MARCUS BULL
The crusade is a feature of medieval Christian civilisation with a decidedly contemporary resonance. It summons up images and associations that have been routinely misunderstood and misappropriated, never more so than in the wake of 9/11. Many aspects of the medieval world have enjoyed, or endured, some sort of popular currency since the emergence of the Gothic novel and the Romantics' love affair with chivalry, but few have been as badly misrepresented as the crusades. No other event or process in medieval history, moreover, has prompted modern Christian apology, both papal and evangelical. But it is not just their lurid modern reputation which makes the crusades an important area of study, for they also impinged significantly on the medieval church and medieval culture. It is necessary, for example, to know something of the crusade movement in order to understand the functioning of papal authority between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, changes in the ideological self-fashioning of royal governments, the ups and downs in the delicate relationship between ecclesiastical and secular authorities, the spread and influence of the international religious orders, the morphology of aristocratic culture, and expressions of popular religiosity. Itself a relative novelty, crusading nonetheless insinuated itself into the most fundamental and traditional of social relations. For example, in 1201 Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) issued a decretal stating that a crusader's vow could not be negated by a prior marriage vow. At a stroke a central tenet of the canon law treatment of marriage, an area of people's lives that the church had in fact been addressing very seriously for more than a century, was undone. The arresting stories told by writers close in time to Innocent, such as Gerald of Wales (1146-1223) and Caesarius of Heisterbach (c. ii8o-c. 1240), of crusade recruits wriggling free from the despairing clutches of their wives probably say more about the sorts of made-up domestic vignettes that preachers used to spice up sermons than it does about observable reality, but they show how Innocent was responding
To a real tension in society which was the direct result of crusading, its appeal and its demands.670
Crusading's relevance to our wider understanding of medieval life is evident in many contexts. It is sometimes said, with only a little exaggeration, that the crusades are central to the history of European taxation, because their enormous costs forced the church and secular rulers to innovate and then regularise ways of tapping into their subjects' wealth. Any history of the place of the Jews within Latin Christendom must take full account of the impact of the crusades: although there is some evidence of Christian antagonism towards Jews before the First Crusade (1095-1101), the persecutions that the preaching of this crusade triggered in northern France and the Rhineland, and the frequent correspondence between the preaching of the cross and anti-Jewish agitation in following years, reveal that the crusades represented a new and troublesome phase in Jewish history. The importance of preaching in the recruitment of crusades and the growing sophistication of the church's attention to it, in particular from the thirteenth century, are signs of the importance of the crusades to debates about medieval communication, literacy and orality, and the exchanges between elite and popular culture. The crusades are also highly relevant to current academic debates about the relationship between core and periphery in later medieval western European culture. The brainchild of the reformed papacy and dominated by inhabitants of the old Carolingian heartlands, the crusades were selfevidently the emanation of an assertive, expansionist core, yet they were for the most part played out on or beyond the margins of Latin Christendom, and in the process had to adapt to local traditions and needs.
The fact that crusade expeditions, especially the more successful ones, regularly formed the subject matter of detailed historical narratives reveals their importance to discussions of medieval commemoration and memory. It is noteworthy that the first extensive pieces of prose writing in Old French are two accounts of the Fourth Crusade (1202-4) written within a decade or so of the events they describe. The authors, Geoffrey of Villehardouin (c. 1150-c. 1212) and Robert of Clery (d. after 1216), were eye-witnesses, part of a long tradition of participant-as-historian.671 This is a reminder that a further interest of the crusades is the way in which they break down the historiographical boundaries between observer and observed, and in the process throw up texts which purposively blur, even play with, generic distinctions - chronicle, epic song, foundation myth, grail quest, royal biography, pilgrimage guide, travel text, ethnography. Beyond this, the fascination of the crusades lies in the fact that they, perhaps uniquely and certainly to an unmatched degree, tested the boundaries of the western Christian imagination: an imagination, that is to say, which was not simply a matter of mental mapping, the extent to which the Christian world felt itself limited by geographical and religious frontiers, but also embraced the capacity of ordinary Christians to give clear expression to those notions of shared history, brotherhood and charity which might otherwise have remained amorphous and unrealised.
For all this, it is important to retain a sense of scale. The crusade was not the leitmotif for a whole civilisation, however important and pervasive it could regularly prove. The crusade was a novelty which also articulated deeply rooted ideas that pre-dated, transcended and sometimes outlived it. It involved the playing out of curious paradoxes: the creation of the Gregorian papacy, whose reform policies were grounded in the idea of clerical detachment from the secular world's contaminating influences, the crusade was also an exercise in ecclesiastical immersion in the most secular of activities, warfare, and consequently a demonstration of the church's need for the assistance of the very secular authority that its Gregorianism taught it to mistrust. Perhaps as early as the Second Crusade (1145-9), and certainly by the time of the first crusade of King Louis IX of France (1226-70) in 1248-54, the papacy was heavily reliant on the organisation and resources of kings for the prosecution of major crusades, in the process reinventing in another guise the sort of mutual dependence between popes and emperors which the Gregorians so clearly abominated, and which they originally invented the crusade precisely in order to circumvent.
The crusade was therefore an important but limited presence within medieval civilisation. It has been in the attempt to understand the complexities of the crusade's significance to the medieval church and to medieval Christian culture, in contrast to the older emphasis on simply recounting stirring narratives, that the academic study ofcrusading has broadened and deepened in recent decades. Much of the exciting new work done on the Middle Ages since the 1960s and 1970s has involved the examination of groups of people who were excluded from the traditional historiographical gaze: women, the poor, heretics and minorities, for example. Our understanding of old-fashioned subjects has been reanimated by new methodological approaches: the study of political conflict, for example, by insights gained from social anthropology and gender studies. But crusading is perhaps that part of the old canon of medieval history - the parts of it which go back at least as far as the invention of the academic discipline in the nineteenth century - which has reconfigured itself most profoundly in recent times. This has been in response to various changes in perspective. The most obvious, and perhaps the single most important, has been a broadening of the subject's geographical range. The traditional picture, from the first early modern historians of crusading, through The Talisman (1825) by Walter Scott (1771-1832), to the best-selling and much reissued History of the Crusades (1951-4) by Steven Runciman (1903-2000), was straightforward: crusades were fought in the eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, they were largely defined by that basic fact. The zone of operations could be framed quite broadly in order to accommodate the strategic ebb and flow of events, thereby including Asia Minor and the north African littoral, but in essence Palestine and Syria were regarded as crusading's essential home ground, a reflection of the centrality of Jerusalem and the Holy Land to the crusaders' aspirations.
In recent decades this monolithic vision of crusading has, for most scholars at least, expanded and diversified. It is now recognised that crusades were waged in other places and consequently against other sorts of opponents than the Muslim peoples encountered in the eastern Mediterranean. Crusades were also waged against the Moorish inhabitants of Spain, political opponents of the papacy in parts of Italy, heretics, most notably the Cathars in southern France, and pagans living just beyond the north-eastern fringes of Latin Christendom in the Baltic region. As early as the Second Crusade in the 1140s an attempt was made to synchronise multiple crusade expeditions on three general fronts: in the Middle East, in Spain and in north-eastern Europe. The balance sheet of gains and losses for this particular effort was not impressive, the Christian capture of Lisbon proving the only enduring achievement, but the general sense of real interconnection persisted. In the second half of the twelfth century, one comes across simultaneous bursts of papal interest in crusading in Spain and the Baltic, for all that separated these two very different theatres; and from the pontificate of Innocent III one finds the papacy attempting a holistic direction of crusading in all its forms, so that, for example, a crusade in one area could be 'turned off by the withdrawal of the indulgence for it in order to favour recruitment for another crusade elsewhere.
This broad vision of crusading and its purposes reflected the notion that all the specific problems identified by the papacy had a transcendental quality as threats to the whole church, understood as an emanation of the divine will, an obedience, a cultic tradition, a body of doctrine, a set of institutions, a collection of people, places with historical roles in the story of Christianity, or buildings and objects. Crusades were believed to be responses to threats against these facets of the church configured in different permutations. This helps to explain why as early as the launching of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, peaking with the great thirteenth-century councils of Lateran IV (1215), Lyons I (1245) and Lyons II (1274), and arguably extending as far as Trent in the sixteenth century, discussions of the crusade were bound up with wider efforts for reform, to the extent that crusading became perceived as more than just a possible collateral benefit of the renovation of the church and Christian society; it represented the validating goal of that ambition, the clinching proof that it had worked.
A corollary of the geographical broadening of crusade history has been an extension of its chronological boundaries. This has perhaps represented an equally important break from the old paradigms. The traditional story of crusading was a simple trajectory of rise and fall. The narrative, according to this view, came to its proper end in 1291, when the Mamluk sultanate took control of Acre and the other remaining Latin Christian fingerholds on the Palestinian and Syrian coastline, thereby ending the nearly two centuries of Western presence in the region which had begun with the conquests made during and soon after the First Crusade. True, the Latins were not removed from the eastern Mediterranean entirely, for they still controlled Cyprus and remnants of the short-lived Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-61). But there seemed to be something definitive and emblematic about the panicked, scrambling flight of the last Latins to get on the last ships out of Acre - a scene akin to the frantic climbing on board the last helicopters out of Saigon in 1975. In any event, so it was argued, and this was one reason why events had come to such a critical pass, western Europe's enthusiasm for the crusades was by then in steep decline. Crusading was a finite quantity, and it had had its moment. Recently, revisionist scholars have extended the chronological range of crusading into the sixteenth century and, in certain of its institutional manifestations such as the Military Orders, beyond. The effect has been to expose the old narrative trajectory as simplistic and misleading. Yes, crusading can be said to have declined by the latter part of the thirteenth century, if by 'decline' one simply means western Europe's decreasing ability and willingness to stage reruns of the First Crusade. But this is no more realistic a benchmark than saying that castles in 1300 were somehow worse for being different from the motte-and-bailey structures of two centuries earlier, or that cathedrals should have properly continued to be Romanesque rather than Gothic in design.
Crusading constantly adapted and mutated to meet new challenges. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for example, it became more naval in emphasis to reflect the nature of warfare in the eastern Mediterranean; and it accommodated new emphases in the chivalric culture of the aristocracy. Large set-piece expeditions became fewer, as the costs ofwarfare rose and the growth of states' control over the activities of their warrior elites meant that crusading had sometimes to fit round the lulls in European warfare, especially the Hundred Years War. But the capture (albeit fleeting) of Alexandria by Peter I of Cyprus (1359-69) in 1365, the defence of Belgrade against the Ottomans in 1456 inspired by the preaching and leadership of John of Capistrano (1386-1456), the enthusiasm of popes committed to the cause of crusading such as Clement VI (1342-52) and Pius II (1458-64), and the widespread celebration of the victory of a Spanish-led naval coalition over the Turkish fleet off Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth in 1571, all attest to the continuing vitality of crusading as an ideal.
What, then, was a 'crusade'? This is a contentious issue in spite of, or perhaps because of, the amount that has been written on the subject. The central problem is that modern scholarship has to work with terminology that represents a series of accommodations between the technical Latin jargon of the medieval educated elite, medieval vernacular terms which may or may not map neatly onto their Latin equivalents, concepts and categories (not least the numbering of the big crusades to the East) created by the early modern scholars who pioneered the study of the subject, and modern academic discourse. The absence of clarity and consensus in the Middle Ages is striking: evidence for vernacular terms etymologically rooted in words for 'cross', and specifically used in relation to military expeditions, only appears from the thirteenth century, already more than a century after the First Crusade. On the other hand, the absence of a precise lexis does not necessarily mean that there were not some clear ideas and images at play from the start. In recent usage, the word 'crusade' has tended to be used loosely to refer to any, and every, incidence of warfare that pitted Christians against Muslims, or at least the large subset of those wars in which there is evidence for a self-conscious religious colouration on one or both sides. The problem then becomes one of collapsing enormous variety across time and space into a single category. The study of the conflicts between Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain, for example, has until recent times been bedevilled by a reluctance to rein in the acceptations of 'crusade', which is used so loosely as to become meaningless.
At the other extreme, too precise and narrow an approach to definition can create a pointilliste picture of crusading history which underplays medieval people's abilities to make imaginative connections and resolve inconsistencies for themselves. Nonetheless, some attempt at definition is necessary in order to understand crusading's impact on medieval Europe: it may have been blurred around the edges, but there were core institutions, ideas, values and images which cumulatively added up to what we can satisfactorily term a crusade 'movement'. Most scholars today would single out the following main defining elements: papal authorisation of the crusade and the granting of the indulgence (the precise form of which might vary according to the underlying theology); the taking of vows, linked to but not identical to pilgrimage vows, and the wearing of crosses by participants; and an essentially reactive set of justifications, drawing on traditional Just War criteria to argue for the liberation of Christians and Christian territory or redress for harm done.
The value of some sort of clear definition is confirmed by the fact that when the First Crusade was preached, people were struck by its novelty, albeit a novelty compounded of familiar elements. The message of Pope Urban II (1088-99) in 1095-6 had many antecedents. He was responding to a request for help from the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118), which was the latest in a long series of diplomatic exchanges between Rome and Constantinople. Urban's appeal for a volunteer army to liberate Jerusalem and eastern Christians living under infidel dominion had resonances in the rhetoric of the Gregorian reformers, of whom Urban was one. The emphasis uponJerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, and the penitential quality of the task held out to would-be crusaders, tapped into powerful currents of eleventh-century popular religiosity and the appeal of pilgrimage to the East. Urban is sometimes described as a craftsman who reassembled old material in order to make a new configuration: this probably underestimates his personal achievement, but the basic picture of creativity born of tradition is accurate. With hindsight we can see how things were building up before Clermont: radical thinkers associated with Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) had already made tentative connections between warfare and penance; Urban himself had earlier in his pontificate suggested analogies between fighting and pilgrimage. But we should not underestimate the shock of the new, which in itself does much to explain the success of the message. There is a well-known vignette towards the beginning of the history of the first crusader Tancred (c. 1076-1112) by Ralph of Caen (c. 1080-c. 1130), in which the hero is wracked by depression and anxiety. He finds himself torn between his responsibilities as a lord and warrior, which will drag him into sin, and the precepts of the Gospel, which effectively means conversion to the monastic life. He then hears about the crusade message, and his spirits suddenly and wholly revive, for he appreciates that the crusade has transformed knightly identity from an impediment hindering salvation to the vehicle for it.672
It is clear that the crusade message was mainly conceived with western Europe's military elites in mind. From as early as the First Crusade, Urban II's surviving utterances on the crusade speak of milites, knights, as the prime target, and this emphasis was to be one of the most enduring and consistent themes of crusading. In practice, however, the aristocratic quality of crusades was routinely qualified in two respects. First, no knight could function in glorious isolation from a support team of dependants that looked after him, his equipment and his horses. The image of the intrepid and lone knight errant, which became a favoured motif of imaginative literature from the twelfth century onwards, is one with no connection to the lived experience of crusaders. Second, the essentially pastoral quality of the crusade message, with its emphasis upon the remissions of sins and its co-option of pilgrimage, which was by long tradition open to people from all walks of life, meant that it was impossible to exclude the non-military majority. It has been estimated that about io per cent of the total numbers who went on the First Crusade were knights; and the same sort of ratio probably holds true of the other mass-participation crusades. By the thirteenth century, as it became more common for crusades to the East to travel by ship, the greater costs of sea travel acted as a social filter, accentuating crusading's aristocratic profile. It is no coincidence that from around this time, for example in 1212, 1251, 1309 and 1320, one also begins to see outbursts of popular enthusiasm for the crusade, usually triggered by official crusade preaching but also cast in some way in opposition to, and as a purer, more meritorious improvement on, the aristocratic norms. These poorer crusade enthusiasts were often described by hostile observers as 'children' or 'shepherds' as if to emphasise their misdirected innocence or subversiveness, their social marginality and their military unsuitability. The children and the shepherds could be volatile forces, given to excesses in the absence of strong leadership and a clear direction. But they at least demonstrate the enduring appeal of crusading outside the charmed circle of aristocratic culture within which crusade ideology found its immediate home.
Because of this deliberate and persistent elitist colouring, as much to do with perceptions as actual numbers of bodies on the ground, it is principally to aristocratic society that we must look if we wish to assess crusading's impact on Christian culture as a whole. Most knights most ofthe time did not become crusaders, but it is striking how far the church pitched the crusade message in terms which transcended crusading's irregular rhythms and voluntary, minority-interest quality, and sought nothing less than the redefinition of knighthood itself. For example, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), one of the greatest crusade preachers and apologists, argued in his In Praise of the New Knighthood (c. 1130), a treatise immediately directed towards the incipient Military Order of the Templars but also full of ideas applicable to crusaders in general, that meritorious war in God's service was such a powerful instrument that it inverted the comfortable categories and assumptions that otherwise governed a knight's perception of himself and his status.673 Playing on the similarity in Latin between militia, 'knighthood', and malitia, 'evil', Bernard argued that knights caught up in their traditional internecine struggles could not be understood as bad knights; they were not properly knights at all. Developing this startling theme, Bernard issued a further challenge: to prefer malitia to militia was to forfeit one's masculinity. This was an extraordinarily bold frontal assault on the gendering of social roles, effectively the organisational principle of male aristocratic self-fashioning. Allegations of effeminacy cut very deep. Bernard of Clairvaux's utterances were, of course, the hyperbole of a skilled rhetorician defending a new idea, but the fact that he brought issues of masculine identity to the surface of his discourse illustrates the fundamental nature of the challenge that the church wished the crusade to pose to aristocratic mores.
In the event, crusading's longevity and adaptability meant that it had to move as aristocratic culture moved. This is particularly evident in a warming towards aristocratic display and ritual as the cult of chivalry developed between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Because late medieval chivalry still has an image as the triumph of form over content, and of gesture over sentiment, its close connections to crusading can easily be misinterpreted as evidence for crusading's own vacuity. This would be to underestimate chivalry's importance as a cultural force. The famously sumptuous Feast of the Pheasant staged at Lille in 1454 by Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy (13961467), during which the duke and many of his noble guests ostentatiously took crusade vows, can easily be dismissed as empty frippery, but this would miss the significance that a successful and ambitious regime such as Philip's could attach to chivalry as a political and cultural tool, and by extension the value of crusading as an animating ideal of the wider value system. Chivalric display could co-exist with hard-headed dedication. It is well known that in the fourteenth century, and into the first two decades of the fifteenth, the Military Order of the Teutonic Knights attracted the nobles and knights of western Europe to its headquarters in Prussia, from which it would lead expeditions across large stretches of difficult wooded and marshy terrain against their Lithuanian enemies. These Reisen, 'trips', have something of the chivalric package tour about them, a sense confirmed by the panoply of ritualised feasting and heraldic display with which the trips were concluded. But these were no promenades: they had to take place in the dry heat of summer or the icy grip of midwinter for the ground to be passable, and the campaigns were directed against resourceful and increasingly well-organised opponents. In a very real way, therefore, and for all the intervening cultural and social changes that aristocrats had experienced, the demands of a Prussian Reise stood in straight line of descent from Urban II's idea at the time of the First Crusade that the spiritual merit of the exercise was a direct function of the dangers, the time, the cost and the sheer physical and mental effort that he shrewdly calculated the crusade would involve. This core value supplies the essential continuity in crusading's impact on aristocratic life, and explains its ability to insinuate itselfwithin fundamental aspects ofindividual and group self-identity, for example in relation to ideas of gender, reputation, ritual and display.
The crusades also resonated with aristocratic culture, and to some extent with popular culture more broadly, because they were an opportunity for people to situate themselves in time in ways which their routine lives would seldom have afforded. On an intimate, domestic level this took the form of family traditions of crusading, significantly transmissible through both male and female lines. These were sufficiently to the fore in people's consciousness to be regularly exploited by preachers aiming to stir visceral, deeply emotive responses in their audiences. As early as the Second Crusade, Pope Eugenius III (1145-53) was emphasising this theme in his crusade encyclical Quantum praedecessores, reminding the aristocrats of his own time of the achievements of their forebears, and holding out the prospect of shameful ignominy if one generation's achievements were not replicated in the next.674 The feeling of being part of a continuum also extended beyond domestic traditions into a broader sense of historical responsibility. When the former master general of the Dominican order, Humbert of Romans (c. 1199-1277), wrote a discussion paper for the Council of Lyons II (1274) about the current and future state of crusading, one of the possible criticisms that he tried to pre-empt was the futility of wasting Christian blood, especially the blood of revered leaders such as the recent crusade casualty St Louis. Humbert evoked the achievements of Charles Martel (684-741) and Charlemagne (747-814) in wars against the Saracens, as well as those of Godfrey of Bouillon (c. 1061-1100) on the First Crusade.675
One reaction to this list might be to wonder how far Humbert was reduced to scraping the barrel in an attempt to disguise the Christians' recent poor track record: two of his three exemplars had been dead for more than 450 years, and even Godfrey's achievements were nearly two centuries in the past. The fact that these figures lived for thirteenth-century aristocrats as much as anything as the heroes of epic songs further reveals the strain, to modern sensibilities at least, in Humbert's historical argument. But the bigger point is that Humbert's experience as a crusade preacher must have persuaded him that these were meaningful connections to make, and that contemporaries valued the ability to locate their own experience within a long chronological frame. Indeed, another part of Humbert's argument was to reach even further back to the time of the Old Testament, evoking parallels between crusaders and the people of Israel, which had been the stock in trade of crusade apologetics since the chronicles of the First Crusade. The biblical connection went even further: the appeal ofcrusading, especially to the East, presupposed a collapsing of chronological distance between the events of the Gospels and the present day. The Holy Land remained Christ's patrimony by virtue of its being the setting for his life, death and resurrection, and in this way perceived injuries visited on it and its inhabitants even more than a millennium later were to be understood as real and unmediated injuries to Christ himself, permitting him, through his mouthpiece the pope, to summon his followers to vindicate that wrong just as a secular lord would summon his knights to prosecute a vendetta. Crusades, then, ran on a heady and unique mixture of biblical, myth-historical and dynastic time.
Assessing the impact of the crusades on Christianity in the round is by no means straightforward, for we are dealing with a movement that found expression in a diverse range of institutions, habits of mind and cultural forms. Perhaps the single most important contribution of the crusades to Christians' religious thinking, and thus to the interactions between clergy and laity in general, was the indulgence, which emerged as a benchmark against which the church could calibrate offers of spiritual reward in a wide array of circumstances. The theological bases and the popular reception of the various formulations of the crusade indulgence are both hotly debated by historians. What probably began as a generous remission of penances at the time of the First Crusade mutated by the pontificate of Innocent III into a release of the temporal penalties (in this world and in purgatory) due from sin. But popular understandings never mapped neatly onto the sometimes hesitant and ambiguous official formulations. A maximal reading of the crusade's spiritual benefits is apparent as early as the eye-witness accounts of the First Crusade, which appropriated the language of martyrdom when speaking of fallen comrades. What exactly the crusade delivered in spiritual terms was an area where the clergy and lay people largely agreed to differ, or not to ask too many awkward questions, and to this extent crusading was an exercise in the creative camouflaging of the disjunctions between educated and popular understandings of concepts such as merit and reward.
In terms of facilitating expressions of religious devotion, the most noticeable effect of the crusades was the Latin control of Jerusalem and the Holy Places between 1099 and the Muslim reconquest under Saladin in 1187. Western pilgrimage to the East had already been picking up in the eleventh century, and the success of the First Crusade made possible a veritable pilgrimage boom. Indications of the importance that this assumed are provided by the Latins' building of the magnificent church of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Knights of St John's hospital, which could accommodate many hundreds of sick and poor pilgrims. To some extent Jerusalem was an exportable quantity: relics brought back to the West by favoured pilgrims included shavings of rock from Calvary and the Sepulchre itself, as weU as splinters of the True Cross and innumerable other precious objects. Mimicking the architecture of the Holy Land could be another powerful statement of pious attachment; the Temple church in London, consecrated by the patriarch of Jerusalem in 1185, is one example of this identity-through-mimesis, the extraordinary reproduction of the aedicule of the Holy Sepulchre built around 1500 in Gorlitz in eastern Saxony is another. It has been argued that one effect of the opening up of the Holy Land in the twelfth century was to confirm in Western popular religiosity an attachment to the humanity of Christ and by extension to the Blessed Virgin Mary, a sensibility that the mendicant orders were able to sustain and develop from the thirteenth century onwards, even though Latin control of the Holy Land had been lost. This is an attractive thesis, but it also exposes the difficulty of isolating effects on Christian life that can be specifically and unambiguously assigned to the crusades in isolation: the interest in the humanity ofChrist had many complex roots that pre-dated crusading, and the Western attachment to the Holy Land was an expression of enthusiasm for pilgrimage in general, not just the crusading subset of pilgrimage ideology.
It is often observed that, of all the events and processes played out on the big pan-European stage in the Middle Ages, mention of the crusades most frequently intrudes into annals, chronicles, miracle collections, saints' Lives, urban histories, and genealogies, that is to say the sorts of texts which were normally dominated by local affairs and very limited in their horizons. In other words, the crusades, by this index at least, did most to break down particularism and promote a sense of a joined-up Christendom. There is much to commend this view, though it should not be overstated: for the most part these texts remained resolutely local in their range, even when the crusades opened up new vistas. Equally, the many profound reorderings that took place within the cores and peripheries of Latin civilisation from the eleventh century onwards were never the result of the crusades alone. The crusades' importance lies in their being one part of a fuller picture which also includes the papal reform movement, the growth of international religious orders, changes in communication techniques such as preaching, maritime expansion, developments in military technology, and population movements towards and across frontiers in the Iberian peninsula, eastern Europe and (to a limited degree) the Middle East. The crusade asked of western Europeans that they revisit their basic identities, but it did so in terms which validated their familiar points of reference, in particular aristocratic status, the family, the values attached to property, loyalty and duty, service and reward. The crusade was an extraordinary innovation, the 'new way to attain salvation', as one historian of the First Crusade put it, but its effect was to inflect the Christian identity of later medieval European civilisation rather than to effect a radical reconfiguration.
World History
