A History of the Crusades Read Online Free Page A

of 288 to the movement after 1291. But recent crusade studies have ended in 1521, 1560, 1580, 1588, and 1798. To Kenneth Setton, above all, must be given the credit for this development. His
The Papacy and the Levant
, covering the centuries from the sack of Constantinople in 1204 to the battle of Lepanto in 1571, provided scholars with an entrée into the major collections of sources for later crusading. It is now clear that, far from being in decline, crusading was almost as active in the fourteenth century as it had been in the thirteenth. Even more startling has been the opening up of the sixteenth century. Early modern historians had occasionally referred to the grim Spanish struggle forNorth Africa at that time as a crusade, although they seem to have been using the term loosely. Setton demonstrated that that is exactly what it was. He wrote a sequel for the seventeenth century, and scholars now have a guide to material, particularly the archives in Italy, up to 1700. Associated with the history of Spanish crusading in the Mediterranean was that of the orderstate of the Knights Hospitallers of St John on Malta, established by the Emperor Charles V as an advance post blocking the sea route from Constantinople to North Africa. The catalogues of the archives of the brother-knights in Valletta have been printed, uncovering the sources for the history of a remarkable little state, the last survivor of the crusading movement, which did not fall until 1798. It is certain that there will soon be a body of solid academic work on centuries of crusading which have been virtually ignored.
    Whatever was going on beneath the surface forty years ago, the generally accepted history of the crusades related particularly to large-scale expeditions to the East and to the Latin settlements in Palestine and Syria. The interest of most historians evaporated after 1291, by which time crusading was believed to be in terminal decline. Since then the subject has expanded in time and space, as it has changed its nature to one extending over seven centuries and many different theatres of war. The prevailing interests used to be economic, proto-colonial, and military. Now they are religious, legal, and social, and there is a growing emphasis on the origins and endurance of the impulses to crusade.

2
Origins
     
    MARCUS BULL
     
His thirst for blood was so unprecedented in recent times that those who are themselves thought cruel seem milder when slaughtering animals than he did when killing people. For he did not establish his victims’ guilt of a crime and then dispatch them cleanly with the sword, which is a routine occurrence. Rather he butchered them and inflicted ghastly tortures. When he forced his prisoners, whoever they were, to pay ransoms, he had them strung up by their testicles—sometimes he did this with his own hands—and often the weight was too much to bear, so that their bodies ruptured and the viscera spilled out. Others were suspended by their thumbs or private parts, and a stone was attached to their shoulders. He would pace underneath them and, when he could not extort from them what was not in fact theirs to give, he used to cudgel their bodies over and over again until they promised what he wanted or died from the punishment. No one knows the number of those who perished in his gaols from starvation, disease, and physical abuse as they languished in his chains.
     
    This vivid description was written in 1115 by Guibert of Nogent, the abbot of a small monastery near Laon in northeastern France. It concerned a prominent local lord named Thomas of Marle. The passage quoted does not exhaust Guibert’s thoughts on Thomas: there is more in the same vein, a mixture of righteous indignation and wide-eyed fascination which veers between the grimly realistic and the anatomicallypreposterous. From the point of view of the First Crusade, the description is of considerable interest because of the careers of the two men involved. Guibert