Abstract
The crusades are one of the most familiar features of the Middle Ages. They appear to typify, even define, a whole period. Remote in aspiration yet retaining an attractive tang of relevance, crusading powerfully evokes a distant past while remaining topical. Although the word is not medieval, the image and resonance of ‘crusade’ provides the most prominent link between modern vocabulary, even thought, and the activities of twenty and thirty generations ago. The image of the crusader is unshakeable in western mentalities. However alien the motives or justifications, crusading still resounds in the imagination as much as the intellect, a persisting icon of western culture.
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Notes
H. E. Mayer, Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (Stuttgart 1965; trans. J. Gillingham, Oxford 1972). esp. pp. 281–6.
J. S. C. Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades? (London 1977, 2nd edn 1992).
Mayer. The Crusades new edn of Eng. trans. (Oxford 1988). p. 312.
N. Housley, The Later Crusades (Oxford 1992), pp. 2–6. For another recent ‘pluralist’ view, E.-D. Hehl, ‘Was ist eigentlich ein Kreuzzug?’, Historische Zeitschrift, cclix (1994), 297–336.
N. Housley, The Later Crusades (Oxford 1992), pp. 2–6. For another recent ‘pluralist’ view, E.-D. Hehl, ‘Was ist eigentlich ein Kreuzzug?’, Historische Zeitschrift, cclix (1994), 297–336.
H. E. Mayer’s review of Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, Speculum (1978), pp. 841–2.
J. Riley-Smith, ‘The Crusading Movement and Historians’, Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. J. Riley-Smith (Oxford 1995), p. 9; C. J. Tyerman, ’The Holy Land and the Crusades of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. Edbury (Cardiff 1985), pp. 105–12.
J. Riley-Smith, ‘The Crusading Movement and Historians’, Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. J. Riley-Smith (Oxford 01995), p. 9; C. J. Tyerman, ’The Holy Land and the Crusades of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. Edbury (Cardiff 1985), pp. 105–12.
To take two incidences noted recently by Riley-Smith, ‘The State of Mind of Crusaders’, Illustrated History of the Crusades, pp. 80, 82. For the most recent restatement of the idea of a self-conscious, definite crusade movement in the twelfth century, see J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders 1095–1131 (Cambridge 1997), which even resorts to describing some events as ‘Crusades’, rather than crusades.
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© 1998 Christopher J. Tyerman
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Tyerman, C. (1998). Introduction. In: The Invention of the Crusades. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26541-1_1
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