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Chapter 7 The Crusades It is with the Crusades that the study of war propaganda is provided with the most fertile evidence to date. The knights of the first (People’s) crusade, advocated by Pope Urban II in a sermon at Clermont in 1095, had little idea of their Muslim opponents, other than they were heathens. The crusade was a holy war authorized by the Pope in the name of Christ and, as such, was justified or legitimate violence. It was around this rather simplistic point that atrocity propaganda was constructed, although events such as the burning of the
This book investigates the ways in which the crusades have been observed by historians from the 1090s to the present day. Especial emphasis is placed on the academic after-life of the crusades from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. The use of the crusade and its history, by humanists and other contemporary writers, occupied a world of polemic, serving parochial religious, cultural and political functions. Since the Renaissance humanists and Reformation controversialists, one attraction of the crusades had lain in their scope: recruited from all western nations, motivated by apparently transcendent belief systems and fought across three continents. From the perspective of western Europe's engagement with the rest of the globe from the sixteenth century, the crusades provided the only post-classical example to hand of an ideological and military world war. Remarkably, the patterns of analysis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have scarcely gone away: empathy; disapproval; relevance; the role of religion; materialist reductionism. Despite the explosion of literary attention, behind the empathetic romanticism of Michaud or the criticism of Mills and Scott, the themes identified by Thomas Fuller, Claude Fleury, David Hume, Edward Gibbon and William Robertson persisted. The idea of the crusades as explicit precursors to modern events, either as features of teleological historical progress or as parallels to modern actions remains potent. The combination of ideology, action, change, European conquest and religious fanaticism acted as a contrast or a comparison with the tone of revolutionary and reactionary politics.
increased the power and prestige of the French monarchy. Many scholars have sought to explain the precise way in which Philip achieved this. Their explanations for the most part have been administrative and constitutional in nature. Less attention has been paid to Philip’s relationship to crusading, despite the fact that four major expeditions were launched during his reign: the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Crusades, as well as the Albigensian Crusade. John Baldwin has considered the extent to which Philip’s participation in the Third Crusade – including vis-à -vis his
O ne afternoon in early June 1147, Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis stood alongside Pope Eugenius III on the steps of the Saint-Denis basilica, awaiting the arrival of King Louis VII. The King was travelling to the church to mark his departure on the Second Crusade. Upon his arrival, Louis expected to receive the pilgrim’s script and a blessing from the Pope. 1 Louis also was going to receive Saint-Denis’s legendary battle standard, the oriflamme , to carry with him to the East – a ritual that had come to symbolize St Dionysius’s protection
2 Forced conversion during the First Crusade Apostasy and Jewish identity Forced conversion during the First Crusade T he tendency that emerges from Rashi’s words reflects a decisive leadership approach, establishing a clear direction of attempting to return converts to Christianity to Judaism. The self-definition of Judaism its leaders sought to establish was that of a religion that felt confident in its ability to deal with Christian theological claims and in its political ability to deal with the threat of forced conversion. This situation changed during
being associated with a convicted revolutionary, and no evidence has surfaced that the dedication made it into print. Das also acknowledged La Motte’s study of opium in a newspaper article from 1922, indicating that he at least maintained respect for her efforts, and it is hard to believe that the two would not have crossed paths in the course of their common crusade against opium, but if they did there are no letters documenting the content and extent of their contact. In 1919, after her interview with Winslow, she typed up a
absence of French genealogical literature by arguing that the King circa 1100 did not have the need to prove his dynastic validity. 5 The Fleury text argues against this point, and its production in the year following the successful capture of Jerusalem by the first crusaders may help to explain its significance. As we saw in Chapter 2 , at precisely the time this text was composed, the Capetian court was in a period of crisis. Philip I had not joined the First Crusade, and his brother Hugh had (in 1100) come home in shame, having deserted the crusading host and not
I n the spring of 1106, a sizeable crowd gathered at Chartres Cathedral to witness the marriage of the Norman crusader Bohemond of Antioch to Constance, the eldest daughter of King Philip I of France. 1 Few could have predicted a royal bride for the Norman warlord, the son of a cattle poacher turned duke who only a decade before had faced the prospect of a landless existence after losing his inheritance to a half-brother. 2 When he took the cross for the First Crusade in 1096, Bohemond was little more than an itinerant noble in
1 Of constitutional and economic crusades: Ireland in the 1980s A major achievement for the nation. Charles J. Haughey on social partnership, 9 October 1987 I would deprecate any attempt to make this a political issue in the House because there are certain things that the parties in the House are united on and this is one. Garret FitzGerald on abortion, 26 January 1982 Social partnership and the corrosion of intellectual thought Since the collapse of social partnership in 2009, the model heralded by many politicians in the two decades since its inception in