Kreuzzug und regionale Herrschaft: Die älteren Grafen von Berg 1147–1225

Abstract

German crusade studies are slowly but surely gathering pace. In this new book Alexander Berner investigates the involvement of the counts of Berg in the crusades between the middle of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries. The counts of Berg were one of the leading noble families of the Rhineland during the high middle ages, dominating the regional political and seigneurial scenes together with a number of other powerful families, such as the counts of Jülich, Cleve and Sayn, and the archbishop of Cologne. The chronological boundaries of Berner’s study are set by the first appearance of a crusading count of Berg on the Second Crusade and the disappearance of the high medieval dynasty of the older counts of Berg with the death of its last male heir Count Engelbert II in 1225. The centrepiece of the study is an investigation into the crusading activities of the four counts of Berg who took part in the Second, Third, Fifth and the Albigensian Crusades. Berner combines traditional German regional history ( Landesgeschichte ) with approaches of recent, mostly English-language crusade studies that explore the political, social and cultural contexts that promoted crusading enthusiasm and shaped a crusading culture beyond the military campaigns. Like Berner’s book, most of these studies, by scholars such as Marcus Bull, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Jonathan Phillips, Kathleen Thompson and Nicholas Paul to mention just a few, are focused on comital families and their involvement with the crusades.