The Crusades:
Theology for Christian War
I. Introduction
Crusades in the 21st century
1066: The Battle of Hastings (penance after fighting)
1071: The Battle of Manzikert (Byzantine army destroyed)
Alexius I Comnenus looks west for mercenary help
II. The first crusade (1095-1099)
Crusaders are victorious and reclaim Jerusalem in July 1099
Major Battles: Nicaea, Dorylaeum, Antioch, jerusalem
Crusade theology: penitential warfare, remission of sins, martyrdom, free the holy land, warfare in both testaments, service to Christ
iii. Inter-Crusade time
Levant governing
Intermarriage
Knights Templar
Bernard of Clairvaux
Iv. The Second Crusade (1147-1149)
Edessa Falls to zengi
Pope Eugene III orders Bernard to preach the Crusade
Louis Vii’s army destroyed at Anatolia
Crusaders attack Damascus
They are repelled and the levant is weakened and reduced
Theology: sin brought defeat
V. The Third Crusade (1189-1192)
Saladin united the Muslim World
Captured Jerusalem in 1187
Richard & Philip united
“Saladin tithe” & the business of crusading
Legend of the lionheart
Ultimately a stalemate but Christians can return to Jerusalem
Theology: remain pure or crusaders will lose, saladin as God’s instrument of wrath
vi. The fourth Crusade (1202-1204)
Christendom’s civil war
Dandolo & Zara
The Siege of Constantinople
Excommunicated armies attacked Christian cities and won the approval of the pope
Theology: Zara-reported past behaviour gave the Crusaders cause to attack plus their complete lack of financial resources
Constantinople-a tentative claim to the throne brought them to the city; the refusal of the patriarch to submit to Rome (in 1045) gave them just cause.
Crusaders successfully besieged both cities and returned home
The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229)
Crusading at home
Cathars believed: Matter was corrupt, Worldly authority was a fraud, Their god, unconcerned with the material, simply didn’t care if you got into bed before you were married, had a Jew or Muslim for a friend, treated men and women as equals, or did anything else contrary to the teachings of the medieval Church
Theology: if crusades are to be successful, then Europe must be pure; heretics and schismatic’s are as great a threat as muslims, maybe greater. Same Indulgences granted for a much shorter trip.
Their influence over southern French nobility was serious
© James Robertson 2010
QUOTES:
Unlike Islam, Christianity had no well-defined concept of holy war before the Middle Ages. Christ had no army at his disposal, nor did his early followers.” ~Madden, 1.
The Crusades are among the most remarkable phenomena of the Middle Ages. Their causes were many and complex…The internal colonization of previously uninhabited regions within Europe was matched by the external colonization of land inhabited by Muslim ‘infidels’ or by ‘schismatic’ Greeks….Spiritual considerations, however, were no less influential than material ones…The crusader’s ‘taking of the cross,’ his life of self-sacrifice as Christ’s liegeman, was seen as an imitation of the monastic life and as an approximation of the monk’s higher spiritual perfection…The piety of the time also placed great value on pilgrimages to holy places, above all to the land hallowed by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.”
~Walker et.al., History, 283 “the Lord seeing that the land of his birth and place of his passion had sunk into an abyss of turpitude, treated with neglect his inheritance, and suffered Saladin, the rod of his wrath, to put forth his fury to the destruction of that stiff-necked people; for he would rather that the Holy Land should, for a short time, be subject to the profane rites of the heathens, than that it should any longer be possessed by those men, whom no regard for what is right could deter from things unlawful “ ~Geoffrey de Vinsauf
“they showed to the pilgrims that the war was a righteous one; for the Greeks were traitors and murderers, and also disloyal, since they had murdered their rightful lord, and were worse than Jews. Moreover, the bishops said that, by the authority of God and in the name of the pope, they would absolve all who attacked the Greeks. Then the bishops commanded the pilgrims to confess their sins and receive the communion devoutly; and said that they ought not to hesitate to attack the Greeks, for the latter were enemies of God. They also commanded that all the evil women should be sought out and sent away from the army to a distant place. This was done; the evil women were all put on a vessel and were sent very far away from the army” ~Robert de Clari~
Further Reading:
Madden, Thomas F. The New Concise History of the Crusades: Student Edition. Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
Phillips, Jonathan. The Crusades, 1095-1197. Toronto: Pearson Education, 2002.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades A History: Second Edition. London: Yale University Press, 2005.
______________. The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. London: Athlone Press, 1993.
Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades Volumes I-III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951-1953.
________. The First Crusade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Seward, Desmond. The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders. London: Penguin Books, 1995
Tate, Georges. The Crusaders Warriors of God. New York: Henry N. Abrams Inc., 1996.
Tyerman, Christopher. Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
