The Crusades by Christopher Tyerman

Author:Christopher Tyerman [Tyerman, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781402782053
Publisher: Sterling
Published: 2010-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

Jihad, a pillar of the Muslim faith, means “struggle.” The greater jihad is the internal or personal struggle, and the lesser jihad is the struggle in the believer’s daily activity.

Holy War, Crusade, and Christian Society after 1095

In medieval Christendom the malleable contingency of the crusade in concept and practice ensured its popularity and longevity. The defined uniqueness of the Jerusalem journey allowed its essentials—the vow, the cross, plenary indulgence, and temporal privileges—to be transferred to other theatres of religious and ecclesiastical conflict on the principle of equivalence: Spain, the Baltic, internal enemies of the papacy, and heretics. The success of 1099 silenced most critics as well as establishing later conduct. Holy war, commanded by God, earning spiritual reward, continued to provide an important weapon in the papacy’s armory. To signal especial gravity (or papal favor), a comparison with the Jerusalem war could be drawn. However, the Jerusalem model exerted only limited influence on canon law and in no sense became the universal or exclusive form of Christian holy war. Its most profound and lasting innovation came with the twelfth- and thirteenth-century creations of military religious orders, embodiments of the oxymoronic nature of Christian holy war, whose members became, uniquely in Christian society, permanent, professional holy warriors. As a holy war, the crusade fell outside the categories for just war explored in detail in the Decretum (first redaction c.1139, enlarged edition by 1158) traditionally ascribed to Gratian of Bologna, its legal implications deriving from its associated privileges standing apart from both the academic attempts to define and limit warfare and the experience of battles of the cross. Away from the Curia, especially in frontier regions on Christendom’s northern and southern borders, where traditions of inter-communal and inter-faith conflicts readily merged, holy war offered a natural recourse, its acceptability parallel to that of crusading, deriving from similar cultural impulses, but not necessarily narrowly determined by the Jerusalem war. The Danish writer Saxo Grammaticus (c.1200) carefully cast his heroes in the Danish wars against their neighbors in terms both specifically of crusade and more generally of holy war. For his employer Archbishop Absalon of Lund (d.1201), it was “no less religious to repulse the enemies of public faith than to uphold its ceremonies”; he was content to make “an offering to God not of prayers but of arms.” Similarly in Spain, the granting of formal crusading privileges acted within a context of growing identification of the Reconquista with holy war; as early as c.1115, the patron saint, the Apostle St. James, was described in a northern Spanish chronicle as “the knight of Christ.”

While the long tradition of holy war continued to supply the emotional intensity for a range of Christian warfare, the Jerusalem war and its derivatives did not escape the scrutiny of lawyers and academics who increasingly sought to integrate the crusade into a comprehensive canonical justification for violence, rather than, as the appeals for the First and Second Crusades implied, rely simply on Divine mandate and the individual devotional standards of participants.

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