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CRUSADE CREATIONISM
V E R S U S PO P E U R B A N I I ’ S
CONCEPTUALIZATION OF
1
THE CRUSADES
PAUL E. CHEVEDDEN
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being
through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
Jn 1:1–4
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of
the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
1 Cor 12:12
I
Today, much of Crusade scholarship remains committed to the creationist fallacy
of the Crusades. Crusade creationism is a form of creationism that asserts that the
Crusades testify to a creator’s design manifested in a single common core of
never-changing characteristics. The essence of Crusade creationism is that crusading was created functionally complete from the beginning. It did not develop by
historical processes but was “created” or “invented by Pope Urban II in 1095,”2
Paul E. Chevedden, Ph.D. (1986, UCLA), is an Associate member of the Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies of the University of California at Los Angeles. He specializes in the history
of the Middle East with a focus on the Islamic/Christian interface in the Mediterranean world and
has published numerous studies pertaining to the Crusades, medieval warfare, and post-Crusade
Muslim society in Spain, among them, with Robert I. Burns, Negotiating Cultures: Bilingual
Surrender Treaties in Muslim-Crusader Spain under James the Conqueror.
1. The present article owes its origin to a talk delivered at the 47th International Congress on
Medieval Studies in May 2012 at Kalamazoo, Michigan, under the title, “The NormanSicilian Genesis of Crusading versus Crusade Creationism.” I thank the Texas Medieval
Association for sponsoring the panel on which I spoke, and the panel’s respondent, James
Muldoon of the John Carter Brown Library, for his insightful comments. I also thank Donald
J. Kagay of Albany State University for help on some of the Latin texts discussed herein, and
Alexandru Anca of the University of Bamberg for assistance in translating Hans Eberhard
Mayer’s definition of “crusade.” My debt to Diana Darke is made explicit in n127.
2. Malcolm Barber, The Crusader States, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2012, 20 (“the crusade had
been created by the pope [i.e., Urban II]”); Jonathan Phillips, Holy Warriors: A Modern
History of the Crusades, London: Bodley Head, 2009, 29 (“the crusade was invented by Pope
Urban II in 1095”). See also Phillips, Holy Warriors, 326 and 350, where crusading is
2
THE HISTORIAN
or had its origin in an idea in the mind of Pope Urban (r. 1088–99; Fig. 1).3 All
Crusade essentials were present from the start, with only trivial modifications left
to be added later. Thus, from the beginning, the leaders and organizers of the
Crusades were popes, and the institutions of the indulgence, the vow, the Cross,
and Crusader privileges were all in place. The local environment can modify the
original form of the Crusades to give varieties of crusading—the Crusades in Spain,
the Baltic, the Balkans, etc.—but these local varieties are seen as trivial and
characterized as “a creation of the papacy.” Scholarly works, too numerous to be cited here,
credit Pope Urban II with creating, inventing, or bringing into existence the Crusades;
originating, initiating, inaugurating, launching, or setting in motion the Crusades; fusing
together the elements that constitute crusading; or instituting a Church council that was the
starting point of the Crusades.
3. Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1935, 285,
306, 307, 308, 309, 319; translated as C. Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, trans.
Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart, ed. Marshall W. Baldwin, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1977, 307, 331, 332, 333, 334, 348; Jean Flori, La guerre sainte: la formation de l’idée
de croisade dans l’Occident chrétien, Paris: Aubier, 2001, 289; idem, La croix, la tiare et
l’épée: la croisade confisquée, Paris: Payot, 2010, 120 (“la plupart des éléments de l’appel de
Clermont sont déjà rassemblés dans la pensée d’Urbain II”). Not all scholars agree that the
Crusades began through the agency of Pope Urban. During the twentieth century, scholars
from France (Joseph Bédier, Ernest Petit, Prosper Boissonnade, Maurice Chaume, Augustin
Fliche), Spain (José Goñi Gaztambide, Manuel Riu Riu), and Great Britain (Arnold J.
Toynbee, Christopher Tyerman) challenged this view. Joshua Prawer of Israel, who adheres to
the traditional starting date of the Crusades in 1095, has raised doubts that “any one man,
institution or ideology can be directly credited with its inception” (Joshua Prawer, The
Crusaders’ Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, New York: Praeger, 1972,
5). Carl Erdmann accepts that crusading depended on “something that Urban first brought
about” in 1095, namely, “the unification of holy war with pilgrimage” (Erdmann,
Entstehung, 319; Erdmann, Origin, 348), but he nonetheless speaks about crusading in the
period prior to 1095 in a language that contradicts that very affirmation. See Paul E.
Chevedden, “The Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade: A New (Old) Paradigm for Understanding the Crusades,” Der Islam 83, 2006, 90–136: 121–36. It is this inconsistency that
raised the hackles of Crusade scholars, such as Michel Villey, Paul Rousset, John Cowdrey,
Jonathan Riley-Smith, and Norman Housley. The contradiction between crusading reality and
Erdmann’s theoretical model that is supposed to represent it emphasizes the need for a new
approach—one that establishes consistency between the reality of crusading and the theory of
crusading. In his groundbreaking study of the “First” Crusade, Peter Frankopan looks, “not
to the foothills of central France” and to “Urban’s call to arms at Clermont,” “to understand
the origins of the Crusade,” “but to the imperial city of Constantinople,” where “a direct
appeal for help from the emperor of Constantinople, Alexios I Komnenos,” “triggered Urban’s
call to arms,” which “was shaped by an agenda that was to a large extent set by Alexios in
Constantinople” (P. Frankopan, The First Crusade: The Call from the East, London: Bodley
Head, 2012). Scholars who have raised foundational questions concerning the Crusades
hardly speak in unison, but the issues that they have highlighted are important ones and
deserve discussion and debate. Unfortunately, Christopher Tyerman’s monograph-length
study of Crusade historiography that encompasses a chronological span stretching back to the
“First” Crusade does not discuss the many debates arising over foundational questions on the
Crusades (see C. Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011).
Tyerman is especially remiss in not examining the foundational debate that he himself ignited
with the publication of his controversial book, The Invention of the Crusades (Toronto: U. of
Toronto P., 1998).
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
3
Figure 1: Pope Urban II invests Grimoald of Volturno as abbot of the monastery of St.
Clement of Casauria (San Clemente a Casauria) in the Pescara province of Abruzzo, central
Italy, in the spring of 1097 when visiting Chieti to rally support for the Jerusalem Crusade.
Chronicon Casauriense (Liber instrumentorum seu chronicorum monasterii Casauriensis),
late twelfth century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. lat. 5411, fol. 238r.
unimportant modifications of the original form of the Crusades as embodied in
“Pope Urban’s creation.”4 Crusading could not have developed step by step, first
as a political force, followed by the development in successive stages of an
institutionalized tradition into which its practitioners were initiated, because
Crusade creationism envisions crusading to have been created whole and complete
from the beginning, emerging simultaneously as a political force and as an
institutionalized tradition. Crusade creationism ensures that there is no historical
continuity between the situation at the time immediately preceding 1095 and the
situation following it; in an instant, crusading appears in an already advanced
state.
Scholars have relied on the notion of the unfolding of a creator’s design such
that all Crusades express the handiwork of Pope Urban. Those expeditions that
4. Phillips, Holy Warriors, 1.
4
THE HISTORIAN
are in harmony with Pope Urban’s design, having a Jerusalem focus and an
ecclesiastical apparatus matching the one attached to his Jerusalem Crusade,5 or
having this ecclesiastical apparatus alone,6 are deemed true Crusades.7 Two
groups of Crusade creationists have emerged: “old” creationists and “new”
creationists. “Old” creationists, such as Hans Eberhard Mayer and Jean Flori,
believe that no Crusades occurred outside the creator’s design. They contend that
Pope Urban II not only initiated the Crusades but also in some meaningful sense
controlled crusading in the furtherance of a purpose sanctioned explicitly by him.
The Crusades were fixed at the moment of their supposed inception in 1095 and
did not deviate from their original goal.8 “New” creationists, such as Jonathan
5. See below n37, and text.
6. See below n54, and text.
7. The term “crusade” (med. L., cruciata, cruzata, croata, OFr. croisee, Pr. crozada, Sp. cruzada,
Cat. croada, It. crociata) is derived from the Latin compound crucesignatus, or cruce signatus,
literally meaning “marked with the cross,” which first appeared long after the Crusades
emerged as a political force and stemmed from a practice introduced by Urban II of having
Crusaders wear the sign of the Cross on their clothing. This term can properly be applied to
wars that began in the eleventh century with a Christian reconquest in the Mediterranean
unfolding in three stages: first, in the central Mediterranean; next, in the western Mediterranean; and, by the end of the century, in the eastern Mediterranean. The Crusades, as
conventionally understood, are considered not to have begun until the third stage of this
sequential progression was reached with the expedition of 1095–99 to “rescue Jerusalem and
the other Churches of Asia from the power of the Saracens” (“expeditio . . . ad Ierusalem et
alias Asie ecclesias a Sarracenorum potestate eruendas,” Robert Somerville, ed., The Councils
of Urban II, vol. 1, Decreta claromontensia, Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1972, 124).
Although the term “crusade” did not exist in the eleventh century, and was not, until the
modern era, the unitarily accepted term for an enterprise arising from the reconquest of
Mediterranean Christian lands from the Muslims, it can safely be assumed that crusading had
a fundamentum in re, a foundation in reality, prior to the activity of men’s minds to name it,
conceptualize it, and give it an intellectual content. The absence of a unitary term for crusading
cannot be taken as evidence for the absence of crusading. Throughout the course of the
Crusades, there was never any absence of terms and expressions for the activity later to be
designated by the term “crusade,” and, as we shall see below, the use of a descriptive phrase,
instead of a unitary term, appears to be how Pope Urban first expressed the concept of
crusading as a series of specific deeds and events of reconquest and restoration of the lost lands
of Christendom. Crusading had from the beginning a rich lexicon, and a multiplicity of
descriptive terms and evocative expressions were used to describe it. “What we now call
Crusade, whatever definition we give it, . . . preceded the appearance of the term coined later
to describe it” (Flori, La croix, 232).
8. See below n37, and text, and Flori, La guerre sainte, 357; idem, “De Barbastro à Jérusalem:
plaidoyer pour une redéfinition de la croisade,” in Aquitaine-Espagne (VIIIe-XIIIe siècle), ed.
Philippe Sénac, Poitiers: Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale, 2001, 129–46:
146; idem, “Pour une redéfinition de la croisade,” Cahiers de civilisation medievale 47, 2004,
329–49: 349; idem, La croix, 31. For other expositions of this interpretation, see below n35,
and text, and Lucien Paulot, Un pape français: Urbain II, Paris: Librairie Victor Lecoffre,
1903, 279; Maureen Purcell, Papal Crusading Policy: The Chief Instruments of Papal Crusading Policy and Crusade to the Holy Land from the Final Loss of Jerusalem to the Fall of
Acre 1244–1291, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975, 10–11; Paul Rousset, Histoire d’une idéologie: la
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
5
Riley-Smith, believe that Crusades were governed by a single set of common
characteristics attributable to Urban that all and only the Crusades possessed, a
set of characteristics that make a Crusade a Crusade. Some scholars list five core
characteristics—usually comprising papal authorization, indulgence, vow, Cross,
and Crusader privileges9—while others allow for fewer.10 “New” creationists do
croisade, Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1983, 9; David A. Trotter, Medieval French Literature
and the Crusades (1100–1300), Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1988, 18; Edward Peters, “The
Firanj Are Coming,” Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs 48, Winter 2004, 3–17: 4; Jaroslav
Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land: From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre,
1187–1291, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005, 513; Alain Demurger, Croisades et croisés au
Moyen Âge, Paris: Flammarion, 2006, 335.
9. See below n54, and text, and Norman Housley, The Later Crusades, 1274–1580: From Lyons
to Alcazar, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992, 2; James A. Brundage, “The Hierarchy of Violence in
Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Canonists,” International History Review 17, 1995, 670–
92: 680–1; Christopher Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades,
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004, 30–1; Helen Nicholson, The Crusades, Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2004, xlvi–xlvii; Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, New
York: Columbia UP, 2008, 9–10 (“war that was both holy . . . and penitential,” papal
authorization, indulgence, vow, and Cross); John Gilchrist, “The Papacy and War against the
‘Saracens,’ 795–1216,” International History Review 10, 1988, 174–97: 189 (“papal benediction, dispensation, indulgence, and the crusader vow, and theoretically expressed in the
doctrine of the just war”); John France, Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom,
1000–1714, London: Routledge, 2005, 101 (“papal initiative and authorization, the indulgence or remission of sin, pilgrimage, the vow and the taking of the cross”); Marcus Bull,
“Crusade and Conquest,” in: The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 4, Christianity in
Western Europe, c. 1100–c. 1500, eds Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2009, 346 (papal authorization, indulgence, vow, Cross, and Just War rationalization);
Jennifer Price, “Alfonso I and the Memory of the First Crusade: Conquest and Crusade in the
Kingdom of Aragón-Navarre,” in Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict, eds Thomas F.
Madden, James L. Naus, and Vincent T. Ryan, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011, 75–94: 78
(papal authorization, “spiritual and temporal privileges,” vow, and Cross).
10. Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975,
294 (pilgrimage, vow, Holy War, and just war); Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade
and the Idea of Crusading, Philadelphia, PA: U. of Pennsylvania P., 1986, 30 (papal
authorization, pilgrimage, indulgence, vow); idem, Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, 52
(“warfare ... holy and penitential,” papal authorization, vow, and Cross); Norman Housley,
The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305–1378, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1–2
(indulgence, vow, Cross, and Crusader privileges); idem, Religious Warfare in Europe,
1400–1536, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, 12 (indulgence, vow, and Cross); Sylvia Schein,
Fideles Crucis: The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land, 1274–1314,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 5 (papal authorization, indulgence, vow, and Crusader
privileges); Ernst-Dieter Hehl, “Was ist eigentlich ein Kreuzzug?,” Historische Zeitschrift
259, 1994, 297–336: 307 (the idea that God initiates and orders war to bring about an
epochal change); Jean Richard, Histoire des croisades, Paris: Fayard, 1996; translated as J.
Richard, The Crusades, c. 1071–c. 1291, trans. Jean Birrell, Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1999, ix, 259–63 (indulgence, Cross, and privileges of protection); Michael Mitterauer, “The
War of the Pope,” in The Islamic World and Europe during the Age of Crusades, eds Eduard
Fuchs, Peter Feldbauer, Michael Mitterauer, John Morissey, and Andrea Schnöller, Wien:
Verein für Geschichte und Sozialkunde, 1998, 5–20: 6–7 (papal authorization); idem,
Michael Mitterauer, Warum Europa? Mittelalterliche Grundlagen eines Sonderwegs,
Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003, 201–2; translated as Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe? The
6
THE HISTORIAN
not restrict Crusades to Jerusalem-bound ventures, as do “old” creationists, but
consider non-Holy Land expeditions to be legitimate Crusades, provided they
manifest a record of the creator’s design in a single common core of neverchanging characteristics traceable back to Pope Urban.
“Old” creationists recognize that a Crusade and the fulfillment of a purpose are
indissolubly linked, but they deny the possibility that a Crusade could ever be
reinterpreted or adapted towards new ends and new purposes not envisioned or
anticipated at the outset. Mayer argues that any reinterpretation of the Ur-form of
the Crusade constitutes a “perversion of the original idea of a Crusade” and “an
abuse on the part of the Church,” while Flori contends that this amounts to “the
improper appropriation (captation) of the concept [of Crusade] by the Holy See,”
which enabled it “to entice warriors to carry out, on the initiative of the papacy,
other military actions against its Muslim enemies, pagans, heretics, or political
rivals of all kinds.”11 “New” creationists maintain that a Crusade is formed out
Medieval Origins of Its Special Path, trans. Gerald Chapple, Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P.,
2010, 197 (papal authorization); Tomaž Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the
Muslim World, and Western Political Order, Berkeley, CA: U. of California P., 2002, 84
(indulgence, vow, and papal protection); Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in
Medieval Spain, Philadelphia, PA: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2003, 21 (papal authorization,
indulgence, vow, and Cross); Andrew Jotischky, Crusading and the Crusader States, Harlow,
UK: Pearson/Longman, 2004, 7 (papal authorization, spiritual rewards); Christopher
Tyerman, The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 81 (“the
vow, the cross, plenary indulgence, and temporal privileges”); idem, God’s War: A New
History of the Crusades, London: Allen Lane, 2006, 50 (“war as penance, Jerusalem and the
Holy Land, papal authorization”); Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades, Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 20 (“assumption of the cross with the intention of engaging in
penitential combat, in response to a cause that was defined as holy by the pope and preached
by the Church”); Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 1147–1254,
Leiden: Brill, 2007, 4 (spiritual rewards, vow, and papal protection); Jonathan Phillips, The
Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007,
247 (indulgence, vow, and Cross); idem, Holy Warriors, 2 (pilgrimage, idea of Holy
War, and offer of salvation); Nikolas Jaspert, Die Kreuzzüge, 4th ed., Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008, ix; translated as N. Jaspert, The Crusades, trans.
Phyllis G. Jestice, London: Routledge, 2006, vii (papal authorization and indulgence);
Rebecca Rist, The Papacy and Crusading in Europe, 1198–1245, London: Continuum,
2009, 1 (papal authorization, indulgence, and vow); Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The
War for the Holy Land, London: Simon & Schuster, 2010, 199 (papal authorization,
indulgence, vow, and Cross); Thomas F. Madden, “Crusades,” in The Oxford Dictionary of
the Middle Ages, ed. Robert E. Bjork, 4 vols., Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010, 1: 469–74: 469
(papal authorization, indulgence, vow, and temporal privileges); Judith Bronstein, “Crusades: Historiography (1095–1183),” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and
Military Technology, ed. Clifford J. Rogers, New York: Oxford UP, 2010, 1: 502–11: 504
(“papal authority, crusader vows, and the remission of sins”).
11. Hans Eberhard Mayer, Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, 10th ed., Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
2005, 252, 376n125; Flori, La croix, 11, 56, 265 (“pour inciter les guerriers à mener,
à l’initiative de la papauté, d’autres combats contre ses adversaires musulmans, païens,
hérétiques ou rivaux politiques de toute sorte”), 268 (“la captation du concept par le
Saint-Siège”), 275.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
7
of its parts, so that a purpose cannot enter into the picture as a principle of
explanation unless it is brought within the scope of one of the parts. Both
creationist schools presuppose as established fact that a Crusade is made up of
parts. The ecclesiastical apparatus that emerged to sustain the Crusades—papal
authorization, indulgence, vow, Cross, and Crusader privileges—is assumed to be
a permanent condition of crusading, something woven into the very constitution
of crusading, not something that grew out of crusading itself and was the result of
a historical development. A Crusade with no parts, which is itself the origin of the
parts and the basis for their determinate existence, cannot be considered a
Crusade because it is bereft of the properties that a Crusade must supposedly
possess.12
“Old” creationists affirm that the parts of a Crusade are held together by a
purpose, unlike “new” creationists who maintain that a Crusade is a mere
aggregate of parts. Since the parts can take on meaning only through their relation
to an end or purpose, the explanation advanced by the “old” creationists has a
distinct advantage over that put forward by the “new” creationists. But recognition by “old” creationists of crusading as a purpose-driven activity is undercut by
a failure to acknowledge crusading as an ever-evolving historical reality, as
opposed to a fixed and immutable reality. “New” creationists, on the other hand,
cannot conceive of crusading apart from a fixed institutional apparatus. If crusading could be conceived apart from its apparatus, then an entirely new
conceptualization of the Crusades would emerge.
“New” creationists intuitively recognize that a mechanical explanation of the
Crusades, or an explanation in terms of parts that do not themselves depend on the
whole, is an incomplete explanation. What holds the parts together is the element
of purpose, without which the whole enterprise of the Crusades becomes unintelligible. For this reason, many “new” creationists have sought to establish a property
that is common to all the parts of a Crusade, a universal characteristic that all
Crusades share and that may serve in place of a purpose. “New” creationists
12. A Crusade with no parts is presupposed by Erdmann in the statement, “the crusading idea
became articulate only after it had developed in real life” (Erdmann, Entstehung, 133;
Erdmann, Origin, 147). A Crusade with no parts is also implied in three statements by
Christopher Tyerman: (1) “During the Third Crusade, as in the First, the practice of crusading
fashioned the institution [of crusading], not vice versa”; (2) “The development of crusading
was fuelled by practice, not theory”; (3) “Traditions, ideology and institutions grew up thickly
around [crusading] wars” (Tyerman, Invention, 24, 40; idem, Debate, 2). I explain elsewhere
that once crusading was initiated, the Church moved to create institutions that would assist it;
the institutional components of crusading were not created all at once but were adopted
piecemeal (see Paul E. Chevedden, “Canon 2 of the Council of Clermont [1095] and the
Crusade Indulgence,” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 37, 2005, 253–322).
8
THE HISTORIAN
have thus identified such a universal attribute and refer to it under several
designations: “the unification of holy war with pilgrimage,”13 “a penitential
war-pilgrimage,”14 a “penitential war” or manifestation of “penitential warfare,”15
13. Erdmann, Entstehung, 319; Erdmann, Origin, 348.
14. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997,
77; idem, “Introduction,” in The First Crusade: Origins and Impact, ed. Jonathan Phillips,
Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997, 1–4: 1; idem, “Islam and the Crusades in History and
Imagination, 8 November 1898–11 September 2001,” Crusades 2, 2003, 151–67: 166–7;
idem, The Crusades: A History, 2nd ed., New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005, 8; idem, Crusades,
Christianity, and Islam, 9.
15. Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 10, 48, 49, 51, 52, 66, 68, 77, 162; idem, “The State of Mind of
Crusaders to the East, 1095–1300,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, 66–90: 80, 90; idem, “The Crusading
Heritage of Guy and Aimery of Lusignan,” in Cyprus and the Crusades: Papers Given at the
International Conference “Cyprus and the Crusades,” Nicosia, 6–9 September 1994, eds
Nicholas Coureas and Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith, Nicosia: Cyprus Research
Centre, 1995, 31–45: 37; idem, “Erdmann and the Historiography of the Crusades, 1935–
1995,” in La Primera Cruzada novecientos años después: el Concilio de Clermont y los
orígenes del movimiento cruzado, ed. Luis García-Guijarro Ramos, Madrid: L. GarcíaGuijarro, 1997, 17–29: 19; idem, “The Idea of Crusading in the Charters of Early Crusaders,
1095–1102,” in Le Concile de Clermont de 1095 et l’appel à la croisade: Actes du Colloque
universitaire international de Clermont-Ferrand (23–25 juin 1995) organisé et publié avec le
concours du Conseil régional d’Auvergne, ed. André Vauchez, Rome: Ecole française de Rome,
Palais Farnèse, 1997, 155–66: 162; idem, “Introduction,” 4; idem, “Rethinking the Crusades,” First Things 101, March 2000, 20–23: 20; idem, “Christian Violence and the
Crusades,” in Religious Violence between Christians and Jews, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia,
Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002, 3–19: 7; idem, “The Crusades, 1095–1198,” in The New
Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, C. 1024–c. 1198, eds David Luscombe and Jonathan
Riley-Smith, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004, 4/1: 534–63: 537; idem, Crusades: A
History, 9, 10, 12, 80, 113, 120; idem, “Christians of the Middle East under the Franks: I.
Motives for the Crusades: A European Perspective,” in Christianity: A History in the Middle
East, eds Habib Badr, Suad Abou el Rouss Slim, and Joseph Abou Nohra, Beirut: Middle East
Council of Churches, Studies & Research Program, 2005, 548–58: 550; idem, Crusades,
Christianity, and Islam, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 39; idem, Templars and Hospitallers as
Professed Religious in the Holy Land, Notre Dame, IN: U. of Notre Dame P., 2009, 12–13;
idem, What Were the Crusades? 4th ed., San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2009, 55, 56, 58,
88, 89; idem, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, PA: U. of
Pennsylvania P., 2009, 7; idem, The Knights Hospitaller in the Levant, c. 1070–1309,
Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 9, 10; Christopher Tyerman, “Were There Any
Crusades in the Twelfth Century?” English Historical Review 110, 1995, 553–77: 568; idem,
Invention, 21; idem, “What the Crusades Meant to Europe,” in The Medieval World, eds Peter
Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, London: Routledge, 2001, 131–45: 132, 137; idem, Fighting, 47,
112; idem, Crusades: Short Introduction, 26, 77; idem, God’s War, 67, 71, 72, 243, 248, 250,
251, 253, 256, 258, 259, 260, 263, 266, 567, 650, 652, 656, 661, 662; idem, The Crusades,
New York: Sterling Publishing, 2009, 27, 97; idem, “Expansion and the Crusades,” in A
Companion to the Medieval World, eds Carol Lansing and Edward D. English, Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 455–74: 459; idem, Debate, 22, 190, 202, 219; Jacob G. Ghazarian,
The Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia during the Crusades: The Integration of Cilician Armenians
with the Latins, 1080–1393, Richmond, VA: Curzon, 2000, 84, 86; Anthony W. Bartlett,
Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press
International, 2001, 101, 102, 103; Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto,
1571, London: Cassell, 2003, 113; Jotischky, Crusading, 10; Janus Møller Jensen,
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
9
“the fusion of penitence and holy war,”16 or “the unapologetic and unequivocal
combination of war and penance.”17 A universal characteristic allows “new”
creationists to deftly sidestep the element of purpose altogether, while it ties the
“Peregrinatio sive expeditio: Why the First Crusade was not a Pilgrimage,” al-Masāq: Islam
and the Medieval Mediterranean 15, 2003, 119–37: 124, 128; idem, “War, Penance and the
First Crusade: Dealing with a ‘Tyrannical Construct,’” in Medieval History Writing and
Crusading Ideology, eds Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Kurt Villads Jensen, Helsinki: Finnish
Literature Society, 2005, 51–63: 53; Housley, Contesting, 3, 7, 112; idem, Fighting for the
Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008, 24, 171; Kwok
Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2005, 13; Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2006, 45, 46, 47; Thomas Deswarte, “Entre historiographie et histoire: aux origines
de la guerre sainte en Occident,” in Regards croisés sur la guerre sainte: Guerre, idéologie
et religion dans l’espace méditerranéen latin (XIe-XIIIe siècle); Actes du Colloque international tenu à la Casa de Velázquez (Madrid) du 11 au 13 avril 2005, eds Daniel Baloup and
Philippe Josserand, Toulouse: CNRS-Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail, 2006, 67–90: 70,
79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87, 88; idem, Une chrétienté romaine sans pape: l’Espagne et Rome
(586–1085), Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010, 502, 509; Fonnesberg-Schmidt, Popes, 4, 5,
11, 65, 77–8, 129, 250, 251, 254, 255; idem, “Riga and Rome: Henry of Livonia and the
Papal Curia,” in Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier: A
Companion to the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, eds Marek Tamm, Linda Kaljundi, and
Carsten Selch Jensen, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, 209–27: 218, 219; Phillips, Second Crusade,
xxiii; William J. Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c. 1095–c.
1187, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008, 11, 95, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 155,
168, 169, 170, 173; Burnam W. Reynolds, “The Prehistory of the Crusades: Toward a
Developmental Taxonomy,” History Compass 6, 2008, 884–97: 892, available at: http://
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00525.x/full, accessed 20 February
2012; Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, New York: HarperOne,
2009, 105–9; Michael C. Horowitz, “Long Time Going: Religion and the Duration of
Crusading,” International Security 34, Fall 2009, 162–93: 175; Xavier Storelli, “Les
harangues de la bataille de l’Étendard (1138),” Médiévales 57, Autumn 2009, 15–32: 22;
Bronstein, “Crusades: Historiography,” 503; Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Sign of the
Cross: From Golgotha to Genocide, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011,
150; Susanna A. Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216, Farnham:
Ashgate, 2011, 3, 125; Price, “Alfonso I,” 83, 85; Miguel Dolan Gómez, “The Crusades and
Church Art in the Era of Las Navas de Tolosa,” Anuario de historia de la Iglesia 20, 2011,
237–60: 243; Michel Balard, “The French Recent Historiography of the Holy War,” in La
Papauté et les croisades/The Papacy and the Crusades: Actes du VIIe Congrès de la Society
for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East/Proceedings of the VIIth Conference of the
Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, ed. Michel Balard, Farnham:
Ashgate, 2011, 45–51: 47; Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the
Quest for Apocalypse, New York: Basic Books, 2011, 25; Elizabeth Groppe, “After
Augustine: Humility and the Search for God in Historical Memory,” in Learned Ignorance:
Intellectual Humility among Jews, Christians and Muslims, eds James L. Heft, Reuven
Firestone, and Omid Safi, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011, 191–209: 201; Anna Sapir Abulafia,
Christian-Jewish Relations, 1000–1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom,
Harlow, UK: Pearson/Longman, 2011, 138; Andrew A. Latham, Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics: War and World Order in the Age of the Crusades, New York: Routledge, 2012,
106, 107, 124, 125, 126, 131, 157, 158, 159, 160.
16. Housley, Contesting, 13.
17. Tyerman, God’s War, 56.
10
THE HISTORIAN
Crusades down to a Procrustean bed into which complex developments are
trimmed to fit a static, timeless, and inflexible reality.
Despite their differences, both “old” creationists and “new” creationists insist
that the Crusades possessed core characteristics—a set of essential elements that
all and only Crusades possessed—and they largely agree on what these characteristics are.18 Most scholars concur that there has to be at least a common core of
attributes that characterize the Crusades, and Giles Constable observes that “those
who want a strict definition [of ‘crusade’] mostly agree on the importance of taking
the cross, making a vow, and receiving a papal grant of spiritual and worldly
privileges.”19 Both creationist schools believe that these attributes, or “ingredients,” did not develop by historical processes in successive efforts to connect
political practice to suitable instruments, but can be explained in terms of the
special creative purpose of Pope Urban.20 Both creationist schools maintain a strict
monism. All Crusades are supposed to be different expressions of one and the same
Crusade, the Jerusalem Crusade, because all Crusades have the same underlying
18. See above, n9 and n10, and text, and below, n20, n35, n37, n54, and text. Other than the
requirement of “a specific and clearly defined geographical objective,” Riley-Smith’s set of
core crusading characteristics, first put forward in 1977, exactly matches Mayer’s set of
characteristics: papal authorization, indulgence, vow, Cross, and Crusader privileges (see
below, n37 and n54, and text, and Mayer, Kreuzzüge, 10th ed., 377n125).
19. Constable adds that he is “reluctant to exclude the ‘popular’ crusades [from the realm of
legitimate crusading] or to deny that at least a spiritual orientation towards Jerusalem was
an essential aspect of crusading” (Giles Constable, “The Historiography of the Crusades,” in
Giles Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century, Farnham Ashgate, 2008,
3–43: 18–19 [originally published in Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy P. Mottahedeh, eds, The
Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, Washington, DC:
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001, 1–22]). He specifies “the defining
characteristics of a crusade” as a papal summons, spiritual and temporal privileges, solemn
vows, and the Cross (see Constable, “The Fourth Crusade,” in Constable, Crusaders and
Crusading, 321–47: 325).
20. Just as Riley-Smith maintains that the Crusades are dependent on certain key elements
attributable to Pope Urban, Jean Flori likewise maintains that the Crusades are contingent
upon a cacophony of “ingredients” credited to this pope and “his” Crusade (Flori, La croix,
10, 11, 51, 147, 252–68, 274). Alain Demurger agrees with this assessment and finds that
the Crusades require seven active “ingredients”: “Un contexte—favorable—de réforme, un
pape inspiré, l’idée de la libération des Églises d’Orient, la guerre sainte, le pèlerinage
pénitentiel, la rémission des péchés et Jérusalem. De cet amalgame (lui aussi divin, car
inspiré par Dieu!) naît la croisade: une idée neuve, un objet historique nouveau” (Demurger,
Croisades, 52). Maureen Purcell lists papal authorization, “spiritual and temporal advantages,” the crusading vow, and the Cross as being essential elements of the Crusades
(Purcell, Papal Crusading Policy, 10–11). David Trotter contends that the essential elements
are: “cross, indulgence, role of the papacy, notion of recovering the hereditas Christi in the
East” (Trotter, Medieval French Literature, 21). Jaroslav Folda maintains that the essential
characteristics are papal authorization, indulgence, vow, Cross, and Crusader privileges
(Folda, Crusader Art, 513).
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
11
substance derived from this Crusade. For “old” creationists, this substance is a
fixed form tied to a fixed geographical objective. For “new” creationists, this
substance is a single common core of characteristics that is transmitted to all
Crusades, regardless of their geographical or historically determined differences.
Both creationist schools reject a pluralist, or pluriform, approach to the Crusades
that views crusading as variable in form and function, and variously manifested in
a variety of locales from the 1060s onward, not something that was fixed and
immutable with static attributes from 1095 onward.21 Both creationist schools
imagine that, prior to 1095, the Crusades were formless and void of life. In 1095,
Urban activated the forces of the Crusades and brought forth their fundamental
elements or allowed these elements to interact for the first time.
The chief drawback of both creationist schools is their static view of the
Crusades. Neither of these schools has been able to master the central problem of
the Crusades: the problem of change. Both schools start from the presupposition
that Crusades are reproducible repetitions of the same mode of activity, the basic
elements of which do not change. Both schools separate out from the totality of the
Crusades a single one—the Jerusalem Crusade—and set this Crusade up as a norm
and pattern for all the others. The Crusades, however, were immensely diversified
and must be viewed in their totality. A single Crusade cannot be hypostasized into
the whole, and the whole cannot be fully expressed and reproduced by any
particular Crusade. “Old” creationists have proved incapable of determining how
crusading evolved beyond an exclusive emphasis on Jerusalem. “New” creationists
have proved incapable of determining how crusading evolved such that the
21. In 1993, Riley-Smith dubbed his own interpretation of the Crusades “pluriformity” and
claimed that it had “won the day.” The term “pluriformity” indicates a diversity or variety
of forms, which Riley-Smith clearly does not accept with respect to the Crusades, because he
contends that all Crusades come in one form, that of “a penitential war pilgrimage,” and are
united by this fact, as well as by being “united by common elements,” which constitute the
“unchanging features of crusading” (Jonathan Riley-Smith, “History, the Crusades and the
Latin East, 1095–1204: A Personal View,” in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century
Syria, ed. Maya Shatzmiller, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993, 1–17: 9–10; idem, Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, 9, 52; see below n54, and text). The journal Crusades frames the plurality
of Crusades, not in terms of a diversity of forms, but in terms of a diversity of geographical
settings and a diversity of opponents confronted, while it sets strict chronological limits on
the Crusades: 1095–1798 (see Benjamin Z. Kedar and Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Editors’
Statement,” Crusades 1, 2002, ix–x: ix; description on back cover, Crusades 1–10, 2002–
2011). A truly pluralistic conception of the Crusades has not found support among scholars
working in the field of Crusade history. What passes for pluralism in this field of study is a
form of monism that is so riddled with internal contradictions that Norman Housley, a
self-proclaimed “pluralist,” has abandoned the so-called “pluralist” school of Crusade
historians and has embraced a new theory, “modified traditionalism,” a monistic interpretation of the Crusades that views non-Holy Land Crusades as “purely ersatz ventures”
(Housley, Contesting, 5, 10).
12
THE HISTORIAN
expedition to Jerusalem could not only be explained, but, what is more, be
explained so that the crusading movement as it developed could be derived from it.
To the casual observer and to many scholars, it would seem unlikely that the
iter Hierosolymitanum (“march to Jerusalem”) could be the driving force of the
non-Holy Land Crusades because it enhances a characteristic—pilgrimage to
the Holy Sepulcher—which leaves all other Crusades at a distinct disadvantage
with respect to it. If the process of linkage between the Jerusalem Crusade and all
other Crusades goes beyond superficial analogy (e.g., “a crusading character”)
and involves detailed internal similarities (e.g., the entire ecclesiastical apparatus
equated with the Holy Land Crusade), why would these similarities not include
pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher? If the Jerusalem Crusade is the norm and
pattern for all the others, why doesn’t this norm and pattern include pilgrimage to
the Holy Sepulcher? If the fusion between Holy War and Holy Land pilgrimage
generated crusading, as Carl Erdmann and many other scholars maintain, once
crusading is under way, what permits it to become associated with non-Holy
Land regions? Can the element that is deemed so essential to the emergence of
crusading—pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher—be rendered superfluous for all
non-Holy Land Crusades?
“New” creationists face a fundamental conundrum. If they take the Jerusalem
Crusade as the norm and pattern for all the other Crusades, they must not only look
for a single common core of characteristics—papal authorization, indulgence, vow,
Cross, and Crusader privileges—but they must also ascertain that the end or
purpose towards which a Crusade was directed coincides with the end or purpose
of the Jerusalem Crusade: “the conquest or defense of Jerusalem.”22 Failure to do
so would indicate that the norm and pattern into which the Crusades must fit is not
firm and fixed. Because Riley-Smith accepts the Jerusalem Crusade as the norm and
pattern for all the other Crusades, and maintains that a Crusade came into being
“whenever the church equated or, at least, associated an indulgence for a holy war
with that promised to the Holy Land crusaders,” Mayer asks the question, “does
this not put Jerusalem squarely back into the middle of things?”23 With all the
emphasis placed upon the similarity between the Jerusalem Crusade and all other
Crusades, Mayer realizes that this sort of similarity can only be achieved by
Crusades being “directed again and again to the same objective: Jerusalem.”24
22. See below, n. 37, and text.
23. Hans Eberhard Mayer, review of What Were the Crusades? by Jonathan Riley-Smith,
Speculum 53, 1978, 841–42: 841.
24. Hans Eberhard Mayer, Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965, 263.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
13
In examining the views of both creationist schools, it is apparent that they are
ultimately dependent, not on “what contemporaries understood by crusading”25
in the eleventh and subsequent centuries, but on intellectual doctrines and postulates that scholars have brought to the study of the Crusades. After discussing
some of these unexamined presuppositions, this paper will oppose them with the
views of the so-called founding father of the Crusades, Pope Urban II. Because
Urban died on 29 July 1099 before learning of the conquest of Jerusalem two
weeks earlier, his interpretation of the Crusades is able to avoid the problem of
anachronism, of judging all prior crusading from the standpoint of the greatest
crusading triumph in the eleventh century. Since Urban does not view all Crusades
on the basis of the latest expression of crusading activity, his testimony is
extremely valuable and should be given much more weight in assessing the
Crusade movement than twelfth-century narrative accounts of the so-called
“First” Crusade that describe the origins of a single crusading enterprise “in the
light of its final outcome.”26
II
To defend the notion of the creation of the Crusades, a number of scholars have
embraced the idea of preformation. Erdmann, for example, contends that the
Crusades were predetermined at the outset, with every element constituting the
Crusades present from the beginning. He cannot bring himself to admit that
crusading was ever incomplete and imperfect and came to comprise elements not
present at its inception. Reacting against scholars who view the origins of the
Crusades within the framework of “either an Eastern cast or one determined by
East-West relations,” Erdmann argues that the Crusades developed, not from an
ongoing war with Islam, but from wars against heretics, pagans, and fellow
Christians:
The prehistory of the crusading idea has acquired, therefore, either an
Eastern cast or one determined by East-West relations, whereas the many
crusades undertaken in other theaters—against heretics and opponents of
the papacy, as well as against heathens—have been regarded as “aberrations” or degenerations of a “genuine” idea of crusade. This view is erroneous. The “aberrations” had long been there, and the “genuine” crusade
25. Housley, Contesting, 166.
26. Erdmann, Entstehung, 365; Erdmann, Origin, 357–8.
14
THE HISTORIAN
proceeded from them far more than from a supposed change in the condition of pilgrims and of the city of Jerusalem.27
Erdmann bases this contention on the claim that “the true war of the church
was to be directed against heretics and schismatics, excommunicates and rebels
within the church,” which leads him to conclude that “there is no truth to the
common opinion that the idea of crusade against heretics was a corruption of
the Palestinian Crusade.” “On the contrary,” he says, “such a crusade against
heretics was envisioned from the start.”28 In the creation of the Crusades, it
seems, Pope Urban made everything that he could make, and nothing came into
being without him. What crusading was at its birth remained just what it would
be capable of throughout its existence. All the ends pursued by Crusades were
specified as such from the very beginning, so that crusading at its start was
already the whole of what crusading would ever become. Thus, everything subsequent to the onset of the Crusades depends on the beginning from which it
proceeds.
John Gilchrist agrees with Erdmann that “the Palestinian crusade was a corruption of the campaign against heretics and not vice-versa,” and argues that “the
fundamental problem in Erdmann’s thesis arises from him failing to apply consistently the idea that ‘a crusade against heretics was envisioned from the start.’”29
Burnam Reynolds credits Pope Urban with having “inaugurated a movement that
would shape European attitudes and policies toward the Muslim world, and
home-grown heretics, for nearly half a millennium.”30 And Michael Mitterauer
claims that all the ends towards which Crusades were directed were “completely
worked out” from the start:
The history of the Crusades is often described as if they developed from
the campaign to liberate Jerusalem, a Crusade considered legitimate because
27. Erdmann, Entstehung, vii; Erdmann, Origin, xxxiii.
28. Erdmann, Entstehung, 246; Erdmann, Origin, 265. Tyerman cites this passage with approval
(see Tyerman, Debate, 186). Erdmann does not develop his thesis of the origin of the
Crusades in wars against heretics, pagans, and fellow Christians in any systematic way, but
he does identify Pope Leo IX’s campaign against the Normans in southern Italy in 1053 as
a “crusade against the Normans” (Normannenkreuzzug; Erdmann, Entstehung, 251;
Erdmann, Origin, 270).
29. John Gilchrist, “The Erdmann Thesis and Canon Law,” in Crusade and Settlement: Papers
Read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of Crusades and the Latin East and
Presented to R. C. Smail, ed. Peter W. Edbury, Cardiff: University College Cardiff P., 1985,
37–45: 42n16.
30. Reynolds, “Prehistory,” 884.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
15
of its objective. In this interpretation, the Crusades against heretics,
schismatics, and the pope’s enemies—seen as not being legitimate in the
same way—simply grew from this basic model as a secondary form, as a
later abuse, so to speak, of an initially just cause. This presumed priority is
hardly defensible. The pope’s holy war against his enemies within the
church predates the Jerusalem Crusade. Every element constituting the
Crusades, including fighting against Christians, appears to have been completely worked out before Urban II made his call.31
To think of the Crusades in this way is to imagine all the many forms that the
Crusades took as somehow already present in advance, waiting to burst forth like
butterflies out of the cocoon. In the manner of Athena who emerged whole from
the head of Zeus, the Crusades emerged whole and did not develop piecemeal by
historical processes. The fallacy of preformation, as if each and every Crusadepossibility were already in existence from the very beginning, denies the historical
nature of the Crusades by removing the Crusades from the realm of history and
transferring the Crusades to an original act of creation.
III
Another strategy of promoting Crusade creationism has been to establish the unity
of the Crusades by deriving all essential “crusade” elements from their supposed
point of origin in the first great Crusade to Jerusalem. This strategy relies on
extracting whatever differences there are from among a plurality of Crusades and
retaining only the common properties, with the assumption being that the range
of common elements was fixed by the kinds of elements that existed at the time of
the “First” Crusade, so that no element not present at the “creation” of crusading
can be considered essential to the Crusades. This approach ends up negating the
very phenomenon that must be explained by divesting the Crusades of crucial
content and leaving little more than an empty shell.32 The relentless process of
31. Mitterauer, Warum Europa? 209; Mitterauer, Why Europe?, 205.
32. Ernst Cassirer offers a critique of the Aristotelian theory of concept formation in which
differences between similar things are excluded by abstracting their common characteristics.
According to Cassirer, the fatal flaw in obtaining general concepts by “selecting from a
plurality of objects . . . only the similar properties, while [neglecting] the rest,” lies in
reducing the content of our knowledge, because “what is merely a part has taken the place
of the original sensuous whole,” and “there is nothing to assure us that the common
properties, which we select from any arbitrary collection of objects, include the truly typical
features, which characterize and determine the total structures of the members of the
collection.” A concept that arises through abstraction, Cassirer maintains, gains its fundamental form by a process of negation: “If we merely follow the traditional rule for passing
16
THE HISTORIAN
negation, which transforms diversity into unity, change into changelessness, and
dissimilarity into uniformity, reduces the Crusades to a few basic building blocks.
These building blocks are all presumed to have been present from the beginning
and need only to be passed down to each succeeding Crusade to ensure the
continuation of the Crusade movement.33 By means of a “familiar panoply of
privileges and ecclesiastical, propagandist and fiscal institutions,” all Crusades
can be recognized.34
Thus, Count Paul Riant (1836–88), the founder of the very first international
body devoted to the study of the Crusades, the Société de l’Orient Latin, formulates a definition of “crusade” that fixates on its origins, and that attends to
the similarities between Crusades by abstracting from the differences. With all
differences eliminated, what remains is a fixed and unchangeable essence that
reduces crusading to what it was in 1095: a “crusade” is a “religious war . . .
induced by the solemn granting of ecclesiastical privileges, and undertaken
with the aim of recovering, either directly or indirectly, the Holy Places [in
Palestine].”35
Carl Erdmann also defines the nature of “crusade” in relation to its origins and
looks to establish the unity of the Crusades by removing all differences. By
maintaining continuity between the origins and the development of crusading,
from the particular to the universal, we reach the paradoxical result that thought, in so far
as it mounts from lower to higher and more inclusive concepts, moves in mere
negations. . . . What enables the mind to form concepts is just its fortunate gift of forgetfulness, its inability to grasp the individual differences everywhere present in the particular
cases. . . . If we adhere strictly to this conception, we reach the strange result that all the
logical labor which we apply to a given sensuous intuition serves only to separate us
more and more from it. Instead of reaching a deeper comprehension of its import and
structure, we reach only a superficial schema from which all peculiar traits of the particular case have vanished” (Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff:
Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910,
8, 23–24; translated as Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, in Substance and Function,
and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins
Swabey, Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1923, 1–346: 6–7, 18–19). In the case of the Crusades,
the abstractionist theory of concept formation has produced an idea of crusading that is
reduced in content and in scope, and is associated with extrinsic, rather than intrinsic,
properties.
33. Housley remarks “that all of the features that [‘the pluralist position’] regards as characterizing a crusade were present in the First Crusade” (Housley, Contesting, 14n51).
34. Tyerman, Debate, 210.
35. “En premier lieu, le mot CROISADE désignera toujours, pour moi, la guerre religieuse
proprement dite, provoquée par l’octroi solennel de privilèges ecclésiastiques, et entreprise
pour le recouvrement direct ou indirect des Lieux Saints” (italics in original) (Paul Riant,
“Inventaire critique des lettres historiques des croisades,” Archives de l’Orient latin 1, 1881,
1–224: 2).
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
17
Erdmann denies that crusading is an activity in which new ends are generated. He
begins his study of the origin of the idea of Crusade with an assertion of what
constitutes this idea: “Two forces affecting the human spirit came into play in the
crusading movement: the ideas of pilgrimage to the sites of primitive Christianity
and the idea of holy war—knightly combat in the service of the church.” Attempting to verify this assertion, he abstracts from everything related to crusading two
“essential” features, or “forces,” that allegedly made “the crusading movement”
possible: “the idea of pilgrimage to the sites of primitive Christianity and the idea
of holy war.” This abstractionist process yields three conclusions: (1) the content
of crusading is “the idea of pilgrimage” and “the idea of holy war”; (2) the root
cause of the Crusades is the historical appearance of “the unification of holy war
with pilgrimage, something that Urban first brought about”; and (3) the failure of
the Crusade enterprise to emerge at an earlier date than it actually did is due to the
absence of “the unification of holy war with pilgrimage” at an earlier date.36 Here,
the historical explanation takes the form of a mirror image. The same elements
whose absence is regarded as the reason for the failure of the Crusade enterprise
to emerge prior to the year 1095 is made to account for the rise of the Crusade
enterprise in 1095.
Hans Eberhard Mayer likewise assumes that the nature of the Crusade movement can be determined by assessing its origins and by reducing all differences to
uniformity. Since the origins of crusading are assumed to be found in Pope
Urban’s Jerusalem Crusade, Mayer claims that a Crusade must have a goal fixed
for all time—the conquest or defense of Jerusalem—and a never-changing organizational structure, modeled after the organizational structure of the so-called
“First” Crusade, which consists of an ecclesiastical apparatus of papal authorization, indulgence, vow, and secular privileges:
A Crusade in the true sense of the word . . . is a war that is proclaimed by
the Pope in which a vow is required and an indulgence and secular privileges
are granted; and—this appears fundamental—it is a war having a specific
36. Erdmann, Entstehung, vii, 319; Erdmann, Origin, xxxiii, 348. The texts that Erdmann cites
in behalf of his “war-pilgrimage” theory do not really support it. The only evidence he finds
to underpin his theory are a few “sources [that] summarily define the crusade as ‘traveling in
arms to Jerusalem’” (Erdmann, Entstehung, 307n78; Erdmann, Origin, 331n78). These
sources, however, can more accurately be read as evidence against his theory because the
condition of “traveling in arms to Jerusalem” appears to be related to the exigencies of a
military campaign, which would have required soldiers to travel with their arms, rather than
to the possibility that “the new war [was declared] to be an actual pilgrimage to the Holy
Sepulcher,” or that “the idea of the armed pilgrimage was proclaimed for the first time at
Clermont” (Erdmann, Entstehung, 307; Erdmann, Origin, 331).
18
THE HISTORIAN
and clearly defined geographical objective, namely, to acquire or to preserve
Christian dominion over the Sepulcher of Our Lord in Jerusalem. We must
not allow ourselves to be deceived by the expeditions against Egypt; they
were in fact only a means to an end, and the ultimate end was the conquest
or defense of Jerusalem from Muslim domination.37
Criticizing Mayer’s “narrow definition of ‘crusade’ (only to Jerusalem),”38
while seeking a more comprehensive understanding of “Was ist eigentlich ein
Kreuzzug?” (“What essentially is a Crusade?”), Ernst-Dieter Hehl declares that
“the Crusade cannot be defined by its form of organization and its politicalmilitary objective.”39 Like Mayer, Hehl seeks the nature of the crusading enterprise in its origins, and, like Mayer, he seeks to discover what Crusades have in
common, not how they differ. As he broadens the scope of the Crusades, he also
broadens his efforts to nullify differences between Crusades and to repress heterogeneity. In doing so, he impoverishes the conceptual content of the Crusades by
removing from consideration any organizational structure and any politicalmilitary objective. Hehl’s elimination of political-military objectives from their
central place in the Crusades not only leaves the Crusades without any purpose or
direction, but it also excludes from discussion any outside factors that might
explain the need for political-military objectives in the first place. Instead of
reaching a deeper comprehension of the content of the Crusades, Hehl reaches a
truncated and superficial understanding of the Crusades by discarding all differences of content exhibited by specific Crusades. The exclusion of differences leaves
Hehl with little to go on to determine what defines a Crusade. He searches for a
characteristic feature that would encapsulate the inner essence of the crusading
37. “Ein Kreuzzug im eigentlichen Sinn ist dagegen ein Krieg, der vom Papst ausgeschrieben
wird in dem das Gelübde verlangt, der Ablaß und die weltlichen Privilegien bewilligt
werden, und der (das scheint wesentlich) auf die Erlangung oder Erhaltung eines ganz
bestimmten, geographisch fest umrissenen Zieles gerichtet ist: auf die christliche Herrschaft
über das Grab des Herrn in Jerusalem. Man darf sich von den Unternehmen gegen Ägypten
nicht täuschen lassen; sie waren nur Mittel, die die Eroberung oder Sicherung Jerusalems
vor muslimischer Herrschaft zum letzten Zweck hatten” (Mayer, Kreuzzüge, 1st ed., 263
[deleted since the 7th ed.]). I thank Alexandru Anca for assistance in translating this
passage. For a different translation, cf. Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades, trans. John
Gillingham, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972, 283. Mayer responds to critics of his position in
Hans Eberhard Mayer, Zwei deutsche Kreuzzugsgeschichten in Züricher Sicht: eine Replik,
Kiel: H. Mayer, 2008).
38. Mayer, Kreuzzüge, 10th ed., 376n125.
39. “[L]äßt sich der Kreuzzug nicht nach seiner Organisationsform und politisch-militärischen
Zielsetzung definieren” (Hehl, “Kreuzzug,” 300).
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
19
enterprise. Hehl finds that far more crucial to crusading than Mayer’s “precise
geographical objective,” which is linked to an “indulgence as a specific promotional tool,” is the fact that the “initiators” of this “ecclesiastical war,” the popes,
together with the participants, provided this war with “an interpretive framework (Interpretationsrahmen), which distinguished it from other wars.” According to Hehl, “this interpretative framework has ultimately freed crusading
completely from a military expedition having a specific objective” (e.g., “the
conquest or defense of Jerusalem”), so that today the term “crusade” can be used
as “a code word for any ideologically-influenced conflict, applied to each and
every struggle fought with all one’s heart, regardless of whether military means
are used.”40
The “interpretative framework” that Hehl argues for is a “historicaltheological schema” (geschichtstheologisches Schema) that Pope Urban employs
to explain how crusading was part of Christian history. This schema divides the
history of Christianity into four successive stages. The first stage is that in which
Christianity grew and prospered, becoming the universal religion of a world
empire and a truly world religion; the second is that in which Islam expanded its
power and subjugated more than half of Christendom; the third is that in which
“the Christian people, led by princes chosen by God, implement a translatio
regni that God now in a great turning point of history (Zeitenwende) makes
possible and by which He confers on the Christians victory over the pagans [i.e.,
Muslims]”41 in a movement of Christian reconquest (reconquista); and the
fourth is that in which the Christian people engage in the restoration
(restauratio) of the Church in order to return “the Holy Church” to “the former
position” that it enjoyed prior to the coming of Islam.42 Pope Urban clearly sees
the Crusades against the background of the Islamic conquests and as a reaction
40. Ibid.
41. Alfons Becker, Papst Urban II (1088–1099), 3 vols, Stuttgart: Hiersemann and Hannover:
Hahn, 1964–2012, vol. 2, 354.
42. “[E]t antiquum Ecclesie sancte statum pro voluntatis sue beneplacito reparavit” (Urban II to
Bishop Gerland of Agrigento [d. 1101], 10 October 1098, in Paolo Collura, ed., Le più
antiche carte dell’Archivio capitolare di Agrigento [1092–1282], Palermo: Manfredi, 1961,
22, no. 5). On Pope Urban’s “historical-theological schema,” see Becker, Urban II, vol. 2,
344–46, 351–53, 357, 368–72, 398–99; idem, “Urbain II, pape de la croisade,” in Les
champenois et la croisade: actes des quatrièmes Journées rémoises, 27–28 novembre 1987,
eds Yvonne Bellenger and Danielle Quéruel, Paris: Aux Amateurs de livres, 1989, 9–17:
13–14; idem, “Urbain II et l’Orient,” in Il Concilio di Bari del 1098: Atti del Convegno
Storico Internazionale e celebrazioni del IX Centenario del Concilio, eds Salvatore Palese and
Giancarlo Locatelli, Bari: Edipuglia, 1999, 123–44: 135–36.
20
THE HISTORIAN
against Muslim occupation of Mediterranean Christian lands. What is most
central to and characteristic of Urban’s schema, according to Alfons Becker,
is the notion of a translatio regni, a turning of the times (Zeitenwende or
Zeitenwandel),43 or epochal transition, that God carries out, nostris temporibus
(“in our time”),44 to return Christians to a time when they had been in possession of rights and liberties of which conquest and tyranny had deprived them.
An old concept, translatio regni, which goes back to the Book of Daniel (2:21),
serves to designate a new reality. For Urban, it is not so much that the Old
Testament can make sense of present-day events, but rather that present-day
events can make sense of the Old Testament. The translatio regni spoken of in
the Book of Daniel becomes meaningful to the pope and his contemporaries
when viewed in the light of recent events in Sicily, Spain, and the eastern
Mediterranean.
Hehl credits Becker with “[making] this historical-theological schema the key
to his interpretation of Urban’s conception of the Crusade,”45 but Becker never
applies this schema to the entire crusading enterprise, as does Hehl, who makes it
the distinguishing feature of the Crusades. Given the importance Hehl places on
this schema, it is remarkable that he fails to recognize any of the military actions
prior to 1095 that Urban incorporates into his schema as Crusades, such as the
Norman war in Sicily, the Castilian expansion into central Iberia, marked by the
conquest of Toledo in 1085, and the Catalan push down the eastern coast of
Iberia, marked by efforts to rebuild Tarragona.46 Hehl is oblivious to the fact that
the crusading enterprise, an entity of many disparate parts, resists reduction to
Urban’s schema, just as he is oblivious to the actual contents of this schema. What
interests him is not the particulars of the schema, but what can be derived from it
to make it possible to account for the entire Crusade movement. Accordingly,
he detaches this schema from the real-world context in which it arose and
transforms it into a free-floating body of thought centered around a self-conscious
43. Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 342, 344, 349, 352–54, 356, 361–63, 369, 372–75, 384, 398, 404,
and vol. 3, 356, 587, 675, 676; Ingrid Heike Ringel, “Ipse transfert regna et mutat tempora.
Bemerkungen zur Herkunft von Dan. 2,21 bei Urban II,” in Deus Qui Mutat Tempora:
Menschen und Institutionen im Wandel des Mittelalters; Festschrift für Alfons Becker zu
seinem fünfundsechzigsten Geburtstag, eds Ernst-Dieter Hehl, Hubertus Seibert, and Franz
Staab, Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1987, 137–56: 139; Hehl, “Kreuzzug,” 303, 304, 319,
328, 335.
44. Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 342.
45. Hehl, “Kreuzzug,” 301.
46. See below n112 and n113, and text.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
21
commitment of Latin Christians to bring about “an order that is believed to be
God-given,” contending that this ideological commitment has repeatedly
impacted Western Christendom and has met with efforts “to align [Western
Christendom] again and again with an order that is believed to be God-given.”47
What Hehl fails to comprehend is the close relationship that exists between
Urban’s theory of crusading and the practice of crusading as it was carried out
during the latter half of the eleventh century. Instead, he understands and evaluates Urban’s theory of crusading in abstraction, apart from the concrete events
and circumstances that gave rise to it, and he proposes that this theory be
promoted as a paradigm for understanding the Crusades over the course of many
centuries. Urban’s theory, however, should not be abstracted from the specific
situations in which Urban applied it. As Alasdair MacIntyre warns: “Detach any
type of theorizing from the practical contexts in which it is legitimately at home,
whether scientific, theological or political, and let it become a free-floating body
of thought and it will be all too apt to be transformed into an ideology.”48 By
reshaping Becker’s “interpretation of Urban’s conception of the Crusade,” found
in the pope’s “historical-theological schema,” into a total explanation for the
Crusades, Hehl transforms Urban’s theory of crusading into an ideology that is
sufficient to explain all crusading phenomena. Once the pope’s schema is no
longer viewed as representative of reality, but as an ideology, and even a
Weltanschauung, of “epochal change” (Epochenwandel), it can be linked exclusively to “the central structures of Christianity.”49 External factors need not
be examined to understand the Crusades because an ideology supplies a total
explanation.
Hehl puts the role of external factors in the Crusades in the form of a dilemma.
“Each definition [of ‘crusade’],” he says, “runs the risk of detaching it as a specific
war of the Church from the general development of medieval society, of making
it an event on the frontiers of Christendom, instead of locating its underlying roots
in the central structures of Christianity.”50 Because some Crusades were fought
47. Hehl, “Kreuzzug,” 334.
48. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, “Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995,” in Alasdair C.
MacIntyre, Selected Essays, vol. 2, Ethics and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006,
145–58: 157.
49. Hehl, “Kreuzzug,” 307, 333.
50. “Jede Definition [des Kreuzzugs] . . . läuft Gefahr, ihn als einen spezifischen Krieg der Kirche
von den allgemeinen Entwicklungen der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft zu trennen, ihn zu
einem Ereignis an den Grenzen der Christenheit zu machen, statt seine Verwurzelung in deren
zentralen Strukturen herauszustellen” (ibid., 333).
22
THE HISTORIAN
“on the frontiers of Christendom,” while others were not, the unity of the
Crusades can only be grasped by taking into consideration properties that all
Crusades share in common, and not what distinguishes them. Any definition of
“crusade” that includes wars “on the frontiers of Christendom” takes a risk “of
detaching [crusading] as a specific war of the Church from the general development of medieval society,” because it might cause crusading to be seen from the
point of view of “an event on the frontiers of Christendom,” and not from a point
of view appropriate to all Crusades no matter where they are fought, such as from
the perspective of “the general development of medieval society,” or from the
standpoint of “the central structures of Christianity.” To avoid such a risk, Hehl
reasons that it is best to isolate the common properties that are found in Crusades,
and to build a definition on these common elements. A definition of “crusade” will
only take on a form free from “detaching [crusading] as a specific war of the
Church from the general development of medieval society” when it abandons the
attempt to present the particular in crusading and restricts itself consciously and
explicitly to the universal.
The particular and the universal represent the two horns of a dilemma. Something must be sacrificed in order to solve the dilemma, and Hehl concludes that it
is advisable to relinquish the particular, lest one “[run] the risk of detaching
[crusading] as a specific war of the Church from the general development of
medieval society.” In the process of eliminating the particular in crusading, Hehl
does away with all outside factors that bear upon the Crusades and retains only
internal factors. By divesting outside factors of any function in the Crusades, Hehl
can then locate the underlying roots of the Crusades “in the central structures of
Christianity.” The abstractionist process allows Hehl to discount Pope Urban’s
interpretation of the Crusades as events that occurred, not in response to internal
forces within the Latin West, but as events that occurred in response to forces
external to the Latin West. The pope’s conceptualization of crusading as a
translatio regni lays bare the roots of the Crusades in the ongoing conflict between
Islam and Western Christendom in the Mediterranean world.51 For Urban, the
Crusades are comprehensible only in the context of the struggle against Islam,
whereas, for Hehl, the Crusades are comprehensible only in the context of “the
central structures of Christianity.”
51. For an account of the revolutionary changes in Europe’s international relations with
Islam, see Archibald R. Lewis, Naval Power and Trade in the Mediterranean, A.D. 500–
1100, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1951, 183–251; Chevedden, “Islamic Interpretation,”
92–93.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
23
What makes external factors unmentionable in Hehl’s definition of “crusade”
is the process of abstraction that he employs to construct a broader picture of the
Crusades, which cancels out all specific differences among Crusades while paying
heed only to similarities. Hehl ends up with a paradoxical result: a grossly
diminished view of the Crusades, now regarded solely as “an expression of the
internal condition of Latin Christianity” and “a reflection of the inner state of
Western Christendom.”52 He has emancipated Pope Urban’s schema from the
context in which it is legitimately applicable, and has made all Crusades variants
of “Urban’s call for a war in which God brings about an epochal change
(Epochenwandel).”53 In the Crusades, it seems, evidence of Pope Urban’s design is
to be found everywhere.
Following in the tradition of Riant, Erdmann, and Mayer, Jonathan RileySmith accepts the fact that the origins of the Crusade movement and its nature
coincide, and that one can establish the essence of the Crusades by extinguishing
all differences. “To contemporaries,” Riley-Smith states,
a Crusade was an expedition authorised by the pope, the leading participants in which took vows and consequently enjoyed the privileges of protection at home and the Indulgence, which, when the campaign was not
destined for the East, was expressly equated with that granted to crusaders
to the Holy Land.54
This definition of “crusade,” while in many ways a repudiation of Mayer’s
definition, derives its ideas and even its basic categories from Mayer. Herein lies
the problem. Riley-Smith mistakenly supposes that it is possible to obtain a
pluralistic conception of the Crusades by simply modifying Mayer’s monistic
52. Hehl, “Kreuzzug,” 335 (“sie Ausdruck des inneren Zustandes der lateinischen Christenheit
sind”), 336 (“als Reflex des inneren Zustandes der abendländischen Christenheit”).
53. Ibid., 307.
54. Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, 1st ed., London: Macmillan, 1977, 15.
This definition appears, with minor modifications, in Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the
Crusades?, 4th ed., 5: after “to contemporaries,” one reads “therefore”; after “authorized by
the pope,” one reads “on Christ’s behalf”; after “vows,” one reads “and consequently wore
crosses”; and, in place of “was expressly equated,” one reads “was equated.” For other
attempts to define “crusade” in terms of a single set of common characteristics impervious
to change, see James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, Madison, WI:
U. of Wisconsin P., 1969, 25-6n91; Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History,
New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1987, xxviii–xxix; idem, “The Crusading Movement and
Historians,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, 1–12: 8–9; idem, “Rethinking the Crusades,” 20; idem, “Crusades, 1095–1198,” 544; idem, Crusades, Christianity,
and Islam, 9–10; idem, What Were the Crusades? 4th ed., 88–89; and above, n9, n10, n20,
n35, n37, and text.
24
THE HISTORIAN
theory. He does so by declaring the ecclesiastical apparatus that Mayer identifies
with Crusades—papal authorization, indulgence, vow, and Crusader privileges—
to be the only content of crusading. Absent from Riley-Smith’s definition of
“crusade” is any mention of the purpose of crusading. The Crusades are considered to possess their identity apart from any particular purpose or frame of
reference, except from what can be inferred from an ecclesiastical apparatus
consisting of papal authorization, indulgence, vow, and Crusader privileges. Of
course, Riley-Smith does not deny that specific Crusades had a purpose or intent
behind them, but he does exclude the purpose, or purposes, for which Crusades
were undertaken from his theory and definition of Crusade. His interpretive
principle can best be described as the Cheshire Cat rule of historical analysis—
now you see the purpose of a Crusade, now you don’t. According to this
approach, the purpose, or purposes, for which Crusades were fought vanish
during the process of determining What Were the Crusades and only reappear
after the Crusades have been understood in a new way and assigned some new
meaning and justification.
Riley-Smith finds this new meaning and justification in a single act of creation:
“Pope Urban II’s call to bear arms as a penance in 1095,” which “created a new
category of warfare” and “a new type of pilgrimage”—“a penitential warpilgrimage”—a truly “radical,” “revolutionary,” and “unprecedented” development.55 The ingenious elimination of the purpose of “Pope Urban II’s call to bear
arms” in 1095 allows Riley-Smith to substitute another purpose—“a penitential
war-pilgrimage”—for the original one—“to liberate the Church of God” (ad
liberandam ecclesiam Dei) in the East56—and to promote this fabricated purpose
55. Riley-Smith, “State of Mind,” 78, 90; idem, First Crusaders, 6, 39, 48, 51, 52, 69, 72, 77,
168, 189; idem, “Erdmann,” 18, 19; idem, “Introduction,” 1, 4; idem, “Christian Violence,”
7; idem, “Islam and the Crusades,” 166–7; idem, Crusades: A History, xxxi, 8, 9, 10, 13, 47,
80; idem, Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, 9, 31, 32, 39; idem, What Were the Crusades?
4th ed., 55, 57.
56. “Quicumque pro sola devotione, non pro honoris vel pecunie adeptione, ad liberandam
ecclesiam Dei Hierusalem profectus fuerit, iter illud pro omni penitentia ei reputetur”
(Somerville, Decreta claromontensia, 74). This text is from the second of thirty-two canons
recorded in an account of the legislation of the Council of Clermont made by one of the
council’s participants, Bishop Lambert of Arras. It has been mistranslated by a number of
scholars working in the field of Crusade history, who have done so in the same exact way
by narrowing the purpose of the Jerusalem Crusade to the liberation of “the Church of
God in,” or “at,” “Jerusalem” (see Johannes Pahlitzsch, Graeci und Suriani im Palästina
der Kreuzfahrerzeit: Beiträge und Quellen zur Geschichte des griechisch-orthordoxen
Partriarchats von Jerusalem, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001, 66; Paul E. Chevedden,
“Canon 2 of the Council of Clermont [1095] and the Goal of the Eastern Crusade: ‘To
liberate Jerusalem’ or ‘To liberate the Church of God’?” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum
37, 2005, 57–108: 58–65, 104–8). According to Riley-Smith, the aim of the Jerusalem
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
25
as the overriding intention of the entire Crusade movement, “which was to last
for seven centuries.”57 He can then view “the crusade as something deliberately
created” for “nobles and knights,” and as something that did not change appreciably since that creation event.58 By refashioning the Crusades around the
concept of “a penitential war-pilgrimage,” Riley-Smith cuts the Crusades off from
their real genesis in the ongoing conflict in the Mediterranean between Islam and
Christendom, and from any purpose, or purposes, for which they were intended.
The Crusades are thereby dispossessed of what constitutes their reason for being,
and are locked into the purely subjective world of the individual, so that it is the
individual that is important, not the purpose or function of a Crusade. As a result,
“it is no exaggeration to say,” as Riley-Smith has often said, “that a crusade was
for an individual [Crusader, and] only secondarily about service in arms to God
or the benefiting of the church or Christianity; it was primarily about benefiting
himself, since he was engaged in an act of self-sanctification.”59
Crusade as described in this text is the liberation of “the Church of God in Jerusalem,”
whether specified explicitly or not (Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, 1st ed., 59;
idem, First Crusaders, 60; idem, “Idea of Crusading,” 156n7). See also Urban II to all the
faithful in Flanders, c. December 1095, in which the goal of the Crusade takes on a specific
context in the eastern Mediterranean (Heinrich Hagenmeyer, ed., Epistulae et chartae
ad historiam primi belli sacri spectantes: Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–
1100, Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1901, 136: “ad
liberationem Orientalium ecclesiarum” [“to liberate the Churches of the East”]).
57. Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 6; idem, “Introduction,” 1.
58. Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 69; idem, “State of Mind,” 78; idem, Crusades: A History, 13.
Riley-Smith credits Pope Urban with creating, originating, or initiating the Crusades, or
fusing together the elements that constitute crusading: Riley-Smith, Crusades: Short History,
7 (“the first deviation [from the original objective of crusading] occurred during the First
Crusade, was proposed by the originator of crusading [i.e., Urban II]”); idem, First Crusaders, 69 (“the pope [i.e., Urban II] was . . . creating a new type of pilgrimage [i.e., crusading]”), 189 (“these traditions [i.e., ‘pilgrimage to Jerusalem’ and ‘pious violence’] did not
merge gradually together, but were fused by Pope Urban II in 1095”); idem, Crusades: A
History, 13 (“he [i.e., Urban II] was . . . creating a new type of pilgrimage [i.e., crusading]”);
idem, What Were the Crusades? 4th ed., 55 (“Urban was . . . creating a new type of
pilgrimage [i.e., crusading]”); idem, “Introduction,” 1 (“Pope Urban II . . . was initiating a
movement which was to last for seven centuries” [i.e., crusading]”).
59. Riley-Smith, Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, 33. See also Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 75;
idem, “Rethinking the Crusades,” 20; idem, Crusades: A History, xxx–xxxi; idem,
“Motives,” 555; idem, What Were the Crusades? 4th ed., 58; Sylvia Schein, Gateway to the
Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West (1099–1187), Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005, 116; Miriam Rita Tessera, Orientalis ecclesia: Papato, Chiesa e regno latino di
Gerusalemme (1099–1187), Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2010, 32 (“gli uomini che intrapresero
la via de Gerusalemme . . . furono attratti dalla pietra nuda del Santo Sepolcro, meta di un
pellegrinaggio che giovava in primo luogo alle loro anime, e soltanto in seconda istanza alla
lotta per la difesa della Chiesa”). Pahlitzsch also finds self-interest to be the pervasive
motivator of Crusader action, but he divides self-interest between other-worldly spiritual
goals and this-worldly political goals (Pahlitzsch, Graeci und Suriani, 74–75).
26
THE HISTORIAN
One of the most problematic aspects of Riley-Smith’s theory and definition of
“crusade” is his apotheosis of the individual. The great challenge facing Western
Christendom came, not from Islam, but from a spiritual crisis confronting Christian warriors that expressed itself in a heightened ambivalence between warmaking and a desire for salvation. According to Riley-Smith, crusading “provided
an answer to a question which had been troubling [Christian warriors] and their
families for a century”—“How could they make their peace with God except by
abandoning the world for a monastic community and thereby turning their backs
on their obligations and responsibilities?” Pope Urban addressed this spiritual
crisis and “presented [Christian warriors] with an alternative solution,” which
was “only secondarily about benefiting the Church or Christianity; it was primarily about benefiting [‘the armsbearing public’ of Western Christendom],”
since this alternative was “an act of self-sanctification.” Riley-Smith maintains
that “the armsbearing public and its charter-writers” were faced in 1095, not
with a political objective to be achieved, but with “a new penitential exercise”
that Christian warriors found very appealing. The Crusade proclaimed in 1095
was simply an instrument or an occasion for engaging in a penitential exercise so
that Christian warriors would have “the chance of contributing to their own
salvation by undertaking a severe penance which did not entail the abandonment
of their profession of arms and the humiliating loss of status involved in
pilgrimaging abroad as normal penitents without weapons, equipment and
horses.”60
Riley-Smith contends that “the summons to crusade” was “a pastoral move,”
concerned with the spiritual care of Christian warriors.61 Yet the Crusades, like all
wars, cannot be understood without placing them in their political and historical
context. These wars were not the product of discrete individuals preoccupied with
saving their individual souls but of an entire society coming together in the latter
half of the eleventh century to fulfill a common purpose: liberating Christian
peoples and lands from Islamic domination.62 “Above all,” asserts Becker, “the
60. Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 69, 74–75; idem, “State of Mind,” 78; idem, Crusades: A
History, 13.
61. Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 69; idem, “State of Mind,” 78; idem, Crusades: A History, 13.
62. Muslim authors accurately describe the common purpose behind the Crusade movement: a
desire to recover lands that had “originally belonged to the Christians” but had been
conquered by Islam and subjected to Islamic rule. See ‘Abd Allāh ibn Buluggı̄n al-Zı̄rı̄, Kitāb
al-Tibyān lil-amı̄r ‘Abd Allāh ibn Buluqqı̄n, ākhir umarā’ Banı̄ Zı̄rı̄ bi-Gharnāt·ah, ed. Amı̄n
Tawfı̄q al-T·ı̄bı̄, Rabat: Manshūrāt ‘Ukāz·, 1995, 100; translated as ‘Abd Allāh ibn Buluggı̄n
al-Zı̄rı̄, The Tibyān: Memoirs of ‘Abd Allāh ibn Buluggı̄n, Last Zı̄rid Amı̄r of Granada, trans.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
27
feeling grew that Islamic rule over Christians was to be born no longer and that
this rule was intolerable, especially over the Holy Places of Christianity.”63 A
common abhorrence took root in the Latin West of a Christian world dominated
by Islam, and a common conviction emerged that this situation should be
reversed. Islamic domination was regarded as a tyranny that attacks the most
basic rights of Christians. Pope Urban prescribes action to reverse centuries of
Islamic occupation of Christian territory and makes the realization of freedom for
the Church the very purpose of the Crusade enterprise itself. It is simply false that
political change was not essential to crusading, as if crusading was nothing more
than an instrument for attaining salvation. If we examine the letters of Pope
Urban, as Becker has done, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that political change,
translatio regni, was central to crusading.64 Urban was promoting a program for
changing the world, not a program designed principally for getting to the next
world.65 He maintained firmly and resolutely that the Church should be free and
restored to its former state prior to the Islamic conquest movements of the seventh
and eighth centuries.66 The main problem with an apolitical, or anti-political,
interpretation of crusading, such as the one advanced by Riley-Smith, is that it
cannot do justice to the explicit and emphatic statements made by Pope Urban
about crusading. Missing from Riley-Smith’s theory is an analysis of the political
Amin T. Tibi, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986, 90; Abū al-‘Abbās Ah·mad b. Muh·ammad Ibn
al-‘Idhārı̄ al-Marrākushı̄, al-Bayān al-mughrib fı̄ akhbār al-Andalus wa-al-Maghrib, tome
troisième: Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane au XIème siècle, ed. Évariste Lévi-Provençal,
Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1930, 282.
63. Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 404.
64. Ibid., 333–413.
65. When noncombatants, such as monks, began thinking of the Jerusalem Crusade as an
instrument for attaining salvation, Urban was quick to disabuse them of this notion, telling
them that the Crusade was for “soldiers who are heading for Jerusalem with the good
intention of liberating the community of Christians . . . for we are spurring soldiers to
undertake this expedition, because they are the ones who can repel the savagery of the
Saracens (i.e., Muslims) by their arms and restore the Christian <Churches> to their former
freedom” (“Audiuimus quosdam uestrum cum militibus, qui Ierusalem liberande˛
christianitatis gratia tendunt, uelle proficisci. Recta quidem oblatio, sed non recta diuisio;
nos enim ad hanc expeditionem militum animos instigauimus, qui armis suis Saracenorum feritatem declinare et christianorum <ecclesias> possint libertati pristine˛ restituere”);
Urban II to the monks of Vallombrosa, 7 October 1096, in Rudolf Hiestand, ed.,
Vorarbeiten zum oriens pontificius III: Papsturkunden für Kirchen im Heiligen Lande,
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985, 88–89, no. 2; Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 390–91,
397, 410.
66. Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981; Hugh
Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live
In, Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo, 2007.
28
THE HISTORIAN
foundations on which the Crusades were originally founded and the sweeping
political goals once imagined for the Crusades.
Riley-Smith, like many scholars, maintains that the roots of the Crusades are
not to be found in the ongoing conflict in the Mediterranean between Islam and
Christendom, but exclusively in internal developments in Latin Christendom.67
The willful omitting of the Islamic-Christian confrontation as a factor in the
emergence of the Crusades seems to reflect the aspirations of our own time rather
than the realities of the eleventh century. “The crusades were so much a Christian
development,” Riley-Smith says, “that it is almost as if Muslim foes would have
to have been invented had they not already existed.”68 He claims that “all of us,
although with different emphases, now know that the subject of crusading is a
religious one, whatever other elements were important to it, and that, whatever its
casus belli, the roots of the First Crusade lay in the ideas, devotions and aspirations of Western Europeans.”69 At the same moment that he declares the Crusades
to have their roots in “the ideas, devotions and aspirations of Western Europeans,” Riley-Smith asserts that “[Crusades] grew out of the eleventh-century
[papal] reform movement, which gave rise to forces that probably would have
found expression in wars of liberation whatever the situation in the East had
been.”70 Riley-Smith seems unaware of the tension in his two views and has made
67. Erdmann, Entstehung, vii–viii, 1, 8, 106, 291, 293, 319, 321; Erdmann, Origin, xxxiii–
xxxiv, 3, 10, 117, 313, 316, 348, 349; H.E.J. Cowdrey, “The Genesis of the Crusade: The
Springs of Western Ideas of Holy War,” in The Holy War: Papers of the 5th Conference on
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Ohio State University, 1974, ed. Thomas Patrick
Murphy, Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1976, 9–32: 13; idem, “The Origin of the Idea of
Crusade,” review of The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, by Carl Erdmann, International
History Review 1, 1979, 121–25: 122; Marcus Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to
the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, c. 970–c. 1130, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993, 4–6, 20, 69, 86, 166, 249, 280–81, 285, 288; idem, “The Roots of Lay Enthusiasm for
the First Crusade,” History 78, 1993, 353–72; Hehl, “Kreuzzug,” 300, 301, 333, 335–36;
Malcolm Barber, The Two Cities: Medieval Europe, 1050–1320, London: Routledge, 1992,
119; Mastnak, Crusading Peace, 71, 117, 118–19, 121, 123, 126, 129, 183, 184; Tyerman,
Invention, 5; idem, “What the Crusades Meant,” 134, 142; idem, God’s War, 7, 54, 72;
idem, Debate, 32; Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade: A New History, Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2004, 19–20; Housley, Contesting, 19, 29, 36, 160; idem, “The Crusades and Islam,”
Medieval Encounters 13, 2007, 189–208: 195; idem, Fighting, 26, 236, 239.
68. Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Foreword,” in The Atlas of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith,
New York: Facts on File, 1991, 7–8: 8.
69. Riley-Smith, “Erdmann,” 29.
70. Riley-Smith, “Crusading Movement,” 10. See also Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 17–18; idem,
Crusades: Short History, 5–6; idem, Crusades: A History, 6–10, 113; idem, “Foreword,” 8;
idem, First Crusaders, 44, 48–52, 77, 189; idem, “Crusades, 1095–1198,” 536.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
29
no attempt to resolve it. Regardless of which view he prefers, Riley-Smith affirms
the exclusively religious character of the origin of the Crusades and denies the
importance of external causes. By advocating a religious interpretation of the
Crusades, Riley-Smith leaves himself open to the criticism once leveled by John
LaMonte against Paul Rousset of trying “to reestablish the old thesis of the
crusade as essentially a religious movement” by maintaining that “religion was the
essential cause of the crusade.”71
How can Riley-Smith set forth what “crusade” means without heed to the
intentions, purposes, and reasons for engaging in it, or without regard to the
Islamic world as a factor in its development, and affirm that self-interest, in
the form of “self-sanctification,” is what crusading is primarily about? The
abstractionist model of concept formation offers an answer. In the process of
defining “crusade” as “a movement which was to last for seven centuries” and
“involve millions of men and women in many theatres of war,” Riley-Smith
abstracts out of crusading those features of the concrete and particular that refer
to specific theaters of war in order to encounter the universal and the general in
crusading.72 In doing so, he is able to selectively attend to particular crusading
content (e.g., papal authorization, indulgence, vow, and Crusader privileges),
while ignoring the situational context in which Crusades occurred. He views the
content of crusading analytically, as something that exists independently and can
be considered on its own without a context.
The price of ignoring the context, such as the centuries-old war of Islam
against Christendom and all other circumstances in which Crusades occurred,
is hypostasis, i.e., giving a dubious selection of “crusade” content an independent reality of its own without reference to the historical circumstances that
71. John L. LaMonte, review of Les Origines et les caracteres de la premiere croisade, by Paul
Rousset, Speculum 23, 1948, 328–31: 329, 331. Tyerman criticizes Riley-Smith’s “religious
emphasis in explaining the crusades,” not on the same grounds as LaMonte, but because his
analysis “did not go very far,” which recalls Riley-Smith’s own criticism of Erdmann: “he did
not take things far enough.” Tyerman rightly attributes “the prevailing religious emphasis in
explaining the crusades” to Erdmann and his continuing influence on Crusade studies.
Erdmann’s influence on Riley-Smith is apparent in his “penitential war-pilgrimage” thesis,
even though Riley-Smith prefers to see himself as dissenting from Erdmann while accusing
Becker, who explicitly opposes Erdmann and his war-pilgrimage paradigm, of presenting
“fundamentally a sophisticated restatement of Erdmann’s position” (Tyerman, Debate,
189–90, 223, 234; Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Crusading as an Act of Love,” History 65, 1980,
177–92: 192; idem, review of Papst Urban II (1088–1099): Der Papst, die griechische
Christenheit und der Kreuzzug, by Alfons Becker, Journal of Theological Studies 41, 1990,
281–82).
72. Riley-Smith, “Introduction,” 1.
30
THE HISTORIAN
brought this content into being. The vanishing of the many life-giving contexts
in which Crusades took place allows history to recede from view, while transforming crusading into a “sophisticated ideology”73 that shifts its shape or
function in different circumstances to accommodate the aspiration to achieve
“self-sanctification.” The pursuit of an ideal religious life by Christian warriorscum-“penitents performing a severe penance” now becomes the permanent
drama of crusading.74 The drama of a sustained confrontation between Islam
and the Latin West is lost from view, replaced by a “devotional war,” in which
war itself is regarded “as a devotion” or “as a penance and a devotion.”75
Norman Housley asserts the “prominence” of “the devotional and above all the
penitential origins of crusading,” and deems it “unlikely that the emphasis placed
by recent research on devotional motivations [for the Crusades] will be overturned.”76 He has challenged Crusade historians to examine “what contemporaries understood by crusading, and above all the sense they had of their crusading
past,” observing that this subject “has as yet received little attention.”77 Despite
his purported interest in the standpoint of contemporaries in the understanding of
the Crusades, Housley exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards those contemporaries that would frame the Crusades within the context of “the ongoing struggle
against a powerful Islam” and places impossible demands on these contemporaries
and on the evidence they provide of crusading activity. He maintains that the point
of view they bring to the Crusades, far from enabling us to see crusading reality in
the round, from different perspectives at different times, was a “factor which stood
in the way of contemporaries building up a historically accurate and nuanced
picture of past crusading which might have clarified its overall nature.”78 Here,
73. Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 6. See also idem, First Crusade, 139.
74. Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 74; Schein, Gateway, 116.
75. Riley-Smith, “State of Mind,” 77, 78, 84 (“devotional war”); 81, 88 (“war as a devotion”);
90 (“war as a penance and a devotion”).
76. Housley, Contesting, 36, 79.
77. Ibid., 166. Others disagree. Riley-Smith suggests that what contemporaries understood by
crusading has been previously raised and answered: “What did the contemporaries of these
crusades think? A crusade came into being when proclaimed by a pope, and it is undeniable
that popes, at least officially, made little distinction between the validity of the various
theatres of war”(Riley-Smith, “Crusading Movement,” 9). Thomas F. Madden stresses the
importance of studying different points of view of past events to gain an understanding of
history in a recent article (Thomas F. Madden, “The Venetian Version of the Fourth
Crusade: Memory and the Conquest of Constantinople in Medieval Venice,” Speculum 87,
2012, 311–44).
78. Housley, Contesting, 17.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
31
the onus is placed on contemporaries “[to build] up a historically accurate and
nuanced picture of past crusading which [might clarify] its overall nature,” and the
chief inhibiting factor blocking this development is identified as one of the many
perspectives on the Crusades provided by contemporaries. Since contemporary
standpoints are by their very nature partial and perspectival, not overall and
objective, it is absurd to require contemporaries to lay aside the limited and
incomplete outlook that is part and parcel of their perspective and oblige them to
satisfy the historian’s requirement for “a historically accurate and nuanced picture
of past crusading which [might clarify] its overall nature.” It is the function of the
historian to make the many partial standpoints and perspectives on the Crusades
presented by contemporaries coherent; this is not the task for contemporaries to
accomplish, or even a task that one should expect them to accomplish.
Abstractionist thinking leads Housley to range over the entire span of the
crusading enterprise and to emphasize those elements that clarify “its overall
nature,” as reflected in what Crusades have in common, not what differentiates
them. Particular Crusades engaged in “the ongoing struggle against a powerful
Islam” have served only to prevent contemporaries from “building up a historically accurate and nuanced picture of past crusading which might have clarified its
overall nature.” An unwavering commitment to the abstractionist principle
explains Housley’s affinity for overall characteristics of Crusades and his aversion
to particular characteristics. It also explains why he is unwilling to tolerate
epistemic incompatibility between the perspectives of contemporaries. Only by
removing one particular perspective from all the other perspectives—the view that
the Crusades had something to do with “the ongoing struggle against a powerful
Islam”—would it have been possible for contemporaries to construct “an objective perspective” on the Crusades.79 Since this did not happen, Housley has made
up for this shortfall by interpreting the Crusades as a movement whose “roots lay
not in the east but in the west,” specifically “in developments that took place
within Catholic Christendom.”80 Citing scholarly consensus, Housley says that “it
has become accepted that individuals in the late eleventh-century West experienced extraordinary concern, verging on alarm, about their chances of salvation
and that this concern lay behind their response to Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 to
win remission of all their sins by liberating Jerusalem.”81
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., 19, 36.
81. Housley, “Crusades and Islam,” 195.
32
THE HISTORIAN
In championing “the pre-eminence of religious beliefs and values in explaining
the First Crusade,”82 Housley claims that “crusading was first and foremost an act
of devotion,” and that “its origins must be sought in the sphere of [religious]
belief.”83 This interpretive turn in the study of the Crusades no longer describes
and understands crusading in its own terms, but automatically assumes it to
signify an altogether different reality: a recipe for “spiritual health”84 and a desire
“to win salvation.”85 If Crusades are considered merely as a means to a further
end, say, to attain salvation, then the specific deeds and events, or res gestae, of
crusading cannot be placed at the center of crusading, as the basis to explain the
Crusades. The purpose of crusading is accepted as something external to the res
gestae of crusading, imposed upon it from the outside, so that the Crusades
become, in Housley’s words, “a religious and cognitive experience.”86 What this
means is that the Crusades have been instrumentalized and deprived of their
intrinsic worth. The intrinsic devaluation of the Crusades does not diminish
Pope Urban’s power over “the devotional experience of crusading,” but rather
enhances it, since through him “a new Christian devotional practice had come
into being.”87
IV
We are uniquely fortunate that Pope Urban II has given his own view of the
origins and development of crusading. As he sees it, the Christian people, “led by
princes chosen by God,”88 instigated and carried out the Crusades; they were not
the product of papal initiative. According to him, popes were not the originators
and organizers of Crusades, Christian princes were.89 Urban’s conceptualization
82. Housley, Contesting, 29.
83. Housley, Fighting, 26; idem, Contesting, 29.
84. Housley, Contesting, 29.
85. Housley, Fighting, 236.
86. Ibid., 239.
87. Housley, Contesting, 7, 55.
88. Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 354.
89. Popes did not originally plan to be the leaders and organizers of the Crusades. Their original
goal was to promote crusading by sanctioning crusading campaigns initiated by Christian
rulers, and by mobilizing popular and international support for crusading wars by offering
incentives to those who served in combat, especially the Crusade indulgence granted from
1063 onward (see Erdmann, Entstehung, 125; Erdmann, Origin, 138–9; Chevedden,
“Crusade Indulgence”; idem, “‘A Crusade from the First’: The Norman Conquest of Islamic
Sicily, 1060–1091,” al-Masāq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 22, 2010, 191–225.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
33
of the Crusades involves a fundamentally different concept of explanation from
that employed by modern scholars, who rely on the Aristotelian theory of concept
formation according to which general concepts are arrived at by abstracting from
the differences between a plurality of things that have the same fundamental
character and attending only to the common elements. The abstractionist model
of concept formation reduces the content of knowledge to mere pieces of the
whole with no assurance that the “pieces” selected are necessary and permanent
characteristics of the whole, rather than accidental and changing characteristics.
If an extrinsic property is mistaken for an intrinsic property, crusading will
assume an entirely new face. An enterprise that encompassed, by the end of the
eleventh century, a fight against “the Turks in Asia and the Moors in Europe”
(in Asia Turcos in Europa Mauros),90 will be explained solely in terms of a desire
“to acquire or to preserve Christian dominion over the Sepulcher of Our Lord in
Jerusalem,” or will be interpreted as “an act of self-sanctification” and be looked
In 1074, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) attempted to galvanize support for a campaign that
would “cross to Constantinople to bring aid to Christians who are grievously afflicted by the
most frequent ravagings of the Saracens,” and that would “go as far as the sepulchre of the
Lord [in Jerusalem].” Gregory may have contemplated leading this expedition himself, since,
according to the pope, “men from Italy and from beyond the Alps have accepted this
challenge . . . if they can have myself as leader and as pontiff.” By January 1075, however,
Gregory’s plans had come to naught, as did the prospect of a pope leading a Crusade
(Gregory VII, Das Register Gregors VII [Gregorii VII registrum lib. I-IX], ed. Erich Caspar,
vol. 2, fasc. 1–2, Berlin: Weidmann, 1920–23, 1:70–1, no. 1.46, 1:166, no. 2.31; translated
as The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085: An English Translation, trans. H.E.J.
Cowdrey, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, 51, no. 1.46, 123, no. 2.31). It took the Jerusalem
Crusade of 1095–99 to push the papacy more into the foreground of crusading leadership
and organization, but this was the result of the accidents of political history, rather than the
result of a fixed plan from the beginning. The period during which popes were the leaders
and organizers of the Crusades spanned roughly a century, from the end of the eleventh
century to the beginning of the thirteenth century. During the thirteenth century, the papacy
retreated “more into the background” of the crusading enterprise “as the individual states [of
the Latin West found] themselves capable of assuming most of the initiative and organization
by themselves” (Robert I. Burns, “The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia [1238–1276]: A Study
in the Organization of the Mediaeval Frontier,” unpubl. Ph.D diss., The Johns Hopkins
University, 1959, 24–25). See also James M. Powell, “Church and Crusade: Frederick II and
Louis IX,” Catholic Historical Review 93, 2007, 251–64; idem, “A Vacuum of Leadership:
1291 Revisited,” in La Papauté et les croisades, 165–71. Becker, like many historians, posits
a gulf between “reconquest” and “crusade,” and regards the active role played by the papacy
in the leadership and organization of the Crusades as a feature that distinguishes crusading
from pre-1095 activities of “reconquest” in Sicily and Spain (Becker, Urban II, vol. 2,
387–88). Yet if papal leadership and organization is intrinsic to crusading, how can such a
“vital” element be eliminated or degraded without undoing the Crusade movement? In actual
fact, the type of leadership and organizational structure associated with the Crusades varied
over the centuries. The changes wrought in the leadership and the organization of the
Crusades illustrate the protean nature of crusading and its ability to adapt to changing
conditions. Crusading did not maintain a single form of leadership and organizational
practices throughout its long history.
90. See below n109, and text.
34
THE HISTORIAN
upon as “primarily a penitential exercise.”91 In either case, crusading loses its
independence and self-sufficiency and becomes subordinate to a strictly contingent
feature of crusading.
The abstractionist model of concept formation inevitably explains a whole in
terms of its “pieces,” or its parts, that is, it explains the whole mechanistically. A
mechanistic model assumes the form: “Take six eggs. Then break them into a
bowl. Add flour, salt, sugar, etc.”92 In the case of the Crusades, this becomes:
“Take pilgrimage and Holy War. Mix them together. Add papal authorization, a
Crusade indulgence, a crusading vow, a Cross, and Crusader privileges, etc.”
Crusading is conceived as a mere compositum of parts that precedes the whole
and makes the whole possible because a Crusade cannot be determined into action
by crusading acts alone but can only be set in motion by something outside itself
(e.g., a Jerusalem pilgrimage, an institutional apparatus, or an extrinsic reward).
Urban does not look upon the Crusades in this way. What binds one Crusade to
another and every element of crusading together is not a set of common elements,
or properties, but a common purpose.
For Urban, the unity of the Crusades is expressed in their purpose, not in their
actualization (i.e., their particulars). The multiplicity of particulars is thought of
as a unified whole, as one particular phenomenon rather than a mere collection of
phenomena sharing some characteristics together. The particular individual Crusades belong together, not because they are alike or resemble each other in every
detail, but because they are united by a common task, which, in contrast to the
period preceding the Crusades, is perceived to be new: “the great task of the
reconquest of the Mediterranean from the power of Islam.”93
For Urban, the unity of the Crusades can be grasped, not by looking for unity
in multiplicity, by ridding the Crusades of all differences to find what is the same
in all of them. Rather, this unity can be grasped only through multiplicity, by
rejecting the unity of uniformity and by accepting multiplicity as the ground of all
unity. This is a unity that manifests itself in multiplicity. Instead of looking for the
unity underlying multiplicity, Urban looks for the multiplicity underlying unity.
His vision of unity does not exclude difference but rather fosters and requires it.
He does not subordinate the many to the one, the mutable to the invariable, the
91. See above n37, n59, and text, and Riley-Smith, Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, 23.
92. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed., Notre Dame, IN: U.
of Notre Dame P., 2007, 209.
93. Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European
Unity, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1932, 285.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
35
transitory to the permanent, the ever-changing to the unchanging, as do modern
historians of the Crusades. Instead of viewing unity and multiplicity as opposites,
Urban views them as mutually interdependent, as does Leibniz: “For where there
is no true unity, there is no true multiplicity.”94 The unity of the Crusades can only
be revealed in constant change, and the multiplicity of the Crusades can only be
explained as a unity. Urban clearly embraces a dynamic conception of crusading
rather than a static conception. The nature of crusading does not consist in its
being a fixed and unchangeable phenomenon but rather in producing ever new
variations of itself. Crusading is not a finished, ready-made product, but rather a
dynamic process that progressively determines itself. Its permanence lies in its
capacity to bring forth new and distinctive forms of crusading, from Sicily, to
Spain, to the eastern Mediterranean.95
Instead of reducing diversity to unity, change to changelessness, and dissimilarity to uniformity, as do modern historians, Urban introduces a pluralistic
approach to the Crusades by finding multiplicity in unity.96 He proceeds, not from
94. “Nam ubi nulla vera unitas ibi nulla vera multitudo” (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Leibniz
to Burcher de Volder, Hanover, 30 June 1704,” in Die philosophischen Schriften von
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. Carl I. Gerhardt, 7 vols, Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–90, vol. 2,
267); Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, With
an Appendix of Leading Passages, trans. Bertrand Russell, Cambridge: The University Press,
1900, 242.
95. On the Norman conquest of Sicily as the First Crusade, see Chevedden, “Crusade from the
First.” Pope Urban’s trichotomous view of the Crusades—from Sicily, to Spain, to the eastern
Mediterranean—is corroborated by Middle Eastern sources; see Chevedden, “Islamic Interpretation”; idem, “The Islamic View and the Christian View of the Crusades: A New
Synthesis,” History 93, 2008, 181–200; idem, “The View of the Crusades from Rome and
Damascus: The Geo-Strategic and Historical Perspectives of Pope Urban II and ‘Alı̄ ibn T·āhir
al-Sulamı̄,” Oriens 39, 2011, 257–329.
96. “Ou xyniasin hokōs diapheromenon heōutōi homologeei; palintropos harmoniē hokōsper
toxou kai lyres” (“Men do not understand how that which is torn in different directions
comes into accord with itself,—harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the bow and the
lyre”), Heraclitus, Fragment B51, in Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
griechisch und deutsch, 6th ed., ed. Walther Kranz, 3 vols., Berlin: Weidmann, 1951–52, vol.
1, 74; Source Book in Ancient Philosophy, ed. and trans. Charles M. Bakewell, New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907, 31; “intellectus in uno multitudinem comprehendit” (“the
intellect comprehends a multiplicity in unity”), Thomas Aquinas, Expositio super librum
Boethii De Trinitate, ed. Bruno Decker, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1955, 211 (pars 3, q. 6, a. 1, co.
22); “perceptio nihil aliud sit, quam multorum in uno expressio” (“perception is nothing but
the expression of many things in one”), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Leibniz to Bartholomew
Des Bosses, Hanover, 11 July 1706,” in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz-Des Bosses
Correspondence, eds Brandon Look and Donald Rutherford, New Haven, CT: Yale UP,
2007, 43–45, 44; “L’état passager qui enveloppe et represente une multitude dans l’unité ou
dans la substance simple n’est autre chose que ce qu’on appelle la Perception,” Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, “Ohne Überschrift, enthaltend die sogenannte Monadologie,” in Gerhardt,
Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 6, 608 (prop. 14).
36
THE HISTORIAN
plurality to unity, but from unity to plurality, just as he moves, not from the parts
to the whole, but from the whole to the parts. Accordingly, Urban grasps the
Crusades in their wholeness and simultaneously analyzes the parts of the Crusades, “in Asia” and “in Europe,” and relates them to the whole.97 He looks upon
crusading and its properties, not as conditioned by something outside itself (e.g.,
an extrinsic incentive), but as conditioning and determining action by means of its
already determined nature. He recognizes the whole of crusading in each of its
individual expressions, in Sicily, in Spain, and in the eastern Mediterranean. The
whole is not set forth as an entity having a fixed and unchangeable form, but is
seen as a process of which one can determine the purpose of the enterprise but not
the specific form of its realization, which differs according to time and place. The
constitution of this whole is reflected in every specific form of crusading, and in
every individual manifestation of the Crusades. No single manifestation, such as
the Jerusalem Crusade, can possibly incorporate the completeness and totality of
the whole to which it belongs, but every individual manifestation can represent, or
stand for, this completeness.
The concept of crusading is not embodied exclusively in one form (e.g., the
Jerusalem Crusade) but in the totality of crusading forms. This totality can only be
grasped in the aggregate, in the many manifestations of crusading, not in a single
Crusade. Only by looking at the Crusades in this way do the multiplicity, the
diversity, and the heterogeneity of the Crusades cease to appear to be a contradiction of their unity and become instead a necessary expression of that unity itself.
Every individual manifestation of crusading is what it is only in connection with the
whole, i.e., the end or purpose towards which Crusades are directed. And while that
end or purpose evolves and changes over the centuries, crusading still maintains
a sense of unity by continuing to be “at least in theory, international enterprises
against the common enemies of Christendom.”98 Thus, while crusading transforms
itself in all its changes, it also preserves itself in all its changes.
Modern historians have judged the entire Crusade movement from the standpoint of one Crusade, the Jerusalem Crusade summoned in 1095. Events prior to
1095 exhibiting a “crusading character” or associated with “the idea of crusade”99
97. See above n90, and below n109, and text.
98. Christopher Dawson, “Europe and the Seven Stages of Western Culture,” in idem, Understanding Europe, Washington, DC: Catholic U. of America P., 2009, 20–37: 28.
99. Erdmann, Entstehung, 103, 113, 116, 118, 123, 133, 152, 164, 165, 197, 210, 268, 272,
274, 293, 294, 295, 308, 309, 317, 320, 325; Erdmann, Origin, 114, 125, 128, 130, 136,
147, 168, 181, 215, 228, 288, 292, 294, 316, 317, 318, 333, 334, 344, 348, 354;
Chevedden, “Islamic Interpretation,” 126–29.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
37
are reduced to a mere prologue to the Jerusalem Crusade, and all Crusades
following this one are judged by the “standard,”100 the “scale,”101 the “touchstone,”102 the “template,”103 the “model,”104 the “blueprint,”105 the “benchmark,”106 or the “reference point”107 of this Crusade. In the Jerusalem Crusade the
entire meaning of crusading is supposed to become clearly visible. All other
Crusades receive their significance and validity through their relationship to this
Crusade. Yet Urban places all the Crusades on the same plane, equal in value and
validity. He makes his position on the equality of all Crusades especially clear in a
letter to a number of Catalan counts and their knights, written most probably in
July 1096, in which he admonishes “anyone” in Spain wishing “to go to Asia,” with
“the warriors of other provinces . . . to aid the Churches in Asia and to liberate their
brothers from the tyranny of the Saracens, . . . to fulfill the desire of his devotion
here [i.e., in Spain],” because “it is no feat of valor to liberate Christians from
Saracens in one place [i.e., in Asia] only to deliver Christians to Saracen tyranny and
oppression in another place [i.e., in Spain].”108
100. Riley-Smith, Crusades: Short History, xxix; idem, Crusades: A History, xxxi; Hehl,
“Kreuzzug,” 318; idem, “War, Peace and the Christian Order,” in The New Cambridge
Medieval History, vol. 4, part 1, 185–228: 214.
101. Riley-Smith, “Crusading Movement,” 9; Tyerman, Fighting, 228.
102. Louise Riley-Smith and Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095–1274,
London: E. Arnold, 1981, 2; Schein, Gateway, 117.
103. Housley, Contesting, 19; Brett Edward Whalen, Dominion of God: Christendom and
Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009, 70.
104. Ernest O. Blake, “The Formation of the ‘Crusade Idea,’” Journal of Ecclesiastical History
21, 1970, 11–31: 12; Hehl, “Kreuzzug,” 318; Simon Lloyd, “The Crusading Movement,
1096–1274,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, 34–65: 44; Maria
Starnawska, “Military Orders and the Beginning of Crusade in Prussia,” in The Crusades
and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity; In
Memoriam Sir Steven Runciman (1903–2000), eds Zsolt Hunyadi and József Laszlovszky,
Budapest: Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, 2001, 417–28:
418; Mitterauer, Warum Europa? 208; Tyerman, Fighting, 47; France, Crusades, 97; Price,
“Alfonso I,” 77, 78.
105. Jotischky, Crusading, 7.
106. Frankopan, First Crusade, 5.
107. Tyerman, Debate, 2.
108. “Si ergo ceterarum prouinciarum milites Asiane ecclesie subuenire unanimiter proposuere et
fratres suos ab Saracenorum tyrannide liberare, ita et uos unanimiter uicine ecclesie contra
Saracenorum incursus patientius succurrere nostris exortationibus laborate. . . . Si quis ergo
uestrum in Asiam ire deliberauerit, hic deuotionis sue desiderium studeat consummare.
Neque enim uirtutis est alibi a Saracenis christianos eruere, alibi christianos Saracenorum
tyrannidi oppressionique exponere” (Urban II to Bernat of Besalú, Hugo of Ampurias,
Guislabert of Roussilon, and Guillem of Cerdanya, and their knights, c. July 1096, in Paul
38
THE HISTORIAN
Urban views the broad scope of the Crusades themselves, rather than focusing
on a single Crusade, and subjects the many Crusades of his day to historical
scrutiny. He attempts to grasp the entire crusading enterprise, rather than separating out one Crusade and setting it up as a norm and pattern for all the others.
In 1098, with the Crusade in Sicily (1060–91) long ended, he takes stock of the
recovery of Huesca by Aragon (1096) and the victories in the East at Nicaea and
Dorylaeum (1097) and conceptualizes the Crusades in broad terms as a Christian
movement of reconquest and restoration of the lost lands of Christendom on two
fronts: in the eastern Mediterranean against “the Turks in Asia” and in the
western Mediterranean against “the Moors in Europe.” His own scrutiny into the
many Crusades of his day produces this assessment:
Best of all, after many years, God has, in our time (nostris temporibus),
alleviated the suffering of the Christian people and has deigned to exalt the
faith. In our day (nostris diebus), He has conquered (debellauit) the Turks
in Asia and the Moors in Europe with Christian forces, and He has restored
(restituit) once famous cities to the practice of His religion by even more
immanent divine grace. Among these, He has released (liberatam) the cathedral city of Huesca from the tyranny of the Saracens by the vigorous effort
of our beloved son, King Peter of Aragon, and has reestablished (reformauit)
His Catholic Church.109
By taking in the broad sweep of the Crusades, Urban introduces the idea of
development into the crusading enterprise. He does this by furnishing a full
conceptual framework for understanding the Crusades of his own era in his
schema that divides Christian history into four major epochs: (1) the epoch of
Christian antiquity; (2) the epoch of Islamic ascendancy; (3) the epoch of Christian
reconquest; and (4) the epoch of Christian restoration. Historical change is
Kehr, ed., Papsturkunden in Spanien: Vorarbeiten zur Hispania Pontificia, vol. 1,
Katalanien, pt. 2, Urkunden und Regesten, Berlin: Weidmann, 1926, 287–88, no. 23;
Becker, Urban II, vol. 1, 228–30; vol. 2, 347–48).
109. “[Dominus] . . . post multa annorum curricula nostris potissimum temporibus christiani
populi pressuras releuare fidem exaltare dignatus est. Nostris siquidem diebus in Asia
Turcos in Europa Mauros christianorum uiribus debellauit et urbes quondam famosas
religionis sue cultui gratia propensiore restituit, inter quas Oscam quoque pontificalis
cathedre urbem sarracenorum tirannide liberatam karissimi filii nostri Petri Aragonensis
regis instantia katholice Ecclesie sue reformauit” (Urban II to Bishop Peter of Huesca, 11
May 1098, in Antonio Durán Gudiol, La Iglesia de Aragón durante los reinados de Sancho
Ramírez y Pedro I (1062?–1104), Rome: Iglesia Nacional Española, 1962, 193, no. 20);
Becker, Urban II, vol. 1, 228; vol. 2, 334, 348–49, 351, 383, 400; idem, “Urbain II, pape
de la croisade,” 15–16; idem, “Urbain II et l’Orient,” 136. I thank Donald J. Kagay for
assistance in translating this text.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
39
fundamentally development towards an ultimate translatio regni, a shift from
Islamic to Christian rule that seeks to “restore the Christian <Churches> to their
former freedom,”110 the political purpose behind the Crusades. Crusading can take
place in a variety of forms and circumstances, yet the defining characteristic of
crusading, for Urban, is translatio regni. In setting forth this vision of crusading,
Urban connects various cities and regions of the Mediterranean with the historical
realization of a translatio to Christian rule and a restauratio of the Church
(understood as an entire religious society embracing both West and East).111 The
historical surge of translatio-restauratio can be seen more clearly the further the
two processes advance. We can follow the broad outlines of these processes
through Urban’s letters, in which he speaks of the yoked activities of translatio and
restauratio at work in the Norman war in Sicily,112 in the Castilian and Catalan
expansion in Iberia,113 and in the expedition to Jerusalem.114
110. See above n65.
111. Becker, Urban II, vol. 3, 38, 65–70.
112. See above n42, and text, and Urban II to Ambrose, first abbot of the monastery of St.
Bartholomew on Lipari, just off the northeast tip of Sicily, 3 June 1091, in Urban II,
“Epistolae et privilegia,” in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completes, Series Latina,
221 vols., Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1841–64, 151, col. 329C-D (hereafter cited as PL); Urban II
to Abbot-Bishop Ansgar of Catania, 9 March 1092, in Giuseppe Scalia, “Nuove
considerazioni storiche e paleografiche sui documenti dell’Archivio Capitolare di Catania
per il ristabilimento della sede vescovile nel 1091,” Archivio storico per la Sicilia orientale,
57 (4th ser., 14), 1961 5–53: 48, no. 1; Urban II to Bishop Roger of Syracuse, 23 November
1093, in Urban II, “Epistolae et privilegia,” PL 151, col. 370C-371A (under the date 17
November 1093); Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 342–46, 349–51, 359–60, vol. 3, 356.
113. See above n. 109, and text, and Urban II to Bernard de Sauvetot, archbishop of Toledo, 15
October 1088, in Demetrio Mansilla Reoyo, ed., La documentación pontificia hasta
Inocencio III (965–1216), Monumenta Hispaniae vaticana 1, Rome: Instituto Español de
Estudios Eclesiásticos, 1955, 43, no. 27; Urban II to Berenguer de Lluçà (d. 1099), bishop
of Ausona-Vic, 1 July 1091 in Mansilla, Documentación pontificia, 50–1, no. 32; Urban II
to Count Ermengol IV of Urgell, 1 July 1091, in Kehr, Papsturkunden, 286, no. 22; Urban
II to Bishop Gomez of Burgos, 14 March 1095, Piacenza, in Urban II, “Epistolae et
privilegia,” PL 151, col. 407B-D; Urban II to Bishop Pons of Barbastro, 1099, in Kehr,
Papsturkunden, 298, no. 31; Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 337, 341–42, 346–49, 351, 359, 383,
398, 400, 425, vol. 3, 65, 77, 91, 356, 586–88, 600; idem, “Urbain II, pape de la croisade,”
14–15.
114. In two letters, Pope Urban assesses in general terms the progress achieved with respect to both
translatio and restauratio while the Jerusalem Crusade is underway: Urban II to Bishop Peter
of Huesca, 11 May 1098 (see above n109, and text); and Urban II to Bishop Pons of
Barbastro, 1099 (see below n115, and text). In three letters issued to galvanize support for the
“military enterprise” (procinctus), or “expedition” (expeditio), to Jerusalem, Urban identifies the political objective of the campaign as: “to liberate the Churches of the East,” “the
liberation of the Church,” “liberating the community of Christians,” and “restor[ing] the
Christian <Churches> to their former freedom”: “procinctum,” “ad liberationem
Orientalium ecclesiarum” (Urban II to all the faithful in Flanders, c. December 1095, in
40
THE HISTORIAN
In 1099, Urban examines the general Mediterranean situation and declares: “In
our time (nostris temporibus) the Church has been enlarged, the domination of the
Muslims has been reduced, the ancient honor of episcopal sees has been, by the
gift of God, restored (restauratur).”115 No fixed and permanent institutional
structures or “specific and clearly defined geographical objective” serve as criteria
to identify Crusades. Rather, Urban understands the Crusades as a single continuum of activity “[to restore] once famous cities to the practice of [God’s]
religion,”116 “[to reestablish] the former position of the Holy Church,”117 or “to
liberate the Church of God.”118 He perceives the deeds and actions “to liberate
Christians from Saracens”119 and “[to] greatly [expand] the Church of God into
Saracen territory”120 as a unity, as a manifestation of an identical reality. Crusading is not to be understood statically but dynamically. Crusading is not some
mysterious atavism—a perpetual recurrence to an ancestral type—but a swiftly
progressing historical development whose results Urban sees “in our time”
(nostris temporibus)121 have transformed the Mediterranean world.
Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, 136); “ecclesiae liberatione” (Urban II to his supporters in
Bologna, 19 September 1096, in Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, 137); “expeditionem,”
“liberande˛ christianitatis,” “christianorum <ecclesias> possint libertati pristine˛ restituere”
(Urban II to the monks of Vallombrosa,7 October 1096, see above n65). In a letter soliciting
support for the restoration (restitutionem) of the city and Church of Tarragona, Urban
identifies the political objective of the Jerusalem campaign as: “to aid the Churches in Asia
and to liberate their brothers from the tyranny of the Saracens” and “to liberate Christians
from Saracens”: “Asiane ecclesie subuenire . . . et fratres suos ab Saracenorum tyrannide
liberare,”: “a Saracenis christianos eruere” (Urban II to a number of Catalan counts and their
knights, c. July 1096; see above, n108, and text); Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 341–42, 348–49,
351, 386–91.
115. “[Q]uod nostris temporibus ecclesia propagatur, Sarracenorum dominatio diminuitur,
antiquus episcopalium sedium honor prestante Domino restauratur” (Urban II to Bishop
Pons of Barbastro, 1099, in Kehr, Papsturkunden, 298, no. 31); Riley-Smith, First Crusade,
18; Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 351, vol. 3, 600.
116. See above n109, and text.
117. See above n42, and text.
118. See above n56, and text.
119. See above n108, and text.
120. “[I]n Saracenorum finibus Ecclesiam Dei plurimum dilatavit” (Urban II to Count Roger of
Sicily, 5 July 1098, in Urban II, “Epistolae et privilegia,” PL 151, col. 506C; Geoffrey
Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi Ducis
fratris eius, ed. Ernesto Pontieri, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1927–28, 108 [IV.29]); Becker, Urban
II, 2: 350–51, 3: 38, 66–69.
121. See above n42, n109, and n115, and text, and Urban II to Bernard de Sauvetot, archbishop
of Toledo, 15 October 1088, in Mansilla, Documentación pontificia, 43, no. 27; Urban II
to Daibert, bishop of Pisa, Anagni, 21 April 1092, in Urban II, “Epistolae et privilegia,”
letter 63, PL 151, col. 345A; Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 342, 351, 353, 357.
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
41
To understand Urban’s conception of “crusade,” we must set aside all the
narrow connotations of the term that associate it in the eleventh century only with
Jerusalem or the eastern Mediterranean, and we should bear in mind that, for
Urban, the war against “the Turks in Asia” and the war against “the Moors in
Europe” are inseparably united and are regarded as part of the same common
enterprise. As Riley-Smith observes, “Urban regarded the new crusade to the East
as part of a wider movement of Christian liberation and did not distinguish it from
the Spanish Reconquest.”122 Even a distinction, such as the one that Riley-Smith
draws between a “crusade” and a “reconquest,” would have made little sense to
Urban.123 Rather than seeing “crusade” and “reconquest” as mutually exclusive
alternatives, as Riley-Smith does, we should recognize that Urban would never
have accepted such exclusive options, because for him the fight against Islam in
Spain and the fight against Islam in the eastern Mediterranean were “two sides of
the same enterprise to liberate territories formerly in Christian hands.”124 Robert
I. Burns repudiates the usual separation of “crusade” and “reconquest.” “The
122. Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 20. According to Erdmann, “[Pope Urban II] considered the two
wars [i.e., the war against ‘Turks in Asia’ and the war against ‘the Moors in Europe’] as
parallel undertakings, forming a unit from the spiritual standpoint but separate as campaigns. . . . This presupposes nothing other than the idea of a common front of Christianity
against the heathen” (Erdmann, Entstehung, 296, 321; Erdmann, Origin, 319, 349).
123. Likewise, the distinction that Becker draws between Pope Urban’s “reconquista texts” and
his “Crusade texts” (“Reconquista- und Kreuzzugstexten”) would have made little sense
to the pope, particularly in light of the fact that Becker finds these texts in complete
agreement with one another (Becker, Urban II, vol. 2, 395–96). The absolute dichotomy
between “reconquest” and “crusade,” with 1095 forming the dividing line between these
realms, is one of the intellectual doctrines that scholars have brought to the study of the
Crusades. Becker does not attempt to overcome the conventional “reconquest”-“crusade”
dualism. He accepts these categories as they have been traditionally defined, and, while he
posits differences between reconquista and Crusade, he nonetheless shows that there is no
distinction in kind but only one of degree between these two realms (Becker, Urban II,
vol. 2, 387–88). In other words, what Becker conceives as distinct and separate historical
entities is really the same entity at different stages of development. During the eleventh
century, crusading developed in degrees and stages through levels of increasing organization and cooperation. The level of activity reached by the Jerusalem Crusade represents
the highest degree of international organization and cooperation achieved by a Crusade
enterprise up to that time. Although Becker does not surmount the “reconquest”“crusade” dualism, he does proceed halfway toward this goal by “reconquestifying”
crusading (see Becker, Urban II, vol. 1, 229–30, vol. 2, 284, 337, 339, 378, 383–84, 390,
395–400, 403–04, 407, vol. 3, 675–76; idem, “Urbain II, pape de la croisade,” 15, 17;
idem, “Urbain II et l’Orient,” 136).
124. Flori, La croix, 120 (“Pour le pape, la reconquête en Occident et la croisade en Orient sont
deux aspects d’une même entreprise de libération de territoires jadis chrétiens”). See also
Jean Flori, “Réforme, reconquista, croisade (l’idée de reconquête dans la correspondance
pontificale d’Alexandre II à Urbain II),” in idem, Croisade et chevalerie: XIe-XIIe siècles,
Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 1998, 51–80: 77; Hehl, “War,” 212 (“Urban II himself
considered the two theatres of war [Spain and the Holy Land] as one”).
42
THE HISTORIAN
very term Reconquest,” he says, “has probably outlived its usefulness,” because
“it reflects the antiquated fantasy of eight centuries of war consciously designed to
recover a lost country [i.e., Spain],” which no scholar now regards as tenable. “It
is particularly misleading,” argues Burns, “when suggesting a merely secular war
of gain during Europe’s crusade period.” The eleventh century, with its “violent
readjustment of Christian society, at its moment of urbanization and expansion,
marks the beginnings,” according to Burns, “of whatever ‘Reconquest’ Spain
underwent.” It is in the context of the Crusades, Burns maintains, where the term
can meaningfully be applied: “It is used most exactly as a substitute or substratum
for crusade, as canonists did, in the sense of a just war to ‘recover’ from Muslims
the lands lost to Islam by Christendom, including the Holy Land.”125
The events of the so-called “First” Crusade did not lead Urban to create new
ideas about crusading or to revise existing ones, but were a vindication of
observations already made, that events nostris temporibus—in Sicily, in Spain,
and now in the eastern Mediterranean—were a turning point in Christian history,
and that a single reality holds this series of events together. Pope Urban does not
form a concept of “crusade” by separating out a fixed group of properties from a
plurality of Crusades. Rather, he constructs his idea of “crusade” by unifying a
series of similar undertakings into a single order of coherent relationships, which
he characterizes under the rubric of translatio regni. The serial ordering of these
events constitutes the truly creative aspect of Urban’s formation of the crusading
concept, and demonstrates that Urban thought of crusading, not as a fixed entity,
but as a continuous activity.126 As Becker states, “Spain, Sicily, and Asia Minor
125. Robert I. Burns, “Muslim-Christian Conflict and Contact in Medieval Spain: Context and
Methodology,” Thought 54, 1979, 238–52: 242; idem, “The Many Crusades of Valencia’s
Conquest (1225–1280): A Historiographical Labyrinth,” in On the Social Origins of
Medieval Institutions: Essays in Honor of Joseph F. O’Callaghan, eds Donald J. Kagay and
Theresa M. Vann, Leiden: Brill, 1998, 167–77: 177. See also Damian J. Smith, “‘Soli
hispani’? Innocent III and Las Navas de Tolosa,” Hispania Sacra 51, 1999, 487–513:
496–501, esp. 500 (“the language of the Reconquista is the language of the Reformed
Papacy”). On the historical construct of reconquista, see now Martín F. Ríos Saloma, La
Reconquista: una construcción historiográfica (siglos XVI-XIX), Madrid: Marcial Pons
Ediciones de Historia, 2011. I thank Damian Smith for alerting me to this publication.
126. According to Cassirer, the construction of a series is the most important element in the
formation of the concepts of mathematics and the natural sciences that depend upon
mathematics: “Without a process of arranging in series, without running through the
different instances, the consciousness of their generic connection—and consequently of the
abstract object—could never arise. This transition from member to member, however,
manifestly presupposes a principle according to which it takes place, and by which the form
of dependence between each member and the succeeding one, is determined. Thus from this
point of view also it appears that all construction of concepts is connected with some
definite form of construction of series. We say that a sensuous manifold is conceptually
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
43
were for the Pope—apart from the question of the unification of the Church and
the problems of papal-Byzantine politics—in the last three or four years of his
pontificate simply three different fronts, as it were, in which the same fight
between Christianity and Islam was being played out, and in which everyone—
Spaniard, Norman, or Crusader—took his assigned place and fulfilled a task of
exactly equal value.”127
The dynamic nature of crusading consists in giving birth to a variety of
Crusades. Thus, Sicily leads to Spain, Spain to the eastern Mediterranean, and
afterwards to the entire Mediterranean.128 Given “the protean quality of crusading,” which “hardly confirms the creation of a homogeneous movement,” and still
less that “the papacy was . . . in control of a homogeneous movement,” we should
not be surprised that crusading defies formalization and “precise definition.”129
Never is one Crusade just like any other. Spain does not mirror Sicily, nor does the
Jerusalem Crusade reproduce what happened in Sicily or Spain. In similar fashion,
never can a Crusade be reduced to the sum of purely static elements that are
derived from a single Crusade. All the particular elements that make up a Crusade
are to be understood rather as in transition, in flux, in the process of change. Their
recognizability as crusading elements is not owing to the fact that they can be
identified by means of a single common core of never-changing characteristics, but
apprehended and ordered, when its members do not stand next to one another without
relation but proceed from a definite beginning, according to a fundamental generating
relation, in necessary sequence. It is the identity of this generating relation, maintained
through changes in the particular contents, which constitutes the specific form of the
concept” (Cassirer, Substanzbegriff, 19–20; Cassirer, Substance, 15). In a similar way to
mathematical concept formation, Urban’s concept of Crusade consists in recognizing
translatio regni as the serial principle at the heart of crusading, according to which Crusades
take place, and by which Crusades are connected together. In the opinion of Tyerman, “the
First Crusade was unique and . . . unrepeatable,” not part of a connected series of events
(Tyerman, Invention, 8; idem, Debate, 23).
127. “Spanien, Sizilien, Kleinasien waren für den Papst—abgesehen von der Frage der
Kirchenunion und den Problemen einer päpstlichen Byzanz-politik—in den letzten drei
oder vier Jahren seines Pontifikats sozusagen nur drei verschiedene Fronten, an denen
sich ein und derselbe Kampf zwischen Christentum und Islam abspielte, und an denen
jeder—Spanier, Normanne oder Kreuzfahrer—einen ihm zugewiesenen Platz einnahm und
eine durchaus gleichwertige Aufgabe erfüllte” (Becker, Urban II, vol. 1, 229–30; see also
Becker, Urban II, vol. 3, 675). I thank Diana Darke for assistance in translating this
sentence.
128. “[R]egnum Christi et ecclesiae a mari usque ad mare usquequaque dilataret” (“expand the
kingdom of Christ and the Church everywhere from sea to sea”), Daibert, Archbishop of
Pisa, Duke Godfrey, Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher, Raymond, Count of Saint-Gilles, and
the entire army of God to Pope Pascal II and all the Christian faithful, September 1099,
Latakia, in Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, 171–72.
129. Tyerman, Invention, 1, 6, 23; idem, God’s War, 260.
44
THE HISTORIAN
that they are perceived as manifestations of a single reality that unfolds in multiple
and divergent ways. What makes a Crusade a Crusade is not a single set of
common characteristics, or conformity to a common model (i.e., the Jerusalem
Crusade), but the principle of an end or purpose to be attained that gives shape
and form to all of the elements or structures of a Crusade. The possibility of these
elements, as well as their form, is dependent upon the end or purpose towards
which Crusades are directed. The structure of a Crusade depends on its function
or purpose; its function or purpose does not depend on its structure.
Because structure is inseparably linked to function, what holds the various
structures of a Crusade together is not the unity of a historical prototype (i.e., the
Jerusalem Crusade), or the unity of a single common core of characteristics, but
the unity of a purpose. This unity manifests itself in successive acts of crusading,
so that each act of crusading is understandable as part of a dynamic whole
developing in a profusion of different forms. Each act, or exploit, of crusading
signifies an ever new expression of the whole. Yet in the profusion of crusading
forms, crusading preserves its identity by being related to a common task. The
common task connects the actual particulars of crusading (i.e., the many individual acts of crusading and the many individual components of crusading) with
the whole, which can only manifest itself in multiplicity. This conception of
crusading is not based on the concept of permanence, or continuity, in change, but
on the idea that change forms the basis of permanence and continuity, just as the
different waters of Heraclitus’s river form the basis of the continuing reality of the
river. Permanence can be grasped only through the process of change, and unity
can be understood only through the lens of multiplicity. Permanence and change
are inseparably related in the Crusades because Pope Urban sees the Crusades as
successive stages in a continuous movement, proceeding from Sicily to Spain to the
eastern Mediterranean.
Pope Urban’s vision of crusading is built upon a “functional,” or purposebased, theory of crusading, not upon an abstractionist theory of crusading. In
stressing the synthetic character of the Crusades, Pope Urban stands at odds with
nearly every modern explanation of the Crusades, which proceeds on the basis
that understanding is analytical in nature and is established by dividing a whole
into its separate parts and reasoning from the parts to the whole. We know that
Urban held a “functional” view of crusading because the two formulations that he
gave crusading—translatio regni and ad liberandam ecclesiam Dei—indicate that
he thought about Crusades in terms of whether, and to what extent, the actual
outcomes of crusading conformed to the political purpose of the enterprise. Urban
conceives of the various forms of crusading as specific functions of translatio regni
CRUSADE CREATIONISM
45
and ad liberandam ecclesiam Dei. Crusading is not an aggregate of separate parts,
but a unified whole manifested in a common task. Modern scholars have something to learn from Pope Urban. First, Urban conceptualizes the Crusades on a
non-Jerusalem-centered basis. Second, he reaches an understanding of the Crusades, not through a process of abstraction, but through a synthetic act of the
mind that perceives the whole “as a whole,” not as a whole of parts, and perceives
the parts as meaningful only to the extent that they affirm the whole. Finally,
he sees the Crusades as unfolding in a progressive sequence of events. The manner
of this progression ensures that every Crusade is definable in terms of what has
come before, while guaranteeing that each new Crusade expands the previous
content of crusading and adds synthetically to the concept of Crusade new and
transformative elements. Thus, the unity of the Crusades maintains itself continuously in a manifold of expressions, as crusading develops and divides itself into
new forms and new practices.
In “ongoing modes of human activity,” as Alasdair MacIntyre observes, “ends
have to be discovered and rediscovered, and means devised to pursue them,” and
it is these very modes of activity, which he terms “practices,” that “generate new
ends and new conceptions of ends.”130 Crusading comprised precisely those
ongoing modes of human activity within which new ends emerged, and within
which old ends were revised and adapted to new conditions. Crusading can never
be defined in a static way, as having either a fixed geographical objective or a fixed
core of common characteristics. The Crusades were not created functionally
complete from the beginning, nor were they locked into the perpetuation of a fixed
and immutable type of activity. Instead, as the practice of crusading grew as a
political force, the Church, beginning in 1063, moved to sustain it by creating
institutions that would support it. A loose nexus of institutional structures and
arrangements evolved which over time crystallized into a standard panoply of
institutional components. Crusading did not emerge simultaneously as a political
force and as an institutionalized tradition, but developed step by step, first as a
political force, followed by the development in successive stages of an institutionalized tradition into which its practitioners were initiated. The processes of
institutionalization, in turn, compelled theoretical formulations of crusading (ad
liberandam ecclesiam Dei) and a biblical warrant for it (translatio regni). Eventually, the original ends for which the Crusades were begun became the means for
new ends.
130. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 273.
46
THE HISTORIAN
Because the Crusades were produced by historical processes, rather than controlling these processes in advance, a variety of particular crusading forms
emerged, each responding to the context in which it arose. Each of these forms
was a by-product of a changing world. As the world changed, crusading changed
with it. Over the centuries the peoples of Western Europe employed the concept
of Crusade as the world they lived in changed around them. Each major change
in the direction of crusading was related to changes in the wider society to which
crusading was an adaptation. Hence, there were many kinds of Crusades, whose
structures and institutions, once established or adopted, were analogous, but
whose contexts and circumstances varied widely, according to time and place.
There were Crusades against Muslims in the Mediterranean, pagans in the Baltic,
heretics in southern France and Germany, schismatics in Greece, Mongols in
eastern Europe, and political opponents of the papacy in western Europe. Yet
without the original mode of activity in which crusading found its purpose—
recovering from Islam the lost lands of Christendom—there would have been
nothing for individuals and groups in society to reflect upon in order to “generate
new ends and new conceptions of ends.” It is with respect to the original mode of
crusading activity that Pope Urban concerns himself—a translatio from Islamic to
Christian rule beginning in the central and western Mediterranean and extending
to the eastern Mediterranean. While historians rush to guarantee the fixity of the
Crusades, so that each Crusade preserves in some fashion the basic character of
the so-called “First” Crusade, Pope Urban’s understanding of the Crusades introduces us to a mutable and ever-evolving historical reality.