III’s March through Anatolia’, German History 28.2 (2010).
Jiirgen Kriiger is Professor of Art History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KOT. His publications include, as co-editor, Transfer: Innovationen in der Zeit der Kreuzztige (Speyer: Pfalzischen Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Wissenschaften, 2006); Die Dormitio-Basilika in Jerusalem: Dormitio Beatae Mariae Virginis, Benediktinerabter (Karlsruhe: Arte Factum, 2007); Klosterlandschaft Maulbronn (Karlsruhe: Arte Factum, 2008). His most recent article is “The Crown Prince and His Ambassador: Two Individuals in the Service of Roman Archaeology’, in Nathalie de Haan, Martijn Eickhoff and Marjan Schwegman (eds), Archaeology and National Identity in Italy and Europe 1800-1950 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).
Alan V. Murray studied History, German Language and Literature, and Folk Studies at the universities of St Andrews, Salzburg and Freiburg, and received his Ph.D. for a dissertation on the origins of the nobility of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds and editorial director of the International Medieval Bibliography. He has written numerous studies on the Latin states of Outremer, crusade and mission in the Baltic region, and the historiography and literature of the crusades. He is author of the monograph The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Dynastic History (Oxford: Unit for Prosopographical Research, 2000) and editor of the four-volume reference work The Crusades: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), as well as of several collections of essays on the crusades.
Chris Wright received his Ph.D. in History from the University of London in 2006, for a thesis on the history of the Genoese Gattilusio dynasty of Lesbos in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A chapter of this dissertation, examining the Gattilusio lordships’ interaction with the crusades, was awarded the Norman Hepburn Baynes Essay Prize for 2006. He is currently adapting his doctoral thesis for publication by Cambridge University Press, while teaching at Royal Holloway, University of London.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has its origins in a research programme for 2008-2012 by the Centre for Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin. One of the questions raised by the programme was that of how the phenomenon of crusading, through both conflict and cohabitation, influenced the creation of Mediterranean identities. I am very grateful for the support of the Centre — and Professor Brian McGing in particular — which allowed me to travel to conferences where papers relevant to the themes of this book were being read, in search of possible contributors.
Funding from the Centre also allowed me to invite Professor John France to Trinity College Dublin, where he delivered the talk which now forms Chapter 1 of this book to a packed audience. Trinity Long Room Hub also supported the visit of Professor France to Trinity College and in addition provided funding for me to obtain professionally drawn maps and diagrams. I am very appreciative of the award from Trinity Long Room Hub and — once more — of the efforts of the staff at Freeline Graphics for their compositions. Copyright to the maps and figures resides with the respective contributors.
INTRODUCTION
Conor Kostick
Modern conflicts in the Middle East and the War on Terror have created enormous interest in the history of the region and in the origins of Christian—Muslim conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of crusading has come under intense scrutiny as increasing numbers of modern historians have turned their attention to the subject, producing a flurry of studies to meet the demands of readers and students wanting to understand the medieval origins of conflict between the West and the Near East. There has also been a huge increase in the numbers of researchers investigating narrower and narrower aspects of the crusades, as well as a noticeable increase in the availability of modern editions of source materials.
The level of discussion around the subject, as reflected in the growing number of papers concerning the crusades read at history conferences, has also grown rapidly. And it is from this wave of scholarship that I have solicited the essays contained in this book on the grounds that they were original, that they enhanced our understanding of the Near East in the era of the crusades, and that they were investigations of previously unresolved assumptions concerning the practice of crusading in the Near East.
Broadly speaking, these are cultural studies, and the conscious assembly of a volume of cultural histories concerning the crusades is unusual for the discipline. But with so much work having been done on the political history of the crusades and also on the question of the motivation of the crusaders, it seemed to me that the priority for a new anthology was to look for areas of study that were relatively underdeveloped, but were also fertile in their possibilities. As a result, this book is a step towards a dialogue between crusading historians and practitioners of Cultural Studies in its narrow sense: that inchoate discipline which (deliberately) eludes succinct definition but which has taken a sharp turn from its origins in the work of historians such as E.P. Thompson and the Aznales school, to embrace post-modernism, post-colonialism, gender studies and self-reflexivity. Cultural Studies is a discipline that above all mistrusts generalisations and perhaps for this reason has not particularly appealed to practitioners of medieval history, despite the importance of the writings of Marc Bloch to its origins. But it is also a discipline that has revolutionised the humanities, most obviously in the field of Literature, but even a subject like Archaeology — so much more rooted in the materials rather than the ideas of society — has benefited from its interaction with proponents of Cultural Studies.
If this volume does represent a methodological step by crusade historians in the direction of Cultural Studies, it has to be said that the step is a very small one. The main difficulty in developing a strong dialogue between studies of the crusades and Cultural Studies is that the latter has evolved from its roots in history to be a discipline that today shares more with philosophy. While there is an overlap between the two disciplines, it is the same kind of overlap as that, say, between physics and botany, or mathematics and chemistry: that is, there is an overlap — and potentially a very interesting one — but the area where the disciplines can usefully communicate to one another is relatively small. Just as there would be limited scope for a specialist in botany to contribute to a conference on quantum physics, so it would be very hard for a follower of Foucault or Derrida to add value to a history conference wanting to understand the world of the crusader. If such a person were to study a classic crusading text, say the Gesta Francorum, there is no doubt their findings would be of interest to the historian. But what the proponent of Cultural Studies would find very difficult — and they would probably not desire to do so anyway — is to say something about the society and events that led to the production of the manuscript and which in turn are illuminated by the historian’s analysis of the text.
This anthology is very much a collection of history essays; and insofar as it is a collection that is focused on culture in the broader sense, this is a result of my raising particular questions with those historians whom I believed had the expertise to answer them. I have no idea of the philosophical outlook of the contributors and the extent to which they have an interest in Cultural Studies. But they all, whether long-established professors or relatively early career researchers, are splendid historians, and as a result I hope the reader will find here crusading studies that are clear, erudite and fresh.
The anthology opens with something of a keynote essay, by John France, on warfare in the Mediterranean region in the age of the crusades. For all that the meeting of crusaders with Muslims in the Near East led to fascinating cultural exchanges, these need to be framed by a recognition that Muslim armies and Muslim citizens in the path of the crusaders first encountered one another in battle and that, despite periods of détente, major conflicts between the rulers of the rival states flared repeatedly in the period that the crusaders had a presence in the region (1098-1291). The evolution of the pattern of warfare over such a long period has its own dynamics worth understanding, especially when the conflicting forces differ not only in their religions, but in their fundamentally different approaches to the art of war. This essay is the work someone who has devoted decades of research to the subject and, moreover, has taken the trouble to explore the geography of the region, including areas where it is difficult for a Western scholar to travel today. As a result, it is rich in comparative assessments and lucid generalisations that a historian of less experience would hardly dare formulate.
Despite the rapid growth of research into the subject of the crusades, it is widely recognised that there exists a noticeable lacuna in the use of medieval Arabic sources. Researchers with the appropriate language skills are in a small minority and a great number of important medieval Arabic texts lack modern editions and reliable translations. Discussion of topics such as the evolution of jzhad in the era of the crusades has been hampered by this difficulty, and although since 1999 readers of the English language have been able to avail themselves of the seminal work by Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, further advances in this area have been slow to emerge. The second essay in this volume was commissioned in recognition of this problem and I consider myself fortunate that a scholar so thoroughly conversant with medieval Arabic sources as Yehoshua Frenkel was willing to address the question of how the theory and practice of the counter-crusade developed in the Muslim Near East.
Through a thematic — rather than chronological — approach, Yehoshua Frenkel has been able to develop a number of insights here. Above all, the essay carries the argument that while Muslim jurists and theologians responded to the crusades with clear invocations of the duty of Muslims to declare jihad against the invaders, Muslim rulers found means to adopt more flexible and pragmatic policies that suited the complexities of their position: complexities that included a recognition of the dangers posed by the ambitions of fellow Muslim princes; the dissatisfaction of Muslim merchants if trade faltered; and, in some instances, the need for temporary military alliances with Christian neighbours.
The phenomenon of the crusades fundamentally altered the political map of the Near East and, ironically, given their adherence to Christianity, the most dramatic of these changes was the significant weakening of the Byzantine Empire and Armenian lordships in Cilicia. The process by which this happened is assessed here by Chris Wright with respect to the Byzantine Empire and Natasha Hodgson with respect to Cilician Armenia. The theme that runs through Chris Wright’s analysis is that of marginalisation. The Byzantine state, he argues, lost its ability to act as a coherent authority for the affairs of its citizens partly for material reasons — the catastrophic Fourth Crusade and sack of Constantinople severely disrupted the mechanisms of imperial rule — but also for ideological reasons: the whole crusading project had a tendency to marginalise the empire with regard to Mediterranean affairs despite the fact that a call from Constantinople for military aid against the Turks was one of the factors that triggered the appearance of crusading armies in the Near East.
Natasha Hodgson’s focus is on the marriages that took place between crusading Latin Christian princes and the Armenian lords of Cilicia. Intermarriages between these two cultures took place throughout the period that the crusaders had a presence in the region and by paying careful attention to the patterns of marriage alliances Natasha Hodgson is able to piece together the dynamics of the ambitions of both groups as well as to assess the respective effectiveness of these alliances. One of many conclusions that can be drawn from this chapter is that while at times such marriage alliances assisted both Latin Christian and Armenian rulers to maintain their autonomy from the Byzantine Empire and strengthened their ability to resist attacks from neighbouring Muslim powers, these intermarriages also created cross-cultural dynastic ambitions that led to conflicts that drained the resources of both sides.
The subject of the origins of modern European national identity is a large one and one to which a study of the crusades can make an important contribution. For the crusades took place at a time when national structures were beginning to coalesce in Europe, typically around royal authority. More importantly, crusading was a phenomenon that was almost unique in the Middle Ages in bringing together large numbers of people of all social classes in bands that formed up into even greater amalgamations of people from all the regions of Europe. The question of national identity in these crusading armies very much came to the fore, as rival princes manoeuvred for hegemony at the same time as a sense of common purpose and religion cut across regional interests.
In an important essay for those interested in the wider topic of national identity as well as crusading history, Alan V. Murray focuses on the crusades to the Near East between 1096 and 1192, to reveal the expressions of nationality within the crusading armies. Additionally, he makes the notable point that near-contemporary medieval historians attempted to appropriate successful crusaders to their own emerging nations and thus crusade-related sources provide us with good evidence for the development of a nationalistic spirit from the twelfth century onwards, one that was to develop more powerfully in the early modern period.
The following essay by Sini Kangas also concerns the history of ideas. Her investigation is into the important and very sensitive topic of medieval Latin Christian writings on Islam. Again, crusading expertise is valuable in opening up a line of investigation for this much wider topic, for four crusade-related texts form the basis for this study. What they reveal is a great interest in the Muslim religion, not so much — in the eyes of these authors — as a theology worthy of serious intellectual engagement, but as a ‘heresy’ that could be caricatured and polemicised against in order to provide warning examples for the Christian population.
The crude and insulting language that the Christian polemicists directed against Muhammad and his followers served to send a message about the superiority and correctness of the Christian Church. A secondary, but notable, observation made by Sini Kangas is that despite the hostility of these authors towards Islam, they did not entirely fabricate the material from which they fashioned their attacks. It may well have been that as a consequence of the crusades and Latin Christian settlement in the Near East, there was a flow of information about Islam arriving in Europe that did communicate the basic history and tenets of the religion.
In a third essay concerned with mentalities, Léan Ni Chléirigh undertakes a close reading of two very early Latin crusading histories: those of Fulcher of Chartres and Guibert of Nogent. The point of her investigation is to assess whether the growth of hostility in the Latin Christian world towards the Byzantines was necessarily accelerated as a result of the experience of crusades to the Near East. While Guibert’s Dei Gesta Per Francos is an early example of a crusading history that vigorously pursues an anti-Byzantine theme, Fulcher provides a stark contrast and it is this contrast that leads Léan Ni Chléirigh to talk ofa polarisation of Western opinion, rather than a one-sided development of antiByzantine feeling. As with some of the earlier chapters, this is an essay with a very important secondary observation.
For nearly a century, modern historians have considered Fulcher of Chartres to have been an eyewitness to the launching of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, but Léan Ni Chléirigh’s examination of Fulcher’s language in his account of the council leads her to a different conclusion. Fulcher was indeed close to the thinking of Pope Urban, whom he met during the course of his journey east. But this familiarity with the papal message is more likely to have arisen from his having access to written sources, such as the decrees of the council, rather than from his presence at Clermont.
In raising the issue of inter-cultural exchanges between Christian and Muslim society in the Near East in the era of the crusades, one distinct topic worthy of proper investigation is that of medicine. When I learned that Susan B. Edgington was carrying out research in this area I immediately sought an essay from her for this book, thinking that such a chapter would provide a case study of how Christian medical practices benefited from the more advanced Muslim traditions and that as these new practices were incorporated more generally into Latin Christian culture they came westwards from the crusader states. In her extremely thorough analysis of the sources and of recent scholarship, however, Susan B. Edgington gives us a much more sophisticated view of the subject.
Crusading armies brought with them very competent battle surgeons; and insofar as the wider body of crusading medics learned from Oriental practices, they seem to have done so from native Christians rather than directly from Muslim society. The development of the theory and practice of medicine in Western society benefited from Oriental knowledge, but the flow of ideas and treatments was not one way, nor can these developments be crudely attributed to the crusades, as in the same era important Arabic medical texts were independently being translated in centres of Christian intellectual activity, such as the great monastery of Monte Cassino.
Another discipline whose evolution was shaped by cultural exchange between the Christian West and the Muslim Near East in the era of the crusades is architecture. Again, a lot of assumptions are often made about the flow of influences: in particular, in the 1990s it was stated that Gothic architecture in the West derived from innovations begun in the crusader states and this style — crudely, pointed arches — subsequently found its way to Europe.
By taking as a case study the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Jiirgen Kriiger addresses these assumptions, because the history of the building and its many reconstructions allow us to identify a succession of distinct architectural influences. This chapter presents a great deal of new and original material, the result of Jiirgen Kriiger’s research at the church. He is able to draw a number of conclusions, two of which stand out as highly significant: first, that Western traditions influenced construction at the church until the middle of the twelfth century, when more local influences came to dominate; and second, the exchange of architectural culture, such as the Gothic style, took place in both directions. If the cross-cultural exchanges between Christian and Muslim neighbouring societies tended to be mediated through Arab-speaking Christian residents of the Near East, so that the direct contact between them proves hard to establish in fields such as medicine and architecture, there was one area of activity where direct encounters were a necessity: establishing peace treaties.
The final essay in this volume comes from Yvonne Friedman, who has long devoted her expertise in crusading history to the issue of peace treaties. For this book, she analyses the 120 or so treaties mentioned in the sources between Christian and Muslim lords (1096–1291), to demonstrate the evolution of a mutual understanding of the stages of peacemaking out of an initial lack of comprehension – in both mentality and practice – of their respective views on how to conduct and conclude peace agreements. Framing the book in this way, between John France’s discussion of warfare between crusading and Muslim armies and Yvonne Friedman’s focus on peace between the rival lords, serves to emphasise the curious dialectic of the phenomenon of the crusades.
The huge Christian army of the First Crusade set out to defeat Muslim forces in the Near East and establish new states, in particular at Jerusalem. But having done so, in order to survive, crusading settlers found themselves adjusting to a necessary engagement with the politics and culture of the region. Never stable, always prone to renewed outbreaks of warfare and the arrival of new waves of crusading armies, the consequences of this engagement were simultaneously a strengthening of the ideology of Holy War on both sides and a growing level of cultural interaction between the religious rivals. This was an era of profound changes in the political formations of the region as well as in the ideas that were circulating in both societies.
A growing cry for jihad to counter the Christian armies by the Islamic clergy was a factor in the emergence of Muslim princes capable of ruling much larger territories than their predecessors. In the West, crusading led – among other developments and not in a linear fashion – to a growth in the alienation of the Latin world from the Byzantine Empire; a furtherance of the concept of national identity; and an increase in the circulation of polemical texts belittling Islam. More positively, although less definitively, the period in which Christian states existed in the Near East was one where a sharing of knowledge could take place, to the mutual advantage of practitioners in fields such as medicine and architecture. It was an era of both conflict and cohabitation.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق