Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (review)

The scattered apocalyptic texts relating to the First Crusade naturally attracted attention as the year 2000 approached. There were very few that could be identified with certainty, and interest in them soon appeared to wane. Nevertheless, some historians have continued to maintain that the course of the crusade masked a widespread conviction that the expedition itself and the events surrounding it foretold or contributed to the end of time, or at least to the conclusion of one of the ages into which time was eschatologically divided. Jay Rubenstein sets out to treat the First Crusade as an example of apocalyptic warfare. He is not deterred by the fact that he has comparatively little direct evidence on which to base his thesis. Although he never clearly defines his terms, he equates holy war with apocalyptic war. Battles—even quite minor ones—turn out to be “of apocalyptic scale” (p. 203). Heavenly portents are intrinsically apocalyptic. So are the visions experienced by some crusaders. So are warfare atrocities and massacres. So are the terms of a letter from the crusaders calling hyperbolically on the pope to come to Syria and unite the Church. It is tempting to conclude that to Rubenstein, who suggests implausibly but ingeniously that Godfrey of Bouillon could have been thought to be “the last Emperor” (pp. 299–301), apocalypsis means whatever he wants it to mean.

He applies his flexible approach to definition to a narrative of the First Crusade. It could be argued that his case might have been more convincing if compressed into a learned paper, although the weakness of its evidential foundations would have been more apparent. He has chosen a technique— the rewriting of the same story from a slightly different point of view—which has been employed by a number of historians in the last few years. His book joins what has become a procession of narrative accounts of the crusade—so many, indeed, that it must be hard for an interested reader to decide which one to buy. Feeling, perhaps, the need to make his case as attractive as possible, Rubenstein has opted for a popular approach. His account contains almost as many set-piece constructions as those for which Sir Steven Runciman was famous, although Runciman’s were much better written. So the crowd at Clermont in November 1095 “roared its approval” (p. 29) and “the furor to go to Jerusalem grew still more heated” (p. 30), in spite of the facts that a relatively small number of nobles were present and, as Rubenstein acknowledges, the bishops did not take the occasion very seriously. In southern Italy “by the hundreds they abandoned Amalfi and the surer money of Roger of Sicily for the uncertain prospects of Syria, Palestine, and Jerusalem” (p. 38), whereas we know that Bohemond of Taranto’s contingent turned out to be small. Rubenstein describes the nobles of the French royal domain early in 1096 as “two-bit warriors spinning fantasies of world domination” (p. 44). After the battle of Dorylaeum the crusaders “mourned, they sang songs . . . They also told stories to one another, celebrating their victory and fictionalizing it” (p. 132). He wants us to believe that before the fall of Antioch Bohemond “remained strangely calm, even chipper” (p. 189).

The use of creative imagination and colorful language is, of course, appropriate to a popular account of the First Crusade, but it is unlikely to persuade fellow historians to take a thesis seriously.