The Experience of Crusading (review)

Abstract

The Experience of Crusading. Volume One: Western Approaches. Edited by Marcus Bull and Norman Housley; Volume TTJVO: Defining the Crusader Kingdom. Edited by Peter Edbury and Jonathan Phillips. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 311;xv, 311. $60.00; $65.00.) The illustrissimo of Anglophone crusade historians, Jonathan Riley-Smith, is the worthy dedicatee of this handsomely produced, two-volume, sixty-fifthbirthday present from his former students and crusade colleagues. And in it Jonathan-I confess a friendship-appears twice. For the same portrait of the amiable, pipe-smoking scholar serves as the frontispiece of each volume. Would that the editors had inserted along with their respective Appreciations a bibliography of his books, essays, and reviews. Particularly in Volume Two, they are guilty of referring to his works without properly citing them. One aspect of Jonathan's achievement deserves to be underscored. A driving force behind the foundation of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East in 1980, he provided crusade studies with a vital institutional focus. Nowadays, no medievalist, regardless of specialism, can ignore the pervasiveness of crusading culture in the Middle Ages. Witness the chronological range of these essays (c. 1000-c. 1400), together with their geographical sweep (Western Europe, the Levant, the Mediterranean world). Likewise impressive are the genres of history represented. Western Approaches, the European volume, begins with Marcus Bull, who offers wise observations on so many themes, e.g., Urban II's sermon, miracula as sources, that his title vainly struggles to contain them. Giles Constable notes that the conquest of Lisbon (1147) was indisputably integral to the Second Crusade. Norman Housley highlights the fundamental problem of the staggering costs of crusading, which, ironically, fourteenth-century promoters of the crusade helped to publicize. Perhaps because the rhetorical pieties of the sources are taken at face value, Christopher Marshall perceives no contradiction between the religious and commercial motives of the Italian city-republics for supporting the crusades. Signaling the influences of the First Crusade upon the Second, Jonathan Phillips argues that Odo of Deuil's De profectione Ludovici VlI is more complex than is usually assumed. James Powell examines the failure of Innocent UFs two-track policy to win over the Byzantine Emperor Alexius III on the eve of the Fourth Crusade. John Pryor's essay on the FourthCrusade Venetian fleet conies as a breath of fresh sea air. Pryor presents a strong case for an amphibious attack on Egypt as Dandolo's original objective. Anna Sapir Abulafia's touches on Joachim of Fiore's attitude to the crusades (disregarding B. Z. Kedar's critique of E. R. Daniel), but is mostly concerned with Joachim and the conversion of the Jews. James Brundage demonstrates convincingly how the canonists created a new category of ecclesiastical persons to accommodate the military orders. Currently preparing a critical edition of Humbert of Romans's Depredicacione cruets (after 1266), Penny J. Cole proves that Humbert took the First Crusade as his paradigm. Characteristically probing, H. EJ. Cowdrey distinguishes between the bellum sacrum and the helium iustum, and dates the blurring of that distinction to the end of the twelfth century. In an essay which is not altogether in harmony with Cowdrey's, John France takes up the Christian attitude to war before 1000, cleverly exploiting hagiography to refute Erdmann. Art and the crusades is reserved for Christoph T. …