The Medieval Association Of The Midwest

“Crusading Ideologies I: 1095-2006”

Panel A

Chair/Organizer:  Cynthtia Z. Valk, Independent Scholar

valac@sbcglobal.net

Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Eschatology and Sacrificial Devotion in the Epistre Lamentable of Philippe de Mezieres (1397)

Robert Desjardins, PhD provisional candidate

University of Alberta (Canada)

Shortly after the rout of the Burgundian-led crusade at Nicopolis in 1396, the statesman, mystic and crusade advocate Philippe de Mézières sent Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy an “epistre lamentable et consolatoire” – a letter both lamenting the disaster that had claimed the flower of Burgundian chivalry and consoling the duke with advice concerning the possibility of future victories against the Turks.

The Epistre was the last of the aged Philippe’s chivalric and devotional tracts.  It summed up many of his lifelong concerns and preoccupations – his belief that God would only reward crusading armies who exhibited “moral virtues” in warfare; his plans to establish a chivalric Order of the Passion of Christ; and his conviction that the warriors of the Order, marching toward Jerusalem under the banner of the Apocalypse Lamb of God, would bring about their own salvation. 

In my presentation, I shall discuss and analyze Philippe’s use of these and other devotional and eschatological themes in the Epistre.  This is an important exercise – not just in understanding how one old knight came to understand his world through an amalgam of ideas, inherited and contemporary, ecclesiastical and “secular,” but also as part of a larger project of rethinking traditional approaches to the cultural history of the late medieval warrior nobility.   Influenced, perhaps, by the decades-old prejudices of Johan Huizinga, scholars of fourteenth and fifteenth century crusading often suggest that “secular” concerns such as nationalism and chivalric vainglory had by the fourteenth century eclipsed the yearning for salvation that appeared to motivate many participants in the earlier crusades.

This claim takes for granted a conceptual distinction between notions of chivalric prowess and the theme of the penitential quest; it thus rests upon a false dichotomy.  It is my position that changes in the discourses of late medieval chivalry need not be understood as marking a more “secular” phase in the ideology of the crusading class.  On the contrary, the most popular crusading texts of the day – the romances, exhortatory letters, histories, books of instruction – reveal that the notion of penitential warfare continued to animate aristocratic ideas and, seemingly, to inflame noble passions.  Philippe’s Epistre was just such a text.  Far from abandoning devotional and eschatological themes, it borrowed widely from the exhortations of earlier crusade preachers such Guibert of Nogent and Gilbert of Tournai, and from end-times theorists such as Adso of Montier-en-Der.  By adapting and refining these ideas, Philippe recast them in terms more consonant with the concerns and preoccupations of contemporary culture – a culture that is impossible to understand, as Simon Gaunt has observed, through the filter of such modernist distinctions as “secular” versus “ecclesiastical.”

My presentation will pay special attention to three general motifs in the Epistre:  the crusade as pilgrimage and penitential journey; the crusader as lay brother and soldier of Christ; and the armed martyr as imitator of the Lord’s passion.  The length of the presentation is at present approximately 20 minutes, but I would be happy to revise the paper if another length is preferable.

Philippe de Mezieres’ Dreams and the Meaning of the Crusades: from 

Warfare to Reform

Robert S. Haller

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

This paper is a pointed summary of the career and literary production of Philippe de Mezieres (1327-1405), who went from being the Chancellor to the 

Peter of Lusignan, King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, to a Parisian retirement in which he founded the crusading Order of the Passion, and advocated Christian 

unity and peace between France and England, with some effect and even more notice. The paper aims to show that the Crusades became, for him, as he 

grew older, less a military excursion than a condition which forced a recognition of the political, religious and personal spiritual shortcomings of Christendom. 

He had been a participant in the momentarily successful crusade battles of Peter of Lusignan at Nicopolis and Alexandria. When he retired from political 

service to a Paris convent, he issued extensive correspondence and long allegorical works proposing the means of reuniting the Papacy, ending the war 

between France and England, and reforming the military ethos by establishing a new Order (of the Passion) as a model for the totality of European Chivalry. 

He advocated for these things because European disunion and lack of discipline and self-control in the troops had doomed the military enterprise.  In his 

enthusiasm for his large plans, he treated Papal unity, peace between France and England, and the formation of his new Order as the prelude to a grand 

invasion of the Near East. As long ago as 1934 a scholar studying him mocked this strategy as a genuine “dream” in contrast to his allegorical work, the 

“Dream of the Old Pilgrim.”  This paper reviews the history of  Philippe’s literary engagement with the crusade and with European politics, citing his 

observations about the Eastern Church and the West’s Saracen foes, to demonstrate that the Crusades in Philippe’s work became a conceptual heuristic 

to force Christians back on their own deepest values—Christian unity, peace between Christian nations, and rejection of the vices (greed, desire for power, 

physical indulgence) which undermined their claim to superiority over the “enemies of the faith” who occupied Jerusalem. Since Philippe did attract the 

attention and support of significant political and religious leaders of his time, it follows that his royal and noble supporters, too, could have come to 

recognize that the aims of the Crusades were not ultimately validated by military success, but by their own reform and reconciliation. Implicitly his prolix 

and impassioned writings had greater effect on the morale of its readers than on their commitment to crusading adventures which had by the late 14th 

century become futile.

Crusaders of El Cid and Santiago Matamoros in Modern Times: From Franco to the War in Iraq.

Loreto Catoira

The University of New Mexico

The struggle against the dominance of Islamic forces over Spain (r. 711-1492) during the Middle Ages generated a range of somewhat fictional stories that narrated the deeds of Christian heroes fighting against Moors.  The most predominant stories were those concerning Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known as El Cid, and Santiago Zebedeo, also known as Santiago Matamoros.  Christians fighting Muslims in the Reconquista would receive inspiration to battle through the heroic accounts of El Cid and El Matamoros.  Although the historical facts behind the existence and the actions of these two semi-historical crusaders are scant and sometimes unreliable, they have come to enjoy a place of prestige in Spain’s history due to the cultural need of a military hero (El Cid) and a religious figure (Santiago) to whom Spaniards could look up to, whether it be in the political arena (right-wing nationalism) or in religion (Roman Catholicism).

In the 20^th and 21^st centuries we find that both El Cid and Santiago Matamoros are still very much present among modern crusaders against ideologies that threaten conservative policies and Christian principles.  This presentation will provide an overview of some of the most remarkable cases of crusaders of El Cid and Santiago Matamoros in modern times, ranging from Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (r. 1939-1975) to Spanish soldiers in the current war in Iraq.

Crusading in Double Reverse: Malory’s Palomides  (abstract to follow)

Peter Goodrich

Northern Michigan University