The Crusades Myth: The Construction of the Nation and Europe within Historical Discourse from 1780-1914

1) Starting Hypotheses of the Project

• Representations connected to the topos of the Crusades have great potential to mobilise political and cultural resources, for they are still a central point of reference in people’s perception of the ‘Christian Occident’ and the ‘Islamic Orient’.
• The Crusades are perceived as a paradigmatic event in which the encounter between Christians and Muslims, between ‘Europe’ and ‘the other’, is conceived in largely conflictive terms.
• The Crusades are often conceived from a European point of view as the embodiment of western heroism and as the origin of joint European political and cultural endeavour; as such, they are perceived as the source of a common historical tradition.
• At the same time, the Crusader narratives of the long nineteenth century are among the main narratives of nation-building by which nations drew boundaries distinguishing themselves from neighbouring European countries.

This discursive tension, which resulted from the interconnection between national and European identity constructions, provided the starting point of this research project.

2) Aims of the Research Project

• To explore the continuities and discontinuities in historical interpretations of the Crusades in German states and in the German Empire on the one hand, and in France on the other hand.
• To explore interconnections and cultural translations on two levels: first, between the various media arenas which contribute towards historical meaning (historical research and textbook narratives) and, second, between the two countries.

3) Results of the Research Project

The Political and Cultural Background: the Rise of Nationalism

• Impetus for the broad historiographical study of the Crusades was initially given by Napoleon’s expeditions to Egypt and Palestine. These marked the beginning of a new era in which the Crusades were perceived in highly enthusiastic terms by Europeans, who included both secular and Christian-conservative historians.
• It has been proven that modern professional historiography is closely connected to the rise of nationalism.
• The connection between nationalism and Crusader narratives can be deduced from nationalistically coded definitions of aims and values, and of patterns of thought, argumentation and behaviour, which arise in connection with the Crusader narratives in the period under examination.
• The meaning of the medieval Crusades for Europe, as well as the development of its nations and of the Mediterranean area, were radically overestimated both in scholarly writings and in textbooks.
• Representations of the Crusades in the nineteenth century may be understood as the discursive spaces in which contemporary historians reproduced or incorporated into their narratives notions and patterns of meanings in order to lend, from a Christian point of view, historical and political legitimacy to contemporary events taking place in the course of European colonisation.

(Supra- and Sub-)national Crusader Narratives

• Representations of the Crusades in the nineteenth century proved to be extremely changeable narratives which could integrate, in a single historical master narrative, secular and Christian concepts as well as European, colonial and national notions of order.
• The new dichotomy of Orient and Occident offered an opportunity to draw on both Christian as well as secular Crusader narratives in conjunction with the colonialist reasoning to which they were inextricably linked. In this way, the various political, religious, national or regional perspectives each spawned a specific contribution towards European Crusader narratives.
• Historians, intellectuals and rulers of the nineteenth century did not agree with criticism of the Crusades which had arisen towards the end of the seventeenth century and came to a head in the Enlightenment period; rather, they saw the Crusader topos in historical discourse as an appropriate symbol of the contemporary political climate.

The Christian Crusader Narrative

• In the early nineteenth century, neo-Crusader ideology was combined with a historico-theological zeal which treated the Crusades as if they were the work of God. Representatives of this Christian narrative opposed secularisation and created Crusader narratives which were more Christian and European than national.
• In spite of the clear transformations of historical understandings, Christianity served almost exclusively as a source of unifying values underpinning notions of nationhood and of Europe in the nineteenth century

Colonial Concept of the Crusades

• The rise of historicism posed a threat to dominant, largely theological, interpretations of the day. The idea of the Crusades, which was Christian in origin, was secularised, historicised and appropriated in the language of colonialism.
• Although secular-minded historians, with the help of their scholarly rational analyses, deconstructed the Crusader myths handed down by Christian scholarship, they also gave succour to colonial perspectives within these narratives.
• The new secular interpretation differed from Christian interpretations in particular because violent interventions were lent legitimacy not in the name of Christianity’s presumed claim to Palestine, but on the basis of the ‘moral right’ of Europe to civilise ‘the other’.
• Evidence of the nationalisation of Crusader narratives can be found in both France and Germany, albeit with differing connotations. In France the secular concept of a civilising mission dominates interpretations, whereas German historiography gives priority to the notion of a mediaeval, nationally organised world domination. 
  

The Persistence of Christian National Crusader Narratives in Textbooks

• These developments were only partially reflected in history textbooks, where (even in the late nineteenth century) the Crusades were still conveyed largely in religious terms, in conjunction with national and imperial arguments.
• The Crusader narratives contained in French textbooks and historiography of the nineteenth century corresponded to the prevailing images of the ‘deux France’, which pitted royalist conservative followers of the ancien régime against republican progressive defenders of the Enlightenment and of the revolution of 1789.
• These images of the French nation may be subordinated to the Christian and secular patterns of interpreting the Crusades insofar as they present France, on the one hand, as the ‘eldest daughter’ of the Catholic church and as the missionary of Europe and of the whole world and, on the other hand, as the bringer of civilisation, the heir and guardian of ancient Greek and Roman cultures.

Images of the ‘Other’

• The Crusader narratives of the nineteenth century gave rise to fundamental descriptions of a ‘non-European other’. Constructions of ‘the’ Arabs, Turks or Greeks at that time also drew on elements which belonged to the cultural knowledge of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or Enlightenment.
• German textbooks underwent a process of radicalisation in the second half of the nineteenth century, which heralded a holy war against the ‘barbarians of the Orient’ driven by Christian zeal.
• Scholarly works, by contrast, developed in the opposite direction. These contain assessments about Muslims and the Orient which may be interpreted as attempts to represent the cultural significance of Islam for Mediterranean societies more accurately than had been done in the first half of the nineteenth century.
• In general, French history textbooks are not as intensely interspersed with radical Christian narratives as German textbooks. They certainly contain some major voices which should be read as a measured criticism of the image of the ‘barbaric Orient’. In this sense, they do justice to the civilising achievements of the Arabic or Muslim world in terms of its contacts with the less well developed Christian culture of the European Middle Ages.
• However, several texts about the Crusades declare that Christianity, the heir to antiquity, is the cradle of civilisation which is confronted by Islam as the embodiment of Oriental despotism and an anti-civilising principle. The logic of this argument suggests that the Crusades are the focal point of the dispute between civilised Europe and the violent troops of Islam.
  

Duration: 06/2008 – 09/2011

Funded by: PRO*Niedersachsen

Cooperation Partners

• Christian Amalvi – Université Paul-Valéry/Montpellier III
• Andreas von Prondczynsky – TU Braunschweig, Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft
• Juliane Jacobi – Universität Potsdam, Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft

Project Supervisor: Simone Lässig

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