crusades

crusades. The main crusades were (1) 1095–9 summoned by Pope Urban II; (2) 1145–8 by Eugenius III; (3) 1188–92 by Gregory VIII; (4) 1198–1204 by Innocent III. Subsequent crusades included the ‘Children's Crusade’ of 1212, in which the English were not involved. The crusades constituted the most popular mass movement of the later Middle Ages. They may be defined as a species of holy war, authorized by the pope and proclaimed in the name of Christ; a just war, that is a justifiable reaction to aggression towards Christian people or territory, their participants enjoying a set of privileges offered by the pope and enshrined in canon law. Such a definition, crucially, did not require a crusader to fulfil his vow in the Holy Land, nor did it postulate Muslims as the target. Crusades came to be deployed against a variety of opponents and in a number of crusading theatres at different times—against Moors in Spain, Mongols in eastern Europe, pagan Slavs in north-eastern Europe, heretics in Bosnia and in southern France, and a variety of papal political opponents within western Europe.

Many of these applications were controversial at the time and remain so today. The same is true of the very notion of crusade, from the time that Pope Urban II made his call to what we now know as the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in November 1095. In protestant Britain, not surprisingly, the crusade was harshly judged for centuries. For Thomas Fuller, a 17th-cent. royalist Anglican, as for the 16th-cent. martyrologist John Foxe, the ‘holy war’ was fatally tainted by catholicism, while the notion of savage fanaticism was effectively developed by Edward Gibbon in the 18th cent., in a general attack on the lamentable consequences of religious frenzy. This train of thought was famously stated by David Hume in his condemnation of crusade: ‘the most signal and durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.’ This tradition is still alive, found, for example, in the summing-up by Runciman, whose massive work ends in a ringing denunciation: ‘the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.’

Such a tradition has militated against serious consideration of the significance of the crusades in and for British history. Allowance must also be made for that narrowly insular outlook of many 19th- and early 20th-cent. historians. Apart from the deeds of Richard I, incongruously a source of English national pride as Richard was not English, nor even Anglo-Norman, the limited English role in the crusading movement was scarcely conducive to extensive historical study. What is more, the very wisdom of English involvement was questionable, especially that of kings. Were the crusades not a terrible distraction, deflecting the king from his primary concerns at home, and resulting in Richard I's case in disastrous consequences for his subjects as well as himself? It followed that the crusades could be seen as a deplorable squandering of resources that could have been more usefully employed in England or to England's advantage.

Times and attitudes have changed. One recent trend has been a move towards thorough investigation of the impact of the crusades upon the societies in which they were preached, and it is now apparent that the crusade affected vast areas of life. It is in these effects, on what might be termed the home front of the crusading movement, that the crusades exerted a most profound influence. The heyday of crusading was in the 12th and 13th cents., at least so far as English participation is concerned, but as an institution and as a real force in English life the crusade only finally withered and died in the later 16th cent., as a result of the reordering of values during the Reformation. Every king of England between 1154 and 1327 took the cross, though only one, Richard I, fulfilled it in person. Many of their subjects continued the tradition into the 16th cent.

S. D. Lloyd

Bibliography

Lloyd, S. D. , English Society and the Crusade 1216–1307 (Oxford, 1988);
Runciman, S. , A History of the Crusades (3 vols., Cambridge, 1954);
Tyerman, C. J. , England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago, 1988).