holy wars empires and the portability of the past

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Holy Wars, Empires, and the

Portability of the Past: The Modern

Uses of Medieval Crusades

A D A M K N O B L E R

The College of New Jersey

On 12 June 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte took control of the islands of Malta.

The Knights Hospitaller surrendered with little fight, and the independently

recognized polity of the Knights of St. John, the last bastion of the medievalchivalric orders, fell. Founded in the Middle Ages as a military order created

both to carry the sword against Islam and provide shelter and medical care for

pilgrims to the Holy Land, the Knights had by the end of the eighteenth

century become an anachronism. The Ottoman Empire, the last of the great

Muslim powers of the Mediterranean, had long been considered little more

than a pawn in larger political struggles on the Continent. The practical appli-

cation of crusading as church policy had long fallen out of favor. As a military

force, the Order was no longer of any consequence. The Grand Council that

directed the Order consisted for the most part of Maltese or Italian noblesof little formal training in the strategy and tactics of modern warfare. His-

torians of the late eighteenth century had come to the conclusion that the cru-

sades of the Middle Ages were little more than the fanatical hate mongering of

an unenlightened time. As Edward Gibbon wrote: The principle of the cru-

sades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous

to the cause. . .. The belief of the Catholics was corrupted by new legends. . ..

The active spirit of the Latins preyed on the vitals of their reason and

religion. . .. The lives and labours of millions, which were buried in the

East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement oftheir native country. . ..1

However, we should not be too hasty in agreeing with Gibbons assessment

of crusading as merely an example of medieval savage fanaticism. Quite

apart from the purely romantic images of the knights in shining armor and

damsels in distress which, folly or not, still remain with us today, many

who retained power in Europe in the nineteenth century were not devotees

of Hobbes or Gibbon, and did not take their historiographic cues from the

1 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols. (London, 1925), ch. 61.

293

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realm of bourgeois liberalism. Rather, for many of those at both the apex and

nadir of the social classes, the crusades were an apt and readily portable

symbol of the current political landscape. In the face of revolutionary barri-

cades, the crusades represented to many supporters of the ancien regimes a

time when governance, justice, and diplomacy were undertaken with divinesanction and under a rather uncomplicated set of moral absolutes. Yet, since

the Roman church no longer sanctioned crusading in its original form, royalist

conservatives, and the ultramontanist religious right who opposed the

growing secularization of European society felt crusading needed to be

reinvented or, at the very least, transposed from its original medieval

milieu to make it a useful contemporary symbol.

The use of the image and ideology of the crusades, as part of a portable

memory of history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the

subject under discussion here. I have structured this paper around threethemes or motifs, to examine the manifold ways nineteenth-and twentieth-

century people used the memory of the medieval crusades.

The first theme concerns debates over the meaning of nation, nationhood,

and the possession of national symbols. Throughout the nineteenth century,

the states of Europe worked to define who could rightly lay claim to the

symbols of the nation seen as central to the nations history. Were these to

be the property of an elite few or a large majority? What defined the

symbols of nationhood: flag, religion, language, history? In examining

history, was there a collective past, or collective memory, upon which allcould agree?

The second motif, derived in part from eighteenth-century pre-Revolutionary

thought, but still alive in the nineteenth century, was the same romanticism

against which Gibbon had railed. Could the methods and ideas of the old cru-

sades, with their notions of chivalry and purity, be revived in an era when, to

many, such niceties had been lost to high politics? The notion of the hero was

particularly important in developing and maintaining this kind of crusading:

individuals to whom nations, states, or political factions could point and

who would provide a rallying point for political or social action.The third motif developed largely as a backlash against the development of

the imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inverted the crusad-

ing motif and romance of Europeans in the Muslim world. Muslim nationalists

and intellectuals used crusading metaphors to indict current political circum-

stances directed against the Islamic world by Europeans. In essence, they used

the crusades as a negative image of the past, about which the West should be

ashamed. Likewise, western imperialism was often seen as the direct linear

descendant of medieval crusading against Islam.

The trans-national ubiquity of crusading images is striking. How and whydid an 850-year-old series of conflicts become such an effective language in

communicating ideas between classes and societies? As all Europeans had

294 A D A M K N O B L E R


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some knowledge of the stories of Old Testament, so too, the adventures of

Richard the Lion-hearted, St Louis, Saladin, or the Fall of Constantinople in

1453 were part of nineteenth-century common memory.

The debate over the possession of national symbols in the nineteenth

century is a common theme in contemporary historical and anthropologicalcircles. Collective memories have become the subject of many recent scho-

larly works, whether the subject be the internal battles of ideology, religion,

or class which took place in states existing prior to the French Revolution

(Spain, Portugal, Britain, or France itself); the congregation of smaller

states into imperial bodies through conquest or manipulation (such as the

Austro-Hungarian and German entities); or those states whose development

arose from some form of construction based on ethnic irredentism and external

political and military forces, the control of symbols, and the construction of

national pasts.2 A specific term, medievalism, has come to be broadly ident-ified with those working on the uses of the Middle Ages later periods, yet

few have examined the place of the crusades in the context of broader political

and social discourse.

C R U S A D I N G A S A N A T I O N A L S Y M B O L I C I N H E R I T A N C E

France

Joseph-Francois Michaud, the French editor of the royalist organ Le Quotidi-enne, first published his Histoire des croisades in 1815 as a means of discredit-

ing Napoleonic legitimacy and evoking the great deeds of the French heroes of

the pre-Revolutionary past. Thus, from the first year of the post-Revolutionary

era the French right began to look to crusading as an important symbol for

their claims to rule France.3

In 1827 the French royal minister of war turned to the monarchial past in

proclaiming the French king as the son of Saint-Louis.4 Royalists appealed,

not to democratic or liberal values, but to the older ideal of un roi, une foi,

une loi (one king, one faith, one law). Such values were represented mostclearly by the most blessed of medieval French kings, the sainted Louis IX,

who, albeit unsuccessful as a crusader, was nevertheless a beloved and holy

figure to whom churches, abbeys, and monasteries had been dedicated

across France, and to whom a entire popular hagiographic cult was resumed

in both public and private French life throughout the nineteenth century.

While the Royalist successor of the French Revolution, Charles X, connected

2 See Patrick Huttons review article, Recent Scholarship on Memory and History, HistoryTeacher33, 4 (2000), 53348.

3

Michauds work was republished throughout the nineteenth century.4 Marquis de Clermont-Tonnerre to Charles X, 14 Oct. 1827, in, Paul Azan, ed. Le rapport du

Marquis de Clermont-Tonnere ministere de la guerre sur une expedition a Alger (1827), RevueAfricaine 70 (1929), 215, 253.

T H E M O D E R N U S E S O F M E D I E V A L C R U S A D E S 295


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much of his crusading association with imperial ambitions in North Africa and

his invasion of Algeria in 1830, the July Revolution of the Orleanists began a

thorough revision of public political culture. Appeals to the past, necessary to

insure a symbolic legitimacy of the new dynasty, had to be couched in such a

way as not to glorify the deeds of the recently deposed ancien regime. TheFrench nation was to be the object for pride. A national policy of restoring his-

torical monuments was undertaken under the directorship of the author and

historian Prosper Merimee. However, the greatest public memorial to

Frances grand past was to be the conversion of the royal palace at Versailles

to a museum dedicated to all the glories of France.5 Of the nearly 130 paint-

ings on medieval topics commissioned for the monarchy by Louis Philippe for

display at Versailles, nearly fifty were on crusading themes.6 Four works deal

specifically with Saint Louis himself, the largest and most renowned of these

being undoubtedly Delacroixs depiction of the Battle of Taillebourg, com-missioned in 1834 and now hanging in the grand Salle des batailles. The

exploits of crusaders, hung on the walls of Frances new national

museum, publicly affiliated military action (in this case in North Africa)

with the Orleanist dynasty and French nation without needing to be associated

with Charles ultraroyalist politics. The majority of crusading scenes were

commissioned between 1838 and 1842, corresponding to Louis Philippes

renewal of Charles Xs crusade in Algeria. Any renewed action in the

Maghrib could be undertaken in the name of the new French nation and

would invoke ancient and noble grandeur rather than Bourbonist excess andwhimsy.

Napoleon III, too, was a master of political propaganda and manipulation of

collective historical memory. Conflict in Lebanon, for example, gave birth to

schemes in the conservative Catholic press in the summer of 1860 demanding

that the emperor intervene militarily in defense of the Christians of Syria and

Lebanon. Clerics were sent to Syria to distribute aid and solace to Maronite

refugees while rightists posited the possibility of a crusade.7 The Emperor

himself, like Charles and Louis Philippe before him, invoked the great crusad-

ing precedent of the French past as the basis of his right to protect the HolyPlaces of Palestine in the face of Ottoman and Russian claims to the contrary.

As French troops left for the Levant in 1860, Napoleons words rang with

5 See Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Versailles, de la residence royale au musee historique. Lagalerie des batailles dans le musee historique de Louis-Philippe. Patrick Poirot, trans.(Antwerp, 1984); Michael Marrinan, Historical Vision and the Writing of History at Louis-Philippes Versailles, in, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gerald P. Weisberg, eds., The Popular-ization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy (Princeton, 1994), 11343.

6 Calculated from Claire Constans, Musee national du chateau de Versailles: Catalogue des

peintures (Paris, 1980).7 Napoleon III nest pas seulement lEmpereur des Francais, il est le chef de la derniere

croisade . . . comme a une autre epoque; la France dit a son souverain: Dieu le veut! Dieu leveut! La question dOrient(Paris, 1860), 48.



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crusading imagery: You leave for Syria . . . to that distant land, rich in great

memories . . . you will prove yourselves to be the worthy descendants of those

heroes who had gloriously carried the banner of Christ to those [same] lands.8

The Orientalist Gabriel Charmes looked across the Mediterranean at Syria

and noted how everything of the Syrian past reverberated with the deeds of thecrusaders. At the core of French responsibility to the memory of the medieval

crusaders, he wrote, were the protection of Lebanese and Syrian Christians

and the establishment of French colonial control over Syria.9 Arab nationalists

would use such French claims against them in the twentieth century.

Spain

Following the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic conquest of

Spain, crusading came to be an almost constant theme in Spanish traditionalist

polemic during the nineteenth century. The Revolutions disestablishment of

the Catholic Church and Napoleons support of sweeping social reform stood

in direct contrast to the almost theocratic ideology of the far right. Unsurpris-

ingly, the Napoleonic regime in Spain served as the straw man against which

traditionalists would use holy war imagery. The royalist polemicist Antonio

Capmany compared Napoleon to everything from the Ottoman Sultan

Mehmet the Conqueror to Tamerlane, while comparing the Spanish to the cru-

saders of old.10 The popular press made the historical parallel even more strik-

ing, casting the war against the French as a cause that was as holy as the war

against the Prophet Muhammad.11 By reformulating Napoleon and his huma-

nistic and liberal allies as akin to Muslims, traditionalist editors tapped

directly into part of Spanish collective historical memory. Those who

defended Spain against such an invasion were thus the spiritual descendants

of the Reconquistadores of the Middle Ages.

The traditionalist press was, however, speaking to a readership that, we can

assume, already had a certain level of political sophistication, or at least some

awareness of the events of the time. The transformation of these images from

part of the national collective memory to active political symbol was, for the

majority of Spaniards, accomplished through the work of local rural clergy.

Throughout the century, local clergy were able to translate political ideol-

ogy into historical symbols through their control of local education. For

many of the rural poor, the Sunday sermon or the priestly instruction in

8 Vous partez pour la Syrie . . . Sur cette terre lointaine, riche en grands souvenirs . . . vousvous montrerez les dignes enfants de ces heros qui ont porte glorieusement dans ce pays la ban-niere du Christ. Quoted in Taxile Delord, Histoire du Second Empire, 6 vols. (Paris, 1873), 3: 31.

9 Journal des debats, (17 June 1880); and Gabriel Charmes, Politique exterieure et coloniale(Paris, 1885), 1013, 305428.

10

Antonio Capmany y de Montpalau, Centinela contra franceses, Francoise Etienure,Coleccion Tamesis, eds., serie B, 17 (London, 1988), 122, 125, 145. Capmanys work is ananti-Napoleonic polemic of the most vivid and graphic order.

11 Diario Poltico de Mallorca, 25 June 1808.



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local schools was the only news of the outside world they were likely to hear.

And, with the anticlerical strain notable in Napoleonic and subsequent liberal

political discourse, it is not surprising that members of the clerical class often

threw their own political support (and, as a consequence, that of many of their

parishioners) with the more traditionalist forces of the political spectrum. Forexample, the suppression of the monasteries and friaries in August 1809 sent

monks and friars into the countryside where, according to one report, they

fanned the flames of . . . holy war. . ..12 One Carmelite prior exhorted his

friars to sacrifice themselves on the battlefield of a Holy Crusade.13 Some

were even promised heavenly reward for their participation in the fight.14

Sufficient troops were rallied in the so-called Spanish War of Independence

(or Peninsular War) to expel the Napoleonic forces, and the Spanish monarchy

was restored under Ferdinand VII, an ultra-traditionalist who had been lauded

throughout the war as the incarnate spirit of the nation and the Church. WhileFerdinand steadily lost popularity during the remainder of his reign, those who

continued to support his martial causes, such as his failed attempt to regain

Mexico in 1829, returned to the earlier image of the king as a crusader,

leading Spain in a just fight. Royalist priests in Mexico called upon their

mostly Indian parishioners to take up a crusade against the liberal-humanist

leaders of the independence movement.15 In truth, however, Ferdinand

proved to be a singularly inept military leader and diplomat, and prone to lis-

tening to poor advice, and his death left Spain in political turmoil.

The troubles were, as they had been several times before in Spanish history,a question of legitimate succession. Ferdinand died leaving no sons. His eldest

daughter, Isabella, was only three years old and many traditionalists viewed

her regent, her mother Queen Maria Cristina, as morally unfit to rule. As a

consequence, a surge of support developed on the right for Ferdinands

brother, Don Carlos. The so-called Carlist faction of the Spanish monarchist

movement was next to adopt medieval crusading images to greatest effect.

For the Carlists, their greatest political obstacle was to prove their legiti-

macy as the true and rightful inheritors of the Spanish crown. Using the sup-

posed moral turpitude of the regent queen mother, and stressing the need forSpain to return to its strong Catholic heritage, Carlist propagandists spent

more than forty years attempting to connect their claimants to the great

moral and military battles of the past.

12 Francisco Aragones, Los frailes franciscos de Cataluna, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1891), 1: 49 50.13 Juan R. de Legsima, Las ordenes religiosas en la guerra de la Independencia, Archivo

Ibero-Americano 22, 118 (1935): 197.14 Alfredo Martnez Albiach, Religiosidad hispana y sociedad borbonica (Burgos, 1969), 138.15 The leading preacher of this action was Father Miguel Bringas of San Antonio de Bejar, who

claimed that the political and economic crises facing Mexico in the late 1820s were divine punish-ment for abandoning the king as Gods chosen ruler. See Eugenio de Aviraneta e Ibargoyen, Mismemorias ntimas, 18251829, Luis Gonzalez Obragon, ed., Documentos historica de Mejico, 3(Mexico, 1906), 76.



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Again, working mostly through networks of rural clergy and ultra-

traditionalist nobility, the Carlists played on the most widely understood

and appreciated symbols of the medieval Reconquista. Don Carlos was

lauded in poems and sermons as leading his troops with the Reconquistadores

battle cry of Santiago y cierra Espana! ([For] Santiago and to save Spain).16

Others dubbed the Carlist army as the children of El Cid, the conquistador of

medieval Spanish epic.17 Throughout the century, Carlist pamphleteers

likened their cause to everyone from Columbus, to Ferdinand and Isabella,

to the victors at Lepanto, all in an attempt to stir not only patriotic feeling,

but, more importantly, a sense that only they were the true inheritors of

such a noble history, one abandoned by Isabella II and her supporters. Even

after the death of Carlos in 1855 and the deposition of Isabella in 1868,

which launched another succession crisis, the Carlists continued to use medi-

eval images in their public pronouncements to link themselves with Spainsheroic past. In 1870, the twenty-two-year-old Carlist claimant, Carlos, the

Duke of Madrid, was publicly presented with a small replica of the Cross of

Victory, a relic associated with the great medieval conqueror, James I of

Aragon.18 The young Carlos, some Carlist pamphleteers prophesied, would

restore Spains glory even to the point of re-extending Spains borders to

reclaim the medieval Spanish patrimony in Gibraltar, North Africa and

Portugal.19

While Carlist claims for legitimacy had a strong following among the clergy

and the rural poor, the movements leadership rarely rose to the occasion.Gentleman soldiers, ill equipped for the new face of warfare and supported

by weak and undisciplined troops, in the end had little but their symbols to

carry them to victory.

As for the government, Prosper Merimee, living in Spain during the disas-

trous Spanish attempt to conquer Morocco in 18591860, wrote that all the

Spanish viewed the expedition as a guerre sainte (holy war) that united

the country in single purpose.20 Certainly, once the war was underway, the

Spanish press and by many of its authors and poets popularized the imagery

of the crusade. Spain, having lost most of its imperial gains of the sixteenthcentury to the Latin American independence movements of the 1820s, was

16 As in the poem, Himno de los voluntarios vasconavarros dedicado al marque s de Valde-Espina, in Alexandra Wilhelmsen, La formacion del pensamiento poltico del Carlismo(18101875) (Madrid, 1995), 24243.

17 Juan Arolas, Himno en la destruccion de la faccion de Negr por el general Espartero,Obras, (Madrid, 1982), 2: 14142.

18 Proclama a los aragonenses, in Historia del tradicionalismo espanol, Melchor Ferrer,Domingo Tejera, and Jose F. Acedo, eds., 30 vols., (Seville, 19411979), 20: 222; 23 (sup-

plement), 130.19 Sebastian Perez Alonso, Carta consejo a Dona Isabel de Borbon (Logrono, 1870), 5.20 Merimee to [French War Minister] Marshall Jean Vaillant, 4 Nov. 1859, in Prosper Merimee,

Correspondence generale, 2e serie, Maurice Paturier, ed., 9 vols. (Toulouse, 19531961), 291.



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again to take its rightful place among the nations of Europe through joining in

this new imperialism. Traditionalist conservatives and liberals alike evoked

the Reconquista. In doing so, the former could claim legitimate authority to

conduct a war under a constitutional monarch, while the latter could ward

off fears of Carlist revival. Both could successfully appeal to a broadlynational sentiment by drawing parallels with the decidedly Spanish

nature of sixteenth-century Iberian crusading in North Africa.

Some papers, it is true, such as El clamor publico, wrote sadly that the time

of the Crusades has already passed (26 Oct. 1859).21 Others, such as the

moderate El estado, voiced opposition to giving the war a religious charac-

ter.22 Most, however, filled their pages with stories of a great Spanish past

that was about to be renewed. The moderate El conciliador referred to the

Spanish soldiers of the expedition as the descendants of those illustrious

men who planted the standard of the Cross on the Barbary coasts!23 Likewise,El espanol, on the same day, declared proudly, the blood of our fathers . . .

[who made] the Moorish multitude that refused to bow before the sacred

sign of the cross bite the duststill runs in our veins.24 Still others, such

as the absolutist La Esperanza, recalled the spirit of Saladin, who opposed

the Christians and the battle of Lepanto, which drove the Turks to their

knees.25

Apart from journalists, literary circles often saw crusading analogies and

parallels in the penetration of Morocco. Jose Maria de Ugarte, the poets

who contributed to official El Romancero de la Guerra de Africa collection,and Fernan Caballero each wrote of the operation as an explicit renewal of

crusading.26 The Romancero collection, in particular, strove to connect the

campaigns in Morocco with a whole range of Spanish conquests and holy

wars of the past. In his poetic invitation, which begins the collection, the

Marques de Molins himself not only invoked the Reconquista and the deeds

of Cisneros, but also those of Magellan, Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro.27

Other authors in the collection, such as former Spanish premier, the Duque

de Rivas, poet and secretary to Queen Isabella, Manuel Canete, and dramatist

Manuel Tamayo y Baus all make clear reference to past crusading deeds.28

21 In Robert C. Bogard, Africanismo and Morocco, 18301912, Ph.D. diss., University ofTexas at Austin, 1974, 29.

22 12 Nov. 1859, in Marie-Claude Lecuyer and C. Serrano, La guerre dAfrique et ses repercus-sions en Espagne: Ideologies et colonialisme en Espagne, 1859 1904 (Paris, 1976.), 66.

23 Issue of 22 Oct. 1859, in Bogard, Africanismo and Morocco, 29.24 In Bogard, Africanismo and Morocco, 2930.25 25 Oct. 1859, in Lecuyer and Serrano, La guerre dAfrique, 74.26 El Romancero de la guerra de Africa, Mariano Roca de Togures, marques de Molins, ed.

(Madrid, 1860); Fernan Caballero, Deudas pagodas, in Obras completas 8. Coleccion deescritores castellanos: Novelistas, 132 (Madrid, 18981914).

27 Romance invitatorio, in El Romancero, 917.28 Poems 2, 22, and 10, respectively, in El Romancero.



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One author, Ventura de la Vega, invoked the actual crusades in concluding

his piece.29

However, perhaps because of the enormous cost of life due in large part to

disease, glorious crusading imagery quickly faded from Spanish writing about

Morocco. Others, such as Perez Galdos in his Aita Tettauen of 1905, perhapsnoting how the mosque of Tetuan was converted to a church, as had been done

by Cisneros in Oran, wrote, The priests . . . [urged the soldiers] not to return

without destroying Islamism.30

The year 1898 was, of course, a disastrous one for Spanish imperial ambi-

tion, as most of its remaining colonies were stripped away following their

military defeat at the hands of the United States. This loss called for much

soul searching, including attempts by traditionalist forces to lay blame at

the feet of liberal humanism: it was divine retribution for turning Spains

back on its religious past.31 The history referred to in the political arena aswell as that taught in the increasingly secularized schools became an import-

ant battleground for ideological discussions.32 This issue of national regener-

ation became the central topic of conversation that came to dominate Spanish

political culture for two decades, and those whose political future had relied so

much on reviving past glories seemed to many to be desperately out of touch.

Progressive forces came to the fore, and addressed their concerns to the urba-

nized working classes as well as to the middle orders of society, who together

came to view traditionalist ideology as untenable in a modern world. But the

forces of tradition remained strong among the clergy and in rural areas, whereappeals to religion and glory held far more appeal than talk of a new day for

the working class. Therein lay the political conundrum that bedeviled Spain

for much of the first thirty years of the twentieth century.

The New Byzantium

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 gave way to numerous

claims of succession to Byzantiums place at the apex of the Orthodox

world. However, many scholars have maintained that Orthodox Chris-

tiansGreeks and Russians in particularnever developed a true conceptof crusade or of justifiable holy war.33

29 El Romancero, 218.30 Benito Perez Galdos, Aita Tettauen (Madrid, 1905), 47.31 See the pastoral letter of Bishop Fernandez Pierola, 11 Feb. 1899, in Boletn eclesiastico del

obispado de Vitoria 35 (1899).32 Manuel Merry y Colon, the catedratico of Spanish history at the University of Seville, wrote

in his school textbook that it was necessary to purge our History of the series of errors [which] . . .have tried to obscure our national glories. He devotes nearly 40 percent of his text to the Recon-quista, and emphasizes the providential destiny of Spain. See Manuel Merry y Colo n and Antonio

Merry y Villaba, Compendia de historia de Espana: Redactado para servir de texto en los semin-aries y colegios catolicos (Seville, 1889), 79.

33 On what follows, see Athena Kolia-Dermitzake, Ho Vyzantinos Rhieros polemosS: Heennoia kai he probole tou threskeutikou polemou sto Vyzantio (Athens, 1991).



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However, there are three necessary presuppositions in Byzantine thought

which make a war holy: the adversaries must be non-Christian; there

must be proof of some prior injury to the Christian faith, the Church, or its

believers (such as persecution or the destruction of a church); or, the war

must be in the name of re-conquering a lost part of the Roman patrimony.These three conditions are, of course, nearly identical to the Augustinian

notion of a just war as used by Latin holy warriors.

Because the Byzantines did not have a Pope who could issue crusading

indulgences, it was up to the Emperor, as the leader of the chosen of God,

to publicly proclaim a holy war. The Church never officially recognized

soldiers as martyrs, yet neither did it condemn the Emperors for promising

salvation to those who fought in a holy war. In essence, this promise was

nearly identical to the papal indulgence issued in the Latin Church. Indeed,

the Russians explained their military conquests in Asia as reminders of theircommon, crusading heritage in diplomatic discussions with Latin powers.34

Yet, following the Council of Florence, where the Byzantine patriarch had

agreed to the union of Greek and Roman churches, the Russians roundly con-

demned such Latinity. Moscow saw the fall of Constantinople as a transla-

tio imperii which granted to it succession to Rome and Constantinople.35 By

extension, since Moscow viewed itself as the sole surviving source of salva-

tion on earth, only Russia could conduct a truly holy war against the

enemies of Christendom.36

Under these theological guidelines Russian tsars viewed many of their warsof expansion against their Muslim neighbors in terms of crusading ideals

and their Byzantine predecessors.37 The princes of Muscovy repeatedly har-

kened back to Byzantine liturgical sources to justify their rulethe role of

the emperor/tsaras a conqueror for the faith.38 From the late fifteenth

century, following the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the tsars gained recognition

throughout the orthodox world as the defenders of the faith. As such, Russian

crusading tended to focus on the liberation of Orthodox Christians from

Muslim lands, as well as the recovery of land that rightly belonged to

the princes of Muscovy and the Russian crown.

34 Jaroslaw Pelenski, Muscovite Imperial Claims to the Khazan Khanate, Slavic Review 26(1967), 565; Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva 59 (1887), 103.

35 Letter (1510) of Philotheus of Pskov to Vasiliy III, in Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi.Konets XV-pervaia polovina XVI veka (Moscow, 1984), 43741.

36 Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven, 1961),36 41, 107n.

37 We do have an image from the Kazan Chronicle of Ivan as St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki,trampling the Kazan khan underfoot; see Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, fig. 3 (text p. 53).

38

E. V. Barsov, Drevne-russkie pamiatniki sviashchennogo venchaniia Tsarei na tsarstvo,Chteniia v imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiskikh (1883), bk. 1, 2728, 34,51; P. Schreider Hochzeit und kronung kaiser Manuels II in jahre 1392, Byzantinische Zeits-chrift, 60 (1967), 77, ll.1415 (from Codex Laurentianus Olut. VIII.17).



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While justifying war as necessary for the liberation of captive Christians

begins in the 1230s, it was not until the campaigns in the late fifteenth and

early sixteenth centuries against Kazan that Russian wars of expansion

really took on the characteristics of a crusade. In the sixteenth century, Arch-

bishop Vassijan Rylo, and Metropolitans Makarios and Daniil, led thecharge for anti-Muslim crusading against Kazan. Even at the coronation

of Ivan IV in 1547, we find Makarios asking God to subdue unto him [the

new tsar] all barbarian nations, using a Slavonic translation of the Byzantine

imperial coronation prayeragain, making an explicit connection between

the tsar and the Byzantine emperorboth conquerors for the Church.39

Makarios was probably instrumental in fostering the idea that the land of

the Bulgars had been rightfully Russian since the time of Vladimir I.40

Because Kazan rulership had simply carried on from the Bulgars it stood to

reason that Kazan would be rightfully part of the patrimony of the tsars.Seek the property of [your] ancestors, Makarios urged Ivan IV in a 1552

letter.41 Chronicles, notably the Otryvok russkoi letopisi, were commissioned

expressly to justify these claims by proving dynastic continuity from Vladimir

I to Ivan IV.42 The Kniga stepennaia (which may have been commissioned by

Makarios himself) also argued for continuity, especially when dealing with

Tsar Ivans victories over Kazan.43 Kazan and Astrakhan were conquered

by Ivan in the years 1552 to 1557.

During the late seventeenth century, Russia began to break with its earlier

rather isolationist tradition, and begin to undertake cultural and politicalforays to the west. The Russians maintained a tenuous and sometimes antag-

onistic relationship with the Ottoman Turks on their southern border. The

tension that developed at the court over the following three hundred years

between westernizers and traditionalists had a profound effect on

the holy war imagery generated in Russia. During the regency of Sophia

Alekseevna (1682 1689), the Russians briefly joined the newly formed

Holy League in 1686. The Russians were not, as it happened, able to be par-

ticularly helpful allies to the Venetians, Poles, or the Holy Roman Empire.

Following the Treaty of Radzin (1681), the Ottomans could not afford toantagonize Moscow, and they strove mightily to pacify the Russians. Under

Peter the Great the Russian court turned its diplomatic and cultural focus west-

ward, and even toward western notions of crusading. Peter sent an embassy in

1697 to Malta to enlist the Hospitallers, and though it was but a small and

39 Hupotakhon auto panta ta barbara ethne.40 Otryvok letopisi voskresenskomu novierusalimskomu spisku, sub anno 15261527, 1528,

1532, and 1535, in Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Letopisei [hereafter PSRL] 6: 282, 28486, 289,29697.

41

Letter in Otryvok letopisi voskresenskomu novierusalimskomu spisku, sub anno 1552, inPSRL 6: 308 9.

42 Otryvok letopisi voskresenskomu novierusalimskomu spisku, in PSRL 6: 277315.43 Kniga stepennaia tsarskogo rodosloviia: Pervaia stepen, in PSRL 21: 1: 63.



12/33

rather ineffectual piece of diplomacy on the greater stage of Russo-Ottoman

relations, it did represent a curious overture toward the distinctly Catholic

crusading entity.44

Militant anti-Muslim tendencies typified the policy of the government until

Catherine the Great issued the edict of Toleration of All Faiths in 1773.45

Many members of the conservative aristocracy opposed Catherines liberaliz-

ing initiatives. Most vocal among these was Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, who

noted that Muslims were born enemies of Christians and as once they ruled

over Russia, it should be Russias policy to treat them as her enemies. The

Muslims, he noted, would always be loyal to the Ottoman sultan over the

tsar, and should be eternally suspect as enemies of the faith and crown.46

Despite such vehement concern regarding Muslims as an Asian problem,

during Catherines reign Russians renewed their former vision of their

relationship to the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire within the context of aunited European Christian front. For example, during this period the

Russian word krestonosets acquired the meaning of crusader, in a western

sense. Before this time, the term referred to someone who simply propagated

the faith, wore crosses on their clothing, or simply bore the cross in a church

procession.47 In May 1769, Catherine asked assistance from the Hospitallers

of Malta to fight the Turks. The Hospitallers, not wishing to offend the

French crown, politely declined. In 1774 the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji

granted the Russians the full right of protection over all the Christians resident

in the Ottoman Empire. In 1780, Catherine and Foreign Affairs MinisterPrince Bezborodko drafted plans for a more ambitious crusadethe actual

restoration of the Byzantine Empire, under the rulership of her second grand-

son the appropriately named Constantine.48 Much of Catherines attention

throughout the 1780s was dedicated to this project. A triumphal arch was con-

structed at the fortress of Kherson on the estuary of the river Bug which read

the way to Byzantium. But the Russo-Turkish war did not fulfill Catherines

expectations, and the project was abandoned.

44

Peter to Order of Malta (Moscow, 30 Apr. 1697), in Pisma i bumagi imperatora Petra Veli-kago (Saint Petersburg, 1887), 1, 15455.

45 PSRL, 19: no. 13996 (17 June 1773).46 Mikhail M. Shcherbatov Statistika v razsuzhdeni Rossii, Chteniia v imperatorskom

obshchestve istorii i drevnostei pri Moskovskom Universitete, 30 (1859), 3, 2: 6162.47 Slovar russkogo iazyka XI XVII vv (Moscow, 1981), 8: 46. A far cry from the newer Russian

crusader, exemplified by Andrei Malov, the chaplain of the 4th Orenburg Line battalion at thesiege of Tashkent in 1865, who led an assault holding his cross on high. See Turkestanskiikrai: sbornik materialov dlia istorii ego zavoevaniia, A. G. Serebrennikov, ed., 19 vols. (Tashkent,1914), 19, 1: 210; Mikhail Afrikanovich Terentev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 3 vols. in 2(Saint Petersburg, 1906), 1: 315.

48 On this Greek Project see Vladen Nikolaevich Vinogradov, Vek Ekateriny II: proryv na

Balkany, Novaia I Noveishaia Istoriia (1996) 4: 4364; Hugh Ragsdale, Evaluating the Tra-ditions of Russian Aggression: Catherine II and the Greek Project, Slavonic and East European

Review 66, 1 (1988): 91117. Sochineniia Imperatritsy Ekateriny II (St. Petersburg, 1901), 2:259304.



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One critic called for a grand Orthodox Christian empire, centered in Rome,

with the Pope subordinate to the Tsar in Petersburg.49 The Byzantine emperors

Justinian and Constantine were posited as the models for Russian expansion

into Central Asia.50 The solution to the Eastern Question,the conflict

among the powers of Europe concerning the fate of the Balkans and theEastern Mediterraneanwas, in the eyes of Fyodor Dostoevskii writing in

1877, to liberate Constantinople.51 By the beginning of the nineteenth

century, Greek nationalists had already rallied behind this concept in the so-

called Megale idea, which envisioned a re-establishment of a Greater Greek

kingdom with a capital at Constantinople.52 Perhaps the best-known articula-

tion of the Megale idea, in the context of Greek territorial expansion, or irre-

dentism, was that by John Kolettes, who combined French-influenced

nationalism with an almost messianic concept of Greek destiny. As early as

1834 he proposed that any new Greek state should forego an officialcapital as a solemn reminder that only Constantinople could serve that lofty

purpose, as a sign of Greek faith in the imminence of its acquisition.53

Some politicians took this idea one step further and envisioned Greece in

the widest possible geographical context, stretching from the Danube and

the Black Sea in the north to the Euphrates in the east, the Adriatic in the

west and the Mediterranean in the south.54 A crusade was even called for

to establish the Greek Christian empire.55

This desire for the re-conquest of Constantinople and the re-establishment

of a Christian state in the eastern Mediterranean was sustained well into thetwentieth century. It was used to bridge the gap between the often-liberal

nationalism of the politicians and the vehement traditionalism of the church

leaders and their large popular followings, and Balkan monarchs and their pro-

pagandists invoked repeatedly the theme of holy war.56

49 Note, for example, the plans of the mystic poet Fyodor Tiutchev (1803 1873). FedorI. Tiutchev, Sochineniia: stikhotvoreniia i politicheskiia stati (Saint Petersburg, 1886), 141, 193.

50 See Nikolai IA. Danilevsky, Rossiia i Evropa (New York, 1966), 419.51 Fyodor Dostoevskii, Dnevnik Pisatelia za 1877 god (Paris, 1951), Mar. 1877, 97.52

See R. Clogg, The Byzantine Legacy in the Modern Greek World: The Megali Idea, in,L. Clucas, ed., The Byzantine Legacy in Eastern Europe (Boulder, Colo., 1988), 25381.

53 Quoted in Theodore George Tatsios, The Megali Idea and the Greek-Turkish War of 1897:The Impact of the Cretan Problem on Greek Irredentism, 18661897 (Boulder, Colo., 1984), 16.See also Kolettes speech to the Greek National Assembly, in Eduard Driault and MichelLheretier, Histoire diplomatique de la Grece de 1821 a nos jours, 5 vols. (Paris, 19251926),2: 25253.

54 See the speech of Kleominis Oikonomou [Logos en ti Vouli peris tis ikonopoliseos i polemoukentia tis Tourkias (Athens, 1898)]; the anonymous 1855 pamphlet Panellenis (Ermopoulis,1855); and the citations from the newspapers Aion (especially 1 Jan. 1854) and Athina, whichbroadcast such ideas to the public at large, as noted by John S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with aCause: Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece, 1821 1919 (Oxford, 1987), 3089,

notes 43, 44, and 45.55 Koliopoulos, Brigands, 30910, and note.56 See Madame Guy Chantepleures observations of Greek demonstrations in 1913, in

Eduard Driault, Le roi Constantin (Versailles, 1930), 65 66. Queen Maria of Romania



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Ethiopia

Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia (r. 1855 1868) stated throughout his

career that one of his ultimate goals was the re-conquest of Jerusalem in

the name of Christendom.57 He initially gained his power and notoriety

in battles and skirmishes against the armies of Mehmet Ali of Egypt, and

upon coronation he chose the name Tewodros because an old Ethiopian

legend prophesied that Jerusalem would fall to a man with such a

name.58 In wishing to fight the Turk (his term encompassing all

Muslims) and liberate Jerusalem, Tewodros was perceived by outsiders

and, on occasion, presented himself as following in the tradition of the

Solomonic sainted kings of Ethiopias Middle Ages such as Dawit,

whose victories against the Mamluks and whose stated ambitions in re-con-

quering Jerusalem had become legend. Yet Tewodros was not himself of

Solomonic or royal descent. Therefore the dream of Jerusalem, the claim

of being a holy warrior, and the adoption of the persona of a crusader,

were merely means of bolstering his claim to legitimacy at home, and

gaining respectability as an equal among the Christian nations in

Europe.59 Toward this end, Tewodros worked incessantly to demonstrate

his piety to both the monarchs of Europe and his own people, and his

status as a legitimate holy warrior.60

One of the most curious aspects of Tewodros career is the uncomfortable

balance between his desire to bring Ethiopia into the modern technological

age and his insistence on perceiving the world in terms of a Christian-

Muslim dichotomy. One of his most important advisors, Mahdere Qal

Tewelde Medhiin, was one of the first modern Ethiopians to be educated in

Europe, at a college in Malta, where he would have been surrounded by the

memories of the Knights.61 Tewodros must have been shocked at the

British alliance with the Ottomans, considering what he felt was the religious

specifically ordered a Byzantine/medieval theme for her official coronation in 1922. See. MabelDaggett, Marie of Roumania: The Intimate Story of the Radiant Queen (New York, 1926),29495.

57 David Appleyard and Richard Pankhurst, The Last Two Letters of Emperor Tewodros II ofEthiopia (11 and 12 April 1868), Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1987), 31.

58 Appleyard and Pankhurst, The Last Two letters, 23; Richard Pankhurst, Tewodros: TheQuestion of a Greco-Romanian or Russian Hermit or Adventurer in Nineteenth-Century Ethiopia,

Abba Salama 5(1974): 13642.59 Tewodros was very conscious of his non-Solomonic birth. H. A. Stern, Wanderings among

the Falashas in Abyssinia (London, 1862), 63, 80f.60 Tewodros to Victoria (Nov. 1857), in, Sven Rubenson, ed., Tewodros and His Contempor-

aries 18551868 (Addis Ababa/Lund, 1994), no. 24, where he attempted to establish a common-ality based on common faith. The same may be found in a letter written nearly a decade later(29 Jan. 1866), in ibid., no. 162.

61 See Tewodros and His Contemporaries, no. 1, and note.



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basis of his relationship with the British.62 The theme of Christian solidarity

against Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world runs through much of his cor-

respondence, and he expected any warfare against the Ottomans to be con-

ducted by a united Christian front.63 In a final testimony Tewodros

addressed to the English in 1868, shortly before his suicide, he wrote,Let alone my Ethiopian enemies, it had seemed to me that I should march

to Jerusalem and drive out the Turks.64 Tewodros historical legacy is that

of an Ethiopian crusader bent on capturing Jerusalem. Contemporary Ethio-

pian writers still commemorate him as such.65

By claiming a direct linear claim to holy warriors of the past, or compar-

ing their own actions to those of past rulers, nineteenth-century leaders

could link themselves with a great martial tradition at a time when the

tenor of politics called into question monarchial legitimacy. While the

Spanish might have been divided regarding who was the rightful ruler ofSpain at mid-century, none would dare deny that Spanish kings in the fif-

teenth and sixteenth centuries had created the greatest global empire of its

day, had spread Spanish culture over half the globe, and had expelled

Muslim invaders from the Iberian Peninsula under the banner of Santiago

and with crusading bulls from the Papacy. Nor would any Frenchman

have questioned the role of French soldiers in fighting and defeating

Muslims in the first crusade. Any king who could revive those glories

would gain the respect of not only his own people but also the entire

Christian world. Following the Revolutions of the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries, that would be no small accomplishment. Like-

wise, Orthodox monarchs had, indeed, ruled the vast Byzantine Empire,

which was the linear inheritor of Rome but had in its own right spread

from Italy to Western Asia.

Secondly, the declaration of holy war also provided curious comfort. The

Middle Ages recalled a time of moral absolutes, romantic heroism, and

noble deedsa far cry from the Gatling guns and artillery that marked

the modern military experience. A war couched as a crusade, re-conquest,

or holy war was one where death meant more than simply burial in theMoroccan desert, Balkan forest, Ethiopian mountaintop, or Central Asian

plateau. It gave hope for a salvation that seemed desperately far from the

modern battlefield.

62 On the difficulties of British-Turkish alliance, see Plowden to [British Foreign Secretary] theEarl of Clarendon, 7 Apr. 1855, in K. V. Ram, The Barren Relationship: Britain and Ethiopia,1805 to 1868: A Study of British Policy (New Delhi, 1985), 85.

63 See his letter to Queen Victoria with a similar letter to Napoleon III on 29 Oct. 1862, in.Tewodros and His Contemporaries, nos. 11718.

64

Appleyard and Pankhurst, The Last Two Letters, 31.65 See Alamayahu Mogas, Yamarinna Qene Mastamarya (Addis Ababa, 1959), 29, cited in

Taye Assefa, Tewodros in Ethiopian Historical Fiction, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 16(1983): 122.



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The use of crusading images corresponded to a need on the part of tradition-

alist forces to forge cultural symbols of their own that contrasted with the

Revolutionary symbols of liberty used by liberals in France and Spain.

History lessons taught by priests in local schools were sure to include tales

of St. Louis, El Cid, and the great era of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip IIsglobal crusading vision.66 The same was true in Greece and Russia, where

schoolbooks and popular literature emphasized the Byzantine legacy of

their cultures and the continuing need to expel the Turkish enemy from Ortho-

doxys rightful home. By the time children so schooled had reached adult-

hood, these heroes of the past were more likely to seize their imaginations

than more abstract notions of choice, freedom, and liberty presented by poli-

ticians from Paris and Madrid, Athens and St. Petersburg. Traditionalists

placed their political hopes on just this sort of sentiment of collective

memory. In Ethiopia, Tewodros wished to be seen as a modernizer but alsoa man who respected and indeed revered tradition, and he used titles and

legal practice to reestablish what he felt was a lost sense of a single Ethiopian

kingdom. All of these tactics failed in the end to restore the past as envisioned,

but they established precedents for the twentieth-century nation builders who

followed.

T H E C R E A T I O N O F C R U S A D I N G H E R O E S

Russia Under Paul IIn November 1796 Paul I acceded to the throne at the death of his mother,

Catherine the Great.67 Paul was Orthodox by birth if not by ancestry or incli-

nation. He had been educated in the history and traditions of French historio-

graphy and from childhood he developed a fascination with the Middle Ages

and medieval chivalry of the Hospitallers,68 as well as an interest in military

spectacle.69 This played itself out after the fall of Malta, when, blaming the

collapse on incompetence, the Russian priory of the Order declared Paul the

new Grand Master of the Hospitallers.70 At face value this was curious: an

Orthodox monarch claiming leadership of the most Roman Catholic oforders, whose historical traditions had little impact on prior Russian

66 See Christian Amalvi, Les heros de lHistoire de France: Recherche iconographique sur lepantheon scolaire de la troisieme Republique (Paris, 1979), 14448, 252.

67 For more details, see Roderick E. McGrew, Paul I and the Knights of Malta, in, HughRagsdale, ed., Paul I: A Reassessment of His Life and Reign (Pittsburgh, 1979), 4475; Idem.,Paul I of Russia (Oxford, 1992), 258ff.

68 Dmitrii Kobeko, Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich, 17541796 (St. Petersburg, 1887), 16667.Following his marriage, Paul staged mock medieval tournaments regularly.

69 Semen Poroshin, Zapiski (St. Petersburg, 1881), 32733, 416, 51718; N. K. Shilder,

Imperator Pavel Pervyi (St. Petersburg, 1901), 6164.70 Pauls manifesto in Michel, Comte de Pierredon, Histoire politique de lordre souverain de

Jerusalem (Ordre de Malte) de 1789 a 1955, 3 vols. (Paris, 1956), 1: 34147; his Ukase in ibid.,34849.



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history.71 On the other hand, Paul could claim a role as protector over all

Christians both Latin and Orthodox.72

Paul saw in the Hospitallers something of an opportunity for Russia to

return to a golden age. He conceived of the past in almost wholly western

rather than Russian terms. He declared that the Knights, with their historyof glory and grand ceremony, were a means for states to increase strength,

serenity, and glory . . . which will offer to OUR faithful nobility a further

motive to stimulate the love of glory.73 Their formal establishment in

Russia would allow the nation and its nobility to recapture its past, yet

without returning to what he felt was the barbarism of Russias Middle

Ages. The Knights represented a new old order into which the Russian nobi-

lity could be brought in order to stave off revolutionary change, preserve tra-

ditional political and social values, and, in essence, restore the elaborate pomp

and ceremony of the great monarchies of the past. It would introduce intoRussian autocracy formalized ritual traditions of the sort the Latin West had

in such abundance but the tsar felt the Russian nobility lacked. With traditions

would come strength, and with strength a rejuvenated golden age. Paul intro-

duced the Order into the life of Russian nobility, and the result was highly

compatible with his love of ceremony.74

Perhaps not surprisingly, Pauls schemes drew opposition and ridicule from

those who saw the entire project as a masquerade.75 Yet, Paul continued to

search for a neo-medieval revival, going so far as to build his own medieval-

esque castle, the Michael Castle, moving there from the Winter Palace in early1801. The new building even contained a Resurrection Hall designed

specifically for the ceremonies of the Knights. Within five weeks the Tsar

was dead from an assassins bullet, and his castle and other medieval simula-

cra were seen by many as merely an example of his mental instability.

Britain

The Protestant British had to refashion thoroughly a medieval heritage that

they had, in large part, rejected as outmoded Catholic barbarism less than acentury before. Yet there can be no question that the British popular imagin-

ation of the nineteenth century still looked upon the notion of medieval

71 For the history of relations between the Order and Russia, see Cyril Toumanoff and OlgerdP. de Sherbowitz-Wetzor, LOrdre de Malte et lEmpire de Russie (Rome, 1979); Petr Perminov,Pod seniu vosmikonechnogo kresta: Maltiiskii orden i ego sviazi s Rossiei (Moscow, 1991);Andrew P. Vella, Malta and the Czars: Diplomatic Relations between the Order of Saint Johnand Russia, 16971802 (Valletta, 1972).

72 On this see Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in RussianMonarch, 2 vols. (Princeton, 19952000), 1: 185f.

73

Appel de lEmpereur Paul Ier

, in Pierredon, Histoire politique, 1, 377 79.74 McGrew, Paul I and the Knights, 5960; N. IA. Eidelman, Gran vekov: politicheskaia

borba Rossii, konets XVIII-nachala XIX stoletiia (Moscow, 1986), 7980.75 Adam Czartoryski, Gran vekov, 189.



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chivalry and gentlemanly honor with great fondness and fascination. Marc

Girouard and others have discussed at great length how, despite the admoni-

tions of historians, the romance of the crusades and crusading remained very

much part of both the literary output of romantic authors such as Sir Walter

Scott and the iconographic, artistic, and public self-presentation of Britainselite classes. Through such self-presentation they attempted to cling to their

own sense of class privilege at a time when earned capital and inherited,

landed wealth could control the political and social fortunes of the nation.76

The crusades were de-Catholicized and gradually blended into the cult of

Christian militarism which first took hold in Britain at the time of the

Crimean War.77 Those with apocalyptic expectations could cite a variety of

Biblical passages (e.g., Dan. 8:9; Rev. 12:12) as predicting the collapse of

the Ottoman Empire.78 The image of the crusades and the crusader reentered

the public sphere as part of popular political discourse of empire to such anextent that, by World War One, war campaigns and war heroes were regularly

lauded as crusaders in the popular press, from the pulpit, and in the official

propaganda of the British war machine. Military failures as much as victories

became the birthplace for soldier-saints: men of arms who carried with them

all of the knightly virtues associated with crusading. The convergence of

three separate, but ultimately integrated phenomena of the Regency and

early Victorian periods prompted this phenomenon: the feminization of

British religion, the rise of public, patriotic rhetoric, and, gradually, the chan-

ging nature of warfare and the realities of war as the century progressed.Until recently, most twentieth-century historians have downplayed the

importance of religion and religious instruction in forming national and com-

munal identities in Victorian Britain. Instead, they have seen religion and reli-

gious teaching as a means of social control foisted upon the lower orders from

above. Religion has been interpreted as something quite apart from the self-

identification of the working classes, in particular, and as only peripheral to

the mainstream of political narrative. While many churches, particularly

Anglican and Roman Catholic, were hierarchical in their presentation of

scripture, members of the so-called dissenting denominations (Methodists,Baptists, Congregationalists) held a far more egalitarian view of religion.

This is significant because the Victorian public was, in large part, educated

not merely in school but also from the pulpit.79 The Churches and their

76 See Marc Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (NewHaven, 1981). The most recent and complete study is Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders:

Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000).77 On this phenomenon, see the seminal article by Olive Anderson, The Growth of Christian

Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain, English Historical Review 86 (1971): 4672.78

Ernest Peter Cachemaille, Turkey: Past, Present, and Future in Prophecy, Aids to PropheticStudy 9 (London, 1916).

79 Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England (Stanford, 1999), 5.



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parishioners study of scripture created a sense of identity based upon a

common interpretation of certain texts, images, and stories, and this identity

transcended boundaries of class.80 Many of these archetypes were taught,

learned, and memorized through the Sunday School movement, which even

un-churched adults had attended as children. Churches had been under terrificpressure to retain in their pews those men who had attended Sunday school but

to whom the more worldly concerns of workplace, male camaraderie, and

financial success were more enticing than stories taken from the patriarchs

or the Gospels. Scholars have referred to the increasing imbalance between

mens and womens participation and attendance in church activities as a fem-

inization of nineteenth-century religion. The phenomenon existed not only in

Britain but in America, where British traveler Frances Trollope observed, in

the 1820s, she had never seen or read, of any country where religion had

so strong a hold upon the women, or a slighter hold upon the men.81 Thisstate of affairs posed both a spiritual and a financial problem for churches

on both sides of the Atlantic for while women filled the pews men paid the

clergymens salaries.82 In order to redress this imbalance, churches tried to

associate themselves with causes and rhetoric designed specifically to lure

men back to services and away from the more worldly temptations available

to post-Sunday School, school leavers. Most consistently, they attempted to

incorporate manly and martial images into the presentation of religion, the

church, and the life of Jesus. The goal was to counter the common view

that devoutly religious men and male missionaries were, in Charles Dickensswords, akin to weird old women, or, as others put it, not quite men.83 The

churches themselves were keenly aware of this broad, public notion of their

activities as being somehow antithetical to accepted forms of masculine beha-

vior. The Congregationalist preacher, C. H. Spurgeon wrote at the end of the

nineteenth century, There has got abroad a notion, somehow, that if you

become a Christian, you sink your manliness.84

This attitude was most notable in an era when the call to arms and the right

to defend and extend Britains empire through soldiering became intimately

80 Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation inthe Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983).

81 Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York, 1960[1832]), 75.82 Terry D. Bilhartz, Sex and the Second Great Awakening: The Feminization of American

Religion Reconsidered, in, Philip R. Vandermeer and Robert P. Swierenga, eds., Belief and Beha-vior: Essays in the New Religious History (New Brunswick, 1991), 123.

83 Charles Dickens, The Niger Expedition, in Miscellaneous Papers 1 (London, 1848; repr.,Millwood, N.Y., 1983). See also William Thackerays coeval portrayal of Pitt Crawley as MissCrawley whilst at Eton, in, Peter L. Shillingsburg, ed., Vanity Fair, (New York, 1989), ch. 9;Thorne, Congregational Missions, 90.

84

C. H. Spurgeon, A Good Start: A Book for Young Men and Women (London, 1898), 16, 24.This idea was echoed by William Alexander Smith, founder of the Boys Brigades, who stated thatmost boys equated being a Christian to being a molly-coddle. See William Smith, The BoysBrigade: Its Organization and Methods, Boys Brigade Gazette 1 (2 Feb. 1891), 16869.



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attached to notions of manliness, an idea reinforced for the elites through the

development of military corps in the Public Schools, and for the middle and

working classes through the development of the Volunteer Forces. As the

century progressed, soldiering developed into a moral mandate for British

men. The solution to the disconnection between religion and masculinitycame in a variety of forms: hellfire preaching replete with images of battle

and warfare in the form of revivalism, education and socialization techniques

for boys which combined Christian teachings with sport and other mascu-

line pursuits, and the search for iconic heroes (both fictional and in life)

who combined strong manly actions in war with deep and devoted piety,

without contradiction between them. This attempt to marry martial imagery

with Christian teachings has been deemed Christian militarism.

For the elites, for whom there had long been a military pedigree and for

whom soldiering was often seen as a traditional calling, the public schoolsserved to meld Christianity and masculinity quite well. Particularly important

were the teachings of Charles Kingsley, which promoted a Healthful and

manful Christianity . . . which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclu-

sion of the masculine. Kingsleys teachings became central to the educational

philosophies of schools such as Eton and Rugby. Some observers, such as the

writer Thomas Hughes, went so far as to see Christian virtue in violence.85

The task of getting the message to the working classes was more difficult.

One of the most common methods in this regard was the development of

mutual improvement societies and organizations such as the Young MensChristian Association and the Boys Brigade. The founding purpose of such

organizations was to serve both as vehicles for bringing the ideals of Christian

manliness to the lower middle and working classes, and also to ease the

transition of young men both from Sunday and state school leaving, and to

adulthood in the workplace or army. However, given the deeply ingrained

antipathy between the image of the religious molly-coddle and the desire

for true manliness, which every boy was supposed to desire, the success of

such organizations was marginal.86

Nonetheless, success was found in the propagation of the manly, Christianmilitary iconboth fictional and factualwhose martial deeds in service of

the empire never overshadowed his devout faith and humble piety.87 Such

soldier saints and heroes of the empire and their deeds were most frequently

portrayed in terms of crusading and crusaders, with parallels to Richard I,

Englands most notable crusading king in great evidence. This is no surprise,

since the crusades of the late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were

85 Thomas Hughes, Tom Browns School Days at Rugby (Cambridge, 1857).86

See Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (Boston, 1870), passim, esp. Introduction.87 The most famous of these early fictional soldier saints was the eponymous hero of Catherine

Marsh, Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, 97th regiment (London, 1856), which was writtenexpressly to serve as an instrument of evangelism among young men.



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the most obvious historic unification of religious piety and manly, martial

virtues. Publications became one of the primary means of education, most

notably the Boys Own Paper founded by the Religious Tract Society,

which, with its lauding of soldier-saints became for wealthy and impover-

ished boys alike the unofficial organ of the muscular Christianitymovement.88

From the 1840s the language of chivalry and crusading was used within the

army with increasing self-consciousness. Even before Crimea, soldier-writers

such as Sir William Napier were fond of describing the early heroes of British

campaigns in India, especially, in crusading terms.89 By the 1860s, the associ-

ation of religion and femininity had largely been obliterated from the minds of

those who sought inspiration from new, militaristic hymns such as Sabine

Baring-Goulds Onward Christian Soldiers, written initially in 1864 for

schoolchildren at Baring-Goulds Horbury Bridge mission.90 Some prominentEnglishmen attempted to take crusading to its ultimate extreme. In his second

will (September 1877), Cecil Rhodes instructed his executors to establish a

secret society dedicated to, among other things, encouraging British occu-

pation of the Holy Land.91

Crusading imagery was used most vividly in the development of personality

cults around military heroes of the empire. The disasters of the Indian Mutiny

bore a number of crusaders. King Baldwin I of Jerusalem and King Richard

the Lion-hearted themselves would look very poor beside many whom we

could mention, one commentator noted.92 Perhaps no English warrior inIndia was lauded more for his crusading virtues than Sir Henry Havelock

the Christian martyr par excellence. Havelock, it was written, was concerned

88 Note such stories as G. Demages A Plunge into the Sahara [translated from selections ofAtravers le Sahara. Adventures merveileuses de Marius Mercurin (Paris, 1894)], in Boys OwnPaper 16 (18931894), which noted that the preaching of Christianity in the Sahara was anoble revenge for the death of St. Louis and the Mohammedan Conquest of the Holy Sepulchre.By the late 1880s, Boys Own had a circulation in excess of a half-million.

89 William Napier was the brother of Sir Charles Napier, who undertook the conquest of Sind in

1842. See William Napier, The Conquest of Scinde, 2d ed. (London, 1845).90 Other hymns from this period with crusading themes included J.S.B. Monsells Fight the

Good Fight; W. W. Hows For All the Saints; E. P. Hammonds Marching Along, We areMarching Along; and George Duffields Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, Ye Soldiers of theCross. I should like to thank Elisabeth Jill Henderson-Wild, Thalia Wild, and the late JamesWild for helping me identify some of these themes through their deep knowledge of Anglicanhymnody.

91 W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 6162.92 E. P. Hood, Havelock: The Broad Sword of Honour. A Tribute of the Tongue and Pen

(London, 1858), 8. Also see descriptions of Sir Herbert Edwardes, commander of British troopsagainst the Sikhs in the 1840s, and reconciled the Afghans during the 1857 uprising, who wasdescribed as a Christian Knight. See Edward Gilliat, Heroes of Modern India (London,

1911), 198. See, too, stories of the stern and just knight John Nicholson, who was killedleading the first British assault on Delhi in 1857; John Kaye, Lives of Indian Officers (London,1889), 2: 48889, quoting Edwardes; and that of Sir Henry Lawrence, killed at Lucknow in1857, whose deeds were likened to an old knight in a story. See Gilliat, Heroes, 312.



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for the honour of the Cross and for the honour of England.93 His religious

virtues were lauded by John Ruskin, who referred to Havelock and his men

as Crusaders . . . indeed.94 The Nonconformist journalist Hugh Shimmin,

in his exposes of the conditions of Liverpools working class, wrote how pic-

tures of Havelock were commonplace on sitting room walls, demonstratingthe widespread popularity of the new crusading saints even in the meanest

of social circumstances.95

Exceeding even Havelock in his resemblance to a medieval crusader was

General Charles George Gordon, hero of China and martyr of Sudan. This

is not surprising, since Gordons final enemies were Muslims, and the parallels

with the Muslim opponents of the crusades could be made readily manifest.

Even before his death at Khartoum, Gordon was presented publicly as a

crusader, as the very exemplar of muscular Christianity.96 Books referred

to his faith and his symbolic place in the English mind by their very titlessuch as Abraham Kingdons Gordon: The Christian Hero (1885) and the

anonymous Englands Hero and Christian Soldier (1886).

Gordons life was described as divided naturally into three portions . . .

three distinct campaigns in one Crusade.97 The old symbols of the Holy

War, of the ceaseless Crusade, one encomiast wrote, wake up to a new

life through this man who was so essentially a soldier, and so essentially a

Christian.98 Another encomiast referred to Gordon as a Christian knight

errant, whose life proved that the age of chivalry [was] not gone.99 No

less a public figure than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw the ultimate victory ofthe British over the forces of the Mahdi in Sudan as a clear triumph of Chris-

tianity over Islam.100

Gordons death was portrayed as a passion play, teaching, not preaching,

how soldier-saints die.101 One author spoke in tones reminiscent medieval

millennialists in predicting the overthrow and conversion of Egypt, the restor-

ation of the houses of Israel, and the return of the remnant of Gods people

93 Hood, Havelock, 61.94

John Ruskin, A Knights Faith, in, Edward T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., TheWorks of Ruskin, Vol. 31 (London, 1907), 506.

95 Hugh Shimmin, Liverpool Sketches (London, 1860), 115.96 Edward Gilliat, for example, presents him as one of his heroes of modern crusades, though

as much for his work with youth in England as for his victories or martyrdom on the battlefield,in, Heroes of Modern Crusades: True Stories of the Undaunted Chivalry of Champions of the

Down-Trodden in Many Lands (London, 1909), ch. 13.97 Elizabeth R. Charles, Three Martyrs of the Nineteenth Century: Studies from the Lives of

Livingstone, Gordon and Patteson (London, 1885), 172.98 Charles, Three Martyrs, 173.99 The former is the title of chapter 6 of Robert E. Speers Some Great Leaders in the World

Movement(New York, 1911); the latter is from Englands Hero and Christian Soldier: A Biogra-

phical and Historical Sketch of the Life of General C. G. Gordon (London, 1886), 230.100 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Tragedy of the Korosko (London, 1898), 320, 329ff.101 General Gordon of Khartoum, in, Ella May Gordon, White Heather (London, 1909),

207 9, line 20.



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from the land of Cush.102 There was, he wrote no clear and definite evidence

of General Gordons death, and scriptural arguments favored his survival.103

He then characterized Gordon as a modern Joshua, the savior and deliverer of

Egypt.104 By the centurys conclusion, Professor J. A. Cramb, an ardently

militaristic professor of modern history at London, could write conclusivelythat this ideal of Imperial Britainto bring the peoples of the earth

beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher justicethe world has

known none fairer, none more exalted, since that for which Godfrey and

Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St. Louis died.105

World War One provided perhaps the widest berth for those wishing to

evoke crusading imagery.106 Politicians and preachers alike declared the

war against the Germans a crusade. As early as November 1914 the M. P.

Lord Halifax called for the formal declaration of a holy war against

Germany.107 Not surprisingly, such sentiment was echoed manifold fromthe prominent pulpits of Britain.108

Crusading imagery became even more vivid with the actual development of

military operations against the Muslim, Ottoman Turks in and around the Holy

Land, with its direct historical connections with the crusades.109 However, a

wide range of commentators and participants looked upon the Palestine cam-

paign, both during the action and in retrospect, as nothing less than the last

crusade, destined to restore Jerusalem to the forces of Christendom. While

the government (and General Allenby, for that matter) chose to keep their

public pronouncements on the campaign purely secular, the War Office was

102 John Meaburn Bright, Who Is the White Pasha? A Story of Coming Victory (London, 1889), 4.103 Ibid., 23, 29.104 Ibid., 4547, 10465.105 J. A. Cramb, Lecture IV: The War in South Africa (29 May 1900), in Reflections on the

Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain (London, 1900), 160.106 For an in-depth study of World War I and chivalry, see Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good:

Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago, 2004).107 He was echoed by the Lord Chancellor Lord Haldane and the principal of Newnham

College, Cambridge, Eleanor Sidgwick (who was the sister of the future Foreign Secretary,

A. J. Balfour). See Church Times (27 Nov. 1914); Church Family Newspaper (12 Feb. 1915).108 There is a sense, as with the ancient knights, in which these roaring guns of yours may be

baptized for the service of goodness and truth. . .. James Black, Around the Guns: Sundays inCamp (London, 1915), 21. The American clergyman Randolph McKim proclaimed the war tobe indeed a crusade (R. H. McKim, For God and Country; or the Christian Pulpit inWartime Addresses [New York, 1918], 116 17). Bishop Arthur Winnington-Ingram (18581946), the so-called Bishop of the Battlefields, appealed to the Church to Mobilize theNation for a Holy War. (Guardian, 10 June, 24 June, and 1 July 1915; and Church Times, 1Oct. 1915).

109 Note that this crusading was never condoned as an official ideology in the houses of Parlia-ment. The fall of Jerusalem in 1917 was described in wholly secular terms by both ChancellorAndrew Bonar Law (who made the initial report on behalf of the government) and Prime Minister

David Lloyd-George (Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., 100 (1917), cols. 875, 118081). However, Lloyd-George, looking back upon his political career later in life, wrote that, withAllenby, Christendom had been able to regain possession of its sacred shrines. See David Lloyd-George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 6 vols. (London, 19331936), 1879.



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not above using a crusading image to garner popular support, entitling one of

their films on the campaign The New Crusaders.110 Clearly, the crusades

were a readily identifiable image for the British public at large.

The actor Vivian Gilbert, who served under Allenby and then commenced a

Trans-Atlantic lecture tour about his experiences, repeatedly talked about theTenth Crusade, making the medieval-modern contrast explicit.111 The

spirit of the Crusaders was in all these men of mine, he wrote, Was not

their courage just as great, their idealism just as fine, as that of the knights

of old who had set out with such dauntless faith under the leadership of

Richard the Lion Hearted to free the Holy Land?112

Among the elites, nowhere was this imagery stronger (or more dramatized)

than in the musings of the poet Rupert Brooke. Writing in February and March

of 1915, Brooke told of his life-long desire to go on a military expedition

against Constantinople, and even referred to himself, somewhat disparagingly,as a crusader.113 This image, self-conscious though it might have been,

remained with Brooke until his death. Even the legend on Brookes grave

reads Here lies the servant of God, Sub-Lieutenant in the English Navy,

who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks.114

Allenbys name is, of course, most clearly attached to the Palestine

campaign and the capture of Jerusalem. In truth, he became irritated by any

crusading imagery attached to his campaigns. Speaking in Jerusalem in

1937, he said, Our campaign has been called The Last Crusade. It was

not a crusade. There is still a current idea that our object was to deliverJerusalem from the Moslem. Not so. Many of my soldiers were

Moslems.115 This statement is a far cry from the over-dramatized crusading

sentiment found in Ernest Raymonds fictionalized autobiography meant for a

more middle class audience. Recalling speeches made while he served at the

Gallipoli campaign, Raymond placed the following words in the mouth of a

zealous and veteran colonel of troops: I say the Gallipoli campaign is a

New Crusade . . . Constantinople is a sacred city. Its the only ancient city

purely Christian in its origin . . . In their fight to wrest this city from the

Turk, the three great divisions of the Church are united once more. . .

Christendom United fights for Constantinople, under the leadership of the

110 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 75.111 Vivian Gilbert, The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem (New York,

1923), 171.112 Ibid., 37.113 Brooke to Violet Asquith, Feb. 1915, in Rupert Brooke, Letters, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed.

(London, 1968), 66263; Brooke to Jacques Raverat, 8 Mar. 1915, in Brooke, Letters, 668.114 W. Denis Browne to Edward Marsh, 25 Apr. 1915, in Brooke, Letters, 686. Both men were

Cambridge friends of Brooke, and Marsh authored The Memoir of Rupert Brooke (London, 1918).115

Notes from a lecture given by Allenby at Y.M.C.A., Jerusalem, 19 Apr. 1933, 6/VIII/70,Allenby papers [now MS. London, Kings College, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives,Allenby papers 3/5], in Jonathan Newell, Allenby and the Palestine Campaign, in, BrianBond, ed., The First World War and British Military History (Oxford, 1991), 193.



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British, whose flag is made up of the crosses of the saints. The army opposing

the Christian fights under the crescent of Islam . . . Its the Cross against the

Crescent, again, my lads.116

Allenby, a veteran of campaigns dating back to the Victorian period of colo-

nial and guerilla warfare, pointed out what Raymond concealed: there waslittle romance to actual battlefield operations. The gradual mechanization of

warfare from the time of the Napoleonic Wars had changed the battlefield

experience forever. The romances of sword and cannon that filled the pages

of the Boys Own in the 1880s bore little resemblance to the hellish conditions

and mass execution brought by the machine gun, long distance artillery, and

trench warfare. As contemporary historians of the Gallipoli campaign have

pointed out from their interviews with veterans from the common soldiery,

crusading romance was difficult to cull from a sea absolutely red with

blood for fifty yards from the shore, or where the corpses floating in thebay could be likened to a stranded shoal of fish, or where soldiers wept, not

from fear, but because of the foul, lice-infested, fecal-ridden conditions of

their existence. These grim realities help explain the need for that most roman-

tic of martial images: the medieval crusader whose just war, in a Christian

cause, was a comforting and universally understood metaphor for fighting

the good fight. As Michael Adams has put it succinctly, Chivalry veneered

the naked use of force.117

Bulgaria

If the British felt it necessary to reinterpret crusading for the nineteenth

century and reestablish a crusading heritage in the case of late nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century Bulgaria, we find a monarch who attempted to

import a western crusading ideology with which he was comfortable into a

country which had no crusading traditions. Ferdinand I of Bulgaria

(r.1887 1918) worked during the central part of his reign to portray

himself, both to his people and to the diplomatic community of Europe, as

the logical leader of a newly formed Byzantine Empire. In this he came tofollow both the historiographic traditions with which he was raised and the

view posited by some Bulgarian historians that the Byzantine Empire was a

Slavic rather than a Greek enterprise.118

Born of a German father and a French mother, Ferdinand became keenly

aware of his position between Western and Eastern traditions. After an

early reign during which the new king displayed a great insensitivity toward

116 Ernest Raymond, Tell England: A Study in a Generation (New York, 1922), 19697.117 Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I

(Bloomington, 1990), 71.118 This was most notably true with an 1874 history, edited by Dragan Manchov, intended for

use for the national schools. Dragan V. Manchov, Bulgarska istoriia za nardony uchilishta: otrazny suchineniia po bulgarsku-tu istorii-u (Plovdiv, 1874).



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Orthodoxy, Bulgarian nationalists were justifiably wary of his loyalties and

faith. Thereafter, Ferdinand worked to appease traditionalist forces in the

society, notably the Church hierarchy and the army, by a skillful blending

of religious and militaristic imagery, which, for a German-born prince,

would have been typified by crusading.119 He was keenly aware of hisFrench heritage, as imbued in him by his mother Clementine dOrleans, the

daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. His first wife, Marie-Louise of

Bourbon-Parma, was a direct descendant of Charles X. Ferdinand declared

proudly at his marriage reception in 1893, In my veins too flows the blood

of St. Louis.120 During a visit to Constantinople in March and April of

1896, Ferdinand first began to play upon such crusading themes in his

foreign policy.121 The subsequent formation of the Balkan League in 1912

as a union ofChristian states raised the specter of a true crusade of recovery

intended to eliminate Muslim power from Europe.122 In declaring war againstthe Ottomans in October 1912, in the interest of humanity and Christendom,

Ferdinand, joined with the kings of Greece and Serbia, in a struggle of the

Cross against the Crescent.123 The Bulgarian declarations in the Balkan

War were, in essence, a western method applied to an eastern ambition.

Rumors spread in Europe that the Bulgarian monarchs burning desire to

hear a Te Deum sung in Hagia Sophia was spurred on by religious

visions.124 The French ambassador Maurice Paleologue described a painting

of Constantinople, kept in a palace drawing room, which depicted Ferdinand

as a knight of the apocalypse, in clouds of purple and gold, riding toward

119 A notable example is his founding of the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius in 1909.120 Joachim von Konigslow, Ferdinand von Bulgarien (Munich, 1970), 14.121 For Ferdinands reminiscences regarding the St

holy wars empires and the portability of the past

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