A Pious Belligerence

In A Pious Belligerence Uri Zvi Shachar examines one of the most contested and ideologically loaded issues in medieval history, the clash between Christians, Muslims, and Jews that we call the Crusades. He does so not to write about the ways these three groups waged war to hold onto their distinct identities, but rather to think about how these identities were framed in relation to one another. Notions of militant piety in particular provided Muslims, Christians, and Jews paths for thinking about both cultural boundaries and codependencies. Ideas about holy warfare, Shachar contends, were not shaped along sectarian lines, but were dynamically coproduced among the three religions. The final decades of the twelfth century saw a rapid collapse of the Frankish and Ayyubid hegemonies in the Levant, followed by struggles for political dominion that lasted for most of the thirteenth century. The fragmented political landscape gave rise to the formation of multiple coalitions across political, religious, and linguistic divides. Alongside a growing anxiety about the instability of cultural boundaries, there emerged a discourse that sought to realign and reevaluate questions of similarity and difference. Where Christians and Muslims regularly joined forces against their own coreligionists, Shachar writes, warriors were no longer assumed to mark or protect lines of physical or political separation. Contemporary authors recounting these events describe a landscape of questionable loyalties, shifting identities, and unstable appearances. Shachar demonstrates how in chronicles, apocalyptic treatises, and a variety of literary texts in Latin, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Judeo-Arabic holy warriors are increasingly presented as having been rhetorically and anthropologically shaped through their contacts with their neighbors and adversaries. Writers articulated their thoughts about pious warfare through rhetorical devices that crossed confessional lines, and the meaning and force of these articulations lay in their invocation of tropes and registers that had purchase in the various literary communities of the Near East. By the late twelfth century, he argues, there had emerged a notion that threads through Christian, Muslim, and Jewish texts alike: that the Holy Land itself generates a particular breed of pious warriors by virtue of the hybridity that it encompasses.

"This is a book about how Near Eastern communities clustered around pious warfare as a set of literary conventions and how these dialogical conventions infiltrated the semantics of contemporary authors"--

During the late Middle Ages the Near East was a major crossroad where Muslims, Jews, and Christians, representing a large variety of spiritual dispositions, speaking different languages, and sharing the same space, had multiple opportunities for mutually defining cultural interactions. Indeed, with the continuous stream of immigrants from both east and west living among and maintaining frequent contacts with their neighbors, this region emerged as a space abundant with meaningful, if not always peaceful, exchange among members of different communities.

Medieval Westerners accepted killing for religion and praised the outcome of the First Crusade (1096-1099). At the same time, their attitude to violence was ambivalent. Theologians shunned the practical use of force, while the warrior aristocracy valued the capacity for physical destruction. In the absence of theological doctrine on the practicalities of holy warfare, the first crusaders draw their ideas about killing from diverse and sometimes conflicting traditions. This book answers questions about how religious violence was described, justified and remembered in the sources of the First Crusade. What was the relation between faith, convention, and action?

The relationship between war and religion is nothing new. For millennia, humankind has waged war over religion and derived religion from war. It is not surprising, then, that military leadership and religious conviction frequently coincide. This study documents the long tradition of the religious warrior in Western history and literature, with a special focus on Civil War general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. It also provides a general survey of the religious antecedents of Jackson and other more modern American military heroes. The book begins with an introduction to the Confederate general, largely from the perspective of those who lived with and served under him, whose testimonies attest to his courage, initiative, innate tactical talent, deep religious faith, and eccentric personal habits. The author analyzes the extent to which Jackson's national zeal has elevated him to the status of a religious martyr, remembered today within an epic frame of sainthood and heroism. Concise comparisons are drawn between Jackson and his Old World predecessors, including Ulrich Zwingli, John Knox and Oliver Cromwell. Similar associations are made between Jackson and such Civil War contemporaries as William Dorsey Pender and Oliver Otis Howard. A chapter addressing the representation of "Stonewall" in modern Civil War literature and film, particularly in the novel and subsequent motion picture Gods and Generals, provides an insightful juxtaposition of Jackson's status among the "gods" of the Civil War and his own reverence for the God of his Presbyterian faith.

The Damietta Crusade, which is often referred to as the 'Fifth Crusade', was the first of the numbered crusades to be targeted against Egypt. Rather than directly targeting Jerusalem, its architects believed that by threatening the economic hub of Cairo the Ayyubid sultan would gladly give up Jerusalem in exchange. Here Laurence Marvin offers the first book-length treatment of the Damietta Crusade in almost 40 years. Written in accessible language and driven by a narrative and analysis firmly grounded in the primary sources in multiple languages, Marvin emphasizes what made this campaign unique, from its planning, choice of target, "brown-water" or amphibious nature, course, and result. He presents a multi-sided perspective by amply describing and analyzing the Egyptians and other groups in the eastern Mediterranean who played an important role in mounting a successful defense against Latin Christian forces. Marvin contends that the crusade in Egypt failed not because it derived from an unachievable or flawed grand strategy, but because of shifting operational goals, leadership issues, the social dynamics within the army, arrivals and departures of participants, and the effective defense led by Egypt's sultan, al-Kamil. This detailed analysis of an understudied event of thirteenth century history brings the latest methodologies of military history to bear on a wide range of primary sources, raising important questions about the complex nature of warfare and crusade in the medieval Mediterranean.

Taking their inspiration from the work of Thomas N. Bisson, to whom the book is dedicated, the contributors to this volume explore the experience of power in medieval Europe: the experience of those who held power, those who helped them wield it, and those who felt its effects. The seventeen essays in the collection, which range geographically from England in the north to Castile in the south, and chronologically from the tenth century to the fourteenth, address a series of specific topics in institutional, social, religious, cultural, and intellectual history. Taken together, they present three distinct ways of discussing power in a medieval historical context: uses of power, relations of power, and discourses of power. The collection thus examines not only the operational and social aspects of power, but also power as a contested category within the medieval world. The Experience of Power suggests new and fruitful ways of understanding and studying power in the Middle Ages.

In the 88 years between its establishment by the victorious armies of the First Crusade and its collapse following the disastrous defeat at Hattin, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was the site of vibrant artistic and architectural activity. As the crusaders rebuilt some of Christendom's most sacred churches, or embellished others with murals and mosaics, a unique and highly original art was created. Focusing on the sculptural, mosaic, and mural cycles adorning some of the most important shrines in the Kingdom (such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, The Basilica of the Annunciation, and the Church of the Nativity), this book offers a broad perspective of Crusader art and architecture. Among the many aspects discussed are competition among pilgrimage sites, crusader manipulation of biblical models, the image of the Muslim, and others. Building on recent developments in the fields of patronage studies and reception theory, the book offers a study of the complex ways in which Crusader art addressed its diverse audiences (Franks, indigenous eastern Christians, pilgrims) while serving the intentions of its patrons. Of particular interest to scholars and students of the Crusades and of Crusader art, as well as scholars and students of medieval art in general, this book will appeal to all those engaging with intercultural encounters, acculturation, Christian-Muslim relations, pilgrimage, the Holy Land, medieval devotion and theology, Byzantine art, reception theory and medieval patronage.

Dangerous Speech is the first systematic treatment of blasphemous speech in colonial Mexico. This engaging social history examines the representation of blasphemy as a sin and a crime, and its repression by the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish colonists viewed blasphemy not only as an insult against God but also as a dangerous misrepresentation of the deity, which could call down his wrath in a ruinous assault on the imperial enterprise. Why then, asks Villa-Flores, did Spaniards dare to blaspheme? Having mined the period’s moral literature—philosophical works as well as royal decrees and Inquisition treatises and trial records in Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. archives and research libraries—Villa-Flores deftly interweaves images of daily life in colonial Mexico with vivid descriptions of human interactions to illustrate the complexity of a culture profoundly influenced by the Catholic Church. In entertaining and sometimes horrifying vignettes, the reader comes face to face with individuals who used language to assert or manipulate their identities within that repressive society. Villa-Flores offers an innovative interpretation of the social uses of blasphemous speech by focusing on specific groups—conquistadors, Spanish settlers, Spanish women, and slaves of both genders—as a lens to examine race, class, and gender relations in colonial Mexico. He finds that multiple motivations led people to resort to blasphemy through a gamut of practices ranging from catharsis and gender self-fashioning to religious rejection and active resistance. Dangerous Speech is a valuable resource for students and scholars of colonialism, the social history of language, Mexican history, and the changing relations of gender, class, and ethnicity in colonial Latin America.