Glossing the First Crusade: Biblical Exegesis and Holy War, 1099–c.1150

FAIN: FT-58537-11

Katherine Allen Smith
University of Puget Sound (Tacoma, WA 98416-5000)

This project analyses three exegetical strategies by which clerical chroniclers carved out a privileged place for the First Crusade (1095-99) within salvation history: first, crusaders were associated with the ancient Israelites, whose ancient campaigns against unbelieving tribes foreshadowed the medieval holy war; second, the crusaders’ Muslim opponents were cast as reincarnations of the Philistines and Amalekites, ancient peoples whom the ancient Israelites had defeated with divine aid; and finally, the crusade narrative was inscribed onto an explicitly biblical landscape, in which nearly every landmark was associated with a holy figure or miraculous occurrence described in the Scriptures. In a larger sense, the project aims to shed new light on the relationship between history and exegesis, and the negotiation of Christian identity vis-à-vis non-Christian ‘others’ during the Twelfth Century Renaissance.

Associated Products

The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century (Book)
Title: The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century
Author: Katherine Allen Smith
Abstract: The Bible exerted an enormous influence on the crusading movement: it provided medieval Christians with language to describe holy war, spiritual models for crusaders, and justifications for conquests in the East. This book adds to the growing body of scholarship on the biblical underpinnings of crusading, offering a reappraisal of the early twelfth-century narratives of the First Crusade as works of biblical exegesis rather than simply historical texts. It restores these works and their authors to the context of the monastic and cathedral schools where the curricula centered on biblical study, and demonstrates how the crusade's narrators applied familiar methods of scriptural commentary to the crusade, treating it as a text which could, like the Bible, be understood through historical, allegorical, and mystical lenses. These glosses of the First Crusade, which collectively constitute one of the great intellectual achievements of their age, drew upon the Scriptures and earlier Christian theology, pilgrimage guides, and polemic to construct the crusade as a new chapter of sacred history. Within this story, the first crusaders played various biblically inspired roles: as new Israelites, they wrested the promised land from Muslims cast as new Canaanites and Babylonians; as new apostles, they reenacted some of the greatest miracles of the Gospels. By reconstructing the interpretive processes that made such readings possible, this study allows us to better appreciate the crusading movement's relationship to church reform, the apostolic revival, and the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment in twelfth-century Europe.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781783275236/the-bible-and-crusade-narrative-in-the-twelfth-century/
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Access Model: For purchase or by subscription to Cambridge Core
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781787448506
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Road to Babylon: The First Crusade as Moral Performance (Article)
Title: The Road to Babylon: The First Crusade as Moral Performance
Author: Katherine Allen Smith
Abstract: This article takes a closer look at descriptions of early crusading encounters with Babylon, with the aim of demonstrating that what seems on the surface like a simple geographical misidentification is actually the purposeful evocation of a potent theological symbol. This becomes clear if we follow the lead of medieval authors and treat the First Crusade not simply as a series of diplomatic and military encounters but as a high-stakes spiritual contest.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781783275731/the-haskins-society-journal-31/
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Access Model: By subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Haskins Society Journal
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

The Crusader Conquest of Jerusalem and Christ’s Cleansing of the Temple (Book Section)
Title: The Crusader Conquest of Jerusalem and Christ’s Cleansing of the Temple
Author: Katherine Allen Smith
Editor: Elizabeth Lapina and Nicholas Morton
Abstract: In the eyes of many medieval Christians, history repeated itself in 1099. In June of that year, a fraction of the original armies of the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem and massacred the majority of its inhabitants. The city’s bloody conquest quickly came to stand for the entire First Crusade in medieval historiography; eyewitness narrators of the conquest creatively redeployed and combined scriptural passages as a way of endowing this momentous event with meaning, and later chroniclers continued this hermeneutical endeavor, mining the crusader capture of Jerusalem as they would a sacred text which might be interpreted along historical, moral, typological, and mystical lines. On the typological level, the conquest of 1099 seemed to have been predicted by types in the Old and New Testaments, including the parting of the Red Sea and the dispersal of Christ’s followers from Jerusalem, analogies which reflected widespread views of the crusaders as new Israelites or new apostles. But the most insistent typological interpretation linked the 1099 conquest with the so-called ‘cleansing of the Temple,’ when Christ drove the merchants and money-changers from the Temple in Jerusalem and afterward worked miracles of healing in the Temple precincts.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://https://brill.com/view/title/26934
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Access Model: By purchase or institutional subscription
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources
ISBN: 978-90-04-3412

Glossing the Holy War: Exegetical Constructions of the First Crusade, c.1099-c.1146 (Article)
Title: Glossing the Holy War: Exegetical Constructions of the First Crusade, c.1099-c.1146
Author: Katherine Allen Smith
Abstract: The early Latin chronicles of the First Crusade contain a vast number of biblical quotations and allusions, and incorporate interpretive techniques borrowed from scriptural exegesis. Though these chronicles are some of the most intensively studied texts of the entire medieval period, scholars have so far paid relatively little attention to this aspect of early crusading historiography. This article presents a series of case studies suggestive of how historians might use the biblical material in the early crusading chronicles to better understand the historical reception of the First Crusade in the Latin West, the role of the Scriptures in mediating European chroniclers’ views of Christian holy warriors and their Muslim enemies, and the relationships between individual histories of the crusade. More broadly, this way of reading the early crusading chronicles illustrates the fluidity between the genres of exegesis and history in twelfth-century Europe.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://https://acmrspress.com/studies-in-medieval-and-renaissance-history-journal-volume-10/
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Access Model: By subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History
Publisher: ACMRS Press (c/o Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies)

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