Before I get into the books you have selected, could you explain what the crusades were, intellectually, socially, and in terms of warfare? Where did the idea of fighting for the god of love come from?
defining crossovers is a very difficult thing to do. I was at a conference where a room full of distinguished medievalists tried to come up with a working definition that everyone could accept. after several useless hours, we gave up in disarray. However, the truth is that when we think of the Crusades, what we are really imagining is the 200 years between 1095 and 1291. This covers the period since Westerners first took up arms to “liberate” the Holy Land. , until they were finally kicked out of it forever.
You are reading: Books on the crusades
That said, however, there was much more to the movement than that. The Crusade is often understood as something that only took place in the Middle East. in fact, however, there were crusades everywhere against other “enemies of christ.” This included against Muslims, again, in Spain and North Africa. there were also crusades against the pagans in the Baltic. but the crusade was also used within the Latin West itself, both against heretics and political opponents of the papacy. In short: the Crusades quickly ceased to be something that only happened in the fringes, and instead became a key feature of how Latin Christianity was defined during the central Middle Ages.
All of this begs the question of how far this could be justified, how far one could fight for a god of love, peace and forgiveness. The idea that Christianity should not involve violence, war, and bloodshed is, of course, very old. but in practice, however, that prohibition has been observed mainly in non-compliance. very soon a distinction was made between the love and forgiveness with which personal adversaries should be treated and those matters that had to do with politics and the state. and in that sphere, force may well be necessary to preserve a public good.
this brings us to the old augustine idea of a “just war”. according to the saint, a just war must be defensive (that is, it must be fought to recover lawful possessions); it must be proclaimed by a legitimate authority, such as the pope; and it must also be fought with the right intention by all participants. with the exception, perhaps, of the last, the crusade was felt to meet all of these stipulations—and added another: the need to defend the church and the faith. in this way, then, the crusade could be considered as a particular type of “holy war”, and therefore as an irreproachable moral desideratum.
It is the pope who claims the right to declare a crusade. is that correct?
yes, and, in fact, this is not much questioned. This might bring us back to the contentious question of definition, but it’s probably safe to say that a holy war can only be considered a crusade if the pope proclaims it, identifies its goals, and grants a package of spiritual and legal privileges to the participants. . most famously, this includes remission of penance or full forgiveness of sins: a very attractive offer!
let’s move on to the first book you picked to recommend about the crusades, which is war of the gods by christopher tyerman. why did you choose it?
there are so many books that are simply called “the crusades”, or variations on that theme (and the old classic, in english, is sir steven runciman’s magnum opus). so there is a wide range of jobs to choose from if you want to find a basic guide to movement. but god war tells you everything you need to know. it is not just huge and complete. it is also the product of a lifetime’s reflection on the subject. And I must confess that I have a special affection for it, because the author is my former doctoral thesis supervisor!
If I had to pick what’s particularly good about God’s War, then it’s the fact that Tyerman refuses to accept simple answers to difficult questions. he sums it all up, very neatly, at the end. “The inner decision to follow the cross, to inflict harm on others at great personal risk, at the price of enormous deprivation, in the service of a consuming cause, cannot be explained. , excused or dismissed as either a virtue or a sin.” what he is saying, in short, is that we must accept the crusades, in all their messy complexity, as something very real and very human.
i think runciman, as a historian of byzantium, saw the crusades as the last barbarian invasion of the roman empire, which he saw as surviving in byzantium. therefore, it was hostile. Does tyerman have a point of view on crusades like that, or does he avoid getting into these kinds of fights?
I think what Tyerman is saying is that we need to be more dispassionate about it. we want to see a clear moral message, but there just can’t be one for something like this.
Let’s turn to the creation of Europe: conquest, colonization and cultural change by Robert Bartlett, 950-1350. maybe it could explain why he chose this particular book.
I have to say this is a pretty strange choice. It doesn’t normally show up on crusade reading lists, and I’m being a bit cheeky in including it. but what this book does, and, in my opinion, much better than any of its rivals, is explain the Latin Western environment from which the Crusades arose. He describes how the heartland of Europe produced a warrior aristocracy: figures who can be described as “meager but with huge appetites.” , this happened regardless of the faith that was held in some of these places.
“these warriors actually made the entire Latin world much more homogeneous”
The interesting thing about all this is that, in the process, these warriors made the entire Latin world much more homogeneous. At the end of the process, Latin Christianity had much more in common than at the beginning: not only in terms of distinctive religious practices, but also in spheres such as government, warfare, and trade. bartlett is particularly strong on the topic of naming patterns. why, all over europe, do you find people calling things ‘william’, ‘robert’ and ‘john’? it’s because these names became the standard currency of the medieval west, spreading as the region became much more homogeneous. In short: this book has shaped my own studies far more than any other work. I am really interested in social and geographical mobility, both up and down and across great distances. I was never able to explain much of this before reading this book, which is why I highly recommend it.
when you say ‘the center’, what do you mean geographically: the northeast of france and the netherlands?
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you’re certainly putting me on the spot there! One of the main trends in medieval studies, over the course of the last thirty years, has been to move away from an overly French approach, from the idea that France was somehow “the norm”, and everything else was wrong. but i guess i still believe in an old ‘frankish’ core: the territories of the old empire led by charlemagne, which included what is now france, the netherlands, germany, and northern italy. that’s the bloc of western europe, and it was from there, more than anywhere else, that the warriors advanced into regions like spain, the british isles, southern italy and sicily, the baltic, and the holy land.
And in the Baltic, were those Crusader wars the ones that imposed Christianity?
some of them were. The crucial point to remember is that some form of violence almost always occurred along the borders of Latin Christendom. Very often, these forms of violence can have a very significant religious and/or ideological undertone. it is these more charged encounters that could more easily turn into full-scale holy wars or crusades. but they are still very complex, despite everything. for example, the crusades in the Baltic—which, at times, became almost genocidal—were simple opportunities for plunder, and culture wars, religious wars, all at the same time. in other words, it was possible to try to get rich and promote Germanization and Christianity, all as a kind of package deal. however, needless to say, it wasn’t always comfortable how those various elements were held together.
Isn’t that more or less what Charlemagne had been doing, 200 years earlier?
You’re absolutely right. one of the key criticisms that some scholars make of this book is that bartlett’s starting date is the year 950. many historians would say that the processes you are describing are simply what charlemagne was doing, 150 years earlier, to build his own empire. the basic message, which the book says explicitly at the end, is that europe was not only the engine of one of the great processes of conquest, colonization and cultural change in the world. it was also the product of one. but it is certainly arguable that this latter process began long before 950.
Let’s move on to the Crusades: Islamic Perspectives by Carole Hillenbrand. I imagine it is largely because there are significant Muslim populations in Europe these days that we think quite differently about the Crusades, at least on a non-academic level. a sense of ‘us and them’ doesn’t really work anymore. what does this book say?
for an astonishingly long time, it was normal to see the crusades, almost entirely, from a western perspective. Fortunately, that point of view is now fully exploited. in fact, we need to examine the crusades to the holy land from both a greek and an islamic angle as well. If I had the space I would have chosen a book on the Byzantine perspective, but if I only had the opportunity to have one then I would have chosen the Muslim angle.
“when you get to places like iraq and iran, the crusades really weren’t that big of a deal”
There have been a lot of books trying to examine what the crusades were like for the Islamic world. the reason i chose hillenbrand is simply because he is a classic. covers the entire period of the fight. it shows how Muslims viewed ‘the Franks’ and all the religious and ethnic stereotypes that were being spread during this long period of cultural interaction. evaluate what daily life was really like in the crusader states, where, on the one hand, you could be enemies on the battlefield, but you could also meet in the souk or in the bathhouse. hillenbrand also examines how muslim armies fought, what armor and weapons they used, their fortifications etc etc. and, of course, discusses the most important question of all: what did all this mean for the way the West viewed the Islamic world, and vice versa.
Does she come up with a vision of how the crusades changed the Islamic world, or the Islamic uprising?
hillenbrand strives not to give simplistic answers. To some extent, the Western world and the Muslim world are portrayed as two self-assured cultures, looking at each other, not really liking what they see, and therefore connecting far less than we might think. but on the other hand, however, an increasingly “globalized” crusades scholarship says that we should see these two spheres as quite similar. the warrior aristocracy, on both sides, operated under closely related assumptions about how one should live, rule, and fight, and how religion should affect what one does. but I would also highlight a point that, in my opinion, hillenbrand minimizes too much. this is the simple fact that Westerners never got that far in the Islamic world. (The Mongols are the ones who actually invaded the Middle East, causing enormous damage in the process.) On the one hand, then, the crusades appear to be crucial in poisoning relations between the West and Islam. on the other hand, though, one could certainly argue that at the time, at least, the Crusaders were little more than an irritant to the Muslim sphere. Westerners might worry the warlords in Syria and affect the rulers in Egypt and what is now Turkey, but when you get to places like Iraq and Iran, the Crusades really weren’t that big of a deal.
were not the crusader states separated from much larger political entities?
somehow. The Seljuk Turks had recently conquered most of the Middle East, but their united empire had already begun to fragment. One of the most interesting consequences of this is the simple fact that foreign minority rule was quite normal in eleventh- and twelfth-century Syria. (at this particular time, most of the ruling class were Turks, but there were also Kurds, Armenians, etc., and some of them, at least, were quite suspicious in religious terms). therefore, there is room to argue. that the Franks were not as shocking as one might think: that they were just another foreign ruling class to go along with the others. this is a particularly significant point because, in hindsight, we assume that the crusader states were always doomed. but when you really look at the history of the Islamic world, there were very long periods when a Turkish ruling class, for example, maintained control over vast subject populations.
until the end of the first world war.
exactly.
let’s move on to the next one, which is chronicles of the crusades, edited by caroline smith. these are two contemporary sources, right?
yes, geoffrey de villehardouin’s conquest of constantinople and jean de joinville’s life of saint louis. the reason for including this book is that, at some point, you have to listen to the original voices. I wouldn’t want to recommend five works on the crusades without giving you a chance to read what a crusader actually wrote. And if there is a medieval chronicle that stands out for being close, it is that of Joinville. he’s writing in French, for a lay, rather than clerical, audience, and suddenly he becomes real and alive in a way that just doesn’t happen with previous Latin writers. it is joinville, for example, who tells us that when he was leaving his castle to go on the crusade, he did not dare to look back. one of the children he left behind was only a few weeks old. you don’t hear that kind of stuff from a lot of other sources. Joinville also provides us with asides, anecdotes and funny stories. He reveals, for example, that when the Crusaders camped together in Sidon, the Earl of Eu used to play practical jokes. the earl had a small catapult built and used it to fire stones while the crusaders ate, wreaking comic havoc at the table. he also got hold of a small bear and sent it to joinville camp, where he killed some of the chickens. This is all heavy medieval humor that hasn’t aged well, but it was clearly very relaxing at the time.
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in the life of san luis, does san luis emerge as an interesting character?
joinville is writing explicitly as part of the formal canonization process of Saint Louis (Louis IX of France). so there is a clear mission statement: to show that the king was an admirable person. but it is not an entirely positive picture. In fact, there are times when Joinville is actually quite critical. for example, when louis declares his intention to undertake his second crusade in 1267, joinville clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea this time and, in the end, the future chronicler stays home. This way, then, you’re not just getting Joinville’s reminiscences of Louis’ First Crusade. He is also getting a remarkable insight into France in the mid-thirteenth century, as well as a portrait of a prominent king. and—in this book as a whole—you also get geoffrey de villehardouin’s conquest of constantinople: his account of the fourth crusade.
was this the disastrous crusade of 1204?
yes. This expedition culminated in the capture and sack of Constantinople, which is truly the most shocking event that took place in all of the Crusades. that is especially the case when taking into account the fact that the movement had originally started to save the Greeks from the Turks. And then, a hundred years or so later, it’s the West that destroys Byzantium, grinding Constantinople to a pulp.
villehardouin is trying to excuse him? Or does he realize that he is shocking?
well, there’s a lot going on here. For one thing, there has long been a schism between the Latin West and the Greek Orthodox churches, and this can be exploited to justify what happened in 1204. Even more than that, though, Geoffrey presents the Fourth Crusade as a grand undertaking. chivalrous, driven by honor. And of course there is another key point, which is that the ultimate legitimizer is success. If you capture a great city like Constantinople, which has never before been taken by a non-Greek army, then it’s pretty clear (to most medieval thinkers) that God is on your side.
villehardouin describes the looting of the city?
yes, and the most fascinating thing is that you can compare his description with that of a contemporary Greek historian. In that of him or the city of Byzantium, Niketas Choniates gives us quite a different view. what everyone can agree on is that the sack was really horrible. However, on the one hand, we have Geoffrey trying to defend it as the legitimate result of a long and complex process, ultimately driven by chivalric ideals like honor. On the other hand, however, we have Niketas, who clearly think that this event marks the end of civilization as we know it.
let’s move on to seven myths of the crusades. tell us a little about this book.
again, this is a bit of an odd recommendation. I know this book has been somewhat mocked by many of my colleagues and oddly enough I could not find a copy in any academic library in Oxford. but this is what people need, much more than historians who disappear into their own ivory towers. the public needs scholars who really engage with the questions people really have about the crusades. Should the First Crusade be seen as an unprovoked attack on Islam? should the crusade be seen as colonialism or as the first stage of western imperialism? What is the truth behind all the myths and legends about the Templars? so I would recommend this book precisely because it doesn’t try to dodge those questions. instead, he meets them head-on.
with the children’s crusade, my memory from school, when I was about eight years old, is that a bunch of enthusiastic children went to marseille, where they were sold into slavery. is that more or less correct?
yes, that’s more or less correct. they were not children at all: more ‘young’, often from poorer backgrounds. and not all of them ended up being sold into slavery. there were also two later expeditions known as the “shepherds’ crusades”. once again, this is not the correct label: it basically refers to “country louts”. what we can really see, through all these developments, is the strength of the basic message that the west should be making a real effort to take back jerusalem. this has seeped deep into society, and the poor and lowly are telling the ruling classes, ‘this is the ultimate goal and yet you have failed, time and time again.’ it is rather like the message of today’s young climate change activists. . And there is also an implicit idea: maybe God will bless the children and the shepherds with success, in a way that he has not allowed his superiors. Needless to say, though, he doesn’t: You can’t win a war with a bunch of youngsters who naively hope for the best.
what about anti-Judaism? my recollection, from the history of the bachelor’s degree, is that there were pogroms and that sort of thing, but actually some bishops were very helpful in protecting the jews from the mob.
yes, that’s exactly right. the crusade is not the basis of western antisemitism, but it certainly takes it and builds on it. it is no accident that when a crusade has been called, and when people have been whipped into hysteria against the enemies of christ, someone can always say, ‘but there are some here at our door’, and then point to the jews local. communities but the church line is usually very clear. Jews living in peace, within Christian territories, cannot be a legitimate target for holy war. it’s a bit upsetting for us because we wish the church had said this for humanitarian reasons. but that is not the fundamental reason. in any case, the main point is that the Jews must continue to live among the Gentiles in misery and subjection, to show the ultimate truth of Christian revelation. so it’s not that nice I’m afraid.
And what about the Templars? is not the myth about them that they descended into a state of almost late Roman orgiastic decay? is there something to that?
There are so many myths and legends about the Templars that I don’t even know where to start. I suppose we could talk about anything from Sir Walter Scott and the Da Vinci Code to the computer game Assassin’s Creed (and don’t even get me started on the supposed link to the Holy Grail). in fact, I’m one of those boring people who thinks that the truth is much more interesting than myths and legends. a military order is a fascinating notion: the idea that you could combine religious vows with being a knight. If you’ve seen a lot of jackie chan movies, then you think the idea of ”fighting monks” is pretty normal. but in the west, in the early 12th century, you were mixing opposites, producing what was supposed to be the ultimate holy warrior.
There is, of course, much more to military orders than that. We could also talk about the fact that they had an international reach, creating property portfolios across Europe to help save the Holy Land. But the fascinating point about the Templars really comes from what happened after the Crusader states of the continent collapsed in 1291. At the time, the order was basically treated as the scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong. the mighty French king was also after his money, so the Templars were brought down amid (now standard) medieval accusations of sodomy, heresy, and witchcraft. from there, it’s pretty easy to see where all the subsequent conspiracies and myths come from.
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