Crusading in the Age of Joinville

Over the last two decades, members of the energetic Cambridge née London équipe of crusader historians have sought to excavate the pathology of medieval crusaders’ motives, mentalities and psychology. In the latest contribution to this project, Caroline Smith's monograph uses a range of ecclesiastical and secular sources, centred on Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis, to establish the varied frameworks of ideas, beliefs, aspirations and attitudes that inspired active crusading and sustained the gilding of its image in western (in this case almost exclusively French, and northern French at that) Christian society, chiefly in the mid- and later thirteenth century. After examining the sources generally—sermons, songs, chronicles, letters etc.—and analysing the nature of Joinville's text, Dr Smith carefully scrutinises her evidence for the crusade message projected by the church and its reception by its secular audience through identifying a set of defining categories of attraction: pilgrimage, service (to lord or Lord), genuine or pseudo-historical precedent, actual or invented literary memory, danger (from seasickness or captivity to injury and death), martyrdom and suffering. The point is made that the priorities and interests of clerical and lay promoters and participants differed in emphasis. The study is completed with a comparison between the crusading involvement (or rather, in the house style, ‘what role to play in the crusade movement’, pp. 170-1) of Joinville and Oliver of Termes, recently made familiar by Gauthier Langlois’ 2001 biography. The detailed sifting of the evidence produces what may seem a somewhat tame set of conclusions: that clerics were more influenced by canon law; that the few surviving sermons (all from Paris-trained magistri) displayed similar ideological frames; that chansons de geste exerted an influence on attitudes and understanding as well as on narrative and poetic secular texts; that most sources betray a cross-referential formalism (an aspect rather surprisingly ignored on page 157 in using a charter as straight evidence of the grantor's motives); that Joinville is a rich and diverse source; that the experiences and purposes of promoters and participants were at once comparable and contrasting; and, finally, that ‘personal circumstances and family history’ contributed to crusade recruitment. That ‘decisions about crusading were likely to be influenced by circumstances as well as belief’ is unlikely to come as a surprise to many outside a very particular conceptual hall of mirrors. Much of the material deployed is familiar and many of the insights hardly novel or original, which is a pity because Smith has read widely and thought hard. The interesting discussion about Joinville that runs as a thread through the work concludes that he ‘exchanged fighting for writing’. This being the case, as is well and subtly argued, perhaps more could have been said of the influence on his historical-cum-hagiographic work of the literary genre of prose romance or the ‘rhetoric of truth’ supported by the formal as well as actual coincidence of author, narrator, witness and participant. The survey of non-Joinville texts—based largely on Bedier's selection of songs and Maier's edition of sermons—appears full but inconsistent: why James of Vitry but no Caesarius of Heisterbach for instance? Some may find that the reluctance to place crusading in a wider cultural context, the insistence on the ‘movement’ as a discrete phenomenon, while familiar from Smith's mentors, tends to distort. Thus, the interesting discussion of crusade sermons could, perhaps should, be placed in a wider setting of evangelical preaching and the teaching on penance, where the image of the cross, service, suffering, and imitatio Christi, all rightly central themes in Smith's analysis, could feature in non-crusading as well as crusading exhortation to moral revivalism. Similar criticisms could be offered on the exposition of the lay sources, on the determination on seeing the crusade as something apart, and the attempt to describe individual emotions, even to the bizarre extreme of a tentative consideration of whether love and crusading actually did cause domestic trouble (pp. 125–6) and, seemingly, reading the minds of the passengers on the Saint Victor in 1250 (‘there must have been some who did have specifically pious motives’, p. 111). Some may think these sources cannot be used in this fashion to demonstrate actual feelings seven centuries ago. While the habitual conflation of literary genres, fact and fiction is well and consistently caught, recognition by contemporaries that they were dealing with inventions is discounted. Many of these problems are not Smith's fault, but that of the project of which she seems to be a part, which appears to be to prove the validity and sincerity of crusading impulses. Her undoubted industry, erudition and forensic intelligence might be better served by a less rigid adherence to what could be seen as a rather mechanical and oddly old-fashioned response to her period and the crusades.