Zealous Wrath for the Holy Land

The scant attention anger has received in a crusading context has focused almost exclusively on positive manifestations of that emotion, especially ira per zelum (anger through zeal). It is contended here that the importance of crusading in providing a setting for the legitimate outpouring of anger against non-Latins has been overstated. While zelus and the idea of crusading as vengeance continued to intersect and to be espoused after 1216, the terminus date of Susanna Throop’s 2011 study, zelus proves to be an ambiguous term, and one relatively poorly attested in twelfth- and thirteenth-century narratives of the crusades. Moreover, when the semantic field is broadened to encompass other anger terms, it becomes clear that anger was not an integral component of crusading ideology; and a close reading of accounts of righteous wrath, especially in relation to rulers, suggests that crusading did little to popularize or modify pre-existing attitudes towards anger in western Europe.

Conclusion

The main findings of the previous chapters are brought together, leading to several overarching conclusions regarding the ways in which emotional language intersected with broader themes, the literary functions emotions performed, continuities and changes in the emotional landscape of crusading, the factors and traditions which influenced chroniclers, and how modern historians should approach the affective registers of historical narratives. Three major conclusions are outlined. Firstly, the traditional approach of simply accepting the emotional language found in crusade narratives as straightforward evidence of protagonists’ lived feelings needs to be supplanted by a methodological framework which deals primarily with textual representation and function. Secondly, the emotional landscape that contemporaries applied to crusading was not unique. Finally, the various religious, social, and political functions that emotions performed in the texts undermine any notion that the crusades took place in an era of emotional immaturity.

Restraining Rage

Depictions of dysfunctional and socially unacceptable anger are scrutinized in this chapter, which begins by identifying and analysing a set of recurring tropes commentators utilized to signal uncontrollable rage, before demonstrating that all anger—even if righteous—was considered fundamentally dangerous. The remainder of the chapter draws attention to a deep-seated ideology of anger control which pervades the narratives, and, on this basis, it calls for current thinking on the conceptual distinction between ira and furor to be revisited. The main conclusion reached is that crusade propagandists and chroniclers were less concerned with the validity of channelling anger towards the Christians’ Muslim opponents, and far more interested in flashes of anger between the crusaders themselves which had the capacity to fuel inter-Latin rivalries and inhibit expeditions to the Holy Land.

To Fear Death or Trust in God?

This chapter challenges the established scholarship, which has usually taken the descriptions of crusader fear in historical narratives as straightforward reflections of the crusading experience, by exploring the relationship between faith and the fear of death (timor mortis) in crusade narratives, focusing particularly on those written by ecclesiastics. It argues that, far from accurate evidence of participants’ lived feelings, these ecclesiastical texts proffer a highly theological interpretation of the fear of death as an emotion which ought to be relinquished by crusaders. For many chroniclers, rather than fearing death, crusade participants were expected to unswervingly trust in God and undauntedly embrace martyrdom—a discourse which, it is suggested, was deeply rooted in scripture. At the same time, the chapter charts how the relationship between timor mortis and crusader spirituality evolved over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Introduction

The Introduction critiques the methodological frameworks available to the historian of medieval emotions, arguing for the enduring value of the social constructionist approach and the need to simultaneously respond to the theoretical principles associated with the linguistic turn. Relevant crusades scholarship is then surveyed, including the long historiographical tradition of seeking to reconstruct participants’ beliefs and ideologies from historical narratives, before outlining the book’s structure and arguments. An overview of the core sources which form the backbone of this study follows, with the intention of introducing uninitiated readers to the breadth and diversity of sources available to historians of the crusades.

The Lachrymose Crusader

Despite the amount of scholarship dedicated to various aspects of crusader spirituality, there has not yet been a detailed assessment of the religious and social roles of weeping in crusade texts. This chapter examines the religious significance of, and functions assigned to, the crusaders’ tears in twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources, charting continuities and changes over time as well as similarities and differences between source types. It is argued that in the ecclesiastical texts, weeping featured as a legitimate form of affective piety, and that the crusaders’ tears were chiefly understood to be mediators between temporal and heavenly worlds—devices that allowed for the petitioning and thanking of God. The representation of weeping in these works, it is suggested, not only reflected the influence of scripture, but also the Christian theology of tears, against which monastic writers and their audiences would have interpreted their own tears.

The Multifaceted Nature of Fear

By exploring the intersections between fear and contemporary conceptions of chivalry, masculinity, deception, and power, this chapter demonstrates that the ways in which fear was represented in twelfth- and thirteenth-century crusade narratives were far more complex and multifaceted than has hitherto been appreciated. This, in turn, necessitates that we reject the scholarly approach of treating chroniclers’ accounts of crusader trepidation as representative evidence of participants’ actual feelings. Gender- and shame-centred appraisals of fear add further weight to the argument set forth in Chapter 1: that fear was an emotion which Latin combatants ought to relinquish. However, in alternative contexts, such as in the face of treachery, it was simultaneously considered an understandable—perhaps even praiseworthy—sentiment for crusaders to openly display; and fear terminology was integral to the texts’ power dynamics.

Discourses of Tears and Sorrow

This chapter extends from Chapter 3 by exploring the interplay between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ weeping in a crusading context, and then broadens the scope of enquiry to consider discourses of grief in crusade texts. It starts with a discussion of the social value of the crusaders’ tears, principally as expressions of the fraternal love which supposedly bound participants together in a Christian community and as devices for arousing the mercy of co-religionists. An analysis of these interrelated themes reveals that the boundaries between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ modes of weeping were frequently blurred, especially in ecclesiastical texts. The remainder of the chapter treats tears as part of the broader rhetoric of lamentation and sorrow to assess their implications in terms of the texts’ gendered presentation of crusading and power dynamics.