A History of the Crusades Read online

  THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES

  THE EDITOR

  JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge.

  THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES

  EDITED BY

  JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York

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  The text of this volume first published 1995 in

  The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades

  First issued as The Oxford History of the Crusades 1999

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  ISBN 0–19–285364–3

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by

  Cambrian Typesetters, Frimley, Surrey

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  PREFACE

  The inclusion of the subject of the crusades in this series of Oxford histories and the fact that only one of the contributors is from outside Britain provide an opportunity to reflect upon the phenomenal rise in the number of British crusade scholars since the early 1950s, when there cannot have been more than half a dozen, only two of whom were historians, teaching in the universities. By 1990 twenty-nine history departments in British universities and colleges had members of the Society for theStudy of the Crusades on their staff. The subject’s strength in British academic circles probably owes most to a general public interest, a fascination with the Near East which has a long history, the reputation of St John Ambulance, which associates itself with the medieval Knights Hospitallers, and the continuing success of Sir Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades .

  This volume reflects the recent developments in crusade historiography which are described in Chapter 1. It covers crusading in many different theatres of war. The concepts of apologists, propagandists, song-writers, and poets, and the perceptions and motives of the crusaders themselves are described, as are the emotional and intellectual reactions of the Muslims to Christian holy war. The institutional developments—legal, financial, and structural—which were necessary to the movement’s survival are analysed. Several chapters are devoted to the western settlements established in the eastern Mediterranean region in the wake of the crusades, to the remarkable art and architecture associated with them, and to the military orders. The subject of the later crusades, including the history of the military orders from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, is given the attention it deserves. And the first steps are taken on to a field that is as yet hardly explored, the survival of the ideas and images of crusading into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

  Croxton, Cambridgeshire

  April, 1994

  CONTENTS

  LIST OF PLATES

  LIST OF MAPS

  1. The Crusading Movement and Historians

  JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

  2. Origins

  MARCUS BULL

  3. The Crusading Movement, 1096–1274

  SIMON LLOYD

  4. The State of Mind of Crusaders to the East, 1095–1300

  JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

  5. Songs

  MICHAEL ROUTLEDGE

  6. The Latin East, 1098–1291

  JONATHAN PHILLIPS

  7. Art in the Latin East, 1098–1291

  JAROSLAV FOLDA

  8. Architecture in the Latin East, 1098–1571

  DENYS PRINGLE

  9. The Military Orders, 1120–1312

  ALAN FOREY

  10. Islam and the Crusades, 1096–1699

  ROBERT IRWIN

  11. The Crusading Movement, 1274–1700

  NORMAN HOUSLEY

  12. The Latin East, 1291–1669

  PETER EDBURY

  13. The Military Orders, 1312–1798

  ANTHONY LUTTRELL

  14. Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

  ELIZABETH SIBERRY

  15. Revival and Survival

  JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

  CHRONOLOGY

  FURTHER READING

  INDEX

  LIST OF PLATES

  1. Knight in twelfth-century relief

  Abbey of Notre-Dame-de-la-Règle, Limoges. Photothèque du Musée. Photo M. Marcheix

  2. Moissac, south-western France

  © Jean Dieuzaide

  3. Drawing from the Luttrell Psalter

  British Library [Add Ms 42130 fo. 82]

  4. Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: twelfth-century ground plan

  Österreichische Nationalbiblothek [NB 24376]

  5. Divine assistance

  Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

  6. Taking the cross

  Bibliothèque Municipale de Besançon

  7. Cathedral of Jubayl

  A. F. Kersting

  8. Castle of Segura de la Sierra, Andalusia

  MAS, Barcelona

  9. Temple church in London

  Pitkin Pictorials Ltd.

  10. Illustration from treatise on chess by Alfonso X of Castile

  MAS, Barcelona

  11. Contemporary pen drawing of a Hussite wagon fortress

  British Library [AC 801/9 TabIV]

  12. Battle of Lepanto, 1571

  National Maritime Museum, London [BHC 0261]

  13. Fourteenth-century water mill, Danzig: elevation and plan

  Niels von Holst, ‘Der Deutsche Ritterordern und Siene Bauten’, Gebr Mann Verlag, Berlin, 1981

  14. Ruins of castle and octagonal tower, Weissenstein

  Bildarchiv Foto Marburg [152.496]

  15. Crusader’s vigil, Lessing

  Städesches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main, photo © Ursula Edelmann

  16. Teutonic knights

  Ridderlijke Duitsche Orde, Balije van Utrecht, photo by S. J. Ramkers

  LIST OF MAPS

  Map 1. Europe and the Near East before c. 1300

  Map 2. Europe and the Near East after c. 1300

  Map 3. The Latin East

  Map 4. The Aegean Region

  Map 5. The Baltic Region

 
Map 6. Spain and North Africa

  1

  The Crusading Movement and Historians

  JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

  In November 1095 a church council was meeting in Clermont under the chairmanship of Pope Urban II. On the 27th, with the council coming to an end, the churchmen, together with some lay people mostly from the countryside around, assembled in a field outside the town and the pope preached them a sermon in which he called on Frankish knights to vow to march to the East with the twin aims of freeing Christians from the yoke of Islamic rule and liberating the tomb of Christ, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, from Muslim control. As soon as he had finished Adhémar of Monteil, the bishop of Le Puy who was to be appointed Urban’s representative on the expedition, came forward and was the first to take the cross, while the crowd called out ‘God wills it!’ Although the eyewitness accounts of this assembly and the pope’s sermon were written later and were coloured by the triumph that was to follow, they give the impression of a piece of deliberate theatre—a daring one, given the risk involved in organizing an out-of-doors event at the start of winter—in which the actions of the leading players and the acclamation of the crowd had been worked out in advance.

  The crusading movement had begun in the melodramatic fashion which was to be typical of it thereafter. Coming himself from the class he wished to arouse, the pope must have known how to play on the emotions of armsbearers. Now about 60 years old, he had embarked on a year-long journey through southern and central France. The summoning of an expedition to the aid of the Byzantine empire had probably been in his mind for several years and it had been aired at a council held at Piacenza in March which had heard an appeal from the Byzantine (Greek) emperor Alexius for aid against the Turks, who for over two decades had been sweeping through Asia Minor and had almost reached the Bosphorus. Soon after Urban had entered French territory he must have discussed his plans with Adhémar of Le Puy and with Raymond of St Gilles, the count of Toulouse, whom he wanted as military leader. These meetings cannot have been confidential and there may have been some truth in a tradition in Burgundy that ‘the first vows to go on the way to Jerusalem’ were made at a council of thirty-six bishops which had met at Autun earlier in 1095. Another tradition was that the wandering evangelist Peter the Hermit was already proposing something similar to the crusade before it was preached at Clermont. Peter was congenitally boastful and the stories of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the appeal to him by the patriarch, his vision of Christ, and his interview with the pope in Italy at which he persuaded Urban to summon men to Jerusalem’s aid seem to have originated in Lorraine, not far from the abbey of Neumoustier where he lived once the crusade was over. But at the very least there must have been a lot of talk and some preliminary planning in advance of the pope’s arrival at Clermont.

  Urban seems to have followed up his proclamation by preaching the cross wherever he went in France. By the following spring crusaders were assembling for what came to be known as the First Crusade (1096–1102), the climax of which was the capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, an achievement made all the greater for contemporaries by the catastrophic defeat by the Turks in Asia Minor two years later of the armies of a third wave of crusaders.

  Jerusalem could not be held in isolation and its capture inevitably led to the establishment of western settlements in the Levant (which are known collectively as the Latin East). These soon came under pressure and military expeditions had to be organized, and military orders were founded, to assist them.

  Crusades were in action in 1107–8—although this was diverted into a preliminary and disastrous invasion of the Byzantine empire—1120–5, 1128–9, 1139–40, and 1147–9; the last of these came to be known as the Second Crusade. Meanwhile, the movement had been extended to Spain, the reconquest of which from the Moors had already been equated with the liberation of Jerusalem by Pope Urban II. Crusades in the peninsula were preached in 1114, 1118, and 1122, when Pope Calixtus II proposed a war on two fronts with armed forces serving concurrently in Spain and in the East. Calixtus’s initiative was developed by Pope Eugenius III in 1147 when he authorized a crusade against the Wends across the northeastern German frontier at the same time as crusaders were being called to serve in Spain and Asia. The Second Crusade was a fiasco, and although there were three further crusades in Spain before 1187, one in northern Europe, and a few expeditions, notably that of 1177, to Palestine, the thirty years that followed were in many ways the lowest point the movement reached before the fifteenth century.

  Everything changed, however, with the consternation that swept Europe at the news of the Muslim victory at Hattin, and the loss of Jerusalem and nearly all of Palestine to Saladin in 1187. The Third Crusade (1189–92) and the German Crusade (1197–8) recovered most of the coast, ensuring the survival of the Latin settlements for the time being, and enthusiasm was to be found at every level of society throughout the thirteenth century. Feelings among the masses were expressed in the Children’s Crusade (1212) and the Crusade of the Shepherds (1251), while military forces sailed to the East in 1202–4 (the Fourth Crusade, diverted to Constantinople, which the crusaders took, together with much of Greece), 1217–29 (the Fifth Crusade, which ended with the recovery of Jerusalem by treaty by the excommunicated Emperor Frederick II), 1239–41, 1248–54 (the first crusade of King Louis IX of France, inspired by the loss of Jerusalem in 1244), 1269–72 (Louis’s second crusade) and 1287–90; crusading armies invaded Egypt in 1218 and 1249, and Tunisia in 1270.

  There was also a renewal of activity in Spain between 1187 and 1260, when the crusade was briefly extended to Africa; the highpoints were the victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) and the conquests of Valencia (1232–53), Córdoba (1236) and Seville (1248). Crusading in Spain resumed in the early fourteenth century and again in 1482–92, after which, with Granada and the entire Iberian peninsula in Christian hands, it spilled into North Africa and led to the establishment of beachheads as far east as Tripoli. In the Baltic region crusades were launched in support of Christian missions in Livonia between 1193 and 1230, after which the Teutonic Knights took over, and in Prussia, where the Teutonic Knights ran a ‘perpetual crusade’ from 1245 until early in the fifteenth century. Crusades were also waged in Estonia, Finland, and Poland. From 1199 onwards crusades were fought against political opponents of the papacy in Italy—they were endemic between 1255 and 1378—Germany, and Aragon, while the Papal Schism generated crusades in Flanders and Spain in the 1380s. The first crusade against heretics, the Albigensian Crusade, was in action in south-western France between 1209 and 1229; others were waged in Bosnia, Germany, Italy, and Bohemia, especially against the Hussites between 1420 and 1431. Crusades were also launched in 1231 and 1239 against the Greeks, who were trying to recover Constantinople; against the Mongols from 1241 onwards; against the Orthodox Russians in northern Europe from the thirteenth century and against the Protestant English in the sixteenth (the Armada of 1588).

  But the chief field of activity remained the East. The loss of Acre and the last Christian toeholds in Palestine and Syria in 1291 gave rise to another wave of enthusiasm, finding expression in popular crusades in 1309 and 1320. Expeditions sailed regularly to the eastern Mediterranean region. One sent to Mahdia in North Africa in 1390 was followed, as the threat to Europe from the Ottoman Turks grew, by disastrous forays into the Balkans, the Crusades of Nicopolis (1396) and of Varna (1444), although the Turkish advance was temporarily halted at Belgrade in 1456. In 1332 a new expression of the movement—an alliance of interested powers in a crusade league—came into existence. There were to be many of these leagues, the most successful of which were those which took Smyrna in 1344, won the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and recovered much of the Balkans from the Ottomans between 1684 and 1697, although there were also conventional crusades to North Africa in 1535, 1541, and 1578. Crusading, however, was petering out from the late sixteenth century, although the Hospital of St John still functioned as a military order in its order-state of Malta until
that island fell to Napoleon in 1798.

  The crusading movement had involved every country in Europe, touching almost every area of life—the Church and religious thought, politics, the economy, and society—as well as generating its own literature. It had an enduring influence on the history of the western Islamic world and the Baltic region. Although until comparatively recently it tended to be thought of as something exotic and peripheral, it has never lacked historians. The foundations of modern scholarship were laid in the second half of the nineteenth century. This golden age, which ended with the outbreak of the First World War, was followed by a period of consolidation; indeed, the multi-volume histories of Steven Runciman and the American team of scholars led by Kenneth Setton (commonly known as the Wisconsin History), which had appeared or had begun to appear by the middle 1950s, could only have been planned in a relatively stable environment.

  By the early 1950s, however, there were signs that the pace of crusade history was beginning to quicken again. The first signs of renewed vigour came in the study of the Latin East, which a French historian, Jean Richard, and an Israeli, Joshua Prawer, set alight. Richard and Prawer broke new ground in the study of institutions, bringing to it a wide knowledge of developments outside the Latin East, a concern for the source material, particularly the charters and laws, and an intelligent analysis which put it a long way above the rather pedestrian work that had mostly gone before. But although in the long run this may have been their greatest achievement, much more excitement was generated at the time by another aspect of their research. A problem faced by all historians of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the most significant of the settlements, related to the most important surviving source material, the Assises de Jérusalem, a collection of works of jurisprudence written in the thirteenth century, which portrayed a state in which a kind of ‘pure’ feudalism—if there could ever have been such a thing— had been imposed at the time of settlement around 1100 and had survived, archaic and fossilized, for a century and a half. In the 1920s a French scholar called Maurice Grandclaude had sifted through the Assises, extracting from them references to laws which he thought could be dated to the twelfth century. His conclusions had been almost entirely ignored, but it was on the basis of the evidence he had brought to light that Richard and Prawer rewrote the history of Jerusalem, because it became apparent that the ossified feudal state of the thirteenth-century law-books did not accord with the reality of the twelfth century, nor, it transpired, with that of the thirteenth century either. The law-books increasingly looked less like authorities and more like intelligent but tendentious political tracts, written by partisans in a constitutional battle which had been raging in Palestine in the decades before they were composed. And the kingdom of Jerusalem began to look more ‘normal’, although of course with its own peculiarities, and subject to political and constitutional developments not unlike those elsewhere.