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  THE POST-MEDIEVAL REPUTATION OF CRUSADING

  In post-Reformation Europe, the disdain of Enlightenment thinkers, ignoring the brutality of their own era, did much to relegate the crusades to a distant and discredited past. Criticism of crusading during the medieval period had been sporadic and short-lived. It was usually provoked by the collapse of an expedition or when the target of a particular campaign, such as the Albigensian crusade, was especially controversial. With the advent of Protestantism, judgments on the Catholic holy war became far harsher. The failure of the majority of the crusades to the Holy Land made the movement a particularly tempting target and writers such as Thomas Fuller (who wrote c. 1639) launched vitriolic attacks on the immorality of the papacy as the promoter of such a worthless bloodbath. He also claimed that the Catholic Church had made an immense profit from the crusades: “Some say purgatory fire heateth the pope’s kitchen; they may add, the holy war filled his pot, if not paid for all of his second course.”1 Equally culpable were the gullible, sinful participants: “Many a whore was sent thither to find her virginity; many a murderer was enjoined to fight the holy war, to wash off the guilt of Christian blood by shedding the blood of Turks.” In any case, Fuller believed little of value had emerged from the medieval period at all: “One may wonder that the world should see most visions when it was blind; and that age, most barren in learning, should be most fruitful in revelation.”2

  William Robertson dismissed crusading as “a singular monument of human folly” in 1769, while several decades later Edward Gibbon argued that “the principle of the crusades was a savage fanaticism” which “had checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe.” In mid-eighteenth-century France, Voltaire described crusading as an outbreak of blind religious zealotry and gave it the ironic label “une maladie épidémique.” Taking the sickness metaphor further he insisted that the only thing that Europeans gained from the crusades was leprosy; he also decried the leaders’ arrogance and derided their military failings.3 In 1780 the German Wilhelm Friedrich Heller thundered: “Urban and Peter [the Hermit]! The corpses of two millions of men lie heavy on your graves and will fearfully summon you on the day of judgement.”4 In the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that the crusades were perceived as “a monument of folly and tyranny” and that claims to be the voice of God were “shrill and evil.”5

  Sir Steven Runciman echoed some of these damning judgments in his hugely influential three-volume A History of the Crusades, first published 1951–54 and still in print over fifty years later. By faith Runciman was a Calvinist, and by academic inclination a Byzantinist; two reasons why the crusades were never likely to emerge with much credit from his writings. The closing lines of his work convey a lacerating final judgment: “There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.”6 In more modern parlance Runciman described the crusades as “a tool of unscrupulous western imperialism.”7 Through sheer ubiquity Runciman’s work has done much to form attitudes to the crusades, in the English-speaking world at least. It has created the impression that a primitive idea, born of superstition and barbarity, was stone dead by the end of the medieval period and was worthy, at most, of a place in Romantic literature.

  In reality, across much of nineteenth-century Europe, particularly those areas that had remained Catholic, the concept and legacy of crusading provided rulers and policymakers with a remarkably accessible shorthand to a series of powerful ideas. The international nature of the medieval crusades gave these lands a collective or, if required, a selective past to draw upon. Self-evidently papal appeals, preaching tours, and offers of indulgences were, in most cases, inappropriate; the modern age highlighted the more secular principles of morality and heroism. Thus it was no longer the papacy that called for, or invoked, crusades but often royalist governments or particular groups—frequently nationalist in tone. As the historian Marc Bloch wrote: “Once an emotional chord has been struck, the limit between past and present is no longer regulated by a mathematically measurable chronology.”8 Crusading history was a rich store of ideals and images that could be made relevant and appropriate to a variety of contemporary events. Colonial expansion into North Africa and the Middle East, coupled with nascent nationalism in, for example, Italy, offered potent outlets for the revival of some form of crusading mentality.

  There are, of course, several fundamental differences between colonialism and crusading: the latter was originally conceived as defensive in nature, while colonial empires were quintessentially expansionist. Plus, while one can suggest that the crusades to the Holy Land were, in a broad sense, a form of religious colonization on behalf of the Catholic Church, a conventional understanding of colonialism with the organized dispatch of governing representatives and the passing of money and resources back to a homeland was, with the exception of the enclaves of the Italian trading states, absent during the medieval age. With nineteenth-century conquests coterminous with the energy of the emerging Romantic movement and the stimulus of an ongoing interest in the culture of the East (Orientalism), crusading—or a mutated subspecies of the genre—found a relevance that it had lacked for centuries. Contrary, therefore, to the impression offered by Gibbon, Robertson, et al., crusading was not dead but remained a vigorous and evolving phenomenon. This nineteenth-century reawakening is, in turn, the prime reason why the idea has carried over into the present and explains why the word and the concept continue to be used in both secular and political arenas today.

  THE CRUSADES IN LITERATURE

  The emergence of the Romantic movement did much to restore interest in and respect for the Middle Ages after the dismissive and condescending treatment it had received in the preceding period. Above all else, the writings of Sir Walter Scott proved crucial in generating enthusiasm for the medieval world and the crusades.9 The nineteenth century was an era when reading and literary culture expanded dramatically, and Scott’s exotic adventures sold in astounding numbers and were translated all across Europe. His perspective of the crusades was, broadly speaking, a positive one, yet as a Calvinist he strongly disapproved of their “intolerant zeal.”10 On the other hand, crusading presented a perfect stage for chivalric values to shine forth and it was through this prism that he forged an association with the glamour and the excitement of great deeds in the mysterious Orient. The crusades were the setting for four of his novels: Ivanhoe (1819), The Betrothed (1825), The Talisman (1825), and Count Robert of Paris (1831). In The Talisman he set Richard and Saladin up as opposites: the king of England was “a pattern of chivalry, with all its extravagant virtues, and its no less absurd errors;” he “showed all the cruelty and violence of an eastern sultan. Saladin, on the other hand, displayed the deep policy and prudence of a European sovereign.”11 As one recent commentator wrote, the sultan “was patently a modern liberal European gentleman, beside whom medieval westerners would always have made a poor showing.”12 In the story, Sir Kenneth of the Leopard, a (seemingly) poor Scottish crusader, befriended a Muslim emir; this man (eventually shown to be Saladin himself) came to the crusader camp and healed King Richard of sickness. Religious motives are not, however, entirely absent from The Talisman; Sir Kenneth considers “his good sword as his safest escort and devout thoughts his best companion.”13 Yet faith must compete with love and the Knight of the Leopard was transfixed by his feelings for the lady Edith: “A Christian soldier, a devoted lover, he could fear nothing, think of nothing, but his duty to heaven and his devoir to his lady.”14 The hero fell into disgrace when he failed to guard the royal standard, drawn away by a message supposedly sent by Edith. In Scott’s depiction of chivalric virtues, Sir Kenneth “thought of her as a deity” and believed that his “sole object in life was to fulfil her commands.”15 He narrowly escaped
execution when a furious Richard learned of his neglect but recovered his standing when, disguised as a Nubian slave, he saved the king’s life and revealed himself as the brother of the king of Scotland. Saladin then gave an amulet with healing powers (the talisman) to his Christian friend. The sultan shared in the chivalric values so important to Scott: “let us leave to mullahs and monks to dispute about the divinity of our faith, and speak on themes which belong to youthful warriors—upon battles, upon beautiful women, upon sharp swords, and upon bright armour.”16 A strong supporting cast included the master of the Templars—a brave man, but one anachronistically described by King Richard as “a worse pagan [than Saladin], an idolator, a devil-worshipper, a necromancer, who practises crimes the most dark and unnatural in the vaults and secret places of abomination and darkness.”17

  This intriguing, if historically challenged, plot was propelled by Scott’s narrative powers into a major bestseller. It was outstripped, however, by Ivanhoe, which, in turn, inspired a vast number of poets, artists, sculptors, and other authors. This was an international success with translations into French (where perhaps two million of Scott’s novels were sold by 1840), German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Its influence was immense: 290 Ivanhoe-derived dramas have been produced; in 1820, no fewer than sixteen versions of the story were staged across England, and various operas, including one by Rossini, were performed. A further manifestation of the cultural impact of Scott’s creation was the popularity of his characters in the costume balls held by the royalty of the day. In short, he had produced a compelling and noble tableau that the public devoured. Other artists and composers took crusading figures as their primary actors: Edvard Grieg composed Sigurd Jorsalfar (Sigurd the Crusader), after the Norwegian king who visited the Holy Land in 1110); crusade-themed operas by Verdi, Schubert, and Spohr were also performed across Europe during the nineteenth century.18

  The combination of European colonial power and an interest in the Orient prompted many to visit the Levant to see the world of the crusaders and the Holy Land for themselves; incidentally, this was a practice that caused Walter Scott to worry that people might fault the authenticity of his descriptions of the region given that he had not traveled to the East in person.19 Tellingly, perhaps, almost all of his settings in The Talisman feature desert landscapes, as if he was unaware of the more fertile districts. Travelers were as diverse as the writer Anthony Trollope, future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (later the author of the Young England Trilogy, subtitled “The New Crusader”), and Mark Twain. The latter wrote The Innocents Abroad (1869) about his travels, and in Jerusalem he viewed the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon (it can still be seen today, although closer inspection reveals it to be a thirteenth-century weapon), and he delighted in the “visions of romance” such an object stirred up. For him “no blade in Christendom wields such enchantment as this . . . it stirs within a man every memory of the holy wars.” The Prince of Wales visited Jerusalem in 1862, as did his sons two decades later. Another prominent royal, Prince Albert, made a more public contribution to the preservation of the crusading ideal with his commission to Baron Carlo Marochetti for a splendid equestrian statue of Richard the Lionheart. First shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851, a bronze replica was erected in front of the House of Commons in 1860 where it remains today, standing proudly outside the heart of the national government. This majestic figure, defiantly brandishing a sword, vividly conveys the nineteenth-century devotion to chivalry and pride in British achievements overseas, values much heralded in the literature of the day.

  THE CRUSADES IN THE AGE OF NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM

  Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria (1798–1802) marked a starting point for Europe’s revived interest in the history of the Near East. Ironically, it began with the capture of Malta from the surviving Knights Hospitaller, effectively ending their standing as an independent political body after centuries of power in the central Mediterranean. The literature produced at this time began to stir interest in Orientalism and thence the crusades. In 1806 the Institut de France offered a prize for an essay concerning “the influence of the crusades on the civil liberty of the peoples of Europe, upon their civilisation, and upon the progress of their culture, commerce and industry”—a series of categories that betrayed a far more enthusiastic view of the crusades than that of the Enlightenment age.

  The Romantic writer Chateaubriand visited the Levant and his works became enormously influential in France. To him the crusades represented an idealized Christian past: “In modern times, there are only two noble subjects for epic poetry: the crusades and the discovery of the new world.”20 Chateaubriand encouraged others to write about the subject. In post-Revolutionary France, Joseph Michaud’s Histoire des croisades set the tone by providing a ringing endorsement of the crusades as a source of glory and achievement for the French people and the French nation.21 Nineteen editions were published between 1808 and 1899 and there was a special children’s version too (the book was also translated into Russian, English, Italian, and German). Michaud was, however, careful to deplore the massacre at Jerusalem in 1099 and he was extremely guarded in his comments on the efficacy of miracles and visions. To him, the crusades had a positive aspect in that they created a sense of unity among the participants and they reduced internal warfare—both appropriate to his desires for contemporary France; they also stimulated chivalry and trade. Michaud regarded the crusades as especially “French,” although, as we saw earlier, in medieval times this was recognized in ethnic terms alone.22 The nationalistic pulse at the heart of Michaud’s viewpoint is revealed here: “If many scenes from this great epoch excite our imagination or our pity, how many events fill us with admiration and surprise! How many names made illustrious in this war are still today the pride of families and of the nation! What is most positive of the results of the First Crusade is the glory of our fathers, this glory which is also a real achievement for a nation. These great memories establish the existence of peoples as well as that of families, and are, in this respect, the noblest source of patriotism.”23 Saint Louis loomed large in Michaud’s thoughts too. He wrote: “the memory of the saint-king has been, for me, like a spirit encouraging the pilgrims to set out for Palestine.”24

  King Charles X (1825–30) highlighted several traditions from the medieval age; for example, he chose to be crowned in Rheims Cathedral, thereby emulating the Capetian crusading monarchs; he also identified himself particularly closely with the crusader-saint Louis IX. In 1830 Charles initiated an invasion of Algeria and the leader of the campaign, General Bourmont, explicitly recalled the memory of Saint Louis as he set out on his new crusade. Charles had ordered the expedition to help generate a sense of national unity, as well as to reduce the threat of piracy in the Mediterranean. He claimed that the enterprise was “for the benefit of Christianity,” although Bourmont’s capture of Algiers on July 3, 1830, failed to save Charles’s line from defeat by King Louis-Philippe and the Orléans dynasty.

  While Louis-Philippe’s continued involvement in North Africa had more of an imperialist hue compared to the actions of his predecessor, the age of the crusades remained prominent in his thinking. The king’s desire to recall a magnificent past—and to legitimize the present regime—was most dramatically revealed by his commission of a historical museum for the royal palace at Versailles.25 This was an attempt to reconcile the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic eras with the July Monarchy and, in Louis-Philippe’s words, to assimilate “all the glories of France” in one place. The crusades were designated the first stage of French history: as a formative influence on “national” unity and, with their purportedly positive effect on the peoples of the East, they dovetailed well with the contemporary political climate. Five entire rooms were devoted to the crusades and over 120 pictures were commissioned, collected, and displayed, including Émile Signol’s Capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders on 15 July 1099, Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse’s Louis VII Taking the Banner of the Cross
for the Second Crusade at Saint-Denis, 11 June 1147, and Eugène Delacroix’s Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, 12 April 1204 (now in the Louvre Museum, Paris), along with works closely connected to the ongoing North African wars, such as The Death of St Louis Before Tunis on 25 August 1270; other rooms at Versailles included images of the conflict in Algeria, thereby memorializing these events in the national consciousness.26

  One visitor to these latter rooms gave voice to this sense of continuity: “We there find again, after an interval of 500 years, the French nation fertilising with its blood the burning plains studded with the tents of Islam. These are the heirs of Charles Martel, Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert Guiscard and Philip Augustus, resuming the unfinished labours of their ancestors. Missionaries and warriors, they every day extend the boundaries of Christendom.”27 The rooms also displayed the coats of arms of families with crusading ancestors. When the gallery opened 316 arms were shown, but so great was the perceived importance of such a heritage that protests from families not included caused it to close within a year. People “found” documents attesting to their lineage and in 1843 the rooms reopened with a further sixty-two families represented. In fact, a trio of master forgers had set up a lucrative business to generate fully convincing “medieval” charters, often complete with seals, to sate the demands of those desperate to be honored. The full extent of these forgeries was only revealed in 1956, understandably a matter of genuine dismay to some of the surviving families.28 While the July Monarchy fell in 1848, the impetus provided by Louis-Philippe and his Bourbonist predecessor, Charles X, caused crusading to remain prominent in the mind-set of French efforts overseas for decades to come.