Crusading Memory and the Political Uses of the Crusades

The Crusades began as papally supported religious campaigns in the late eleventh century, initially focused on the eastern Mediterranean. Over time, crusading also encompassed campaigns in Iberia and the Baltic, and conflicts within Christian Europe. Participants understood a crusading expedition as a religious act associated with penance and spiritual reward, but later generations remembered and repurposed these wars in very different ways.

The familiar word crusade can make a diverse movement seem more unified than it was. Early participants often described their expeditions as journeys or pilgrimages; language specifically associated with taking the cross developed gradually. The history of crusading memory therefore includes both accounts written during the medieval campaigns and later interpretations that attached new political, religious or national meanings to them. Novels, paintings, national histories and political speeches eventually gave the medieval wars audiences and purposes far beyond their original settings.

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Medieval writers made the First Crusade a precedent

Accounts of crusading began soon after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Participants and other writers interpreted the expedition’s outcome through religious ideas, including the belief that success and failure reflected divine will. Their narratives did not offer a single account: writers came from different regions and settings, and later authors adapted earlier works to suit their own purposes.

The First Crusade became a particularly useful precedent as new campaigns were preached in the twelfth century. Writers and preachers could invoke its imagery and moral lessons to encourage participation. Some accounts circulated widely: Robert the Monk’s version of the expedition was copied in more than 120 manuscripts, while William of Tyre’s history served as a standard account of the Crusades for centuries. Such influence helped shape what later readers thought crusading had been, even as the movement’s aims and theatres of war changed.

After 1291, remembrance served plans for recovery

The fall of Acre in 1291 ended Latin Christian rule in the last major mainland stronghold of the Crusader states. It did not end proposals to recover the Holy Land. Writers produced treatises and memoranda outlining possible campaigns, strategies and preparations. These recovery plans, sometimes known by the Latin phrase de recuperatione Terrae Sanctae, drew on earlier crusading experience but varied in their practicality and influence. Authors proposed routes, financing, alliances and targets to rulers who might support another expedition.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Ottoman advance and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 renewed interest among European humanists in the earlier expeditions. Some presented the First Crusade as a model for a European alliance against a shared enemy. Flavio Biondo connected the loss of Constantinople with the Council of Clermont, where Pope Urban II had called for the First Crusade. Benedetto Accolti’s account of that expedition was associated with Pope Pius II’s preparations for war. Other writers made crusading history serve civic or national pride, including histories that presented it as chiefly a French or Venetian achievement.

Muslim remembrance developed through different kinds of writing. One relevant tradition was Fada’il al-Quds, meaning works on the merits of Jerusalem, a genre of Islamic sacred geography. After 1291, some works in this tradition gave greater attention to Frankish invasions and the desecration of Islamic sacred places. By the late fifteenth century, writers including Shams al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī and Mujīr al-Dīn al-‘Ulaymī had developed narratives centred on Jerusalem’s struggle with the Franks and on Saladin. These accounts did not amount to a single, comprehensive framework for the Crusades across Muslim historical writing, where references to the conflicts also appeared within dynastic histories, biographies and broader chronicles. Sacred-city histories preserved this remembrance alongside dynastic chronicles.

Medieval campaigns continued beyond the eastern Mediterranean

Remembering crusading was not the same as continuing it, but crusading activity itself did extend beyond the loss of Acre. In the Baltic, campaigns against pagan peoples continued into the fifteenth century. In Iberia, the Christian conquest of Granada in 1492 brought the Reconquista to an end. A crusading expedition against the Ottoman Empire was defeated at Nicopolis in 1396. After the Reformation, popes sometimes granted crusade indulgences against Protestants, while Catholic powers more often formed papally supported Holy Leagues against the Ottomans into the seventeenth century.

These were later campaigns and political arrangements, not simply memories of the First Crusade. At the same time, the language and rewards associated with crusading could be applied to new opponents and purposes. Treating every later use as an unchanged continuation would obscure the differences between medieval campaigns, early modern religious wars and modern political rhetoric.

Reformation and Enlightenment writers reinterpreted crusading

During the Reformation, accounts of the Crusades became part of arguments about religious authority. In his 1566 history of the Turks, the Protestant writer John Foxe blamed the Catholic Church’s failings for the Crusades’ defeats and condemned campaigns against groups such as the Albigensians and Waldensians, whom he regarded as having preserved the faith. Other writers criticised the papacy and the damage religious conflict had caused. In the early seventeenth century, both Protestant and Catholic thinkers also recast the Crusades as wars of political defence rather than expressions of faith, a framing that could present them as part of a shared French past while condemning their religious methods.

Enlightenment writers including David Hume, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon used crusading as an example in critiques of religious authority and medieval society. They associated it with fanaticism, economic damage and abuse of papal power, though other writers treated the Crusades as one stage in the development of European civilisation. In 1671, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz proposed to Louis XIV that France conquer Egypt using a strategy inspired by the Crusades. His proposal joined a claim about France’s historical role to a plan for influence and colonisation in the Near East. It was not accepted, but the argument resurfaced in the period before Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and Syria at the end of the eighteenth century.

Nineteenth-century revival joined romance to empire

In the nineteenth century, novels, popular histories, nationalism and colonial politics gave crusading a renewed public life. Walter Scott’s Crusades-based novels, written between 1819 and 1831, portrayed western Europeans as glamorous but culturally inferior intruders. Joseph-François Michaud’s influential Histoire des croisades, published between 1812 and 1822, instead presented the Crusades as a source of French national pride and a precedent for imperial ambition. Their portrayals differed, but both strongly associated crusading with conflict between Christians and Muslims.

The revival also took physical and political forms. In 1843, Louis-Philippe opened the Salles des Croisades at Versailles, displaying more than 120 specially commissioned paintings related to the Crusades. Benjamin Disraeli, who visited the Near East in 1831, later published a crusading novel, Tancred, in 1847. French historians who developed Michaud’s approach connected crusading history to the country’s Mediterranean colonial interests. In this setting, the medieval past could be presented as a source of national character or as a precedent for modern European influence, rather than examined solely on its own medieval terms.

Modern national and political memories differ

Crusading memory acquired particular force in modern Spanish politics. Under Francisco Franco, the Catholic Church in Spain declared a crusade against Marxism and atheism. During the following decades, the idea of the Reconquista as a foundation of Spanish history and national identity became established in conservative circles. The transition to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975, culminating in the constitution of 1978, changed the official political setting in which these national narratives circulated. Conservative debates about the medieval past continued.

Modern Arabic-language discussion also developed in changing political circumstances. Syrian Christians translated French histories into Arabic, and the Ottoman writer Namık Kemal published a modern biography of Saladin in 1872. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Jerusalem in 1898 prompted further interest in the Crusades. Nationalist Arab writers made Saladin a symbol of resistance to the West, drawing in part on an image of his chivalry that had been popularised in nineteenth-century European writing. Saladin’s modern political use was therefore not a simple survival of a uniform medieval memory; it arose through the interaction of different historical traditions and contemporary opposition to imperial power.

Some modern political Islamist arguments have drawn on the Crusades to express ideas of jihad and a prolonged struggle against Christian states. Secular Arab nationalists have instead stressed Western imperialism, and some have compared the Crusades with modern events such as the establishment of Israel in 1948. In some right-wing Western circles, the parallel runs in the opposite direction: crusading symbols and anti-Islamic language are used to describe Christianity as threatened by Islam. These political interpretations gave medieval names and symbols new meanings in modern conflicts.

Modern scholarship separates history from its uses

Historical writing about the Crusades has also changed with the questions scholars ask. In the 1940s, Claude Cahen helped situate the Latin settlements in the eastern Mediterranean within the history of the Near East rather than treating them only as an extension of western European history. Later work on the region’s laws and institutions challenged the idea that the Latin East could be understood simply as a transplanted European feudal society. These approaches differed from colonial-era accounts that had described the settlements as prototypes for modern European expansion.

Steven Runciman’s three-volume A History of the Crusades, published between 1951 and 1954, strongly influenced popular understanding through its literary style and broad narrative. Later scholars have challenged parts of its approach and conclusions. Present-day debates also question how broadly the term crusade should be applied, including whether it refers only to campaigns for Jerusalem or also to other wars authorised by the papacy. Such distinctions matter: medieval crusading, the ways people later remembered it and the modern political use of its symbols are related histories, but they are not the same thing.