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4. Remembering the Crusades in the Fabric of Buildings: Preliminary Thoughts about Alternating Voussoirs
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99 chapter four Remembering the Crusades in the Fabric of Buildings Preliminary Thoughts about Alternating Voussoirs jerrilynn dodds On 31 march 1146 King Louis VII of France traveled to the town of Vézelay. There, an unusually large crowd had assembled to witness ceremonies intended to visualize the launching of the Second Crusade. The king received a cross sent by Pope Eugenius III at a ceremony in which he and a group of nobles made their vow to join the crusade. He then joined the famed Cistercian preacher Bernard of Clairvaux on a dais at an outdoor public assembly, a production meant to enlist broad support for the crusade among the people. Little cloth crosses were to be distributed to promote the crusade in the crowd that gathered to hear Bernard. The great monastic leader and extraordinarily persuasive speaker had been chosen specifically by the pope, and his exhortation so moved those listening that there were not enough crosses, and he was forced tear off strips of his monastic habit to make more for the waiting crowd.∞ This was an event for which the monks of Vézelay had waited for more than fifty years. William of Tyre tells us that in 1095 Pope Urban II had thought of holding the council that would launch the first crusade in either Vézelay or Le Puy but that finally he settled on Clermont.≤ There Urban had addressed a crowd of churchmen and laity, exhorting Frankish knights to make a militant pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to free the Eastern Christians and liberate the Holy Sepulchre. The churchman who played the protagonist’s role at that original theatrical event was Le Puy’s bishop, Adhémar of Monteil, who became the first to take the cross, as the pope’s representative. But in 1146 it was a monk, Bernard, who would preach the 100 sites and structures call to the Second Crusade against the theatrical backdrop of Ste. Madeleine de Vézelay, a powerful and independent monastic church. Vézelay would appear yet again as a site associated with the crusades in 1190, when Richard Lion-Heart, king of England, and Philip Augustus of France would begin the Third Crusade from the same site, against the backdrop of the same dramatic monastic church. These observations lead naturally to an older study of Vézelay’s iconography—one received with alternate reverence and ambivalence in recent decades—and to the question of the interaction of monuments and the public remembrance of historical events. The Church Fabric of Vézelay In his powerful interpretation of the central tympanum of Vézelay of 1944, Adolph Katzenellenbogen suggested that its iconography reflected an ‘‘encyclopedic Mission of the Apostles’’ that ‘‘prefigures the new mission of the crusaders’’ (fig. 4–1).≥ Created after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099 and before the launch of the Second Crusade at its very threshold in 1146, he saw it as justifying and celebrating the crusades metaphorically, in language reflected in contemporary sources. William of Malmesbury reported Urban’s command in language that echoes Christ’s in the Mission of the Apostles, and Raymond of Aguilers, who fought in the First Crusade, reminded his readers that Jerusalem was captured on the fifteenth of July, ‘‘the day on which the apostles had dispersed throughout the world to fulfill their mission.’’∂ The crusaders were continuing the work of the apostles, following their mission to conquer the world for the Christian faith into faraway lands, to the exotic peoples represented in the carefully articulated archivolts of Vézelay’s tympanum. Scholars have recognized a significant number of other purposeful architectural allusions to the crusades in Romanesque architecture. The crusades had become more than merely a contemporary political event by 1099: they were now also integrated into the exegetical framework of salvation history. Linda Seidel’s work, in particular, has recognized the presence of the crusades in every level of production of the churches of Aquitaine: craft, imagery, meaning, and the social and economic position of their patrons.∑ Ann Derbes has found specific reference to Adhemar of Le Puy and the First Crusade in frescos at the cathedral of Le Puy; [44.204.117.57] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:36 GMT) figure 4.1. The Benedictine Abbey Church of Sainte-MarieMadeleine de Vézelay, tympanum. Dedicated 1104. Photograph by Jerrilynn Dodds. 102 sites and structures direct reference to the crusades has been uncovered at St. Gilles...