Download PDF | Thomas F. Madden, James L. Naus, Vincent Ryan (eds.) - Crusades - Medieval Worlds in Conflict-Routledge (2016).
230 Pages
Contributors
Sam Zeno Conedera, SJ, recently completed his PhD in History at UCLA. His areas of interest include Iberia, crusading spirituality, and the military orders. He is currently pursuing a degree in philosophy at Fordham University as part of his Jesuit formation. Walker Reid Cosgrove is a doctoral candidate at Saint Louis University working under the direction of Thomas F. Madden. He is currently writing a dissertation on the episcopate in southern France at the turn of the thirteenth century, and the impact the Albigensian Crusade had on the church in the region. Thomas Devaney, currently a PhD candidate at Brown University, previously studied at the University of Chicago with Walter Kaegi, to whom this essay is greatly indebted. His research interests are focused on the interactions between different religious groups in the medieval Mediterranean. He is writing a dissertation on frontier culture and public spectacle in both Iberia and the Latin East under the direction of Amy Remensnyder.
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2001. She teaches at Dartmouth College, and works on late medieval French cultural history. She has published on the intersection between politics, kingship, and representation, and is currently interested in art and culture under the Capetian kings, as well as the influence of crusading and crusade ideology on culture and kingship in the West. Her first book, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, was published by Cornell University Press in 2008. Carole Hillenbrand is Professor Emerita of Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Her two most recent books are The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh, 1999), and Turkish Myth and Muslim Symbol: The Battle of Manzikert (Edinburgh, 2007).
Robert Hillenbrand was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. He has taught for most of his career at the University of Edinburgh, with Visiting Professorships at the universities of Princeton, UCLA, Bamberg, Dartmouth College and Groningen. He has written eight books, edited or coedited 10 books, and published over 150 articles or contributions to books. Michael Lower is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1999 and is the author of The Barons’ Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences (Pennsylvania, 2005). He was a residential fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007 and is a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow for 2010–2011. He is currently working on a comparative history of Christian mercenaries in North Africa and Muslim mercenaries in Spain in the medieval and early modern periods, tentatively titled Fighting for the Enemy. Thomas F. Madden is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. His publications include The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople (with Donald E. Queller) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), and The New Concise History of the Crusades (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
James L Naus is a doctoral candidate at Saint Louis University working under the direction of Thomas F. Madden. He is currently writing a dissertation on the Capetian monarchy’s use of crusade memory during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. David Alan Parnell is a doctoral candidate at Saint Louis University and a historian of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire. His dissertation is entitled “Justinian’s Men: The Ethnic and Regional Origins of Byzantine Officers and Officials, ca. 518–610.” He is also interested in the relationship between the crusades, the crusader states, and the Byzantine Empire. C. Matthew Phillips is Assistant Professor of History at Concordia UniversityNebraska and resides in Lincoln, Nebraska. He completed his PhD in medieval history at Saint Louis University in 2006. He is currently working on writing a book on the relationship between monastic preaching on devotion to the cross and crusade propaganda during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Jennifer A. Price completed a M.Phil at Cambridge University under the supervision of Jonathan Riley-Smith and a PhD at the University of Washington in 2005. She is completing a monograph with the working title, “Cruce Signatus: Crusaders and their vows, 1095–1291.” Her current research focuses on the communication and transformation of the crusading idea, the visual representation of the crusader in medieval art, and the ongoing cultural dialogue between Christian and Muslim communities.
Dr. Price currently serves as an adjunct professor of History at Seattle University. Vincent T. Ryan to received his Ph.D. from Saint Louis University and is one of the co-founders of the Crusades Studies Forum. He is the author of “Richard I and the Early Evolution of the Fourth Crusade” in The Fourth Crusade: Event, Aftermath, and Perceptions (Ashgate, 2009). His dissertation is a study of the relationship between crusading and Marian piety during the Middle Ages. Caroline Smith studied History at the University of Cambridge, from which she received her PhD in 2004. She is the author of Crusading in the Age of Joinville (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and translator of Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s “The Conquest of Constantinople” and John of Joinville’s “The Life of Saint Louis,” published together as Chronicles of the Crusades (London: Penguin Classics, 2008). Brett Edward Whalen is Assistant Professor of medieval history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He works on Christian intellectual and cultural history during the High Middle Ages. His recent book, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Harvard, 2009), explores how the Roman papacy, its supporters, and its critics invoked prophecy and apocalyptic thought to theorize the proper ordering of the world during the age of European expansion from the eleventh to the fourteenth century.
Introduction
At one time the crusades were regarded as a sidelight of the Middle Ages – peripheral campaigns fought thousands of miles from Europe for a variety of religious, economic, and political reasons. Historians have come to know better. The crusades stood not at the periphery of the medieval world, but at its core. They were the product of events separated by thousands of miles and across complex frontiers of culture and religion. They owed their existence as much to Muslim expansionism and Byzantine instability as they did to the articulation of ecclesiastical reform to a Western feudal nobility. It is within the context of the crusading movement that each of the major medieval cultures – Latin West, Byzantine, and Muslim – came into contact. That contact, of course, resulted in conflict, cooperation, collaboration, and individual assimilation, accommodation, or rejection of the newly encountered other. Crusade studies is not simply the study of campaigns and battles (although those are by no means excluded), but the examination of a context in which the medieval Mediterranean and its disparate cultures both acted and interacted.
The purpose of this volume is to bring together recent research into the ways in which those medieval worlds were affected by the crusading movement. All of the studies here were presented initially at The First International Symposium on Crusade Studies held on the campus of Saint Louis University between 15 and 18 February 2006.
The title of the symposium, like that of this volume, was Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict. Its goal was to bring together scholars at all career levels and from a wide variety of disciplines to present research and respond to the work of others. In that respect, and many more, it was a highly successful event. The Symposium was originally conceived by a group of graduate students at Saint Louis University – primarily Vincent T. Ryan and James L. Naus – who were working on the history of the crusades under the direction of Thomas F. Madden. With some modifications, Madden took their idea to the university administration, which very generously supported it. The Symposium itself took place in two distinct phases. The goal of Phase I was to present new research from distinguished scholars in a venue approachable to fellow scholars, interested specialists in other fields, and the general public. On the evenings of 15, 16, and 17 February two lectures were delivered in the magnificent Pere Marquette Gallery with questions and discussion after each. Free and open to the public, all of these lectures attracted standing-room-only crowds. Phase I lecturers were Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge University), John France (University of Wales, Swansea), Robert Hillenbrand (University of Edinburgh), Jaroslav Folda (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Carole Hillenbrand (University of Edinburgh). Phase II of the symposium took place on 18 February.
This provided an opportunity for participants to present specialized research in a traditional conference environment. More than 40 papers were delivered in both plenary and concurrent sessions. Taking advantage of the venue, a special plenary session was devoted to the crusader king, Saint Louis IX. Although originally intended for a scholarly audience, many people from the Saint Louis region attended the plenary session making it yet another overflow event. Among the attendees were clergy from the nearby Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis who had days earlier allowed participants to view relics of both Louis IX and the True Cross. After papers were presented by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin (Dartmouth College), Michael Lower (University of Minnesota), and Caroline Smith (Saint Louis University) a comment was delivered by William Chester Jordan (Princeton University). Jordan remarked on the exceptional quality of the papers and reflected on the passing of the torch of Louis IX studies to a new generation of scholars.
After the papers were delivered, the banquets and receptions enjoyed, and the participants had departed, the Symposium nevertheless continued to bear fruit. Aside from this volume, it also brought into being the Crusades Studies Forum, a new, permanent venue for the presentation of research, the discussion of recent scholarship, and the exploration of new directions in topics relating to the crusades. The Crusades Studies Forum now meets approximately 15 times per year at Saint Louis University. Half of those meetings provide an opportunity for participants to discuss and debate new publications in crusade studies. The rest of the meetings host visiting crusade scholars who deliver lectures and discuss their own work with participants. For a full list of past presenters and current schedules.
This volume includes a select group of the papers delivered at the symposium in 2006. They were chosen not only because of their quality and importance, but also because they illuminate several of the diverse medieval worlds in which the crusades took place. All three of the studies from the session on Louis IX are here included. Although Jordan’s comment is not included directly, its insights and suggestions are woven into the studies as they stand in their current form. The first section explores worlds of conflicting sanctity within the framework of the crusades. Across the battlefields two religious cultures constructed narratives of the sacred while simultaneously describing the other as polluted and therefore worthy of destruction. In the Islamic world old conceptions of jihad against Christians were retooled to meet the challenges of the crusades. Carole Hillenbrand demonstrates in her essay the ways in which jihad poetry, an established genre of propaganda during the centuries of warfare against Byzantium, was modified to focus on the Latins in the East, especially during the years leading up to 1187.
While earlier jihad poetry made much of the importance of Constantinople, the new poets were able to replace the Byzantine capital with Jerusalem itself. Thus, the message of the poet went from conquest to restoration, from expansion to redemption. Jihad poetry during this period described a sacred Jerusalem now polluted by idolators and pork-eaters. It cried out for rescue. On the other side of sanctity was the Christian understanding of crusade, particularly after the loss of Jerusalem and the True Cross in 1187. C. Matthew Phillips uncovers the monastic roots of crusading spirituality that emphasized self-denial and the communal life as the bearing of one’s own cross. Like jihad poets, monastic sermon writers took existing concepts – in this case the equation of monastic rigor with the imitation of the crucified Christ – and adapted them to new circumstances. Not only the monk, but the crusader was crucified by his trials and sacrifices to restore Jerusalem. The loss of the True Cross, which remained a source of profound concern for Europeans, brought into sharp relief this metaphorical image.
These sermons made clear that the crusader was called to take up the cross of self-denial in order to redeem the cross on which Christ himself had been (and continued to be) crucified. And these crusaders need not only be bound for Jerusalem. Crusaders in Iberia were affected by the same concepts of sanctity which interwove monasticism and crusade. Sam Conedera illuminates one such manifestation of this with his examination of the hermandades, religious military confraternities in Spain that played an important part in the reconquista. The second group of essays focuses on the crusades and contested worlds of ideas. Robert Hillenbrand begins by demonstrating how the crusades and the presence of Latin Christians in the East may have set off cultural ripples that affected expression within Islamic art in Syria and Jazira. Although contacts between the Byzantine and Muslim worlds were plentiful, Islamic art had long ago left behind Byzantine and classical styles. However, in Syria and Jazira in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many of those styles returned. Hillenbrand posits that the presence of the crusader states isolated the area from both Cairo and Baghdad, leading to an independence that naturally manifested itself in artistic expression. By examining the practice of including author portraits in Islamic books Hillenbrand finds a classicizing influence which simultaneously depicted and elevated the author. After the fall of the Latin East, however, this trend began to subside and finally collapse utterly, leaving only epigraphy, with no author portrait at all.
The influence of Mamluk Egypt from the south and the Mongols from the East, unhindered by the foreign buffer of the Latin East, displaced the classicizing independence of the area. Jennifer Price tackles the difficult question of the Spanish reconquista. Scholars have long wrestled with attempts to define and relate this concept to the crusading movement. Rather than deal in generalities, however, Price trains her analysis on the ways that warfare against Muslims in Spain was re-understood in the wake of the First Crusade. She finds that the two activities continued to be regarded as different – that the crusade remained an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. However, particularly in the court of Alfonso I of Aragón-Navarre, crusade components came to be used to support local warfare against Muslims. Perhaps the thorniest problem at the intersection of the crusades and ideas is one of definition. Crusade scholars have sometimes found it difficult to agree on what was and was not a crusade. In part, this mirrors a similar uncertainty in the medieval world as the concept of crusade developed and changed over time.
Although the majority opinion now appears to have accepted RileySmith’s expanded definition, there remain important challenges. These include Christopher Tyerman’s assertion that the crusades were born only during the pontificate of Innocent III and Michael Markowski’s claim that even Innocent did not consider all of the crusades of his pontificate to be, in fact, crusades. Walker Reid Cosgrove responds to Markowski’s use of language as evidence, arguing that the use of the word crucesignatus cannot reliably be used as a window into the medieval understanding of crusade. Instead, Cosgrove finds that it was one word among many that Innocent and other popes employed to describe the crusades of their time.
Since the crusades (if we assume that their origins can, indeed, be traced to the Council of Clermont in 1095) were conceived in part as a rescue for the Byzantine Empire, some attention should certainly be paid to the intersection of crusades with Byzantium. Brett Edward Whalen begins his study in the immediate aftermath of the First Crusade. He argues that scholars have been too quick to project later crusader/Byzantine animosity onto the events of 1107 when they describe Bohemond’s attack on Alexius I as a sanctioned crusade. Whalen demonstrates that an unbiased reading of the sources does not bear this interpretation. Rather, the attack on Durazzo should be seen as an episode in the continued belligerence between the Normans and Byzantines, not as the opening salvo in a war that would continue until 1204. Likewise, the Venetian Crusade of 1122 was not a war against Byzantium, but that certainly did not stop the Venetians from using it to punish John II Comnenus for his revocation of their commercial privileges in the empire. Thomas Devaney provides a comprehensive examination of this crusade within the context of Byzantine/Venetian relations. He argues that John’s actions constituted one part of a larger policy to consolidate and reclaim powers and assets lost in previous years. John erred by assuming that the Venetians would accept his decision, something unlikely given their increased wealth and power.
The crusade, therefore, provided a means for them to make that case, although in so doing they laid the seeds of the Byzantine seizure of Venetians and their assets 50 years hence. John II’s policy toward Venice may have been problematic, but it did not attract near the attention that he gave to his plans in the East. David Parnell examines John’s policy toward crusader Antioch. He finds that, unlike his Venetian strategy, John II initially continued the policy of his father, Alexius I, toward Antioch. However, when he saw the need to expand, John quickly pressed his claim to the city. Parnell believes that John’s plan was to conquer Aleppo and other parts of Syria or Mesopotamia in order to create buffer states to be handed over to the Latin rulers of Antioch, thus freeing up the city for direct imperial control. In this way, John could place the barbarians again beyond the empire’s border while providing for the long-term security of the eastern frontier. His sudden death, however, ended that plan while it was still in execution.
The last set of essays is the product of the symposium’s special session on the crusade and Louis IX. Caroline Smith provides a truly fascinating study of the fear with which crusaders, in this case those on the first crusade of Louis IX, approached travel by sea. More than the battlefield, the capricious sea put crusaders in direct contact with the divine, for it was only by God’s will and the intercession of his saints that they could hope to survive. The sea served as a test of courage and devotion. It was both a journey and a destination, for it was itself a penance.
Louis mightily struggled with this test, dramatically stretched out before the consecrated host in prayer while his vessel seemed lost. Smith reminds us not only of the hardships of the crusade, but the anxious feelings of helplessness that accompanied the seaborne journey of the crusaders. Michael Lower next focuses our attention on the Second Crusade of Louis in 1270. Scholars have long puzzled over the reasoning behind the destination of this crusade. Why did Louis choose to sail to Tunis? Lower convincingly argues that the king did so with two goals in mind. First, he hoped to use the wealth of Tunis to help fund his crusade. It was this sort of strategy of using confiscated non-Christian wealth that had served him well in the past.
The Jews in France had previously had their usurious funds confiscated by the king to fund his crusade. Second, Louis seems to have believed that the emir of Tunis was willing to convert to Christianity. This intelligence, Lower believes, came not from Tunisian envoys, but from Dominicans who Louis knew and who were connected to the Dominican mission in Tunis. Lower’s explanation is compelling, for it not only brings new evidence to bear on the problem, but it places the decision within the constellation of previous decisions made by the crusader king. Finally, this volume ends where it begins, by tying together the crusade career of Louis IX with competing concepts of sanctity. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin investigates this theme within the various approaches to the sanctity of Louis himself. Louis was canonized quickly after his death, but neither as a crusader nor as a martyr. Indeed, as Gaposchkin points out, Louis was not alone in this since no crusader was ever canonized as a crusader.
The crusade therefore was a vehicle, an activity, and a penance. It was not in and of itself evidence of sanctity. Instead, Louis was canonized for his exemplary life. Impossible to ignore his crusading career, this served only as evidence of Louis’ willingness to suffer with humility for Christ. Ironically, Louis’ captivity, the mark of his first crusade’s failure, was a powerful argument for his sanctity for it put in clear light his patient and steadfast humility. Together these essays reveal more of the seemingly endless facets of medieval life that touched and were touched by the crusading movement. With each new investigation into the crusades we learn more about the conflicting medieval worlds that they themselves mirrored.
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