Download PDF | Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095-1588, University of Chicago Press, 1988.
514 Pages
Preface
Writing a first book, the academic tyro inevitably and thankfully incurs heavy debts. It is a pleasure as well as an obligation to record my gratitude to those who have made this book so much better than I could have done alone. In particular I must thank the electors of the R. H. Murray Fellowship at the University of Oxford and the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford, for providing the time and surroundings which made this work possible. For help on individual points, for discussion, and for opportunities to air some ill-formed views, I am extremely grateful to Dr. W. J. Blair, Dr. D. A. Carpenter, Mr. C. S. L. Davies, Professor R. B. Dobson, Dr. P. W. Edbury, Dr. P. R. Hyams, Dr. S. D. Lloyd, Mr. J. O. Prestwich, Professor J. S. C. Riley-Smith, and Mrs. J. Wallis. To avoid poaching or duplication, by mutual agreement I have not viewed Dr. Lloyd’s thesis, English Society and the Crusade, 1216— 1307, which fortunately is soon to be published by the Oxford University Press. To Mr. E. Christiansen I owe the introduction to my publishers, as well as guidance, encouragement, and inspiration over many years. Dr. P. H. Williams and Dr. P. A. Slack generously spared time to comment on a medievalist’s excursion into early modern history. Dr. M. H. Keen read most and Dr. J. R. Maddicott the whole of the first draft. My debt to all of them, as critics and friends, is very great. What I and this book have gained from the intellectual companionship of Paul Slack and John Maddicott is immeasurable. As with the crucesignati themselves, I have made mistakes on my iter, not all of them redeemable by the help and advice of others. For such errors and all remaining blunders and follies I alone am responsible. Finally, I hope my sharpest, kindest critic, who has shared, suffered, tolerated, and eased the inner agonies and outward frustrations of authorship, will accept as some inadequate recompense the dedication of the work with which she has lived for so long.
I must thank the Trustees of the British Library for permission to reproduce MS Roy 2. A XXII on the cover and the Trustees of the National Gallery, London, for permission to reproduce the Wilton Diptych. Mrs. Gwendoline Butler kindly allowed me access to the papers of her late husband, Dr. L. H. Butler. Both the Trustees of the R. H. Murray Fund and the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford, assisted with the expense of typing the manuscript of the book, which task was undertaken with patience by the staff of Tonedo, Ltd., Oxford. Thanks are also due to the staffs of the libraries in which this work gestated, in particular the staffs of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Venerable Order of St. John’s Library, Clerkenwell, and the Assistant Librarian, Exeter College, Oxford. The evidence of the patience, friendliness, and skill of the staff of the University of Chicago Press is everywhere in the following pages.
Introduction
This book is not intended as a history of the crusades with English subtitles. Rather, it is a study of the effects of the crusade movement on the politics and society of medieval England and only looks from that perspective at the English, and occasionally Welsh, contributions to the crusading campaigns themselves. The stance is deliberately Western and domestic, for it is essential to the understanding of the significance of the crusades that their European and local dimension be appreciated, an aspect for long neglected by scholars and writers more interested in military expeditions, religious ideals, commerce, and European colonialism. The purpose is to show that the courtroom and council chamber no less than the battlefield bear witness to the importance of crusading, which was, as F. M. Powicke wrote over a generation ago, a political and economic function of society. The history of the crusades follows the contours not of any systematic theory or dogmatically organised canonical institution, but instead of changing devotional and secular aspirations and needs, of which crusading was as often a symptom as a cause.
The crusade meant different things to different people at different times; it both reflected and concentrated domestic developments in religious observance, military organisation, personal piety, social ambition, and financial administration in church and state. The aim here is to show that the crusade was an important aspect of English history in its own right, not an appendix or a distraction, a good story, a costly blunder of foreign policy, an aberration of religious hysteria, or an indulgence in vaunting ambition, although it was all of these as well. Participation in crusading exposed patterns of social, religious, and cultural behaviour often remote from the ideal itself. It refined popular and ecclesiastical attitudes to violence on the one hand and redemption on the other. It accelerated the development of techniques of raising money through extraordinary, compulsory national taxation and of recruitingmen by paid contract, which were both of central importance to the growing political and institutional cohesion of the late medieval state. Responses to the crusade demonstrate how people behaved in facing some of the more difficult aspects of life: money, self-esteem, social repute, landlords, the church, God, and salvation. Although emerging from and running parallel to older theories of just and holy war, crusade ideology and rhetoric supplied a distinct impetus towards the creation of a quasi-religious ideology of nationalism which sustained English politicians and people into the sixteenth century and beyond.
The subject also provides a case study relevant to the wider history of the crusade movement itself. England may not have been typical (where is?) but its experience is illuminating. The justification for this approach lies in the hundreds, if not thousands, of named and unnamed men and women whose commitment, in thought, word, pocket, or deed, has survived as testimony that the crusade was a part of their environment. However, one battleground familiar to historians of the crusade will be avoided. It is not part of this work to pass judgement on the motives of those actively or passively involved in crusading. For one thing, evidence of private feeling and emotions is almost wholly lacking. For another, an individual’s capacity to be moved by contradictory impulses is immeasurable; to allocate precise, let alone single, motives is to mislead. The only test of sincerity of interest in the crusade, or lack of it, is in the evidence of external actions and attitudes. It is not the purity of the enthusiasm of a person or group that matters so much as the importance of the crusade, popular or unpopular, exciting or mundane, for good or for ill, in their conscious lives. That is demonstrable and will be demonstrated.
A crusader, a crucesignatus or man signed with the cross, was someone who, with the approval of his local priest or other authoritative cleric, swore a vow to go to fight the enemies of the church, in the Holy Land or elsewhere. In public recognition and confirmation of his oath, the individual performed the liturgical rite of assuming the cross. This was often, perhaps usually, conducted as a sequel to that of receiving the scrip and staff of the pilgrimage. As a symbol of his having solemnly bound himself, the crusader wore on his garments a cloth cross, usually sewn onto the shoulder. Once the cross had been received, the crusader became, like the pilgrim, immune from various secular liabilities and enjoyed the spiritual privilege of full remission of confessed sins. Such, at least, was in crude outline the standard practice as it had developed by 1200. The reality was often less clear. Not all crucesignati fought, some in the twelfth century probably not even promising, let alone intending, to do so, and many never embarked on the journey, through accident or design. Conversely, it is unlikely that everybody who fought in wars regarded by participants and contemporaries as crusades were in fact crucesignati, although probably most were. In terms of individual motive, objective, and action, therefore, the crusade presents a diverse picture.
Equally, as a religious institution the crusade was never unitary or monolithic in practice. It was a particular form of war, justified, according to circumstance, by pope or private conscience as being holy, and associated, initially by Pope Urban II in 1095, with the pilgrimage to Jerusalem; as such it was a religious exercise. The crusade had twin ancestors, in the militant secular mentality and growing religiosity of the early medieval warrior aristocracy, and in the monastic radicalism of the church reform movements of the tenth and eleventh centuries. It was the papacy that first fused holy war (one which, if conducted in a pure state of mind, was meritorious in the sight of God) with pilgrimage (a penitential act designed specifically to gain the executant remission of the penalties of sin and a better chance of Eternal Life). It was also the papacy that subsequently manipulated this construct most extensively and inventively. However, the tension between the individual’s perception and official control was never resolved. Sustained by widely various religious and secular impulses and often barely reconcilable pressures of piety and social esteem, the institution of the crusade was only lent some legalistic cohesion by the thirteenth-century policies and legislation of popes and the legal codifications of canon lawyers. Alongside what could be called public or official crusades following the classical model of a campaign authorised by express papal edict, recruited by papally delegated agents, and conducted according to papal rules, there existed a continuing stream of private crusades, journeys by individuals or groups of pilgrims who had taken the cross outside the confines of any immediate general call to arms.
The failure of contemporaries clearly to distinguish between a pilgrimage and a crusade, ceremonially for about half a century and linguistically, in some cases, for four centuries after Urban II’s speech launching the First Crusade, was neither coincidental nor solely a function of academic unease at the implications of a war that earned the soldiers indulgences instead of demanding penance; it mirrored reality. As a pilgrimage-in-arms the crusade, true to its prototype, had Jerusalem as its central, most potent, and most important goal, to such an extent that in the majority of instances even the papacy equated the spiritual and temporal privileges attached to a number of campaigns it directed at targets other than the Holy Land with those granted to pilgrim-crusaders to Jerusalem. If the canonists and papal apologists are believed, formally this association was unnecessary, and a number of surviving rites for giving the cross do allow for destinations apart from the Holy Land; practically, however, for England the link was probably essential. English support for the crusade, at least in the first two centuries, was overwhelmingly concentrated upon the Holy Land enterprise.
If not unitary, neither was the crusade static. At the very time when ideology and practice were being constructed in the thirteenth century, the administration of the crusade took a new direction. Instead of depending upon active, personal participation, the spiritual benefits of the crusader, notably the indulgence, were made accessible to those who paid to redeem their crusader’s vow. Within a few generations the indulgence began to be sold outright without any intervention of a pilgrim-crusader vow. The later Middle Ages, although short of crusading victories, witnessed, partly in the wider involvement in the movement made possible by selling indulgences, the tenacity of the ideal and institution in a recognisable and comprehensible form. This period also saw a potentially more significant development in the cross-fertilisation of the crusade with a new and ultimately all-conquering, yet in some respects derivative, phenomenon, the national war. The religious and secular energies that had gone into the efforts to secure the Holy Land or fight other enemies of the church far from home were translated, or perhaps were returned, to defending the patria. The emotions that inspired the crusader were in many ways equivalent to those that encouraged the national warrior: duty to a righteous and respectable cause sanctified by lay authority and the church, against an enemy characterised as being hostile to the cherished and familiar community of the national or religious faithful (the paradigm of the twelfth-century “Saracen” or the twentieth-century “Hun”.
However, the triumph of nationalism should not be anticipated. Englishmen still took the cross in the late fifteenth century, and Tudor monarchs still found the vocabulary and the emotional and spiritual resonances of the crusade both intelligible and useful. As an institution of organised religion and a living intellectual force the crusade only ceased to occupy a place in English life in the late sixteenth century, a casualty of the religious and political reordering of social values during the Reformation. The time span of this book is, therefore, both deliberate and inevitable, embracing the history of the movement from its inception to its dissolution. The period, though long, possesses its own unity; Spanish recruits to the Armada in 1588 were offered crusade privileges explicitly associated with those granted to crusaders to the Holy Land. In England, the crusade was characteristic of the habitual, communal religion of medieval Catholicism, which derived its strength from the aspirations and interests of the faithful as much as from the dictates of the clergy. By 1600 the concerns of the faithful were being articulated in a different idiom, one alien to the crusade.
England was not left unmarked by the experience of half a millenium. Some of English history’s more colourful moments occured on crusade, most famously Richard I directing operations from his sickbed at Acre on the Third Crusade or Eleanor of Castille sucking the poison from the Lord Edward’s wound eighty years later. The crusade appeared in numerous late medieval folktales and legends, such as the stories of Robin Hood or the Lambton Worm. Reputedly the oldest public house in England, The Old Trip to Jerusalem at Nottingham, dating, it is alleged, from 1189, commemorates the extensive English involvement in the Third Crusade. More certainly, the memory of the crusading military orders lingers in the names of places they once owned; in London alone there are the examples of the Temple, St. John’s Wood, and Knightsbridge. Perhaps the crusade’s most indelible imprint was on the literary and public records of medieval England, but it also left a trace on the English language. As a synonym for a just cause vigorously pursued, the term crusade has been widely adopted in the English-speaking world at least since the eighteenth century, to apply to a variety of issues: military, as in General Eisenhower’s war memoir Crusade in Europe; social, as in Thomas Jefferson’s 1786 call for a “crusade against ignorance”; religious; and political. Occasionally, the adaptation displays knowledge of the word’s original implications. Thus in the London Spectator of 19 January 1985, a correspondent wrote, ““Crusading rhetoric is all very well if one really is on the march to Jerusalem—it begins to jar a bit if it’s clear that we’re not going any further than Southend.” This sentiment would not have disgraced a moralising preacher of six or seven centuries ago.
In view of all this, it is surprising that until recently there had been no study of England and the crusades. This book will be the first modem academic attempt at an account of the whole period. Yet the crusades in general have long held the historical and literary attention of British writers and, for just as long, they have been a subject of controversy. Since the sixteenth-century Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, the crusade has been analysed and judged. For Thomas Fuller, a moderate royalist Anglican in the mid-seventeenth century, as for Foxe, the “holy war” was tarnished with Catholicism: “Superstition not only tainted the rind, but rotted the core of this whole action.” The theme of “savage fanaticism” was expounded most dazzlingly by Edward Gibbon a century later and was placed by him in a general philosophical attack on the damaging effects of irrationality and religion. This atti-tude was famously summed up by David Hume in his History of Great Britain (1761), when he described the crusades as “the most signal and durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.” The Protestant analysis and its rationalist heir still find powerful modern echo in the work of Sir Steven Runciman, whose epic three volumes on the movement end with a resounding condemnation of the crusades as “nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”
Between Hume and Runciman the nineteenth-century British revival of medievalism in art, literature, and religion to a degree rehabilitated the image of the crusades, although not universally among the medieval enthusiasts. Walter Scott, for example, admired chivalry and set one of his novels, The Talisman, in the camp of the Third Crusade in Palestine, yet he was unhappy about the crusades and their associated intolerance; Ivanhoe exalts chivalry but casts the Knights Templar as hypocrites and villains. However, the tide of sentimental Gothicism proved irresistible. In works such as Kenelm Digby’s revised Broad Stone of Honour (1828—29) or Henry Stebbings’s History of Chivalry and the Crusades (1830), Catholic and Anglican apologists united in praising the crusades as the expression of virtues they hoped to instill in their readers. As an image of human greatness the crusade continued to inspire into the early twentieth century. The Oxford historian Emest Barker, in his brilliant essay on the crusades written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, chose ‘to give thanks for their memory” as examples of human devotion and daring.
Since the Second World War, judgement, let alone approval, of the crusades has been less prevalent among historians. The intellectual and emotional complexities of legitimate public violence and its outlined consequences for the sufferers, in particular the Jews, coupled with the retreat of European colonialism, have made crusading more approachable and less attractive to modern Western commentators. For some historians, the revival of a theology of Christian resistance and just war in Catholic South America, even though it lacks the authority of papal blessing, has revived an intellectual appreciation of the nature of crusading. More to the point, the range of sources for the crusaders’ circumstances and environment has widened to include not simply the records of their deeds on campaigns and in the East, but also evidence of their domestic situation and the society from which they came. This less polemical, more humdrum material prompts new lines of enquiry that integrate the crusades even more firmly into the study as well as the reality of medieval Europe.
A consequence of these fresh insights is to shift the emphasis of investigation towards the place occupied by the crusade in society and away from the mere recitation of the military history of the movement. Thus it is not only the traditional chronological frame that needs adjustment. The themes of this book are not those of the success or failure of individual crusades or of the movement in general. Instead they concern the extent to which crusading penetrated the ordinary workings of English life, in political discussions at the highest level, private behaviour, the common law, the land market, the organisation of armies, social mobility, and the fortunes of individual families and of whole communities, most notoriously that of English Jewry. It may be a matter of regret, or, alternatively, relief, that Evelyn Waugh never pursued his idea, expressed in 1935, of writing a history of England and the Holy Places; what follows does not attempt to repair his omission, for it will deal with the reverse of what interested the novelist, namely the effect of the Holy Places, and the crusading brand of militant Christianity, on England.' The scope is broadened to include such diverse issues as antiSemitism and the history of military uniforms, civil disobedience and the rise of nationalism. Yet even though this is inevitably a long book, there are gaps. Most notably, after the first chapter there has been no attempt to investigate in detail English migration and settlement in areas conquered by crusading forces, nor has there been space to include a full history of the military orders in England.
Although concentration is on the significance of the crusade in medieval England, wider perspectives may be gained on the nature and application of an ideal and habit that gripped imaginations for five hundred years. The crusades were important to England and to the rest of Europe. This book tries to indicate how, and to offer suggestions as to why, for centuries after the first summons in 1095, men and women contemplated leaving their homes at great personal cost and potential danger to travel to the furthest edge of the known world to capture or protect the Empty Tomb. As the crusade was a recension of Christian just and holy war, it is appropriate to begin the investigation with the genesis of that tradition and the origins of the crusade in England.
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