The Gilded Age and the Commodification of the Medieval: George Barrie's American Edition (1880) of Michaud's History of the Crusades

Modern manifestations of medievalism exist in almost every American urban environment. Around Chicago, where I live, they range from the neo-Gothic fantasy of the former Scottish Rite Masonic Cathedral at 935 North Dearborn Street to the ersatz experience of indoor jousting at Medieval Times in suburban Schaumburg. And sometimes, the modern medieval materializes in unexpected ways and places . . . ¹

Last year, my wife was helping a friend clear debris from the flooded basement of a late-Victorian three-flat in the Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport. In the basement's mid-century "party room," standing on the bottom shelf of two bookcases flanking a faux fireplace, was a somewhat water-damaged copy of the first and only American edition of Joseph-François Michaud's Histoire des Croisades, translated into English by William Robson and illustrated by Gustave Doré. The two massive tomes (each measuring 15 by 11 inches and almost three inches thick) demanded rescue, and my attention.

Despite my long career studying the European Middle Ages, I was, to be honest, almost completely ignorant of Michaud (1767–1839) and his work.² Little research was necessary to learn that his Histoire des croisades was a monument of Romantic medievalism, a "major landmark in European crusade historiography," in the words of Elizabeth Siberry.³ Originally released in a series of seven octavo volumes between 1812 and 1822, Histoire des croisades was a best-seller, reprinted at least twenty times in nineteenth-century France. It also sold throughout Europe, thanks to translations into English, German, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and even Turkish.⁴ The English version by the prolific British translator William Robson (1785–1863), first published at London by Routledge in 1852, remains today the only one available for Anglophone audiences.

Thanks to the wide dissemination of Michaud's work, Jonathan Riley-Smith considers it directly responsible for fostering several enduring conceptions of the Crusades, like those enumerated in Andrea and Holt's Seven Myths of the Crusades. According to Riley-Smith, Michaud helped shape, above all, representation of the Crusades as "proto-colonialist experiments,"⁵ motivated as much by economic opportunism as by religious zeal. For Michaud, this was not a bad thing: he presented the medieval Crusades as an example for nineteenth-century Europe to emulate, in a final triumph of Western Civilization over Oriental Barbarism. Christopher Tyerman's characterization of Michaud's ideology is almost as histrionic as Michaud's own florid prose:

Michaud's crusades, for all their horrors, follies, and blunders, were in essence events to be wondered at, central to the development of the global supremacy of western European civilization. An obvious academic challenge, this altered the terms of engagement. The crusades became politicized in an immediate partisan and national fashion inconceivable a century before. Concurrently, riding and encouraging the tide of popular medievalism, Michaud's Histoire asked its readers to share the crusaders' hopes, aspirations, and fears, to enter their world. One of his cleverest tricks was to pretend that he was writing from an objective, carefully researched, contemporary medieval perspective; that his empathy stemmed from understanding not prejudice. In fact, purple passages of invented imaginative narrative and sculpted analysis according with early nineteenth-century sensibilities and politics drew readers in. Few western European writers on the crusades after the 1830s could entirely be free from a popular backdrop that owed something to Michaud.⁶

Although Tyerman and other modern scholars may deplore Michaud's failings as a historian, he did in fact research his Histoire des croisades with extensive consultation of primary sources, many gathered in his four-volume Bibliothèque des croisades. He also helped establish one of the most important serial collections of crusade source materials, the Recueil des historiens des croisades. And he actually visited the Middle East from 1830 to 1831, seeking further source materials to amplify his work. Giles Constable has praised the "scholarly impulse" of these endeavors.⁷ Unfortunately, Michaud died without revising his Histoire, although he did manage to complete an abridged version for young readers...