The Knight, the Hermit, and the Pope: Some Problematic Narratives of Early Crusading Piety (original) (raw)
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This introductory article serves a number of purposes. It offers an abridged narrative of the scope of the Second Crusade and introduces the major debates associated with the venture. All the contributions to the present volume are introduced within this framework and, when applicable, their place in the current historiography is highlighted. While serving as a concise introduction to the multifaceted nature of the crusade and, for the first time, drawing attention to the main debates associated with it within a single article, the historiographical discussion of this remarkable mid-twelfth-century endeavour has necessarily proved to be a testing ground for a familiar although still unresolved debate: what do scholars mean when the employ the terms ‘crusading’, ‘crusade’ and ‘crusader’?
Missionaries and Crusaders, 1095–1274: Opponents or Allies?
Studies in Church History, 1983
The Christian missions to the Muslims in the Near East during the Central Middle Ages have already attracted much attention from historians, but as yet no real attempt has been made to analyse the relationship between those who advocated peaceful conversion by means of preaching and teaching, in other words a programme of missionary work, and the crusaders, who sought to defeat the enemies of the faith in battle. In the past, historians have tended to portray advocates of missions as opponents of the crusades and it has been suggested that by the late thirteenth century, as a result of a series of Christian defeats in the Near East. the missionary ideal had won a great deal of support and that this was one of the factors which contributed towards the decline of the crusading movement. The aim of this paper is to challenge this thesis. The first step towards this reappraisal will be to examine the attitude of certain prominent supporters of a policy of peaceful conversion towards the...
2020
The Crusades have been one of the most enduringly popular topics in medieval history among historians and a wider public alike, and crusade studies have reached an impressive critical mass over the last few decades. In the process, it has become one of the most cross-disciplinary fields within medieval history, encompassing a multitude of methodological and theoretical approaches. Fighting for the Faith – The Many Crusades aims to illustrate the variety in Crusade studies internationally. The initiative arose from general discussions about the Crusades among a group of Danish medievalist at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, which led to further discussions at symposia and workshops around Europe and in the United States. In the “Introduction”, Kurt Villads Jensen and Carsten Selch Jensen state that the aim of the book is to discuss “some of the fundamental questions of current Crusade studies, including the reasons for undertaking crusades, against whom to crusade, and t...
Of all the ecclesiastical apparatus employed by the papacy to promote crusading, the Crusade indulgence was the most important. Like all institutional arrangements, the Crusade indulgence underwent a process of development. This development has been distorted by a teleological view of the facts that regards the Crusade indulgence as the direct expression of Pope Urban II’s Jerusalem Crusade (1095-1102) and the indulgence that was set forth in Canon 2 of the Council of Clermont (1095). This study will show that the institutionalization of the Crusades was a long, drawn out, piecemeal process, which did not begin in 1095, but in 1063 with the introduction of the Crusade indulgence for Sicily and Iberia. Crusading did not owe its inception to the novel elements that Urban added to the enterprise in 1095, nor did it owe its inception to the new direction that crusading took in 1095 with Jerusalem the focus of its ambitions. Rather, the institutional history of the Crusades indicates that these wars began in the western half of the Mediterranean and were already in full swing when Crusaders undertook to “rescue Jerusalem and the other Churches of Asia from the power of the Muslims.”