The Routledge Companion to the Crusades

Professor of Law at Florence and secretary of the Republic, co-authored with his brother Leonardo the first attempt at a history of the Crusades in 1452; first published in Venice 1532. It was not a particularly historical approach and was concerned almost entirely with the First Crusade and the heroic role of Godfrey of Bouillon. Nonetheless it was very popular and was reprinted as late as 1731. It is said to have been Tasso’s main inspiration for Gerusalemme Liberata (earliest version 1564).

Oxford philosopher and historian who specialised in political thought and Byzantine social and political theory. His succinct account of the Crusades in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the broad insights expressed there, shows the very real value of crusading history written by Byzantinists.

A Huguenot, he studied in Germany and visited Constantinople. He was a classicist who produced two notable translations of Justin (1581) and of the letters of Aristaenetus (1597). From 1581 he was in the service of Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV), serving as a diplomat in England and Germany (1593–1610). On his retirement he brought together for the first time in 1611 the principal western sources of the Crusades in two folio volumes entitled Gesta Dei per Francos, a title he borrowed from Guibert of Nogent’s twelfth-century chronicle of the First Crusade. The compilation remained influential until the publication of RHC in the nineteenth century, and is still the main working text for Marino Sanudo’s Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis (c. 1318–21).

A distinguished French Byzantinist best known for Le Monde Byzantin (3 vols, Paris, 1946–50). He was particularly interested in symbolism in religious art. In 1907 he produced Les Croisades, L’Eglise et L’Orient au Moyen Age, which went through five editions by 1928. Five years later, in 1912, he wrote a short overview of the Crusades for The Catholic Encyclopaedia. Today the presence of this article on the Internet makes it the first introduction to crusading history for many.

Known as Alexandre, he was born on 21 May 1791 and was a traveller journalist, prolific editor, and the historian who edited the major chronicles associated with the Fourth Crusade and the Frankish settlements in Greece. His work on Greece, although of immense importance to the study of the area as a whole, was but a small portion of his output which consisted of Collection des chroniques nationals françaises ecrites en langue vulgaire du XIIIe au XVIe siècles (46 vols, Paris, 1826–8), Histoire populaire des Français (Paris, 1834), Pantheon Literaire (38 vols, Paris, 1835–43), journals from his various travels in Ireland, Greece, the Ionian Islands, the Cyclades undertaken at various times between 1820 and 1845. He was instrumental in the preservation of many heraldic carvings unearthed in Chalkis in the 1830s and 1840s; these may still be seen in the museum there. He died on 29 April 1846.

Conder combined professional soldiering and scholarship. He was the discoverer of the site of ancient Kadesh. As an officer in the Royal Engineers he participated with Kitchener in the survey of western Palestine (1870–88), and combined his topographical and historical skills in the first academic history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

A prolific writer on crusading whose bibliography reflected the concerns of the late nineteenth century. His work on the Hospitallers built upon that of Bossio and the abbe Vertot in the eighteenth century and set it on a secure historical footing. His major publications were Cartulaire general de l’ordre des Hospitalers de St-Jean de Jerusalem (1100–1310) (4 vols, Paris, 1894–1906), Les Hospitaliers en Terre Sainte et à Chypre (1100–1310) (Paris, 1904) and Les Hospitaliers à Rhodes jusqu _a la mort de Philibert de Naillac (1310–1420) (Paris,1913); all of which bar the first have been superseded in the twentieth century.

Born in Amiens, du Cange was a private scholar of wide historical interests who is best known for his La lexiicographique du latin medievale et ses rapports avec les recherches actuelles sur la civilisation du Moyen-Âge (Paris, 1678). He wrote under the patronage of Louis XIV and Colbert, and the topics of some of his work may be fitted into this imperial and expansionist ideology. He produced a text and translation of Villehardouin’s chronicle and incorporated it in his Histoire de l’empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs français (1657). He published texts and translations of the Byzantine historians Kinnamos  and Nicetas Akominatos for the Byzantine du Louvre series, and in 1680 published his Historia Byzantina. Much of his work on genealogy and heraldry remained unpublished in his lifetime, most notably Les familles d’Outremer, written in 1657 and published by E.G. Rey in 1869 (Paris, Imprimerie imperiale).

¹ Jean-Michel Speiser, ‘Du Cange and Byzantium’, in R., Cormack and E. Jeffreys, eds, Through the Looking Glass (Aldershot, 2000), 199–210.

Born in Boulogne, whose museum now houses his private archaeological collection, Enlart was assistant librarian to the École des Beaux Arts (1891), and in 1903 he became curator of the Musée de Sculpture Comparée. His research was based around the influence of French gothic architecture in the eastern Mediterranean and his L’Art gothique (1899), based on fieldwork carried out in Cyprus in 1896, is a model of comprehensiveness and thoroughness. Like Schlumberger, he was responsible for introducing cultural history to the study of the Crusades.

² Nicola Coldstream, ‘Camille Enlart and the Gothic Architecture of Cyprus’, in D. Hunt, ed., Gothic Art and the Renaissance in Cyprus by Camille Enlart (London, 1987), 1–10.

As a member of the Prussian Institute in Rome, Erdmann established his reputation as a historian with two works on the papacy in the Iberian Peninsula based on his doctoral research: Papsturkunden in Portugal (Berlin, 1927) and Das Papsttum und Portugal im ersten Jahrhundert der portuguessichen Geschichte (Berlin, 1928). In 1934 he joined the University of Berlin, but his anti-Nazi views held up his academic career. In the same year he became a staff member (Mitarbeiter) of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a post he held until his death. He was one of the most effective and productive members of that formidable body, contributing to some twenty editions of charters and letters, especially those of Henry IV, emperor of Germany (1050–1106). His groundbreaking work, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, was published in 1935. For the first time it focused attention on the evolution of the idea of crusade and the motivation of crusaders. It is still a fundamental book for crusading studies. The so-called Erdmann thesis has set the parameters of debate for seventy years. In 1977 it was translated into English by Marshall Baldwin and Walter Goffart as The Origin of the Idea of Crusade. He was conscripted into the German army in September 1943 and served as an interpreter in the Balkans. He died of typhus at Zagreb on 7 May 1945 and was buried in the military cemetery there.

³ An appreciation and bibliography of his work is included in Friedrich Baethgen, ed., C. Erdmann, Forschungen zu politischen Ideenwelt des Frühmittelalters aus dem Nachlass des Verfassers (Berlin 1951).

Fuller was an English Protestant clergyman and royalist who produced the first English history of the crusades in 1631. His line was strongly anti-Catholic, but he did take a broad view of crusading to include the Albigensian crusade and he did include a very inexact map. His work is more anecdotal than historical, but it does have marginal notes from which it is clear that he used Bongar’s edition of western crusade texts. He also published A History of Cambridge University (London, 1655) and Worthies of England (London, 1662), on which his reputation as a wit is largely based.

On completion of his doctoral studies in medieval history at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1899, Gerola was invited by the Venice Institute to participate with Friedrich Halbherr in the recording of the medieval monuments of Crete, following the Ottoman withdrawal from the island. The work was conducted between 1900 and 1902. To supplement written descriptions of the monuments and transcripts of the inscriptions everything was photographed. The photographic archive is invaluable today in the assessment of the condition of the monuments. Gerola was a fast-working and accurate field archaeologist. In 1911 he was invited to conduct a similar survey of the Dodecanese, newly acquired as a colonial possession by Italy from the Ottomans. His work on Rhodes, conducted in a little over a fortnight, is of enormous value today in the assessment of the state of the monuments. His work shows the value of photography as applied to medieval sites. His later work concentrated on the restoration of Hospitaller monuments in Rhodes city, and from this came an overview of the Italian contribution to military architecture on Rhodes. His photographic archive is in the possession of the Italian Archaeological School in Athens.

⁴ S. Curuni and L. Donati, Creta Veneziana (Venice, 1988); G. Gerola, ‘I Monumenti mediovali delle tredici Sporadi’, Annuario Scuola Archaeologica Italiana di Athene, 1 (Athens, 1914).

Born in Putney, Gibbon spent much of the late 1750s and 1760s, and the late 1780s, in Geneva, Rome and Lausanne. It was during a visit to Rome in 1764 that he conceived the idea for his classic study History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which appeared in 1776 (Volume I), 1781 (Volumes II–III) and 1788 (Volumes IV–VI). On the death of his father in 1774 Gibbon lived in London, entering into literary society there, and from 1774 to 1782 sitting as a Member of Parliament. His reputation for learning was prodigious in English circles, but his treatment of the early Christian Church and the Byzantine Empire has been subject to severe revisions in the last two centuries.

Born Grenoble, and a graduate of the University of Montpelier, where he was the student of Joseph Calmette. After military service in the First World War he became director of the Cernuschi Museum in Paris and curator of its Asiatic art collection. In 1946 he was appointed to the Academie française. His two most important works were Histoire des Croisades (3 vols, Paris, 1934–6), which was much criticised in the Anglo-Saxon academic world, and L’Empire des Steppes (Paris, 1939).

⁵ S. Halperin, ed., Some Twentieth Century Historians (Chicago, 1961), 201–25.

The first major publication on the Crusades written by this German Protestant clergyman and professor at Nancy was Peter der Eremite. Ein kritischer Beitrag zur Geschichte des ersten Kruezzüges (Leipzig, 1879). He was concerned with producing critical editions of Latin crusader texts improving upon those made available in RHC. To this end he edited the chronicles of Ekkehard, abbot of Aura (Tubingen, 1877), the Anonymous Gesta (Heidelberg, 1890), Walter the Chancellor (Innsbruck, 1896), and Fulcher of Chartres (Heidelberg, 1913). He is best known for his Chronologie de la première croisade (Paris, 1901), and for Die kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100 (Innsbruck, 1901) in which he established the authenticity of various letters from and to crusaders, the texts of which he published for the first time. Both books have been reprinted in the 1970s and both are of use today. In 1897 he exposed the so-called letter of Alexios I to Robert of Flanders as spurious (Byzantinizsche Zeitschrift ⁶).

⁶ ‘Recent Developments in Crusading Historiography’, History, 22 (1937–8), 110–25, and ‘Some Problems in Crusading History’, Speculum, 15 (1940), 57–75.

An American academic, who in the best tradition of his generation was concerned with the effective teaching of history both in schools and universities. His publications reflect that interest. He is best remembered for his collection of source material in translation for undergraduate students of the First Crusade (Princeton, 1921, reprinted 1958) and for his translation of William of Tyre with Emily Babcock (New York, 1943).

An academic who spent his academic life at Tübingen University. In a series of articles he did early work on crusade letters which was built upon by Hagenmayer, on sources for a biography of Godfrey of Bouillon, and on the Second Crusade. His major works are Boemund und Tankred, Fürsten von Antiochien. Ein beitrag zur geschichte der Normannen in Syrien (Tübingen, 1862), Studien zur zweite Kreuzzüge (Stuttgart, 1866), and Albert von Aachen (Stuttgart, 1885).

During the 1930s and early 1940s he wrote many articles on the baronage of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and one important monograph on its constitutional history, The Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (New York, 1932). His health broke down in the early 1940s, curtailing his scholarly output. Just what was lost to scholarship could be seen at the 1938 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago where he set out various avenues for the future of crusading research and publication. All of this is contained in two important review articles on the state and potential for crusading studies. In one he resurrected and publicised the idea of Frederic Duncalf (b. 1882) for a collaborative history of the Crusades by American scholars, this eventually being realized with the multi-volume Pennsylvania/Wisconsin History.6 In collaboration with Merton Hubert he translated Philip of Novara on Frederick II and the Ibelins (New York, 1936) and Ambroise’s account of the Third Crusade in verse (New York, 1941).

He was a Flemish humanist and classicist who occupied the chairs of History and Philosophy at Jena (1572), of History and Law at Leiden (1578), and of History and Latin at Louvain (1592). He was best known for his editions of Tacitus and Seneca. His work on the Crusades is epigrammatic and moral in tone, and heavily reliant of William of Tyre.

He was a prolific French church historian born at Nancy on 10 January 1610. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1626 and won fame as a preacher and staunch opponent of Protestantism and Jansenism. He was also a trenchant supporter of the Gallican Church, for which he was expelled from the Jesuits in 1682. Louis XIV granted him a pension and he lived the remainder of his life at the abbey of St Victor near Paris. His many books, written from 1673, deal with Arianism, Lutheranism, Iconoclasm and the Eastern Schism. These works, including his Histoire des Croisades (Paris, 1675), are beautifully written but have a clear partisan agenda that did not always respect the facts.

An independent scholar who used archaeology and geography in the service of history, particularly the history of Lusignan Cyprus. Following an article on Lusignan coins and seals to be found in the national collections in Paris, ‘Un voyage archeologique en Orient’ in 1845–46, sponsored by the Ministry of Education, he focused his attention on the gothic (French) monuments of Cyprus. This led to a series of articles on the buildings of Cyprus in general and of Nicosia in particular, Frankish inscriptions in Cyprus and Constantinople and the influence of geography on the history of Cyprus produced between 1847 and 1850. His major work was the Histoire de l’île de Chypre sous le règne des princes de la maison de Lusignan (3 vols, Paris, 1852–62). In the tradition of Michaud and Wilken, he followed this up with the publication of hitherto unknown documents dealing with the history of Lusignan Cyprus in articles in the Bibliotheque de l’École des Chartes (1871–82), and in particular documents dealing with the Genoese involvement in the island in the Archives de l’Orient Latin in 1881. His work, although now superseded, is still consulted by those concerned with the protection of Cypriot heritage; it exercised considerable influence on that of Enlart.

Born in Bourg-en Bresse on 19 June 1767, he was a journalist and historian and a member of the publishing house Michaud Freres. As a royalist he suffered much during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, which he spent in hiding in the Jura. However, he was given permission by Napoleon to consult the Imperial archives in 1811, and with the return of the Bourbons in 1813 and 1815 he became lecteur du Roi and was well-connected within the Parisian literary world. He instituted the Biographie Universelle Anciens et Modernes (82 vols, Paris, 1811–62), but it was his history of the Crusades for which he is best remembered. His history emphasised the religious motivation of the First Crusade and stressed its importance in defining western Christendom. He spent the 1820s and 1830s in revising his great work, first by publishing the sources on which his history had been based (1829) and then in visiting the Holy Land ‘not to reform the errors of his life but to correct the errors in his history’.⁷ As a member of the Academy français (1813) and the Academy of Belles-Lettres (1837), he was prominent as a supporter for the RHC project. He died on 30 September 1839.

⁷ G.P. Gooch, History and Historians of the Nineteenth Century (2nd edn, London, 1952), 157–8.

He was the archetypical self-made man of the mid-nineteenth century, almost a model for the novels of Balzac and Dickens. As a poor priest from the Auvergne ordained in 1824, he appreciated the technological and marketing techniques that could make available large amounts of technical scholarly literature at affordable prices. Although often in trouble with the Catholic authorities in Paris he established a religious publishing empire worth over 3 million francs at the time of his death. He moved to Paris in 1833 and founded the Ateliers catholique, which published ten newspapers and over a thousand volumes of theological literature between 1840 and 1870. He is best known for the Patrologia series that made accessible in 384 volumes many Greek and Latin texts not available elsewhere. The quality of the textual editing is much criticised, but the very scope of the texts that were published makes the works still valuable today.

⁸ R.H. Bloch, God’s Plagiarist (Chicago, 1994).

This English barrister and historian abandoned the law to concentrate upon his historical writing. The results – The History of Muhammadism (London, 1817) and The History of the Crusades (London 1820) – were some of the earliest serious overviews to be published in English, though lacking in the consideration of the primary sources in Michaud and Wilken.

Like his near contemporary Krey, Munro was a historian concerned with historical education in the United States. The majority of his writings were textbooks concerned with medieval survey courses. He was much respected as an inspirational teacher. He wrote two principal monographs, The Speech of Urban II at Clermont (New York, 1906) and The Kingdom of the Crusaders (New York, 1935; reprinted Port Washington, 1966), seen through the press by Krey.

Born in Bedzin (Poland), he emigrated to Palestine in 1936. He entered the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, as a lecturer in 1947 and became Professor of Medieval History there in 1958. He was the founder and inspirer of Israeli crusading studies, and his many important and controversial books include: The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (London, 1972), Crusader Institutions (Oxford, 1980) and the History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford, 1988). He was interested in the interface of history and archaeology. In 1999 he was honoured by having a street named after him in Jerusalem, one that led to the remains of a crusader village.

This Munich-based historian was the first to publish a cultural history of the Crusades that went beyond the events of the Crusades themselves. He had been involved in excavations at Tyre in the mid-1870s and went on to make serious contributions to the study of the international military orders and the Malta archives. His major contribution in this field was his work on the financial operation of the Hospitallers and the Templars, in which he complemented the work of J. Delaville le Roulx.

This topographer and historian was concerned with the interface between history and archaeology, and as such reflected the growing contribution of archaeology in crusading studies from the 1870s up to the present day. During the late 1870s Rey was himself involved in fieldwork in Antioch, Acre and Edessa. His writings were concerned with the life in the crusader states and with the families that were established in the lordships of Outremer. This led him to publish du Cange’s unpublished work on this subject in 1869. His major works include: Essai sur la domination franque en Syrie Durant le moyen-âge (Paris, 1866), Études sur les monuments de l’architecture des croises en Syrie et dans l’ile de Chypre (Paris, 1871), Récherches geographique et historique sur la domination des Latins en Orient (Paris, 1877), and Les colonies franques de Syrie au XIIe et XIIe siècles (Paris, 1883).

This private scholar wrote widely on all aspects of the Crusades. It was he who had the vision to found the Societe de l’Orient Latin in 1875. This defined crusading as a distinct subject for study and sowed the seed for a truly international community of scholars engaged in its pursuit. As such his publications reflect the current issues in crusading history at that time, such as the authenticity of crusading letters, charter evidence for the Crusades and the crusader settlements, the spurious letters of Alexios I to Robert of Flanders.⁹ He was interested in the transfer of relics to the West after the Fourth Crusade, and in his major work, Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae (2 vols, Geneva, 1877–8), he edited a number of lesser accounts of that crusade by Gunther of Pairis and the Anonymous of Halberstadt. His large library was acquired by Harvard University in 1899.¹⁰

⁹ ‘Inventaire des letters historiques des croisades’, AOL, 1 (1881); ‘Les archives des établissements latins d’Orient, AOL, 1 (1881); Alexii I Comneni Romanorum imperatoris ad Robertum I Flandriae comitem epistola spuria (Geneva, 1879).

¹⁰ L de German and L. Palain, Catalogue de la bibliotheque de feu M. le comte Riant (2 vols, Paris, 1899).

A teacher in the Luisenstadt Realschule (1870s) and the Humboltgymnasium (1880s), Röhricht’s output was prodigious in both book and article form. He wrote overview histories of the Crusades and studies of individual crusades, focusing scholarly attention on the golden age of crusading in the thirteenth century. His use of pilgrim texts and geographical material was innovative, whilst his edition of the charters of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, for which he is best remembered today, set high technical standards and is still in use and recently reprinted. In may ways this scholar deserves the title of ‘father of modern crusade studies’.

Sir Steven was a distinguished British Byzantinist and international scholar, who could claim to be the first and only postgraduate student of J.B. Bury (1861–1927). During his life time he was acclaimed as the greatest living narrative historian. Nowhere is this seen better than in his History of the Crusades (3 vols, Cambridge, 1951–4), a fundamental study that set out the parameters for future debate. For him the whole crusading movement was a vast fiasco, and the crusaders compared to the armies of Genghis Khan in their destructiveness. Other books from his considerable list of publications, with special relevance to crusading history were, The Sicilian Vespers (Cambridge, 1958), The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (Cambridge, 1965), and Mistra (London, 1980). All his books are beautifully written and a joy to read. He was knighted in 1958 and paid the compliment of having a street named after him in Mistra. He has left a verbal biography in the 1987 television programme for Channel 4, Bridge to the East, and a partial autobiographical memoir, A Traveller’s Alphabet (London, 1991).

Swiss pastor and Church historian who emigrated to the United States in 1864. Here he became involved in Protestant publishing activities on a large scale. He produced an influential encyclopaedia article on crusading that has had amazing longevity due to its use on the web.

He was a prolific writer of both books and articles on Byzantine and crusading history.¹¹ He is celebrated for bringing the material culture of the Byzantine and crusader worlds to the assistance of historians in his two treatises on coins and on seals. His Numismatique de l’Orient Latin (Paris, 1878) relied upon verbal descriptions and did not employ any illustrations. It did, however, consider crusading states in both Greece and Cyprus as well as in Syria. Sigillographie de l’empire byzantin (Paris, 1884) was sumptuously illustrated and considered the Byzantine influence on crusader seal design. He went on, in a series of studies of Byzantine emperors, to use objects to illuminate political and administrative history.

¹¹ A. Blanchet and G. Millet, eds, Mélanges offerts a M. Gustave Schlumerger a l’occasion du Quatre-Vingtième Anniversaire de sa Naissance (2 vols, Paris, 1924), I, xvii–xxxi, has a bibliography of Schlumberger’s work.

In 1950 he succeeded La Monte at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to become Professor of History at the Institute for Advance Study, Princeton and the general editor of the collaborative work, A History of the Crusades (6 vols, Madison, 1955–89). His own original work, published as Catalan Domination of Athens, 1311–1388 (1948; revised London, 1975) and The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571 (4 vols, Philadelphia, 1976–84), produced much new material on the later crusades that is still being assimilated.

He was an outstanding and inspirational Cambridge historian from 1948 until his retirement in 1980. His two main works, Crusading Warfare (Cambridge, 1956) and The Crusaders in Syria and the Holy Land (London, 1973), were well written, magisterial in approach, and provoked thought on all levels not just on crusading. His study on warfare set the parameters for future debate on the subject.

A pupil of von Ranke and a German nationalist historian, he was the first professor of History at Munich, the department of which he established. His anti-Catholic stance made his position in Bavaria difficult and he moved to a chair at Bonn University. He is best remembered for his considerable work on French and German history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but his forays into crusading history were profound – especially his source criticism applied to the First and Second crusades, which were thought worthy of publication and imitation in England.

¹² C. Varentrapp, Vortrage und Abandlungen von Heinrich von Sybil (Munich, 1897); Gooch, History and Historians of the Nineteenth Century, 131–7.

Late Renaissance poet and courtier whose unsettled vagabond life was often troubled by bouts of poor health and mental instability. In Gerusalemme liberate he attempted to revive the ancient epic tradition according to the recently rediscovered Poetics of Aristotle, anchored in the events of the First Crusade and interspersed with various interludes of courtly love. The poem became the obsession of his life, with parts of it written in the 1560s and, according to his own lights, never finished to perfection. It went through many pirated editions and even became something of a historical source in the eighteenth century, being cited by Gibbon.

A historian and orientalist who was born in Ratzeburg on 23 May 1777. He was well connected with the Prussian royal family, to which he served as a tutor from 1803 to 1809. He was Oberbibliothekar of the Royal Library in Berlin, and from 1817 until his death was Professor of History at the Humboldt University, in which he served as rector, 1821–2. Best known for his history of the Crusades and for his use therein of Arabic and Syriac sources for the first time. This work was seminal and made a difference to the way people viewed the Crusades. His other publications show the range of his interests in East–West relations, which to some extent underpinned his approach to the crusades. These include Über die verfassung, den Ursprung und die Geschichte der Afghanen (Berlin, 1818–19), Über die Partheyen der rennbahn vornehmlich Byzantinischen Kaiserthum (Berlin, 1827), Geschichte der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin, 1828), Über die verhaltnisse der Russen zum Byzantischen Rieche in dem Zeitraum vom neunten bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1829), and Über die Venetianisch Consulin zu Alexandrien im 15 und 16 Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1831). He died on 24 December 1840.

¹³ Adam Stoll, Freidrich Wilken (Berlin, 1896).