Download PDF | Mike Horswell, Jonathan Phillips - Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century_ Engaging the Crusades, Volume One-Routledge (2018).
149 Pages
Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century
Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes which offer windows into a newly emerging field of historical study: the memory and legacy of the crusades. Together these volumes examine the reasons behind the enduring resonance of the crusades and present the memory of crusading in the modern period as a productive, exciting and much needed area of investigation. Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century explores the ways in which the crusades have been used in the last two centuries, including the varying deployment of crusading rhetoric and imagery in both the East and the West. It considers the scope and impact of crusading memory from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, engaging with nineteenth-century British lending libraries, literary uses of crusading tales, wartime postcard propaganda, memories of Saladin and crusades in the Near East and the works of modern crusade historians. Demonstrating the breadth of material encompassed by this subject and offering methodological suggestions for continuing its progress, Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century is essential reading for modern historians, military historians and historians of memory and medievalism.
Mike Horswell recently completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is a Visiting Lecturer. His book – The Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, c.1825–1945 – was published in early 2018; he is currently researching and writing about the memory and use of the crusades in the modern era.
Jonathan Phillips is Professor of the History of the Crusades at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on the history of the medieval crusades, including works on the Second and Fourth Crusades, and is the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Crusades. His next book, to be published in 2019, is on the life and legacy of Saladin.
Contributors
Felix Hinz is Professor of Politics, History and Didactics at the University of Education in Freiburg im Breisgau who has published on the use of the crusades in German, French and English literature – Mythos Kreuzzüge (2014). His interests include concepts and reception of ‘Holy War’ through the ages as well as the processes of historical narration.
Mike Horswell recently completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is a Visiting Lecturer. His book – The Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, c. 1825–1945 – was published in early 2018; he is currently researching and writing about the memory and use of the crusades in the modern era.
Jonathan Phillips is Professor of the History of the Crusades at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on the history of the medieval crusades, including works on the Second and Fourth Crusades, and is the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Crusades. His next book, to be published in 2019, is on the life and legacy of Saladin.
Elizabeth Siberryhas published many articles and chapters on nineteenthand twentieth-century images of the crusades in Britain, most notably in her book The New Crusaders (2000). Her current research examines how families memorialised the crusades and crusading ancestors through legend, art and architecture.
Kristin Skottki is Junior Professor of Medieval History at the University of Bayreuth. She has mainly published on the medieval and modern historiography of the First Crusade, as in her monograph Christen, Muslime und der Erste Kreuzzug (2015). Her current research focuses on late medieval piety and medievalism.
Series introduction
The crusades and ideas of crusading have long held a place in our collective imaginations. To a nineteenth-century Frenchman it was part of his heritage; to a twenty-first-century US president, it was an image to conjure in his wish to defeat al-Qaeda. To a nineteenth-century Egyptian facing the Emperor Napoleon, the crusaders had simply come back again after 550 years; to a twentieth-century Egyptian president, Saladin’s achievements were a template for action. To a Norwegian right-wing extremist, the Knights Templar offered an example of striving against the forces of Islam; to the propagandists of the so-called Islamic State (IS/ISIL/ISIS), the crusades were another expression of Western religious expansionism which had never ended.1 Crusading, then, has proven to possess an enduring legacy.
This series of essays aims both to draw together and to give substance to a newly emerging field of historical study: the memory and the legacy of the crusades. The crusades – as illustrated by the breadth of examples above – have remained a potent concept, although their meaning has been contested. This is a topic that stretches back down the centuries and takes many different forms. The question overarching the field is this: how and why has an idea created in the late eleventh century resonated down the ages and, at times, echoed so powerfully?2 These volumes seek to examine the means by which this happened and to provide illustrations of the many, varied forms in which the memory and the legacy of the crusades have persisted and been employed. Moreover, perceptions of what constituted the crusades have varied. Over 900 years of history writing on the crusades has seen changing interpretations of what the medieval expeditions were, what motivated the crusaders, what the effects of the crusades were, when they ended and – not least – what counted as crusading. Crusade historiography constitutes an existing field of study in itself, but one which cannot be divorced from broader assessments of how crusading has been variously understood.3 Thus, considerations of academic perspectives on the crusades find a home here alongside studies which contextualise popular perceptions and draw connections between the two.
At root, this is a matter of cultural memory, and in that sense, all of these studies are indebted, consciously or not, to memory studies. Paul Connerton argued that ‘concerning social memory in particular, we may note that images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order.’ He notes that ‘our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past […] past factors tend to influence, or distort, our experience of the present’.4 Collective memory of any given event, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs proposed, could be heterogeneous across a society as there would be the potential for as many different uses or needs as there were subgroups within that society – it is more accurate therefore to talk of memories. 5 ‘[T]he remembered past,’ Geoffrey Cubitt has concluded, ‘is in practice, always multiple and contestable, mutable and elusive.’6 In these ways, memories of the crusades can be understood to be flexible and depend for their meaning on the societies in which they have been embodied. This series sits at the interface between memory, medievalism and crusade studies.7 We can explore the subject through an enormous range of evidence. Relevant material is found in literature, educational works, visual sources, academic historiography, drama, music and opera, as well as through political and religious texts, ceremonies and performances. Crusading has been used at popular, mass-culture levels, as well as in carefully framed ideological moments (these are, of course, not mutually exclusive). It can also be employed to inspire, enflame, entertain, educate, misinform and provoke. The studies included, therefore, will address a wide range of events, groups, individuals and contexts, whilst discovering and evaluating perceptions and uses of the crusades.
This project builds on foundations established by (among others) Adam Knobler, Elizabeth Siberry, Emmanuel Sivan and Jonathan Riley-Smith, as well as a plethora of specific works which often address material on the memory of the crusades sidelong.8 What we have here is a subject that draws together previously disparate studies and gives a broader cultural, historical and geographical context to such work. The Engaging the Crusades volumes mark the emergence of an important new subject area. As we have discovered, this is a topic that continues to grow as scholars from across the globe realise their work can feed into this project.9 Since our conference in September 2015 further areas of interest have emerged: the memory of the crusades in the Spanish conquest of South America, the legacy of the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (1204) in early modern and modern Greece, the image of Saladin in Southeast Asia, family memories of crusading ancestors, the re-inscription of Iraqi textbooks after the Gulf War and representations of crusading in computer games, to name but a few. For all the wrong reasons (the emergence of IS being the most troubling, but also, for example, the presence of individuals dressed as crusaders in alt-right rallies in Europe) the memory and the legacy of the crusades are topical issues to address. What we hope to offer here is a forum to enable scholarly research into this subject to cohere and to blossom.
Volume one: perceptions of the crusades from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century Some historians regard Napoleon’s conquest of the crusading order of the Knights of Saint John on Malta (1798) as an end point for crusading. This is, however, only a marker of convenience. What becomes strikingly apparent from around the same time onwards is a resurgence and revival in the use of crusade ideas in both Western Europe and the Near East. European expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to a greater fascination with the lands and history of the crusades alongside material involvement in the form of consular presence, archaeological exploration, tourism, pilgrimage, heritage preservation and direct control.10
As European power and influence in the Mediterranean increased, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Russia and Spain, for example, all harked back to a crusading past. As the Crimean War demonstrated, all antagonists flexed ideological muscles in the context of imperial competition and vying for power and drew on crusading rhetoric.11 This came during the development and emergence of the distinct, professional disciplines of history and archaeology, which fed off and fuelled this increased contact. Crusading proved extremely flexible in accommodating the requirements of the nation-builders of Europe, and beyond, whether legitimising particular regimes, serving as a ‘golden age’ to hark back to or as the background and landscape for the creation of national heroes.
Crusading pasts, real or imagined, continued to occupy central places in European national self-imaginings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Associating modern nations with medieval figures asserted some form of continuity between medieval and modern ages. Moreover, ‘The virtues these crusaders represented’, Christopher Tyerman has observed, ‘were of generalised national spirit not precise political arrangements. Nonetheless, such reimagining securely incorporated the crusades into national histories and public consciousness.’12 From the perspective of the modern Near East, a blend of factors recommended crusading parallelism. First of all, Western aggression and invasions, coupled with loss of life, land and freedom, appeared to be repeating themselves. Secondly, and more importantly, the medieval crusades were defeated. Saladin drew together the Muslim Near East and in 1187 recovered the holy city of Jerusalem for Islam and for the rulers of al Sham; just over 100 years later, the Christians were finally ejected.
This was a narrative to inspire – one that could persistently be seen as relevant and topical. To pit West versus East and then to run a sequence from the medieval crusades through to the colonial age, the Mandate era and into Zionism as well, can form a compelling argument to some. Furthermore, during the nineteenth century this was a narrative which the West did much to encourage through its own self-image as treading in the footsteps of their crusading ancestors, something that has not entirely disappeared today. The Western presence in the Mediterranean also generated a whole new series of challenges for the people of the Near East. These concerned, for example, the advent of technology or relationships between community structures. In seeking responses to these questions, some of which included Western-derived influences such as nationalism, people looked to history. In the circumstances, they did not have to look far for a model to rally around: Saladin.13
The Kurdish hero was adopted (and adapted) by Arab Nationalists in the early twentieth century, by Gamal Nasser in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and by both Hafez and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, as well as being more broadly feted in school books and popular culture throughout the last two centuries. More recently, the crusades have been employed as a symbol of continuous Western aggression by both Osama bin Laden and IS. This volume will provide an initial window into the ways in which the crusades have been used in the last two centuries, taking seriously the popular penumbra of crusading memory and considering its shape, scope and impact from the nineteenth into the twentieth century.
The chapters here engage with varying uses of crusading rhetoric and imagery in both East and West, from Sir Walter Scott to modern crusade historians, in order to indicate both the breadth of material the topic can encompass and different methodological approaches. Elizabeth Siberry’s pathfinding chapter builds on her previous investigations of crusading memory by considering ways in which it is possible to uncover what the Victorians were reading about the crusades; it represents an important provocation to integrate studies of cultural reception into evaluations of how crusading was understood. Mike Horswell’s chapter seeks to bring together examples of juvenile literature written by British author-educators and establish how they were promoting Victorian values through crusading stories. In examining German postcards printed during the First World War, Felix Hinz highlights the German uses of holy war imagery and crusading rhetoric to frame the conflict and imagine the Kaiser.
Jonathan Phillips’ chapter overturns the assumption – long held by crusade scholars – that the East had forgotten the crusades as he shines a light on the long memory of Saladin and the crusades between 1880 and 1925. Finally, contributing to the ongoing discussions among crusade historians, Kristin Skottki reflects on historiographical traditions and how the perceptions and assumptions of historical practitioners can shade their work. Crusading, then, has had a special resonance and power. The longevity and diversity of crusading – while maintained at different levels of intensity between the West and the Near East – kept the idea, or the memory of the idea, ‘in play’. This series seeks to elucidate how, where and why this has, and continues to, take place.
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