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Book Review
Tomaz Mastnak. Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
Reviewed by Andrew Holt
Crusader motivations, whether of the individual crusader or the crusading leadership, have long been the focus of historians. Tomaz Mastnak’s 2002 book Crusading Peace represents one of the more recent attempts by a scholar to determine such motivations; in this case, those of the papacy. Mastnak argues that the crusades were a tool employed by reform minded popes for the furtherance of the Peace and Truce of God movements.(1) The crusades represented a “transportation of violence” as combative Christian knights found an outlet for their destructive energies in the East, while their absence in the West brought peace.(2) The unity of purpose established through the crusades provided Europe with a collective sense of identity under the authority of a papal monarchy.(3) According to Mastnak, all of these issues resulted from a new theology of positive or “sacred violence,” which became the basis for a “crusading ideal” that inspired a “state of permanent war” against the non-Christian world with a “newly constructed” Muslim enemy as the primary opponent.(4)
One of the more interesting aspects of Mastnak’s book is that it has exposed something of a historiographical divide in that it has not been enthusiastically received by crusades historians,(5) but has received favorable reviews by other scholars.(6) Perhaps the reason for this divide is that the two groups, crusades specialists and non-specialists, appear to disagree on Mastnak’s main point, which perhaps could be clearer. Several reviewers have come to the conclusion that Mastnak is simply expanding on Carl Erdmann’s earlier arguments on the relationship of the Peace and Truce of God movements to the calling of the First Crusade.(7) Other reviewers have come to different conclusions.(8) This inconsistency among reviewers is perhaps understandable in light of the vast amount of territory covered by Mastnak, who borrows heavily from traditional theories to make what this reviewer has determined is his primary argument; that with the crusades the Church appropriated and sanctified warfare for its own purposes.
Mastnak claims that in sacralizing violence, the Church hoped to establish peace and unity in the West, while also expanding the frontiers of a newly constructed “Christendom.” These arguments are not new, as all of these points have been made by other historians.(9) Nor does Mastnak claim to make an original contribution on these issues.(10) What is purportedly new, however, is the claim that the crusades represented the first sacralization of violence by Christians (11) that universally applied to the Church as a whole, rather than in limited or specific circumstances as had been the case many times prior to the crusades.(12) Yet even this argument is of questionable novelty, as Loren C. MacKinney made a similar argument, using similar language (which was later appropriated by Carl Erdmann and other scholars), in a 1930 article for Speculum.(13)
Regardless of whether Mastnak is making a new or old argument, he does provide the most recent and up to date study of these events, which in itself makes his work a worthy contribution to the field of crusades studies. Also, it should be noted that Mastnak is careful to limit the majority of his claims to crusading theory, as understood by clerical leaders, rather than the actual experiences and goals of crusaders.(14) While there are several occasions when Mastnak abandons crusading theory and asserts an often questionable crusading reality, for the most part he focuses his comments on how popes and other clerical elites understood crusading, rather than the hundreds of thousands of crusaders that actually took part in the crusades. It is an important distinction to keep in mind as one reads through his work and considers his arguments.
Mastnak is certainly correct in noting that ecclesiastical leaders saw the potential for peace in Europe by redirecting the energies of violent knights from fellow Christians in the West to Muslims in the East. Some, although not all,(15) of the earliest accounts of Pope Urban II’s calling of the First Crusade record instances of the Pope condemning inter-Christian warfare in the West and arguing that such efforts would be better expended fighting Muslims in the East.(16) In doing so, the Pope clearly sought to bring together former enemies through a unity of purpose during the crusades.
Mastnak is also correct that during the crusades the Papacy sought ways of unifying Christian Europe under its authority, whether ecclesiastical or otherwise. At the time of the First Crusade, the Papacy was emerging victorious from a lengthy Investiture conflict with the Holy Roman Emperor. Quelling violence in Europe would be necessary to strengthen and extend the Church’s new authority. Mastnak convincingly demonstrates that the successful “transportation of violence”(17) from Europe to the East during the crusades was a reflection of the Church’s broad new authority.
Yet most crusades historians have never doubted that the potential benefits of an “export of violence” may have contributed to papal motivations for crusading,(18) but they have questioned its primacy as a cause, noting that many things appear to have been behind papal motivations for crusading. For example, a genuine desire for reconciliation, or at least better relations, between eastern and western Christians had long been a major papal objective.(19) Nor was the idea of a crusade to the East solely the product of papal aspirations, as eastern rulers had been corresponding with Popes and other western leaders for several years before the calling of the First Crusade. In doing so eastern Christians were in some cases literally imploring western Christians to wage war in the East on their behalf.(20) The status of Jerusalem was also enormously important to clerical leaders in the West, and the likelihood that they would have been moved by reports of Turkish abuses of the Holy City is practically certain.(21) Yet Mastnak’s work is largely based on the assumption that these issues were not issues at all, and this is where he makes some important mistakes.
In contrast to the mainstream of current crusades scholarship, Mastnak notes that the First Crusade “…had little to do with the circumstances in the Near East, or, more specifically, with anything happening in Jerusalem…."(22) Here Mastnak breaks away from his theoretical approach and makes a claim of crusading reality that seems poorly founded. To begin with, there are well known historical precedents that demonstrate that eleventh century Christians cared deeply about the fate of Jerusalem. For example, when the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was destroyed by the Egyptian Caliph al-Hakim in 1009, it resulted in outrage in the West and led to pogroms against Jews who were believed to have been in collusion with Muslims. Historians also note the reinvigorated pilgrimage movement of the eleventh century, which held Jerusalem as the ultimate pilgrimage destination. More specifically, in response to Mastnak’s claim, the sources overwhelmingly tell us that Jerusalem was central to the goals of crusaders, particularly Pope Urban II,(23) and such a view is widely held by modern crusades scholars.(24)
Mastnak also argues that declarations of fraternal love by the crusaders for eastern Christians were only a pretext for launching the First Crusade.(25) This of course begs the question of how he would know if either popular or papal declarations of fraternal love for eastern Christians were untrue. Mastnak seems unwilling to accept, at the very least, that doing good for others while doing well for oneself are not mutually exclusive and instead seems to have been quite common in medieval Europe. There is enormous textual evidence for the earliest crusaders, including the crusading leadership [i.e. papacy], drawing their motivation for crusading from tales of eastern Christian sufferings.(26) Yet Mastnak makes no real attempt to deal with this evidence, instead simply discarding this claim as “a pretext” without offering any support for his argument.(27)
Mastnak also notes, “There is no evidence that the Christians in the East were actually oppressed by their Muslim rulers, whatever Urban II may have said at Clermont…”(28) Here Mastnak ignores the Turkish conquest of most of the Christian region of Asia Minor and the hardships it brought on local Christians, as well as western pilgrims. Christian cities of historical importance to both eastern and western Christians, including Nicaea and Antioch, were attacked and captured in the years leading up to the calling of the First Crusade.(29) Thousands of Christians were killed and enslaved during these attacks, and then forced to live as subjected people under Islamic rule.(30) Curiously, these conquests are nowhere mentioned in Mastnak’s book. Mastnak also ignores the correspondence of Byzantine writers to Latin Christians, as well as the claims of Byzantine ambassadors to the West, which were the basis for western understandings of Christians suffering from Islamic persecution in the East.(31)
Finally Mastnak argues that the crusade was nothing more than an “unprovoked” war of extermination against Muslims.(32) Yet European Christians had long experienced Muslim military aggression throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world, including parts of Spain, Italy, Southern France, Eastern Europe and North Africa. Nor were western European Christians unaware or unconcerned with Islamic conquests of formerly Christian lands as Mastnak argues. These concerns were voiced extensively by ecclesiastical leaders prior to, and during, the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095.(33) At the very least this calls into question Mastnak’s theory that the construction of a Muslim enemy by western clerics was a late eleventh century innovation of the crusading era.(34)
Nor were western clerical leaders unfamiliar with the Islamic attacks on eastern Christian lands. In the years immediately prior to the First Crusade, militant Turks had captured such universally important Christian cities as Nicaea and Antioch (among others), and after the defeat of the main Byzantine army at Mantzikert in 1071, Turks took control of vast territories of Anatolia and threatened the capital city of Constantinople itself. Within a few years residents of Contantinople could literally look over their city walls across the Bosphorus into the camps of their new and troubling Muslim neighbors.(35) These dire circumstances very quickly resulted in the establishment of a dialogue initiated by the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas with Pope Gregory the VII for western aid to eastern Christians in their fight against Muslims. These negotiations developed to a point that Pope Gregory proposed personally leading an army of 50,000 westerners to aid Byzantium and then possibly pushing on to Jerusalem.(36) Such negotiations continued between Emperors until Popes, with Urban II considering sending French volunteers to lend military aid to the Greeks as early as 1089.(37) Yet due to domestic troubles at home resulting from the Investiture controversy, the Pope was not able to respond until receiving a formal request for aid from the ambassador of the Byzantine Emperor in March of 1095 at the Council of Piacenza, only months before calling for the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095.(38)
To support Mastnak’s theory that the crusades were a “war of extermination” against Muslims, he cites the crusaders conquest of Jerusalem in 1099.(39) Mastnak prefaces his comments on Jerusalem by noting, “Gaining victory [for the crusaders] means a fight to extermination, and grand victory means a great massacre.” While Mastnak implies that the crusaders actions were exceptional because they were driven by a new crusading ideology that sought the extermination of Muslims, the reality is that such actions were not unique to the crusaders as even Muslims fought by the same rules.(40) Mastnak nowhere draws the distinction between rhetoric and reality,(41) leaving his readers with the understanding that the crusaders conquest of Jerusalem was exceptional for its brutality.(42) While it’s true that many were killed in Jerusalem after it fell to the crusaders, perhaps 3000 according to a recently discovered contemporary source,(43) it is also the case that many others, in fact the vast majority of the city’s population numbering in the tens of thousands, were ransomed or allowed to leave. On the other hand, and in contrast to Mastnak’s claims that the crusades were wars of extermination, the inhabitants of other Muslim cities that surrendered to the crusaders were left unmolested, retained their property, and allowed to worship as Muslims. Nor is there any record of a papal protest of this outcome, which is odd if the extermination of Muslims were among the Pope’s chief goals of the crusade.(44) In fact the vast majority of the crusading era was one of calculated coexistence in the Holy Land rather than conflict, or efforts to “exterminate” the other. Christians and Muslims lived together in the same cities (whether under Christian or Muslim rule) and regularly interacted economically and quite often socially.(45)
Mastnak also claims that the Pope’s unhappiness with Frederick II’s successful negotiations (as opposed to combat) for control of Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade shows the crusade was about “exterminating” Muslims rather than simply reclaiming Jerusalem.(46) Mastnak fails to mention that, in addition to the Pope, very few Christians liked Frederick II’s treaty, especially the inhabitants of the Holy Land who knew their situation had not really changed from before the crusade. In fact as Frederick II made his way through Acre, local butchers expressed their disapproval when they pelted him with animal intestines, which Mastnak dismisses as only the result of the local patriarch’s propaganda. The truce did little to secure the place of Christians in the Holy Land and the Mamluks later recaptured Jerusalem not long after it expired. Perhaps most problematic is Mastnak’s unwillingness to consider that papal disapproval of Frederick’s actions were the result of both personal animosity between the two men (Frederick had been excommunicated, after all), as well as concern over the strategic limits of the treaty. For Mastnak the Pope’s disapproval can mean only one thing, the Pope wanted a blood bath and was furious when he did not get it. Yet when similar truces were negotiated around this time, such as that of Richard of Cornwall in 1241,(47) the papacy made no objections, which of course presents a problem for Mastnak’s theory.
Perhaps most confusing is Mastnak’s claim that eastern Christians had “never appealed for help” to the West.(48) As already noted, there is a considerable amount of correspondence from Eastern Christian rulers in the late eleventh century requesting military aid from Popes and members of the western nobility in the years leading up to the crusades.(49) It would be odd indeed if Mastnak were simply unaware of this correspondence. If he is aware then he needs to deal more forthrightly with it and explain how such negotiations do not qualify as an appeal from the East to the West for help.
On the whole, Mastnak deserves credit for his work as it provides an alternative opinion on those issues crusades historians have been debating for years. There is no question that Mastnak is widely read in primary sources, even if his knowledge of secondary works seems at times questionable. Mastnak is certainly correct in asserting that the crusades have had an important impact on the development of the West and its relations with the Muslim world. Yet his unwillingness to consider that the crusades and the survival of a crusading idealogy in Europe happened in part as a response to Muslim military expansion into the European world (lasting until the eighteenth century no less) seems an enormous handicap to his research.
References----------------------------
1. Tomaz Mastnak. Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), see chapters 1-3, especially chapter one. The Peace and Truce of God movements originated in local French councils in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries and were efforts by the Church to pacify the militant culture of the West and end inter-Christian warfare. Clerical leaders sought to do this by proscribing attacks on certain social groups (clergy, women, children, and the poor) and on several days of religious significance. Anyone who violated these terms was subject to excommunication. Pope Urban instituted the Truce of God for the whole Church just prior to his calling of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095. See H.E.J. Cowdrey. “The Peace and Truce of God in the Eleventh Century.” Past and Present, 46 (1970), 42-67 and The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
2. Mastnak, 163.
3. See chapter 3 in Mastnak, 91-154, which covers the unification of Europe in the making of a common front, the making of the Muslim enemy, and the papal monarchy and the crusade.
4. See page 346 for his only explicit reference to “sacred” violence (although the notion of a sacralization of violence is implied throughout his work). Concerning the permanent nature of the crusade, see page 120 where Mastnak notes “Winning event the entirety of this world could not have quenched the holy desire that animated the crusade. The crusade, once launched, was destined to become permanent. The crusading ideal was indeed a ‘state of permanent war against the heathen.’”
5. A number of historians who have published on the crusades have unfavorably reviewed Mastnak’s book. Undoubtedly the most hostile review is that of Matthew Sayles and John H. Prior (Journal of Religious History, 29:2, June 2005, p. 183-184). In response to Mastnak’s claim that the papacy’s desire for war in the East was to establish peace and unity in the West, Sayles and Prior note, “Mastnak has rehabilitated an argument that has been soundly attacked by Marcus Bull in his Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade [Also cited by Bernard Hamilton in his review of Mastnak] and by many others.... It is the stuff of undergraduate essays. He has fallen into the same trap as many scholars of the past because he has both misunderstood what the Peace movement was all about and also how limited it was in its achievements. In fact the Peace movement had little to do with “right” or “wrong” warfare but a huge amount to do with protecting ecclesiastical property. And, for the most part, it failed…The idea that that avenues for exercise of the profession of arms of arms for profit in the West were cut off by the Peace movement and that this induced the warriors to embrace an alternative, war against Muslims, is simply silly. Less than 2-3% , probably closer to 1%, of the warriors of the Latin West left on the armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1096, and those that did didn’t go for the reasons attributed to them by Mastnak but rather for reasons of personal penitential piety such as has led thousands of their predecessors to make penitential pilgrimages also…Not only does Mastnak’s book fail on the grounds of historicity, it also fails on the grounds of sociological analysis…[the authors continue with several more criticisms, describing some of Mastnak’s claims as “ridiculous.”]. Perhaps the most positive review was by Norman Housley (The Journal of Ecclesiastical History Jan. 2003, v54 i1, p 131) who notes “The great merit of Tomaz Mastnak’s study is his willingness to engage with ideology, focusing on the relationship between crusading and public peace…” Yet Housley also has his concerns, “He [Mastnak] has a tendency to indulge in sweeping generalizations which fail to advance the argument, and at times he cannot break free from an old fashioned tendency to consider all issues of authority in medieval Europe in terms of Church and State.” James Muldoon (The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2003), 54: 97-194), notes “It seems to me that Mastnak underestimates the fear that Muslim advances generated within the Christian world. Even the internal persecution that [R.I.] Moore discusses was often linked to a belief that Jews and Heretics were a kind of fifth column, serving the interests of the advancing Muslims.” In reference to the long term effects of the crusading spirit on the development of Europe, Muldoon notes, “In the long run, Mastnak overestimates the effect on Europe of papal calls for crusades. Christendom never became the peaceful, orderly society that was sought, and there was never the united opposition to the Muslims that the supporters of crusades demanded.” Bernard Hamilton takes a more aggressive approach (American Historical Review Oct. 2003, v108 i4, p.1204 ). noting, “Yet he [Mastnak] nowhere explains that the crusade movement was part of an ongoing war between Christian and Muslim powers dating back to the rise of the Arab Empire in the seventh century; nor does he give any consideration to the effects of those conquests on the indigenous Christians who, from the ninth century at least, were treated as second class citizens by their Muslim rulers and were subject to petty discrimination. Yet these were factors that helped to shape the medieval West’s reaction to Islam.” In reference to Mastnak’s claim that the launching of the First Crusade “had little to do with circumstances in the Near East…” (p. 119) Hamilton responds, “Given the Seljuk annexation of Asia Minor, the appeal of Emperor Alexius I Comnenus to the pope for military aid, and the complaints of Western pilgrims about the dangers of traveling to Jerusalem, this statement is seriously misleading. Mastnak’s whole account is written this way: he will not accept that Westerners associated with the crusades were ever well intentioned.”
6. See, for example, the review by Talal Asad, (History of Religions 42:3, 2003, 249) a Professor of Anthropology at City University of New York, whose research focuses on religious law in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt [see the C.U.N.Y faculty webpage]. Talal describes Mastnak’s book as a “brilliant, learned study.” Mastnak also receives high marks in a review by Albert Hernandez (Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, 2004, 552-556), Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity at the Iliff School of Theology. Hernandez notes that Mastnak has made an “innovative and insightful” contribution that will “enhance the public and academic understanding of the complex historical forces that shaped western attitudes toward the Muslim “other” and of the Islamic reaction to the nebulous ‘Franks’ before, during, and after the Crusades—and indeed right up to the current, post- 9/11 phase of this conflict.”
7. Of the previously mentioned crusades historians who have reviewed the work (see f.n. 6 in this essay), none of them seem to pick up on the idea that the sacralization of violence with the calling of the First Crusade is Mastnak’s new contribution to understandings of the period. Norman Housley notes Mastnak’s main argument is that “the relationship between crusading and public peace …was established with great force by Urban II, was reaffirmed and refined by crusading apologists thoughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries…” If Housley’s is correct, then Mastnak offers nothing new as this is ground that was first covered extensively by Carl Erdmann in 1935. James Muldoon argues that Mastnak’s main argument “is that ‘the crusades had a deep, crucial influence on the formation of Western civilizations’, shaping Western relations with the Muslim world to this day. At the heart of Christian Muslim relations, so he argues, is the paradox that the Crusaders were the by-product of the peace movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, because this movement required the diversion of those given to violence away from Europe to the frontier with the Islamic world.” Again, this is Carl Erdmann’s argument. Bernard Hamilton notes, “Tomaz Mastnak argues that the crusading ideology still underpins much Western thinking about Islam and sets out to examine how this has come about. Mastnak attributes to the Peace and Truce of God movements a more central role in the genesis of the crusades than the work of Marcus Bull…” By citing Bull’s work in opposition to Mastnak, Hamilton implies that Mastnak is examining the same theory already refuted by Bull, which is that the crusades were called primarily to export violence to the East thereby bringing peace to Europe. Sayles and Prior simply note that “Tomaz Mastnak has joined Loren Mackinney and Karl Erdmann in arguing that the First Crusade was a product of the Peace Movement of the late tenth and eleventh centuries…”
8. Albert Hernandez (see f.n. 7) notes, “Toma [sic] Mastnak’s book examines how the medieval Church and feudal nobility acted together in the sanctification and carrying out of the “peace movement,” which transformed feudal warfare into what he calls the “peace war” and eventually led to the use of “peace” as a pretext for acts of aggression against the Muslim world.” Talal Asad (see f.n. 7) notes that the “provocative conclusion” of Mastnak’s book is that the crusades were a “vehicle” for achieving the “ideals of unity and peace” and that crusading ideology had a “crucial influence on the formation of western civilization, shaping culture, ideas, and institutions” making a “profound impact on Christian thinking about “sacred violence.”
9. The idea that the crusades resulted from a desire to export violence to the East and pacify the West in accordance with the Peace and Truce of God movements is what crusades historians refer to as the “Erdmann thesis”, see Carl Erdmann. The Origins of the Idea of the Crusade, trans. M. W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart, Princeton, NJ, 1977 (originally published in German in 1935). Erdmann was not the first to make this argument, as Loren C. MacKinney had made the same argument five years earlier (see f.n. 12), but Erdmann was the first to popularize it. While the Erdmann thesis is no longer widely embraced, or has at least been heavily modified, by crusades historians, it is a testament to Erdmann’s influence that so many historians at some point were compelled to refute some aspect of it. For refutations of the Erdmann thesis, or crucial aspects of it, see , Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, 1972. Translated by John Gillingham. 2nd edition, Clarendon Press, 1997. Mayer’s classic work argues that Pope Urban II’s primary concern (and reason for calling the First Crusade) was the treatment of Jerusalem under Muslim rule. See also H. E. J. Cowdrey.. "Pope Urban II's Preaching of the First Crusade." History 55 (1970): 177-88, which expands on Mayer’s thesis. Also see Marcus Bull. Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, C.970-C.1130. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993. Bull argues that the Peace and Truce of God movements were not as central to the cause of the crusade as Erdmann once argued.
10. Mastnak cites research by prior historians on these issues extensively. For example, Mastnak cites Erdmanns’ work no less than 26 times in his footnotes for the first chapter alone, and several additional times in later chapters. Such documentation may have contributed to the claim of some reviewers that Mastnak was rehashing Erdmanns’ thesis.
11. See, for example, the review of Albert Hernandez (see f.n. 8). Also see Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s short blurb on the back of the book jacket, in which she notes, “As Mastnak puts it, the peace movement and then the Crusades declared war on war, in the process ennobling and sanctifying- “Christianizing- war and spawning a new type of war, the peace war.”
12. On a number of occasions before the crusades, Church authorities, including the papacy, often blessed Christian war efforts or promised spiritual benefits for doing so. Mastnak essentially acknowledges this when he writes, “Were we determined, however, to identify wars that we could say presaged the Crusades, we might settle upon wars that did not figure in the crusaders’ imagination: those conducted by the ninth century and tenth century popes.” Although Mastnak argrees that such wars were very similar to Crusades (nearly identical spiritual benefits and reasons were promised for those who heeded the papal call to arms), in no case was the Pope formally “allowed to initiate, direct, or lead a war” even if the reality was different. In otherwords, for Mastnak, these wars would not count as presaging the crusades because in theory, even if they did so in reality, the Popes had no legitimate right to call for these wars. One wonders if the same reasoning could not be applied to Pope Urban II’s calling of the First Crusade, as he had not had the approval of tradition or church councils (other than those he oversaw) to initiate and direct the First Crusade. The ninth century Popes Mastnak refers to include Pope Leo IV (r. 847-855) who called on the Franks to go to war as a defense of faith and country, “Now we hope that none of you will be slain, but we wish you to know that the kingdom of heaven will be given as a reward to those who shall be killed in this war. For the Omnipotent knows that they lost their lives fighting for the truth of the faith, for the preservation of their country, and the defence of Christians. And therefore God will give then, the reward which we have named.”. In Migne, Patrologia Latina, 115: 656-657, and 161:720, .trans. Oliver J. Thatcher, and Edgar Holmes McNeal, eds., A Source Book for Medieval History, (New York: Scribners, 1905), 511-12. Mastnak also references Pope John VIII who in 878 called the Franks to battle, noting, “You have modestly expressed a desire to know whether those who have recently died in war, fighting in defence of the church of God and for the preservation of the Christian religion and of the state, or those who may in 'he future fall in the same cause, may obtain indulgence for their sins. We confidently reply that those who, out of love to the Christian religion, shall die in battle fighting bravely against pagans or unbelievers, shall receive eternal life. For the Lord has said through his prophet: "In whatever hour a sinner shall be converted, I will remember his sins no longer." By the intercession of St. Peter, who has the power of binding and loosing in heaven and on the earth, we absolve, as far as is permissible, all such and commend them by our prayers to the Lord.” In Migne, Patrologia Latina, 126: 816. trans. Oliver J. Thatcher, and Edgar Holmes McNeal, eds., A Source Book for Medieval History, (New York: Scribners, 1905), 512. The wording used by these Popes concerning the spiritual benefits of warfare are nearly identical to those used by crusading era popes. Yet nowhere does Mastnak credit these as examples of the Church sacralizing war even with a limited application.
13. Loren C. MacKinney “The People and Public Opinion in the Eleventh-Century Peace Movement.” Speculum 3:2 (1930), 201. Mackinney notes, “So far as the Truce of Clermont is concerned, the notable point is the way in which the Pope used the prevailing peace sentiment as a medium for his combined projects. The plan of directing the warlike forces of Christendom against the infidel instead of vainly trying to inhibit them was in itself a masterpiece of strategy…The crusading Truce-Peace saved feudal society from domestic wars by glorifying foreign warfare.” [emphasis mine] One may quibble about the precise meanings of glorify (to give glory, honor, or high praise to; exalt) as opposed to sanctify (to set apart for sacred use, to give social or moral sanction to), but it seems in essence here that Mackinney is making a very similar argument to Mastnak. H.E. J. Cowdrey’s 1970 article (see f.n.9) also touched on the issue in a similar way. He noted, “…it was upon the knights that the task of defending Christian peoples by force of arms against their internal and external foes increasingly rested; in recognition of this, the Church began to bless their weapons of warfare…In due course, Pope Gregory VII finally broke with the age long reluctance of Christians fully to recognize the licitness of the procession of arms.” Also, concerning Mastnak’s claim that this sacralization of violence was only first applied to the whole Church with the calling of the crusades, rather than with limited jurisdiction as in previous cases, Mackinney notes, “At the Council of Clermont, Urban gave universal application…to the peace movement” in which she notes the crusades were an essential element. Consequently, it may be the reason that none of the previously mentioned crusades historians bothered to mention this aspect of Mastnak’s work in their reviews, that the crusades represented a sacralization of violence, was because they did not consider it a new or novel argument.
14. Mastnak, 44. He notes, “The crusade was the consummation of the peace movement—its accomplishment and the realization of its ideals. It is true that this view, propounded by a number of historians both before and after World War II, has recently been questioned. The argument that “the superficially attractive link between the Peace and the crusade is a chimera,” is based on a study of the ‘actual experiences of the lay rank and file,’ as opposed to ecclesiastics’ theoretical pronouncements.” [In this paragraph Mastnak is citing Marcus Bull, Knightly Piety, 1993].
15. Interestingly, the Gesta Francorum, which provides the earliest record of the First Crusade by a participant, does not mention inter-Christian violence in the West as among the preaching themes cited by either Pope Urban II or other preachers. In his account, the Pope emphasized only the need to go to the aid of holy places in the East. For a short selection from the Gesta on the preaching of the First Crusade see, Oliver J. Thatcher, and Edgar Holmes McNeal, eds., A Source Book for Medieval History, (New York: Scribners, 1905), 513-17. For a full length translation of the Gesta see, Anonymous. Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum. translated as The Deeds of the Franks and the Other Pilgrims to Jerusalem, by Rosalind Hill. New York: T. Nelson, 1962.
16. See, for example, the account of Fulcher of Chartres, who wrote of the Pope’s universal application of the Truce of God at the Council of Clermont. Other early accounts, such as those of Robert the Monk, Baldric of Dol, and Guibert of Nogent also cite the Pope’s call for an end to violence in the West. In all of these accounts, once he turned his attention to the calling of the crusade, the Pope described violence against Muslims in the East and in defense of eastern Christians and holy places as a positive good. All of these accounts are found in A.C. Krey. The First Crusade. The Accounts of Eye Witnesses and Participants. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1921.
17. Mastnak, 163, and elsewhere.
18. Variations of the export of violence theory have been cited as one (among others) of the potential motivations for Urban II’s calling of the First Crusade in several general studies of the crusades since Erdmann’s thesis became well known in the late 1930s. Among the more recent, see Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A Short History, p.14-16, Christopher Tyreman’s Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades, p. 111-112, and Thomas Madden’s A Concise History of the Crusades, 6.
19. See Jonathan Riley-Smith. The Crusades: A Short History. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 2, and Hans E. Mayer. The Crusades. Trans. John Gillingham. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 7.
20. While numerous crusades historians have made this point, including Hans.E. Mayer, H.E.J. Cowdrey, Thomas Madden, and Jonathan Riley-Smith, it is perhaps most worthwhile to return to the earlier and foundational work of Steven Runciman on this issue, as there are few historians who have shown greater sympathy for the position of the Greeks during the crusades. Runciman first addresses Byzantium’s need for western aid when he notes, “The emperor, Alexius Comnenus, was a realist. He saw that for his empire to survive, the Turks must be driven back in Anatolia, and he needed soldiers for that purpose. In the old days, the bulk of the empire’s troops had come from Anatolia, and now Anatolia was almost entirely lost [to Turkish invasion]…it seemed [to Alexius] that the troops best fitted to deal with the Turks in battle were soldiers from the West, especially the heavy western cavalry.” Then Runciman notes the means by which the emperor sought military aid from the West, “His ambassadors [of Alexius] happened to be in Italy when Urban II held the first great council of his reign, at Piacenza in March 1095. The ambassadors received permission to address the assembly. In their desire to obtain recruits, they seem to have painted in lurid colors the danger to Christendom that the Turks presented…The pope was deeply moved, and during the next few months he developed the idea of helping the East…” It is also interesting to note, in light of Mastnak’s attribution of ulterior motives for the papacy’s calling of the First Crusade that Runciman ascribes pure motives to Pope Urban II. While arguing that the crusades were ultimately disastrous for Byzantium, Runciman describes their origins (entirely in contrast to Mastnak) as “a movement launched by a noble minded pope [Urban II] with the utmost good will…” See Steven Runciman. “Byzantium and the Crusades.” The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange between East and West during the Period of the Crusades. Eds. Vladimir P. Goss and Christine Verzar Bornstein. (Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), 15-22.
21. Certainly Byzantine officials writing to western leaders in the decades leading up to the crusades believed that stories of the desecration of the Holy Land by the Turks would inspire western sympathy. Their correspondence [i.e. the Letter of Alexius to Count Robert of Flanders of which the surviving form is believed based on a genuine original] is full of horrific examples of the abuse of Christians and Christian holy places in Jerusalem and the Holy Land and is clearly meant to provoke a response. See also Mayer, 8. Mayer notes, “Our information on the Council of Piacenza comes from the chronicler Bernold of Constance, and it is today generally accepted as bring trustworthy…the discovery, some twenty years ago, of a thirteenth century Byzantine chronicle tended to confirm Bernold’s account for although itself written much later, the chronicle appears to contain excerpts from reliable contemporary historians. It also tells us that when Alexius appealed for help at Piacenza he deliberately emphasized the idea of help for Jerusalem because he anticipated that this would prove an effective propaganda slogan in Europe.”
22. Mastnak, 119.
23. No less than nine existing accounts of Pope Urban’s preaching of the First Crusade that were authored in the twelfth century cite the desecration of Jerusalem (or more specifically the Holy Sepulcher) as one of the Pope’s chief reasons for calling the crusade. See the accounts by Fulcher of Chartres, Robert the Monk, Baldric of Dol, Guibert of Nogent, William of Malmesbury, Ekkehard of Aura, Ordericus Vitalis, William of Tyre, and Roger of Wendover.
24. I am unaware of any modern crusades historian who thinks Jerusalem had nothing to do with the Pope’s reasons for calling the First Crusade other than Mastnak. This includes historians such as Jonathan Riley-Smith, John France, Thomas Madden, Christopher Tyreman, Helen Nicholson, Edward Peters, Hans Meyer, and many others.
25. Mastnak, 126. “The declaration of fraternal love for the eastern Christians was a pretext for launching the First Crusade; Urban II had laid much emphasis on this love when he preached the crusade at Clermont .
26. Again, almost all accounts of Urban II’s calling of the First Crusade emphasize this point (as Mastnak acknowledges, see f.n. 25). In the case of many of these versions it is the chief argument the Pope cites to justify the calling of the crusade. See especially the account of Robert the Monk, for example. Nor am I aware of a major modern historian who argues that western concerns for eastern Christians just prior to the launching of the First Crusade were not genuine. To the contrary, many seem to think they were quite sincere and list such a concern among the chief motive.
27. My concern is not that Mastnak is arguing something different on these points, but only that since he is diverging so far from the mainstream of current scholarly thought among specialists of these issues, that he make a greater effort to justify his position rather than simply asserting it, as he has done in this case.
28. Mastnak, 118-119.
29. The Turks captured Nicaea in 1077 and Antioch in 1084, as well as a host of other cities throughout Asia Minor which they came to control nearly in its entirety by means of siege and conquest.
30. With each Turkish victory, to the victor went the spoils, which included newly made slaves drawn from the surviving population of the defeated city. Others were executed, ransomed, or allowed to live on in the city with multiple restrictions placed on their religious, social, and cultural customs. Additionally, there were numerous reports by pilgrims returning from the East of the abuse of Christians by Muslims in the Holy Land. See for example the Annalist of Nieder-Altaich’s account of the Great German Pilgrimage of 1064-1065, in which he notes, “… they [the pilgrims] suddenly fell into the hands of the Arabs [Turks] who leaped on them like famished wolves on long awaited prey. They slaughtered the first pilgrims pitiably, tearing them to pieces. At first our people tried to fight back, but they were quickly forced, as poor men, to take refuge in the village. After they had fled, who can explain in words how many men were killed there, how many types of death there were, or how much calamity and grief there was? Bishop William of Utrecht, badly wounded and stripped of his clothes, was left lying on the ground with many others to die a miserable death.” In James Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary History, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1962. If we can believe the chroniclers of this event, then only around 2000 of the original 7000 who began the pilgrimage made it back to the West, with the rest being killed, enslaved, or dying from other causes. Regardless of whether such numbers are to be trusted, the event caused quite a stir in the West and undoubtedly gave thousands of potential western pilgrims cause for concern.
31. Again, since at least the reign of Michael Doukas II, in the wake of the Byzantine defeat at Mantzikert in 1071, Byzantine rulers had been in correspondence with western leaders seeking aid for their wars against their increasingly successful Muslim opponents.
32. Mastnak, 125.
33. According to the various versions of Pope Urban’s speech at Clermont, he frames his call for a crusade to his French audience by appealing to the deeds of Charlemagne and other Carolingians against their Muslim foes. Perhaps even more noteworthy, in the version by Guibert of Nogent, the Pope references that once Christian lands such as Egypt, Africa, and Ethiopia had “withdrawn from the communion” of the Christian belief on account of Islam, which clearly reflects an awareness on the part of ecclesiastical elites of the historic impact of the rise of Islam on Christianity. As John Tolan has pointed out, western concerns about Islam began centuries before the crusades, “From the eighth century to the twelfth, Eastern Christians polemical views of Islam were imported into Spain, where they were reworked and brought to Northern Europe.” Southern Europe had long since developed a view of Muslims as the enemies in Spain, Italy, and Southern France due to various military conflicts with Islamic armies. See John Tolan. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 70.
34. Negative images of Muslims as an enemy of Christians had existed in the West since the eighth century. See Tolan’s work for an extensive examination of western understandings of Islam (see reference in above f.n.).
35. Thomas Madden. A Concise History of the Crusades. (Lanham: Rowman, 1999), 5. Madden notes, “Within a few years [of the Byzantine defeat at Mantzikert], the citizens of Constantinople could look across the Bosphorus and see the land of the Turks.”
35. Riley-Smith, 2. “The papacy had for sometime been worried by the disintegration of Christendom’s eastern frontier. News of the Turkish advances had led Pope Gregory VII to make an extraordinary proposal to lead personally a force of as many as 50,000 volunteers to ‘liberate’ their Christian brothers in the East; he stated that the army might even push on to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.”
37. Riley-Smith, 2.
38. Oddly, the events of the Council of Piacenza are nowhere mentioned in Mastnak’s work. While Urban began his pontificate in exile, he worked hard to win support from powerful allies so that he could return to Rome in 1094. In the following year the Council of Piacenza was held to settle a number of issues in the wake of the Investiture Controversy. The Council was attended by a large number of bishops and representatives of secular powers. Perhaps the most important representative to attend was that of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus. Urban II had been in contact with Alexius Comnenus in an effort for better relations since the beginning of his reign in 1089 and the Pope undoubtedly knew the reason the Byzantine ambassador was there was for the express purpose of asking for aid in their increasingly dangerous conflict with the Turks, who by then controlled most of Asia Minor and threatened the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The Byzantine ambassador’s appeal for aid at Piacenza set in motion events that would only become fully realized later that year at the Council of Clermont in November of 1095 when Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade.
39. Mastnak, 60.
40. What Mastnak does not note is that the actions of the crusaders at Jerusalem in 1099 were well within the accepted moral standard in all pre-modern European and Asian civilizations [i.e. Islamic]. Cities that resisted capture and were then taken by force belonged entirely to the conquerer. This included not just the city and its possessions, but the people as well.
41. The way Mastnak portrayed this event did not sit well with me. His presentation of events here is more in keeping with the way crusades historians wrote about the event up until the Steven Runciman era, rather than how it is understood by more recent scholars. If Mastnak were restricting his comments on this event to only the rhetoric used at the time, he should have made this clearer by at least referencing the massive amount of scholarship over the last thirty years that has reassessed the reality of the events that took place at Jerusalem in 1099. Mastnak is right, however, that clerical sources of the time present the siege as a bloodbath victory by the crusaders. Medieval thinkers associated such a victory with God’s good will while the defeated assumed that God had forsaken them, hence the need to portray events in such a way. Such accounts also reflect the literary skills of the writer more than actual events. For example, Mastnak cites Raymond of Aguilers describing scene of the crusaders’ victory, noting, “men rode in blood ip to their knees and the bridle reins.” Yet this, as Mastnak might have pointed out since his focus is rhetoric, reflects the cleric Raymond’s familiarity with the bible more than any reality of the event, as he was citing Revelations 14:20.
42. An enormous amount of scholarship has come out over the last thirty years that frame the capture of Jerusalem as no worse in terms of bloodshed or brutality than similar sieges and conquests throughout the medieval world. Such a view has become the prevailing orthodoxy on the issue. See John France, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 355, and Ronald C. Finucane, Soldiers of the Faith: Crusaders and Moslims at War. (London: Dent, 1983), 100.
43. This refers to a source that was discovered in the late 1990s by the twelfth-century Muslim author Ibn al Arab. I have not been able to consult the source directly as it has not, so far as I know, been translation into English. I am only aware of it through secondary sources by Thomas Madden and Jonathan Riley-Smith.
44. One would think that if the papacy’s official (rhetorical) position was to “exterminate Muslims” then there would be some source from the crusading era in which a pope expresses his disapproval (at least rhetorically) with the literally dozens of times successful battles for the crusaders ended without an extermination of the Muslim population. Quite the opposite, as Pope’s usually sent their blessings and congratulations in the wake of successful battles that did not end in extermination. Mastnak will have to wait until the Sixth Crusade led by the excommunicate Frederick II in the mid-thirteenth century before he can make such a claim, but even then, there are mitigating circumstances that Mastnak does not take into account as will be explored in this essay.
45. Perhaps the best work of primary sources to consult for more information on this interaction is Francesco Gabrieli. Arab Historians of the Crusades. Translated by E. J. Costello. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Source selections provide details on friendships and commercial relationships between Latin Christians and Muslims throughout the period of the existence of the crusader states. There are also an enormous number of secondary works that address this issue. See, for example, Hussein M. Attiya. "Knowledge of Arabic in the Crusader States in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries." Journal of Medieval History 25:3 (1999): 203-13, Adrain J. Boas. Jerusalem in the time of the Crusades: Society, landscape and art in the Holy City under Frankish rule. London: Routledge, 2001, and Joshua Prawer. "Social Classes in the Crusader States: the 'Minorities.'" In A History of the Crusades (Editor in Chief, Kenneth Meyer Setton) Vol. V The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East. Edited by Norman P. Zacour and Harry W. Hazard. 59-116. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969-89.
46. Mastnak, 152.
47. It’s worth noting that, in addition to Richard of Cornwall’s treaty in 1241, there were a considerable number of other peace treaties negotiated by Christian leaders throughout the crusading era and such arrangements were never condemned by the papacy. Any recent study of the crusader states will provide numerous examples. The fact that the only example Mastnak can cite as support for his claim that Popes sought the extermination of Muslims comes from this particular incident with Frederick II, more than 150 years after the start of the crusading movement, is quite revealing.
48. Mastnak, 119.
49. See page 13 and explanatory footnotes 20 and 21.