HH462A: The Crusades (historiography seminar)

Trabalho Final de Curso de Doutoramento em Historia, FCSH/UNL, 2010

acontecimentos políticos e militares, nos aspectos institucionais e na procura das origens, motivos e objectivos da primeira cruzada. Contudo, tem-se verificado desde meados do século passado uma enorme multiplicação de estudos especializados, assentes em novas perspectivas e metodologias, os quais têm contribuido para devolver às cruzadas a sua medievalidade. As abordagens, entre outras, de âmbito jurídico e ideológico ou económico e social, ao nível da religiosidade e espiritualidade ou da cultura letrada e das concepções mentais e realizações artísticas, permitem, de facto, uma construção cada vez mais compósita desta realidade, traduzida num número crescente de globais sínteses interpretativas. 3 No âmbito destes estudos, o problema que tem provocado maior divergência e algum debate constitui o da definição de cruzada, pois a ausência de um conceito coevo proporcionou, em contrapartida, construções historiográficas alternativas, as quais condicionam, naturalmente, a percepção actual desse passado distante. Aliás, o próprio esforço de codificação dos elementos identitários da cruzada, assim como a sua formalização enquanto instituição papal, ocorreu apenas durante o pontificado de Inocêncio III, ou seja, mais de um século depois do seu começo, embora um conjunto de inovações anteriores testemunhe a consciência, desde as suas origens, das especificidades desse projecto. 4 Também o vocabulário, extremamente prolixo, utilizado ao longo da Idade Média, contribui para essa imprecisão conceptual, extensível ao próprio estatuto social do cruzado. Com efeito, tais expedições surgem então identificadas, sobretudo, com a palavra peregrinatio ou com outra terminologia 3 As análises mais recentes da historiografia das cruzadas encontram-se em James M. Powell, «The crusades in recent research»,

2010

A dissertation for the study of History at York St John University that looks at the immediate legacy of the First Crusade. It takes a thematic approach covering impacts on culture, identity and conflict.

Today, much of Crusade scholarship remains committed to the creationist fallacy of the Crusades. Crusade creationism is a form of creationism that asserts that the Crusades testify to a creator’s design manifested in a single common core of never-changing characteristics. The essence of Crusade creationism is that crusading was created functionally complete from the beginning. It did not develop by historical processes but was “created” or “invented by Pope Urban II in 1095,” or had its origin in an idea in the mind of Pope Urban (r. 1088-99). All Crusade essentials were present from the start, with only trivial modifications left to be added later. Thus, from the beginning, the leaders and organizers of the Crusades were popes, and the institutions of the indulgence, the vow, the Cross, and Crusader privileges were all in place. The local environment can modify the original form of the Crusades to give varieties of crusading—the Crusades in Spain, the Baltic, the Balkans, etc.—but these local varieties are seen as trivial and unimportant modifications of the original form of the Crusades as embodied in “Pope Urban’s creation.” While historians rush to guarantee the fixity of the Crusades, so that each Crusade preserves in some fashion the basic character of the so-called “First” Crusade, this study shows that the so-called founding father of the Crusades perceived these undertakings quite differently—not in terms of a fixed, definable, and unchanging essence derived from a single Crusade, but in terms of a connected series of events, encompassing Sicily, Iberia, and the eastern Mediterranean, which were bringing about the reconquest and restoration of the lost lands of Christendom from the power of Islam.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. Jn 1:1-4 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.

History, 2008

Conventional wisdom maintains that the Islamic world and western Christendom held two very different views of the crusades. The image of warfare between Islam and Christendom has promoted the idea that the combative instincts aroused by this conflict somehow produced discordant views of the crusades. Yet the direct evidence from Islamic and Christian sources indicates otherwise. The self-view of the crusades presented by contemporary Muslim authors and the self-view of the crusades presented by crusading popes are not in opposition to each other but are in agreement with each other. Both interpretations place the onset of the crusades ahead of their accepted historical debut in 1095. Both interpretations point to the Norman conquest of Islamic Sicily (1060 -91) as the start of the crusades. And both interpretations contend that by the end of the eleventh century the crusading enterprise was Mediterranean-wide in its scope. The Islamic view of the crusades is in fact the enantiomorph (mirror-image) of the Christian view of the crusades. This article makes a radical departure from contemporary scholarship on the early crusading enterprise because it is based on the direct evidence from Islamic and Christian sources. The direct evidence offers a way out of the impasse into which crusade history has fallen, and any attempt at determining the origin and nature of crusading without the support of the direct evidence is doomed to failure.

A discussion of British contributions to crusading studies in the second half of the twentieth century.

Conventional wisdom maintains that the Islamic world and western Christendom held two very different views of the crusades. The image of warfare between Islam and Christendom has promoted the idea that the combative instincts aroused by this conflict somehow produced discordant views of the crusades. Yet the direct evidence from Islamic and Christian sources indicates otherwise. The self-view of the crusades presented by contemporary Muslim authors and the self-view of the crusades presented by crusading popes are not in opposition to each other but are in agreement with each other. Both interpretations place the onset of the crusades ahead of their accepted historical debut in 1095. Both interpretations point to the Norman conquest of Islamic Sicily (1060–91) as the start of the crusades. And both interpretations contend that by the end of the eleventh century the crusading enterprise was Mediterranean-wide in its scope. The Islamic view of the crusades is in fact the enantiomorph (mirror-image) of the Christian view of the crusades. This article makes a radical departure from contemporary scholarship on the early crusading enterprise because it is based on the direct evidence from Islamic and Christian sources. The direct evidence offers a way out of the impasse into which crusade history has fallen, and any attempt at determining the origin and nature of crusading without the support of the direct evidence is doomed to failure.

A b s t r a c t : In its apocalyptic variant, medieval Catholic eschatology could lead men and women to mobilize to fight alongside Christ's heavenly armies in the war to end all wars, which would cleanse the world and usher in eternal peace. It was expected that Satan would try to corrupt Christ's soldiers. But ultimately a purified Christian army would triumph both over sins and heathendom. In a variant, when one felt close to the End of times, one could fear that the call to holy war was a satanic trick. Especially devious close to the Eschaton, the Deceiver tried thereby to lead would-be milites Christi into sin, without redemption. These two configurations are visible with the First and Second crusades.