Poetic Places and Real Spaces: Anthropology of Space in Crusade Literature

Abstract

Space was not a neutral topic in the Middle Ages. Who you were, what your name was, if you were a noble: these were functions of land, the place with which you were identified. Nation, originally, was the place of one's birth. Yet space was, to no small extent, less an empirical concept than a literary one. For many, the Bible was the first and only authoritative geographical text in the Middle Ages-the Bible and the pilgrimage accounts it spawned. For at this time, literary texts, beginning with the Bible, became guides for real activities that from a modern perspective would seem to have been better grounded in empirical observation. Be that as it may, reading the Bible as a literal account of terrestrial topography, and then acting on this understanding by making pilgrimages, had significant consequences for all kinds of practical enterprises. One such enterprise was the crusades, and the main question I want to ask in this paper is relatively straightforward: Why were the crusades a central preoccupation of Europe for some five hundred years (from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries) when, with the exception of the First Crusade (1099-1101 ), these expeditions were military disasters, or certainly far from a succession of glorious victories, at least for the Europeans? Muslim heroes like Saladin, and Muslim triumphs were by far more common, and yet Europe kept looking to its crusading dream. I am a literary historian, not an economic or military one, so it will come as no surprise that the two theses I will advance involve the crusade literature of the period. I first look at the link that has long been postulated between pilgrimages and crusades. In my view, the connection, while real enough, is, in reality, illogical; yet it does explain in part how the crusaders could fail to perceive what it was they were really