Few events in European history generated more historical, artistic, and literary responses than the conquest of Jerusalem by the armies of the First Crusade in 1099. This epic military and religious expedition, and the many that followed it, became part of the collective memory of communities in Europe, Byzantium, North Africa, and the Near East. Remembering the Crusades examines the ways in which those memories were negotiated, transmitted, and transformed from the Middle Ages through the modern period. Bringing together leading scholars in art history, literature, and medieval European and Near Eastern history, this volume addresses a number of important questions. How did medieval communities respond to the intellectual, cultural, and existential challenges posed by the unique fusion of piety and violence of the First Crusade? How did the crusades alter the form and meaning of monuments and landscapes throughout Europe and the Near East? What role did the crusades play in shaping the collective identity of cities, institutions, and religious sects? In exploring these and other questions, the contributors analyze how the events of the First Crusade resonated in a wide range of cultural artifacts, including literary texts, art and architecture, and liturgical ceremonies. They discuss how Christians, Jews, and Muslims recalled and interpreted the events of the crusades and what far-reaching implications that remembering had on their communities throughout the centuries. Remembering the Crusades is the first collection of essays to investigate the commemoration of the crusades in eastern and western cultures. Its unprecedented multidisciplinary and cross-cultural approach points the way to a complete reevaluation of the place of the crusades in medieval and modern societies.

This book contributes to the flourishing interest in memory and the crusades. It offers a nuanced understanding of how medieval authors presented the crusades. It opens up new avenues for research into medieval texts and songs about the crusading movement.

Crusading was a religious movement involving papal authorization, the incentive of remission of sins, pious motivation on behalf of the individual, and the justification of holy war. Much recent historiography in this area has focused on resolving the questions of what a crusade was, and why people went on them. But crusading became a cultural and social phenomenon that changed across time and geographical space. In turn, crusading was shaped by the ways specific crusades and their participants were remembered in specific historical contexts. Moreover, crusade memory had profound effects on the cultivation of family lineage, kinship ties, national and regional identity, and religious orthodoxy. Integrating memory into crusades scholarship thus offers new ways of exploring the aftermath of war, the construction of cultural and social memory, the role of women and families in this process, and the crusading movement itself. This book explores memory as a methodological means of understanding the crusades. It engages with theories of communicative memory, social and cultural memory, war commemoration, and historical processes of remembering. Contributions explore the variety of cultural forms used in cultivating crusade memory. Material, visual, liturgical and textual objects are all reflective of crusade culture and the process of crafting its memory, and the analysis of such sources is of particular interest. This publication furthers new trends in crusade scholarship which understand the crusades as a broad religious movement that called upon and developed within a wider cultural framework than previously acknowledged. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History.

In this book, Megan Cassidy-Welch challenges the notion that using memories of war to articulate and communicate collective identity is exclusively a modern phenomenon. War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade explores how and why remembering war came to be culturally meaningful during the early thirteenth century. By the 1200s, discourses of crusading were deeply steeped in the language of memory: crusaders understood themselves to be acting in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice and following in the footsteps of their ancestors. At the same time, the foundational narratives of the First Crusade began to be transformed by vernacular histories and the advent of crusading romance. Examining how the Fifth Crusade was remembered and commemorated during its triumphs and immediately after its disastrous conclusion, Cassidy-Welch brings a nuanced perspective to the prevailing historiography on war memory, showing that remembering war was significant and meaningful centuries before the advent of the nation-state. This thoughtful and novel study of the Fifth Crusade shows it to be a key moment in the history of remembering war and provides new insights into medieval communication. It will be invaluable reading for scholars interested in the Fifth Crusade, medieval war memory, and the use of war memory.

The Crusades is an authoritative, accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Thomas Asbridge—a renowned historian who writes with “maximum vividness” (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker)—covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this big, ambitious, readable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history. From Richard the Lionheart to the mighty Saladin, from the emperors of Byzantium to the Knights Templar, Asbridge’s book is a magnificent epic of Holy War between the Christian and Islamic worlds, full of adventure, intrigue, and sweeping grandeur.

Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes which offer windows into a newly emerging field of historical study: the memory and legacy of the crusades. Together these volumes examine the reasons behind the enduring resonance of the crusades and present the memory of crusading in the modern period as a productive, exciting, and much needed area of investigation. Crusading was a part of the rich tapestry of family history, with tales of crusading developed as evidence of heroic endeavour to enhance family prestige. Lists of crusaders were published to satisfy this market and heraldry was a visible means of displaying such lineage. Drawing on extensive research and previously untapped sources, this book charts continuing British interest in the crusades, focusing on the nineteenth century. The volume discusses what was available to read on the subject and how this was discussed in numerous journals. Set in the British context of growing local and regional interest in history and archaeology, the study also considers the physical artefacts associated with the crusades. Tales of the Crusaders – Remembering the Crusades in Britain is the ideal resource for students and scholars of the history of memory and crusades history in a British context.

The First Crusade (1095-1101) was the stimulus for a substantial boom in Western historical writing in the first decades of the twelfth century, beginning with the so-called "eyewitness" accounts of the crusade and extending to numerous second-hand treatments in prose and verse. From the time when many of these accounts were first assembled in printed form by Jacques Bongars in the early seventeenth century, and even more so since their collective appearance in the great nineteenth-century compendium of crusade texts, the Recueil des historiens des croisades, narrative histories have come to be regarded as the single most important resource for the academic study of the early crusade movement. But our understanding of these texts is still far from satisfactory. This ground-breaking volume draws together the work of an international team of scholars. It tackles the disjuncture between the study of the crusades and the study of medieval history-writing, setting the agenda for future research into historical narratives about or inspired by crusading. The basic premise that informs all the papers is that narrative accounts of crusades and analogous texts should not be primarily understood as repositories of data that contribute to a reconstruction of events, but as cultural artefacts that can be interrogated from a wide range of theoretical, methodological and thematic perspectives. MARCUS BULL is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; DAMIEN KEMPF is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Liverpool. Contributors: Laura Ashe, Steven Biddlecombe, Marcus Bull, Peter Frankopan, Damian Kempf, James Naus, L an N Chl irigh, Nicholas Paul, William J. Purkis, Luigi Russo, Jay Rubenstein, Carol Sweetenham,