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The Crusades in the Context of World History
The following is the text of a lecture presented by Alfred J. Andrea to the
Crusades Studies Forum at St. Louis University on November 3, 2006
Given by Alfred J. Andrea, November 3, 2006
Allow me to confess that I am a Janus-like historian. That is a fancy way of saying “two-faced.” Trained over 40 years ago as a specialist in medieval European history, I have over the past 25 years become increasingly involved in a new field of historical studies known as world history
What is World History?
World history is not the cumulative histories of every culture that has ever existed. Such a mish-mash would have no coherence, apart from being an impossibility. It is also not area studies. Rather, world history is an attempt to look at the major patterns of human history in a way that transcends single cultures, nations, civilizations, and even regions. Put another way, it deals in some form or other with a phenomenon or with phenomena that have world historical significance and that underscore connections on a grand scale that link disparate cultures. For example, to the global, or world, historian, the story of the early Industrial Revolution is not just about European textile entrepreneurs and laborers and the consequent changes in Europe’s social and economic structures. Alongside these important phenomena are the parallel and connected stories of cotton producers in the Americas, India, Brazil, and Egypt and the varied consequences that textile mechanization had on their societies and economies.
Thus, world history is not a discipline unto itself. Rather it is a framework or perspective that enables the researcher to address historical issues that transcend cultural and civilizational boundaries. It does not privilege a single culture or civilization or region but is constantly shifting its focus as the phenomena that it studies shift their locales.
The Battle of Hattin (4 July 1187)
Matthew Paris, ca. 1250
Crusade History as World History
Crusade history is by its very nature world historical in content and perspective, even though many crusade historians might not recognize it as such. When I was an undergraduate student, crusade history was fairly straightforward. It centered on the eight canonical crusades of the late 11th through late 13th centuries that were waged by Western European crusaders in the East and the vicissitudes of the crusader states that they established in the Levant. What tied all of this together was the putatively self-evident and simple proposition that true crusades had as their goal the liberation and/or defense of Jerusalem and other areas of the Holy Land. Moreover, the chronological boundaries of our study were exact: from the sermon of Pope Urban II at Clermont on 27 November 1095 to the fall of Acre on 28 May 1291 (almost exactly 195 ½ years). But even within these constricting limits, we were doing world history of a sort, although most of us, and certainly I, were unaware of that fact because of a Eurocentric bias. After all, we were studying the interplay of Latin and Byzantine Christian, Islamic, and Jewish societies during these two centuries, even though we viewed it all through a Latin Christian prism.
Over the past several decades, roughly just about the time that world history was beginning to appear on the historical profession’s radar screen, a new approach to crusade studies took shape thanks to the efforts of such pioneers as Jonathan Riley-Smith of Cambridge and St. Louis University’s own Thomas Madden. Known as the Pluralist School (to differentiate it from the Traditionalist School that I just described), it has a much broader view of the crusades. Pluralists, who are in the ascendance in crusade studies, count as crusades the Reconquista, or reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors, holy wars launched against pagans and other perceived enemies in the Baltic and Eastern Europe, and wars called by the papacy against heretics and political enemies in Western and Central Europe. They also greatly expand the chronological limits of the crusades, finding protocrusades well before 1095 and a vibrant crusading tradition well after 1291. And it is correct to do so. Certainly wars waged between Christian European forces and Ottoman Turks during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, such as the Battle of Lepanto of 1571, were seen by European Catholics as crusades. Indeed, Catholic monarchs often requested crusading indulgences for participants in their crusades against the Turks, and they were granted by the papacy on several occasions until the end of the 17th century. Moreover, the Knights Hospitaler of Malta were carrying on maritime operations against Muslim fleets in the Central Mediterranean down to 1741.
The Pluralist School is based on a simple premise. Namely, crusading, as both ideal and reality, was in constant flux. As an idea and as an institution, the crusade took a century to develop into full form, reaching its maturity in the pontificate of Innocent III. And even after it had achieved this level of coherence, crusading continued to respond to new stimuli, challenges, and circumstances. In effect, the crusade was a constant work in progress. What is more, over the centuries the ideal of crusading became embedded in the Western Christian psyche and became part of the cultural baggage of Western civilization. In fact, even Protestant Christians, who rejected many of the once-essential aspects of crusading—papal authority, indulgences, vows, and pilgrimages—accepted the idea of holy war, as the Wars of Religion of the 16th and early 17th centuries bear witness.
But it is not my intention today to discuss Europe’s Wars of Religion or even Catholic Europe’s crusades against the Ottoman Turks. Rather, I wish to go farther a field. Taking the perspective of the world historian, I want to suggest that crusading was a driving force in Catholic Europe’s first and second efforts to link up with China, as well as in Spanish imperialism in the Americas. I could do the same for Portuguese overseas adventures in Africa and lands washed by the Indian Ocean, as well as in Brazil, but time will not allow that. I will simply show you this 16th-century West African image of Portuguese “crusaders.”
In my less-than-complete talk, I hope to demonstrate in rough fashion that, between about 1250 and 1550, crusading served as a driving force in world history far from the Levant. But please note my words: It was a driving force—one of many. I am not arguing that it was the sole or, in many cases, even the main motive or framework. I also am not so foolish as to deny that during the 16th century and following there were many countervailing voices in Europe that questioned the ideology of crusade. But all of this—namely multiple motives and voices of dissent— had also been true in the 13th century, but to a lesser extent. Nevertheless, crusade ideology was still alive and powerful in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Europe’s First Direct Contacts with China
Let us first turn to a phenomenon that I am sure is known to many of you already--Catholic Europe’s first attempts to evangelize China in the late 13th century. Beginning in the early 13th century, the Mongols under Chinggis Khan and his successors exploded out of Mongolia on their way to carving out the largest land empire in history.
The West's initial reaction was fear. Tales of horrendous atrocities convinced Western Europeans that these "Devil's horsemen" were demonic forces of the Antichrist who foreshadowed the Final Days as foretold in the Bible.
Matthew Paris, ca. 1250
When the Mongols overran large portions of Christian Eastern Europe in a campaign that lasted from 1236 to 1242, the Latin West was forced to confront this new menace from the East. Pope Gregory IX responded in 1241 by calling for a crusade against the Mongols, and his successor Innocent IV renewed it in 1243. But both were ineffectual gestures. Fortunately for the West, the Mongols withdrew to the Volga in 1242, due to the death of the Great Khan and the succession struggle that followed. This withdrawal took place, however, only after they destroyed in April 1241 a combined Polish and German army that contained a large contingent of Teutonic Knights and, two days later, a Hungarian army.
Fearing that the Mongols would return, Pope Innocent IV and King Louis IX of France tried diplomacy, dispatching a series of legations aimed at discovering Mongol intentions and converting these so-called "enemies of God and friends of the Devil" to Christianity, thereby gaining a new Christian ally in the fight against Islam.
Although conversion of infidels had clearly not been a goal of the First Crusade, except for some unofficial attempts at forced conversion of Jews in Europe, the crusade as mission began to take shape as early as 1147 with the crusade against the pagan Wends, a Slavic people who lived east of the Elbe. In supporting this crusade, St Bernard of Clairvaux had called on Christian crusaders “to utterly annihilate or surely convert” these pagans, and Pope Eugenius III echoed this sentiment in his crusade bull. Certainly Francis of Assisi’s unsuccessful attempt to convert the sultan of Egypt, al-Kamil, in 1219 during the Fifth Crusade gave further legitimacy to the marriage of crusade and mission, especially for the Order of Friars Minor.
Giotto, Bardi Chapel, ca. 1315
Not surprisingly, therefore, these initial missions to the Mongols, which began in 1245 and lasted down to 1255, were conducted mainly by Franciscans. Also not surprisingly, they were met with Mongol indifference. To the Mongol mind, the West had only one option: submission.
The situation changed around 1262, when the Mongol il-khans of Persia, beset by rival Mongol powers in the north and east, were finally willing to discuss an alliance with the Christian West against the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. Because these same Mamluks were pressing hard against the rapidly weakening crusader states of Syria-Palestine, the West was willing to negotiate. The il-khans corresponded with a number of popes and the crowned heads of France, Aragon, Sicily, and England, emphasizing their favorable attitude toward Christianity.
The most celebrated of these Mongol overtures began in early 1287 when Il-Khan Arghun, who was married to a Byzantine Christian princess, dispatched a Nestorian, or Eastern, Christian monk, Rabban Sauma, to the West entrusting him with the task of proposing an alliance. Sauma, a Turk, who had set out on pilgrimage to Jerusalem around 1275 from northern China but never reached the Holy Land, had settled instead in the il-khanate of Persia, where he was befriended by the Mongol il-khan. In mid-1287, Sauma reached Italy, where he discovered a vacant papal throne. Frustrated, he traveled to Paris, where he met King Philip IV, and then on to Bordeaux, where he was received by King Edward I. Both monarchs supported the idea, especially Edward, a former crusader who now swore the cross again. However, domestic affairs prevented his ever fulfilling this second crusade vow. Philip, likewise, never made good on his promise.
Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, ca. 1290
But back to Rabban Sauma. Upon hearing of Pope Nicholas IV's election, Sauma hurried back to Rome, where he was treated with respect and Arghun's proposal was met with enthusiasm. When Sauma left Rome in April 1288, he carried with him several warm papal letters for the il-khan. Shortly thereafter, in 1289, the pope, himself a Franciscan, sent Friar John of Montecorvino to the il-khan's court.
Before anything could come of these negotiations, Arghun died—ironically in 1291, the year in which Acre, the last major Christian stronghold in Outremer fell to the Mamluks and the year in which Arghun had promised he would be baptized a Christian in Jerusalem once it was reconquered. To compound the irony, Arghun’s son had been baptized and given the name Nicholas, in honor of the pope. Upon Arghun’s death, Nicholas’s elder brother, Ghazan, became il-khan, and in 1295 Ghazan embraced Islam, the faith of the vast majority of his subjects, and the Mongols of Persia followed suit, including Nicholas, who in 1304 succeeded his brother as Il-khan Oljeitu, his prebaptismal name. Actually, Il-Khans Ghazan and Oljeitu continued sporadic negotiations with the West, still looking for an alliance against the Mamluks, but nothing came of them, and the next il-khan made peace with his Mamluk coreligionists. All hopes for a Mongol-Latin crusade were dead. Or were they?
Friar John of Monte Corvino, whom the pope had dispatched east in 1289, was still an agent in play. Friar John also carried with him a letter for the Great Khan in China, so in that pivotal year 1291, he set off for China, arriving there, by way of India, in 1294 or 1295. The Franciscan friar proceeded to set up a mission church in Dadu, the Mongol capital city. Also known as Khanbaliq (City of the Khans), its remains are today located within Beijing. This mission church enjoyed Mongol protection for the next three-quarters of a century. Friar John maintained precarious ties with the West through a few letters carried back by Italian merchants. In 1307/08 Pope Clement V named him archbishop of Khanbaliq, with the authority to organize a church for all of China, and dispatched a few Franciscan bishops to consecrate and assist the new archbishop. Their arrival in 1313 enabled Archbishop John to expand his mission church into southern China. Montecorvino died around 1328, and when word reached Rome, Pope John XXII dispatched, in 1333, Friar Nicholas to succeed him, along with 26 other Franciscans.
This mission church never succeeded in converting many Chinese or Mongols, and it certainly did not win the Great Khans over to Christianity or enlist their aid in a crusade. As it was, after about 1294, the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China experienced a rapid decline in fortunes, which culminated in the Mongols’ expulsion from China in 1368.
Although the Ming dynasty, which reasserted native Chinese rule, was hostile to all foreign elements that had any association with the hated Mongols, the mission church probably continued to exist until the late 14th or early 15th century. In addition to the rise of a nativist Ming dynasty, a number of other factors combined to isolate and choke off the small Catholic Church in China and to essentially bar overland access to the Far East for Europeans. These included the rise of strong and aggressive Muslim states in West and Central Asia and the Great Eurasian Pandemic, that in the West is known as the Black Death (1347-50). The Latin West, however, unaware of the Mongol Yuan dynasty’s fate, never forgot the dream of linking up with the Great Khan.
This lust was fueled by surviving memories of the East as recorded by Franciscan missionaries. One of the most important was the Chronicle of Friar John of Marignolli, who had been dispatched as papal legate to the Great Khan in 1338 and only returned home in 1353. This, the last known Franciscan mission to the East witnessed Friar John bringing to the Great Khan the papal gift of a great black horse with white hooves, whose magnificence caused a stir within the Yuan court to the point that the khan immediately commissioned a painting of the horse, along with a commemorative poem.
If Pope Benedict XII’s gift left echoes in China, Friar John’s account had even greater repercussions in Europe, because one of its most avid readers was
Columbus.
Likewise, artistic images of richly clad Mongols and other exotic Easterners circulated in the West during and after this period of interchange, as evidenced by this image at Subiaco in Italy of ca. 1350 depicting the bargaining for Christ’s clothes at the crucifixion.
and the first burial place of Queen Isabella
The Alhambra, Granada
Crusade Ideology in New Spain
And such dreams died hard. Even after it became clear that Columbus had not sailed to the Indies, at least some European churchmen continued to harbor the hope that the lands and peoples of the Americas would be the means for the liberation of Jerusalem and the destruction of Islam, and they apparently imparted that dream to at least some of their Indian converts.
Religious pageants became an integral part of the religious practices of the newly converted Indians of New Spain, and they allow us to infer quite a bit about the ways in which Catholic Christianity was assimilated in the New World. The sixteenth-century Franciscan missionary-priest Fray Toribio de Motolinía in his History of the Indians of New Spain preserved an eye-witness description of a Corpus Christi pageant performed by the Christian Indians of Tlaxcala in 1539. In this pageant, which was composed at least in part by the Tlaxcalans but probably with the advice of Franciscan mentors, they portrayed the future conquest of Jerusalem by the combined armies of Spain and New Spain and the consequent baptism of the sultan of Jerusalem. The striking thing about this pageant and its mock battles is that all of the combined European crusader forces fail to take Jerusalem, despite their bravery. The Christians only succeed when the Indians of New Spain join the fray, aided by a heavenly patron on a brown horse, Saint Hippolytus, on whose feast day, 13 August 1521, the Spaniards and their Tlaxcalan allies entered Tenochtitlán in victory. Indeed, just as the Tlaxcalans are led by Saint Hippolytus, the Spaniards who now sweep to victory along side these new Christians, are led by Santiago Matamoros—Saint James the Moor-slayer—on a horse “as white as snow.” Santiago, of course, was the patron-saint of the Reconquista. According to legend, Saint James the Greater had initially appeared to lead the Christian forces of Asturias to victory at the mythical Battle of Clavijo in 844.
He was also the namesake of the Order of Santiago, the most powerful of the Iberian military orders, founded in 1170 in León. Significantly, Hernan Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, belonged to that order, as did many of his subordinates. And we are told by the sources that these conquistadors regularly shouted out the traditional Spanish battle cry, “Santiago,” as they went into battle in the Americas.
The meaning of this Tlaxcalan pageant is clear, I think. There is every reason to conclude that the Tlaxcalans were avid to present themselves as latter-day crusaders and as having bought totally into the Spanish crusading ethos, despite whatever secret animosities they might have harbored against their conquerors.
Moreover, the Tlaxcalans were fully aware, as were the Spaniards, that Cortés’s small army of Spanish soldiers could never have conquered the Mexica Empire without the tens of thousands of Indian allies who marched with him, and chief among these were warriors from Tlaxcala. As a consequence, Tlaxcala became a privileged, largely self-governing province under Spanish colonial rule and was showered with honors and privileges.
Ever mindful of their special status, the Tlaxcalans reminded the Spaniards of Tlaxcala’s special place in New Spain in a marvelous work of art known as the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. A lienzo is a picture or series of pictures on fabric that tells a story. Around 1550, Tlaxcalan artists, incorporating a mixture of European and native artistic traditions and styles, crafted three identical renderings of a lienzo that told, in a series of more than 80 scenes that follow one another in chronological sequence, the story of their people’s critical role in Cortés’s conquest of Mexico. At least one of the three lienzos was a gift for the Viceroy of New Spain.
I want to focus briefly on two images. The first is of the baptism of four
The reason that I show this image is that it is anachronistic. The lienzo supposedly shows the conquest in chronological sequence, but we know from Spanish sources that these nobles were baptized only after the la noche triste (the Night of Sorrow) of 1 July 1520 when the Spaniards and their Tlaxcalan allies were driven out of Tenochtitlán with heavy losses. Yet this scene precedes a second scene that I want to focus on.
Consider the scene. The Nahuatl inscription reads: “There the marquis burned the idol.” The Templo Mayor, defended by Mexica who are obviously losing, is aflame. A Spanish commander, closely followed by a Tlaxcalan chief, leads the charge up the stairs, and they are followed by five other Tlaxcalans and two Spaniards. A warrior on horseback strikes down a Mexica warrior, but note that beardless horseman. He is not the bearded Cortes. Indeed, he appears in at least three other battle scenes in this work of art and propaganda. The most notable of these is a depiction of the combined Spanish-Tlaxcalan attack on the great temple at Cholula, the largest and most sacred temple complex in Mexico and a place of pilgrimage.
So much more can be and should be said. We have not dealt with expressions of Portuguese crusade mentality in the course of tiny Portugal’s carving out an empire in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Brazil. If time allowed, I would like to look at the role played by the Portuguese Order of Christ, a military order founded in 1319 from the confiscated properties of the recently dissolved Order of the Temple, and certainly I would like to analyze the crusade imagery, tone, and message in the great Portuguese epic, The Lusiads, by Luis de Camoes, a crusader himself who lost an eye fighting Moors in North Africa. Published in 1571, this national epic celebrates the opening of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean by Vasco da Gama, but does so, especially in Book VII, in a manner that places the events of 1497-99 in the context of the crusades. But you will be relieved to hear that my time is up.
But before I leave, a postscript, if you please.
Modern Memories of the Crusades
Three weeks ago I was walking through the city center of Jaén in Andalusia, when I encountered this monument.
A few days later I was in Madrid’s Church of San Francisco el Grande, dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi, where I entered this 19th-century Chapel of Santiago.
Giotto, Church of San Francesco, Assisi, between 1296 and 1304
Bibliography:
Ames, Glenn J. Vasco da Gama: Renaissance Crusader. New York: Pearson, 2005.
Arnold, Lauren. Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures: The Franciscan Mission to China and Its Influence on the Art of the West. San Francisco: Desiderata Pres, 1999.
Flint, Valerie. The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
France, John. The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000-1714. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Gillespie, Jean. Saints and Warriors:Tlaxcalan Perspectives on the Conquest of Tenochtitlan. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2004.
Harris, Max. Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
Kedar, Benjamin Z. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Motolinía, Toribio de. History of the Indians of New Spain. Ed and trans. Francis Borgia Steck. Washington D. C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1951.
Rossabi, Morris. Voyager from Xanadu: Rabban Sauma and the First Journey from China to the West. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1992.
(c) Alfred J. Andrea. November, 2006. Permission is granted for electronic copying and distribution in print for educational and personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.