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This collection is a new addition to Blackwells
'Essential Readings in History' series, which reprints important
academic articles on historical topics. The books in the series
are useful acquisitions for academic libraries, as they take the
pressure off over-used journals, but, more importantly, they also
make the scholarship and advances contained in the articles available
to a readership that may not have access to university libraries
or obscure journals, and so allows a wider public access to the
process of debate and reformulation. The series is also useful for
researchers, since the inclusion of an index allows themes, individuals
and events to be traced across all the contributions. Unlike Ashgates
excellent Variorum 'Collected Studies' series, however, the original
pagination is not retained.
The editor of this volume on the crusades, Thomas
F. Madden, has picked out some of the plums from crusade scholarship
of the last 35 years. Not surprisingly, Jonathan Riley-Smith looms
large, contributing two of the twelve articles. His provocatively-entitled
Crusading as an act of love is a superlative attempt
to understand crusade motivation on its own terms, while his later
Early crusaders to the east and the costs of crusading, 1095-1130
forcefully argued against the notion that crusaders were Europes
landless sons, going east solely in the hope of material gain. There
are articles by Giles Constable, Marcus Bull, R. A. Fletcher, John
France, Norman Housley, and, of course, H. E. J. Cowdreys
classic Pope Urban IIs preaching of the First Crusade.
This last has also been reprinted as number XVI in Cowdreys
own collection, Popes, Monks and Crusaders (Hambledon; London,
1984), but there is certainly no harm in it appearing again. Cowdrey
considered the question of whether the objective of Jerusalem was
integral to Urbans original vision for the expedition to the
East as expressed in the sermon at Clermont in November 1095, and
in subsequent letters and encyclicals. His argument that Jerusalem
was central to the enterprise from the beginning has been largely
accepted ever since.
Also included is Jonathan Tyermans radical
Were there any crusades in the twelfth century?, which
argues that it is misleading to regard crusades as a separate phenomenon
from the general development of attitudes to warfare in western
Europe before the pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216). Taken
to their logical conclusion, Tyermans iconoclastic ideas would
put an end to any debate on the crusades before 1198, since the
very term is retrospective and inappropriate. So far, however, he
has not been as influential as Riley-Smith or Cowdrey, although
as an alternative voice, he well merits inclusion here.
Thomas Maddens contribution to the book
is to give it unity and to provide very helpful clarifications of
the main points at issue. He gives, at the beginning of each article,
a short summary of the argument and some indication of how it influenced
subsequent scholarship. He has also provides an introduction which
traces the fluctuating approaches to crusading in western Europe
and America from the Renaissance to the world after 11 September
2001. This survey is very well pitched towards a general readership,
placing the academic debates in the wider context of world events
and how they have changed attitudes to ideologically motivated warfare.
There is only one aspect of this book that strikes
an odd note and that is the decision to include Sir Steven Runcimans
Byzantium and the Crusades. Like all of Runcimans
output, the nine pages reproduced here are a compelling read with
a clear and forcefully argued thesis. The First Crusade was, he
believed, tantamount to a barbarian invasion of the civilised and
sophisticated Byzantine empire and its consequences were ultimately
to bring about the ruin of Byzantine civilisation. This mass migration
was unwittingly triggered by the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus,
when he had sent ambassadors to the pope at the Council of Piacenza
in March 1095 to ask for mercenary soldiers to enrol in his armies.
The emotive appeal made in response by Urban II at Clermont, however,
had the effect of sending thousands of Frankish knights to Constantinople
under their own leaders, quite a different outcome from what Alexius
had expected.
Consequently, in the words of his daughter, Anna
Comnena, Alexius dreaded the arrival of the crusaders,
and there was misunderstanding and tension from the start. It
is commonly believed by worthy people, wrote Runciman, that
the more we see of each other, the more we shall like each other.
It is a sad delusion (p. 214). There had been differences
between Byzantium and the West in the past, but since contact between
the two societies was sporadic, open animosity had little chance
to develop. Now that the westerners were brought into the heart
of the empire in large numbers, those differences, especially those
between the Byzantine and western churches and the more tolerant
attitude of the Byzantines towards Muslim powers, became more noticeable
and led to resentment. Although Runciman lays some of the blame
at the door of the Byzantine emperors who reigned after 1143, the
sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in April 1204 was the
culmination of the mounting dislike and suspicion that all
western Christendom now felt towards the Byzantines (p. 219).
Cogent though Runcimans views are, the fact
remains that they are hardly new. Although published in 1986, this
contribution is in fact a straight summary of the position adopted
by Runciman in his History of the Crusades which was published
between 1951 and 1954 (3 vols, Cambridge University Press). That
singles it out immediately from the rest of the articles. The next
earliest is Cowdreys, which came out in History for
1970, while the rest all appeared in the 1980s or 1990s.
Moreover, while Cowdreys thesis has stood
largely unchallenged since it first appearance, Runcimans
most certainly has not. One of the main problems is its almost uncritical
acceptance of the main Byzantine source for the First Crusade, Anna
Comnenas Alexiad, which presents Alexius Is actions
throughout the episode as motivated solely by Christian charity
and places the blame for subsequent disagreements on the shoulders
of the crusade leadership and particularly of the Norman, Bohemond
of Taranto. Runciman also takes at face value Anna Comnenas
descriptions of some of the crusaders as uncouth louts and this
is largely the basis for belief that the two peoples were mutually
estranged from the start. It could be objected that the classicising
literary genre in which Comnena wrote dictated that foreign peoples
be presented as barbarians and that this did not necessarily
mean that the entire populations of the two halves of Christendom
were in a constantly increasing state of mutual antipathy.
Madden is, of course, well aware of all this.
He openly admits in his introduction that many aspects of Runcimans
work have been criticised since he wrote (pp. 6, 11), and he himself
has done much to mitigate Runcimans picture of mutual intolerance
leading directly to the sack of Constantinople. The second edition
of Donald E. Quellers The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest
of Constantinople (University of Pennsylvania Press; Philadelphia,
1997), which Madden co-authored, presents the diversion to Constantinople
as the outcome of a series of accidents, in no way related to any
previous history of east-west hostility. One can even detect a certain
antipathy to the Runciman thesis on Maddens part in his introduction
to this collection, albeit expressed in oblique fashion. He is highly
critical of the 1995 BBC Television series, presented by Terry Jones,
because it portrayed the crusades as a long, misguided war
of intolerance, ignorance and barbarism against a peaceful and sophisticated
Muslim world (p.1). Substitute Byzantine for Muslim,
and you are left with the essence of Runcimans opinion on
the matter, one that he expressed succinctly in interviews given
for the Jones programme. Jones was, moreover, heavily dependent
on Runciman as his main historical source. He even faithfully reproduced
some of Runcimans errors. In the second episode, for example,
while recounting the siege of Antioch in 1097-8, Jones mentions
how Alexius I obligingly sent the English exile, Edgar the Aethling,
from Constantinople with a shipload of siege engines for the hard-pressed
crusaders. The story appears in History of the Crusades,
vol. 1, p. 227, but subsequent investigations have shown that it
has no basis whatsoever. (1) It
therefore seems impossible to criticise Jones without, by implication,
criticising Runciman as well.
All this begs the question as to why Madden includes
Runciman at all, in a book which, he asserts, is designed to explode
popular myths and disseminate a more thoughtful approach to the
problem (p.12). History of the Crusades is still in print
and is probably much more widely available than the works of any
of the other authors featured in this collection. It is not as though
people need to be encouraged to read Runciman. He jokingly boasted
that he had made more money for his publisher, Cambridge University
Press, than any other author apart from God, since his books were
only outsold by the Bible.
Nevertheless, Madden is facing a genuine difficulty
here. He has included two articles on the Muslim experience of the
crusades: Nikita Elisséeff on the slow response to calls
for jihad after the First Crusade, and Benjamin Kedar on
Muslims under crusader rule. It is, however, difficult to find alternatives
to Runciman which sum up the Byzantine experience in the same accessible
and engaging way. There are surveys by Joan Hussey and Anthony Bryer
which cover the period 1081 to 1204, but both are now fairly dated
and in any case, they tend to mirror Runcimans central contention
that cultural differences were the ultimate source of conflict.
(2)
There are, of course, a number of scholars who
have reinterpreted aspects of Byzantine-crusader relations. Of these
the three most prominent must be Paul Magdalino, Ralph-Johannes
Lilie and Jonathan Shepard. Magdalinos and Lilies close
studies of Byzantine policies towards the crusader states of Syria
show not steadily mounting tension, but periods of animosity interspersed
with co-operation and alliance. (3)
Shepard re-examines the whole question of Byzantine involvement
with the genesis of the First Crusade in two masterly articles.
Adopting a more critical stance towards Anna Comnena, Shepard argues
that there was far more to the episode than an innocent Byzantine
emperor taken aback by the turn of events and that Alexius was cleverly
exploiting the situation for his own ends. While Runciman unabashedly
labels Bohemond as a villain, whose greed and lack of
scruple poisoned relations with the Byzantines, Shepard argues that
this picture is an uncritical and literal reading of Anna Comnena,
who vilified the Norman leader with the hindsight acquired in the
forty-year interval between these events and the writing of her
history. There is intriguing evidence that in 1096-7, Alexius viewed
Bohemond as a potential tool, ally and recruit, a kind of imperial
agent to oversee the re-conquest of Asia Minor.(4)
Yet there are problems in using the works of these
authors for a volume of this type. Lilies articles are in
German, with only his major book being available in English. Magdalinos
work tends to be extremely detailed, making it far less accessible
and readable than the broad canvas of Runciman. Shepard, like Magdalino,
is a painstaking scholar who has little interest in broad generalisations.
He often tends to write at length in order to bring out the full
potential of the evidence he adduces. 'When Greek meets Greek' covers
almost a hundred pages, which would create difficulties of space
in a small paperback publication.
In short, even though his work is now fifty years
old and many of his ideas discarded, in one respect, namely his
sheer accessibility combined with genuine erudition, Runciman remains
unsurpassed. For this reason, Madden is justified in including him.
Yet his very inclusion is also ample proof that a re-examination
of east-west relations at the time of the crusades is long overdue.
Jonathan Harris
August 2002
1. Nicholas
Hooper, Edgar the Aethling: Anglo-Saxon prince, rebel and
Crusader, Anglo-Saxon England, 14 (1985), 197-214,
at pp.208-209.
2. J. M. Hussey,
'Byzantium and the Crusades, 1081-1204', in K. M. Setton, gen. Ed.,
A History of the Crusades (6 vols, University of Wisconsin
Press; Madison,1969-89), ii, pp. 123-51; A. A. M. Bryer, 'The first
encounter with the West AD 1050-1204', in Byzantium: An Introduction,
ed. P. Whitting (2nd edn, Blackwells; Oxford, 1981),
pp. 85-110.
3. R-J. Lilie,
Byzantium and the Crusader States 1095-1204, trans. J. C.
Morris and J. C. Ridings (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1993);
Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos 1143-1180
(Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1993), pp. 66-108.
4. 'Cross-purposes:
Alexius Comnenus and the First Crusade', in The First Crusade
Origins and Impact, ed. Jonathan Phillips (Manchester University
Press; Manchester, 1997), pp. 107-29, and idem, When Greek
meets Greek: Alexius Comnenus and Bohemond in 1097-98, Byzantine
and Modern Greek Studies, 12 (1988), 185-277.
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