The Crusades

Marcus Bull:

• First crusade was culmination of a century's effort to square the circle of reducing the incidence of violence in society whilst enhancing fighting men's sense of their moral worth.
• BUT, doesn't allow for the considerable variations among the regions of post-Carolingian Europe.
• Ample narrative evidence that the news of the crusade was enthusiastically received over a wide area.
• Diverse composition of the crusading armies also impressed the crusaders themselves.
• Compared to late expeditions to the Holy Land, the interval between the proclamation of the First Crusade and mobilisation was extremely short.
• Valuable clues which point to a planned preaching campaign engaging in different levels of church hierarchy.
• Proved crucial to the success of the crusade appeal that Urban was able to follow the Council of Clermont with an eight month tour of Southern and Western French-speaking lands.
• Participation on the crusade was a voluntary exercise. No domestic ties and allegiances could oblige a person to crusade.

Norman Housley:

• Chroniclers depict the crusade as one of a handful of examples of divine intervention in the affairs of men.
• Possible Pope experienced a revelation (divine or otherwise) that caused him to preach of wholly new way of earning salvation througb pious violence in Christ's name (BUT hardly likely).
• Edward Gibbon - sermon at Clermont 'touched a nerve of exquisite feeling'.
• The Catholic west was ready for the First Crusade, so Urban's call to arms was greeted with enthusiasm.
• Over the past 50 years, slackening of interest in socio-economic factors has occurred.
• Heavy expenses the aristocratic families had to shoulder show it was the opposite of any east option for them.
• Timing seems to fit with Marxc Bloch's famed interpretation of the arrival of a 'second feudal age'.
• Argument that the commitment of the first crusaders was shaped by an ideology of peace is hard to square with their behaviour before, during or after the first crusade.
• Stressing religious origins of the crusade fits with picture presented in sources

Erdmann:

• Views the crusade as first and foremost a form of the Holy War, addressed to Christian knights in terms of their vocations by a Pope who was fuly conscious of what it meant for his authority.

Norman Housley:

• No monastic charters written to the poor, so this revised view of the devotional origins of the first crusade applies primarily to the nobles.
• Agreed - the events in the Adriatic played at best the role of the catalyst in producing the call to arms and the response that it acheived.
• Developments in the East did less to create the first crusade than used to be thought, but there can be no doubt that events in the Islamic world were crucial in enabling the expedition to succeed.

Maurice Keen:

• Crusading and chivalry not precisely the same thing.
• There developed about crusading a whole body of chuch doctrine, canonical and theological, which centred ultimately on the indulgence, the formal remission on Papal authority, of the sins of those who took part in the crusade.
• Pope Urban II's appeal of 1095 came as a climax at the end of a long period of development in the Church's attitude in these matters.
• Pope Urban promised 'those who fight in this war shall win remission of all penance'.
• The crusade is presented, indeed, in terms of a positive transformation of the knightly way of life.
• The call to crusade played on ideas which had strong independent roots.
• Church rites, such as the blessing of banners and swords, together with the cult of the military sins did help to remind knights, through symbolism and ritual, that as Christians they should view their calling in Christian terms.