Dear Richard,
Call it the people's, peasant's, popular crusade, what you will. But it was
the first response to an official crusade; it was never repudiated by the
papacy; and there were knights on board--not many, it is true, but some.
The best recent treatment is J. Riley-Smith, 'The First Crusade and the
Persecution of the Jews', in W.J. Sheils (ed.) Persecution and Toleration
(Studies in Church History, 21) (Oxford, 1984), pp. 51-72. This should be
supplemented with Idem., The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading
(London, 1986).
On popular crusades in general, see: F. Cardini,"Per una ricerca...crociate
popolari," Quaderni Med., 30 (1990), 156-67. Cardini, however, is far too
dominated by Norman Cohn's utterly and irretrievably lost, Paradigm Lost.
As for your second query, 'what is the best refutation of the alphandery
and dupront argument that the crusades was essentially an apocalyptic
millenarian movement', that depends upon whether or not anything as
important as this was 'essentially' about one thing and only one thing.
There was certainly a prophetic element about it; but there were other
motifs as well. (Why can't ordinary people be credited with some of the
complexity always lavished on intellectuals? It just ain't fair; it just
ain't democratic.)
When I someday finish marking the heaps and heaps of essays I have still to
mark, I'll be resuming work on 'Popular Crusades or Crusading Revivalism?'
in which I try to address some of the questions posed by what can be called
"the idea of a popular crusade".
Gary Dickson
University of Edinburgh
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