Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade by Elizabeth Lapina

Abstract

Reviewed by: Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade by Elizabeth Lapina Megan Cassidy-Welch Lapina, Elizabeth, Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015; hardback; pp. x, 212; 1 b/w illustration; R.R.P. US $74.95; ISBN 9780271066707. Elizabeth Lapina’s monograph offers an original and engaging exploration of the chronicles of the First Crusade, a group of ever-intriguing sources [End Page 223] which has recently enjoyed the attention of a new generation of crusades scholars. As Lapina eloquently expresses, ‘the chronicles of the First Crusade are not just narratives but attempts, disguised as narratives, to prove that this campaign was different from any that had taken place in the past and to understand what this new development meant for the future’ (p. 151). The chronicles are thus explored in the contexts of genre, imagery, and the communication of both confidence and anxiety in the wake of that somewhat unexpected victory at Jerusalem in 1099. The four main participant chronicles – the Gesta francorum, the Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere of Peter Tudebode, Raymond of Aguiliers’s chronicle, and the eyewitness account of Fulcher of Chartres – form the backbone of the book. The re-workings, redactions, and appropriations of these works tell a textual tale almost confounding in its complexity, yet Lapina navigates the sources with care and clarity. Indeed, the short section describing the sources in the introduction to the book is a beautifully concise presentation of these difficult texts. Chief among the textual devices employed within the chronicles to describe and understand the crusade was the miracle, and this is the focus of the book. The six chapters begin with a nuanced study of eyewitnesses of miracles, and especially eyewitnesses to the discovery of the holy lance at Antioch in 1098. Lapina shows that ‘a vocal minority’ (p. 18) disputed the legitimacy of this relic object and as with the miraculous appearance of celestial troops at the battle of Antioch, the eyewitness was not automatically accorded credibility, especially by second-generation chroniclers, who increasingly asserted their own interpretive sophistication over the telling of events. The second chapter examines more closely the supernatural interventions in the battle of Antioch by considering the longer history of similar occurrences, particularly in Graeco-Roman, early Christian, and Byzantine narratives. Lapina finds that the First Crusade chronicles drew on and reworked these earlier traditions. In the third chapter, the mechanics of this borrowing is analysed. It was Byzantine saints who were reported to have appeared at Antioch and Lapina deftly explains how this cohort of warrior saints became integrated into the western crusade imaginary via the Normans. The appropriation of what Lapina describes as a Byzantine ‘sophisticated vocabulary of power’ (p. 74) took place as the Normans transformed themselves from, as Lapina argues in Chapter 4, the ‘scourge of God’ to the ‘Chosen People’, and was one element in the gradual sacralisation of warfare more generally. In the fifth chapter, the figure of Judas Maccabeus is analysed. As crusades scholars have long noted, the story of the Maccabees provided many medieval commentators with a biblical parallel for their efforts in the Holy Land and Lapina adds to this literature with a careful and articulate reading of how Christian writers were able to integrate Old Testament, Jewish imagery into their texts. The final [End Page 224] chapter returns to specific miracles, this time celestial phenomena, such as fire in the sky. Here, Lapina is interested in the spatial and spiritual meanings of ‘east’ and ‘west’, showing that the First Crusade led to a transformation in understandings of these categories: ‘chroniclers suspected that this spread of Christianity from west to east was to bring about the end of time, which the spread of Christianity from east to west a thousand years earlier had failed to do’ (p. 141). This is an excellent and rigorous study of what many would see as a niche group of texts. As Lapina has shown, however, these texts were nothing less than medieval efforts to understand the meaning of the crusade. As such, they connected with much more than the events they purported to...