1 Objective and Goals
On 4 July 1187, the forces of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem were crushed at the Battle of Hattin. The Muslim army under Sultan Saladin (c.1138â1193) even captured the relic of the so-called True Cross, an object that used to precede the Christian armies when marching into battle, a visible guarantee of Godâs protectionâuntil this fateful day. The Cross on which Christ himself had hung was lost. Godâs favor, so it seemed, was now irrecoverable. This news generated great shock and panic when overwhelming the Latin West in autumn of the same year: Pope Gregory VIII did not hesitate and called all of Christendom to a new crusade. While the Curia was busy with these preparations, Saladin conquered the holy city of Jerusalem on 2 October and thus shattered the kingdom of Jerusalem, which had existed since the successful First Crusade (1095â1099).1 Two objects, Cross and city, that were of such pivotal meaning to Christianity, representing literal embodiments of this religion, were gone in one fell swoop.2 These bewildering events, which seemed to contradict every prophecy and expectation, mobilized the massive expedition of the so-called Third Crusade (1187â1192), a collective endeavor of the Latin West joined by three of the most important European princes as well as thousands of participants; it was likely even the largest expedition to date.3 This study is devoted to the mobilization of this venture and in particular to corresponding preaching activities.
The modern portrayal of the crusades, including the Third Crusade and notably the preaching of such expeditions, is predominantly narrative in nature and largely dependent on the chronicles, those historiographical accounts that have always figured as the prime sources in crusade studies. However, there is the question of how far these can be considered representative, and whether they can offer sound insights into the ventureâs mobilization. The fact is that these are artificial and narrative texts whose manuscript evidence is generally slim.4 Similarly, these sources contain only limited information about preaching activities, even though such activities undoubtedly fulfilled an essential purpose in drawing attention to the Holy Land, in classifying the Eastern events in providential terms, and in preparing the participants spiritually. The neglect of this subject was likely also due to some misleading modern ideas, especially the myth that not many âcrusade sermonsâ have survived. However, âcrusade sermonâ just like âthe crusadeâ in general are modern categories; the Middle Ages did not know such a genre, and consequently this category has tended to obscure rather than illuminate in the past.5 This results in the essential issue of how to select sources: the contemporary ontology and terminology do not permit an unequivocal identification of the crusade; what we today call âcrusadeâ was intrinsically interwoven with vital areas of Christian existence such as exegesis, liturgy, or salvation history.6 This suddenly opens up the vast field of medieval sermon material and specifically the written form of the sermon text, usually organized in collections that follow the liturgical calendar. Such sources have survived in enormous numbers, whereas large amounts are still unpublished and unconsidered by previous research (especially but not limited to crusade scholars). This material provides the opportunity for challenging the existing portrayal of the Third Crusade by making a range of new sources available for understanding the mobilization of this important expedition. These sources permit us to examine the phenomenon in a representative empirical breadth, and the same sources are significantly entwined with a historical practice, that is, preaching, instead of limiting ourselves to a few artificial texts. They can also shed new light on a long-lasting issue, that is, sharpening crusade-specific language and terminology.7
The methodological challenge of selecting sermon texts and of classifying them as crusade-related is an essential concern of this book: via the case study of the Third Crusade, the goal is to develop tools for investigating such material through the lens of the crusade, tools that have not yet been sufficiently developed. It is intrinsic to sermon texts that we usually do not know for what purpose or context they were actually used: they were often consciously penned as models, allowing them to be used on different occasions and for different audiences.8 This protean nature obligates us as crusade historians to consider whether these texts may have been put to use in the service of the crusade, that is, to examine if these texts hold a semantic potential for the crusading purposeâgiven that their preaching was certainly a major occupation in the 12th century. The microcosm of the Third Crusade thus provides a spotlight that sheds light on several significant phenomena: the expedition is the pivotal node for understanding the unceasing crusade efforts in the succeeding decades. Its preachers came mostly from the early University of Paris; they are thus vivid witnesses to the nature and goals of this institution. Finally, preaching and the penning of sermon material were at an evolutionary step in the late 12th century, increasingly opening up towards broad lay audiences and anticipating the friars in many efforts.9 These preachers formed the so-called circle of Peter the Chanter (c.1130â1197) or biblical-moral school (according to Martin Grabmann), a movement devoted to a holistic permeation and moral reform of Christian society.10 Peter the Chanter, at the beginning of his seminal Verbum abbreviatum, defines preaching (praedicatio) as a vital activity of his reform agenda (besides lectio and disputatio that precede preaching causally and chronologically). He thus indicates the essential role of preaching as a measure of communication and societal reformâand this already before the friars.11 That this incorporates the crusade movement becomes clear already in the workâs title (in at least one manuscript): Liber magistri Petri Cantoris Parisiensis, qui dicitur viaticum tendentis Iherusalem (The work of the Paris master Peter the Chanter, which is called the travel insurance for reaching Jerusalem).12 As Jessalynn Bird aptly demonstrated, crusading was an intrinsic part of the overarching reform agenda. It represented the most effective and hence most attractive way of personal reform, entangled with penitential practices, liturgical actions, and the papal remission of sin. Therefore, crusade preaching must be understood as a significant component of general preaching efforts; it cannot be separated from these, neither formally nor in terms of contents.13
This study identifies nine preachers, many of them hitherto unnoticed, and relates them to the Third Crusadeâs mobilization via either their works or biographical details: it thus made sense to explore their sermon collections for material that could have served this purpose. This endeavor unearthed numerous pertinent sermon texts devoted to manifold crusade-related subjects: these texts hold a high âcrusade potential,â an analytical concept that will find application throughout this study (see also the tables 9â11). One can identify the crusade in these texts via different parameters, inferring different purposes in terms of crusading activities, just as one encounters a large variety of pertinent thematic strands such as Jerusalem, pagans, or penance. However, a second step is required, which consists of anchoring the texts in their context, in order to argue not only for a thematic but also for a causal and chronological nexus with the endeavor, that is, to argue that a text served the ventureâs mobilization in one way or another. To do justice to this twofold analysis, this study implements a discourse analysis according to Michel Foucault, which consists of two essential parts: first, investigating the discourse in terms of contents: What did one preach?âthat is, examining a large number of sermon texts within the corpus of the Third Crusade. Second, investigating the operating mode of the discourse: How did one preach? How did crusade mobilization unfold?âthat is, examining the textsâ context with regard to four dimensions: immediate, institutional, media, and historical context. The methodology of discourse analysis also helps with organizing the evidence in order to reach conclusions about the purpose and meaning of specific texts: How do texts construct knowledge and thus a historical reality? And which texts were essential for the discourse?
However, it is crucial to interlace this modern tool with the idiosyncratic foundations of the sources: this primarily means a consideration of the Bible and exegesis, since biblical elements are thus constitutive in sermons, making it impossible to analyse them properly without considering these dimensions.14 This indicates how strongly the crusades blended with scrutinizing the Bible, and how profoundly the exegetical metatext informed the view of the Holy Land, a dimension that recent research has increasingly engaged with. This research delivers a methodological toolbox for analysing a textâs biblical elements.15 This study thus investigates how clerics and Paris masters developed their vision of the Holy Land on the basis of the Bible, how they subjected contemporary events to their providential schemes, and how they then prepared this vision for broad audiences in the form of sermon texts. This study examines, therefore, primarily the ideas of clericsâthese may not be immediately transferable to their audiences, but they provide us with a sense of how these clerics thought that they could effectively mobilize and spiritually prepare a crusade expedition. Considering the rich recruitment, one may surmise that they did so successfully. Even though this study does not claim that preaching was the only factor at play in the maze of mobilization, it does claim that it was a pivotal factor hitherto largely overlooked and underestimated by scholarship. Agreeing with a distinction proposed by Kristin Skottki, the book will preferably speak of a âcrusade discourseâ and not of a âcrusade ideaâ (the latter has been a popular axiom among scholars).16 Whereas the latter suggests an essentialist understanding (there was one uniform crusade idea), crusade discourse considers that a variety of ideas were negotiated in society, including developments and breaks when interpretive authority was established, adapted, or discardedâand the preachers were certainly crucial guardians of interpretive authority. They were brokers who mediated between different registers and social groups; they were nodes in a network of crusade mobilization.17
One can align the nine identified preachers with three centers: the archbishopric of Canterbury, the pivotal Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux, and the early University of Parisâthese places played a key role in the crusadeâs mobilization, just as the nine preachers were important protagonists, including contacts with vital political figures. The three represented in general centers for the production of texts and knowledge; they thus held great authority in terms of a discourse analysis. Gathered around Canterbury were (1) its archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, a Cistercian and one of the leaders of the Third Crusade; (2) his secretary Peter of Blois, an eminent Paris master, who was sojourning at the papal Curia in 1187 when the news about Hattin arrived; and (3) Ralph Ardens, another Paris master, who held the office of chaplain in the service of Richard Lionheart. All three participated in the expedition. Around Clairvaux assembled (4) the Cistercian Henry of Albano, papal legate and one of the ventureâs main preachers, who also sojourned at the Curia in 1187; (5) Garnerius of Clairvaux, abbot of Clairvaux at the time; and (6) Hélinand of Froidmont, another Cistercian, who had close ties with Philip of Dreux, archbishop of Beauvais and another leader of the expedition. Around Paris assembled (7) Alan of Lille, an important master of his generation; (8) Prevostin of Cremona, another eminent master of the early university; and (9) Martin of León, an Augustinian canon with Parisian education, who likely sojourned in Italy in 1187 and participated in the crusade.
This study will thus demonstrate how the Third Crusade was preached (or at least how its preaching was drafted within the clerical milieu), while making accessible an immense amount of hitherto unnoticed sources. This approach will always keep in mind methodological issues regarding which sermons are crusade-related and how one may identify the crusade in such texts. Contesting the oft-applied focus on chronicles as well as certain modern ideas about crusade preaching, this study will demonstrate the following: Who preached the crusade? What did these protagonists preach? How did the Bible serve as a template for envisioning the Holy Land? How did this stimulate attention towards the same? How may one grasp, define, or demarcate this specific purpose of preaching? How widely disseminated were preaching efforts? And eventually, how do all these results thwart or modify the established narrative on the preaching of the Third Crusade? The next section depicts precisely this narrative, as it presents itself to date, stemming from both medieval chronicles and modern scholarship. It will critically review this story as to its representativeness and gapsâremarkably, seven of the nine preachers just introduced remain invisible in it.18 The section on methodology elaborates on the issue of what a âcrusade sermonâ is, and how this study selected and analysed source material. The book then moves on to the first chapter devoted to the immediate context of the texts: it introduces the nine preachers and their works. The second chapter deals with the institutional context, the early Parisian university: it discusses how this context significantly informed the production of texts and knowledge, thus determining views on and ideas about the Holy Land. Chapters three to six constitute the heart of this study, being devoted to a minute examination of the sermons, focusing on the Cross relic, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land. How do the sermons broach these elements? What other elements do they throw in the mix? What notions and expectations does this create, consequently informing crusade spirituality? Which calls for action do they formulate? Chapters seven and eight contextualize these analyses with the idiosyncratic metatext of salvation history, discussing in particular the dominant role of eschatological ideas for the crusade arena. The ninth chapter examines the media context, that is, the manuscripts. Considering how they present the texts, it argues that these were significantly entwined with preaching practice. Finally, the tenth chapter is devoted to anchoring the sermon texts in their historical context with the help of three dimensions: the framework of the liturgical calendar; the sermon materialâs (intended) audience; and essential mechanisms of mobilization, including corresponding questions of how preaching efforts operated in the late 12th century.
2 The Established Narrative on the Preaching of the Third Crusade
Existing depictions of and notions about the ventureâs preaching depend largely on the stories which the chronicles deliver.19 Modern research literature fused these into one authoritative narrative, and has, overall, reproduced their storylines uncritically.20 Reading these narratives, both medieval and modern, one hears of great councils, effective preaching tours, and of great princes taking the crossâbut scholars have hardly tackled the question of what these accounts do not tell. This is the point of departure for this study, which is devoted to preaching activities that were pivotal to the expeditionâs mobilization, but are not found in any historiographical report. Why should they be present in such texts? Should one suppose that all preaching was protocolled for historical commemoration? The opposite is the case: narrative recording represents an absolute exception, encompassing only a few select events and preachers, not least to serve the chronicleâs own purpose.21 The perception of such reports is highly selective: they usually limit themselves to one or two preaching events, presenting these as the dramaturgical prelude to the venture, whereas they do not reveal any desire for protocolling a crusadeâs mobilization in an elaborate and detailed manner. This is corroborated by the fact that different reports occasionally offer divergent information on the same event, for example, about who was present or who preachedâthe famous example are the vastly different versions of Urban IIâs sermon in Clermont (1095), in preparation of the First Crusade.22 This section depicts the common story of mobilizing the Third Crusade, in order to reflect critically on the notions of previous scholarship, and to unearth focal points and gaps within this established narrative.
Panic broke at the papal Curia in Ferrara upon receiving the news of the defeat at Hattin and the loss of the Cross relic in October 1187. Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, reported in a call for help to the West that âthe most holy and life-giving Cross, the unique and outstanding guarantee of our salvationâ had been lost (sacrosanctam et vivificam crucem, unicum et peculiare salutis nostre subsidium).23 Sylvia Schein asserted, âChristendom, unprepared for the disaster, received the news with amazement, horror and grief.â24 Pope Urban III, the chroniclers agreed, was shattered and died only a few days later.25 Panic-fueled but also enthusiastic, the Curia started seeking a new pope, proposing the office to the cardinal bishop Henry of Albanoâwho rejected it, since he preferred to preach a new crusade in the first flight. An alternative was found in Albert of Mora, who ascended Peterâs throne as Gregory VIII, inspired by Gregory VII, the enabler of the crusade movement.26 In Audita tremendi the new pope called all of Christendom to a new crusade, underlining the devastating events, the Christian sinfulness that was responsible for them, and the providential necessity of a new expedition.27 The Curia was the germ cell; besides Henry of Albano and Gregory VIII, at least two further preachers were sojourning there: the English cleric Peter of Blois, who immediately began penning sermons and crusade treatises, and the legate Paul of Palestrina, who would become pope as Clement III in December 1187 and immediately republish Gregoryâs encyclical.28 As Peter reported in a letter to the English king Henry II, the Curia had been overcome by enthusiasm: the cardinals would preach the crusade and lead the others to the Holy Land (praedicabunt et praecedent alios in terram Jerusalem).29 It is plausible that these figures were involved in the drafting of the papal encyclical, and they likely started preaching soon thereafter, at the Curia or in northern Italy in general.
News of the devastating events quickly spread throughout the Latin West, as several letters and the reactions of specific princes show.30 This stoked enthusiasm for departing as well as a religious fanaticism that directed its attention towards the so-called enemies of Christâs cross, but also towards Christian sins. Reinhold Röhricht put it thus: â[â¦] entire Christendom rose with an unanimous fervor, as it had never occurred in the Latin West.â31 Richard Lionheart took the cross in Tours, already in November 1187, likely immediately reacting to the arrival of the news, a first major occasion where one may expect preachingâeven if historiographical reports remain silent on the matter.32 The German emperor Frederick Barbarossa was likewise devastated and assembled a council in Strasburg (Dec. 1187), supervised by the future crusader Henry, bishop of the same town. Henry of Albano was perhaps also present (the sources are ambiguous, at least a papal legation was there). This is another occasion where one can expect preaching beyond the chroniclesâ perception, especially since some already took the cross on this occasion.33 Paul of Palestrina traveled to the southern German regionsâa crucial area for recruitment since the Second Crusadeâbut his vocation to the papal office soon brought him back to the Curia. As the rich mobilization demonstrates, his presence was not necessary anyway; in other words, preachers were active who are not tangible in the chronicles. Already in December, Barbarossa met with the French king Philip II Augustus, close to Carignan (between Reims and Metz), a meeting where Henry of Albano was likely also present.34
With these efforts underway, the East saw a second devastating event: the fall of Jerusalem. However, contrary to previous scholarly depictions of the unfolding events, Joscius, archbishop of Tyre, had already left for the West (likely in September): he was not the bearer of this news.35 Joscius first landed on Sicily, where William II reacted swiftly by sending a fleet that would help in the defense of Tyreâanother occasion for preaching. A plausible candidate is Joachim of Fiore (c.1135â1202), who would preach three years later to the passing Richard Lionheart: a chronicle quotes the corresponding sermon, which underlines the nexus between crusade and eschatology.36 Joscius then hastened to the Curia, where Clement III had been elected in the meantimeâthe archbishopâs arrival may have been the occasion for republishing Audita tremendi in early January 1188. He continued further north, where he successfully assembled the warlike parties of Henry II and Philip Augustus at the Council of Gisors (between Rouen and Beauvais). Persuaded by the archbishop and Henry of Albano, who was likely present, the two kings took the cross.37 They thus publicly devoted themselves to the causeâa promise that Henry II had made for decades. Now, in light of the situationâs seriousness, he seemed finally willing to spring into action. The Council of Gisors was another occasion for elaborate preaching activities, for example, by Baldwin of Canterbury or Philip of Dreux, archbishop of Beauvais, who both took the cross on this occasion.38
Henry II, now fully devoted to the cause, then organized another council at Le Mans, which issued the crusadeâs legal statutes.39 Upon returning to England, he assembled princes and bishops in Geddington in February 1188 (a town halfway between Birmingham and Cambridge). The chronicles report that both Baldwin of Canterbury and William, bishop of Hereford, preached on this occasion, with numerous people taking the cross as a result. William also attempted to settle a conflict between Baldwin and the Augustinian canons of Canterbury, in order to pave the way for the crusadeâthe chronicler Gervase of Canterbury quotes a sermon by William on the matter.40 At the time, Clement III issued another crusade encyclical addressed to Baldwin and his suffragans (that is, the bulk of Englandâs bishops). It seems as if he is not yet aware of Jerusalemâs loss when he voices that God shall protect the city from being polluted by the unbelievers (sanctam civitatem Jerusalem tueatur, nec eam nefandis manibus impiorum contaminari permittat).41 This provides us with a new terminus post quem that places the arrival of the news even after early February, that is, after the Council of Gisors.42 Simultaneously, Henry of Albano initiated a large preaching tour covering Burgundy, Flanders, and the Ile-de-France, bringing his apostolic authority to several important towns.43 He held a large council in Liège where allegedly two thousand clerics had assembled, whom he instructed in the crusadeâs preaching and spiritual preparation via liturgical and penitential actions. The chronicler Giselbert says that he came to provide counsel and support (ad dandum consilium et auxilium).44 As a consequence, the townâs bishop and 66 other clerics took the cross.45 This council was certainly a vector for distributing the preaching effortâunfortunately, the historiographical reports remain reticent on its impact. If only a small portion of the clerics followed Henryâs call, this still represents an immense number of crusade preachersâwho remain invisible in the chronicles.
At the time, Henry wrote an excited letter to Barbarossa, to entice him to join the crusade. It indicates the legateâs efforts in the Holy Roman Empire, whereas his colleagues covered other regions.46 These efforts climaxed in the Council of Mainz, the so-called Curia Jesu Christi, held on 27 March, the date of Laetare Jerusalem (the fourth Sunday in Lent).47 It is reported that Henry himself as well as Godfrey, bishop of Würzburg, and Henry, bishop of Strasburg, preached there. The Historia peregrinorum quotes a sermon by the latter.48 Inspired by their words and an eschatological mood, Barbarossa and, purportedly, 13,000 others took the cross.49 This must have been an enormous preaching event including numerous preachers as well as many venues where preaching took place. On the same meaningful day, Philip Augustus also held a council in Paris that issued the crusadeâs statutes under the supervision of bishop Maurice of Sully (c.1110â1196).50 Unfortunately, the chronicles say little about it, even though this was certainly a major preaching event, in particular for the resident Paris masters, but also for others who may have come for this occasion. Owing to Parisâ essential role in contemporary preaching efforts and in the dissemination of preaching material, this council, similar to the one in Liège, certainly represented a vector for furthering mobilization.
Parallel to the ambitions in France and the Empire, the English preachers were also active. Subsequent to the Council of Geddington (which may likewise have operated as a vector), Baldwin of Canterbury organized an extensive tour through Wales, which Gerald of Wales, Peter of Blois, and further preachers, especially Cistercian abbots, joined.51 This tour may have had the goal of recruiting specifically in those regions that were not well integrated into the English dominion and likely not involved at Geddington. However, the unique evidence that Gerald of Wales offers with his Itinerarium Cambriae, an elaborate report on the tour, may distort the picture: if he had not decided to pen this text, we might not even know about the undertaking.52 It is highly likely that other such tours never entered the historical record; one may suppose that other bishops conducted similar tours or at least preached throughout their dioceses. Baldwinâs tour took place in March and April 1188: it started and ended in Hereford, whose bishop was a crusade preacher, as already noted, and it covered a number of places: on Laetare Jerusalem, they preached at the important see of Saint Davidâs and in Chester on Easter (early April).53 Thousands seem to have taken the cross at these events; the tour may also have been essential for making Baldwin into one of the expeditionâs military leaders, whom thousands followed to the Holy Land.
These are the main preaching events according to the chronicle reports, where numerous preachers, princes, and bishops assembled to take the cross together, including the four most important Western rulers: Henry II, Richard Lionheart, Philip Augustus, and Frederick Barbarossa. The events in the East generated a wave of enthusiasm and recruitmentâhowever, it would be quite some time before the crusader armies departed. The essential responsibilities for this protracted period were the following: to maintain peace between the princes, in particular between Henry II and Philip II, to ensure their participation;54 to prepare the crusade in practical terms; to prepare the crusade in spiritual and liturgical terms; and to convince further people of the cause. Especially the last two demonstrate that elaborate preaching activities were still requisite. Such preaching, however, was not aligned with the great recruitment events and remains, therefore, invisible in chronicles. Henry of Albano continued preaching in Burgundy, Flanders, and the Ile-de-France, including Cologne where the young Caesarius of Heisterbach (c.1180âc.1240) listened to him, as he recorded some years later.55 In the summer of 1188, Henry sojourned in Paris, where he preached together with Maurice of Sully in Notre-Dame cathedral, which was still under construction. And one may expect preaching by other Paris masters on this occasion. At this time, Henry penned parts of his main work De peregrinante civitate Dei: it laments that many have taken the cross, but now postpone their departureâa textual manifestation of his ongoing preaching activities as well as a call to others to be active.56 This call was answered at least by Garnerius of Clairvaux who still preached the crusade in late 1191, when Richard Lionheart addressed him in a letter (sent from Acre), encouraging him in this activity.57 The same critique as with Henry, in the form of a similar model text, is found in Peter of Bloisâ Conquestio, which can be associated with a specific preaching tour: Peter traveled with Henry II and Baldwin of Canterbury in northern France (summer and autumn of 1188).58 This tour was certainly essential for delivering sermons and for mobilizing crusaders in the Angevin dominions, climaxing in another council in November 1188, where Henry of Albano again managed to make peace between Henry II and Philip II.59 Both Peterâs and Henryâs idiosyncratic texts corroborate the ongoing preaching activities beyond the great recruitment events, precisely because the departure was postponed. These delays made it even more necessary to continue preaching, that is, to underline the endeavorâs urgency and providential necessity.
Beyond that, one may identify further preaching occasions such as Richard Lionheartâs coronation in London (13 Sept. 1189), certainly not coincidentally the day before the feast In exaltatione sanctae crucis.60 This was a preeminent occasion, with so many people assembled, and because Richard had already presented himself as a devout crusader. Plausible preachers are Baldwin of Canterbury, who crowned Richard, and Ralph Ardens, his chaplain. The coronation also triggered an anti-Jewish pogromâusually the result of (crusade-related) preaching.61 Yet, almost another year would pass before the king finally departed (July 1190). The days of departure represent another occasion, as a sermon by Godfrey of Würzburg betrays, cited in the Historia peregrinorum and held soon after the departure of Barbarossaâs army from Regensburg.62 It is significant that the day of departure was often scheduled for specific liturgical feasts that certainly required preaching. The fact that Richard and Philip Augustus departed together from Vézelay is similarly expressive, since this was a crucial venue of Bernard of Clairvauxâs successful preaching of the Second Crusade.63
Some patterns have emerged concerning the information chronicles deliver: they narrate the great councils, especially in conjunction with important princes taking the cross; the preachers visible at these events belong almost exclusively to the first political flight (bishops and legates); the accounts offer hardly any information on the contents of sermons; and different chronicles sometimes deliver divergent information, a fact that points to their selective perception. A number of historiographical issues have thus surfaced:
Save for Baldwin of Canterbury, none of the figures for whom we have sermon texts today appear in the chroniclesâthe same is true if one expands the horizon to other contemporary preachers. Those who penned sermons and were important preachers of their age scarcely appear in the historiographical narratives. It is also remarkable that not a single narrative survived for Paris, the pivotal center for preaching efforts, even though it doubtlessly played a key role (notably the council on Laetare Jerusalem). It transpires that the chronicles are reticent when it comes to preaching events; they do not have any interest in delivering elaborate reports on such activities. Similarly, the historiographical commemoration of particular activities, critically the construction of âpreaching tours,â stems from the idiosyncratic nature of specific sources, as the case of the Itinerarium Cambriae tellingly demonstrates. Such sources often make a specific preacher into their hero (here Baldwin of Canterbury), and they can by no means be considered as representative. The idea that there were no further tours beyond those narrated in texts is untenable. The aspect of narrative construction is substantiated by the fact that we do not have any obvious case where we can relate a specific sermon text to a specific preaching eventâprecisely because the event was not as important as a chronicle wants us to believe; efforts were much more widespread and manifold.64 Similarly remarkable is the way in which the chronicles leap straight from the reported preaching events to the departure of crusade armies. In most cases, a period of several years lay in between: in the Third Crusadeâs case, around one year for the German army and more than two years for the English and French contingents. The ideal of crusading would have demanded an immediate departureâbut delays and internal Christian conflicts often hindered this, making it even more requisite that preachers underlined the endeavorâs spiritual and providential necessity and, thus, drew attention to the Holy Land. However, the chronicles did not have any interest in reporting such activities, probably because doing so would have contradicted their ideal of crusading. If one were to only read such a text, one might think that no more than a few days had elapsed in between cross taking and departure: the enthusiastic mood channeled in the few reported preaching events suggests that the crusaders could not have waited.
Furthermore, in those cases where a âsermonâ is cited within a chronicle (four pieces for the Third Crusade), a comparison with actual preaching material demonstrates that these quotations do not show any formal or contentual resemblance to the sermon texts. This poses the question of whether these can be of any help for investigating common preaching practice. These quotations do not faithfully record a particular sermon, but perhaps provide a âbest of,â an essence of the ideas communicated (as suggested by their compact nature). This is especially true since one may suppose that a cleric preached more than one sermon, in particular at the large assemblies (as we already know for Urban II at Clermont). However interesting these quotations may seem, certainly offering insights into the nature of preaching events, they cannot deliver representative insights into the contents of preaching.65 Similarly, their formal criteria cannot be of any help when it comes to determining a sermon textâs pertinence to the crusades.
The preaching events in the chronicles show a strong tendency to exaggerate, highlighting the emotional outburst and the preacherâs performance and charisma. Their uncritical consideration established the myth among scholars that it was not so much the content of the sermons that was needed, but the preacherâs charisma, or that some had already decided to join the crusade anyway.66 However, we must assume that their contents fulfilled a pivotal purpose (see the section on methodology). This study will therefore balance the chronicleâs place in contemporary discourse with the sermon texts, in order to arrive at a more nuanced and representative picture of the phenomenon. These exaggerated narrations have also fundamentally contributed to the idea that âcrusade sermonsâ were this extraordinary category separate from ânormal preaching.â Yet, the surviving sermon material by no means corroborates such a separation, while even the chronicles frequently note that one preached the crusade on specific feast days:67 they already advise that it is worthwhile to consider liturgical sermon collections. This is even more pertinent to those figures visible as preachers in the narratives such as Baldwin of Canterbury and Henry of Albano. On the basis of their personal relations, for example, with Peter of Blois or Garnerius of Clairvaux, one may consider which of the surviving sermons may have been used for the events reported: the chapter on historical context will be devoted to this task. The bottom line is thus: which preachers and preaching events found their way into the historiographical record was an arbitrary decision, a very selective perception, a small spotlight on a broad phenomenon. The chronicles were subject to narrative modelling, historiographical commemoration, and individual taste, and therefore cannot offer representative insights into crusade mobilization. They were, however, often considered as such by previous scholarship, which barely reflected on their selective perception: this is the point of departure for this study and its method of discourse analysis.
3 Methodology: What Is a Crusade Sermon?
3.1 State of Research: Defining the Pertinent Source Material
This study contributes to the field of crusade preaching, which is still in its early stages compared to the phenomenonâs vital role and despite some important pioneering work.68 However, this research either attempted in vain to cover the entire phenomenon (Penny Cole, Jean Flori), with substantiating research still outstanding in many areas, or it focused on other areas, in particular the 13th century and the friars (such as Christoph Maier or Miikka Tamminen), whereas the 12th century has barely been tackled. Previous research also made clear how many methodological challenges and untapped sources are still waiting, including that of Beverly Kienzle, Constantinos Georgiou, Matthew Phillips, and most notably Jessalynn Bird. Many sermon collections have never been consulted to see whether they contain material relevant for the crusadesâquite apart from the fact that one must first discuss the issue of how one can determine such relevance. The pitfalls of previous research consist of four main points:
First, nobody has delivered a substantial study of the Third Crusadeâs preaching. Some sermons or preachers have occasionally been noted, but not subjected to meaningful analysis; others seem entirely unknown.69 The same is true for the 12th century in general: in cases where it was considered (Cole, Flori), this was mostly based on the chronicle evidence. Second, elaboration on a theorization of crusade preaching is still outstanding, including the fact that nobody has tried to define the category of âcrusade sermonâ despite using the term. Even though several scholars have identified the problem (Cole, Kienzle, Bird, Tamminen), only Maier seems to have operated implicitly with a definition when identifying sermon texts via specific titles such as Ad crucesignatos or In predicatione crucis.70 It is therefore unclear what is meant by âcrusade sermon,â how one may define or demarcate this anachronistic genre, and how one may thus select source material. Another lacuna consists in discussing the purpose(s) of crusade preaching: Is it motivation and mobilization? Spiritual preparation? Or only a spectacular event, the background music to a military organization?âquestions that relate to complex issues about the crusadesâ nature. Third, the fact that scholars have often blended different types of sources, in order to create a coherent story, needs to be critically reviewed. This study opposes this approach with the help of a discourse analysis, which asks about a textâs role and authority within a discourse, weighting different texts differently. One must draw a clear line between sermon texts on the one hand and narratives about preaching on the other. Posing the question of the representativeness of particular sources shall shed new light on the maze of crusade mobilization.71 Fourth, discussion of the content of sermons has sometimes remained haphazard;72 whereas Kienzle, Tamminen, Phillips, and Bird have already shown ways for profound analysis. There was perhaps an underdeveloped interest in the matter, given the view that the contents were of minor importance to a preaching event anyway.73 Further methodological development of how to examine such sources seems necessary, including reflections on the historical value that this may yield. This brings the blending of crusade and other phenomena into focusâas is common throughout the sermon texts.74 The historian is thus prompted to engage with the complex fields of theology, liturgy, and exegesis, whereby this study can build on recent developments in the field. Especially Philippe Buc, Cecilia Gaposchkin, Jay Rubenstein, and Katherine Allen Smith have demonstrated how strongly the crusades interacted with such dimensions, increasingly embedding them in their Christian meta-structure, and thus equipping the scholar with an entirely new toolbox.
Moreover, this study tackles two further essential aspects: the first concerns the state of the art in sermon studies, where the 12th century remains a neglected field, due to the myth that extensive preaching (especially with lay audiences) only unfolded with the friars.75 However, the friars represent the outcome, and not the beginning, of a process that originated at least in mid-12th-century Paris, a fact underlined by all previous research on 12th-century sermons. Many of the efforts usually attributed to the friars were already taking shape in the 12th century; the period knew important predecessors and pioneers, just as one observes attempts to encourage preaching and to disseminate preaching material.76 Another dimension of sermon studies concerns the fact that one often finds there disciplines other than the historical (many theologians and philologists of different languages), whose interest is often limited to the texts themselves. Dimensions of historical contextualization and the interaction with historical phenomena are left unconsidered more often than not. Sermons, however, did not exist in a vacuumâeven biblical commentaries contain numerous references to political, social, and historical phenomena, as Philippe Buc demonstrated (1994). Consequently, one needs to animadvert on the idea common among sermon scholars that model sermons are timeless and unspecific.77 While their model character is an important factor, this study will show that such texts offer many specific insights: thanks to historical contextualization, dimensions become visible in the texts that are otherwise overlooked. Yet, this comes with its challenges; scholars such as David dâAvray have developed promising approaches: his profound investigations have revised stereotypical notions such as the antithesis of spontaneous itinerant preaching and university sermons.78 Whereas scholars were sometimes quick to assert a spiritual or monastic reading for a sermon, the crusades must find consideration in the central and late Middle Ages as a sermon textâs possible purpose and layer of meaning.79 Nicole Bériou even asserted that the late 11th century, with the dawn of the crusade movement, represented the pivotal point for the emergence of broader preaching efforts: following the expertise of this eminent sermon scholar, the development of preaching material was from the beginning significantly interwoven with the crusades.80
The second aspect concerns reviewing the deeply narrative historiography of the crusades, which established certain myths about crusade preaching, especially that not many âcrusade sermonsâ have survived (see below). This study contests the representativeness of chronicles; this includes the dimension of their reception and distribution, given that their manuscript evidence is generally slim (with a few exceptions).81 The study will modify the narratives delivered by the chronicles with the help of the sermon texts, since their narrativity requires deconstruction via modern methodsâapproaches that have only recently received attention.82 Chronicles as a source need critical review for another reason as well: they represent a digestion with hindsightâeven more so in the case of failed expeditions such as the Third Crusade. Nikolas Jaspert asserted that they are âcontaminated by the experiences of the journey.â83 Nevertheless, scholars used chronicles for examining a crusadeâs motivations, goals, and preaching.84 This study will demonstrate that essential differences exist between expectation a priori and hindsight a posteriori, critically when a crusade failed. The First Crusade, on the other hand, was characterized by the delivery of expectationsâas visible in the strongly apocalyptic outlook of its chronicles.85 This will show that scholars often underestimated the role of eschatological beliefs for the crusade movement.86 The historiographical focus is also very much visible in the scholarship on the Third Crusade, which was often devoted to the history of events or military dimensions, for example, John Hoslerâs book (2018) on the siege of Acre. Symptomatic is also a focus on the leaders, in particular Frederick Barbarossa and Richard Lionheart.87 Specific chronicles have been subjected to substantial analysis, just as the events of 1187 have been examined, including the calls for help sent to the West.88 Of particular note are Helen Birkettâs excellent article (2018), a first systematic investigation of how news of the events spread to the West, as well as Thomas Smithâs contribution (2018), who reviewed Audita tremendi on the basis of the manuscripts and its different versionsâtwo essential foundations for this study. Finally, Stephen Bennettâs recent book (2021) investigated participants in the Third Crusade from northwestern Europe through the lenses of network analysis and prosopography, providing an extensive list of participants in his appendix, which was of great value to this study.89 In conclusion, previous research on the Third Crusade focused on certain themes and sources, whereas the ventureâs preaching has not received any meaningful attention.
3.1.1 Why Not Propaganda?
Thinking of crusade preaching, it seems tempting to apply the modern concept of propaganda, an attractive keyword that has already embellished the titles of many books and articles. Christoph Maier, in particular, embedded the phenomenon into such a conceptual framework.90 However, this concept is undoubtedly indebted to recent history and largely dependent on present-day media and modern concepts of politics. Especially National Socialism used and abused the term, leaving a specific and negative mark on the concept.91 Several of its key ideas seem unsuitable for the medieval period, in particular mass media, the intended manipulation for own ends (often understood as economic or political interests), and the simplification of complex contents.
First, it is not difficult to argue that the mass media of modernity did not exist in the Middle Ages. Processes of communication were much less centralized and much less controllable. Mediality is crucial for the concept of propaganda: it conveys the world via media, always holding a potential for distortion and abuse.92 The sermon, however, was characterized by the personal contact in the massâeven if contents were transported via media, especially via the lens of the Bible. Yet, this was a media distance shared by preacher and audience, whereas with the concept of propaganda, only the recipients are subjected to this distortion. While I agree with David dâAvray that one can consider preaching as a medieval form of âmass communicationâ that unfolded its impact via its perpetual presence,93 one must still consider the media conditions of the age instead of projecting modern notions.94 Second, using the term propaganda obstructs our view on the effectiveness and universality of cultural paradigms; it suggests that the motivations for crusades were somehow imposed, optional, and an unreliable façade. It evokes in particular the notion of a manipulative clergy who influenced the mass of lay people for their own benefit. But what benefit would that be? Were clerics not those most enthusiastic of all, often found in the first flight of a crusade army? Again, as with the media conditions, producers and recipients were united via common goals, that is, a devout life and the pursuit of salvation.95 Third, the modern understanding of propaganda is fundamentally characterized by the simplification of complex subjects, to thus achieve wide broadcasting, to polemicize, and to develop Feindbilder (notions of the enemy). The credo is the simpler the better.96 One may assert the opposite impetus for medieval preaching: it complicated even the simplest matters by distinguishing subjects according to the four senses of Scripture, by explaining spiritual meanings behind physical objects, or by using manifold biblical imagery.97 Meaning is not simplified but multipliedâthe opposite of propaganda. Simple appeals such as âthese are the enemies, vanquish themâ would agree with propaganda, and some scholars may imagine that crusades were preached accordinglyâbut not a single sermon text exists that would limit itself to such simple messages.
The entanglement of crusades and Christian religion demonstrates how much their mobilization stemmed from the heart of this society and how intrinsically it blended with daily religious practice. Communication and preaching were essential components therein, but notions of manipulation, mass media, or the enrichment of a small elite do not do justice to the phenomenon. As a result, one must not make the mistake of imposing our modern ideas. Already Penny Cole asserted about crusade-related sermons: âThey were more didactic than exhortatory; they provided explanations of the moral and spiritual significance of crusading and, in the process, stripped the crusade of its martial realism and replaced this with a wholly spiritual message.â98 This nature erodes the border between the crusade and other subjects, and for this reason Jessalynn Bird underlined âthe difficulty of identifying sermons intended for the crusade.â99 David dâAvray argued that â[â¦] preachers do not usually have to be original and must not propound ideas that seem too alien to their audience.â100 In agreement, Bird deemed liturgical sermons a lingua franca for granting the crusades meaning.101 Preachers relate to the horizon of their audience; they seek to blend with familiar patterns to stimulate participation in an expedition. Crusade mobilization would not have worked if it distinguished itself too much from other preaching. Now, however, the historian is left with the challenge of identifying the crusade within sermon texts.
3.1.2 The Latin Terminology of âthe Crusadeâ and the Corpus of Crusade-Related Elements (Table 1)
The question of crusade-specific language and terminology represents an unresolved issue: one can only draw on studies either examining limited samples or operating in a piecemeal way.102 It relates to the much-discussed issue of what a crusade is, a debate that often had a cumbersome nature, because scholars hardly distinguished between the ideas of medieval people and modern analytical categories. One may draft an analytical definition, for example, one that agrees with the so-called pluralists (the notion that areas such as Iberia and the Baltic also witnessed crusades)âalthough this does not say anything about the medieval perception.103 This debate tackles another much-discussed question: Did contemporaries understand the First Crusade as something genuinely new or merely as the fulfilment of expectations? Considering the quite unspecific terminology for the crusades, using generic categories such as peregrinatio and at best extending their meaning, one can clearly tend to the latter.104 Similarly telling is the non-existent demarcation of pilgrims and crusaders.105 Norman Housley explained: âBut a distinctive crusading vocabulary was slow to emerge, possibly because it was not needed [â¦].â106 This study is interested in how contemporaries conceived of the activity of crusading, that is, the meaning of a journey to the East and the Churchâs defense against its manifold enemies. This broaches the issue of how the crusade may express itself in the late 12th century in language and imagery.
Modern research always had a strong desire to identify equivalents to the modern âcrusadeâ in medieval texts, a term that only sharpened its meaning in the 17th century, as Christoph Maier recently demonstrated.107 Scholars listed terms such as peregrinatio or iter Hierosolimitanumâbut they hardly asked the question if these were in any way representative, that is, did these represent widespread and established concepts for âthe crusadeâ?108 Thanks to the ability to search full text databases, one discovers that none of these terms was very common. Some may even designate attempts by specific authors to establish a new term for the phenomenon. We will see in the following chapters how authors after 1187 tried the same, thereby creating terminological diversity. The terminology for âcrusadersâ is likewise a complex and unresolved issueâwhile scholars such as Christopher Tyerman have often been too quick to use crucesignati for this purpose.109 Here, too, database searches demonstrate that this term is a rare occurrence; many crusade-specific texts do not use it at all. Walker Reid Cosgrove emphasized that it remained one term among many, even during Innocent IIIâs papacy (to whom its establishment is usually attributed).110 As a result, the selection of sermon material cannot limit itself to the appearance of terms that did not loom large in the contemporary discourse. One encounters a diversity of terms and expressions that try to grasp the historical phenomenon somehow; our analysis must remain open to new linguistic forms that may designate âthe crusade.â It also seems that medieval people did not share our desire to grant the phenomenon a specific name.111 They did not deem this necessary, likely because the linguistic instruments available (stemming from the Bible, exegesis, and the liturgy) offered more than sufficient categories for apprehending the phenomenonâa fact that impedes our view, eager to sharpen crusade-specific language.
Table 1 catalogues elements and biblical references that occur repeatedly in crusade-specific texts. Mapping an elementâs manifold occurrences helps with substantiating its crusade-specific nature; this provides the historian with a toolbox that can help in decoding the sermon texts.112 This corpus sharpens, therefore, the recognizability of crusade-specific language and, in case of doubt, it delivers further evidence for an elementâs crusade nature. Every entry in the table is crusade-specific; it refers either to a crusade-specific source or to a crusade-specific context within a source. Certain parallels with the Third Crusadeâs corpus are especially insightful, for example, when elements appear in First Crusade chronicles, the pivotal precedent, or if they are present in liturgical texts: this indicates a practice, including the fact that broader parts of society were familiar with these elements. However, it is important to note that the table can only build on the state of research; blank spaces are not necessarily real gaps, for example, much material is still waiting in liturgical manuscripts. The meager state of the art is notably evident in the column âCrusade-related sermon texts,â since scholars have not examined sermons through the lens of the crusades prior to 1187. The few entries derive from those hitherto known haphazard findings, such as the different versions of Urban IIâs sermon. Contrariwise, gaps in well-researched and especially digitized materials (such as the First Crusade accounts) are significant; here, it seems that certain elements indeed remain absent. This also permits initial conclusions as to how the preaching of crusades developed thematically. The table shows that some elements are only present after 1187, a fact due to the events of that year, as this study will discuss. The listed motifs concur with those examined in this study; the table is thus informed by the Third Crusadeâs corpus.
Table 1A
The corpus of crusade-related elements
|
Chronicles |
Liturgy |
Letters |
||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
First Crusade |
12th cen. |
Third Crusade |
13th cen. |
First Crusade |
12th cen. |
Third Crusade |
13th cen. |
First Crusade |
12th cen. |
Third Crusade |
13th cen. |
|
|
Ez. 9:4 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||||
|
Gal. 6:14 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Ps. 79 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
Ps. 131:7 / 1â¯Pet. 2:21 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
Hebr. 13:14 |
x |
|||||||||||
|
Ps. 74:12 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||||
|
Is. 51:17 / 60:1 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||||||
|
Job 9:24 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||||
|
Cross as a war banner |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
Ex. 12:7 |
||||||||||||
|
Lk. 19:41 and Palm Sunday |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||||||
|
Is. 11:10 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||||
|
Mt. 16:24 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Comparison Cross and Ark |
x |
x |
||||||||||
|
Holy Land as inheritance |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
Ps. 122:2â3 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||||
|
Laetare Jerusalem (Is. 66:10) |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Gates to Jerusalem |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||||
|
East (oriens) |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Fulfilment of prophecies |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
Earlier conquests of Jerusalem |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||||
|
terra sancta (term) |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
The sea as probation |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||||||
|
John 12:31â32 |
x |
|||||||||||
|
pagani / gentes |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Rev. 19 |
x |
x |
||||||||||
|
Imitatio Christi |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Martyrdom |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||||
Table 1B
The corpus of crusade-related elements
|
Crusade-related sermon texts |
Crusade-specific Artes praedicandi |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
First Crusade |
12th cen. |
Third Crusade |
13th cen. |
Brevis Ordinacio |
Humbert of Romans |
Stephen of Bourbon |
|
|
Ez. 9:4 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
Gal. 6:14 |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Ps. 79 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
Ps. 131:7 / 1â¯Pet. 2:21 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
Hebr. 13:14 |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Ps. 74:12 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
Is. 51:17 / 60:1 |
x |
||||||
|
Job 9:24 |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Cross as a war banner |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
Ex. 12:7 |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Lk. 19:41 and Palm Sunday |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Is. 11:10 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
Mt. 16:24 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
Comparison Cross and Ark |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Holy Land as inheritance |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
Ps. 122:2â3 |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Laetare Jerusalem (Is. 66:10) |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Gates to Jerusalem |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
East (oriens) |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Fulfilment of prophecies |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Earlier conquests of Jerusalem |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
terra sancta (term) |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
The sea as probation |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
John 12:31â32 |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
pagani / gentes |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Rev. 19 |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Imitatio Christi |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
Martyrdom |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Table 1C
The corpus of crusade-related elements
|
Corpus of the Third Crusade |
|||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Baldwin of Canterbury |
Peter of Blois |
Ralph Ardens |
Garnerius of Clairvaux |
Henry of Albano |
Hélinand of Froidmont |
Alan of Lille |
Prevostin of Cremona |
Martin of León |
|
|
Ez. 9:4 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
Gal. 6:14 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
Ps. 79 |
x |
x |
x |
||||||
|
Ps. 131:7 / 1â¯Pet. 2:21 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
Hebr. 13:14 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Ps. 74:12 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Is. 51:17 / 60:1 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Job 9:24 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
Cross as a war banner |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
Ex. 12:7 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
Lk. 19:41 and Palm Sunday |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
Is. 11:10 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||||
|
Mt. 16:24 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
Comparison Cross and Ark |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Holy Land as inheritance |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Ps. 122:2â3 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Laetare Jerusalem (Is. 66:10) |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Gates to Jerusalem |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
East (oriens) |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Fulfilment of prophecies |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||||
|
Earlier conquests of Jerusalem |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
terra sancta (term) |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
The sea as probation |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
John 12:31â32 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
pagani / gentes |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Rev. 19 |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Imitatio Christi |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Martyrdom |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
The column âChroniclesâ includes other narrative sources such as pilgrim reports. Chronicles about the First Crusade that were penned in the advancing 12th century have been moved into the column â12th century.â The column âLiturgyâ builds fundamentally on Cecilia Gaposchkinâs and Amnon Linderâs contributions, complemented by my own observations for the Third Crusade and some treatises De officiis that offer crusade-related discussions. The columns âFirst Crusadeâ and âThird Crusadeâ are obviously quite empty, since liturgical practices were not aligned with specific expeditions. In cases where references are given, this derives mainly from historiographical sources that narrate liturgical action. The column âLettersâ primarily considers encyclicals and other letters of broader historical significance: the presence of elements in these sources indicates a spatial and societal distribution of ideas that certainly transcended a clerical or monastic register. The column âCrusade-related sermon textsâ is informed by those sermons that scholars have hitherto classified as crusade-related.113 These come mostly from the 13th century: using them in a comparative perspective allows us to sharpen crusade-specific language and to substantiate thus the crusade purpose of late 12th-century sermon texts.114
3.1.3 What Is a âCrusade Sermonâ?
It is a tenacious myth that not many âcrusade sermonsâ have survived. This myth is probably a key reason why scholars hardly developed an interest in the preaching of these ventures. It was fueled by unsubstantiated assertions that give the impression that the matter had been sorted out conclusively, for example, by Christopher Tyerman (1998): â[â¦] no independent texts of twelfth-century crusade sermons survive until 1189.â115 Similarly, Anne Bysted wrote (2015): âAll in all, we have evidence of the content matter of crusade sermons of around ten different preachers within our period [i.e., 1099â1215].â116 However, before one could make such definite assertions, one has to deal with two essential issues: first, one needs to discuss what exactly is meant by âcrusade sermon,â since the medieval period did not know such a genre (nor an equivalent). Second, before formulating any quantitative assertions, one needs to survey all extant sermon material, a task that is hardly achievable. This material is already vast (and often unpublished) in the 12th century and largely expanding from the 13th century onwards. This study tried to cope with this task for the Third Crusade: having started with three preachers, the list now includes nine and is still incompleteâat some point, I simply reached the conclusion that the net of sources is too manifold and widespread to be covered in a single monograph. The nine identified preachers, however, were important protagonists, as the first chapter will demonstrate. One can distinguish two schools as to the understanding of what a âcrusade sermonâ is; two different approaches for how to select sources:
On one side of the spectrum, one observes an understanding largely indebted to the modern concept of âcrusade sermonâ that strenuously intends to identify a medieval equivalentâand since such a thing does not exist, this approach fuels the myth of lost crusade sermons. Christoph Maierâs research led the way here: while he was reluctant to formulate an explicit definition of âcrusade sermon,â and his research clearly revealed the entanglement with the liturgy, he still limited himself to small samples of sermon texts. He identified these primarily via formalistic criteria, in particular sermonsâ titles where the crusade surfaces more explicitly in some exceptional cases (and this not before the early 13th century). Valentin Portnykh and Miikka Tamminen agree with this understanding; the latter also attempted a definition of âcrusade sermonâ (only for his study, not a generic definition).117 Yet, it is problematic because it intends to identify relevant sermons via the audience, but in many cases, we cannot determine any audience (thus, one must consider crusaders as a possible audience), just as âcrusadersâ do not represent a homogenous or exclusive group that one could demarcate to other listeners.118
On the other side, one observes an approach that is not obstructed by modern categories or the (not crusade-specific) titles of sermons, but examines their contents, thus accessing a broad range of sources, in particular liturgical sermon texts. Beverly Kienzle and Penny Cole have already developed important approaches; the latter formulated the imperative âfor reading the medieval sermon books in which the crusade sermons lie buried.â119 Jessalynn Bird undertook pioneering work in her PhD thesis, demonstrating the entanglement of crusades to the East with anti-heretical efforts and reform ambitionsâthis made clear that an exclusive categorization of âcrusade preachingâ does not correspond with the medieval understanding. Her recent research showed how worthwhile it is to consider sermon texts broadly and to classify specific feasts per se as crusade-related, specifically Palm Sunday and Good Friday.120 Matthew Phillips pursued a similar approach, discussing crusade elements in liturgical sermon texts (especially the cross, penance, and imitatio Christi); and Constantinos Georgiou unearthed numerous pertinent sources for the first half of the 14th century, while emphasizing that much is still waiting in liturgical collections.
The first school is thus characterized by a narrow and formalistic approach that relies on modern concepts. Even though these scholars also produced many pertinent results, their limited samples raise the question of representativeness: conclusions regarding generic traits of crusade preaching or broader developments should be handled with care. Maier and Tamminen also demonstrate great awareness of the complexity of the situation and the entanglement with the liturgy, butâand this is essentialâthey do not consider these dimensions when it comes to selecting sources. The second school opened up other avenues by considering sermons broadly: one cannot separate âcrusade preachingâ from other preaching activities; this is a false, modern antithesis. This is corroborated by Gaposchkinâs and Linderâs seminal research on the liturgy: both showed how omnipresent the crusade was within the liturgical framework, and how it blended with pre-existing categories. This study clearly follows the second school, since this agrees with the medieval logic: crusade-related preaching was a ubiquitous phenomenon of the period. Yet, it also intends to provide a synthesis, since there is now the issue of how one may assert âcrusade potentialâ in a specific text. This concerns addressing the precise nature of the relationship between a sermon text and the phenomenon of the crusadeâan issue on which protagonists of the second school have not pondered either. Agreeing with Birdâs approach, particular feasts lend themselves to the phenomenon, but at the same time, one finds largely varying contents therein. For instance, some Palm Sunday sermons have little or no crusade potential (for example, since they were meant for the monastic arena); others may even be labeled as âcrusade sermonsâ (for example, since they broach the events of 1187). Thus, the crusade potential may vary from text to text, and it may surface via a variety of motifs and expressions. Since âcrusade sermonâ is not a medieval genre and thus distinguishing it from other preaching occasions seems problematic, the study will abstain from using this term. Instead, it will examine a textâs relationship with the crusading purposeâthematically, causally, and chronologically (see below)âby applying two analytical categories that consider the materialâs variety and will henceforth serve for categorizing specific texts:
Sermons with high crusade potential: These are texts where the crusade surfaces clearly; application in service of the crusade seems likely or even certain, for example, if the events of 1187 or the earthly Jerusalem are discussed explicitly, but also if a large number of crusade elements are combined (for instance, a conjunction of Jerusalem, pagans, and penance). An exhaustive analysis will also uncover the crusade-related program that such a sermon proposes in its entirety: for example, the events of 1187 usually do not represent an isolated note, but interact with other elements in the text. Consequently, one must take the text as it stands seriously: an author consciously included a spectrum where crusade elements blend intrinsically with other traits.
Sermons with possible crusade potential: These are texts where implementation in service of the crusade seems possible, but not the only possibility, indebted to the four senses of Scripture and the genreâs model nature, for example, if a sermon broaches Jerusalem (the guise ambiguous), and this could refer, say, to either the earthly or the monastic Jerusalem.121 These texts thus contribute to notions and expectations; they are pertinent pieces of the puzzle for studying crusade spirituality, but their purpose is not unequivocal. Considering such will help to sharpen the crusade potential of the first category: by comparing texts with âhigh crusade potentialâ and âpossible crusade potential,â one can establish how one may encounter the phenomenon in sermon texts.
Protagonists of the first school may counter that the 13th century knew âcrusade sermonsâ if titles such as Ad crucesignatos or In predicatione crucis appear. Even though these are certainly valuable evidence, limiting oneself to them seems problematic, as does equating them with âcrusade sermon.â These texts are insignificant in quantitative terms; some rare cases must be set against a vast mass of liturgical specimens.122 They make up probably less than 1 per cent of the surviving sermons, whereas crusade-related preaching was certainly a much more dominant phenomenon. Those exceptional cases represent an addendum to regular preaching and, given their exceptional nature, they may be even further away from common preaching practice.123 Furthermore, this does not have any relevance for the 12th century; I have not found a single sermon with such a title. And the phenomenon may have remained ephemeral: despite extensive surveys, Georgiou has not found a single sermon Ad crucesignatos in the 14th century.124 Similarly, the crusade-specific titles of the 13th century are manifold in nature; they cannot be subsumed under a single genre. The only type that may have a slight resemblance with such are the sermons Ad crucesignatos; these, however, belong to the barely disseminated ad status genre. Bird criticized the restriction to such as an âartificially closed tradition.â125 Neither qualitatively nor quantitatively is it justified to equate these with the modern category of âcrusade sermon.â This is especially true since the terminology for crusaders remained diverse, as discussed, just as nobody would suppose that other sermons ad status, for example, ad clericos, were the only ones addressed to this group. Other crusade-specific titles note in rare cases preaching occasions; this often appears as a gloss at a sermonâs outset.126 These do not justify the definition of a genre either, but likely reflect a scribeâs specific interest in recording something about the textâs earlier use.127
How badly an exclusive categorization of âcrusade sermonâ works is demonstrated by the phenomenon of a sermonâs title deviating from one manuscript to the other. This versatile nature sometimes even appears within a single title: for example, a sermon by Roger of Salisbury (mid-13th cen.) says that it is meant either for crucesignati or Good Friday (istud potest esse thema ad crucesignatos vel in die Parasceves).128 Odo of Chateauroux entitles a text as Sermo in conversione sancti Pauli et exhortatio ad assumendam crucem (Sermon on the conversion of Saint Paul and an exhortation to take the cross). Similarly, Gilbert of Tournai notes: verbum hoc competit cuilibet sancto et crucis negotio (This text can serve any saint or the business of the cross).129 The late 12th century offers comparable evidence: one of Prevostin of Cremonaâs sermons says that it can be put to use for any saint (sermo de quolibet sancto). He takes it to extremes with another text bearing the title Sermo in quolibet festo, a sermon for any feast.130 Maurice of Sully proposes one for both in ramis palmarum vel de adventu, Palm Sunday or Adventâtwo quite different feasts (aligned by both being concerned with an arrival of Christ).131 John of Abbeville (early 13th cen.) offers another example: Sermo iste potest adaptari Paulo, beato Augustino et cuilibet sancto de gentilitate ad fidem converso (This sermon can be adapted for Paul, the blessed Augustine, and any saint who converted from heathendom to the faith), a title that indicates a crusade-related purpose.132 These versatile titles demonstrate how adaptable the sermon material was (hence including the crusade), and how little one should stick with clear-cut categories or the notion of clearly defined genres. This reveals likewise how badly an exclusive categorization of âcrusade sermonâ or âcrusadersâ as an audience works, and how intrinsically such preaching was interwoven with liturgical feasts.
This studyâs methodological approach consists thus of four essential steps:
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âCrusade sermonâ is not a medieval genre but a modern concept inhering in certain anachronistic ideas (largely stemming from the concept of propaganda). As a result, this category cannot be of any help in selecting source material. Using modern concepts, the question is always whether they illuminate or obscure a phenomenon; here, the latter is clearly the case, therefore one should discard this category as an analytical instrument.
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As recent research has demonstrated, preaching related to crusading activities was much more than military mobilization, straddling moral and spiritual dimensions and including traits such as the Eucharist or penance. It was intrinsically entangled with pivotal practices of Christian religion; one needs to discard the modern antithesis of âcrusade preachingâ versus ânormal (liturgical) preachingâ; and one must orientate oneself alongside the usual mode of organizing and entitling sermon material: the liturgical calendar.
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Applying now a broad approach, one suddenly discovers that numerous medieval sermons deal with elements undoubtedly relevant to the crusades (such as Jerusalem, pagans, or penance). These texts betray at least a thematic relationship with crusading: they must be considered in an empirical breadth to investigate the phenomenon in a sound and meaningful way.
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It follows (and here I go beyond previous research) that one needs to examine the crusade potential of a sermon text, that is, its relationship with crusading activities. However, it is a complex matter how âthe crusadeâ may surface in such a text, expressing itself in a large variety of imagery, terms, and biblical references. This requires meticulous and exegetical analysis; it requires especially that one approaches these texts unbiased. Furthermore, a textâs historical anchoring, if successful, can help with arguing that such a text also inheres in a causal and chronological nexus with crusade recruitment.
3.2 The Corpus of Sources: A Discourse Analytical Approach
3.2.1 Patrologia latina and Manuscripts
In the service of a discourse analysis, it is first necessary to clearly define the corpus of sources, its size, and how specific texts were selected. Most of the relevant texts are either published in the outdated Patrologia latina (ed. Jacques Paul Migne, Paris 1844â1864) or still unpublishedâlikely a key reason why they have not received meaningful scholarly attention. The PL does not comply with todayâs academic standards and contains mistakes, often simply reprinting older editions (see the chapter on immediate context). It usually builds only on a portion of the surviving manuscripts or even a single copy; this raises the question of deviations: in both the unconsidered codices and those that flowed into the edition, because the PL offers a uniform text without noting any variants.133 Since this study is very much interested in terminological details and the use as well as adaptation of biblical elements, it was necessary to examine the texts in their manuscripts. A copyâs localization and material shape also delivered important insights by considering it as an archaeological artefact that helps in understanding a textâs purpose.134 Dimensions such as format, composition, and organizing devices (for example, tables of contents or glosses) essentially contribute to understanding the practical nature of these sources. Examining the manuscripts thus had four purposes: eliminating errors of the PL; watching out for variants; uncovering texts that are still unpublished; and gaining vital insights into the sourcesâ nature and purpose. I consulted all pertinent manuscripts, that is, those holding sermons or crusade treatises of the nine authors, while not being available in any modern edition.135 Since the number of copies is limited, it has not been necessary to narrow down the selection. Depending on the text, four different approaches were applied: (a) sermons that are published in the PL; (b) sermons published in a modern edition; (c) sermons still unpublished; and (d) texts that were not the prime concern (such as preaching aids).
First, after having identified a relevant sermon via the PL, its text has been compared with the manuscripts (considering title, errors, variants, and position in the codex). Second, with texts available in a modern edition, it was not mandatory to consult the manuscriptsâunless important copies were missing from the edition (see the chapter on immediate context). However, the physical evidence was still of interest, therefore codices have been consulted when an occasion presented itself (primarily regarding deviating titles and the codexâs composition). Third, a large number of unpublished sermons have been read and transcribed. However, many of these, often surviving anonymously or pointing beyond the nine preachers, have eventually not been included in this book, since they would require further research. The chapter on media context provides an impression of the materials that are still waiting in these codices. Fourth, as concerns preaching aids and various treatises, manuscripts have been consulted selectively: I limited myself to early copies, while the focus was on physical shape and composition (partly on issues of attribution); and textual comparisons have only been conducted selectively. The chapter on immediate context delineates what exactly this means regarding particular texts. Save for texts published in a modern edition, the study usually cites the PLâs version (where it provides a viable text). This adheres to the simple logic that it is widely available. Important and interesting deviations are noted within a passageâs quotation.136 All quotations of unpublished texts follow the guidelines that David dâAvray drafted for a âcritical transcriptionâ of sermons; this has the goal of making the texts available without caring about time-consuming editorial standards.137 In cases where only the PL is cited (being concerned with a prime source, that is, sermons or crusade treatises), this means that I have not found any meaningful variants.138 The texts have still been reviewed via the manuscripts and can thus be considered as verified evidence.
The corpus of the nine preachers includes some 630 sermon texts, both published and unpublished (Canterbury circle: c.280; Clairvaux circle: c.120; Paris circle: c.230): 42 of these texts have been analysed in-depth (c.7 per cent of the corpus), as systematically depicted in tables 8â11. Moreover, c.95 further sermons have been considered (c.15 per cent); this makes around 140 sermons altogether (c.22 per cent). The study thus considered a representative portion of the entire corpus. The next section introduces how and why sermons have been chosen from a collection: these are those with the highest crusade potential and the largest number of crusade elements. In practical terms, the selection was also dependent on the state of publication: it was possible to search published and especially digitized sources systematically for specific motifs and biblical references (Peter of Blois, Baldwin of Canterbury, Ralph Ardens, Martin of León, Garnerius of Clairvaux, and partially Hélinand of Froidmont). However, it was not possible to harvest unpublished sources in the same manner (Alan of Lille, Prevostin of Cremona, partially also Garnerius and Hélinand). I had to orientate myself with parameters such as titles or glosses; specific liturgical feasts, such as Palm Sunday or All Saints, were an important guideâan approach that generated a focus on certain feasts. The exhaustive surveys of the digitized materials corroborate that these feasts are indeed among those with the highest crusade potential, yet it remains possible that some crusade-related texts are still waiting under the heading of a less popular feast. There likewise remains potential for thematic expansion, for example, one could scrutinize the dimension of penance more than I did in this study. In doing so, further crusade-related texts would likely turn up. Regarding the manuscript evidence, the phenomenon of the polygraphic sermon collection (those containing several authors) decreases the amount of material covered in a specific codex, since these contain authors that are not considered here. Further crusade-related texts, for example, by Stephen Langton (c.1150â1228), are certainly waiting in such codices. This study analysed all 42 primarily relevant sermons in all the extant copies (between one and six for each text): counting every version as an individual text, this makes 99 sermon texts disseminated over 37 codices.
3.2.2 How the Sermon Texts Were Selected
Whereas numerous sermons broach elements doubtlessly pertinent to the crusades (a definite thematic relationship), there is the question of whether one can also assert a causal relationship with the endeavor: that is, to argue that the crusade was a textâs prime purpose, its prime layer of meaning. Hence, it likely derives from recruitment efforts related to a particular venture, that is, a chronological relationship. As a result, when speaking of a sermonâs relevance, one can distinguish three types (see table 11):
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A thematic relationship with the crusade: Such a nexus is certainly present in numerous sermons; every sermon dealing with some kind of crusade element or reciting biblical stories of the Holy Land applies here. These sermons thus operate at least as a repository of ideas and materials for crusade-related preaching. Whether they did indeed derive from such or have been used for such often remains hypothetical, due to the four senses of Scripture and the genreâs model nature.139 Nevertheless, these are valuable sources for studying crusade spirituality and ideas about specific crusade motifs. The breadth of surviving texts allows us to examine such motifs in-depth, just as it countervails the suspicion that actual preaching may have differed significantly from the texts (see below). The consideration of a large number of sermons allows us to capture the range of resources available to contemporary preachers, which thus informed actual preaching activities. Consequently, it becomes possible to investigate preaching as a historical practice, in agreement with a discourse analysisâwhereas small samples and extraordinary texts do not deliver such insights.
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A causal relationship with the crusade: This designates that its mobilization and (essentially spiritual) support was a textâs prime purpose. Such a nexus is more difficult to argue, yet I am convinced that this is possible in some cases: several parameters indicate the crusade as well as a sermonâs intention to contribute to these efforts (see below). These texts derive from such activity (following the premise that an author would pen sermons that he had successfully tested), and they were likely put to use for such (preachers were probably grateful for available material).140 Liturgical sermon texts comprising such a causal relationship are crucial evidence for the necessity of considering sermon material broadly.
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A chronological relationship with the crusade: On the basis of a causal nexus, one can try to establish a chronological one: that is, relating a sermon text to a specific crusade venture. Such a nexus may likewise have existed with texts where one can only assert a thematic relationship, for example, a generic sermon on the cross took on quite a different meaning when used on the eve of an expedition. The (historical) context thus modifies a textâs meaning.141 Three parameters help with arguing a chronological nexus: first, broaching or alluding to the events of 1187 provides a terminus post quem. Second, the preacherâs biography shows in all nine cases that these figures were active in the Third Crusade, therefore relevant texts likely stem from this historical context (see the chapter on immediate context). Third, the chapter on historical context will identify preaching occasions where the surviving texts may have been used.
Six approaches help in identifying the crusade in sermons, permitting at least the assertion of a thematic relationship. Yetâand this will be demonstrated in the following chaptersâdepending on the quantity of parameters present, but also depending on the quality of their utterances, one can also argue for a causal one (see table 10):
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A holistic program: Many sermons express a holistic understanding; this means including all senses of Scripture and hence all possible guises of a phenomenon (such as Jerusalem). Sermons declare, for example, that they are concerned with both visible and invisible enemies, consequently straddling human groups. Such holistic announcements demonstrate that the crusade is part of their perspective.
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An explicit discussion of physical manifestations: Whereas it remains in some sermons unclear with which sense of Scripture they endow a subject (indebted to their model nature), others explicitly broach physical objects such as the earthly Jerusalem. It is thus clear that the crusade is its purpose (at least thematically; depending on the argument, perhaps also causally).
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An explicit discussion of the present: When sermons speak of the Holy Land or other relevant matters, it is essential to consider verb tenses. It is possible to recite a biblical story in the past or perfect tense (developing thereafter a spiritual reading), or to place prophetic predictions in the future. However, if such elements are broached in the present tense, it is clear that the present and the current state of the Holy Land are at stake, for example, when a sermon discusses in the present tense that pagans attack Jerusalem. Similarly significant is if the future tense of a prophetic quotation is adapted into the present or perfect tense: this suggests the prophecyâs fulfillment.142
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The quantity of crusade elements: It is always a useful first step to compose a list of crusade elements appearing in a sermon. If this generates a respectable list, it is already evident that the text is concerned with crusading: the more elements assembled, the higher is its crusade potentialâeven though a necessary second step is to assess the textâs utterances qualitatively.
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The combination of significant motifs: There are, for example, sermons that discuss sin in a generic manner, representing the usual harangues. Others, however, intertwine the existing sinfulness with the Holy Land: a cardinal pointer to failure in the East, stemming from the common argument of peccatis nostris exigentibus.143 One may argue in a similar way, for example, as to a combination of Jerusalem and pagans: such a blending betrays that a sermon is not only concerned with a spiritual Jerusalem. If this is also broached in the present tense, the crusade surfaces even more clearly.
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The construction of crusade-related identities: Numerous sermons propose offers of identity to their audiences, whereby some lend themselves to crusading (this may extend beyond the Holy Land, relating, for example, to anti-heretical action). Three offers of identity are noteworthy: first, the identity as cross-bearers may even be understood as tantamount to âcrusaders,â including calls to take or to sign oneself with the cross. As the sermon material will demonstrate, it could be expressed via a variety of terms. Second, militant exempla make war and violence into virtuous activities; Christ himself, in his eschatological guise, often appears as such, but also several Old Testament figures (such as Gad or Gideon). Third, eschatological identities represent a strong case, in particular binaries such as iusti and impii, while social or ethnic classifications are (widely) absent in the same text. These are not limited to the crusading arena, but parameters such as an interplay with the Holy Land provide a good indicator.144
Beyond these parameters, three compelling indicators suggest the crusade as a textâs prime purpose; the presence of one of these delivers a substantial argument for a causal relationship (see table 9):
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An explicit discussion of events in the East, especially those of 1187: Every broaching of these events can be understood as a reaction to them, therefore standing in a causal and chronological relationship with the Third Crusade. A preacher intends to teach his audience something about them, while references to events of providential standing always inhere in calls for action. Preachers like to proceed to spiritual dimensions and the collective sinfulness for which the events operate as a signifier; they thus construct spatial and temporal causalities that tie the Eastern events into manifold subjects in the West. Identifying the events of 1187 requires close analysis: whereas some sermons explicitly state that âJerusalem has fallenâ and âthe Cross is lost,â others broach the subject in a more oblique manner. Once news had spread, a preacher could suppose a horizon of knowledge.
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Calling the audience to take the cross: This is a strong indicator, designating immediate recruitment for the East. However, the absence of such a call does not represent an argument against a sermonâs crusade pertinence, since such preaching straddled a number of purposes (see below), and since there is not any reason to believe that such a call was an obligatory part of a crusade-related sermon. As the next point demonstrates, calling for a journey to the East may express itself in other ways as well. Cross markings also existed, for example, in the monastic context, yet the monks had already taken the cross by entering the monastery. Such a callâs rhetorical form suggests, therefore, the context of crusading, even more so if the analysis of the rest of the sermon corroborates this.
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Calls for activity or departure, in particular with the Holy Land as a destination: Many sermons formulate calls for activity and deeds, often to counterbalance sins such as torpor (numbness) or acedia (sloth). This is not crusade-specific per se, yet it is clear that such calls stand in conflict with a contemplative life and, thus, likely addressed broad audiences, possibly related to historical phenomena (such as reform efforts or the war on heresy). It is significant if such appear in conjunction with crusade elements: consequently, the activity called for indicates the crusade. Sermons occasionally urge departure, sometimes even propagating Jerusalem and the Holy Land as a destination: these cases make the crusade as a textâs prime purpose obvious.
In the subsequent analyses, specific texts will be classified according to the parameters introduced in this section: whereas the thematic relationship represents the basis via which texts were initially selected, it will be argued in some cases that a causal relationship is likewise detectable. These assertions will be substantiated via the four dimensions of context, each found in its own chapter. It is also necessary to discuss what kind of call to action is inherent in a sermon, of which four can be distinguished; and it is possible for a text to straddle more than one of these (see table 11):
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It could be a direct stimulation or call (including instruction, preparation) for a journey to the East; this indicates a broad audience, especially but not exclusively lay people.
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It could be a call and instruction for an expeditionâs spiritual preparation (accompanying or explaining liturgical actions, for example, processions). This may have addressed different groups, both clerical and lay. One needs to distinguish between the spiritual preparation of those journeying to the East and those supporting the endeavor from a distance via such actions (whether in the preparation period or during the venture).
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It could be a call and instruction for preaching the crusade: a preacher entices other clerics to spring into action; he operates as a vector in the mobilization effort. Such sermon texts are insightful evidence for the widespread nature of mobilization (if it had fallen on deaf ears, it would likely not exist in textual form).145
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It could also concern preaching during a crusade: such an application must likewise find consideration for the surviving material (see the chapter on historical context).
3.3 How the Sermon Texts Were Analysed
Discourse analysis is the pivotal instrument of this study, a method first drafted by Michel Foucault and thereafter developed for historical research by scholars such as Achim Landwehr or Edward Said.146 Applying it provides, on the one hand, a specific toolbox for analysing a subject; on the other, it inheres in some fundamental premises about how to approach texts. A discourse analysis contests hermeneutical approaches focused on an authorâs alleged intentions and eager to unearth some obscure layers of meaning behind a textâs surface. It builds instead on the following essential premises: texts are not only an accumulation of signs, but also the reflection or manifestation of a practice; they are pieces of the puzzle of a living discourse. Similarly, language is not only a reflection of reality, but constitutes reality and the perception of historical agents. Texts are considered as productive forces in the processes of ordering and making sense of oneâs own world; objects, events, and groups gain meaning via their lingual appropriation. It is therefore the goal to investigate orders of knowledge, that is, the means and ways of how texts produced knowledge, claims of truth, and eventually a historical reality.
A Discourse Analysis Consists of Two Essential Parts
A close analysis of the textsâanalysing the discourse in terms of contents: What do the sermons propose for preaching? What ideas and expectations do they create, specifically about the Holy Land?
An investigation of their contextâanalysing the discourseâs operating mode: How did one preach? How did crusade mobilization unfold? How does written preaching material relate to mobilization efforts?
3.3.1 A Close Analysis of the Texts
The goal is to examine patterns, terms, and ideas recurrent in the pertinent corpus, concluding on hierarchies of meaning and clusters of themes, and thereby ordering the evidence. Foucaultâs framework helps with relating different sources in a network of knowledge, thus assembling a number of texts into a coherent whole. Yet, it is also important to consider that different terms, subjects, and genres have different values for the functioning of a discourse (see below). Examining the relations between texts requires investigating specific textual elements. Such intertextualities tackle, on the one hand, relations within the corpus of the Third Crusade, which indicate a shared background of education and a preaching agenda that points beyond the individual text; and on the other, the interdependence between this corpus and the Bible: such observations reveal exegetical traditions and hence established ideas. A hermeneutical approach would start with a topic and then collect sources for its investigation; different sources are accumulated and often uncritically mixed (something I criticized the existing historiography on crusade preaching for). Instead of a preconceived past, a discourse analysis places the media that produced a historical reality in the foreground. Similarly, it not only examines what a text says, but also how it says something, considering factors such as narrativity and rhetoric: this sheds light on how language shapes the perception of oneâs own reality.
Moreover, the aim is to take the text as it stands seriously. The author and his individual dispositions are not essential for the analysis, but the role of the texts in a larger puzzle is, that is, the university milieu and its processes of creating knowledge and meaning, disseminated to wider audiences via the medium of the sermon. Significantly, sermons often survived in anonymous form; this demonstrates that the text and not its author was the primary concern. The research underpinning this study analysed all relevant sermon texts in their entirety, instead of harvesting them for specific pieces of information: a sermon represents a coherent whole, creating causalities between all the elements it contains. It was thus key to consider its structure and logic, as presented in the chapter on exemplary descriptions, in order to excavate its different layers of meaning, that is, its crusade potential (see also tables 8â11). This shows the reader what such a text offers in its entirety, and how it jumps between different subjects and registers. Thanks to a close reading, sermons reveal crusade potential that one would easily overlook when just skimming the surface. Finally, it is key to consider the role of authority in the creation and dissemination of meaning, including the dominant role of the clergy, the impact of the Bible, and the power of orthodox exegesisâand nowhere can we study these processes in so many texts as in sermons. Foucaultâs understanding of propagating truth in a discourse is very welcome for a culture where orthodoxy and exegesis, in search of divine truth, are essential features. The pertinent discourse is shaped by those who have the possibility and ability to write and to preserve texts as well as the means to promote crusades.
Foucaultâs framework also helps with keeping in mind how distant the texts could be from the subjects they discuss, and how much these were thus indebted to the construction, if not imagination, of a discourse. Paris masters and Cistercians were chronologically distant from the biblical past that provided the pivotal foundation of debate, preaching, and exegesis. They were geographically distant from the frontiers of crusading. And they were socially distant from both the subjects they discussed (pagans) and those they called to fight them (the laity). Even though masters and monks sometimes became engaged in historical events, their texts and the disputations that led to these largely belonged to the time behind their walls. That is not to say that their ideas did not interact with the wider world, but one must consider their textsâ imaginative nature stemming from the sources they had at their disposal. This was primarily the Bible that offered more than plentiful resources on the Cross, Jerusalem, and pagans. This study thus examines how these writers drafted a coherent vision of a subject that was actually unknown and distant to themâbut then, they used or distributed the texts on occasions such as the crusade, broadcasting their intramural discourse with a significant potential for shaping notions, guiding perceptions, and triggering actions.
The crusades were certainly a mass phenomenon and, according to the state of the art, largely motivated by religious ideas.147 Sermons were an essential instrument for teaching and explaining religious contents (already before the friars), hence forming spirituality and mobilizing thousands despite all the burdens and hardships of such a journey. Preaching thus represents the pivotal communicative premise of the crusade movement (see also below).148 As a result, it makes sense to search for âsymptomsâ in the sermon texts; symptoms that anticipate the events; symptoms that help with understanding what moved these people; symptoms that offer calls to action and models for historical protagonists. This stems from the so-called lecture symptomale of the French philosopher Louis Althusser, a teacher of Foucault, and the historical novelist Eric Vuillard has recently taken up his method.149 In agreement with Althusser, and borrowed from medicine, the term symptom indicates possible causes; these, however, may be multifarious and ambiguous. He also speaks of a âstructural causality,â demarcating it from a âlinear causalityâ: an existing structure determines the elements it contains.150 Even though this stems from classic structuralist thinking, this analytical distinction is useful: this study does not propose a linear causality (that is, a specific sermon immediately motivates people to join a crusade), but a structural causality. Sermons were part of a broader discourse, and they were essential tools for communication that shaped or transformed ideas (thus, the sermon as a subject thwarts the idea of rigid structures). Althusserâs model is helpful in understanding crusade preaching as a part of the existing preaching system. The crusades existed as an outcome of these processes of communication; now, one can look for their symptoms, and a significant source for these are the sermon texts.
3.3.2 Investigating the Context
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Immediate context: the context of text and author, the subject of chapter (1); it introduces the nine preachers and their works.
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Institutional context: the networks and conditions that informed the production of the texts, that is, the early university and the reform movement, the subject of chapter (2). It discusses how this context vitally determined the approach to knowledge and truthâand thus, to the Holy Land.
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Media context: in what physical form did the texts survive? What can the manuscript tell us as a vivid artefact, a productive force of the discourse? How do paratextual framings inform the meaning and usability of these texts? These questions are the subject of chapter (9); it examines the manuscript evidence of the pertinent sermons.
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Historical context: the larger developments to which these texts were reacting, and which they may even have influenced, that is, investigating how the texts relate to the crusade movement. Historical context vitally corroborates their interpretation: one must contextualize a term like Jerusalem with the help of contemporary phenomena. Such a term had quite a different echo in the 12th century than, for example, in the Carolingian period.151 This is the subject of chapter (10), which anchors the sermon texts historically.
These classic dimensions are complemented by two idiosyncratic categories:
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The exegetical context: Considering this dimension is essential for understanding biblical elements in the sermon texts. A large variety of sources is available for this purpose; this study considers primarily the Glossa ordinaria and three selected collections of Distinctiones (likely the three most widely disseminated at the time). The first is worthwhile because this work represented a landmark in contemporary exegesis that held much authority and enjoyed wide distribution.152 The latter are worthwhile because these tools were closest to the sermon texts; they served as repositories of preaching material, offering alphabetical entries for keywords and concepts. Furthermore, two of the collections come from preachers whose sermons are examined here: this permits direct contextualization (Alan of Lille and Garnerius of Clairvaux; the third is that by Peter the Chanter).153 Considering the exegetical context is deeply embedded in chapters (3)â(6).
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The metanarrative of salvation history: This theological notion about the course of history is the essential premise of exegesis and preaching. Considering it as a force that informs the structure and meaning of texts helps in assembling the numerous sermon texts into a larger picture. In other words, the orders of knowledge become visible via an idiosyncratic analytical tool.154 This is implemented in chapters (7) and (8), in order to place the textual analyses in a wider context. Salvation history offers an orthodox narrative about past and future that integrates people, places, and events. God is its driving force; his plan grants historical events providential meaning, which is encoded in biblical prophecies. As a result, historical events become the subject of exegetical enterprise, while scholars today may pose the question of how exegetes submitted events to their providential schemes. The metanarrative stems from the Bible and consists of the following key elements: Fall of Mankind / Ten Commandments / Old Covenant / Christ / New Covenant / Apocalypse. While it is obvious that one is located between New Covenant and Apocalypse, there is the question of how far along one may be on the timeline towards the End of Days. The narrative provides only a rough framework that permits adaptations and calls for action in specific historical circumstances; it is capable of integrating contemporary elements (such as the First Crusade). Scholars may thus examine the providential vantage point from which a text was written.
3.3.3 Biblical Elements in Sermon Texts: Interlacing Discourse Analysis with Idiosyncratic Conditions
The correlation of Bible and crusade has become an essential focus of current scholarship, since biblical elements occupy such a determinative role for crusade textsâand even more so for sermons. The art historian Daniel Weiss declared: âIt is not surprising that such a totalized expression of religious ideology would, from the outset, be described in biblical terms. The medieval West constructed its rationale for propagating religious wars in the Holy Land in large part by appropriating biblical precedentâespecially that of the Old Testament.â155 John Cotts agreed: âBiblical and more recent history resonated as Christian armies converged on Palestine, and the crusades forced Christian historians and exegetes alike to reconsider how these histories related to each other.â156 Richard Hays described the Bible in Christian culture as a âdeterminative subtext,â just as Gerard Caspary and Philippe Buc spoke of âthe grammar of exegesisâ with regard to historical phenomena.157 The Bible and exegesis were not merely theological matters, but unfolded a historical force in the medieval period. This study develops a model for contextualizing the determinative subtext in sermon texts with the forces and dynamics of the crusade movement. Therefore, the idea that pre-existing textual elements may only be empty topoi must be categorically dismissed.158 Such an idea indicates only a superficial reading, whereas in-depth investigations have always revealed that authors use such elements for a purpose, often applying them as direct lenses for describing current events or places (for example, via Ps. 79:1 or Job 9:24). Importantly, Benjamin Kedar argued regarding the massacre in Jerusalem in 1099 that such pre-existing elements do not preclude the events described being based on actual observations.159 And Katherine Allen Smith recently reached the following conclusion regarding the chronicles of the First Crusade: âFurther, we must be open to the possibility that sometimes the portions of medieval texts that consist of borrowed material can, paradoxically, be sites of great authorial creativity and originality.â160 However, the notion of empty topoi shows that it may be challenging to decode such texts: doing so requires close analysis as well as comparative consideration of exegetical sources.161 In many cases, this is the only way to render the meaning of an element comprehensible, since texts operate with rich and often enigmatic biblical imagery. The modern scholar thereby does exactly what the medieval preacher was supposed to do. This study blends modern methods with idiosyncratic conditions accordingly:
Step (1): a biblical element is identified in a sermon text. This concerns every use of the Bible, encompassing explicit quotations, allusions, and the use of specific terms, motifs, or imagery, whereby there is the challenge of recognizing the less explicit elements (as rarely happens in editions).
Step (2): the defined corpus of exegetical sources is consulted (Distinctiones and Glossa ordinaria), in order to examine how they explain the element and which other elements they align it with. The consideration of preaching aids (especially distinctiones, sometimes also collections of exempla and artes praedicandi) reveals resources of meaning available to contemporary preachers.162
Step (3): full text databases are consulted for contextualizing an element, that is, examining patterns and frequency of its appearance. These resources have been essential for developing this book, especially the Patrologia latina Database, but also In principio and the digitized versions of MGH and CCCM.163 These surveys served primarily to contextualize an element within the pertinent corpus, but the quick way of operating made it possible to sneak a peek beyond that. These resources have also been essential for assembling the corpus of crusade elements (table 1). Thanks to this contextualization, a broader image emerges; one unlocks an elementâs crusade potential.
Step (4): all these results can serve now for understanding the elementâs use in the source that has been the point of departure. Such an approach is worthwhile because sermons often broach elements only briefly or use triggers, in order to be rhetorically compact, and working with the audienceâs horizon of knowledge. They require the help of other texts as well as an elementâs context in the Bible. We must also suppose that we do not understand all the numerous allusions that were familiar to medieval audiences.164 Contrariwise, this suggests that those matters only present in an allusive manner were agreeing with the audienceâs horizon. In cases where one can determine an audience, this offers valuable insights into the knowledge of lay people.165 However, it remains possible that they associated the subject with other matters than the preacher intended.166 Relating the exegetical results to the specific sermon leads to another dimension: In which context is the biblical element placed, and how does the context transform its meaning?
Step (5): the overarching analysis within the Third Crusadeâs corpus is ultimately essential. By comparing the same element in different texts, one can reach stronger conclusions about its crusade-specific nature (while this does not exclude other layers of meaning). Texts whose crusade nature is certain can serve as points of departure for examining the same element in texts whose crusade nature is less obvious: this approach largely informed the structure of the following chapters. By considering a large corpus, it is possible to reveal an enormous number of parallels and patterns, a fact that demonstrates how strongly this material was shaped by the crusades. Consequently, it either derives from such a purpose (before penning it) or has been used for such (after penning it). Analysing a quantity of sermons unearths the important themes and biblical references of the contemporary preaching agenda: put differently, one investigates the discourse.
3.3.4 Sources for Crusade-Related Preaching and Their Value to the Discourse
Different sources are available for examining the contents of crusade preaching. Yet, these have different values for the inquiry, depending on four dimensions: their proximity to preaching practice; their prime purpose according to genre; the quantities of the surviving texts; and the amount of information they hold on preaching activities. The pivotal question is thus: How representative are specific sources?
Narrative accounts on preaching activities: As argued, chronicles are artificial, narratively modelled, and only contain very limited information on preaching; they cannot deliver representative insights. A partial exception is the Itinerarium Cambriae, a valuable source on the tour through Wales, which, however, barely offers any information on the contents of preaching.167
Quotations of âsermon textsâ in chronicles: As discussed, a comparison with sermon material shows that these do not reflect preaching practice. Their rare occurrence (four cases for the Third Crusade) demonstrates that these stem from a chroniclerâs individual taste. In terms of content, these may well figure as pieces of the puzzle for investigating preaching, but by themselves they cannot deliver representative insights.
Letters concerned with preaching and mobilization may have influenced the contents of sermons or may have been read aloud prior to a sermon.168 The Third Crusadeâs letters cover a spectrum of addressees and regions; this delivers valuable insights into the mechanisms of mobilization.169 However, regarding quantity (including meager manuscript transmission), they are clearly subordinated to the sermon texts.
Sermon-like treatises are not directly entangled with preaching practice. Yet, as a close analysis reveals, they provide mastertexts or pioneering work, eager to find new ways of preparing sermon material. These are testimonies of innovative approaches that likely held some appealâbut we cannot say much about their impact and use. Quantitatively, it remains a manageable phenomenon (primarily Peter of Blois and Henry of Albano), yet quantity may distort the picture when considering their richness in terms of content. As for the information they contain, one needs to place them at the top of the sources at stake. This includes the fact that they sharpen crusade-specific language (another innovative aspect), an opportunity that likely presented itself precisely because they were not bound to the rules of established genres.
Distinctiones (and other preaching aids) bring us close to practice, as shown by both the genreâs purpose and the manuscript evidence.170 These were repositories of preaching material: their organization, however, betrays a smorgasbord that cannot have served as a direct model for delivering a sermon, therefore these are one step removed from practice. As for information, they are rich but also flexible: they can serve perfectly the contextualization of the sermons, but by themselves, they offer only limited insights. Quantitatively, they represent a dominant phenomenon: collections of distinctiones were constantly growing in number (specifically those of Garnerius of Clairvaux, Alan of Lille, and Peter the Chanter). They survived in numerous manuscripts, being thus available to preachers in many different places.171
Sermon texts ad status: One can assess their closeness to preaching similarly to the distinctiones; and these are rich sources: they seem to represent another important occasion for sharpening crusade-specific language. However, they only emerged slowly in the late 12th century, and they cannot claim any representativeness, since this exceptional genre has survived in very limited numbers.172 Such texts can be valuable starting points (for the 13th century), where the crusade surfaces clearly, but considering them alone would be an unjustified approach.
Reportationes are closest to practice: these are notes by a listener (even though it remains possible that they do not record a sermon faithfully). Their manuscript evidence also reveals much entanglement with practice.173 As for information, they are equal to the model sermons, and the quantity makes them into representative sources; these survived in growing numbers from the mid-12th century, in particular in Paris. In the late 12th century, however, they were still rare compared to the model sermons (even more so beyond Paris).174
Liturgical model sermon texts: Together with the reportationes, these bring us closest to practice; their elaborate shape provided an immediate model for delivering a sermon.175 The manuscript evidence likewise betrays numerous indications of practice. As for information, they represent a rich source, especially since such a collection was likely set up with some overarching conception in mind (a dimension hardly investigated by scholars), and are usually of a respectable size. Quantitatively, one clearly needs to place them at the top of the sources discussed: they survived in great numbers and numerous manuscripts, allowing us to study phenomena in a representative empirical breadth.176
The following results emerge: model sermon texts and reportationes are representative sources thanks to their richness in contents and entanglement with preaching practice. Collections of distinctiones are a valuable addition, especially thanks to broad manuscript transmission. Other sources (letters, sermon-like treatises) complement the picture as to specific mechanisms of mobilization. Chronicles (both narratives on preaching and âsermon quotationsâ) are unsuitable sources in terms of a discourse analysis, since they are artificial, tenuously transmitted, and poor in preaching-related contents.
Quantities of the surviving texts (low to high):
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Quotations of âsermon textsâ in chronicles
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Sermon texts ad status
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Sermon-like treatises
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Narratives on preaching (especially chronicles)
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Letters related to preaching
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Reportationes
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Distinctiones (and other preaching aids)
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Liturgical model sermon texts
Proximity to preaching practice / purpose according to genre (far to near):
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Narratives on preaching (especially chronicles)
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Quotations of âsermon textsâ in chronicles
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Letters related to preaching
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Sermon-like treatises
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Distinctiones (and other preaching aids)
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Sermon texts ad status
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Liturgical model sermon texts
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Reportationes
Amount of information on preaching activities (little to much):
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Narratives on preaching (especially chronicles)
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Quotations of âsermon textsâ in chronicles
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Distinctiones (and other preaching aids)
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Letters related to preaching
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Sermon texts ad status
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Reportationes
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Liturgical model sermon texts
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Sermon-like treatises
3.3.5 Sermon Texts: Premises of This Study
This study presupposes certain premises concerning sermon texts and their purpose, premises which the evidence corroborates and which stem from the state of researchâhowever, these tackle complex and much-discussed issues of sermon studies that one may also evaluate differently:
In agreement with a discourse analysis, a sermon text can be understood as an archaeological artefact of a historical practice, the actual preaching activity. It represents a snapshot, the moment when the vivid oral medium finds its way onto parchment. One can suppose that such a text had a prehistory (earlier applications, experience on which the author drew) as well as a subsequent history (using the text as a model for preachingâthis is the reason why it was penned).177 Such a textâs production stemmed from specific interests and necessities; just as one may assume that preachers readily used available material and that such a text (with possible variations) was likely put to use on multiple occasions, if not frequently (a text on a specific feast could have been used each year). A single text was likely a multidimensional vector related to many preaching events that may have straddled different users and occasions. As a result, the surviving texts represent metatexts that informed contemporary preaching agendasâall the more so, the more copies there are. By analysing numerous texts within a reasonably defined corpus, one unlocks the range of the preaching agenda, that is, the sum of materials reflects actual preaching activity.178 Consequently, one may neglect the issue of potential deviation between text and delivery. The relationship between the two likely took on varying forms on different occasions, but the text provided the basisâotherwise, one would not have chosen it as a model.
However, I do not formulate here any argument as to how close a specific text may have been to its delivery: this remains unknowable in specific casesâbut some essential arguments suggest that the written material was significantly entwined with practice. Jussi Hanska reached the conclusion: âTherefore it is safe to assume that model sermons also reflect quite well the style and contents of actual Sunday sermons. They may not be identical with each other, but they are close relatives.â179 Four essential arguments derive from the nature of the evidence: first, the fact that sermons have been penned in vast numbers, in particular since the 12th century, indicates the entanglement with a practice. As noted, their manifestation on parchment stems from particular interests and necessities, and considering the quantity of materials, these cannot be explained otherwise than as serving preaching.180 Second, the pertinent corpus holds well-drafted texts, a product ready for use, including numerous elements obviously meant for oral delivery; their composition, length, and rhetoric reflect their oral nature. Within a range between schematic model sermon (as would become more common in the 13th century) and a text ready for use, the relevant corpus clearly lends itself to the latter.181 Third, as the chapter on media context will demonstrate, the manuscripts betray an intrinsic entanglement with practice; these are certainly not classroom practices or library records intended for preservation. Fourth, in those cases where the same sermon exists as both model text and reportatio, scholars have shown (for the 13th century) how surprisingly identical the two are: preachers apparently stuck closely to the text.182 This was not necessarily always the case, but this significant evidence delivers a spotlight on an existing practice. We will also encounter such cases in this studyâthe argument is thus transferrable to the late 12th century (see the chapter on media context).
Two further arguments are more hypothetical but plausible considering the historical context: on the one hand, the human condition makes it likely that one drew on accomplished work. Be it out of laziness, lack of time, or because the simple clerics did not have the skills to pen their own sermons, it seems more likely than not that one used available material.183 Preachers also had a great need for such material, even more so if matters were pressing such as with the crusade. On the other, we are dealing with an orthodox religion of the book, which was clairaudient about traitors in its own ranks. The culture of exegesis demonstrates how fatally utterances may have been put to the test.184 Such accusations posed a serious personal threat (even just considering the instrument of excommunication), therefore it seems more likely than not that preachers stuck closely to model texts. The preaching efforts of the period were also a reaction to the growing threat of heretics, which required instructing believers in the foundations of faith.185
Furthermore, it is deemed significant if a text is identified as a sermon (mostly sermo) in the evidence. These texts did not serve intra-clerical communicationâthis happened via other genres such as the biblical commentary.186 The fact that a text was prepared as a sermon (and even more so an entire collection) indicates the desire to reach a broad audience that one could not address via the usual devices of intra-clerical disputationâin agreement with the goals of the reform movement.187 This study supposes that sermons, a microcosm of Christian religion, were not empty rituals, but shaped spirituality, informed ideas, and stimulated action. It is evident that one cannot simply draw a line to lay mentality here; primarily, the sermons deliver insights into the preaching agenda and ideas of clerics. However, their skills in the matter, their rhetorical training, and their authoritative position as transmitters of the divine will suggest that sermons were a pivotal device of the crusade discourse.188 And if lay people regarded their priests as authorities, when, if not in the moment of preaching, would this have had an impact? Nevertheless, I do not claim that sermons were the sole source informing crusade spirituality nor the sole mechanism that triggered mobilization, nor do I suppose a linear causality (i.e., a specific sermon motivated listeners to immediately join a crusade), but sermons are considered as essential and hitherto widely unnoticed pieces of the puzzle in the maze of mobilization. Even if one supposes that ideas or the decision to join a crusade antedated the sermon event, one can still expect that it fulfilled essential purposes, thus representing the communicative premise of a crusade:
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It created an occasion for expressing oneâs intention to join a crusade, to transform thus a passive idea into action.
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It created attention and sensibility towards the Holy Land, an entity that was actually invisible and unimportant for daily life in the West.
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It created a coherent picture by suggesting a reading of the events in the East, submitting them to a providential scheme.
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It prepared spiritually via instruments such as penance and confession, guided by the priest who granted justification and a prospect of success to the impending expedition.
3.4 Revising Common Ideas among Scholars
This study thus has the goal of revising the following common notions on the preaching of crusades:
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One must discard the myth that not many âcrusade sermonsâ have survived; first, substantial discussions about what a âcrusade sermonâ is are required, and we must comb through the surviving sermon material extensively.
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âCrusade sermonâ is a modern category that should be discarded, since it obscures rather than illuminates our view of the phenomenon, just as the distinction of âcrusade preachingâ and ânormal (liturgical) preachingâ is a false modern antithesis.
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The logic that liturgical features and other practices (such as penance or the Eucharist) would interlock with crusade preaching is wrong; the process is contrariwise: these are intrinsically interwoven, and the crusade only distinguishes itself slowly as a category of its own (as the research on the terminology of crusading corroborates).
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Considering chronicles as representative sources is a highly unsuitable approach, since these artificial and narrative sources cannot provide us with any insights into a historical practice, and their perception of preaching activities is highly selective.
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Considering mobilization through the lens of military organization is misleading, as the well-known traits of crusading as a pilgrimage and penitential journey demonstrateâyet, some scholars still uphold such notions. This study will show that crusade-related sermons do not only address the fighting class, but reveal a pan-Christian agenda.
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The idea that the contents of sermons were perhaps of minor importance, pushing instead the spectacle of the event and the charisma of the preacher to the fore, is untenable. This idea developed by crusade studies reveals a poor understanding of the pivotal purpose of preaching in Christianity, as it was demonstrated by sermon studies.
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The opinion that extensive preaching (especially with lay audiences) only began with the friars must be discarded: all research concerned with the 12th century has underlined how many efforts preceded them. One must suppose a gradual increase in preaching activities, a process that started at least in mid-12th century Paris, perhaps already in the late 11th century. Therefore, one must consider the preaching of crusades with a broader horizon than it has been done so far: the idea that 12th-century expeditions were mobilized only via large preaching tours and a few popular preachers is neither empirically nor logically tenable.
4 Preliminaries: Crusade, Exegesis, and Space
Umberto Eco, Baudolino189âYou donât have to be in a place in order to knoweverything about it,â Abdul replied. âOtherwisesailors would be more learned than theologians.âThis, Baudolino explained to Niketas, showed how,ever since their first years in Paris, when they werestill almost beardless, our friends had begun to begripped by this story, which so many years laterwould take them to the far ends of the earth.
Drawing on spatial theory, space represents a constructed entity informed by an observerâs culturally determined perception. Spaces and their meaning are reflections of memory, discourses, and social worlds.190 Different spaces shape different modes of movement and options for action. The disposition of the crusades even reinforced this constructed nature: the Holy Land was a distant entity for the Latin West and sources of information were slim. The processes of making this region visible and pertinent in the West did not draw on empirical data, but on the Bible and its exegesis, whose ideas were disseminated via the liturgy, relics, sacral architecture, and sermons. These media represented vehicles for creating closeness and relevance for something that was actually invisible and insignificant for Western daily life.191 It is telling that contemporary maps appear in the manuscripts alongside exegetical works such as Jeromeâs Liber de situ locorum.192 Similarly, theological principles informed cartographical depictions, in particular localizing Jerusalem as the worldâs center, but also several elements of mythological or exegetical origin.193 Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken asserted, âWestern cartography in the Middle Ages served for around a millennium, and until the thirteenth century, almost exclusively theological purposes and notably biblical exegesis.â194 An intriguing example is the identification of the prison of Gog and Magog, somewhere in the far East, for example, on the world map in the Liber floridus by Lambert of Saint-Omer (early 12th century).195 The motif of the âEastâ (oriens), not only as a geographical but a providential category, looms large in the pertinent corpus of sources. Peter the Chanterâs Distinctiones, in the entry for sepulcrum, expressively depict the East as a humanâs cradle to which one would return, after having struggled lifelong in the West.196 Mt. 24:27 locates Christâs Second Coming in the East, and just the fact that churches were orientated accordingly is a clear indication of this aspectâs significance.197 The construction of a meaningful East thus generated a desire for travelling to this East.
The 12th century was certainly a time of sparse information and vague notions about the Holy Land: Christopher Tyerman calls it a âvirtual reality.â198 This dispositionâderiving from geographical distance, but also from the approach of an orthodox religion of the bookâis highly pertinent to studying the crusades. In agreement with Edward Said, one can speak of an âimaginative geographyâ that fills spatial categories with arbitrary meaning, by no means meant to display actual circumstances, but to confirm expectations.199 However, in the contemporary perception, the distinction between Western biblical discourse and actual circumstances did not exist. This held significant potential for disillusionment, if it turned out that the two did not concur. Gerhoch of Reichersberg (c.1090â1169) provides an example of this: having arrived in Jerusalem, the Second Crusadeâs participants were surprised, since the city was not threatenedâcontrary to what Western preachers had claimed.200 The approach seems to have developed slightly in the 13th century: on the one hand, sources of information now conveyed a more tangible picture and increased knowledge in the West.201 On the other, people began to realize the potential of empirical information, for example, Jacques de Vitry (c.1170â1240) collected information in the Holy Land for his works.202 Yet, one must not overestimate these developments: the basic disposition with the Bible as a metatext remains. Matthieu Rajohnson argued recently that the earthly Jerusalem became an even more elusive entity in the late Middle Ages due to the fact that it was lost to the West.203 The second part of Bernard of Clairvauxâs De laude novae militiae (1130s) represents an expressive example of the dialectics between imagined biblical topography and real world. It describes several sites in the Holy Land as if Bernard had visited them, including the emotional reaction that this visit provoked.204 If we did not know the author, one could think that this is a pilgrim report. However, Bernard never went to the Holy Land, and his work relies heavily on biblical components: it imagines the distant Holy Land from the West, but pretends to be an authentic descriptionâand for Bernard, it was. This represents an idiosyncratic approach to those spaces, orthodox and textual in nature, which is different from our rational and empirical approach.205 Actual information did not bother Bernard and his successors; it did not contribute to their arguments. However, their texts shaped the notions and expectations of numerous people in the West, critically if these were sermons addressed to broad audiences.206 The chapter on institutional context will discuss how this dynamic played out in the relevant historical context, specifically within the early University of Paris.
The distant Holy Land existed in the West as a screen of projection. The Bible revealed itself as the essential force in imagining it, but as soon as Christians travelled there, these ideas turned suddenly real: one now moved in the spaces heard of lifelong in liturgy and preaching.207 The crusaders carried an enormous discursive mass that presented itself as the divine truth: a mental map of the way ahead, which they filled with providential meaning. In doing so, readings formerly of spiritual and allegorical nature were drawn into the physical sphereâa pivotal dynamic of the crusades, as the research of Philippe Buc, Jay Rubenstein, and Cecilia Gaposchkin has shown.208 One may speak of a dialectic in the perception of space that intended to transform spiritual into physical (or vice versa). Gaposchkin attributes a key role in this process to the liturgy: â[â¦] the allegorical bellicism of the liturgy was deallegorizedâor actualizedâfor the purposes of warfare.â209 The existence of spiritual matters was due to the state of terrestrial existence, that is, as long as God and the heavenly world remained invisible, but the spiritual would become the more visible the closer one got to the Apocalypse and the heavenly world. The voyage to the Holy Land can be understood as an overcoming of this spiritual barrier: it thus bridged not only space but also time.210 And such an understanding spread to other dimensions, including enemies peregrinating from the spiritual into the physical sphere. Gaposchkin characterizes this leap as dependent on context: â[â¦] meaning could slip easily between the two, or even encompass both at once.â211
The crusades confront us with a number of meaningful spaces, in particular Jerusalem and several of its components such as the Temple, the Holy Sepulcher, or Mount Zion. There are also meaningful spaces of evil, especially Babylon and Egypt. Furthermore, a number of spaces outside the holy city are important, for example, Tyre, Nazareth, or Mount Tabor. Together, they shape the Holy Land or the âlandscape of salvation,â as coined by Mette Birkedal Bruun, when discussing Bernard of Clairvaux.212 Topographical categories are determined via their appearance in the Bible: these places will play a role in salvation history, and they may represent a nexus to the heavenly world. It is key that specific spaces are important to both the crusades and salvation history: a religious meta-structure informs the topographyâs meaning and thus shapes crusade spirituality. Nikolas Jaspert describes such spaces as incentives that stimulated journeys to the East.213 One may distinguish two basic categories: (a) specific places, for example, Jerusalem, characterized by their uniqueness and geographical location; these cannot be replaced or relinquished; and (b) Christian theology draws on a number of topographical elements for discussing moral issues or religious ways of life.214 The Bible determines both categories, for example, the Exodus deals with the evil space of Egypt, but likewise offers meaning for the desert via the 40 years wandering.215 The chapter on the Cross relic addresses the central cause for the Third Crusade, an object whose meaning fundamentally constituted itself via its localization in Jerusalem. The chapter on Jerusalem examines the second critical event and its providential standing, whereas the city had been in Christian hands before: one may surmise that it had not loomed large in crusade preaching.216 The chapter on the Holy Land investigates its meaning and terminology, unearthing the broader landscape of salvation as drafted by late 12th-century preachers. This will reveal providential itineraries that imagine the way back to heaven as an actual journey, as opposed to merely spiritual ones. There are further spaces that this study does not cover, since they do not loom large in the pertinent corpus, for instance, Tyre or Antioch. The example of Acre is remarkable, likewise lost in 1187 and playing an important military role for the Third Crusade with its siege and conquest in July 1191. However, I have not found a single reference to it in the sermon texts, likely because it does not play any role in the landscape of salvation.217 This example perfectly demonstrates the distorted discourse in the West, which hardly drew on actual circumstances in the East.
The four senses of Scripture conceived of different guises of the same space, even though ultimately these all referred to the heavenly guise.218 The others were its representations or images that only existed due to the Fall of Mankind. Honorius Augustodunensis, for example, declared in the early 12th century that Noahâs son established the earthly Jerusalem in figura of the heavenly city.219 The Glossa ordinaria represents an important testimony for how important the four senses were in the 12th century: already the prologue of the book of Genesis presents this scheme as a model, identifying the four with the four Jerusalems.220 Every use of these spacesâeven if explicitly allegoricalâreferred, theologically speaking, to the heavenly guise, but it also betrayed an entanglement with the actual place, which delivered the foundation for the spatial concept.221 Prevostin of Cremona, in his sketch of the four senses, explains the literal as the landmark on which the others build (hystoria limen est, quod aliis substernitur).222 However, emphases could vary, oscillating between a preponderance of allegorical interpretations and a more prominent role for literal readings. Such varying emphases as well as connections between the different senses require close analysis in the following chapters. This pertains to the issue of identifying the crusade in sermon texts: to a certain degree, one can equate this quest with the identification of the literal sense. This sense and the actual places had significantly grown in importance, in particular after the First Crusadeâeven though contemporary authors intertwined all four senses with the crusading arena.223
The scheme poses the challenge that one has to figure out the senses which are at play in a specific text, especially in between the extremes of a literal and an allegorical reading: sermons using a motif like Jerusalem do not always tell us with which sense they endow it. Whereas it is possible that an allegorical reading pertains solely to the Western sphere (for example, a monastic register), the literal sense obviously lends itself to the crusadeâbut it is essential not to understand the two poles as antithetical. Regarding lay audiences, one may suppose that matters lent themselves to a literal understanding: they likely associated specific keywords such as Jerusalem or Zion with the actual placesâwhether this was the preacherâs intention or not. This is exactly the situation which the preachers were eager to counter, as becomes manifest in the reform movement devoted to spiritually reform both the laity and the simple clergy. They intended to explain the invisible spiritual meanings behind the visible physical objects, hence sermons focus on spiritual matters.224 Such a focus, however, does not deliver a compelling argument for reading a sermon as being merely concerned with such. Rather, it is the case that physical objects do not require any description.225 Literal and spiritual readings cooperate and interact, just as medieval writers were eager to reach moral conclusions about historical events.226 One may imagine a sermon delivered during a crusade expedition that focuses on spiritual matters, while a physical object (such as a relic) was its context and occasion.
Similarly, explanations via id est and other spiritual readings in sermons do not deliver an argument for an exclusively spiritual purpose, starting with the fact that the four senses are inclusive: all point to the heavenly city, the one true Jerusalem. As long as an author does not state explicitly that he rejects the earthly guise (as some do), one must consider it every time Jerusalem is named, and the same pertains to other crusade elements. Cecilia Gaposchkin even argues that the liturgical Jerusalem and the earthly city were indistinguishable.227 This is notably true if we know that someone was involved in the crusades: an authorâs biography and attitudesâas the first chapter will discuss themâthus allow us to formulate an argument for reading a sermon text and specific keywords literally. Moreover, the specific interpretation via id est does not indicate a metaphorical understanding in the modern sense: it says something, but it means something else. The reformers rejected mere allegorical readings, emphasizing that the literal sense always required consideration. An explanation such as Jerusalem id est ecclesia does not degrade the city to a metaphor, but rather enhances its status. A compelling argument against the antithesis of literal and spiritual deliver the 13th-century sermons ad crucesignatos: these offer numerous typological and tropological readings.228
It is significant if preachers decided to discuss religious concepts via topographical categories. Christian theology offered a rich spectrum of imagery; discussing a concept such as salvation with the help of such spaces was thus a conscious decision that procured a spatialization and materialization of salvation, an essential dynamic of the crusade movement. This created a landscape of salvation in the listenerâs mind, which acted in unison with the topography of the East. Every use of such imagery and terms was crusade-related in the 12th century; it inhered in a significant crusade potential, as the chapters three to six will show on the basis of manifold materials. And such imagery may be a reflection of the materialâs past useâa sermon devoted to the dangers of the sea (even if proposing spiritual readings) may originally have been delivered during the passage to the Holy Land. Similarly, the contemporary discourse created a meaningful interplay between literal and spiritual via the omnipresent argument of explaining failure in the Holy Land with Christian sinfulness (peccatis nostris exigentibus). The physical signifies the spiritual; the spiritual serves as a preparation for the physical. These causalities created a fatal entanglement between East and West regardless of spatial distanceâchapter seven will address these dynamics.
Lastly, it is an essential trait of Christian culture to conceive of the Christian community as a unity that consists in the Corpus Christi, the so-called Corpus Misticum or âBody Metaphor.â229 This community constitutes itself in the Eucharist: Christ appears as the head (caput) of his own body, while the Christians form its limbs (membra). This indicates an intrinsic relationship between individual and community that is nowadays unfamiliar in Western culture. All limbs of the Corpus Christi would share the same destiny; this fueled the desire to expose weak limbs. As we will see, contemporary authors blended the Corpus Christi with spaces in the East; this tied the Christian destiny to this region and made Eastern events suddenly close and relevant.230 The topography acquired an anthropological component about which Bruun argues the following: âThe representation of soteriological topography gives rise to a topographically attuned anthropological vocabulary capable of denominating a spectre of relations between man and land, and thus signifying the situation of man in the topographical framework.â231 The anthropological entanglement with a specific topography represented, therefore, an essential motor for triggering movement towards the same. However, there is another reason why the Christian community was joined to the Holy Land; it would be the venue of the End of Days: Jerusalem and the Temple are essential elements in Johnâs Revelation, likewise in Old Testament prophecies and the Gospels. The eschatological scenario bears on a spatial structure.232 This raises the question of whether the Apocalypse would even happen everywhere (simultaneously)âit was not simply a question of Yes or No in the medieval period, but constituted itself in a complex relationship between earth (non-Apocalypse) and heaven (Apocalypse).233 The eighth chapter will examine these dimensions, whereas the textual analyses in chapters three to six focus on the four senses and the Corpus Christi, two concepts that deliver the foundation for understanding the entanglement of crusade, space, and eschatology.
On the events, see John France, Hattin (Oxford 2015); Penny J. Cole, âChristian Perceptions of the Battle of Hattin (583/1187),â Al-Masaq 6 (1993), 9â39; Christopher J. Tyerman, Godâs War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, Mass. 2006), 366â374. On disseminating the news in the West, see Helen Birkett, âNews in the Middle Ages: News, Communications, and the Launch of the Third Crusade in 1187â1188,â Viator 49/3 (2018), 23â61. On the long-term reception of Jerusalemâs loss, see Matthieu Rajohnson, LâOccident au regret de Jérusalem (1187-fin du XIVe siècle) (Paris 2021).
On the relicâs purpose as a war banner between 1099 and 1187, see Alan Murray, ââ¯âMighty against the Enemies of Christâ: The Relic of the True Cross in the Armies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem,â in: The Crusades and Their Sources, ed. John France (Aldershot 1998), 217â238. On ideas of Jerusalem between 1099 and 1187, see Sylvia Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West (1099â1187) (Aldershot 2005).
See Christopher J. Tyerman, How to Plan a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in the High Middle Ages (London 2015), 52. See in general Tyerman, Godâs War, 341â474; Jonathan Phillips, Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (New York 2010), 126â165.
On the slim transmission, see Tyerman, Godâs War, xv; Kristin Skottki, Christen, Muslime und der Erste Kreuzzug: Die Macht der Beschreibung in der mittelalterlichen und modernen Historiographie (Münster 2015), 502â503. On narrative modelling, see Skottki, Beschreibung, 252â420; Marcus G. Bull, Eyewitness and Crusade Narrative: Perception and Narration in Accounts of the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades (Woodbridge 2019), 193â255.
The term âcrusadeâ only really established itself in the 17th century; see Christoph T. Maier, âWhen Was the First History of the Crusades Written?â in: The Crusades. History and Memory, ed. Kurt Villads Jensen and Torben K. Nielsen (Turnhout 2021), 13â28; and in general Christopher J. Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Manchester 2011).
See, e.g., Philippe Buc, âCrusade and Eschatology: Holy War Fostered and Inhibited,â Mitteilungen des Instituts für Ãsterreichische Geschichtsforschung 125 (2017), 304â339; Katherine Allen Smith, The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge 2020); Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca, NY 2017); Jay Rubenstein, âCrusade and Apocalypse: History and the Last Days,â Quaestiones medii aevi novae 21 (2016), 159â188.
See, e.g., Benjamin Weber, âWhen and Where Did the Word âCrusadeâ Appear in the Middle Ages? And Why?â in: The Crusades: History and Memory, ed. Kurt Villads Jensen and Torben K. Nielsen (Turnhout 2021), 199â220; Walker Reid Cosgrove, âCrucesignatus: A Refinement or Merely One More Term among Many?â in: Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict, ed. Thomas F. Madden (Ashgate 2010), 95â110.
See David dâAvray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford 1985), 7, 104â131; dâAvray, âMethod in the Study of Medieval Sermons,â in: Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons (Spoleto 1994), 9â10; Penny J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095â1270 (Cambridge, Mass. 1991), 113â114.
On all these developments, see, e.g., Gaposchkin, Weapons, 77â78; Christopher J. Tyerman, âWere There Any Crusades in the Twelfth Century?â The English Historical Review 110 (1995), 574â576; Ronald James Stansbury, Preaching before the Friars: The Sermons of Ralph Ardent (c.1130âc.1215) (PhD thesis, Ohio State University 2001); Nicole Bériou, âLes sermons latins après 1200,â in: The Sermon, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Turnhout 2000), 394â396.
See Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode (Freiburg 1911), 2:467â468; Franco Morenzoni, Des écoles aux paroisses: Thomas de Chobham et la promotion de la prédication au début du XIIIe siècle (Paris 1995), 67â95; Nicole Bériou, Lâavènement des maîtres de la Parole: la prédication à Paris au XIIIe siècle (Paris 1998), 1:31â45.
Petrus Cantor, Verbum abbreviatum, 25; see Riccardo Quinto, âPeter the Chanter and the âMiscellanea del Codice del Tesoroâ (Etymology as a Way for Constructing a Sermon),â in: Constructing the Medieval Sermon, ed. Roger Andersson (Turnhout 2007), 68â69; Nicole Bériou, Religion et communication: un autre regard sur la prédication au Moyen Age (Paris 2018), 12, 24â31. On Peter the Chanterâs biography, see John Wesley Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle (Princeton 1970), 1:3â16.
Ms. BL Add 19767, fol. 153r. The term viaticus can also refer to the Eucharist granted to a dying person. See the entries in Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. Richard Asdowne, David R. Howlett, and R.E. Latham, 2 vols (Oxford 1997â2013); and Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus: lexique latin médiéval; françaisâanglaise, ed. Jan Frederik Niermeyer (Leiden 1997). The same manuscript holds crusade-related sermons and other pertinent works by Alan of Lille; see the chapter on immediate context. A similar formulation offers the report about the Third Crusadeâs contingent that made a stopover in Iberia: Narratio de itinere navali peregrinorum Hierosolymam tendentium et Silviam capientium (ed. David).
Jessalynn L. Bird, Heresy, Crusade and Reform in the Circle of Peter the Chanter, c.1187âc.1240 (PhD thesis, University of Oxford 2001); Bird, âParis Masters and the Justification of the Albigensian Crusade,â Crusades 6 (2007), 117â155; Bird, âRogations, Litanies, and Crusade Preaching: The Liturgical Front in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries,â in: Papacy, Crusade, and Christian-Muslim Relations, ed. Bird (Amsterdam 2018), 155â193. On the remission of sin, see Anne Lise Bysted, The Crusade Indulgence: Spiritual Rewards and the Theology of the Crusades, c.1095â1216 (Leiden 2015); Valentin Portnykh, âPlenary Indulgence for the Personal Participation in Crusades to the Holy Land as Presented by Crusade Preachers,â History 106 (2021), 170â199.
See dâAvray, âMethod,â 24; Jessalynn L. Bird, âPreaching and Narrating the Fifth Crusade: Bible, Sermons and the History of a Campaign,â in: The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, ed. Elizabeth Lapina and Nicholas Morton (Leiden 2017), 340; Miikka Tamminen, Crusade Preaching and the Ideal Crusader (Turnhout 2018).
See esp. Smith, Crusade Narrative; Philippe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West, ca. 70â¯C.E. to the Iraq War (Philadelphia 2015), esp. 67â111; Jay Rubenstein, Nebuchadnezzarâs Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of History (Oxford 2019).
See Skottki, Beschreibung, 489. For âcrusade idea,â see, e.g., Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia 1986).
See Jessalynn L. Bird, ââ¯âTheologians Know Bestâ: Paris-Trained Crusade Preachers as Mediators between Papal, Popular and Learned Crusading Pieties,â Journal of Medieval History 49/3 (2023), 1â19.
Only Baldwin and Henry are visible in the chronicles. Previous research showed some awareness that Peter and Alan were preaching but their corresponding works have not been examined in-depth. As to the state of research relating to particular preachers, see the chapter on immediate context.
For an overview of the Third Crusadeâs chronicles, see Stephen Bennett, Elite Participation in the Third Crusade (Woodbridge 2021), 21â25; Graham A. Loud, âIntroduction,â in: The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa (Farnham 2010), 1â31; Michael Staunton, The Historians of Angevin England (Oxford 2017), 216â235.
See, e.g., Tyerman, Godâs War, 375â389; Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (London 2010), 367â385. Fundamental was already: Reinhold Röhricht, âDie Rüstungen des Abendlandes zum dritten groÃen Kreuzzuge,â Historische Zeitschrift 34 (1875), 1â73. For a useful overview, see Stephen Spencer, âThe Third Crusade in Historiographical Perspective,â History Compass 19 (2021), 1â14. Subsequently, research literature is cited in an exemplary manner, since most portrayals are broadly identical.
See dâAvray, Friars, 61; Jussi Hanska, âReconstructing the Mental Calendar of Medieval Preaching: A Method and Its LimitsâAn Analysis of Sunday Sermons,â in: Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn A. Muessig (Leiden 2002), 295; Augustine Thompson, âFrom Texts to Preaching: Retrieving the Medieval Sermon as an Event,â in: Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Muessig, 25.
For a comparison of the versions, see Cole, Preaching, 1â36; Jean Flori, Prêcher la croisade: XIeâXIIIe siècle; communication et propagande (Paris 2012), 69â97; Georg Strack, âThe Sermon of Urban II in Clermont 1095 and the Tradition of Papal Oratory,â Medieval Sermon Studies 56 (2012), 31â37.
Heraclius, Hilferuf (III), ed. Kedar, 120. Similar in another call for help: Heraclius, Hilferuf (II), ed. Jaspert, 512; see also Henry of Albano, Ep.32, PLÂ 204:249; Itinerarium peregrinorum, ed. Mayer, 258.
Schein, Gateway, 162.
La Continuation, ed. Morgan, 54â55; William of Newburgh, Historia, 267â268; Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 748; Roger of Howden, Chronica, 2:322; Gervase of Canterbury, Opera, 1:388; Robert of Auxerre, Chronicon, 252; Chronica Andrensis, 718. See also Tyerman, Godâs War, 374.
Epistolae Cantuariensis, ed. Stubbs, 108; Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 860â861. On Gregory VII, see Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Darmstadt 1980).
See Cole, Preaching, 63â65; Thomas W. Smith, âAudita tremendi and the Call for the Third Crusade Reconsidered, 1187â1188,â Viator 49/3 (2018), 63â101. Urban III already issued a crusade call in Sept. 1187, addressed to Baldwin of Canterbury, and reacting to the defeat at Cresson (May 1187)âthe relicâs loss is still absent (cited in Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 201â202; discussed by Jonathan Phillips, Defenders of the Holy Land: Relations between the Latin East and the West, 1119â1187 (Oxford 1996), 265â266).
See Smith, âAudita tremendi,â 68, 88; Richard W. Southern, âPeter of Blois and the Third Crusade,â in: Studies in Medieval History Presented to R.H.C. Davis, ed. Henry Mayr-Harting (London 1985), 207â218. On Clementâs activities, see also Gaposchkin, Weapons, 195â198.
Peter of Blois, Ep.219, 508â509, cited in Roger of Howden, Gesta regis, 2:15.
See Birkett, âNews,â 23â61, esp. 32â33, 44â46.
Reinhold Röhricht, âDie Kreuzpredigten gegen den Islam. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Predigt im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert,â Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 6 (1884), 557: â[â¦] mit einer einmütigen Begeisterung, wie sie niemals das Abendland erfüllt hatte, erhob sich die ganze Christenheit.â My translation.
William of Newburgh, Historia, 271; Itinerarium peregrinorum, ed. Mayer, 276â277; Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 239. See John B. Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven, Conn. 1999), 87.
Historia peregrinorum, ed. Chroust, 123; Ansbert, Historia, ed. Chroust, 13; Annales Marbacenses, MGH SS 17:163; see Bysted, Indulgence, 260; Rudolf Hiestand, ââ¯âPrecipua tocius christianismi columpna.â Barbarossa und der Kreuzzug,â in: Friedrich Barbarossa, ed. Alfred Haverkamp (Sigmaringen 1992), 67.
Chronicon Clarevallense, 1251; Alberic of Trois Fontaines, Chronicon, 861; see Ina Friedländer, Die päpstlichen Legaten in Deutschland und Italien am Ende des XII. Jahrhunderts (1181â1198) (Berlin 1928), 39â40. They likely agreed at this meeting to hold both a council on Laetare Jerusalem (27 March 1188); see below. On the southern German regions, see also the chapter on historical context.
See Birkett, âNews,â 39, 47. On previous opinions, see, e.g., Cole, Preaching, 66â67; Hannes Möhring, Saladin und der Dritte Kreuzzug: Aiyubidische Strategie und Diplomatie im Vergleich vornehmlich der arabischen mit den lateinischen Quellen (Wiesbaden 1980), 66.
Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2:151â153. Scholars hardly realized that Joachim preaches to Richard (exceptions: Rubenstein, Dream, 181, 215; Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachitism (Oxford 1969), 7). The situation was mostly rendered as a conversation, but Roger notes that a large audience was listening to Joachimâs words: in quibus [verbis] audiendis rex et sui plurimum delectabantur (151). Thereafter, he cites Joachimâs sermon (151â153). Only then does a conversation develop (153â155). See also Roger of Howden, Chronica, 3:75â79.
Itinerarium peregrinorum, ed. Mayer, 276â277; Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2:29â33, 58â59; Ralph of Diceto, Ymagines, 51; LâEstoire dâEracles, 111â112, 115; Chronique dâErnoul, ed. Mas Latrie, 244, 247â248; William of Newburgh, Historia, 271â272. On Henry of Albanoâs presence, see Historia peregrinorum, ed. Chroust, 143; Chronica Andrensis, 719. The latter text says that the two kings even took the cross after he had preached. Henryâs invisibility in other reports represents an excellent example of the chroniclesâ selective perception.
Rigord, Gesta, ed. Delaborde, 83. On Henry IIâs promises, see Hans Eberhard Mayer, âHenry II of England and the Holy Land,â The English Historical Review 97/385 (1982), 721â739.
See Röhricht, âRüstungen,â 14; Alexander Cartellieri, Philipp II. August, König von Frankreich: Der Kreuzzug (1187â1191) (Leipzig 1906), 2:58.
Gervase of Canterbury, Opera, 1:410â413; see also Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2:29â33, 58â59; Itinerarium peregrinorum, ed. Mayer, 276â278; William of Newburgh, Historia, 275.
Cited in Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 238. See also Kathryn Hurlock, Wales and the Crusades, c.1095â1291 (Cardiff 2011), 64.
See Birkett, âNews,â 53.
See Friedländer, Legaten, 40â45; Barbara Bombi, âPapal Legates and Their Preaching of the Crusades in England between the Twelfth and the Thirteenth Centuries,â in: Legati, delegati e lâimpresa dâOltremare (secoli XIIâXIII), ed. Maria Pia Alberzoni and Pascal Montaubin (Turnhout 2014), 225â226.
Giselbert, Chonicon, 555; Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 861; Henry of Albano, Ep.31, 247â249; see Yves Congar, âHenri de Marcy, abbé de Clairvaux, cardinal, éveque dâAlbano et légat pontifical,â Analecta monastica 5 (1958), 7, 48â49.
Chronicon Clarevellense, 1251. The exact number likely refers only to important clerics such as bishops; the text likewise asserts that 68 important princes (magni principes) took the cross in Mainz.
Ms. BL Add 24145, fol. 77v and Henry of Albano, Brief, ed. Holtzmann, 412â413. On the dissemination of preachers, see the chapter on historical context.
Itinerarium peregrinorum, ed. Mayer, 278â279; Ansbert, Historia, ed. Chroust, 14â15; Historia peregrinorum, ed. Chroust, 122â126; Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, 366; Annales Colonienses maximi, 793â794; Chronica regia Coloniensis, 139; Continuatio Zwetlensis, 543. See Cole, Preaching, 66â67; Knut Görich, Friedrich Barbarossa: Eine Biographie (Munich 2011), 533â536. On Laetare Jerusalem, see the chapter on Jerusalem.
Historia peregrinorum, ed. Chroust, 123â124; discussed by Bysted, Indulgence, 259â260; Valmar Cramer, âKreuzpredigt und Kreuzzugsgedanken von Bernhard von Clairvaux bis Humbert von Romans,â Das Heilige Land 1 (1939), 88â91. One may also expect preaching by the local archbishop Conrad of Wittelsbach, who was active in the crusadeâs organization and joined Henry VIâs crusade in 1197 (see Möhring, Saladin, 90).
Chronica Reinhardsbrunnensis, 543; see Hiestand, âBarbarossa,â 69â70. Several Hebrew sources speak of more than ten thousand; see Robert Chazan, âEmperor Frederick I, the Third Crusade, and the Jews,â Viator 8 (1977), 85, 88. On the councilâs eschatological nature, see the chapter on the Apocalypse.
Rigord, Gesta, ed. Delaborde, 84; and Cartellieri, August, 2:63; Tyerman, Godâs War, 378, 381. Peter seems to refer to the council in a letter (1188): âSane, sicut audivimus, exiit edictum a Philippo rege, ut describeretur Gallicus orbis, et oneraretur Ecclesia decimationibus recidivis.â (Peter of Blois, Ep.20, 74).
Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Cambriae; see Cole, Preaching, 72â78; Tyerman, Plan, 118â123; Peter W. Edbury, âPreaching the Crusade in Wales,â in: England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath (London 1996), 221â233.
Hurlock already noted this disparity: many sources (especially those from Wales) do not mention the tour at all, even though they deal with the crusade. She only found two other texts that endow the tour with no more than a short remark (Hurlock, Wales, 59). It is also noteworthy that Peter of Blois, whose presence is evidenced by charters, remains invisible in Geraldâs workâanother excellent example of the selective perception of such accounts. See John D. Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century (Washington, D.C. 2009), 229.
Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Cambriae, 9â11. See also Hurlock, Wales, 67â72.
See Tyerman, Godâs War, 392â394; Röhricht, âRüstungen,â 20â25; and on the Empire: Hiestand, âBarbarossa,â 55â57. Richard was apparently motivated to depart soon after his cross taking, but his father Henry II impeded him, since he feared that Richard might claim Jerusalemâs crown (see Möhring, Saladin, 75).
Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum (4.79), 872â874. On the further tour, see Chronica Reinhardsbrunnensis, 543; Chronicon Clarevellense, 1251; and Friedländer, Legaten, 39â45.
See esp. Henry of Albano, De peregrinante civitate Dei (XIII), 358. See also Flori, Prêcher, 157â162; Alexander Marx, âJerusalem as the Travelling City of God. Henry of Albano and the Preaching of the Third Crusade,â Crusades 20 (2021), 83â120. See the chapter on immediate context.
Cited in Roger of Howden, Chronica, 3:132; see Schein, Gateway, 164; Jean-Charles Didier, âGarnier de Rochefort. Sa vie et son oeuvre,â Collectanea Cisterciensia 17 (1955), 148.
Peter of Blois, Conquestio, 94; Epistolae Cantuariensis, ed. Stubbs, 227, 256; see Congar, âHenri de Marcy,â 53. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln also joined this tour.
Roger of Howden, Chronica, 2:354â355; Gesta, 2:51.
Already his great-grandfather Fulk of Anjou had been crowned as the king of Jerusalem on the same feast (see Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image (Leiden 2004), 164). On this feast, see the chapter on the Cross relic.
William of Newburgh, Historia, 2â6; Roger of Howden, Gesta, 2:83â84; discussed by Gillingham, Richard I, 107â108. Kletter emphasizes that Richardâs coronation initiated a period of anti-Jewish violence, marking the end of a certain tolerance that had existed under Henry II (Karen M. Kletter, âPolitics, Prophecy and Jews: The Destruction of Jerusalem in Anglo-Norman Historiography,â in: Jews in Medieval Christendom: Slay Them Not, ed. Kristine T. Utterback and Merrall Llewelyn Price (Leiden 2013), 101).
Historia peregrinorum, ed. Chroust, 162â163; discussed by Bysted, Indulgence, 261. See also Hiestand, âBarbarossa,â 73, 82.
See Gillingham, Richard I, 127â128; Tyerman, Plan, 237â238. The departure of a joint crusade of Henry II and Philip II was scheduled for Easter 1189 (see Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 240; and Möhring, Saladin, 76).
This disparity is already visible with Urban II and Bernard of Clairvaux.
For an analysis of such evidence, see Christoph T. Maier, âKirche, Kreuz und Ritual: Eine Kreuzzugspredigt in Basel im Jahr 1200,â Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 55 (1999), 95â115; Maier, âRitual, What Else? Papal Letters, Sermons and the Making of Crusaders,â Journal of Medieval History 44 (2018), 338â343. It is remarkable that Urban IIâs words in their different versions follow the general tenor of the respective chronicle (see Rubenstein, âCrusade and Apocalypse,â 179). Supposing that the versions were not freely invented, this suggests that each chronicler selected information from either a longer sermon or more than one sermon.
See, e.g., Tyerman, Godâs War, 383â386; Rubenstein, Dream, 112â115; Giles Constable, âThe Language of Preaching in the Twelfth Century,â Viator 25 (1994), 151â152.
See Maier, âBasel,â 101â105; Tyerman, Plan, 93â96.
See the depictions of the state of the art in: Tamminen, Crusader, 10â14; Christoph T. Maier, âPropaganda und Diversifikation der Kreuzzüge im 13. Jahrhundert,â in: Die Kreuzzugsbewegung im römisch-deutschen Reich (11.â13. Jahrhundert), ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Stefan Tebruck (Ostfildern 2015), 235â237; Constantinos Georgiou, Preaching the Crusades to the Eastern Mediterranean: Propaganda, Liturgy, and Diplomacy, 1305â1352 (New York 2018), 5â8. Symptomatic is that preaching remains absent from Housleyâs state of research in crusade studies: Norman J. Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford 2006).
For details on the specific preachers, see the chapter on immediate context.
See Christoph T. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge, UK 2000), esp. 4, 30â31, 53; Maier, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, UK 1994), 111â112, 170â172.
See the section below on the different sources for the contents of crusade-related preaching.
Hofreiter criticized this regarding Cole and Maier: Christian Hofreiter, Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages (Oxford 2018), 169.
See, e.g., Maier, âPapal Letters,â 342. See also the previous section.
Maier brings exactly this juxtaposition to the conclusion that a preacher had to select elements from his model texts, in order to preach the crusade. He thus proposes that only a fraction of each sermon is concerned with âthe crusadeâ (Maier, Propaganda, 30â31). This idea requires review: a preacher consciously combined âthe crusadeâ with other matters in a sermon text.
See, e.g., Maier, âDiversifikation,â 241â242; Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (New York 1992), 61; Eyal Poleg, ââ¯âA Ladder Set up on Earthâ: The Bible in Medieval Sermons,â in: The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan Boynton (New York 2011), 208â210. On the developments in sermon studies, see Anne T. Thayer, âMedieval Sermon Studies since The Sermon: A Deepening and Broadening Field,â Medieval Sermon Studies 58 (2014), 10â27.
See, e.g., Quinto, âPeter the Chanter,â 68â70; Stansbury, Before the Friars, 78â80, 312; Jean Longère, La prédication médiévale (Paris 1983), 87â92, 147. See also Mark Allen Zier, âSermons of the Twelfth Century Schoolmasters and Canons,â in: The Sermon, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Turnhout 2000), 325â326; Mary A. Rouse, ââ¯âStatim invenireâ: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page,â in: Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, Ind. 1991), 192.
See, e.g., Stansbury, Before the Friars, 317â318; Pietro Delcorno, In the Mirror of the Prodigal Son: The Pastoral Uses of a Biblical Narrative, c. 1200â1550 (Leiden 2018), 117.
dâAvray, Friars. See also, e.g., Thompson, âTexts,â 13â37; Yuichi Akae, âBetween artes praedicandi and Actual Sermons: Robert of Basevornâs Forma praedicandi and the Sermons of John Waldeby,â in: Constructing the Medieval Sermon, ed. Roger Andersson (Turnhout 2007), 9â32.
For a pointed review of such mere monastic readings, see Bruce Wood Holsinger, âThe Color of Salvation: Desire, Death, and the Second Crusade in Bernard of Clairvauxâs Sermons on the Song of Songs,â in: The Tongue of the Fathers, ed. David R. Townsend and Andrew Taylor (Philadelphia 1998), 159â162.
Bériou, Communication, 47â59, esp. 51; see also Phyllis Barzillay Roberts, Studies in the Sermons of Stephen Langton (Toronto 1968), 42; Charles W. Connell, Popular Opinion in the Middle Ages: Channeling Public Ideas and Attitudes (Berlin 2016), 48â108.
For a convincing argument about specific sourcesâ lack of representativeness, see Robin J. Vose, Dominicans, Muslims, and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (New York 2009), 5â9, asserting that one cannot determine a serious interest in the evangelization of Muslims in 13th-century Iberia. Many texts do not express any interest in this groupâwhereas previous research, building on a few polemical treatises, has drawn another picture (see also Skottki, Beschreibung, 147).
See esp. Bull, Eyewitness; Skottki, Beschreibung, 252â420. On using narratological tools for the medieval period, see Alexander Marx, Gerd Micheluzzi, and Kristina Kogler, âNarrare: Reflexionen über die Anwendung von Erzähltheorie auf das Mittelalter,â in: Narrareâproducereâordinare (Vienna 2021), 13â27.
Nikolas Jaspert, âDas Heilige Grab, das Wahre Kreuz, Jerusalem und das Heilige Land. Wirkung, Wandel und Vermittler hochmittelalterlicher Attraktoren,â in: Konflikt und Bewältigung, ed. Thomas Pratsch (Berlin 2011), 75: âdurch die Erfahrungen der Reise kontaminiert.â My translation.
This concerns large parts of crusade studies; see, e.g., Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (London 2005), 1â55; Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095â1131 (Cambridge, UK 1997), 53â80; William J. Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c.1095âc.1187 (Woodbridge 2008), 86â119. Riley-Smith has a chapter entitled âPreaching and the Crusadersâ that does not cite a single sermon (save for those narrated in chronicles, esp. Urban IIâs). Purkis has a chapter on âThe Cistercian Influence on the Preaching of Crusades, 1150â1187,â likewise citing not a single sermon, yet (astonishingly) he tries to say something about the contents of preaching (e.g., 69, 114). See also the critique of Purkis in: Tamminen, Crusader, 109â110. For a more balanced discussion, moving beyond chronicles, see Tyerman, Plan, 87â123, esp. 114â118.
See, e.g., Buc, Holy War, 74â77, 280â286; Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (New York 2011). See in detail the chapter on the Apocalypse.
See, e.g., Tyerman, Plan, 173; John France, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge, UK 1994), 356; Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 34â35, 102; Riley-Smith, âReview of Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heavens: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse,â Catholic Historical Review 98/4 (2012), 786â787. For a useful depiction of the different opinions, see Buc, âCrusade and Eschatology,â 305â307; Rubenstein, âCrusade and Apocalypse,â 167â168.
See, e.g., Hiestand, âBarbarossa,â 51â108; Stephen Spencer, ââ¯âLike a Raging Lionâ: Richard the Lionheartâs Anger during the Third Crusade in Medieval and Modern Historiography,â The English Historical Review 132 (2017), 495â532. See also the historiographical survey in: Spencer, âPerspective,â 1â14.
On chronicles, see, e.g., Edbury, âWales,â 221â233; Helen J. Nicholson, âThe Construction of a Primary Source. The Creation of Itinerarium peregrinorum 1,â Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 37 (2019), 143â165; Catherine Croizy-Naquet, âRigord, Philippe Auguste et la croisade,â in: De la pensée de lâhistoire au jeu littéraire, ed. Sébastien Douchet and Marie-Pascale Halary (Paris 2019), 148â160. On the events of 1187, see, e.g., Cole, âPerceptions,â 9â39; John H. Pryor, âTwo excitationes for the Third Crusade: The Letters of Brother Thierry of the Temple,â Mediterranean Historical Review 25/2 (2010), 147â168.
See esp. the chapter on historical context; Bennettâs book was in particular helpful for investigating the network of bishops.
Maier, âPropaganda,â esp. 7â8, 28. He confirmed this view recently in: Maier, âDiversifikation,â 235â248. For other examples, see Connell, Opinion, 22â33; Colin Morris, âPropaganda for War: The Dissemination of the Crusading Ideal in the Twelfth Century,â Studies in Church History 20 (1983), 79â101; Beverly Mayne Kienzle, âPreaching the Cross: Liturgy and Crusade Propaganda,â in: Preaching and Political Society, ed. Franco Morenzoni (Turnhout 2013), 11â46. Tamminen noted that the concept is problematic, and yet he decided to use it (Tamminen, Crusader, 3â4). For a review of the rendering as propaganda, see Gaposchkin, Weapons, 7â8.
See Wolfgang Schieder and Christof Dipper, âPropaganda,â in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart 1984), 5:108â112; Thymian Bussemer, Propaganda: Konzepte und Theorien (Wiesbaden 2008), 153â224.
See Bussemer, Propaganda, 33â34.
dâAvray, âMethod,â 8â9; dâAvray, Friars, 3; see also Thompson, âTexts,â 22; Roberts, Sermons, 21â22; Delcorno, Mirror, 15.
As it happens, e.g., in: Connell, Opinion, 33â47.
Menache concludes that several monarchies abused the concept of crusading in the 14th and 15th centuries for political interests: she speaks here of propagandaâin contrast with the golden age of crusading (Sophia Menache, The Vox Dei: Communication in the Middle Ages (New York 1990), 175â190, esp. 189). Surprisingly, however, she uses the term likewise for the earlier crusades (98â123).
See Schieder and Dipper, âPropaganda,â 110; Bussemer, Propaganda, 34, 220.
On the four senses, see Gaposchkin, Weapons, 32; Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de lâécriture (Paris 1959), 1:643â648. See the elaborate discussion in the section on preliminaries.
Cole, Preaching, 175; see also Gaposchkin, Weapons, 211; Christopher J. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke 1998), 145.
Bird, Heresy, 124; see also Kienzle, âCross,â 37.
dâAvray, âMethod,â 4.
Jessalynn L. Bird, âDamietta the Whore, the Purification of the Virgin Mary, and the Crusade Movement,â Medieval Sermon Studies 65 (2021), 18; see also Beverly Mayne Kienzle, âMedieval Sermons and Their Performance: Theory and Record,â in: Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn A. Muessig (Leiden 2002), 91.
See, e.g., Weber, âWord,â 199â220; Michael Markowski, âCrucesignatus: Its Origins and Early Usage,â Journal of Medieval History 10/3 (1984), 157â165.
See the discussion of the different approaches in: Housley, Contesting, 1â23.
See, e.g., Tyerman, âAny Crusades,â 555; Cecilia Gaposchkin, âFrom Pilgrimage to Crusade: The Liturgy of Departure, 1095â1300,â Speculum 88 (2013), 46â47, 65â66, 70; Amnon Linder, Raising Arms: Liturgy in the Struggle to Liberate Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout 2003), 363â364.
See, e.g., Martin Völkl, MuslimeâMärtyrerâMilitia Christi: Identität, Feindbild und Fremderfahrung während der ersten Kreuzzüge (Stuttgart 2011), 43â46; Giles Constable, âThe Place of the Crusader in Medieval Society,â Viator 29 (1998), 380, 384â390. Henry the Lionâs venture (1172), for example, has been declared a pilgrimage, but it also comprised a large number of armed men (see Jonathan Riley-Smith, âAn Army on Pilgrimage,â in: Jerusalem the Golden, ed. Susan B. Edgington (Turnhout 2014), 113).
Housley, Contesting, 7; see also Tyerman, Invention, 20â24, 49â55, 76â83.
Maier, âFirst History,â 13â28.
For an overview of contemporary terms, see Maier, Propaganda, 52â54; Purkis, Spirituality, 41â42, 117; Völkl, Märtyrer, 38â50. Most terms are unspecific such as iter or peregrinatio. Such are only sometimes aligned with complementing information such as iter Hierosolimitanum. Other terms include labor Hierosolimitana or labor peregrinationis (see Alexander III, Ep.1504, 1295; Ep.1505, 1296) as well as via Dei or via domini (see, e.g., Guibert of Nogent, Gesta, ed. Huygens, 118; Peter of Blois, Conquestio, 81).
See Tyerman, Godâs War, 375; Tyerman, Plan, 116.
Cosgrove, âCrucesignatus,â 95â110. Telling is that crucesignati remained a vague term in canon law, whereas it dealt with other groups systematically and coherently (see Housley, Contesting, 16). This substantiates my critique of Maier who supposes that crucesignati represented an established and unequivocal terminology (see esp. Maier, âFirst History,â 15).
Tyerman asserted a trend of using rather verbs of movement than nouns (Tyerman, Invention, 50â51).
In the later 13th century, Humbert of Romans composed a list of biblical references that could have served crusade-related preaching: De thematibus totius biblie ad predicandum crucem (Humbert of Romans, De predicatione, 102â119; see Maier, Friars, 115). He thus broached exactly the task that I postulate for todayâs historian. Yet, one may suppose that his list likewise represents a selection.
Altogether, 33 such sermons have been edited: 17 in Maierâs book (2000) and three more in one of his articles (1995); five sermons by Cole (1991); four by Bird (2004 and 2008); and four by Georgiou (2018). Among these, only eight bear the title Ad crucesignatos.
This was a fruitful endeavor: it happened more than once that I determined that a certain motif or biblical reference lends itself to the crusade, a result that was then corroborated by the later sources.
Tyerman, Invention, 63.
Bysted, Indulgence, 249.
Tamminen, Crusader, 25â26.
On questions of audience, see the chapter on historical context.
Cole, Preaching, xii. See also Holsinger, âColor,â 156â186, who investigated some of Bernard of Clairvauxâs sermons on the Song of Songs in terms of their pertinence to the crusades. For similar approaches, see Strack, âUrban II,â 30â45; Hendrik Breuer, ââ¯âQuia salus ex iudeis estâ (Joh 4,22). Ein Textzeugnis der rheinischen Kreuzzugspredigt des Heiligen Bernhard von Clairvaux in der Glossa ordinaria des Codex 23 der Kölner Dombibliothek,â Mittelalterliche Handschriften der Kölner Dombibliothek 4 (2012), 115â174.
This was complemented recently by an article on how sermon texts for In purificatione sancte Marie relate to the Fifth Crusade (Bird, âDamietta,â 3â25).
On the senses and their identification with the different Jerusalems, see the chapter on Jerusalem.
See also the section below on the different sources and their representativeness.
Humbert corroborates the complementing nature: âEa que scripta sunt de pertinentibus ad crucis predicationem contra sarracenos ad hoc valere possunt ut predicatores crucis nondum in tali predicatione exercitati materiam inveniant hic huius exercitii, qui vero magis sufficientes sunt, data sibi occasione, plura et meliora superaddant [â¦]â (Humbert of Romans, De predicatione, 5).
Georgiou, Preaching, 3.
Bird, Heresy, vi; see also Bird, âDamietta,â 16; Carolyn A. Muessig, âAudience and Preacher: Ad status Sermons and Social Classification,â in: Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Muessig (Leiden 2002), 255.
See Tamminen, Crusader, 292â293; Nicole Bériou, âLa prédication de croisade de Philippe le Chancelier et dâEudes de Châteauroux en 1226,â in: La Prédication en Pays dâOc (Toulouse 1997), 101â102.
See Bériou, LâAvènement, 1:216â227; Thompson, âTexts,â 23â24.
Roger of Salisbury, Sermo, ed. Cole, 227; see Cole, Preaching, 167, who argues that this betrays both the flexible model nature and likely actual use in the past.
See Maier, Propaganda, 30, 38â39.
For the first, see Ms. BNF lat. 14859, fol. 287r; for the second, Ms. BL Add 18335, fol. 3r.
Ms. BNF lat. 14934, fol. 183v; see Jean Longère, Les sermons latins de Maurice de Sully, évêque de Paris: contribution à lâhistoire de la tradition manuscrite (Steenbrugis 1988), 337.
Ms. BNF lat. 2516, fol. 116r; see Longère, Prédication, 90.
It is often not even clear which manuscripts the edition used. Comparing the manuscripts has sometimes yielded the result that the PLâs version stems from a now lost copy, a fact that makes the PL a valuable source.
See dâAvray, Friars, 57â63; Richard Hunter Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, âIntroduction,â in: Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, Ind. 1991), 1â4. See the chapter on media context.
See the section on manuscripts in the bibliography and table 2.
See the introduction to the chapter on âExemplary descriptionsâ as to how exactly this is done.
David dâAvray, Death and the Prince: Memorial Preaching before 1350 (Oxford 1994), 7â11; dâAvray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture without Print (Oxford 2001), 38â47; see also Maier, Propaganda, 71â73.
Obvious mistakes of the PL were tacitly corrected.
Cole discusses such ambiguities for the 13th century, arguing that it is plausible that a sermon concerned with the cross and penance was put to use for the crusade (Cole, Preaching, 173â176; see also Jessalynn L. Bird, ââ¯âFar Be It from Me to Glory Save in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Gal. 6:14)â: Crusade Preaching and Sermons for Good Friday and Holy Week,â in: Crusading in Art, Thought, and Will, ed. Matthew Parker and Ben Halliburton (Leiden 2018), 146â147).
See also the section below on the premises for examining sermon texts.
See Gaposchkin, Weapons, 61â63, 79â81; Gaposchkin, âPilgrimage,â 65â66. This is an essential argument for Gaposchkin as to using older liturgical texts in the context of the crusade. This occasionally generated textual adaptations such as transforming an auxilium sancte crucis into a vexillum sancte crucis.
See Matthew Gabriele, âFrom Prophecy to Apocalypse: The Verb Tenses of Jerusalem in Robert the Monkâs Historia of the First Crusade,â Journal of Medieval History 42 (2016), 308.
On this argument, see Gaposchkin, Weapons, 193â194, 208â219; Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, 1095â1274 (Oxford 1985), 69â95. See in detail the chapter on the failure of crusades.
On these identities and questions of audience, see the chapter on historical context.
On this type of preaching, see the chapter on historical context.
See Michel Foucault, Lâarchéologie du savoir (Paris 2002); Foucault, Lâordre du discours (Paris 2005); Achim Landwehr, Historische Diskursanalyse (Frankfurt am Main 2009); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London 2003).
See, e.g., Housley, Contesting, 75â98; Jonathan Riley-Smith, âThe State of Mind of Crusaders to the East, 1095â1300,â in: The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. Riley-Smith (London 1995), 75â78; Nikolas Jaspert, ââ¯âWo seine FüÃe standenâ (Ubi steterunt pedes eius). Jerusalemsehnsucht und andere Motivationen mittelalterlicher Kreuzfahrer,â in: Die Kreuzzüge: kein Krieg ist heilig, ed. Hans-Jürgen Kotzur (Mainz 2004), 173â176.
See Cole, Preaching, ix; Maier, Propaganda, 3; Menache, Vox, 98â123.
See the review of one of his books for a summary of this approach: Iris Radisch, âDie Welt der NS-Komödianten,â Die Zeit, 3 May 2018.
See Ingo Kramer, Symptomale Lektüre: Louis Althussers Beitrag zu einer Theorie des Diskurses (Vienna 2014), 51â55, 99.
See Gaposchkin, Weapons, 61â63, 79â81; Gaposchkin, âPilgrimage,â 65â66.
The Glossa covered the entire Bible and harvested earlier exegetical works. See Lesley Janette Smith, The âGlossa ordinariaâ: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden 2009); Kevin L. Hughes, Constructing Antichrist: Paul, Biblical Commentary, and the Development of Doctrine in the Early Middle Ages (Washington, D.C. 2005), 207â210; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford 1984), 46â66. It was an established tool from the mid-12th century onwards, especially with its introduction in Paris under Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor. On the Glossa and preaching, see Quinto, âPeter the Chanter,â 50â52; Karlfried Fröhlich, âThe Glossa ordinaria and Medieval Preaching,â in: Biblical Interpretation from the Church Fathers to the Reformation (Farnham 2010), 1â21. See also Constance Brittain Bouchard, âThe Cistercians and the Glossa ordinaria,â The Catholic Historical Review 86 (2000), 183â192; Ernest Norman Kaulbach, âIslam in the Glossa ordinaria,â in: Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Michael Frassetto and David Blanks (Houndsmill 1999), 147â163.
On the collections of Garnerius and Alan, see the chapter on immediate context. Peter the Chanterâs collection is henceforth cited via the copies of Ms. BL Royal 10 A XVI and BNF lat. 10633. These have been identified as primarily relevant due to their date and localization. The work survived in 88 copies divided into two recensions. See Stephen A. Barney, âIntroduction,â in: Petri Cantoris distinctiones Abel, CCCM 288 (Turnhout 2020), 9â12, 277â279. Since Barney edited the Beta recension, I cite here two copies of the earlier Alpha recension; in cases where the passage exists in Beta, I also provide the reference to the edition.
For this methodology, see Marx, Micheluzzi, and Kogler, âNarrare,â 24â26.
Daniel H. Weiss, âBiblical History and Medieval Historiography: Rationalizing Strategies in Crusader Art,â Modern Language Notes 108 (1993), 712; see also Gaposchkin, Weapons, 41â42, 210; Hofreiter, Genocide, 168â170, 189â194; Penny J. Cole, David dâAvray, and Jonathan Riley-Smith, âApplication of Theology to Current Affairs: Memorial Sermons on the Dead of Mansurah and on Innocent IV,â in: Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons (Spoleto 1994), 234â235, 244.
John D. Cotts, âThe Exegesis of Violence in the Crusade Writings of Ralph Niger and Peter of Blois,â in: The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, ed. Elizabeth Lapina and Nicholas Morton (Leiden 2017), 279â280.
Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven 1989), 16; Gerard E. Caspary, Politics and Exegesis. Origen and the Two Swords (Berkeley 1979), 112; Buc, Holy War, 74â78; Buc, Lâambiguité du livre: prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Age (Paris 1994), 40â49. On sermon texts, see dâAvray, âMethod,â 24; Nicole Bériou, âAux sources dâune nouvelle pastorale: les expériences de prédication du XII siècle,â in: La pastorale della Chiesa in Occidente dallâetà ottoniana al concilio lateranense IV (Milan 2004), 340â350.
See the critique of such notions in: Gerd Althoff, âSelig sind, die Verfolgung ausübenâ: Päpste und Gewalt im Hochmittelalter (Darmstadt 2013), 124â129, 169â171.
Benjamin Z. Kedar, âThe Jerusalem Massacre of 1099 in the Historiography of the Crusades,â Crusades 3 (2004), 65, 72; see also Buc, Holy War, 9â10, 105, 264â272; Rubenstein, Armies, 286â292. On the use of Jeremiahâs Lamentations for the events of 1187, see Rajohnson, LâOccident, 223â248. For such an approach to the Iberian Peninsula, see Patrick Marschner, Das neue Volk Gottes in Hispanien: Die Bibel in der christlich-iberischen Historiographie vom 8. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert (Vienna 2023).
Smith, Crusade Narrative, 10. See also Sini Kangas, âScripture, Hierarchy, and Social Control: The Uses of the Bible in the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Chronicles and Chansons of the Crusades,â in: Transcultural Approaches to the Bible, ed. Matthias M. Tischler and Patrick Marschner (Turnhout 2021), 109â144.
For an example where the lack of contextualization has generated misjudgments, see Alan Murray, âBiblical Quotations and Formulaic Language in the Chronicle of William of Tyre,â in: Deeds Done beyond the Sea, ed. Susan B. Edgington and Helen J. Nicholson (Farnham 2014), 25â34, reaching the abstruse conclusion that William of Tyre unconsciously included biblical elements and that they do not serve any purpose in the text.
On the practical nature of artes praedicandi, see Akae, âActual Sermons,â 10â11, 25â26; Phyllis Barzillay Roberts, âThe ars praedicandi and the Medieval Sermon,â in: Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn A. Muessig (Leiden 2002), 61.
See the corresponding section in the bibliography.
See Thompson, âTexts,â 20; dâAvray, Death, 189â198. The same is true for the events of 1187: not every sermon must discuss them explicitly, but it may still have been informed by them: table 9 grasps such in the column âPenned in the shadow of 1187.â
Morton makes the same point as to rendering the enemies as âpagansâ; the audience was not confronted with unknown information: Nicholas Morton, âEncountering the Turks: The First Crusadersâ Foreknowledge of Their Enemy; Some Preliminary Findings,â in: Crusading and Warfare in the Middle Ages, ed. Morton and Simon John (Farnham 2014), 53.
The translation of Latin material for lay audiences, for example, contained the potential for misunderstandings. See dâAvray, Friars, 93â94; Bériou, âSources,â 327â339; Beverly Mayne Kienzle, The Sermon (Turnhout 2000), 170, 971â974.
See Edbury, âWales,â 224â225.
See, e.g., Maier, âPapal Letters,â 335â337.
See the chapter on historical context and table 5.
See dâAvray, Friars, 72â75; Bériou, LâAvènement, 1:138â140, 281; Rouse, âStatim invenire,â 204â209; Tuija Ainonen, âMaking New from Old: Distinction Collections and Textual Communities at the Turn of the Thirteenth Century,â in: From Learning to Love, ed. Tristan Sharp (Toronto 2017), 48â69. On artes praedicandi, see Kienzle, âPerformance,â 94â103; Roberts, âArs praedicandi,â 45â49. On exempla, see Roberts, Sermons, 82â87; Maier, Friars, 118â122, 172â174; Brian Patrick McGuire, âLa vie et les mentalités des Cisterciens dans les exempla du XIIe siècle,â in: Les Exempla médiévaux, ed. Jacques Berlioz (Paris 1998), 107â145.
On the dissemination of Garneriusâ collection, see the chapter on media context.
See Muessig, âAudience,â 255â276; dâAvray, Friars, 127; Maier, Propaganda, 8â12.
See Bériou, âSermons Latins,â 383â384; Bériou, LâAvènement, 1:73, 82â83, 92â97; Delcorno, Mirror, 117â120. These texts may still have served as models for preaching: Bériou identified such a case in the 13th century.
Hanska asserts that reportationes remained rare compared to model sermons (Hanska, âCalendar,â 293â294, 298)âbut they were still numerous compared to other sources.
See dâAvray, Friars, 7, 104â131; Delcorno, Mirror, 111â115.
See dâAvray, âMethod,â 8â10. According to Hanskaâs calculation, building on Schneyerâs Repertorium, c.140,000 sermons survived between 1150 and 1350 (Hanska, âCalendar,â 299). Bériou estimates c.4000 sermons alone from 13th-century Paris (Bériou, LâAvènement, 1:130).
See Longère, Prédication, 158; dâAvray, Friars, 120â121, 130; Bériou, âSermons Latins,â 383â385, 424â427; Beverly Mayne Kienzle, âThe Twelfth-Century Monastic Sermon,â in: The Sermon, ed. Kienzle (Turnhout 2000), 289â290.
See dâAvray, Friars, 251; Hanska, âCalendar,â 293â315.
Hanska, âCalendar,â 299.
This is corroborated by the often anonymous transmission of the texts: the usability of the material was more important than authorship (see Bériou, LâAvènement, 1:91). This also applies to some of the pertinent manuscripts, whose sermons are attributable to an author thanks to another copy. See the chapter on media context.
On the 12th century, see also Kienzle, âMonastic Sermon,â 292â293. On schematic sermons, see Roberts, Sermons, 60â61; Kienzle, The Sermon, 977â978.
See Bériou, LâAvènement, 1:108; Louis-Jacques Bataillon, âApproaches to the Study of Medieval Sermons,â in: La prédication au XIIIe siècle en France et Italie (Aldershot 1993), 21â22; Bataillon, âSermons rédigés, sermons réportés (XIIIe siècle),â in: La prédication au XIIIe siècle, 75â77; see also Roberts, âArs praedicandi,â 59; Longère, Prédication, 164.
Prologues of sermon collections, for example, that by Odo of Chateauroux, occasionally underline that lack of time was an essential reason why one provided others with sermon material (see Nicole Bériou, âLes prologues de recueils de sermons latins, du XIIe au XVe siècle,â in: Les prologues médiévaux, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Turnhout 2000), 415).
See Buc, Livre, 40â49; Buc, Holy War, 74â78; Bériou, âSermons Latins,â 396.
See Cole, Preaching, 113â114, 117; Rouse, âStatim invenire,â 192, 218â219. On excommunication, see Nikolaus M. Häring, âPeter Cantorâs View on Ecclesiastical Excommunication and Its Practical Consequences,â Mediaeval Studies 11 (1949), 100â112. On exempla where a preacher got carried away (apparently since he did not stick to his model), and this generated a negative reaction by the audience, see Jacques Berlioz and Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu, âThe Preacher Facing a Reluctant Audience according to the Testimony of Exempla,â Medieval Sermon Studies 57 (2013), 24, 28.
See the definition of sermon in: Kienzle, The Sermon, 151â158. See also Longère, Prédication, 11â17; Rouse, âStatim invenire,â 204â206.
On the issue of how much lay people were already preached to in the late 12th century, see in detail the chapter on historical context.
See Bird, âTheologians,â 1â19; Kienzle, âPerformance,â 93; Bériou, Communication, 12.
Umberto Eco, Baudolino, tr. William Weaver (London 2003), 77.
For applying such approaches to the crusades, see Jaspert, âAttraktoren,â 69; Jaspert, âFüÃe,â 180; see also Andrea Worm, âVisuelle Vergegenwärtigungen Jerusalems und der Heiligen Stätten im Reichsgebiet. Ãberlegungen zu Kontexten und Ãbermittlungswegen,â in: Die Kreuzzugsbewegung im römisch-deutschen Reich (11.â13. Jahrhundert), ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Stefan Tebruck (Ostfildern 2015), 316.
See Nikolas Jaspert, âThe True Cross of Jerusalem in the Latin West: Mediterranean Connections and Institutional Agency,â in: Visual Constructs of Jerusalem, ed. Bianca Kühnel and Galit Noga-Banai (Turnhout 2014), 214â216; Jaspert, âVergegenwärtigungen Jerusalems in Architektur und Reliquienkult,â in: Jerusalem im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, ed. Dieter Bauer (Frankfurt am Main 2001), 219â297; Mette Birkedal Bruun, Parables: Bernard of Clairvauxâs Mapping of Spiritual Topography (Leiden 2007), 32â33.
See Bruun, Parables, 26. For a combination with hagiographical texts, see Worm, âVergegenwärtigungen,â 292.
See Schein, Gateway, 141â143; Rubenstein, Dream, 50â54; Bianca Kühnel, âGeography and Geometry of Jerusalem,â in: City of the Great King, ed. Nitza Rosovsky (Cambridge, Mass. 1996), 311â316; Ingrid Baumgärtner, âDie Wahrnehmung Jerusalems auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten,â in: Jerusalem im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, ed. Dieter Bauer (Frankfurt am Main 2001), 271â334.
Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Fines terrae: Die Enden der Erde und der vierte Kontinent auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten (Hannover 1992), 182: âDie Kartographie des Abendlandes steht im Mittelalter durch rund ein Jahrtausend und bis ins 13. Jahrhundert fast ausschlieÃlich im Dienste der Theologie, insbesondere der Bibelexegese.â My translation.
See Jay Rubenstein, âLambert of Saint-Omer and the Apocalyptic First Crusade,â in: Remembering the Crusades, ed. Nicholas L. Paul and Suzanne M. Yeager (Baltimore 2012), 78. On Gog and Magog, see also Nicholas Morton, Encountering Islam on the First Crusade (Cambridge, UK 2016), 218â220.
âCum homo nascitur venit de oriente ad occidentem et ibi laborat quamdiu vivit, cum vero transit ab hac vita, de occidente ad orientem reditâ (Ms. BL Royal 10 A XVI, fol. 98v; see also Ms. BNF lat. 10633, fol. 115r).
See Giles Constable, âThe Cross of the Crusaders,â in: Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century (Farnham 2008), 55â56. On the contemporary conception of East and West, see Elizabeth Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade (University Park 2015), 122â142. On the Eastern paradise, see Reinhold R. Grimm, Paradisus coelestis, paradisus terrestris: Zur Auslegungsgeschichte des Paradieses im Abendland bis um 1200 (Munich 1977), esp. 64, 77â78, 162â163.
Tyerman, Plan, 31.
Said, Orientalism, 54. See also Morton, Islam, 21, 226â233; Skottki, Beschreibung, 20â36; Sophia Menache, âEmotions in the Service of Politics. Another Perspective on the Experience of Crusading (1095â1187),â in: Jerusalem the Golden, ed. Susan B. Edgington (Turnhout 2014), 253â254.
Gerhoch of Reichersberg, De investigatione, ed. Scheibelberger, 144; discussed by Rubenstein, Dream, 148.
See Maier, Friars, 115; Tyerman, Plan, 280. The 13th century also seems to have initiated a new stage for knowledge about Islam, even though Tolan stresses that the vague image persisted until the 17th century (John Victor Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York 2002), xix). For the persistence throughout the 12th century, see Morton, âTurks,â 53â56; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Oxford 1993), 255â276.
See Marie-Geneviève Grossel, âJustifier lâavenir par lâHistoire. Un Orient à redéfinir selon Jacques de Vitry et les écrits sur la cinquième croisade,â in: Les nouveaux mondes juridiques, ed. Clotilde Jacquelard and Nicolas Lombart (Paris 2015), 57â82. See also Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Jerusalem sehen: Reiseberichte des 12. bis 15. Jahrhunderts als empirische Anleitung zur geistigen Pilgerfahrt (Freiburg 2010), 191â244.
Rajohnson, LâOccident, esp. 870â871. See also Bernard Hamilton, âThe Impact of the Crusades on Western Geographical Knowledge,â in: Eastward Bound, ed. Rosamund S. Allen (Manchester 2004), 29, who noted how little geographical knowledge the Hereford Mappamundi contains (c.1300), despite its detailed depictions that suggest otherwise.
Bernard of Clairvaux, De laude, 286â320; see Purkis, Spirituality, 108â109; David Richard Carlson, âThe Practical Theology of St. Bernard and the Date of the De laude novae militiae,â in: Erudition at Godâs Service, ed. John Robert Sommerfeldt (Kalamazoo 1987), 138â139; see also Lehmann-Brauns, Jerusalem, 69â75. Carlson noted that the order of places is informed by Christâs biography and not geographical principles.
I disagree, therefore, with Lehmann-Brauns. She did magisterial research establishing the importance of the physical places, including their purpose as a nexus to the heavenly realm. However, her conclusions follow a modern logic: she sees an empirical interest that is eager to increase knowledge and values accurate observation (see Lehmann-Brauns, Jerusalem, 11â16, 110â111, 331â334). She misjudges the dialectic that constructs meaning via the Bible: interest in the physical places is not tantamount to empiricism (more nuanced at: 167â168).
Symptomatic is that many were unfamiliar with Edessa on the eve of the Second Crusade, the central cause of the enterprise, until preachers broached the issue (see Cole, Preaching, 37â41; Rubenstein, Dream, 103â104, 211â212).
On the liturgyâs pivotal role for broad parts of society, see David dâAvray, âPopular and Elite Religion: Feastdays and Preaching,â in: Elite and Popular Religion, ed. Kate Mason Cooper (Woodbridge 2006), 167, 178â179.
Ekkehard of Aura, for example, declares that the First Crusade turned mystical prophecy into visible history (versis in hystorias visibiles eatenus mysticis prophetiis) (Ekkehard of Aura, Chronica, ed. Schmale, 160; discussed by Buc, Holy War, 283; Rubenstein, âCrusade and Apocalypse,â 184).
Gaposchkin, Weapons, 7.
See Bruun, Parables, 38, 88â92; Jaspert, âFüÃe,â 182â183. See the chapter on the Apocalypse.
See Gaposchkin, Weapons, 57, 61â62, cited 62; Gaposchkin, âPilgrimage,â 65â66; Buc, Holy War, 78â79.
Mette Birkedal Bruun, âBernard of Clairvaux and the Landscape of Salvation,â in: A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden 2011), 249â278, esp. 255â256.
Jaspert, âAttraktoren,â 68; Jaspert, âEleventh-Century Pilgrimage from Catalonia to Jerusalem: New Sources on the Foundations of the First Crusade,â Crusades 14 (2015), 13â16.
Bruun, Parables, esp. 30, who renders this a soteriological topography.
On the Exodus, see the chapter on the Holy Land. See also Dennis Howard Green, The Millstätter Exodus: A Crusading Epic (Cambridge, UK 1966). Ademar of LePuy was understood as a new Moses repeating the Exodus via the First Crusade (see Jaspert, âFüÃe,â 179). On the motifs of desert and wilderness among the Cistercians, see Bruun, Parables, 70â80; and in Arnold of Lübeckâs work: Beth C. Spacey, ââ¯âA Land of Horror and Vast Wildernessâ: Landscapes of Crusade and Jerusalem Pilgrimage in Arnold of Lübeckâs Chronica Slavorum,â Journal of Medieval History 47/3 (2021), 356â360.
Nevertheless, calls for its defense may have played a role, especially in the period of growing pressure leading up to 1187: this betrays the crusade call of 1185 (Peter of Blois, Ep.98, 306â308). Investigating Jerusalemâs role in sermon texts between 1099 and 1187 is still outstanding; this could well build on: Schein, Gateway.
An episode that will bring Acre into focus is Richard Lionheartâs massacre of thousands of Muslims; see the chapter on the Apocalypse. On the events, see Tyerman, Godâs War, 402â460; John D. Hosler, The Siege of Acre, 1189â1191: Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and the Battle that Decided the Third Crusade (New Haven 2018).
See Lubac, Exégèse, 1:643â648; Gaposchkin, Weapons, 32; Roberts, Sermons, 104â105; Philippe Buc, Lâempreinte du Moyen Age: la guerre sainte (Avignon 2012), 33. See also the chapter on Jerusalem.
Honorius Augustodinensis, Speculum ecclesiae, 1094; discussed by Schein, Gateway, 115.
Glossa ordinaria, ed. Gibson, 1:6; discussed by Quinto, âPeter the Chanter,â 50â52. For discussions of the four senses in the relevant corpus, see Peter of Blois, Sermo 52, 713; Garnerius of Clairvaux, Sermo 11, 639; Sermo 17, 686; Sermo 34, 790; Garnerius of Clairvaux, Distinctiones, 850; Ms. BL Royal 10 A XVI, fol. 48r and Ms. BNF lat. 10633, fol. 53r as well as Petrus Cantor, Distinctiones, 302â303.
See Bruun, Parables, 29; Jean Flori, Lâislam et la fin des temps: lâinterprétation prophétique des invasions musulmanes dans la chrétienté médiévale (Paris 2007), 300.
Ms. Arsenal 543, fol. 244r. This approach derives from the Victorines (see Cotts, âExegesis,â 286; Lehmann-Brauns, Jerusalem, 89â93; Ineke vanât Spijker, âThe Literal and the Spiritual. Richard of Saint-Victor and the Multiple Meaning of Scripture,â in: The Multiple Meaning of Scripture, ed. Spijker (Leiden 2008), 225â248).
See Smith, Crusade Narrative, 15â47; Jaspert, âAttraktoren,â 83; Lapina, Warfare, 133â135; André Vauchez, âLes composantes eschatologiques de lâidée de la croisade,â in: Le concile de Clermont de 1095 et lâappel à la croisade de 1095 (Rome 1997), 237â241. The origins of this development lay already in the 11th century (see Flori, Lâislam, 233â237; Jaspert, âPilgrimage,â 14â15).
Purkis and Skottki discuss the fact that Bernardâs teachings for the Templars had this intention (Purkis, Spirituality, 108â109, 117; Kristin Skottki, ââ¯âUntil the Full Number of Gentiles Has Come inâ: Exegesis and Prophecy in St Bernardâs Crusade-Related Writings,â in: The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, ed. Elizabeth Lapina and Nicholas Morton (Leiden 2017), 249). A crucial passage states: âDummodo sane spiritualibus non praeiudicet sensibus litteralis interpretatio [â¦]â (Bernard of Clairvaux, De laude, 280). The same happens in First Crusade chronicles, in particular relating to the massacre in Jerusalem (see Buc, âCrusade and Eschatology,â 321). The Ordinacio de predicatione sancte crucis, a manual for preaching the crusade, delivers further evidence for a spiritual focus (see Tyerman, Plan, 91â92; Cole, Preaching, 110â112, 117â126).
This agrees with Bériouâs assertion that a churchâs architectural elements or artworks are hardly broached in sermonsâwith the major exception of the cross (Bériou, Communication, 119).
See Kletter, âProphecy,â 102; Buc, Holy War, 90â105; Gaposchkin, Weapons, 9â10, 61â63, 79â81. Telling are portrayals such as that (allegedly) uttered by Bohemund of Taranto: the crusade is not a carnal but a spiritual war (bellum carnale non est sed spirituale) (Gesta Francorum, ed. Hill, 37). Readings may also refer, for example, to heretics: thus, it is an allegorical reading but not only concerned with a spiritual matter (see, e.g., Glossa ordinaria (Deut. 20), ed. Feuardent, 1:1573â1576; discussed by Hofreiter, Genocide, 100â101).
Gaposchkin, Weapons, 32â33.
See, e.g., Odo of Chateauroux, Sermo 1, ed. Maier, 134; Sermo 2, ed. Maier, 148; Jacques de Vitry, Sermo 1, ed. Maier, 84. Jacques interprets Zion as the Church or Jerusalem as a Christianâs soul, even though he deals with the crusade. See also Cole, Preaching, 133â136, 168â173.
See Buc, Livre, 333â336; Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum: lâeucharistie et lâéglise au moyen âge (Paris 1949); Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kingâs Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton 2016), 194â206. On the nexus between Eucharist and preaching, see Bériou, Communication, 217â262, esp. 233â247.
See, e.g., Peter of Blois, Sermo 39, 678; Sermo 43, 695; Martin of Leon, Liber sermonum, Sermo 4, 215â216; Hélinand of Froidmont, Sermo 15, 607; Garnerius of Clairvaux, Distinctiones, 1065; Alan of Lille, Ars praedicandi, 188; Sermo 2, PL 210:202. Robert of Reims understood Jerusalemâs conquest in 1099 as a restoration of a membrum of the Corpus Christi (Robert of Reims, Historia, ed. Kempf, 13, 24; discussed by Morton, Islam, 231).
Bruun, Parables, 87.
See Schein, Gateway, 141â157, 190â192; Rubenstein, âCrusade and Apocalypse,â 175; Rubenstein, Dream, 49â63; Flori, Lâislam, 228â229, 235â237, 310â311, 316.
For a critique of the Yes/No antithesis, see James T. Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK 2014), 227â235.