A History of the Crusades (57 page)

The nineteenth century also saw the beginning of scholarly research and writing on the crusades. In 1806 the Institut de France held an essay competition on the subject of the influence
of the crusades upon European liberty, civilization, commerce, and industry. It was won by A. H. L. Heeren, a professor of History at the University of Göttingen. As his source for primary texts, Heeren quoted Bongars’
Gesta Dei per Francos
, published in Hanover in 1611. In the early nineteenth century, the task of collecting, editing, and translating the western accounts of the crusades was still in its infancy. A start had been made by the Benedictines, but was interrupted by the French Revolution. It was ultimately completed by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, which produced the
Recueil des Historiens des Croisades
—sixteen volumes of western, Arabic, Greek, and Armenian historians and two volumes of laws—between 1841 and 1906. In 1875 Count Paul Riant founded the Société de l’Orient Latin, the output of which included the two-volume
Archives de l’Orient Latin
and the
Revue de l’Orient Latin
. In addition to Riant, the litany of great nineteenth-century crusade historians includes Wilken, Röhricht, Hagenmeyer, and Michaud.

The career of Joseph Michaud (1767–1839) offers a flavour of nineteenth-century crusade historiography, which is of course a subject which deserves to be treated in its own right. Michaud’s three-volume
Histoire des Croisades
and four-volume
Bibliothèque des Croisades
—excerpts from translated texts—were published in 1829. In 1830–1, he travelled to Constantinople, Syria, Jerusalem, and Egypt. He explored the route of the First Crusade with two engineers and, like Châteaubriand, was made a knight of the Holy Sepulchre. On his return, Michaud revised his
Histoire
in the light of his experiences. Although he had criticisms of the crusaders’ behaviour and cruelty, he described the crusading movement as: ‘one of the most important sections of human history, not only instructive, but extraordinary, supplying abundance of edifying matter to the statesman, the philosopher, the poet, the novelist, and citizen.’

This analysis based upon primary sources does not, however, seem to have captured the popular or artistic imagination. Where it is possible to identify a source for the varied nineteenth-century interpretations of the crusades in music, art, and
literature it is more likely to be the story of the First Crusade as told by Torquato Tasso and glimpses of crusades and crusaders in the novels of Sir Walter Scott than the history of Michaud or the first-hand accounts of a Fulcher of Chartres, John of Joinville, or Geoffrey of Villehardouin.

Tasso’s
Gerusalemme Liberata
, published in 1581, tells the story of the First Crusade, inter-woven with three sub-plots involving thwarted love and with new characters such as the Christian knight Rinaldo and the enchantress Armida to enliven the basic plot. This combination of elements attracted composers and artists and the use of Tasso as a source can be traced from the early seventeenth century. An example of a nineteenthcentury Tasso opera is
Armide
by Rossini, first performed in 1817, while Brahms composed a dramatic cantata entitled
Rinaldo
. There are also numerous nineteenth-century paintings on this theme, not least a Tasso room by the Austrian artist J. Führich at the Cassino Massimo in Rome. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and De Quincey read
Gerusalemme
in translation and, in
The Broad Stone of Honour
, Digby quotes it in the same breath as primary sources for the First Crusade.

The nineteenth-century English translations of Tasso included one by the librarian at Woburn Abbey, J. H. Wiffen. In his Introduction he referred to the recently published
History of the Crusades
by Charles Mills (1820), but noted: ‘Mr. Mills has … portrayed in real colours the nature of these singular expeditions; but who would not willingly continue the illusion which, whether derived from the songs of early minstrels, or the charming tale of Tasso, invests the character of the crusader with I know not what of devotion, generosity and love.’ Not all of Tasso’s admirers, however, saw the crusades through the same rose-coloured spectacles. One reviewer declared: ‘The grand objection to Tasso’s poem is the false view which it gives of the achievements which it celebrates … we must forget that the crimes and cruelties of the croisés as well as their fanaticism sank them below the Moslems and we must strive to believe that the delivery of Jerusalem was an object worthy of the interposition of the highest intelligence.’

Sir Walter Scott was, of course, the most popular historical
novelist of the nineteenth century and four of his books refer to the crusades, either as background or as their central theme:
Ivanhoe
(1819),
The Talisman
and
The Betrothed
, published together as
Tales of the Crusaders
(1825), and
Count Robert of Paris
(1831). Of these
Ivanhoe
was by far the most popular and inspired composers, artists, and dramatists. Scott himself attended a performance of Rossini’s opera
Ivanhoe
in Paris in October 1826 and wrote in his Journal: ‘In the evening at the Odeon, where we saw Ivanhoe. It was superbly got up, the Norman soldiers wearing pointed helmets and what resembled much hauberks of mail, which looked very well … It was an opera and of course the story was greatly mangled and the dialogue in great part nonsense.’
Ivanhoe
was also the subject of an opera by Sir Arthur Sullivan, better known as a composer of operettas with W. S. Gilbert. Paintings on this theme included Leon Cogniet’s
Rebecca and Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert
, now in the Wallace Collection in London. There were also operas and paintings based on
The Talisman
, which takes place during the Third Crusade itself, with Richard and Saladin as central characters. Whilst Scott was not an uncritical observer and indeed queried the value of the expeditions in his ‘Essay on Chivalry’ for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, published in 1818, overall he painted a romanticized picture of the crusading movement.

The crusades offered considerable scope to the romantic imagination and individual idiosyncratic interpretations of the basic historical events. Three very different paintings illustrate the range of imagery on offer. The German Carl Friedrich Lessing’s
The Crusader’s Vigil
, dated 1836, depicts a lone crusader, battered by the elements, in a manner reminiscent of the abandoned King Lear on the blasted heath. In fact the crusades seem to have been a favourite subject of Lessing and the Düsseldorf School, and Lessing was inspired indirectly by Walter Scott. The American artist George Inness had a rather different image of crusaders. His painting entitled
The March of the Crusaders
, now on display at the Fruitlands Museum near Boston, Massachussetts, shows a band of crusaders, identifiable by the red cross on their surcoats, crossing a bridge against a romanticized landscape backcloth. The Pre-Raphaelite painter
William Bell Scott, a friend of Rossetti’s, sought to portray a crusader’s reunion with his family. In
Return from a Long Crusade
, he painted a crusader returning to his wife and son after a long absence. He is scarcely recognized by his astonished wife, who may well have given him up for dead; his son hides behind his mother, fearful of this oddly attired stranger.

More recently, in the 1930s, Richard Hollins Murray, the inventor of the road-safety feature cats’ eyes, who purchased the estate of Dinmore in Herefordshire, a former commandery of the Knights Hospitallers, built a music room and cloisters which are in effect a memorial to the crusades and the Hospitallers. They include stained-glass windows, sculpture, and paintings depicting Hospitallers and Templars, and a series of coats of arms of families from Herefordshire which took part in crusades. A set of murals in the cloisters depicts a young man departing on crusade and Godfrey of Bouillon entering Jerusalem; and the theme of a stained-glass window in the Music Room is the life of a knight during the time of the crusades.

In music, there was the idiosyncratic opera
Count Ory
by Rossini, first performed in 1828. Its plot concerns the sister of the count of Fourmoutiers, who is absent on crusade. In his absence, Count Ory and his friend Raimbaud try to seduce the young girl, first disguised as hermits and then as nuns, but before they have a chance to succeed the count returns. And Verdi’s
Aroldo
, first performed in 1857, tells the story of Aroldo, a crusader just returned from Palestine, where he had been a member of Richard I’s army, and his wife Mina, who had committed adultery during his absence. After the inevitable twists and turns, the opera ends with a reconciliation on the shores of Loch Lomond.

The crusades also inspired romantic playwrights, poets, and novelists. Scott’s crusading novels have already been discussed. An example of a play on a crusading theme is Charles Kingsley’s
The Saint’s Tragedy
in praise of St Elizabeth of Hungary, the wife of the crusader Louis of Thuringia. Kingsley wrote: ‘how our stout crusading fathers fought and died for God and not for gold; let their love, their faith, their boyish daring, distance mellowed
gild the days of old.’ And, as the royal couple take their leave of each other, there is a crusader chorus:

The tomb of God before us,
Our fatherland behind,
Our ships shall leap o’er billows steep,
Before a charmed wind.

The red cross knights and yeomen
Throughout the holy town,
In Faith and might, on left and right,
Shall tread the paynim down.

A similarly romanticized view of the crusades can be found in Wordsworth’s
Ecclesiastical Sonnets
. In his survey of the history of the Church, he devoted four sonnets to the crusades. One simply entitled
Crusaders
runs as follows:

Furl we the sails, and pass with tardy oars
Through these bright regions, casting many a glance
Upon the dream-like issues—the romance
Of many coloured life that Fortune pours
Round the crusaders, till on distant shores
Their labours end; or they return to lie,
The vow performed, in cross legged effigy,
Devoutly stretched upon their chancel floors.
Am I deceived? Or is their requiem chanted
By voices never mute when Heaven unties
Her inmost, softest, tenderest harmonies;
Requiem which earth takes up with voice undaunted,
When she would tell how Brave, and Good, and Wise,
For their high guerdon not in vain have panted.

A further example of a crusade novel is
Hubert’s Arthur
, by Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, in which Rolfe weaves a complex tale involving Arthur, duke of Brittany, who sails for Acre, wages battle, and defeats the Saracens, and ultimately captures Jerusalem and the hand of its queen.

The crusades also lent themselves to the spectacular and in nineteenth-century England the place for this was Astley’s amphitheatre in London. In 1810 Astley’s featured a production entitled
The Blood Red Knight
, which ran for 175 nights and
brought the proprietors a profit of £18,000. The plot concerned the attempts of the Blood Red Knight to seduce Isabella, wife of his brother Alphonso, the crusader. Alphonso returns, is defeated, but then calls in reinforcements, when, to quote the playbills, ‘The castle is taken by storm, the surrounding river is covered with boats filled with warriors, while the battlements are strongly contested by the Horse and Foot guards. Men and Horses are portrayed slain and dying in various directions, while other soldiers and horses are submerged in the river, forming an effect totally new and unprecedented in this or any other country whatever, and terminating in the total defeat of the Blood Red Knight.’

In 1835 the crusade subject was
The Siege of Jerusalem
, which took the audience, mixing fact and fantasy, through Saladin’s capture of the Holy City, a view of the Dead Sea, the arrival of the French and Austrian fleets, the burning sands of the desert, an appearance by Saladin’s White Bull Coraccio, a Grand Asiatic Ballet and Divertissement, the encounter between the Leopard Knight and the Templar (from Scott’s
The Talisman
), and ended with the riches of Saladin’s feast and the last days of the Third Crusade—a full evening’s entertainment. In 1843, another new production was
Richard and Saladin
or
The Crusaders of Jerusalem
, featuring an encounter between the protagonists of the Third Crusade.

Generally the theatre seems to have had less to offer in terms of nineteenth-century images of the crusades, although of course a number of operatic librettos were based on plays such as the German August von Kotzebue’s
Die Kreuzfahrer
, a tale of the First Crusade, which inspired Louis Spöhr’s opera of the same name.
The Crusaders
was, however, the title of a play by Henry Arthur Jones about nineteenth-century social reform: ‘The banner of social reform serves as a rallying point for all that is the noblest and basest, wisest and foolishest in the world of today … This movement is in truth as dramatic an element in the life of the nineteenth century as were the crusades in that of the thirteenth.’

If romanticized and idiosyncratic interpretations prevailed, however, that does not mean that their authors were unaware of
the historical context in which they were writing, painting, and composing. I have not been able to identify any clear correlation between events in the Near East such as the rise and defeat of Mehmet Ali and his son Ibrahim—whose defeat at Acre in 1840 prompted Sir William Hillary to call for a crusade—and peaks and troughs in the nineteenth-century use of crusade imagery. The Middle Ages and specifically the crusades were however undoubtedly used as a quarry for imagery to express particular ideas and ambitions. For example, Disraeli’s
Tancred
needs to be seen in the context of his plans for the eastern expansion of the British empire and control of the road to India. And a further variation on the crusade theme was the celebration of national crusade heroes or traditions.