The Crusades: A History (Yale Nota Bene) - Softcover

Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor Of Ecclesiastical History Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300101287 ISBN 13: 9780300101287

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2005

Synopsis

"Pulls off the enviable feat of summing up seven centuries of religious warfare in a crisp 309 pages of text."--Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World

In this authoritative work, Jonathan Riley-Smith provides the definitive account of the Crusades: an account of the theology of violence behind the Crusades, the major Crusades, the experience of crusading, and the crusaders themselves. With a wealth of fascinating detail, Riley-Smith brings to life these stirring expeditions to the Holy Land and the politics and personalities behind them. This new edition includes revisions throughout as well as a new Preface and Afterword in which Jonathan Riley-Smith surveys recent developments in the field and examines responses to the Crusades in different periods, from the Romantics to the Islamic world today.

From reviews of the first edition:

"Everything is here: the crusades to the Holy Land, and against the Albigensians, the Moors, the pagans in Eastern Europe, the Turks, and the enemies of the popes. Riley-Smith writes a beautiful, lucid prose, . . . [and his book] is packed with facts and action."--Choice

"A concise, clearly written synthesis . . . by one of the leading historians of the crusading movement. "--Robert S. Gottfried, Historian

"A lively and flowing narrative [with] an enormous cast of characters that is not a mere catalog but a history. . . . A remarkable achievement."--Thomas E. Morrissey, Church History

"Superb."--Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Speculum

"A first-rate one-volume survey of the Crusading movement from 1074 . . . to 1798."--Southwest Catholic

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Riley-Smith (1938-2016) was Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, and the author or editor of many books on the Crusades and the Middle Ages.

From the Back Cover

A comprehensive history of the Crusades: an account of the theology of violence behind the Crusades, the major Crusades, the experience of crusading, and the crusaders themselves.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Crusades

A HistoryBy JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2005 Jonathan Riley-Smith
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10128-7

Contents

Maps...............................................................................................xiPreface to the Second Edition......................................................................xxvPreface to the First Edition.......................................................................xxviiIntroduction.......................................................................................xxix1 The Birth of the Crusading Movement: The Preaching of the First Crusade..........................1The casus belli....................................................................................1Pope Urban II......................................................................................2A war of liberation................................................................................4A penitential war-pilgrimage.......................................................................8Jerusalem..........................................................................................10Crusaders as penitents.............................................................................12The response.......................................................................................16The 'first Holocaust'..............................................................................232 The Course of the First Crusade..................................................................26The condition of Islam.............................................................................26The first wave.....................................................................................26The second wave: the march to Constantinople.......................................................29The second wave: Constantinople to Antioch.........................................................32The second wave: the siege of Antioch and its aftermath............................................37The second wave: the liberation of Jerusalem.......................................................42The achievement of the second wave.................................................................44The third wave.....................................................................................44Developments in the idea of crusading..............................................................473 The Holy Places and the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch...................................50The founding of the settlements....................................................................50The embellishment of the holy places...............................................................53The establishment of the Latin Church..............................................................61Relations with the indigenous after 1110...........................................................66The contribution of the Latin Church...............................................................754 Settlement, Government and Defence of the Latin East, 1097-1187..................................82Countryside and town...............................................................................82Administration.....................................................................................85The crown and the lords............................................................................90Baldwin I to Baldwin V.............................................................................94The defence of the settlements.....................................................................101The Battle of Hattin and the loss of Jerusalem.....................................................1095 Crusading in Adolescence, 1102-1187..............................................................112Crusaders or pilgrims..............................................................................112The early crusades of the twelfth century..........................................................116The Second Crusade.................................................................................121Low morale.........................................................................................131The development of traditions......................................................................1346 Crusading comes of Age, 1187-1229................................................................137The Third Crusade..................................................................................137The crusade of 1197................................................................................146Pope Innocent III..................................................................................147The Fourth Crusade.................................................................................149The Baltic crusades................................................................................161The crusade against Markward of Anweiler...........................................................162The Albigensian Crusade............................................................................163Crusading in Spain.................................................................................169The Children's Crusade and the preaching of the Fifth Crusade......................................171The course of the Fifth Crusade....................................................................176The crusade of Frederick II........................................................................1807 Crusading in Maturity, 1229-c. 1291..............................................................183Crusading thought in the mid-thirteenth century....................................................183The Barons' Crusade, 1239-41.......................................................................186The first crusade of St Louis......................................................................189Crusading in Prussia and Livonia...................................................................195The first crusades against the Mongols.............................................................199Crusading in Spain.................................................................................199Crusades against heretics..........................................................................200Political crusades.................................................................................201The second crusade of St Louis.....................................................................207Pope Gregory X.....................................................................................212The failure to launch a great crusade after 1276...................................................2138 The Latin East, 1192-c. 1291.....................................................................215Cilician Armenia...................................................................................215Cyprus.............................................................................................216Greece.............................................................................................217The Italians.......................................................................................224The Ayyubids.......................................................................................226The settlers' knowledge of Muslim politics.........................................................227Antioch-Tripoli....................................................................................228Constitutional conflict in the kingdom of Jerusalem................................................230The emergence of the Mamluks.......................................................................237Changes to the Asiatic trade routes................................................................238The Mamluk conquests...............................................................................240The destruction of the settlements in Palestine and Syria..........................................2419 The Variety of Crusading, c. 1291-1523...........................................................245The range of options...............................................................................245Crusade theoreticians..............................................................................246The fall of the Templars...........................................................................247The Teutonic Knights in Prussia and Livonia........................................................251The Hospitallers of St John on Rhodes..............................................................254Features of the order-states.......................................................................257Cyprus.............................................................................................258Greece.............................................................................................259Crusading in Spain, 1302-54........................................................................261Crusading in Italy, 1302-78........................................................................262Crusading to the East in the aftermath of the fall of Acre.........................................264Crusading to the East, 132360, and the emergence of leagues.......................................266Peter I of Cyprus..................................................................................268Concern about the Turks............................................................................269Crusades engendered by the Great Schism............................................................271The crusades of Mahdia and Nicopolis...............................................................271Crusading against the Turks, 1397-1413.............................................................273The Hussite crusades...............................................................................274The crusade of Varna...............................................................................275Reactions to the loss of Constantinople and the reappearance of peasant armies.....................276Pius II............................................................................................277The conquest of Granada and the invasion of North Africa...........................................278Crusade plans, 1484-1522...........................................................................27910 The Old Age and Death of the Crusading Movement, 1523-1798......................................282The Reformation....................................................................................282The military orders................................................................................284North Africa.......................................................................................285The eastern theatre................................................................................288The Hospitallers of St John and Malta..............................................................292The death of crusading.............................................................................297Afterword..........................................................................................299The critical romantics.............................................................................299The romantic imperialists..........................................................................301Neo-imperialists: Liberal, Marxist, Zionist, Muslim................................................304The Islamization of neo-imperialistic history......................................................306The challenge to historiographical tradition.......................................................308Bibliography.......................................................................................310Index..............................................................................................330

Chapter One

The Birth of the Crusading Movement: The Preaching of the First Crusade

The casus belli

In the first week of March 1095 Pope Urban II presided over a church council at Piacenza in northern Italy. There was present an embassy sent by the Byzantine emperor Alexius I to ask for help against the Turks, whose advance across Asia Minor had brought them within striking distance of Constantinople (Istanbul). This appeal set off the chain of events that led to the First Crusade.

By the early eighth century the Christians had lost North Africa, Palestine and Syria and most of Spain to the Muslims. The frontier between Christendom and Islam had then stabilized until the Byzantine (or Greek) emperors, ruling from Constantinople what remained of the eastern Roman empire, went onto the offensive in the second half of the tenth century. The comparatively subdued reaction of the Muslims to the First Crusade can be partly explained by the fact that their confidence had already been shaken 130 years before, when the ancient cities of Tarsus and Antioch (Antakya) had been retaken and the Byzantine frontier had advanced into northern Syria. A violent shock had been felt throughout the Islamic world: 600 volunteers had arrived in Mosul from Khorasan, 1,200 miles away, in 963; they were followed three years later by a further 20,000 men. The Christian victories had coincided with internal developments that were to transform the western Islamic scene. The authority of the 'Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad had atrophied and they themselves had fallen under the control of Shi'ite princes, whom the Sunnis regarded as heretics. In 969 Egypt had been occupied almost without opposition by another Shi'ite dynasty, the Fatimids, and a rival caliphate had been established. The Fatimids had struggled to wrest Palestine and Syria from the 'Abbasids, but in the 1060s and 1070s they had to give way to Turks who, taking advantage of seventeen years of internal disorder in Egypt, drove them out of most of their Syrian possessions and left them with only a shaky hold on parts of Palestine. It was these Turks who at the same time revived Muslim fortunes on the Christian frontier.

Far to the east, among the nomadic Turkomans on the borders of the Turkish steppe east of the Aral Sea who had converted to Islam in the tenth century, there had been a large group under a chief called Selchk. Brought into the settled Islamic area as hired warriors, his people were in control of Khorasan by 1037 and their victory at the Battle of Dandanqan in 1040 opened Iran to them. In 1049 the motley following of Tughrul, Selchk's grandson, comprising barely controllable nomadic Turkomans and more regular forces, penetrated Armenia. In 1055 Tughrul entered Baghdad and by 1059 he was master of Iraq as far as the Byzantine and Syrian marches. He established a sultanate which ruled Iran, Iraq and part of Syria in the name of the 'Abbasid caliph. At their conversion to Islam the Selchk Turks had absorbed the aggressive and strict religion of the frontiers and they justified their progress westwards as a campaign against the corruption in Islam which, they believed, had manifested itself in the scandal of the orthodox Sunni caliphate being for over a century under the dominance of Shi'ite princes. Their concern thereafter was to proceed against the heretical caliph in Egypt.

Their early moves against Christian territory were haphazard and spasmodic. From the later 1050s parties of nomads were raiding deep into Byzantine Armenia and by the late 1060s they were to be found in Cilicia and in Anatolia proper. As they moved across the borders they passed beyond the control of Tughrul's nephew and successor Alp Arslan, who was forced to intervene in the region. This in turn provoked a Byzantine military reaction. In 1071 Alp Arslan conducted a campaign which, although it involved capturing several Christian places in order to consolidate his frontier, was concerned primarily with bringing Muslim Aleppo to heel. The city fell to him, but he then heard that the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV Diogenes was preparing an offensive. Rounding on the Greeks, he annihilated them and captured the emperor at the Battle of Manzikert.

Byzantine military power had been in decline. Manzikert opened the empire to the Turkoman nomads, a process hastened by the short-sighted actions of Greek generals competing for the throne, who enrolled Turks in their service and established them in the interior. Asia Minor rapidly passed out of Byzantine control and it was this that lay behind the appeal to the West in 1095.

Pope Urban II

The papacy had for some time been worried about the disintegration of Christendom's eastern frontier. News of Turkish penetration had led Pope Gregory VII in 1074 to propose leading personally a force of as many as 50,000 volunteers to 'liberate' their Christian brothers in the East; he stated that with this army he might even push on to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Pope Urban had been in touch with the Byzantine emperor from the beginning of his pontificate, with the aim of improving relations between the Latin and Greek Churches. It is, therefore, highly improbable that his behaviour after the council of Piacenza was a spontaneous response to the appeal just made by the Greeks. It is more likely to have been one that had been long premeditated.

With hindsight one can see how Urban's upbringing and career had prepared him for the step he now took. He had been born c. 1035 into a North French noble family: his father was probably a vassal of the count of Champagne. Educated at the prestigious school attached to the cathedral at Reims, he became canon and archdeacon there, before leaving soon after 1067 to enter the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny, perhaps under the influence of that desire for a stricter religious life which was to lead his teacher St Bruno to found the Carthusians. By 1074 the abilities which had made him archdeacon at a very young age had brought him to the office of grand prior of Cluny, the second-in-command to the abbot. Cluny was at the centre of ecclesiastical affairs and its monks were called upon to serve in Rome under Pope Gregory VII. Urban was appointed to the cardinal-bishopric of Ostia, the senior office in the college of cardinals, succeeding another past grand prior of Cluny. He went to Rome in 1080 and was caught up in the Investiture Contest, particularly during the winter of 10845 when he was trying to shore up crumbling support for Gregory in Germany. He was one of three persons nominated by Gregory as his possible successor and after the short pontificate of Victor III he was elected pope on 12 March 1088. His time as canon of Reims and monk and prior at Cluny had brought him into contact with some of the best elements in the reform movement and had exposed him to views associated with Cluny on the functions of secular knights in the service of the Church. His career in Italy and as papal legate in Germany had introduced him to the latest reform ideas and to their application to ecclesiastical politics. But above all by birth he was well qualified to know the minds of the western knights.

After staying in Piacenza for about a month he began a leisurely journey through northern Italy before moving on to France. On 15 August 1095 he was at Le Puy, the bishop of which, Adhmar of Monteil, was to play an important part in the crusade. From there Urban summoned the French bishops to a council to be held at Clermont in the following November. He then travelled south to St Gilles, in the dominions of Raymond of St Gilles, the count of Toulouse and a future leader of the crusade, before travelling up the Rhne valley to Cluny, which he reached on c. 18 October. One of the reasons for his visit to France had been to dedicate the altar of the great new church that had been built at Cluny. He reached Clermont on 15 or 16 November and opened the council on the 18th. On the 27th he proclaimed the crusade to a large but predominantly clerical gathering, after which he journeyed through central, western and southern France, skirting the area directly controlled by the king, whose excommunication for adultery had been confirmed at Clermont. Urban must have preached the crusade a good deal himself and we have references to the sermons he delivered at Limoges at Christmas 1095, at Angers and Le Mans in February 1096 and at Nmes in July. He also presided over ceremonies at which knights took the cross: possibly at Le Mans, certainly at Tours in March 1096. He recrossed the Alps into Italy in August. By then the crusade was under way. For a man in his sixties his achievement had been astonishing. He had covered about 2,000 miles, entering country towns, the citizens of which had never seen a king or anyone of such international importance in living memory, accompanied by a flock of cardinals, archbishops and bishops, whose riding households must have been immense and whose train must have stretched across miles of countryside. He had timed his arrival to coincide with great patronal feasts: he was at St Gilles for the feast of St Giles, at Le Puy, the greatest Marian shrine of the time, for the feast of the Assumption, at Poitiers for the feast of St Hilary. He had been crowned with his tiara and he had ridden through the streets wearing it. He had dedicated with all the liturgical theatre that could be mustered the cathedrals and monastic basilicas that witnessed to the ambitious building programme embarked on everywhere by French churchmen. He had then preached the cross.

There were many descriptions of the message Urban was trying to get across at Clermont and on his tour of France. Most are not to be trusted because they were written after the crusade had liberated Jerusalem, when no writer was immune from a general euphoria that bathed the immediate past in an artificial glow, but there is enough contemporary material, particularly in his own letters, for us to make out at least the outlines of his appeal. At Clermont and throughout his preaching tour he stressed that he was speaking on God's behalf. He wrote of the crusaders being inspired agents of God who were to be engaged in God's service out of love for him. He told them they were followers of Christ and he may well have referred to them as 'knights of Christ'. The pope was, of course, using the expostulatory language already employed by reformers when they referred to their military supporters, but the crusaders took him literally and became convinced that they were fighting for God.

A war of liberation

Urban called for a war of liberation, to be waged by volunteers who had vowed to fight as an act of penance. This part of his message reflected ideas long held by progressive churchmen. The central power of the state in France had fragmented. Real authority was no longer being exercised by the king, nor by many of the great magnates, but, by a process that is still mysterious but may have had something to do with the fact that by the tenth century a society constructed for war no longer had any function other than to turn its aggression in on itself, many of the provinces had broken into smaller units, based on castles from which castellans and their bodies of knights so terrorized their neighbourhoods that they came to represent the only authorities, violent, arbitrary and demanding, that men knew. This breakdown, even of provincial government, was often accompanied by uncontrollable violence. The Church reacted by taking the lead in a movement for the 'Peace of God', which expressed popular concern in great assemblies of free men, meeting round piles of relics collected from all the local churches and decreeing the immunity of the clergy and the poor from violence and exploitation and banning the use of all force at certain times of the year and on certain days of the week. Attempts were made to force the castellans and knights to accept peace provisions, but they could only be compelled by force and so the peace movement itself engendered military actions against peace-breakers, conducted in the name of churchmen who, if they were bishops and abbots, anyway had their own retinues of knights.

The peace movement had waned in France by the 1090s, but it had spread to Germany which was itself fragmenting. It is indicative of the fear Urban and others felt of the prospect of anarchy at home while the great lords were campaigning in the East that the peace movement was revived in France at the time of the First Crusade. At any rate, out of it had come the conviction that the very aggressiveness that had broken up society could be put to good, God-given purposes if only the laity could be disposed to canalize their energies into the service of the Church. All over Europe churchmen were turning to laymen for military support, while chaplains, concerned to put across the Christian message in terms their employers and their households would understand, drew on the Old Testament stories and Christian hagiography for heroic and martial tales which would appeal to their listeners. Their efforts were rewarded in the sense that, although society in the late eleventh century was still violent, it was less violent than it had been. There was also evidence of growing piety and outward shows of devotion among many armsbearers. If it cannot be said that before 1095 the Church had been outstandingly successful in its appeals for armed assistance, in the response to Urban's call it is as though at last its perception and the laity's aspirations met and the hand it had been holding out to laymen was suddenly grasped. It is surely no coincidence that the pope who engineered this meeting of minds was himself a product of that class the Church had been most concerned to energize.

At the time, churchmen were being driven by a reform movement which had dominated the past fifty years, a half-century that was one of the most extraordinary in Christian history. The reformers wanted to free the Church from corrupt practices, which they imputed above all to an excessive influence of the laity in ecclesiastical affairs. They wanted a purer institution, more akin to the Early Church they perceived in reading the Acts of the Apostles, and since most of them were monks, engaged in a reform of monasticism which pre-dated and ran parallel to the more general reform of the Church, they viewed the Early Church through monkish eyes. It is no exaggeration to say that they wanted to monasticize the Christian world. They dreamed of a clergy, celibate and untainted by worldly values, ministering to lay men and women who as far as they were able lived lives and adopted devotional practices that corresponded to monastic ones. The energy expended on the cause was remarkable. So too were the vigour with which the reformers encouraged the physical transformation of the Church's presence all over Europe through the building of parish churches, each in its way a large conventual chapel for a lay community, and the intelligence that led them to foster scholarship, particularly the study of grammar, history and canon law, to justify their campaign. Most extraordinary of all is the way the papacy was captured by them; it is no coincidence that so many of the popes of this period had been monks themselves. For most of its 2,000-year history the papacy has not been in the forefront of reform. It has supported reformers and it has taken over and controlled reform once it has begun, but only once, in the later eleventh century, can it be said that the popes found themselves in the invigorating but dangerously exposed position of being the leaders of a radical party in the Church.

When Urban called for liberation he was using a concept coloured by its employment in the last half-century by reformers who had an exaggerated notion of liberty, bred in great exempt abbeys like Cluny, communities which had been accustomed to enjoy 'liberties' granted them by the popes, which freed them from the authority of bishops and kings. This pressure for liberation in the West had already led to violence. For over forty years popes had supported the use of force against those who resisted the new ideas, most notably when around 1080 a party of German magnates had dragged Pope Gregory VII into war with their king and emperor-designate Henry IV. The war had spread to Italy. Gregory had been driven from Rome and an anti-pope established there in his place. Urban had begun his pontificate in exile, opposed by powerful forces in Europe. His success in rebuilding support had culminated in his entry into Rome in 1094 and in the council of Piacenza itself, which was attended by a large body of bishops and by a significant number of representatives of lay powers.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300101287
• ISBN 13: 9780300101287
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 400