Crusades-Encyclopedia Return to Crusades Historiography   Return to Table of Contents What is a Crusade? Traditionalists vs. Pluralists
While scholars have differed over what qualifies as a crusade, such a qualification is necessary in determining the proper scope of crusades historiography. The issue is an important one for historians because with the expansion of the crusading movement comes the corresponding expansion of sources available for study. Yet the very issue of defining a crusade has, until recently, been one of the areas of greatest disagreement among crusades scholars. Scholars have essentially divided into two camps on the issue, those known as traditionalists and those known as pluralists. Traditionalists have emphasized the well-known and often popularized crusading efforts in the East, which took place from the end of the eleventh to the end of the thirteenth centuries, as the embodiment of the crusading movement. In this case, the purpose of a crusade is either to assist eastern Christians or to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher. (1) Among the most notable of the traditionalists is the German scholar Hans Eberhard Mayer. Mayer, in his work The Crusades, first published in German in 1965 and English in 1972, defined a crusade as having Christian domination over the Holy Sepulcher as its goal.(2) This narrow definition allows only for those expeditions with Jerusalem as its destination as a proper crusade and may also be a more accurate reflection of popular understandings of the crusades. Pluralists, as opposed to the traditionalists, cite papal authorization as the defining feature of a crusade, regardless of against who or where it is directed. Consequently, the pluralists’ definition of a crusade provides for a broad expansion of the crusading movement including expeditions against religious dissenters, pagans, political opponents, and Muslims in Europe. (3) Because pluralists are increasingly dominating the ranks of crusades historians, the field of crusades studies has grown correspondingly to address the broader pluralist definition. Perhaps the most well known and influential of the pluralists is the Cambridge University historian Jonathan Riley-Smith. In 1977 he defined a crusade as “…a holy war authorized by the pope, who proclaimed it in the name of God or Christ...a defensive reaction to injury or aggression or as an attempt to recover Christian territories lost to the infidels, it answered the needs of the whole church or all of Christendom...rather than those of a particular nation.”(4) Scholar Elizabeth Siberry has endorsed Riley-Smith’s definition with minor modifications arguing the crusades are also launched by the papacy “against heretics, schismatics, and Christian lay powers in the West as well as the campaigns against the Muslims in the Near East.”(5) Riley-Smith argues that the pluralist movement began with Princeton historian Giles Constable in 1953. It was then that Constable demonstrated that the various expeditions around the time of the Second Crusade taking place in the Levant, Spain, and Central Europe, were parts of a larger collective movement, rather than separate unassociated movements.(6) Contributing to Constable’s pluralist position was scholar Norman Housley’s work on the Italian Crusades, which demonstrated their compatibility with the crusades to the East.(7) Crusades Historiography- Crusades-Encyclopedia Traditionalists- Crusades-Encyclopedia Pluralists- Crusades-Encyclopedia Hans Eberhard Mayer- Crusades-Encyclopedia Jonathan Riley-Smith- Crusades-Encyclopedia Giles Constable- Crusades-Encyclopedia Elizabeth Siberry- Crusades-Encyclopedia 1. Giles Constable. “The Historiography of the Crusades.” In The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World. Ed. Angeliki Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh. (Washington DC: Dumberton Oaks, 2001), 12. 2. Hans Eberhard Mayer. The Crusades, 2nd ed., trans John Gillingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 3. Among the specific movements included in the broader definition of the crusading movement are the so-called Reconquista, the Albigensian Crusade, the Hussite Crusades, The Baltic or Northern Crusades, and the Italian Crusades. 4. Jonathan Riley-Smith. What Were the Crusades? (London: MacMillan, 1977), 12. 5. Elizabeth Siberry. Criticism of Crusading: 1095-1274. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), preface. 6. Jonathan Riley-Smith “The Crusading Movement and Historians.” In The Oxford History of the Crusades. Ed. by Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11. 7. Norman Housley. The Italian Crusades: the Papal-Angevin alliance and the Crusades against Christian Lay Powers, 1254-1343, Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. More recently Housley has edited a series of “crusades sources” reflecting his pluralist position that date to the end of the sixteenth century. See Norman Housley, ed.. Documents on the Later Crusades, 1274-1580. Documents in History Series. New York: St Martins Press, 1996. (c) Andrew Holt- December 2005- Permission is granted for electronic copying and distribution in print for educational and personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.