medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
a somewhat critical review which throws a bit of Cold Water on the
Scatological theory.
c
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Received: Wed, 06 Jun 2012 10:26:15 AM EDT
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Subject: TMR 12.06.05 Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven (France)
Rubenstein, Jay. <i>Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest
for the Apocalypse.</i> New York: Basic Books, 2011. Pp. xiv, 402.
$29.99. ISBN-13: 978-0-465-01929-8.
Reviewed by John France
United States Military Academy, West Point
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It is well-known that the term "Crusade" is problematic because it was
not used by contemporaries, and only came into common use in English
in the eighteenth century. Indeed, one notable historian entitled an
article "Were There Any Crusades in the Twelfth Century?" [1] Although
armed expeditions against enemies of Christendom continued across the
twelfth century, formal definition was slow to emerge and took shape
only in the reign of Innocent III (1198-1216) and by then they had
taken many forms. In his scholarly discussion of "The Historiography
of the Crusades," Giles Constable discerned four schools of thought
amongst modern historians seeking to define this movement: the
pluralists, the traditionalists, the populists and the generalists.
[2]
The controversy has been most intense in discussions of the nature of
the First Crusade because this expedition was the original and the
model for all that came later. In many ways the most problematic of
these contending schools is the populist, because its adherents hold
that widespread enthusiasm was the essence of crusading, and, indeed,
virtually defined a crusade. Those who champion this standpoint see
the crusade as essentially a mass-movement of the religiously
inspired, and they place less emphasis on the role of the papacy in
originating it than those in other schools. They see the roots of the
First Crusade in other militant mass-movements of the eleventh century
that culminated in the events of 1095-99. With some exceptions, it has
been European and notably French scholars who have adopted this
position. To them it was self-evident that the crusade arose from the
popular religiosity of western people, and while others have certainly
shared this standpoint, notably Erdmann in his immensely influential
work, populists have zeroed in on apocalyptic expectation as the major
moving force which bestirred the masses and was the central
characteristic of crusading in general, and of the First Crusade in
particular. [3] There is some evidence, enthusiastically accepted by
Rubenstein (318), that a belief in the coming of the last days was
current in Western Europe in the eleventh century, although the
subject is highly controversial. Cohn even argued that millennial
belief was an expression of social discontent given religious form.
[4] Certainly at the end of the eleventh century there was a renewed
interest in the Tiburtine Sibyl, whose prophecies had an immensely
powerful apocalyptic content and it has been surmised that this
influenced Urban II. [5]
Rubenstein's book, then, is a reading of the First Crusade as an
apocalyptic journey undertaken in the belief that the capture of
Jerusalem would usher in a new stage of God's revelation, perhaps that
revealed in the Apocalypse of St John the Divine. This leads
Rubenstein to emphasise the role of Peter the Hermit in starting the
crusade because so many of the possible apocalyptic passages are
associated with him and his followers. Yet Guibert's story of poor men
following a goose (47) to the east should be seen in the light of that
author's aristocratic contempt for the poor. Moreover it may reflect
some local superstition, of which there were plenty, given prominence
in the turmoil of departures in 1096-97. And playing down Urban II as
the originator of the crusade is really not a good idea. When the
crusade was in crisis it was to Urban II--"who started this
expedition, who, by your sermons caused us to leave our lands and all
that was on those lands, commanded us to take up the cross to follow
Christ"--not Peter the Hermit, that the leaders appealed in the autumn
of 1098, and they reported their success to him in another letter at
the end of the crusade a year later.
More generally, the trouble with Rubenstein's approach is that it is
difficult to define what kind of expectation inspired these masses, if
it inspired them at all. For Christians believed in an almighty and
imminent deity, and therefore that all human activity was part of the
divine economy, and there can be no doubt that the crusaders felt they
were acting in His name in a very significant way. And certainly in
such circumstances, especially at moments of crisis, there was nothing
strange about participants speaking directly to the heavenly world in
visions and receiving tangible assurances of divine support. That such
revelations should use the rhetoric of the Bible is hardly surprising,
but that does not mean that participants felt they were trembling on
the edge of the end of all things. In September 1098 the crusader
leaders wrote to Urban II and towards the end of their letter they
referred to the two Jerusalems in what Rubenstein refers to as "an
ecstatic, almost apocalyptic vision" (233). This ignores the
possibility that this is a mere rhetorical flourish on a letter whose
real political purpose was to temporize and avoid the agonizing
choices that confronted the leaders of an expedition whose unity was
shattered by the question of the fate of Antioch.
Rubenstein consistently emphasizes the irrational and violent in the
actions of the crusaders and underestimates the <i>Realpolitik</i>
that resulted in blatant land-grabs and produced deals with Muslim
leaders and Muslim cities. The crusade was an ideological movement,
but man does not live by ideology alone, and at various times it was
ruled by political calculation and quarrels. Most importantly, it is
sometimes hard to disentangle real events from the gloss put on them
by later writers. There was cannibalism at Ma 'arrat, but it is
reported in the most prosaic terms as a reaction to hunger by the
anonymous author of the <i>Gesta Francorum</i> who was present, as was
Raymond of Aguilers who takes much the same attitude, though he adds
that this terrified the enemy. Fulcher of Chartres was not present and
shuddered at the idea of eating human flesh, yet he too ascribes it to
hunger. Interestingly, as Rubenstein says (241), this atrocity was not
justified by reference to biblical passages. It was later writers,
like Guibert of Nogent, who dwelt on this subject and exaggerated it.
Now Rubenstein is right to say that the crusade was a new kind of war,
which was at times appallingly savage, but circumstances as well as
ideology contributed to this. Jerusalem was the culmination of the
crusade and when the crusaders broke into the city there was a
massacre, but any city was at mercy if it held out to the end.
Moreover, the killing was not as total as is suggested here (290),
where there is a heavy reliance for examples on secondary writers
rather than eyewitnesses. Enough Muslims survived to form a suburb of
Damascus and the garrison surrendered to the count of Toulouse whose
men escorted them to friendly territory, while we know that many of
the city's Jews were ransomed. The fact that the really horrible event
(the cold-blooded massacre of Tancred's hostages on the Temple Mount)
took place on the day after the capture of the city is not mentioned
here. It is at least likely that this was motivated by dislike of
Tancred's greed as by crusader fanaticism.
It seems to this reviewer that Rubenstein speaks too often in broad
generalities and is over-keen to find evidence of apocalyptic
enthusiasm. Yet this is an interesting, lively and in a way important
book. It deals with the inner feelings and deepest beliefs of people,
yet it has to be based on sources that are external and may have been
written by people with their own axes to grind. This means that the
evidence is exasperatingly difficult to pin down. While this reviewer
is not convinced by the picture of the First Crusade as an apocalyptic
movement, it is likely that apocalyptic expectation played a role in
motivating people to go on the crusade and perhaps sometimes
conditioned their behavior once they had departed. It most certainly
affected the way in which they thought and wrote about it. Above all,
this book, like Conor Kostick's on the same crusade, has a clear
standpoint. [6] It is a refreshing and stimulating book which casts
familiar events in a new light and makes one think about the subject
in a new way.
--------
Notes:
1. Christopher Tyerman, "Were There Any Crusades in the Twelfth
Century?" <i>English Historical Review</i> 110 (1995), 553-73.
2. Giles Constable, "The Historiography of the Crusades," in Angeliki
E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, eds., <i>The Crusades from the
Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World</i> (Washington:
Dumbarton Oaks, 2001), 1-22, at 10-15.
3. Carl Erdmann, <i>Die Entstehung des Kreuzugsgedanken</i>
(Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1935), trans. M. W. Baldwin & Walter
Goffart as <i>The Origin of the Idea of Crusade</i> (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1977); Paul Alphandéry and Alphonse
Dupront, <i>La chrétienté et l'idée de croisade: Les premieres
croisades<i>, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Michel, 1954-59); Paul Rousset,
<i>Histoire des Croisades</i> (Paris: Payot, 1957); Jean Flori,
<i>Pierre l'ermite et la premie?re croisade</i> (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
4. Richard Landes, <i>Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial
Experience</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Norman R. C.
Cohn, <i>The Pursuit of the Millennium</i> (London: Secker & Warburg,
1957).
5. Huguette Taviani-Carozzi and Claude Carozzi, <i>La Fin des temps:
Terreurs et prophe?ties au Moyen Age</i> (Paris: Flammarion, 1999).
6. Conor Kostick, <i>The Social Structure of the First Crusade</i>
(Leiden: Brill, 2008).
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