CONSIDERING HOLY WAR IN "LE CHARROI DE NÎMES"

Abstract

In recent years the crusades have, not surprisingly, emerged as a flash point in both scholarly and popular discourse. On the one hand, the 900th anniversary of the First Crusade prompted scholars in various disciplines to take stock of that and of later crusades, to re-evaluate them, and to expand their frame of reference by recourse to new documents, analyses, and perspectives.1 On the other hand, the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought the crusades back into the public eye very generally: the current eruptions of conflict in global politics routinely prompt reference to the crusades as a historical precedent, and use of the term 'crusade' itself proves inflammatory.2 The events themselves and prevailing interpretations of them are also played out repeatedly in historical fiction and film, as represented, for example, by the recent film Kingdom of Heaven (dir. Ridley Scott, 2005).3 In specialized study, in the media, and in popular culture, then, a re-examination is under way of the history of religiously inflected conflict between cultures or states, with the heightened ideological, political, and emotional intensity that surrounds the subject of war in a time of war.4Shifts in the majority opinion about the ethical status of the crusades - of both specialists and the general public - have been continual in the centuries since the holy wars took place. At the same time that the facts of the historical events and their causes undergo constant scrutiny, so, too, do the understanding and representation of these events and their causes. As always, the big picture influences the access to and interpretability of the facts in a way which is nowhere more marked than in the question of the ethical status of holy warfare, the motivations of its participants and promoters, and its historical outcomes. The crusades are constantly the subject of re-evaluation, each interpretation usually construed as a corrective to a prior position. After the second World War, for example, Sir Steven Runciman's influential History of the Crusades institutionalized a vision of the crusades as a barbarian invasion motivated largely by self-interest on the part of European ecclesiastics and aristocrats. (If this shorthand summary is a caricature, it exemplifies the simplification and dramatization that usually attend the popular embrace of scholarly constructs.) That vision was contested by Jonathan Riley-Smith, who emphasized instead the sincerely pious motivations of crusaders, who, in fact, made enormous personal and economic sacrifices to take the cross: 'crusading as an act of love', in his words.5 At present Riley-Smith's thesis is enormously influential in crusading scholarship, but in every period there is a broad spectrum of opinion on the phenomenon of crusading. Indeed, one of the purposes of this essay is to contest the idea that during the Middle Ages there was any one 'communal opinion', or overwhelming majority view, of the crusades.The renewed scholarly output on the crusades stimulated by the ninth centenary of the conquest of Jerusalem has included a spate of historiographical reflections dedicated to surveying the way the crusades have been understood and studied. In one deft and incisive survey Giles Constable identifies three major periods in the historiography of the crusades in the West.6 Between 1095 and 1600, he notes, the consensus view was that the holy land was being retaken from Muslims in a primarily territorial struggle. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the threat of invasion receded into the past, the crusades were understood in terms of concerns then current. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the crusades were studied with an attempt at critical and scholarly detachment: in the nineteenth century with a generally positive evaluation;7 in the twentieth, with an increasingly critical eye. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, according to Constable, it is in popular culture that an automatic hostility toward the crusades generally persists. …