The Crusades — Campaigns of the Cross?
Debate 2 Motivations of Crusaders: Runciman, Constable, Bull, Jones
Sir Steven Runciman
Biography
The Hon. Sir Steven Runciman, CH, FBA, born July 7th, 1903, died November 1st, 2000; Professor of Byzantine Art and History, Istanbul University, 1942-45. President of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara 1962-95; of the Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines 1966-2000; and of The Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 1983-2000.
Second son of Viscount Runciman of Doxford. Educated at Eton and Trinity College Cambridge. Diplomat in Turkey and Egypt during World War II. Held many university appointments in Great Britain and America. Knighted in 1958. His three volume History of the Crusades published in 1954 was for many years the authoritative interpretation. He follows Gibbon’s line of condemnation of the Crusades.
His background as a Byzantinist influenced his view of the Crusades, in that he saw the Crusades from an Eastern point of view rather than the Western crusaders’ point of view. He is often praised for his elegant prose style.
Quotations from Runciman’s History of the Crusades
1.
The genuine faith of some crusaders was often combined with unashamed greed. Few Christians have ever thought it incongruous to combine God’s work with the acquisition of material advantages. That the soldiers of God should extract territory from the infidel was right. It was justifiable to rob the heretic and the schismatic also. Worldly ambitions helped to produce the gallant adventurousness on which so much of the early success of the movement was based. But greed and lust for power are dangerous masters. They breed impatience; for man’s life is short and he needs quick results. They breed jealousy and disloyalty; for offices and possessions are limited, and it is impossible to satisfy every claimant. There was a constant feud between the Franks already established in the East and those that came to fight the infidel and to seek their fortune. Each saw the war from a different point of view. In the turmoil of envy, distrust and intrigue, few campaigns had much chance of success. Quarrels and inefficiency were enhanced by ignorance. The colonists slowly adapted themselves to the ways and climate of the Levant; they began to learn how their enemies fought and how to make friends with them. But the newly-come Crusader found himself in an utterly unfamiliar world, and he was usually too proud to admit his limitations. He disliked his cousins of Outremer and would not listen to them. So expedition after expedition made the same mistakes and reached the same sorry end.
…It was indeed less remarkable that the Crusading movement faded away in failure than that it should ever have met with success.
The triumphs of the Crusade were the triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. By the inexorable laws of history the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.
Comments on Runciman
1. Madden
It is easy for moderns to dismiss the crusades as morally repugnant, cynically evil, or as Runciman summed them up, "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God." Yet such judgements tell us more about the observer than the observed. They are based on uniquely modern (and, therefore, western) values. If from the safety of our desk we are quick to condemn the medieval crusader, we should be mindful that he would be just as quick to condemn us. Our infinitely more destructive wars waged for the sake of political and social ideologies would, in his opinion, be lamentable wastes of human life. In both societies, the medieval and the modern, men fight for what is most dear to them. That is a fact of human nature that is not so changeable.
2. Madden
It was in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that the current view of the Crusades was born. Most of the philosophes, like Voltaire, believed that medieval Christianity was a vile superstition. For them the Crusades were a migration of barbarians led by fanaticism, greed, and lust. Since then, the Enlightenment take on the Crusades has gone in and out of fashion. The Crusades received good press as wars of nobility (although not religion) during the Romantic period and the early twentieth century. After the Second World War, however, opinion again turned decisively against the Crusades. In the wake of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, historians found war of ideology—any ideology —distasteful. This sentiment was summed up by Sir Steven Runciman in his three-volume work, A History of the Crusades (1951-54). For Runciman, the Crusades were morally repugnant acts of intolerance in the name of God. The medieval men who took the cross and marched to the Middle East were either cynically evil, rapaciously greedy, or naively gullible. This beautifully written history soon became the standard. Almost single-handedly Runciman managed to define the modern popular view of the Crusades.
Thomas Madden
3. Obituary, The Times of London
His most important work, the three- volume History of the Crusades, took a more sceptical line than any previous Western historian, and was freshly informed by a reading of Islamic sources. Two hundred years earlier Gibbon had portrayed the crusades as doomed romantic escapades, and wrote of "the triumph of barbarism and superstition". But in Runciman's eyes the crusaders were not a chivalrous host who captured but failed to keep the Holy Land: they were the final wave of the barbarian invaders who had destroyed the Roman Empire. They completed this work by destroying the real centre of medieval civilisation and the last bastion of antiquity, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. In charting the medieval phase of the endless struggle between East and West in the Middle East, Runciman's sympathies were unambiguously with Byzantium against the bigots and wreckers of the West. His final judgment of the whole enterprise set a standard of self-laceration which British historians have since struggled to surpass: "High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost."
4. The obituary from the Daily Telegraph.
Sir Steven Runciman, who has died aged 97, was the pre-eminent historian of the Byzantine Empire and of the Crusades; he was also a celebrated aesthete, gentleman scholar and repository of the civilised values of Edwardian times. His magnum opus was the three-volume A History of the Crusades, published between 1951 and 1954. In its preface Runciman set out his credo, one that derived from Gibbon, and stressed the claims of grand narrative over narrow analysis: "I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man." For Runciman, the Crusades were not romantic adventures but the last of the barbarian invasions, albeit ones that brought about the dominance of Western civilisation. His opinion was partly determined by his sympathy for the Byzantine Empire, often at odds with the Crusaders and an oasis of culture surrounded by unappreciative savages….
It was, however, his great History of the Crusades (1951, 1952 and 1954), that made Runciman known to a much wider public. No adequate history in English existed when he began, and he broke with his French predecessors by telling the story not just from the viewpoint of the West, but also as Islam and Constantinople had seen it. To do this he drew on Greek, Armenian and Muslim texts, as well as on more modern sources. The book is a model of narrative history. The three volumes are each divided into five parts, so that the reader primarily interested in one facet of the story can find his way without difficulty. But Runciman was uninterested in historiography. Not for him the sociological techniques, the excursions into demography, geography and economics of the Braudel school of history. He told the tale, he was readable, and his account was authoritative - a standard work for years to come.
5.
Hooray for the Crusades! Piers Paul Read
THE PREVAILING VIEW of the Crusades has, until now, been damning. The philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who dismissed Christian belief as superstition, ridiculed these wars fought in the name of Christianity. The Scottish skeptic, David Hume, thought them "the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation." Denis Diderot's (a French philosophe of the Enlightenment) Encyclopedie, published in 1772, said they were inspired by greed, imbecility, and "false zeal." The same strain of contempt continues through Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to our near contemporary, Sir Steven Runciman, who concluded his monumental History of the Crusades with the judgement that they were "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost."
Giles Constable (contemporary)
Context: contemporary British academic
1.
Charter studies have been around for a long time
• Only relatively recently though have historians been able to focus new computer technologies on these copious and scattered documents to organise and evaluate them
• Giles Constable is one of the pioneers in the field of crusader charter studies (“Mediaeval Charters as a Source for the History of the Crusades”)
2.
Among the most interesting and fruitful new directions in crusade scholarship is the use of charters as a source
• Many thousands of these legal documents survive in Europe
• With mediaeval charters the historian can come closer to hearing the voices of individual crusaders, thus revealing more about their identities, conditions and motivations
• Giles Constable assesses the advantages and possible problems with charters as a source for the crusades
• One of the obstacles to charter studies is the inherently scattered nature of documents related to crusading
• Collecting a small number of them can take many years
Constable’s own collection of crusade charters sheds light on several aspects of the movement
• He finds that crusading in the 12th and early 13th centuries was not differentiated from pilgrimage
• As pilgrims, crusaders emphasized the spiritual when describing their decision to take the cross
• This, Constable argues, was not mere formula nor the invention pf monastic scribes, but a real reflection of crusader motivations
• While accepting that baser motives played some role, Constable maintains that mediaeval crusaders were by and large moved by the desire to do penance for sinfulness, rescue the Christians of the East, and redeem the Holy Sepulchre, just as they expressed in the charters they left behind
From Thomas Madden, Introduction, The Crusades: Essential Readings
Marcus Bull (contemporary)
Context: contemporary British academic
Marcus Bull who conducted his own charter studies in southwestern France, argues (“The Roots of Lay Enthusiasm for the Crusades”) that the decisions of these families were conditioned by their long association with monastic houses
• A fundamental component among aristocratic families was their lavish patronage of these institutions, linked closely to their desire for eternal salvation
• Long-standing acts of piety therefore were translated into crusading when monasteries themselves, always the link between reformers and the military elite, urged them to take up the cross
• The financial sacrifices of crusading were great, yet Bull argues that it was an essential element of the culture of piety among the elite to make them
Like Constable and Riley-Smith, Marcus Bull’s research into mediaeval charters has uncovered a strong current of pious devotion that motivated crusaders to take the cross
• The crusades were primarily a religious movement
• As Riley-Smith shows, economic factors played little role in crusader motivations
• The First Crusade was a pilgrimage and a great act of self-sacrifice all rolled into one
From Thomas Madden, Introduction, The Crusades: Essential Readings
Terry Jones
Biography
Terry Jones was born in Colwyn Bay, North Wales. His father was a bank clerk. He studied at St. Edmund Hall College, Oxford University. In 1965, with his friend Michael Palin, he made 'The Love Show' for television, which was his first success. Also, he wrote for many other TV shows, such as: 'The Kathy Kirby Show', 'Late Night Line-Up' (with Palin), "Complete and Utter History of Britain" (1969) (with Palin). But Jones' greatest success was zany "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (1969) (1969-74) (with Palin, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Giliiam and Eric Idle).
[PCS} Terry Jones television series The Crusades follows Runciman’s and Gibbon’s hostile interpretation. One way to explain this might be to see Jones and the Monty Python comedy team as pioneers of Post Modernism, which is itself in some ways indebted to the Enlightenment. Jones’ audience will tend to be cynical and not entirely serious, so an interpretation which deflates or criticizes the high seriousness of the Crusaders will appeal to them.
It is important to bear in mind that this is a television series, and the visual nature of the medium will influence much of the material (and interpretations?) that are selected by the composers. Because a great deal is being covered in a short time, over-simplification may occur when complex issues are considered. Perhaps there will be a tendency to present situations in terms of heroes and villains.
From the Internet
Politically correct, funny, and informative.
This documentary is so funny, it is almost cruel. After all, the Crusades were very serious affairs (God, country, heathens, invasions, and so on), so what is Terry Jones of "Monty Python" fame doing here, leading the new barbarians of the West in a Quest for the Greater Glory of God and a little bit of plunder? Well, he, and the whole BBC-A&E production team, are taking us to a journey Eastward, retracing the steps of the medieval pilgrim-soldiers, ignorant peasants and nobles alike who invaded Levant because they were religious zealots, greedy, and unscrupulous. Does this sound a bit one-sided? It is, and that is the only problem with this very entertaining and educational documentary: in their attempt to be fair to the Arab/Moslem side, the producers have ended up taking sides, which is not very susprising since the historical bulk comes from the late Sir Steven Runciman, one of the most respected and most widely read historians of the Crusades, whose bias against the "Franks" and for the Byzantines, is evident once one reads his great "History of the Crusades." Jonathan Riley-Smith attempts to balance the story with his commentaries, and it is no secret that his sympathies are with the Crusaders, but the program is structured in such a way that not even Riley-Smith's input saves it from being tilted. Terry Jones is simply outstanding with his British (Welsh) accent and deadpan humor as the perfect guide in this tour.
The Crusades were far more complicated than the simplistic Bad Guys (ignorant Europeans/Christians) against the Good Guys (enlightened Arabs/Moslems) picture would make us believe. Historical perspective helps us see the Crusades as a chapter in the (sometimes quite deadly) embrace of two world religions. Long periods of peace are punctuated by terrible periods of war and invasion. The Moslems got the ball rolling when they invaded the Christian lands of North Africa, Spain, and the Byzantine Empire. It took a while for the Christians to counterattack (just as it took a --shorter-- while for the Moslems to react to the Crusaders). When the Christians finally went on the offensive, their timing was not the best, and their choice of tactics was very questionable. Christendom was extremely intolerant back then, so everybody who was not a Christian, and many who were the "wrong" kind of Christian, were immediately suspect and dealt with mercilessly. What the program fails to mention is that Europe always had voices of dissent, and not all Crusaders were murdering barbarians, as not all Popes were conniving greedy zealots. The program also fails to provide the true historical setting of the Crusades: after the Crusaders were defeated, the Moslem world advanced into Europe from the East and South, and it remained in Western Europe (Iberian Peninsula) until the late 15th century. It was not until the late 17th century that the Ottoman Turks retreated from the siege of Vienna. The Crusades were a chapter in this stormy relationship of European Christianity and Islam. The producers of the documentary would have served their viewers better by being less politically correct. The slef-flagellation is appropiate and even funny in the hands of Terry Jones, but sometimes too much of a good thing is just too much.
Still, "Crusades" is an excellent program, mostly because I am sure it will interest people who otherwise would have never bothered with medieval history or the Crusades in particular.
http://dvd.realbuy.ws/B00005U8F3.html
Comments on Terry Jones’ The Crusades
1.
The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. Ask a random American about them and you are likely to see a face wrinkle in disgust, or just the blank stare that is usually evoked by events older than six weeks. After all, weren't the crusaders just a bunch of religious nuts carrying fire and sword to the land of the Prince of Peace? Weren't they cynical imperialists seeking to carve out colonies for themselves in faraway lands with the blessings of the Catholic Church? A couch potato watching the BBC/A&E documentary on the crusades (hosted by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame no less) would learn in roughly four hours of frivolous tsk-tsk-ing that the peaceful Muslim world actually learned to be warlike from the barbaric western crusaders.
Thomas F. Madden
2.
Since the 1970s the Crusades have attracted many hundreds of scholars who have meticulously poked, prodded, and examined them. As a result, much more is known about Christianity’s holy wars than ever before. Yet the fruits of decades of scholarship have been slow to enter the popular mind. In part this is the fault of professional historians, who tend to publish studies that, by necessity, are technical and therefore not easily accessible outside of the academy. But it is also due to a clear reluctance among modern elites to let go of Runciman’s vision of the Crusades. And so modern popular books on the Crusades—desiring, after all, to be popular—tend to parrot Runciman. The same is true for other media, like the multi-part television documentary, The Crusades (1995), produced by BBC/A&E and starring Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. To give the latter an air of authority the producers spliced in a number of distinguished Crusade historians who gave their views on events. The problem was that the historians would not go along with Runciman’s ideas. No matter. The producers simply edited the taped interviews cleverly enough that the historians seemed to be agreeing with Runciman. As Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith quite vehemently told me, “They made me appear to say things that I do not believe!”
Thomas Madden
3..
Anticolonialism and Political Correctness
In short, an aging collection of anticolonial sentiments has merged with mild political correctness (opposition to violence, skepticism toward Western religious traditions and practices, concern for social issues reflecting race, gender, class, and ethnicity) to dominate current historiography of the Crusades.
This is prominently reflected in the film media, most notably in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and Terry Jones's History of the Crusades.1 It is also somewhat out of touch with Generation X. My students prefer Errol Flynn's Robin Hood to Costner's and enjoy Men in Tights. Jones's much better but strongly antiwar BBC series praised Baibar's use of slave troops against the crusaders. What would he have said if crusaders had adopted that practice? On the whole, Jones is far the better scholar (and arguably the better actor), but he remains a child of the sixties--like so many of us who are active teachers today.
William Urban
Debate 2 Motivations of Crusaders: Runciman, Constable, Bull, Jones
Sir Steven Runciman
Biography
The Hon. Sir Steven Runciman, CH, FBA, born July 7th, 1903, died November 1st, 2000; Professor of Byzantine Art and History, Istanbul University, 1942-45. President of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara 1962-95; of the Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines 1966-2000; and of The Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 1983-2000.
Second son of Viscount Runciman of Doxford. Educated at Eton and Trinity College Cambridge. Diplomat in Turkey and Egypt during World War II. Held many university appointments in Great Britain and America. Knighted in 1958. His three volume History of the Crusades published in 1954 was for many years the authoritative interpretation. He follows Gibbon’s line of condemnation of the Crusades.
His background as a Byzantinist influenced his view of the Crusades, in that he saw the Crusades from an Eastern point of view rather than the Western crusaders’ point of view. He is often praised for his elegant prose style.
Quotations from Runciman’s History of the Crusades
1.
The genuine faith of some crusaders was often combined with unashamed greed. Few Christians have ever thought it incongruous to combine God’s work with the acquisition of material advantages. That the soldiers of God should extract territory from the infidel was right. It was justifiable to rob the heretic and the schismatic also. Worldly ambitions helped to produce the gallant adventurousness on which so much of the early success of the movement was based. But greed and lust for power are dangerous masters. They breed impatience; for man’s life is short and he needs quick results. They breed jealousy and disloyalty; for offices and possessions are limited, and it is impossible to satisfy every claimant. There was a constant feud between the Franks already established in the East and those that came to fight the infidel and to seek their fortune. Each saw the war from a different point of view. In the turmoil of envy, distrust and intrigue, few campaigns had much chance of success. Quarrels and inefficiency were enhanced by ignorance. The colonists slowly adapted themselves to the ways and climate of the Levant; they began to learn how their enemies fought and how to make friends with them. But the newly-come Crusader found himself in an utterly unfamiliar world, and he was usually too proud to admit his limitations. He disliked his cousins of Outremer and would not listen to them. So expedition after expedition made the same mistakes and reached the same sorry end.
…It was indeed less remarkable that the Crusading movement faded away in failure than that it should ever have met with success.
The triumphs of the Crusade were the triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. By the inexorable laws of history the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.
Comments on Runciman
1. Madden
It is easy for moderns to dismiss the crusades as morally repugnant, cynically evil, or as Runciman summed them up, "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God." Yet such judgements tell us more about the observer than the observed. They are based on uniquely modern (and, therefore, western) values. If from the safety of our desk we are quick to condemn the medieval crusader, we should be mindful that he would be just as quick to condemn us. Our infinitely more destructive wars waged for the sake of political and social ideologies would, in his opinion, be lamentable wastes of human life. In both societies, the medieval and the modern, men fight for what is most dear to them. That is a fact of human nature that is not so changeable.
2. Madden
It was in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that the current view of the Crusades was born. Most of the philosophes, like Voltaire, believed that medieval Christianity was a vile superstition. For them the Crusades were a migration of barbarians led by fanaticism, greed, and lust. Since then, the Enlightenment take on the Crusades has gone in and out of fashion. The Crusades received good press as wars of nobility (although not religion) during the Romantic period and the early twentieth century. After the Second World War, however, opinion again turned decisively against the Crusades. In the wake of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, historians found war of ideology—any ideology —distasteful. This sentiment was summed up by Sir Steven Runciman in his three-volume work, A History of the Crusades (1951-54). For Runciman, the Crusades were morally repugnant acts of intolerance in the name of God. The medieval men who took the cross and marched to the Middle East were either cynically evil, rapaciously greedy, or naively gullible. This beautifully written history soon became the standard. Almost single-handedly Runciman managed to define the modern popular view of the Crusades.
Thomas Madden
3. Obituary, The Times of London
His most important work, the three- volume History of the Crusades, took a more sceptical line than any previous Western historian, and was freshly informed by a reading of Islamic sources. Two hundred years earlier Gibbon had portrayed the crusades as doomed romantic escapades, and wrote of "the triumph of barbarism and superstition". But in Runciman's eyes the crusaders were not a chivalrous host who captured but failed to keep the Holy Land: they were the final wave of the barbarian invaders who had destroyed the Roman Empire. They completed this work by destroying the real centre of medieval civilisation and the last bastion of antiquity, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. In charting the medieval phase of the endless struggle between East and West in the Middle East, Runciman's sympathies were unambiguously with Byzantium against the bigots and wreckers of the West. His final judgment of the whole enterprise set a standard of self-laceration which British historians have since struggled to surpass: "High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost."
4. The obituary from the Daily Telegraph.
Sir Steven Runciman, who has died aged 97, was the pre-eminent historian of the Byzantine Empire and of the Crusades; he was also a celebrated aesthete, gentleman scholar and repository of the civilised values of Edwardian times. His magnum opus was the three-volume A History of the Crusades, published between 1951 and 1954. In its preface Runciman set out his credo, one that derived from Gibbon, and stressed the claims of grand narrative over narrow analysis: "I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man." For Runciman, the Crusades were not romantic adventures but the last of the barbarian invasions, albeit ones that brought about the dominance of Western civilisation. His opinion was partly determined by his sympathy for the Byzantine Empire, often at odds with the Crusaders and an oasis of culture surrounded by unappreciative savages….
It was, however, his great History of the Crusades (1951, 1952 and 1954), that made Runciman known to a much wider public. No adequate history in English existed when he began, and he broke with his French predecessors by telling the story not just from the viewpoint of the West, but also as Islam and Constantinople had seen it. To do this he drew on Greek, Armenian and Muslim texts, as well as on more modern sources. The book is a model of narrative history. The three volumes are each divided into five parts, so that the reader primarily interested in one facet of the story can find his way without difficulty. But Runciman was uninterested in historiography. Not for him the sociological techniques, the excursions into demography, geography and economics of the Braudel school of history. He told the tale, he was readable, and his account was authoritative - a standard work for years to come.
5.
Hooray for the Crusades! Piers Paul Read
THE PREVAILING VIEW of the Crusades has, until now, been damning. The philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who dismissed Christian belief as superstition, ridiculed these wars fought in the name of Christianity. The Scottish skeptic, David Hume, thought them "the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation." Denis Diderot's (a French philosophe of the Enlightenment) Encyclopedie, published in 1772, said they were inspired by greed, imbecility, and "false zeal." The same strain of contempt continues through Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to our near contemporary, Sir Steven Runciman, who concluded his monumental History of the Crusades with the judgement that they were "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost."
Giles Constable (contemporary)
Context: contemporary British academic
1.
Charter studies have been around for a long time
• Only relatively recently though have historians been able to focus new computer technologies on these copious and scattered documents to organise and evaluate them
• Giles Constable is one of the pioneers in the field of crusader charter studies (“Mediaeval Charters as a Source for the History of the Crusades”)
2.
Among the most interesting and fruitful new directions in crusade scholarship is the use of charters as a source
• Many thousands of these legal documents survive in Europe
• With mediaeval charters the historian can come closer to hearing the voices of individual crusaders, thus revealing more about their identities, conditions and motivations
• Giles Constable assesses the advantages and possible problems with charters as a source for the crusades
• One of the obstacles to charter studies is the inherently scattered nature of documents related to crusading
• Collecting a small number of them can take many years
Constable’s own collection of crusade charters sheds light on several aspects of the movement
• He finds that crusading in the 12th and early 13th centuries was not differentiated from pilgrimage
• As pilgrims, crusaders emphasized the spiritual when describing their decision to take the cross
• This, Constable argues, was not mere formula nor the invention pf monastic scribes, but a real reflection of crusader motivations
• While accepting that baser motives played some role, Constable maintains that mediaeval crusaders were by and large moved by the desire to do penance for sinfulness, rescue the Christians of the East, and redeem the Holy Sepulchre, just as they expressed in the charters they left behind
From Thomas Madden, Introduction, The Crusades: Essential Readings
Marcus Bull (contemporary)
Context: contemporary British academic
Marcus Bull who conducted his own charter studies in southwestern France, argues (“The Roots of Lay Enthusiasm for the Crusades”) that the decisions of these families were conditioned by their long association with monastic houses
• A fundamental component among aristocratic families was their lavish patronage of these institutions, linked closely to their desire for eternal salvation
• Long-standing acts of piety therefore were translated into crusading when monasteries themselves, always the link between reformers and the military elite, urged them to take up the cross
• The financial sacrifices of crusading were great, yet Bull argues that it was an essential element of the culture of piety among the elite to make them
Like Constable and Riley-Smith, Marcus Bull’s research into mediaeval charters has uncovered a strong current of pious devotion that motivated crusaders to take the cross
• The crusades were primarily a religious movement
• As Riley-Smith shows, economic factors played little role in crusader motivations
• The First Crusade was a pilgrimage and a great act of self-sacrifice all rolled into one
From Thomas Madden, Introduction, The Crusades: Essential Readings
Terry Jones
Biography
Terry Jones was born in Colwyn Bay, North Wales. His father was a bank clerk. He studied at St. Edmund Hall College, Oxford University. In 1965, with his friend Michael Palin, he made 'The Love Show' for television, which was his first success. Also, he wrote for many other TV shows, such as: 'The Kathy Kirby Show', 'Late Night Line-Up' (with Palin), "Complete and Utter History of Britain" (1969) (with Palin). But Jones' greatest success was zany "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (1969) (1969-74) (with Palin, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Giliiam and Eric Idle).
[PCS} Terry Jones television series The Crusades follows Runciman’s and Gibbon’s hostile interpretation. One way to explain this might be to see Jones and the Monty Python comedy team as pioneers of Post Modernism, which is itself in some ways indebted to the Enlightenment. Jones’ audience will tend to be cynical and not entirely serious, so an interpretation which deflates or criticizes the high seriousness of the Crusaders will appeal to them.
It is important to bear in mind that this is a television series, and the visual nature of the medium will influence much of the material (and interpretations?) that are selected by the composers. Because a great deal is being covered in a short time, over-simplification may occur when complex issues are considered. Perhaps there will be a tendency to present situations in terms of heroes and villains.
From the Internet
Politically correct, funny, and informative.
This documentary is so funny, it is almost cruel. After all, the Crusades were very serious affairs (God, country, heathens, invasions, and so on), so what is Terry Jones of "Monty Python" fame doing here, leading the new barbarians of the West in a Quest for the Greater Glory of God and a little bit of plunder? Well, he, and the whole BBC-A&E production team, are taking us to a journey Eastward, retracing the steps of the medieval pilgrim-soldiers, ignorant peasants and nobles alike who invaded Levant because they were religious zealots, greedy, and unscrupulous. Does this sound a bit one-sided? It is, and that is the only problem with this very entertaining and educational documentary: in their attempt to be fair to the Arab/Moslem side, the producers have ended up taking sides, which is not very susprising since the historical bulk comes from the late Sir Steven Runciman, one of the most respected and most widely read historians of the Crusades, whose bias against the "Franks" and for the Byzantines, is evident once one reads his great "History of the Crusades." Jonathan Riley-Smith attempts to balance the story with his commentaries, and it is no secret that his sympathies are with the Crusaders, but the program is structured in such a way that not even Riley-Smith's input saves it from being tilted. Terry Jones is simply outstanding with his British (Welsh) accent and deadpan humor as the perfect guide in this tour.
The Crusades were far more complicated than the simplistic Bad Guys (ignorant Europeans/Christians) against the Good Guys (enlightened Arabs/Moslems) picture would make us believe. Historical perspective helps us see the Crusades as a chapter in the (sometimes quite deadly) embrace of two world religions. Long periods of peace are punctuated by terrible periods of war and invasion. The Moslems got the ball rolling when they invaded the Christian lands of North Africa, Spain, and the Byzantine Empire. It took a while for the Christians to counterattack (just as it took a --shorter-- while for the Moslems to react to the Crusaders). When the Christians finally went on the offensive, their timing was not the best, and their choice of tactics was very questionable. Christendom was extremely intolerant back then, so everybody who was not a Christian, and many who were the "wrong" kind of Christian, were immediately suspect and dealt with mercilessly. What the program fails to mention is that Europe always had voices of dissent, and not all Crusaders were murdering barbarians, as not all Popes were conniving greedy zealots. The program also fails to provide the true historical setting of the Crusades: after the Crusaders were defeated, the Moslem world advanced into Europe from the East and South, and it remained in Western Europe (Iberian Peninsula) until the late 15th century. It was not until the late 17th century that the Ottoman Turks retreated from the siege of Vienna. The Crusades were a chapter in this stormy relationship of European Christianity and Islam. The producers of the documentary would have served their viewers better by being less politically correct. The slef-flagellation is appropiate and even funny in the hands of Terry Jones, but sometimes too much of a good thing is just too much.
Still, "Crusades" is an excellent program, mostly because I am sure it will interest people who otherwise would have never bothered with medieval history or the Crusades in particular.
http://dvd.realbuy.ws/B00005U8F3.html
Comments on Terry Jones’ The Crusades
1.
The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. Ask a random American about them and you are likely to see a face wrinkle in disgust, or just the blank stare that is usually evoked by events older than six weeks. After all, weren't the crusaders just a bunch of religious nuts carrying fire and sword to the land of the Prince of Peace? Weren't they cynical imperialists seeking to carve out colonies for themselves in faraway lands with the blessings of the Catholic Church? A couch potato watching the BBC/A&E documentary on the crusades (hosted by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame no less) would learn in roughly four hours of frivolous tsk-tsk-ing that the peaceful Muslim world actually learned to be warlike from the barbaric western crusaders.
Thomas F. Madden
2.
Since the 1970s the Crusades have attracted many hundreds of scholars who have meticulously poked, prodded, and examined them. As a result, much more is known about Christianity’s holy wars than ever before. Yet the fruits of decades of scholarship have been slow to enter the popular mind. In part this is the fault of professional historians, who tend to publish studies that, by necessity, are technical and therefore not easily accessible outside of the academy. But it is also due to a clear reluctance among modern elites to let go of Runciman’s vision of the Crusades. And so modern popular books on the Crusades—desiring, after all, to be popular—tend to parrot Runciman. The same is true for other media, like the multi-part television documentary, The Crusades (1995), produced by BBC/A&E and starring Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. To give the latter an air of authority the producers spliced in a number of distinguished Crusade historians who gave their views on events. The problem was that the historians would not go along with Runciman’s ideas. No matter. The producers simply edited the taped interviews cleverly enough that the historians seemed to be agreeing with Runciman. As Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith quite vehemently told me, “They made me appear to say things that I do not believe!”
Thomas Madden
3..
Anticolonialism and Political Correctness
In short, an aging collection of anticolonial sentiments has merged with mild political correctness (opposition to violence, skepticism toward Western religious traditions and practices, concern for social issues reflecting race, gender, class, and ethnicity) to dominate current historiography of the Crusades.
This is prominently reflected in the film media, most notably in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and Terry Jones's History of the Crusades.1 It is also somewhat out of touch with Generation X. My students prefer Errol Flynn's Robin Hood to Costner's and enjoy Men in Tights. Jones's much better but strongly antiwar BBC series praised Baibar's use of slave troops against the crusaders. What would he have said if crusaders had adopted that practice? On the whole, Jones is far the better scholar (and arguably the better actor), but he remains a child of the sixties--like so many of us who are active teachers today.
William Urban
posted by Caratacus at 7:41 pm
