Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin (review)

In writing Invisible Weapons, arguably the first ‘devotional history of the crusades’ (p. 6), Cecilia Gaposchkin has made an original and valuable contribution not just to the modern study of the crusading movement, but also to scholarship on medieval religious thought and practice. By privileging the study of ‘liturgy in history’ (p. 9) as opposed to the history of liturgy, Gaposchkin’s approach to her rich and thoroughly documented source material opens up insightful new perspectives on the interdependence between crusading ideology and liturgical texts in the medieval West between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.

As Gaposchkin points out in the introduction, one of the advantages of examining the crusades through a liturgical lens is that ‘the narrative told through the liturgy resists the traditional way of telling the story of crusading’ (p. 12). Instead of using the traditional numbering system of the crusading expeditions to dictate the shape and direction of her analysis, Gaposchkin organically lets the sources themselves ‘establish turning points […] [and reveal] seminal moments of creativity and change that occur against the larger backdrop of continuities and slow developments’ (p. 12). Consequently, the book focuses on the striking liturgical developments that coalesced around such ‘turning points’ as the capture of Jerusalem by the earliest crusaders in 1099, the loss of the city to Saladin in 1187, Pope Innocent III’s promulgation of the bull Quia maior in 1213, and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

An intelligent chapter on ‘Preliminaries’ helps to orient readers who may be unfamiliar with the history of the crusades and the nature and terminology of the Catholic liturgy. Chapter 1 then lays the groundwork for the analysis by tracing the profound influence of pre-crusade liturgy on the formation of crusading ideology in the regions that ‘would become the heartland of the crusades’ (p. 57). Chapter 2 builds on this foundation and explores the general shift from militancy and triumphalism towards penitence, introspection, and salvation in crusading spirituality and its attendant liturgy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by analysing the increasingly tight liturgical nexus between rites for departing pilgrims, rites for arms-bearers and their equipment, and rites for the blessing of the crusader’s cross. Gaposchkin thus reveals how liturgical ideas and practices imbued crusading ideology and evolved in turn under the influence of the nascent crusading movement.

In Chapter 3, one of the cornerstones of the book, Gaposchkin focuses on liturgical performance as a key element of both the lived experience of the First Crusade and the way in which the expedition was narrated in contemporary and later chronicles. Picking up on these themes, Chapter 4 offers an illuminating analysis of how the liturgy celebrating the triumph of 1099 moulded the cultural memory of the First Crusade within the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century. To conclude what is effectively a thematic triptych at the heart of the book, Chapter 5 charts the many and varied ways in which the memory of the First Crusade was incorporated into the Western liturgy in the twelfth century, presenting an analysis which crucially ‘shows that the liturgical commemoration of 15 July [1099] was not an exclusively clerical discourse’ (p. 167).

If the first five chapters are primarily concerned with how the liturgy paved the way for the First Crusade and then transformed in response to its stunning successes, Chapters 6 and 7 analyse instead the implementation of liturgical measures such as ritual clamours, prayers, and processions as an attempt both to mitigate disasters (such as those of 1187 and 1453) and to bolster new crusading expeditions in the later Middle Ages. Although the latter concentrates on the ‘flowering of liturgical supplication in support of crusading against the Ottomans’ (p. 227), both chapters complement each other and convincingly explain ‘the way in which the crusades were iteratively sacralized and brought into the very heart of Christian identity’ (p. 195...