Latin Texts From the First Crusade, Edited by Heinrich Hagenmeyer

The German Protestant minister Heinrich Hagenmeyer, 1834-1915, was also one of the most highly-respected editors of some primary texts of the Crusades. I have two volumes by Hagenmeyer: Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088-1100, a collection of letters written between AD 1088 and 1100 and pertaining to the First Crusade; and Anonymi Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolymitanorum; mit Erläuterungen, an account of the First Crusade, written by an anonymous soldier who took part in it.

This is the edition of the Anonymi Gesta which I have: a reprint made by the University of Toronto Libraries:

It's a fairly well-made volume. Reprints like these, of pre-copyright books, tend to be of okay quality when made by university libraries. The ones made by fly-by-night publishers you've never heard of, with pictures on the covers which make it clear they were made by people who can't read Latin, are very much hit-and-miss, quality-wise. I got lucky with my copy of Hagenmeyer's edition of the crusade letters, made by one of those fly-by-night operations. The front cover is mostly covered by a photo of rippling water. It's a fairly pleasant photo. It has nothing to do with the subject matter of the book.

In Hagenmeyer's editions, the actual primary texts, the letters written between 1088 and 1100 and the anonymous chronicle by a crusader, take up up a very small amount of space compared to Hagenmeyer's Erlaeuterungen, his notes, written in German. In fact, each of these volumes could be considered a historical work written by Hagenmeyer, with the letters and the chronicle included among the footnotes, except that in the case of Anonymi Gesta, the anonymous chronicle, Hagenmeyer's text appears mainly in the form of footnotes. Footnotes which take up by far the greater part of most of the pages, leaving room for a few lines of the Latin text per page. In the case of the volume of letters, the actual letters cover 55 pages, and they actually cover most of those pages most of the time, but the entire volume is over 500 pages long.

That's not a complaint, because what Hagenmeyer writes is very sensible, highly informative and thoroughly scholarly in a way in which, for example, I have never matched, not even back when I was in grad school. I'm just pointing out that what you're getting, by volume, is almost all Hagenmeyer, with the primary texts also included, as opposed to mostly primary text, plus a little bit of introduction and notes, as is often, perhaps more often than not, the case with editions of ancient and Medieval and more recent Latin texts.

There are many highly romanticized stories of the Crusades in Western literature. If you go back and study the eyewitness accounts and contemporary letters and such -- even the ones written by Crusaders themselves, and by their countrymen. Never mind the accounts written by Orthodox Greeks and other Eastern Christians, and Muslims and Jews -- then the Crusaders suddenly appear in a much less flattering light. The excuse giving for all of these Frenchmen, Italians, Germans and other Westerners to travel east and fight wars, was that they were responding to a call for help from the Greek Emperor in Constantinople. And the leaders stopped in Constantinople on their way to the Holy Land, and swore oaths of loyalty to the Emperor. Oaths which they broke in almost every case. They swore they would turn over all the land they conquered to the Byzantine Empire. Instead, they stayed and ruled it themselves. They committed horrendous massacres of civilians and non-enemies and women and children. For example, when the soldiers of the First Crusade conquered the city of Jerusalem: they literally slaughtered almost every human being inside the city walls: not just the Muslims, against whom they had been fighting, but also all of the Jews and Eastern Christians who were there, who had not been fighting against them at all. Even the accounts written by the Westerners are horrific. And Muslims and Jews and Eastern Christians haven't forgotten, and why should they, even if the West very soon started telling itself completely unrealistic stories about the whole enterprise? We Westerners should be more careful with the term "crusade."

Rambling Speculations About Cause And Effect

I like to look at the chronological relation of events of hundreds or thousands of years ago, and speculate about possible cause-and-effect relationships, perhaps ones which have been rather seldom thought of. I'm hardly alone in this: historians often revise and refine our perceptions of events long after the fact. For example, the spires on Gothic cathedrals existed for quite a few centuries before it occurred to many people that they imitated the shape of minarets on masques, and that the Gothic style appeared in Europe in the 12th century, soon after the Crusades had begun and made masses of Western Europeans familiar with Islamic architecture. Now it is a commonplace in some circles that Gothic spires imitate minarets, and it is even somewhat difficult to understand how people failed to see this for so long.



I'm not the first to speculate about the relationship between Columbus' voyages to the Western Hemisphere and the rush of European exploration which followed, or, to use a popular phrase, the "Age of Discovery" -- between the Age of Discovery and the Protestant Reformation. Luther, Henry VIII and Calvin weren't the first Protestants, but no Protestants before them had succeeded and survived on such a large scale. The Hussites had succeeded and survived more than a century before those other three, but on a much smaller scale, and at the cost of their leader, John Hus, being arrested, condemned and executed by the Catholic authorities. Luther, Henry and Calvin all lived to die of natural causes. Did the Age of Discovery, with its shattering of conventional ideas about the extent and variety of human civilization, lead directly to an increased readiness to accept the shattering of the Medieval ideal of the one true universal Catholic Church? (Nevermind that this Medieval conceit of one Church ignored -- as some Westerners today still ignore -- the Orthodox, Coptic, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopic and other churches.) I can't point out a link as clear and obvious as that between minaret and Gothic spire, but there's no reason we can't wonder about it.

And of course there's the effect of printing, which began before 1440 and became widespread in Europe before 1470, on both exploration and religious quarrels.

And let's go back a little further in time, and wonder about the relationship between guns and clocks on the one hand, and printing, exploration and religious conflict on the other. Usually when someone speaks of something like the "mechanical revolution" they mean something which got underway in the 18th or 19th century, with factories and mills and trains and steamships and filthy smokestacks, but there definitely was a great revolution in the 14th century when guns became more and more important in warfare, and clocks began to appear in more and more town squares, and to ring the hours with huge bells. Both inventions turned all sorts of things upside-down, it's hard to say which one did so to the greater extent, guns or clocks.



And now is the time where perhaps you expect me to wrap up this blog post in a neat bow of a conclusion full of real or feigned wisdom and relevance for the year 2015 and beyond, and I fail to do so. At least I'm not feigning something, not presented some half-baked bullshit about what the above means. Minarets, Gothic spires, guns and clocks, then the Hussites, then printing, then Columbus, then a rush of other explorers, and European colonies, then the Reformation -- what does it all mean? Well, I don't know. But at least I'm giving you the list in correct chronological order. (And as long as I'm here, I could add: the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and extinguished the "Byzantine" Roman Empire just as printing began to spread, and for a century and more before that conquest [1453, same year the Hundred Years' War ended], Greek scholars had been fleeing to Italy before the Ottoman onslaught, helping to create what we refer to as the "Italian Renaissance.") Maybe I even gave you something interesting to think about, and maybe eventually one of you will be able to tell the rest of us what it all means. (Maybe all that it means is that I'm preoccupied with the history of Western Europe to the exclusion of the rest of the universe.) I honestly just enjoy thinking about such things, and figuring out what happened before what, just for its own sake, with no pretensions to astonishing insights.

"Deus lo volt!"

On this day 914 years ago, 27 November 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called for a holy war against the Muslims, who had been in control of Jesrusalem and much of area considered the Holy Land by Christians, Moslins and Jews alike, since the seventh century, and had recently been at war with the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor. More specifically, it was the Seldjuk Turks who were warring with the Byzantines in Asia Minor. Although the Christians of western Europe tended to view the Islamic world as one entity, in fact different states struggled with one another and rose and fell much as they did in the Christian West. The immediate impulse for Urban's call for holy war had been a request for military aid from emissaries of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius who spoke at an earlier Council, at Piacenza in March 1095. The war was going well for the Byzantines, there was little reason to doubt that the declining Seldjuk power would soon be beaten back from the environs of the Byzantine capitol at Constantinople, but Alexius felt it would go better still with more troops. Much of the Byzantine army army already consisted of foreign mercenaries. Besides the Seldjuks in Turkey, the Byzantine army had to check the advances of tribal people across the Danube, and of the Empire's always-restive Bulgarian subjects.

However, the Byzantines felt that their appeal for military aid might carry more weight if, instead of describing the Byzantine military situation in great detail, they couched it more in terms of a struggle of all Christendom, Catholic West and Byzantine, Orthodox East, against their common Muslim foe. The Emperor's emissaries were well-received in Piacenza, and Pope Urban took their message and expanded upon it in his famous address at Clermont, held outdoors because the crowds which came were too big for the town's cathedral to hold. Urban described the infidels' control of the Holy Lands as an outrage, mentioned -- and very probably greatly exaggerated -- the hardships of Christian pilgrims at the hands of Moslims and the desecrations of holy Christian sites.

Alexius definitely got more than he had asked for, and Urban, too, soon saw the movement he had called to life grow beyond his control. It is reported that as he spoke, a cry of "Deus lo volt!" ("God wills it!) spread through the huge crowd. Before the main army of the First Crusade, made up of nobles and their followers, got underway, a more spontaneous crowd of tens of thousands, few of them skilled soldiers, mostly peasants, including many women and children, led by charismatic monks, set off from France, pausing in some cities in Germany to rob and kill Jews over the protests of bishops and other authorities. At Constantinople, perhaps at their insistence, perhaps because he was alarmed at the sight of this hungry, angry, riotous mob, numbering perhaps tens of thousands, Alexius had them promptly ferried across the Bosporus and into the path of the Seldjuk army, who promptly massacred most of them. Of those who were not killed in battle many starved or were enslaved; few ever returned to their homes in Europe.

While this fiasco reached its conclusion, the main force of the First Crusade was setting out in a rather more orderly fashion. They were hardly less alarming to the Byzantines, however, than had been the earlier mob of peasants. Alexius had asked for a few mercenaries to fill out the ranks of his army, and instead whole armies arrived, independent units whose leaders clearly had no inclination to subordinate themselves to the normal Byzantine chain of command. Indeed, to many of the western Crusaders the Byzantines seemed scarcely less foreign than any non-Christian infidels. Alexius did his best to extract oaths of fealty from the leaders of these huge armies of knights, Bohemond of Taranto, his nephew Tancred, Godfrey of Bouilion, Raymond of Toulouse and others; but there was great distrust on all sides, and later, as these western armies, like the peasants' army, were sent by Alexius as quickly as possible out of his capitol and into the fighting against the Turks and other Moslims, there were accusations on all sides of treachery and broken promises.

In the first flush of their exuberant rush toward Jerusalem the Crusaders quickly won many victories, and set up principalities for themselves, one with its capitol in Antoch, another based in Edessa, and in July 1099 they took the city of Jerusalem, and in the aftermath of their victory, in a frenzy they massacred many inhabitants of the city, Moslims, Jews and Eastern Christians, men, woman and children. It's very hard to know the number of victims of this massacre -- people tended to be much less exact with numbers in the Middle Ages -- but some Western Christian historians of the time were horrified, along with the others of the time who wrote of it; they, too, wrote of blood running deep in the streets, of thousands of helpless victims.

So that was the First Crusade, and Moslims have tended to remember the massacre which was its climax much better than it has been remembered by Christians, and so when a Western politician uses the word "Crusade" they tend to think of things like that massacre, and of a few others perpetrated since by Westerners who have called themselves Crusaders. Warriors of the Cross, killing ruthlessly, because "God wills it."