The Medieval Crusade (review)

The Medieval Crusade comprises ten papers presented at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, April 2001, on the theme "Crusades and Crusading in the Middle Ages." Robert Chazan examines different modalities of Jewish response to crusading; Jay Rubenstein provides a fresh consideration of apocalypticism as a dynamic of the First Crusade; Christopher MacEvitt examines crusader-Armenian relations in Edessa; Thomas F. Madden and Alfred J. Andrea investigate the Fourth Crusade, in terms, respectively, of Venetian-Papal relations and Innocent III's apocalyptic convictions; Jonathan Riley-Smith treats the trial of the Templars; William E. Rogers finds in the C-revisions of Piers Plowman evidence of criticism of late medieval crusading, and Kelly De Vries explains why Philip the Good of Burgundy never fulfilled his promise to crusade.

Jonathan Phillips introduces the papers as "a thoughtful and stimulating cross-section of modern crusading research." With only ten papers from eight contributors, the cross-section is, necessarily, limited, confined mainly to the war-politics-and-religion perspective. Nonetheless, the volume contains valuable, new critical insights.

Few would suppose that anything original remains to be said about the trial of the Templar Order. Modern consensus is that the knights were railroaded through fabricated charges, and that many of the alleged confessions, extracted under torture, were not truthful. Riley-Smith is cautious about this, and he makes clear the pitfalls of supposing that the Templar case is closed. He argues that whatever the nature of the knights' guilt, the Order needed reform. Comparing its organizational structure with that of the successful Hospital, Riley-Smith details defects that would have attracted suspicion and might have served to cloak, even foster the unsavory secretive rites and abuses of which the knights were accused. Moreover, by the early fourteenth century the Temple was not only inefficient; it was also redundant with respect to the new aspirations of Christian society. Its exclusively martial raison d'être was obsolete, and after the loss of Ruad in 1302, the once glorious Order had little left to do. Without judicial suppression, the Temple, Riley-Smith concludes, was headed, anyway, toward demise. This is institutional history at its best.

Robert Chazan's studies of Jewish responses to crusading reach out to modern-day issues surrounding religious violence. Crusading was violent, and in 1096 Rhineland Jews became the crusaders' first victims. Martyrdom was the response of very many of these Jews, and Chazan and his Hebrew source, the Mainz Anonymous, ask why. Chazan reads his source frankly, arguing that the martyrdoms were "innovative, radical, audacious and creative," and that their singularity is rendered intelligible by reference to the equally singular phenomenon of the First Crusade. Jewish martyrdoms mirror the crusade; both, Chazan says, "were part and parcel of the spiritual ambience [of the late eleventh century] that produced the crusade and its radical tendencies." There is a sense here of violence as ennobling, and Chazan elucidates this by comparing the Mainz Anonymous with the Christian Gesta Francorum. Both sources, he finds, saw history as an unfolding drama of heroic action. God was present, and both the Jewish martyrs and the Christian crusaders were alive to the divine imperative. But the sources also reveal that what they perceived to have shaped the extraordinary events of 1096 was not so much God as man, not divine will, but human willpower: the time was somehow unique, and crusaders and martyrs were heroes in a conflict of faiths, clashing in triumphant violence upon the historical stage. Chazan amplifies this compelling interpretation by describing how the conflict, with its theological-historical dissonances and resonances, subsequently gave rise to the new genre of Jewish anti-Christian polemic.