Crusades and early Christian attitudes toward warfare

2010

The present paper attempts to investigate three cornerstones of the history of the early crusades from a wider range of emotions while focusing on [1] the call to the crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem, [2] the fall of Edessa and, subsequently, the Second Crusade and its outcomes, and [3] the Christian defeat at the Horns of Hattin. Less than a century before the crusades, different groups in Christian society had been the target of the same pejorative emotions that were later used to denounce and reproach the Moslems. These terms should therefore be seen and analyzed, not to produce a superficial moral reading of the vilification of the Moslems, but as an essential part of the thesaurus in which Christian society analyzed itself. In fact, the use of the same Augustinian emotional index transforms negative attitudes toward the Moslems into an act of inverted inclusion of the Moslems within the Christian sphere; in other words, using illusionary inclusion in order to exclude. This...

The American Historical Review, 2008

2020

The Crusades have been one of the most enduringly popular topics in medieval history among historians and a wider public alike, and crusade studies have reached an impressive critical mass over the last few decades. In the process, it has become one of the most cross-disciplinary fields within medieval history, encompassing a multitude of methodological and theoretical approaches. Fighting for the Faith – The Many Crusades aims to illustrate the variety in Crusade studies internationally. The initiative arose from general discussions about the Crusades among a group of Danish medievalist at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, which led to further discussions at symposia and workshops around Europe and in the United States. In the “Introduction”, Kurt Villads Jensen and Carsten Selch Jensen state that the aim of the book is to discuss “some of the fundamental questions of current Crusade studies, including the reasons for undertaking crusades, against whom to crusade, and t...

Traces changes in Christian thought toward violence and war from pacifism through the development of the Crusading ideology of killing heretics and heathens as an act of penance and love.

2012

The traditional view is that early Christians, prior to emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, were pacifists who stubbornly refused to enlist in the Roman army and engage in warfare, preferring to die rather than betray their beliefs. However, a plethora of literary and archaeological evidence demonstrates that was not usually the case. The majority of early Christians did not find military service or warfare particularly problematic. Christians integrated with the dominant mores of society and that included military service. It is, in fact, possible that Christianity was particularly attractive to those in military service. This study looks to reposition early Christian ethics and the attitude towards war and to bring new understanding to the relationship between military service and Christianity.