- Thank you to Grisham College for the invitation to give this talk. What I present to you
relates to research carried out during the academic year of 2020-2021, when I was fortunate enough
to be a Fulbright scholar in the department of history at the University of Birmingham. The arrival of COVID in the
UK in the spring of 2020 meant that I was unable to
give my talk at that time, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to present it to you now. My lecture this evening concerns the European Christian religious wars that we know as the crusades, and the Eastern Mediterranean
world that were shaped by those conflicts. What were the crusades? Well, there can be different ways of answering that question, but many historians today
would generally agree the crusades were wars
fought under the authority of the Roman church and
at its head, the Pope, against those identified as
the enemies of that church, and in which participants
undertook onerous obligations in the belief that they
would earn spiritual rewards. What kinds of spiritual rewards? Well, specifically relief
from the punishment they believed were due
to them for their sins. These conflicts began with the expedition we know as the first crusade, first announced by Pope
Urban II at a church council in Claremont, France, on
the 27th of November, 1095. The first crusade resulted in the conquest of significant territory's
held at that time by the Byzantine empire, the ruling dynasty of lesser Armenia, the Seljuk Turkish empire, who were the followers of the Sunni Muslim (indistinct) of Baghdad, and the Fadiman Shia kingdom of Egypt. The conquered lands were a
culturally and devotionally diverse population, including many different
communities of Eastern Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Druzes. As you see here, the crusaders made from these lands a network of principalities, all governed by a French
speaking aristocracy. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the counties of Edessa and Tripoli, and the Principality of Antioch
existed in what are today Israel, Palestine, Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan, and Turkey. A century after the
original crusading conquest, by which time significant
parts of these territories, including the city of Jerusalem itself, had been conquered by the Ayyubid empire of the Sultan Saladin. Further expeditions that we call the third and fourth crusades, added to these territories
the island of Cyprus, the city of Constantinople, and much of mainland Greece
and the Peloponnesus. Collectively these territories
are sometimes known as the crusader states and
sometimes as the Latin East, but are also sometimes known by the terms used to describe them in the middle ages. To their subjects and
neighbors in the region they were known as the
lands of the Frangoi, or al-Ifranj, that is to say the Franks. And to those in Europe they were known as La terre d'Outremer, the
lands across the sea. Crusading was not limited to the Eastern Mediterranean theater. It was closely allied with the process of Latin Christian conquest and conversion in the Baltic region, the subjugation of an entirely
independent Languedoc region to the kingdom of France, and the so-called Reconquista
of the Iberian peninsula. The bloody history of the
crusades is therefore central to the history of Eastern
and Western Europe, to European states,
institutions and identities, and to the making of Europe itself. The Eastern Mediterranean region, however, is often seen as the core area of medieval crusade
operations and the heart of crusade imaginary and ideology. The earlier crusader
conquest proved ephemeral, despite repeated attempts
to safeguard or restore them with further crusades, despite the creation of
military monastic orders like the Templars and Hospitallers
to guard their borders. And despite the spending
a vast sums of money building castles and
fortifications like this one, Krak des Chevalliers in Syria, all of these territories
were eventually lost to Latin European control. The last crusader strongholds
on the Palestinian mainland fell to the Mamluks of Egypt in 1291. The Frankish Lordship's in
Greece were finally retaken by the Byzantine empire
in the 15th century. And Cyprus was conquered by
the Ottoman Turks in 1570. Nearly five centuries of conflict
in Eastern Mediterranean, arguably the most central
theater of crusading warfare, produced no lasting territorial conquest, resulted in countless deaths
and enormous expenditure. It is perhaps unsurprising
then that one of the defining questions that has
been asked for centuries about the crusades is expressed
as a question of value. What was it all worth? What attracted so many individuals, communities, institutions
over such a sustained period of time to involve
themselves in these costly, dangerous, and frustrating endeavors? So in this lecture, I'm
going to start off talking a bit about this question
of the value of crusading. Then I'll move on to the group who were at the heart of my discussion
today, the aristocracy. Then in the final part of my talk, I'm going to suggest a
new way for us to think about the crusading experience. We begin though with value, and there's no better way
to begin this conversation than with this image from the frontispiece of what some would
consider to be the earliest modern history of the crusades, the history of the holy
war by the English cleric, Thomas Fuller, published in 1640. This opening image in
Fuller's book depicts a tableau of the crusades, represented as groups
of European Christians setting out on the left-hand
side on their journey from the Church of Europe to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb where Jesus
Christ's body had lain. Following over to the right-hand side, we learn that this had led to death, loss, captivity, and confusion. Europe is flanked by two purses, one reading, "We went out full", and the other, "But returned empty." A plinth at the bottom left bearing the Jerusalem cross reads, "We hope a gaining", and the one on the right
bearing the crescent moon reads, "We hope a wanting." Fuller explained the
whole scene in a poem. "Those that escaped
came home full of grief as the poor purse is empty of relief." Above the map are portrayed
to men who Fuller identified as heroes of this history. The crusader, and first ruler
of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, on the left, and the Sultan, Saladin, who conquered the kingdom's
capitol at Jerusalem in the year 1187 on the right. The heroism and indeed
chivalry of both men, which is something that is fully explained in the text of Fuller's book, is clearly associated in the picture with their disregard for precious things. Godfrey is ringed by the words, "No crown of gold where Christ
was crowned with thorns", a reference to his refusal
to adopt a royal title during his reign. While we are told on the right-hand side that this black shirt is all
that the Sultan, Saladin, conqueror of the near east,
took with him to his grave. Gain and want, full and empty, crown and thorns, empires and rags, for the Protestant cleric,
Fuller, and his reader, the tragic story of the
crusades was closely allied with these notions of
value and its acquisition. A little over a century later, the French enlightenment encyclopedist, Diderot d'Alembert, offered a searing
condemnation of the crusades. He wrote, "It might have been difficult to believe that there would ever come a
time of such great darkness and such great obsession
on the part of the people and their sovereigns
(acting in their interest), that they would lead
a part of their people into an unhappy little region ultimately to slit the
throats of its inhabitants and seize a rocky outcrop
worth not one drop of blood and that they might have
venerated in the spirit from afar just as well as nearby and
the possession of which was alien to the honor of their religion." What was it worth? These writers of the reformation
and the enlightenment were rather clear on that point, but this opinion did not hold for long. With the advent of major overseas European colonial empires in the 19th century, popular attitudes toward the
crusades began to change. In the 19th century, romantic nationalism, which found Europeans
looking to the medieval past for a new sense of collective identity together with colonial
conquest in North Africa and the Middle East, led to a surge of interest
in the story of the crusades. As early as 1824 readers
of the popular novelist, Walter Scott, were imploring him to include more content related to the crusades in his
novels of romantic chivalry, leading to the release of his
best seller "The Talisman". And readers wanted to be
part of this crusading world. Those that fancy themselves
members of old families shopped for literature that would confirm their ancestral involvement
in crusading ventures, like James Cruikshank
Dansey's "English crusaders", organized so that you can
easily find your surname, coat of arms, and proof
that you went on crusade. In France, the association
between the new nation of the second republic and the crusades was built into the very fabric
of the palace of Versailles with the installation
of the crusade rooms, the Salles de Croisades. The conflation of medieval crusading with modern colonial
experience also exercised a powerful influence
over the academic study of the crusades. as European powers
established their new empires in North Africa and the Middle East, their medieval philologists,
orientalist, and archeologists conducted surveys to triumphantly
reclaim the knowledge of the crusading past. From this triumphalist
colonialist position the value of the crusades
was almost self-evident in the value of the overseas
colonial project itself. Part national destiny,
part romantic fantasy, and a powerful source
of medieval legitimation from modern white European
global dombination. Even as robust critiques of
colonialism emerged in Europe and European colonial
empires began to break apart, the colonialist
interpretation of the crusades carried through the later 20th century with critics of European
colonialism and opponents of the establishment of
the modern state of Israel eager to invoke a backward,
brutal, medieval intolerance of the origin point of
modern overseas ventures. Jamil Baroody, a Lebanese born diplomat who represented Saudi Arabia
at the United nations, was famed for his contrast
between what he saw as Western and Zionist imperialism and the medieval
colonialism of the crusades, which he said concealed
undeniable, economic, and political ambitions
under the cloak of religion. Anti-colonial invocations of
the crusades are still common in contemporary political discourse today, coexisting with the rising
adoption of the crusades among the white nationalists
around the world, a founding mythos for a
supposedly ongoing clash of civilizations between
Christianity and Islam. And legitimising in the
eyes of white supremacists, horrific violence against
non-white, non-Christian peoples. Discerning what relationship, if any, that conquest and
settlement at the medieval crusading frontier had
with a more modern pattern of European colonization
is a daunting task, made more difficult by the
fact that the very fields of history and archeology in question were fundamentally shaped and
facilitated by colonization and European imperialism. Certainly our sources suggest
some intriguing parallels between the crusading past and later European colonial settlement. The Latin east definitely
featured economic exploitation of the local population. It featured increasingly intensive agricultural exploitation of the land in favor of high value cash
crops, like cotton and sugar. There existed in the crusader states, as across the Mediterranean at that time, chattel slavery. And harsh punishment existed
in the crusader sates for (indistinct) between
Latin Christians and Muslims. The role of the Roman church, which sees the opportunity
to extend its dominions over Eastern bishoprics, displacing in many cases the
existing Eastern patriarchs, is certainly a case of
what my Fordham colleague, George Demacopoulos, has
called colonizing Christianity. Yet the Latin East also resists comparison with familiar colonial patterns. The Latin States were not established by, nor were they beholden to any
particular colonial power. The Italian trading republics, most notably Genoa and Venice, but also Piza, Luca, and Amalfi did benefit through their
commercial partnerships with the crusader kingdoms, signing lucrative
agreements with the princes who relied upon them for naval power and occupying their own
quarters in the major towns of the coast. And their profit from these conquests must clearly be related to
the larger story of commerce and colonization that later emerged in the Western Mediterranean, and Africa, and the Atlantic world. But in this case, they were
not the principal conquerors nor the rulers of the land. Never more than a small minority, the Italian traders and
French speaking lords never convinced waves of European settlers to come and join them in what one observer actually called holy
Christendoms new colony. The apparent failure of
the materialist explanation has led historians in the
past decades to turn away from the emphasis on material benefit, that was at the central to much of the colonialist interpretation, to one that instead focused on the religious principles of crusading. In this formulation the
very lack of any prospect of material gain is critical
to the demonstration that crusading was overwhelmingly
a devotional exercise. Taking the cross as a
crusader demonstrated the individual's desire to
suffer as Jesus of Nazareth had, potentially on the very ground
where his feet once stood, and where, in the apocalyptic
fulfillment of scripture, they will ultimately stand again. It has recently been
suggested by my Fulbright host at Birmingham, William Perkis, that the devotional use of
the holy places of Jerusalem by pilgrims and
particularly the acquisition of sacred relics from the sacred sites was a kind of extraction of wealth from the territories in question. In other words, scholars are beginning to find new ways to imagine this frontier in terms that, while they might not have been familiar to previous generations
of modern historians, are more in concert with the culture of the crusaders themselves. Yet, there may be other ways to imagine the value of this frontier and to see how that value was extracted. To do so we need to remember that the group primarily
implicated in the establishment and sustenance of the crusading project, more so than Venice or Genoa, more so even than the church, was the European landed aristocracy. At first glance it may
seem difficult to credit a collective enterprise
to such a disparate group. After all, they had almost
no direct communication with one another and came
from different regions and different political contexts and spoke different languages. Importantly, in precisely in the period shortly before the first crusade these aristocrats began to
develop a shared culture, which over the course of the
first century of crusading, went from a loose sense of shared ideals to a codified set of
behavior and expectations. We associate the medieval
European aristocracy with a number of powerful cultural forms, including courtliness,
courtly love, and chivalry. And you can see
manifestations of all three on this beautiful casket
from the British Museum. All three of these were really components of a larger revolution, the widespread adoption of a
shared concept of nobility. Europe had always been ruled
by elites of various kinds, but nobility was a distinctive
hereditary social class, theoretically determined by birth, but always demonstrated
or enhanced by behavior. Nobility was expressed
in manners, gesture, clothing, speech. It was demonstrated in
specialized knowledge, for instance about hunting practices or the new mythology of the heroes of the romances of King Arthur. For men principally, it was also expressed in new expectations surrounding military conduct and the specialized skills associated with equestrian combat. The nobility rapidly developed
an arcane visual language of identity that is heraldry. Their own rituals, like
dubbing to knighthood, and their own forms of literature, including both imaginative fiction, manuals of aristocratic conduct, and, as in this manuscript,
songs of love and devotion. As we have seen with the
case with Thomas Fuller in the 17th century and the
romantic writers and artists of the 19th century, the link between crusading and the aristocratic culture of chivalry has long been acknowledged. In fact, crusading and
chivalry are so firmly bound that it is sometimes
difficult to separate them. This was certainly the
case with Geoffrey Chaucer, whose portrait of the knight at the beginning of the Canterbury tales, lists as evidence of
his inherent qualities his participation in
crusading conflicts in Egypt, Asia minor, Algeria, Prussia,
Spain, and Lithuania. And in fact, Chaucer
mentions that the knight had only just returned from
his most recent voyage. Fundamental then to finding the answer to our original question, what was crusading worth, is understanding what
the value of crusading might've provided within
the economy of noble status. Enhancing, or even just
sustaining noble status, required tremendous investment and continuous maintenance in the form of public displays of wealth,
wisdom, taste, loyalty, and again for men mainly, prowess, the proven ability to
perform well in combat. The public personal embodied
nature of noble status is everywhere we look
in the political culture of medieval Europe. From the construction of
great halls for gathering, entertaining and feasting, and elaborate parks and
landscapes for hunting. When medieval aristocrats
could not be around to embody their power in person, they left behind images of themselves in their personal seals, performing actions like fighting, hunting and sitting in judgment. In death they were no less concerned to leave behind an image
of their performance of loyally status. What all this performance yielded them was not material wealth, but what sociologists would
call cultural capital, marked out by material culture around them and embodied within them
in their very behavior. Perhaps the most important
place for the performance of noble virtues and the
acquisition of cultural capital was the tournament. The tournament was an
elaborately staged spectacle. The enactment, not only
of martial prowess, but the display of courtly manners. In the 13th century, tournaments were assigned
imaginary settings, such as famous scenes
from Arthurian literature and filled with heraldry and
other markers of identity. Now, tournaments were condemned
from their very inception by the church who repeatedly
anathematized those who took part in them or organize them. But by the early 13th century in England, not only were the tourneyers themselves, but anyone who gave them lodging or sold food and drink to them
were also threatened with an excommunication. Yet the medieval aristocracy, the same group who
piously responded to calls for penitential crusading wars, paid these threats no heed at all. On the contrary, as the ideal stages for the
demonstration of prowess, tournaments only grew in size, frequency, and sophistication. One of the chief reasons stated for the prohibition on tournaments
was that they interfered with the aristocracies
obligation to go on crusade. But not only did the nobility disagree that crusading was
incompatible with tournaments, repeatedly across the
12th and 13th centuries we find nobles and those
that wrote for them describing crusading as a tournament. In fact, the earliest
crusade recruitment song, written in a vernacular language, which you have here on the screen, referred to the upcoming
expedition as a tournament between heaven and hell set up by God and to which his friends were invited. In 1203, a nobleman, who was also a famous tournament promoter, Count Hugh IV of Saint-Pol, wrote a letter to a
friend while on crusade that not only described the undertaking as a tournament organized by God, but which also stated
that it was only crusaders answering this call who
could truly be knights. And we find the same sentiment that the Eastern Mediterranean
frontier represented the preeminent stage for the
acquisition of honor and virtue wringing on down the
centuries and treaties of noble conduct and chivalry. Another type of evidence
also speaks to the desire to see crusading as an opportunity for aristocratic performance. From the time of the
second crusade forward, Pope's and papal legates
put in place strict rules governing what could be
brought on the expedition. "Those who fight for the Lord", they said, "ought not to care for precious clothes or elegant appearance or dogs or hawks or other things that are
signs of lasciviousness. Pay no attention to
multicolor clothes or minivers or gilded or silvered arms." Like the prohibitions on tournaments, these rules seem to have
been totally ineffective. No less a figure than King
Philip Augustus of France arrived at the siege
camp on crusade in 1191 with his white hunting falcon. His fellow crusader, King
Richard I of England, carried with him, not a
simple soldiers blade, but a sword that he
believed to be Excalibur. We know from the pommels
of swords captured from crusaders in Egypt that these too were special weapons adorned with their personal heraldic devices. That crusading represented an opportunity for an elaborate public
display is also what potential crusaders were promised
in imaginative literature. Epic poems about the first crusade, like the massive song
cycle centered on the climactic siege of Antioch, imagined its protagonist
protected by the finest armor that bore their heraldic arms. Some carrying golden tents, and weapons, and hunting horns belonging
to ancient heroes. Attired and appointed
precisely as ideal knights, the crusaders of these epics engaged in closely matched combat. They score great blows with their weapons. Bravely endure repeated trials. Give sage advice to
their allies and leaders, and demonstrate their Christian devotion. The experiences reported
by those who participated in crusading conflicts however, suggest that the major
expeditions that we name and number as crusades
were not ideal contexts for the kinds of noble performances that they may have imagined and desired. The ultimate goal of nearly
all crusade campaigns was the conquest of large, heavily defended fortresses and cities. Participation in these campaigns therefore implied siege warfare. This was the warfare of
specialist technicians, engineers, the operators
of giant siege engines, crossbow men, and increasingly
professional bodies of men at arms and sergeants. We find a crusader like
Jean, Lord of Joinville, the (indistinct) of Champagne, bewildered when he is
asked one night on campaign in Egypt in 1250 to guard
the wooden siege engines from attacks with incendiary missiles. When open battle at last came for Jean outside the Egyptian town of Montserrat, he led his knights in
one attempted charge. While he managed to lance
one man, killing him, he quickly found himself surrounded and pulled down from his horse. Unable to draw his sword, forced to take shelter
in an abandoned house, he held the reins of the horses
while his household knights did the actual desperate
hand-to-hand fighting. It was not impossible
under these conditions for knights to win renown for themselves, but it was extraordinarily difficult. And Jean de Joinville illustrates
the tension that existed between the desire to perform as a noble and to exhibit prowess
and the strategic aims of the campaign. He tells the story of another knight, Walter, Lord of Autreches, who on the same campaign had
himself armed at all points in his pavilion. When he had armed and mounted his horse, a shield at his neck and
a helmet on his head, he had the pavilion flaps lifted and spurred on to charge at the Turks. As he left his pavilion, all alone, all the members of his
household cried Chatillon at the top of their voices. But it so happened that he
fell before reaching the Turks and his horse galloped over his body. Walter died and the next
day, King Louis IX of France, leader of the expedition,
was heard to say that, quote, "He would not wish to
have a thousand such men since they would not want
to follow his orders." The story of Walter of
Autreches raises a last point about the problem of crusading
as a source for prowess for European knights, and that is death. Joining large scale crusade expeditions like the one led by Louis IX
of France in Egypt in 1250 was an incredibly dangerous enterprise. Some estimates put the
mortality rate at about 40%, although it could have been
much higher in some cases. A knight like Walter was fortunate in fact to have even made it to the battlefront. Many other crusaders
would have died of disease in the crowded camps in
Southern European ports or in the siege camps
surrounding the cities they had assaulted. Or they might be lost at sea
in the hellish conditions of an overcrowded galley. The body of the eager Walter of Autreches was at least recovered. The same could not be said for the bodies of countless knights that
John de Joinville described floating in the Nile following the battle, unidentifiable because their
faces had been eaten off by burbot fish. The body of the King's own
brother, Robert of Artois, who died in another
foolhardy cavalry charge was never recovered at all. These fates may seem
unpleasant to us today, but within the noble regime of lordship, where remember the body of the lord and certainly knowledge
about the lord's fate, was central to its basic operation. These cases of death, captivity, or disappearance at great distance, when bodies or information
could not be returned, was disastrous. We find noble lords
sending their signet rings, as here in the life of Saint
Elisabeth of Thuringia, and asking for their
bodies to be embalmed, boiled and brought home. But despite these efforts, local lordships and even
whole principalities, were thrown into disarray
when a crusader's fate could not be confirmed, or worse, when crusading
lords or imposters claiming to be them returned
home suddenly after five, 10, or even 30 years. Major crusade expeditions, like the ones we've described here, were quite infrequent and
frequently disastrous. Fantastically expensive
slow moving affairs, they required their participants
to subject themselves to command structures
involving higher lords or even crowned heads who might be alien to the feudal networks from
which the crusaders came. Unsurprisingly they were
bedeviled by political tensions and personal rivalries. They also invariably
resulted in strange relations between the crusaders and the rulers and populations of the
Latin Eastern states they were in theory defending. If this was the normal
experience of crusading, then we would have to conclude that beyond the spiritual value of
suffering in the Lord's service, crusading could not have represented, as our aristocratic
sources so often claimed, an ideal stage for the
demonstration of noble virtue and the acquisition of honor and status. And that is why it is critically important for our understanding of
the value of crusading, and especially for the value
of the crusading frontier to medieval Europeans, that we recognize that
this was not in fact the typical experience of crusading. Crusading, in fact, was
a continuous phenomenon. Throughout the long periods in between the large-scale campaigns, members of the aristocracy
were frequently departing for the crusading frontier. A UK colleague, Dr. James Dardy,
and I have begun to compile a database of the departures in between the number of expeditions. While a comprehensive list
is probably impossible, just the examples that can be identified amongst the territorial
princes of Europe before 1187 gives us a sense of the
frequency of these journeys. So this, for instance, is a
timeline showing the traditional canonically numbered
12th century crusades. And this is the same timeline, including all of the
individuals we can identify just among the territorial
princes of Europe, who undertook independent
expeditions in the same timeframe. Now, again, these are just
the territorial princes. Our database actually
reveals participation in these journeys from a
much wider social group, ranging from humble knights
to the highest aristocrats. It's a substantial list of individuals drawn from a considerable
swath of Latin Europe. We find that the phenomenon
was essentially continuous, that it often reflected a local initiative and that it was not
uncommon for individuals to undertake multiple such
journeys in their lifetimes. One further point arising
from this last one is that these journeys seem
on the whole to have been much safer for their participants than the canonical crusades. These expeditions have
long been overlooked because they are generally classified as having a range of explicit
purposes of pilgrimage, and embassy, and intelligence
gathering operation, et cetera. But when we look closely at them, especially at the documents that mark the departure of these people, they do not describe their
own journeys any differently than they would crusades. Stories of other expeditions
were told in Greek, Arabic, Armenian, French, Latin,
and old Norse histories. Some of which like these ones describing the crusading
adventures of a knight from the southern low countries
are essentially unknown to generations of
historians of the crusades. The cruse of chronicles
can be supplemented with works of imaginative fiction. As it turns out, when writers wanted romantic tales about aristocrats on crusade, they most often described this phenomenon, the noble sojourn rather than
large scale kind of campaigns. So what did aristocratic participants do on what I'm calling
here the noble sojourn? The first element of
the journey was to visit whatever holy sites were
available to pilgrims at the time of their journey. As high ranking visitors, our travelers were especially
received by the clergy who managed the shrines. And in addition to
adoring the holy places, the guests would make special gifts, sometimes including
precious objects brought with them specifically for this purpose. Now, the importance of
the spiritual component of these journeys can not be overstated, but neither can the
importance of the performance of lavish aristocratic displays
of generosity and piety, which were parcel of them. Once the pilgrimage was complete, the visitors would be
received at the courts of their Frankish aristocratic cousins. I mean that figuratively, although of course sometimes they were literally the cousins of the
rulers of the Frankish east. Some of the most famous portraits of the Eastern Frankish aristocracy were penned by European clerics who describe their lascivious lifestyles, their dedication to the
pleasures of the flesh, their cavorting with prostitutes, and their ambivalence about religion. But the image cultivated by the Eastern aristocracy
themselves is quite different. They produced a staggering
volume of writing in their (indistinct)
dialect of old French, dedicated to the correct ways to plead, that is to request judicial rulings before one's aristocratic
peers at the noble courts of Jerusalem and Cyprus. They also wrote treaties
on proper noble conduct and chronicles about their kingdom, again, in French that were read
and copied widely in Europe. Visiting Westerners
participated in the discussions that led to the composition of these works and were cited for their wise
opinions on feudal custom or their deeds in the
defense of the kingdom. Some visitors like the
knight, Robert Debaro, seemed to have carried away with them new literary forms and traditions. It was the Latin Eastern noble society that inspired the very first formal guide to becoming a knight,
the Ordene de Chevalerie, which imagined the
Frankish lord, Tiberius, instructing the Sultan, Saladin, here seated wearing a crown
in the knighting ritual. The interiors of the
Eastern palaces can only now be surmised by archeological
remains of isolated castles. But one visitor to the Latin
kingdom of Jerusalem in 1211, Wilbrand of Oldenburg, did leave us with a detailed
description of the palace of the powerful Ibelin family at Beirut. "Recently constructed, he said, "by Syrians, Saracens, and Greeks. It had what he called a
delicate marble pavement simulating water agitated
by a light breeze. Walls covered in marble panels, a vault the color of the sky, and a pool with a fountain
shaped like a dragon that provides air conditioning
and a relaxing sound. Wilbrand wrote that the water, quote, "Lulls to sleep by agreeable murmurings it's lords who sit nearby. I would willingly sit
by it for all my days." End quote. Noble visitors to the
Latin East were not just passive consumers of the
architecture they encountered. Many of the monumental structures, from the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre dedicated in 1159, to the new royal palace
constructed a few years later, or the formidable fortresses
of the military orders that have been supported precisely
by gifts made in the west by powerful aristocratic patrons. They traveled through a landscape that they had helped to build. Over time, visiting
aristocrats had yet more active engagements with towns
and fortifications of the east as the constructions of
castles, walls, and towers became one possible
component of the journey. Krak de Chevallier, for instance, was directly funded by King
Andrew II of Hungary in 1219 after he was received there as a guest. The castles of Safad an
Athlit were constructed by Benoit d'Algnan, Bishop of Marseille, and Walter, Lord of Avesnes, during their respective sojourns. The phenomenon continued on the mainland through at least 1287 when Alix, daughter of John I of Brittany and widowed Countess of Blois, expended enormous sums of
money on a major tower at Acre during her own noble sojourn in the city. Accounts written after the fall of Acre to the Mamluk Sultan,
Al-Ash of Khalil in 1291, still remember the tower as the tower of the Countess of Blois. Wilbrand's description also
noted that the landscape surrounding Ibelin palace
was filled with meadows, orchards, and most delightful places that were visible from its windows. What he described as, of
course, not just nature, but the built landscape. Aristocratic space set aside to enhance the architecture and power, but also for outdoor pursuits. Works describing the construction
of the castles of Saffad and Athlit make specific
mention of the game available hunting in
the lands around them. Hunting was essential element
of the way aristocracies, both in Europe and the near east, articulated their status. Participation in royal
hunts allowed aristocrats to show their closeness to the ruler. And individual hunts
were a chance to bring down high status animals, trophies that reinforced or even elevated the status of those
that chased and killed. In establishing their feudal
principalities in the Levant, the Franks came to occupy
land once their own royal hunting practices had
first emerged millennia earlier and where hunting remained
a critical component of the political culture. In the kingdom of Jerusalem a royal hunt, in which the king was joined by his court, including prominent visitors, was underway by at least 1143 when King Fulk died while hunting hares during his royal itinerary. Fulk's son, Baldwin III,
participated in hunts together with the Byzantine
emperor, Manuel Komnenos, in 1159. But the fact of a royal or princely hunt, which after all was common in Europe, was probably less significant
to western visitors than the methods of hunting
and the objects of the chase. The near east was home to a wide variety of megafauna unfamiliar to Europeans. Some of these animals
such as lions, leopards, oryxes, gazelles, and a
large number of bird species that crossed through
the region in migration were parade for the hunters. Others such as cheetah
and caracal were caught and trained as hunting animals in the same way that
Europeans traditionally used hunting dogs. A richly illustrated copy of
Oppian of Apamea's Cynegetica, as you see here, was made in Constantinople in 1059 and reveals the wealth of opportunities in the form of animals and
different hunting practices available to hunters
in the regions of Syria and Eastern Anatolia. The most important eye witness observer of the hunting culture
of the crusader states was the aristocrat and avid
hunter, Usama ibn Munqidh, whose family were the lords
of Shaizar in Northern Syria. The castle Shaizar was located
just beyond the territory of the princes of Antioch. And in his later career
as a courtier and diplomat Usama moved between the
world of the Muslim princes of Damascus and Egypt and
the kingdom of the Franks. Usama's stories point to a thriving market in hunting birds and mammals, and to a strong desire
on the part of Europeans to hunt large, and to their
eyes, exotic megafauna. He recalled the story of the
unfortunate Frankish lord Autumn of Hoonah, who asked Usama's help in
locating a leopard to hunt. The animal ultimately killed him. Nothing attracted the attention of visiting crusading lords however like the opportunity to hunt lions. The English chronicler, Matthew Paris, included a detailed and
illustrated anecdote in his Chronica Maiora describing how, among other marks of
the virtue and boldness of the English lord, Hugh de Neville, he killed a lion in the holy land. In 1251 near Caesarea in Palestine, the crusader, Jean de Joinville, encountered a recently arrived
small crusading expedition led by (indistinct) who
immediately took up hunting lions and caught several. Hunts for lions and other
types of game, like unicorns, also proliferate in the romance traditions concerning visitors to the Latin East. It would be fair to ask at this point, if in the midst of all
this courtly visiting, sightseeing, and hunting, the noble visitors who
I'm calling crusaders, ever did any fighting. Well, the nobles who
undertook these journeys certainly came prepared to fight, but the types of violence
that they encountered traveling apart from the
major crusading expeditions were qualitatively different
than what we usually associate with crusading warfare. In between periods of heightened conflict, the kingdom of Jerusalem and its neighbors experienced long periods of
relative peace, allegiances, or even condominium, the joint rule of specified lands between Jerusalem and
Damascus for example. In their respective journeys undertaken in 1150 and 1177 for instance, the father and son crusading counts, Thierry and Phillip of Flanders, both undertook a limited type of fighting in the same region of Northern Syria around the castle of
Harim outside of Aleppo. Both raided the area and
engaged in skirmishes with the lord of Harim's forces. Phillip's fighting at Harim
is particularly noteworthy because he undertook
it while a major battle was taking place in the kingdom
of Jerusalem against Saladin who had invaded. Philip deliberately avoided
this larger engagement to participate in the
smaller, more limited, and doubtless, safer one. We can compare the skirmishing
to the increasingly high stakes military conflict
that was taking place in Europe, as monarchs called upon
the knights and lords to help centralize and
strengthen their claims against one another. We can also compare it to the
brutal scenarios that unfolded in the course of major crusade campaigns. These small-scale raids and border actions would have constituted a
much more appealing way for knights to carry out socially and clerically sanctioned violence associated with crusading
and also to produce memorable and visible evidence
that they had done so. The accounts of the
visitor Manassas of Vierch notably claimed that he would
ride across the borders, making raids into enemy territory. They say, quote, "He went beyond the border
of the kingdom of Jerusalem, traversing the neighboring lands of Egypt, Damascus, and Antioch. Frequently, with swords bared, he displayed the banner before
the Damascenes and Egyptians and carried it back happily stained with the enemies' blood." End quote. I began this discussion
of the European nobility and their quest for
distinction by pointing to the popularity of tournaments, the great stages of aristocratic
performance where nobles would go to see and be
seen and therefore reaffirm their social status. It's important to point out then that the Latin East was also the site of a number of famous tournaments. Tournaments are first attested in the Principality of Antioch at
the remarkably early date of 1159 when they were witnessed by the Byzantine emperor Manuel Komnenos. The emperor was so keen
on this form of sport that he wanted to import it to Byzantuim , and an anonymous
contemporary document records the lavish clothing that
he later wore in jousts, affirming that he
understood their importance as courtly political performances as much as they were military games. In 1223, a tournament was staged in Cyprus at which participants dressed
as members of the round table. And this is in fact, the earliest as a station
for this type of tournament that would later find
great popularity in Europe. The popularity and
frequency of tournaments in the Latin East is also suggested by the fact that the old
French customary treaties include language warning knights that if their horses start to go lame thanks to too much tournamenting, they have only themselves to blame. And just a quick note
about this jousting image, it's from an old French collection of stories from antiquity, but it's particularly
relevant to our discussion because this image was actually painted by artists in the Latin East at the famous manuscript of (indistinct)
in the city of Acre. Lavish tournaments continued
to be held in Greece at Corinth and in Cyprus long after the last outpost of the Latin states on the
Eastern Mediterranean mainland had been conquered by
Mamluk armies from Egypt. The descriptions of later
medieval travelers and texts from Frankish Greece show that
visitors were still coming to these courts to
participate in tournaments, to hunt, and to fight. The aristocratic visit
to the crusading frontier had been adopted and perfected
by the crusading order of the Teutonic Knights, who organized their journeys, their reise, to Lithuania along the
lines of what historians have described as packaged
holidays for the nobility, complete with a table of honor, heralds to compose
songs about their feats, and special certificates
or badges of participation. At the European princely courts, for instance, at Burgundy, the past and future of
crusading had become a central component of court
pageants and performances, beginning a tradition of
the theatrical enactment of crusading that can be witnessed in much later and in
radically different contexts, such as Spanish occupied
Tlaxkala and Mexico city in 1539. The later medieval pageants
and reise are often seen as perversions of crusade, turning away from the
more serious geostrategic military endeavors of an earlier era. But as we have seen, there is in fact a bright
thread to this performative theatrical element of crusading
that runs right through the many centuries of crusading history. And this type of activity
was one that continued to yield value in the maintenance of European aristocratic power and status. I began this lecture with the image of the Protestant Thomas
Fuller's "Holy Warre", the frontispiece that
suggested the great expenses and terrible slaughter of the crusades amounted to a moral lesson
for Christian Europeans. They went out full, they came back empty. But the question of the value
of the crusading experience in the middle ages to European
communities and institutions has, I think, been muddied somewhat by the imprecision about
precisely which communities we're talking about and
about the full extent of the crusading experience. It also leaves out the
role of the Latin states to that experience. What I hope to have shown
is that for the aristocracy, the principalities of the Latin East indeed provided a rich
resource of the kinds of cultural capital
that was the very stuff of their social class and status at home. The aristocracy of the Latin
East presented their lands as an idealized world of
noble customs and behavior, an origin point for the
mythic past of chivalry. The value of the
principalities was embedded, not only in these people, but in the architecture
constructed with the assistance of European noble endowments
and in the landscape itself. This extraordinary map created
in England in about 1240 and wonderfully restored by our students at Fordham University demonstrates
much of what we've seen was important about the
landscape of the Latin East. It includes an itinerary
showing how to get to Jerusalem and how long it would take via sea. In addition to the holy
places around Jerusalem, it also mentions numerous
other pilgrimage sites elsewhere in the region. The map also includes the
specific references to lions in the same region where
we know they were hunted by crusaders. And it also indicates the
mythical home of hunting birds on the summit of Mount Gilboa. Remarkably, and this is incredibly rare for a map of this period, it shows political borders, the presence of a frontier
with the kingdom of Egypt to the south and Syria
to the north and east. What the map records then
is precisely the value of the Latin East. This land conquered by crusading and which crusades sought to
sustain and also to cultivate. In its confident claims to
Jerusalem and the holy places it reflects the value
of crusading in a way that might've been understood
to all Latin Christians, but in its insistence on
the political identity of this place, on the existence of its
frontiers with lands governed by non-Christian rulers and its inclusion of other
kinds of information, for instance, about animals
for collecting and hunting and architecture, it affirms the particular
value of the Latin East for an aristocratic audience. Now, the images I've painted for you of European aristocrats traveling to lands of overseas conquest to
learn and to demonstrate their virtues is one that
has obvious residences with later periods, particularly with the grand tour of the 17th and 18th centuries, with the expeditions and
safaris of the 19th century European overseas empires, and with more modern tourism. My hope is that by
modifying our understandings of the full range of
experiences and objectives associated with crusades, and by thinking about the desires and requirements of
particular social groups, we come closer to contextualizing
the entire history of the crusades and especially
the ephemeral crusader states within the larger story
of European colonialism and also global history. The value in comparing elite practices of the central middle ages
to later periods however, is not just to help us join the dots on a flattened historical landscape. Contrary to the desires of
modern European colonial elites steeped in medievalism, the crusades were not just a practice run for later European empires. Contextualizing the violent
history of the crusades within the social and cultural world of the middle ages, a world very different to our own, is also helpful when
confronting the motivations and justifications for
those who would do violence for reasons of religion or identity today. More often than not, those who look to the
middle ages to justify the intolerances of today find only a mirror which reflects back our own troubled image.
