Why they crusaded.(The First Crusade: A New History)(book)(Book Review)

The First Crusade: A New History, by Thomas Asbridge; Simon & Schuster, 2005, $26.95.

THE DUALITY of temporal and spiritual worlds represents the fundamental tension throughout the political and theological history of the Catholic Church. It was central to the eleventh-century reforms implemented under Pope Gregory VII, who sought to weaken the power of monarchs and in effect make them obedient to the spiritual dictates issuing from Rome.

The tension is probably most acute in the case of Gregory the Great, the sixth-century contemplative who turned his back on monastic existence in order to take upon himself the more burdensome life of politics. He was chosen to be Pope in 590, and although he endured the turmoil of worldly affairs with stoical resolve, he always longed for the more meditative life of the cloister. Through the middle ages and beyond his writings became some of the most influential in the Catholic tradition. From the practical concerns of his Pastoral Rule, to the deeply philosophical and theologically astute Moralia: Commentary on the Book of Blessed Job, Gregory articulated with penetrating insight the psychological and political dimensions of the duality between worldly and spiritual values.

The writings of Gregory the Great, along with the sayings of the Desert Fathers and the works of St Benedict, became the foundational texts of medieval monastic culture. The men who sat, wrote and meditated in the monasteries offered a kind of moral and spiritual compass for the rest of medieval society that mitigated the excesses of secular power. As Thomas Asbridge writes, medieval political life was profoundly burdened by such ambivalence and it was often the precepts issuing from the monasteries that held the excesses of violence and political oppression in check:

 
   Monastic institutions shaped the nobility's conception 
   of the Christian cosmos: knights were effectively 
   conditioned to view, interpret and interact with the 
   spiritual world around them through terms of 
   reference and rituals defined by monks ... All 
   medieval society was preoccupied with the pursuit 
   of purity, but the knightly aristocracy, forced by the 
   nature of its profession into daily contact with 
   contaminants such as violence and personal wealth, 
   seems to have been particularly prone to harbour an 
   obsession with spiritual infection and afterlife. 

Asbridge offers a fresh interpretation of medieval life and the motivations of the hundreds of thousands of Christians involved in the first crusade to recapture Jerusalem from Arab occupation in the eleventh century. As opposed to seeing the Crusaders as merely involved in a barbaric land grab, and motivated purely by greed, as some traditional histories have had it, Asbridge offers a more nuanced picture. Certainly many of the knights who led the expedition were interested in personal wealth, and the church was undoubtedly motivated by geopolitical interests. However, many people left their families and homes and at great personal and ,financial expense travelled many hundreds of kilometres through Arab lands, often risking their lives through battle or starvation. Involvement in the reclamation of Jerusalem became a penitential act, and through the ethic of sanctified violence, believers could earn themselves a place in heaven.

Such acts required great dedication and faith, and were underpinned more by a sense of obedience to religious teaching than by worldly self-interest. Consequently, Asbridge argues, in order to understand the mindset of the Crusaders, we need to enter the spiritual and ethical universe of the medieval mind, and only then do their motivations become explicable.