| Abstract: | Introduction Since Hans Eberhard Mayer published his Geschichte der Kreuzzüge in 1965 in which he called for a definition of the concept of crusade the issue has been much debated. I was not personally present at the first conference of The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East that was held in Cardiff in 1983, but according to one eye-witness account the issue was “hotly debated”, and has indeed continued to be so. Central to the discussion has been the question of whether or not crusades only went to the Holy Land or should the term be more generally applied to all papally proclaimed wars, that is between a traditionalist view and a pluralist view. Recently the debate has taken a d0ifferent turn and it has increasingly become a debate about whether the definitions given by modern historians are at all congruous to the medieval phenomenon. In the twelfth century at least there did not exist a term that is congruous to the modern construct of crusade and as John Gilchrist has pointed out, the elements that we are told constituted a crusade – indulgence, pilgrimage, the vow, the remission of sin, an enemy defined by the church – are absent from the canonical collections of the twelfth century. I would not like to say if this modern construct has become “tyrannical”, but it has led at least one English historian, Christopher Tyerman, to ask the question: “Were there any crusades in the twelfth century?” and then conclude in the negative. His conclusions are in fact parallel to the conclusions reached within the study of feudalism, where it has been argued that the concept of feudalism was “invented” by lawyers at the end of the twelfth century under the influence of new-style bureaucratic governments. Historians of the twentieth century, it is possible to argue, used the legal definitions that emerged towards the end of the twelfth century to create the modern concept of crusade. It is, however, obvious from the contemporary sources that people believed that something new was initiated by Urban II (1088–1099) at the council of Clermont in 1095. It is also apparent that the call to arms against the infidels made by Urban II contained some sort of institutional characteristic in the form of new privileges granted to people who wanted to embark upon the expedition to the Holy Land. This, I believe, should be ample reason for us, as historians, to use a word like crusade. But the main conclusion we have to draw from the work of Christopher Tyerman, I think, is to keep in mind that it is not possible to create a matrix of a crusade that applies to the whole crusading period: “The crusade cannot be adequately defined in its own terms because it only existed in relation to the dictates of its shifting western context”. |
