Robert Irwin
ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusaes
By Jonathan Phillips (The Bodley Head 424pp £18.99)
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Holy Warriors has plenty of competition. There must be about a dozen general histories of the crusades in print and the standard is pretty high. Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway College, London University, has not written an academic textbook. As he explains in the introduction, he has aimed his book at the general reader and 'chosen to bring to life a variety of figures and events outside of those well known to a general audience'. It is Phillips's focus on the personalities and picturesque incidents, and his neglect of any attempt to slog year by year through the annals of the crusades, that distinguish this book from the others.
The popularity of books about the crusades with both students and general readers is easy to explain. This area of history consists of one good story after another: the preaching of Urban II at Clermont to impassioned crowds, the discovery of the Holy Lance at Antioch, the storming of Jerusalem, the discovery of King Baldwin IV's leprosy, the ill-fated march of the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem towards the Horns of Hattin, Saladin knocking the cup of water out of Raymond's hand before beheading him, and the confrontation of warrior kings Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, all of these running on to the storming of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Even after 1453, as Phillips shows in his two concluding chapters, the crusades had an afterlife. They were celebrated in novels and operas, and adorned the rhetoric of French and British imperialism. Rupert Brooke on his way out to fight the Turks in Gallipoli in 1915 compared himself to the old crusaders.
In the days when I was an academic, I used to grit my teeth when having to teach such subjects as the Filioque controversy, the Investiture Contest or the fiscal policy of Philip IV of France; I do not think that my students found these subjects much fun either. But the crusades, so colourful, exotic and dramatic, were and are different. One reason for this is that what we know, or think we know, about that history has been delivered to us by literary artists. Fulcher of Chartres wrote feverishly of the departure of the first crusaders: 'Oh what grief there was! What sighs, what weeping, what lamentation among friends when husband left his wife so dear to him, his children, his possessions however great, his father, his mother, brothers and many other relatives!' Usamah ibn Munqidh in his eighties produced a melancholy but vivid memoir in which he looked back on his battles with the Franks, the heretical Assassins and wild beasts, and listed his favourite lance thrusts. Geoffroi de Villehardouin managed to write about the sacking of Constantinople and the slaughter of its Christian inhabitants as if they were deeds of high chivalry. John of Joinville's life of Louis IX gave an unsparing account of the disasters that befell the French Crusade in the Nile Delta, including the spread of scurvy:
People had so much dead flesh on their gums that the barbers had to remove it before they could chew their food and swallow it down. It was most pitiful to hear people throughout the camp howling as their dead flesh was cut away because they screamed like women in childbirth.
Joinville also hinted that living with and fighting under the command of a saint had its problems. At the same time Ibn Wasil was composing gloating poetry about crusader defeats.High-flown rhetoric, latent references to the Bible and the Apocalypse, maledictions, evocations of desolation and protestations of chivalry gave brilliant colour to military narratives. Most of those who preached the crusades or went on its expeditions believed that they were living close to the end of time. Some believed that when Frederick Barbarossa reached Jerusalem, his arrival there would inaugurate the Last Days. (Only he never did, as he drowned in a Turkish river.) Cardinal Pelagius directed operations on the Fifth Crusade on the basis of an Arabic manuscript which prophesied that Egypt would be conquered by a tall man with a lean face and that Mecca would be destroyed by the Abyssinians. Phillips is generous with quotations from his eloquent, if not always terribly reliable, sources. He tends to favour incidents that are redolent of Grand Guignol, and lingers over the details of cannibalism on the First Crusade, the techniques used by Philip IV's henchmen to torture the Templars, and the murder of King Peter of Cyprus, whose killers 'smashed his skull, cut his throat open, dressed him in tramp's clothes and left the corpse in the palace hall'. The crusaders and their enemies liked their violence to be spectacular.
High-flown rhetoric, latent references to the Bible and the Apocalypse, maledictions, evocations of desolation and protestations of chivalry gave brilliant colour to military narratives. Most of those who preached the crusades or went on its expeditions believed that they were living close to the end of time. Some believed that when Frederick Barbarossa reached Jerusalem, his arrival there would inaugurate the Last Days. (Only he never did, as he drowned in a Turkish river.) Cardinal Pelagius directed operations on the Fifth Crusade on the basis of an Arabic manuscript which prophesied that Egypt would be conquered by a tall man with a lean face and that Mecca would be destroyed by the Abyssinians. Phillips is generous with quotations from his eloquent, if not always terribly reliable, sources. He tends to favour incidents that are redolent of Grand Guignol, and lingers over the details of cannibalism on the First Crusade, the techniques used by Philip IV's henchmen to torture the Templars, and the murder of King Peter of Cyprus, whose killers 'smashed his skull, cut his throat open, dressed him in tramp's clothes and left the corpse in the palace hall'. The crusaders and their enemies liked their violence to be spectacular.
Although Holy Warriors has been written for a general readership, its scholarship is meticulous and up to date. Phillips briskly discounts items of popular folklore about the crusades, such as the notion that landless younger sons formed a large part of the crusading expeditions to the East. Similarly, he does not think that it makes sense to regard colonialist land-grabbing hunger as an important motive for crusading. Most people who went on crusades were desperate to return home as soon as they decently could. Of the tens of thousands who took part in the First Crusade only about 300 knights chose to stay in the Kingdom of Jerusalem after the Holy City had been conquered.
Jonathan Phillips eschews the vulgarisms and liberties with the truth that are the marks of so much popular history writing by hacks and amateurs. One reason that the study of the Crusades is popular with students today is because of the perceived relevance of this history to contemporary concerns: East-West relations, colonialism, post-colonialism and jihad. But for all George Bush's casual reference to a 'crusade against terror', Bush was no crusader and impassioned crowds did not rush to take up the cross after he had spoken. Similarly, though Osama bin Laden calls for a jihad against the West, this has a different legal basis and strategic aim from the campaigns commanded by Nur al-Din, Saladin and Baybars. The quest for contemporary relevance in our medieval past invariably distorts that past and delivers delusive messages.
Holy Warriors is not only very readable. Its skilful and detailed use of source material serves as a showcase of what is being done in this, the most intensively studied area of medieval historiography.
Robert Irwin's latest book is 'For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies.' He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.