Download PDF | Megan Cassidy-Welch - War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade-Penn State University Press (2009).
210 Pages
Introduction
Jacques de Vitry, preacher of the Crusades, bishop of Acre, and eventually cardinal bishop of Tusculum, wrote several leters while accompanying the armies of the Fifh Crusade to Egypt. An eyewitness to the progress, brief triumph, and eventual failure of the Crusade, Jacques was one of the campaign’s most important reporters. With Oliver of Paderborn (schoolmaster and ultimately bishop of Cologne), Jacques communicated news from the batlefront in Egypt, wrote of victory, and explained defeat. He wrote six letters while on Crusade, four of which were composed and sent from Egypt during and afer the siege of Damieta. Tese leters reported the military progress of the Crusade and simultaneously reassured the recipients that the Egyptian campaign was God’s work in action. In so doing, Jacques’s leters sought to locate the action of war in a longer story of biblical history and divine will. Tis was a story that was very familiar to his readers and to Crusade participants.
At the same time, Jacques’s leters commemorated fallen crusaders, naming them as pious instruments of God and sometimes martyrs, men who had “departed from us in this exile and joined the Lord in happiness.” Te leters also provided Jacques with an opportunity to communicate something of his own experience at war, although as a cleric and not a soldier. He inserted tantalizing glimpses of his subjective emotional state at various points throughout the leters, rarely discursively but still clearly enshrining his own presence in the history of this most promising but ultimately disappointing Crusade. Jacques de Vitry’s Crusade leters are some of the many sources for the Fifh Crusade in which remembering is prominent. As the above quotes from Jacques’s leters indicate, remembering took a number of shapes for medieval people—eschatological, collective, and individual.
Crusading itself was steeped in the language of memory by the time of the Fifh Crusade: indeed, from the capture of Jerusalem by the armies of the First Crusade in 1099, participants in the subsequent crusading movements increasingly thought of their actions in ways that recalled events of past Crusades and the events of biblical history. Tey understood holy war as vengeance for the loss of Christ’s inheritance, and they saw themselves more and more as engaging in a tradition undertaken previously by their families, communities, and regions. Crusading in the early thirteenth century was not only an act of love, as Jonathan Riley-Smith famously asserted, but an act of remembrance.1 Remembrance was articulated in Christian terms and in familial terms, as a collective endeavor and as an individual activity. Remembrance was intrinsic to motivating, justifying, and defning crusading. By the time Jacques was writing his leters home from the Fifh Crusade, memorial and commemorative ideas had come to be central to all forms of communicating the events and the ideas of the Crusade. Tis book asks two main questions: Why was remembering war so important in the early thirteenth century, and what purposes did remembrance serve? As will become clear in what follows, remembering became integrated into the war experience in diferent and new ways at this time, both during and afer the confict.
This was due to the particular and recent history of the Crusades, which stimulated a renewed interest in the articulation and communication of remembrance. Te overall argument of the book is that crusading possessed a unique temporal and spatial logic in which remembering was central. Crusading asked its participants (whether combatants or otherwise) to look both forward and backward in time for the justification and meaning of their spiritual and military actions in the present. Remembering the past both stimulated action and shaped future understandings of the triumphs and biter defeats of the Crusade. In the case of the Fifh Crusade, which took place afer a series of challenging losses in a number of theaters of crusading warfare and ultimately involved loss itself, remembrance was a signifcant means of explaining and expressing the sometimes devastating nature of military activity while communicating ongoing optimism about the eschatological efcacy of crusading itself.
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