Holy Wars Empires and The Portability of The Past

Holy Wars, Empires, and the
Portability of the Past: The Modern

Uses of Medieval Crusades
A DAM KNOBLER
The College of New Jersey
On 12 June 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte took control of the islands of Malta.

The Knights Hospitaller surrendered with little fight, and the independently
recognized polity of the Knights of St. John, the last bastion of the medieval
chivalric orders, fell. Founded in the Middle Ages as a military order created
both to carry the sword against Islam and provide shelter and medical care for
pilgrims to the Holy Land, the Knights had by the end of the eighteenth
century become an anachronism. The Ottoman Empire, the last of the great
Muslim powers of the Mediterranean, had long been considered little more
than a pawn in larger political struggles on the Continent. The practical appli-
cation of crusading as church policy had long fallen out of favor. As a military
force, the Order was no longer of any consequence. The Grand Council that
directed the Order consisted for the most part of Maltese or Italian nobles
of little formal training in the strategy and tactics of “modern” warfare. His-
torians of the late eighteenth century had come to the conclusion that the cru-
sades of the Middle Ages were little more than the fanatical hate mongering of
an unenlightened time. As Edward Gibbon wrote: “The principle of the cru-
sades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous
to the cause. . .. The belief of the Catholics was corrupted by new legends. . ..
The active spirit of the Latins preyed on the vitals of their reason and
religion. . .. The lives and labours of millions, which were buried in the
East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement of
their native country. . ..”1
However, we should not be too hasty in agreeing with Gibbon’s assessment
of crusading as merely an example of medieval “savage fanaticism.” Quite
apart from the purely romantic images of the knights in shining armor and
damsels in distress which, folly or not, still remain with us today, many
who retained power in Europe in the nineteenth century were not devotees
of Hobbes or Gibbon, and did not take their historiographic cues from the
1
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols. (London, 1925), ch. 61.
0010-4175/06/293–325 $9.50 # 2006 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
293
294 ADAM KNOBLER
realm of bourgeois liberalism. Rather, for many of those at both the apex and
nadir of the social classes, the crusades were an apt and readily portable
symbol of the current political landscape. In the face of revolutionary barri-
cades, the crusades represented to many supporters of the ancien regimes a
time when governance, justice, and diplomacy were undertaken with divine
sanction and under a rather uncomplicated set of moral absolutes. Yet, since
the Roman church no longer sanctioned crusading in its original form, royalist
conservatives, and the ultramontanist religious “right” who opposed the
growing secularization of European society felt crusading needed to be
“reinvented” or, at the very least, transposed from its original medieval
milieu to make it a useful contemporary symbol.
The use of the image and ideology of the crusades, as part of a portable
memory of history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the
subject under discussion here. I have structured this paper around three
themes or motifs, to examine the manifold ways nineteenth-and twentieth-
century people used the memory of the medieval crusades.
The first theme concerns debates over the meaning of nation, nationhood,
and the possession of national symbols. Throughout the nineteenth century,
the states of Europe worked to define who could rightly lay claim to the
symbols of the nation seen as central to the nation’s history. Were these to
be the property of an elite few or a large majority? What defined the
symbols of nationhood: flag, religion, language, history? In examining
history, was there a collective past, or collective memory, upon which all
could agree?
The second motif, derived in part from eighteenth-century pre-Revolutionary
thought, but still alive in the nineteenth century, was the same romanticism
against which Gibbon had railed. Could the methods and ideas of the old cru-
sades, with their notions of chivalry and purity, be revived in an era when, to
many, such niceties had been lost to high politics? The notion of the hero was
particularly important in developing and maintaining this kind of crusading:
individuals to whom nations, states, or political factions could point and
who would provide a rallying point for political or social action.
The third motif developed largely as a backlash against the development of
the imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inverted the crusad-
ing motif and romance of Europeans in the Muslim world. Muslim nationalists
and intellectuals used crusading metaphors to indict current political circum-
stances directed against the Islamic world by Europeans. In essence, they used
the crusades as a negative image of the past, about which the West should be
ashamed. Likewise, western imperialism was often seen as the direct linear
descendant of medieval crusading against Islam.
The trans-national ubiquity of crusading images is striking. How and why
did an 850-year-old series of conflicts become such an effective language in
communicating ideas between classes and societies? As all Europeans had
THE MODERN USES OF MEDIEVAL CRUSADES 295
some knowledge of the stories of Old Testament, so too, the adventures of

Richard the Lion-hearted, St Louis, Saladin, or the Fall of Constantinople in
1453 were part of nineteenth-century common memory.
The debate over the possession of national symbols in the nineteenth
century is a common theme in contemporary historical and anthropological
circles. Collective memories have become the subject of many recent scho-
larly works, whether the subject be the internal battles of ideology, religion,
or class which took place in states existing prior to the French Revolution
(Spain, Portugal, Britain, or France itself); the congregation of smaller
states into imperial bodies through conquest or manipulation (such as the
Austro-Hungarian and German entities); or those states whose development
arose from some form of construction based on ethnic irredentism and external
political and military forces, the control of symbols, and the construction of
national pasts.2 A specific term, “medievalism,” has come to be broadly ident-
ified with those working on the “uses” of the Middle Ages’ later periods, yet
few have examined the place of the crusades in the context of broader political
and social discourse.
CRUSADING AS A NATIONAL SYMBOLIC INHERITANCE
France
Joseph-François Michaud, the French editor of the royalist organ Le Quotidi-
enne, first published his Histoire des croisades in 1815 as a means of discredit-
ing Napoleonic legitimacy and evoking the great deeds of the French heroes of
the pre-Revolutionary past. Thus, from the first year of the post-Revolutionary
era the French right began to look to crusading as an important symbol for
their claims to rule France.3
In 1827 the French royal minister of war turned to the monarchial past in
proclaiming the French king as “the son of Saint-Louis.”4 Royalists appealed,
not to democratic or liberal values, but to the older ideal of “un roi, une foi,
une loi” (one king, one faith, one law). Such values were represented most
clearly by the most blessed of medieval French kings, the sainted Louis IX,
who, albeit unsuccessful as a crusader, was nevertheless a beloved and holy
figure to whom churches, abbeys, and monasteries had been dedicated
across France, and to whom a entire popular hagiographic cult was resumed
in both public and private French life throughout the nineteenth century.
While the Royalist successor of the French Revolution, Charles X, connected
2
See Patrick Hutton’s review article, “Recent Scholarship on Memory and History,” History
Teacher 33, 4 (2000), 533 –48.
3
Michaud’s work was republished throughout the nineteenth century.
4
Marquis de Clermont-Tonnerre to Charles X, 14 Oct. 1827, in, Paul Azan, ed. “Le rapport du
Marquis de Clermont-Tonnere ministere de la guerre sur une expédition a Alger (1827),” Revue
Africaine 70 (1929), 215, 253.
296 ADAM KNOBLER
much of his crusading association with imperial ambitions in North Africa and
his invasion of Algeria in 1830, the July Revolution of the Orleanists began a
thorough revision of public political culture. Appeals to the past, necessary to
insure a symbolic legitimacy of the new dynasty, had to be couched in such a
way as not to glorify the deeds of the recently deposed ancien régime. The
French nation was to be the object for pride. A national policy of restoring his-
torical monuments was undertaken under the directorship of the author and
historian Prosper Merimée. However, the greatest public memorial to
France’s grand past was to be the conversion of the royal palace at Versailles
to a museum dedicated “to all the glories of France.”5 Of the nearly 130 paint-
ings on medieval topics commissioned for the monarchy by Louis Philippe for
display at Versailles, nearly fifty were on crusading themes.6 Four works deal
specifically with Saint Louis himself, the largest and most renowned of these
being undoubtedly Delacroix’s depiction of the Battle of Taillebourg, com-
missioned in 1834 and now hanging in the grand Salle des batailles. The
exploits of crusaders, hung on the walls of France’s new “national”
museum, publicly affiliated military action (in this case in North Africa)
with the Orleanist dynasty and French nation without needing to be associated
with Charles’ ultraroyalist politics. The majority of crusading scenes were
commissioned between 1838 and 1842, corresponding to Louis Philippe’s
renewal of Charles X’s “crusade” in Algeria. Any renewed action in the
Maghrib could be undertaken in the name of the new French nation and
would invoke ancient and noble grandeur rather than Bourbonist excess and
whimsy.
Napoleon III, too, was a master of political propaganda and manipulation of
collective historical memory. Conflict in Lebanon, for example, gave birth to
schemes in the conservative Catholic press in the summer of 1860 demanding
that the emperor intervene militarily in defense of the Christians of Syria and
Lebanon. Clerics were sent to Syria to distribute aid and solace to Maronite
refugees while rightists posited the possibility of a crusade.7 The Emperor
himself, like Charles and Louis Philippe before him, invoked the great crusad-
ing precedent of the French past as the basis of his right to protect the Holy
Places of Palestine in the face of Ottoman and Russian claims to the contrary.
As French troops left for the Levant in 1860, Napoleon’s words rang with
5
See Thomas W. Gaehtgen’s, Versailles, de la résidence royale au musée historique. La
galerie des batailles dans le musée historique de Louis-Philippe. Patrick Poirot, trans.
(Antwerp, 1984); Michael Marrinan, “Historical Vision and the Writing of History at Louis-
Philippe’s Versailles,” in, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gerald P. Weisberg, eds., The Popular-
ization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy (Princeton, 1994), 113 –43.
6
Calculated from Claire Constans, Musée national du chateau de Versailles: Catalogue des
peintures (Paris, 1980).
7
“Napoléon III n’est pas seulement l’Empereur des Français, il est le chef de la dernière
croisade . . . comme à une autre époque; la France dit à son souverain: ‘Dieu le veut! Dieu le
veut!’ “La question d’Orient (Paris, 1860), 48.
crusading imagery: “You leave for Syria . . . to that distant land, rich in great
memories . . . you will prove yourselves to be the worthy descendants of those
heroes who had gloriously carried the banner of Christ to those [same] lands.”8
The Orientalist Gabriel Charmes looked across the Mediterranean at Syria
and noted how everything of the Syrian past reverberated with the deeds of the
crusaders. At the core of French responsibility to the memory of the medieval
crusaders, he wrote, were the protection of Lebanese and Syrian Christians
and the establishment of French colonial control over Syria.9 Arab nationalists
would use such French claims against them in the twentieth century.
Spain
Following the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic conquest of
Spain, crusading came to be an almost constant theme in Spanish traditionalist
polemic during the nineteenth century. The Revolution’s disestablishment of
the Catholic Church and Napoleon’s support of sweeping social reform stood
in direct contrast to the almost theocratic ideology of the far right. Unsurpris-
ingly, the Napoleonic regime in Spain served as the straw man against which
traditionalists would use holy war imagery. The royalist polemicist Antonio
Capmany compared Napoleon to everything from the Ottoman Sultan
Mehmet the Conqueror to Tamerlane, while comparing the Spanish to the cru-
saders of old.10 The popular press made the historical parallel even more strik-
ing, casting the war against the French as a cause that was as holy as the war
against the Prophet Muhammad.11 By reformulating Napoleon and his huma-
nistic and liberal allies as akin to Muslims, traditionalist editors tapped
directly into part of Spanish collective historical memory. Those who
defended Spain against such an invasion were thus the spiritual descendants
of the Reconquistadores of the Middle Ages.
The traditionalist press was, however, speaking to a readership that, we can
assume, already had a certain level of political sophistication, or at least some
awareness of the events of the time. The transformation of these images from
part of the national collective memory to active political symbol was, for the
majority of Spaniards, accomplished through the work of local rural clergy.
Throughout the century, local clergy were able to translate political ideol-
ogy into historical symbols through their control of local education. For
many of the rural poor, the Sunday sermon or the priestly instruction in
8
“Vous partez pour la Syrie . . . Sur cette terre lointaine, riche en grands souvenirs . . . vous
vous montrerez les dignes enfants de ces héros qui ont porté glorieusement dans ce pays la ban-
nière du Christ.” Quoted in Taxile Delord, Histoire du Second Empire, 6 vols. (Paris, 1873), 3: 31.
9
Journal des débats, (17 June 1880); and Gabriel Charmes, Politique extérieure et coloniale
(Paris, 1885), 101– 3, 305–428.
10
Antonio Capmany y de Montpalau, Centinela contra franceses, Françoise Etienure,
Colección Támesis, eds., serie B, 17 (London, 1988), 122, 125, 145. Capmany’s work is an
anti-Napoleonic polemic of the most vivid and graphic order.
11
Diario Polı́tico de Mallorca, 25 June 1808.
298 ADAM KNOBLER
local schools was the only news of the outside world they were likely to hear.
And, with the anticlerical strain notable in Napoleonic and subsequent liberal
political discourse, it is not surprising that members of the clerical class often
threw their own political support (and, as a consequence, that of many of their
parishioners) with the more traditionalist forces of the political spectrum. For
example, the suppression of the monasteries and friaries in August 1809 sent
monks and friars into the countryside where, according to one report, they
“fanned the flames of . . . holy war. . ..”12 One Carmelite prior exhorted his
friars to sacrifice themselves “on the battlefield of a Holy Crusade.”13 Some
were even promised heavenly reward for their participation in the fight.14
Sufficient troops were rallied in the so-called Spanish War of Independence
(or Peninsular War) to expel the Napoleonic forces, and the Spanish monarchy
was restored under Ferdinand VII, an ultra-traditionalist who had been lauded
throughout the war as the incarnate spirit of the nation and the Church. While
Ferdinand steadily lost popularity during the remainder of his reign, those who
continued to support his martial causes, such as his failed attempt to regain
Mexico in 1829, returned to the earlier image of the king as a crusader,
leading Spain in a just fight. Royalist priests in Mexico called upon their
mostly Indian parishioners to take up a crusade against the liberal-humanist
leaders of the independence movement.15 In truth, however, Ferdinand
proved to be a singularly inept military leader and diplomat, and prone to lis-
tening to poor advice, and his death left Spain in political turmoil.
The troubles were, as they had been several times before in Spanish history,
a question of legitimate succession. Ferdinand died leaving no sons. His eldest
daughter, Isabella, was only three years old and many traditionalists viewed
her regent, her mother Queen Maria Cristina, as morally unfit to rule. As a
consequence, a surge of support developed on the right for Ferdinand’s
brother, Don Carlos. The so-called “Carlist” faction of the Spanish monarchist
movement was next to adopt medieval crusading images to greatest effect.
For the Carlists, their greatest political obstacle was to prove their legiti-
macy as the true and rightful inheritors of the Spanish crown. Using the sup-
posed moral turpitude of the regent queen mother, and stressing the need for
Spain to return to its strong Catholic heritage, Carlist propagandists spent
more than forty years attempting to connect their claimants to the great
moral and military battles of the past.
12
Francisco Aragonés, Los frailes franciscos de Cataluña, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1891), 1: 49–50.
13
Juan R. de Legı́sima, “Las ordenes religiosas en la guerra de la Independencia,” Archivo
Ibero-Americano 22, 118 (1935): 197.
14
Alfredo Martı́nez Albiach, Religiosidad hispana y sociedad borbonica (Burgos, 1969), 138.
15
The leading preacher of this action was Father Miguel Bringas of San Antonio de Béjar, who
claimed that the political and economic crises facing Mexico in the late 1820s were divine punish-
ment for abandoning the king as God’s chosen ruler. See Eugenio de Aviraneta e Ibargoyen, Mis
memorias ı́ntimas, 1825–1829, Luis González Obragon, ed., Documentos historica de Mejico, 3
(Mexico, 1906), 76.
Again, working mostly through networks of rural clergy and ultra-

traditionalist nobility, the Carlists played on the most widely understood
and appreciated symbols of the medieval Reconquista. Don Carlos was
lauded in poems and sermons as leading his troops with the Reconquistadores’
battle cry of “Santiago y cierra Espanã!” ([For] Santiago and to save Spain).16
Others dubbed the Carlist army as “the children of El Cid,” the conquistador of
medieval Spanish epic.17 Throughout the century, Carlist pamphleteers
likened their cause to everyone from Columbus, to Ferdinand and Isabella,
to the victors at Lepanto, all in an attempt to stir not only patriotic feeling,
but, more importantly, a sense that only they were the true inheritors of
such a noble history, one abandoned by Isabella II and her supporters. Even
after the death of Carlos in 1855 and the deposition of Isabella in 1868,
which launched another succession crisis, the Carlists continued to use medi-
eval images in their public pronouncements to link themselves with Spain’s
heroic past. In 1870, the twenty-two-year-old Carlist claimant, Carlos, the
Duke of Madrid, was publicly presented with a small replica of the Cross of
Victory, a relic associated with the great medieval conqueror, James I of
Aragon.18 The young Carlos, some Carlist pamphleteers prophesied, would
restore Spain’s glory even to the point of re-extending Spain’s borders to
reclaim the medieval Spanish patrimony in Gibraltar, North Africa and
Portugal.19
While Carlist claims for legitimacy had a strong following among the clergy
and the rural poor, the movement’s leadership rarely rose to the occasion.
Gentleman soldiers, ill equipped for the new face of warfare and supported
by weak and undisciplined troops, in the end had little but their symbols to
carry them to victory.
As for the government, Prosper Merimée, living in Spain during the disas-
trous Spanish attempt to conquer Morocco in 1859 – 1860, wrote that all the
Spanish viewed the expedition as a “guerre sainte” (holy war) that united
the country in single purpose.20 Certainly, once the war was underway, the
Spanish press and by many of its authors and poets popularized the imagery
of the crusade. Spain, having lost most of its imperial gains of the sixteenth
century to the Latin American independence movements of the 1820s, was
16
As in the poem, “Himno de los voluntarios vasconavarros dedicado al marqués de Valde-
Espina,” in Alexandra Wilhelmsen, La formación del pensamiento polı́tico del Carlismo
(1810–1875) (Madrid, 1995), 242 –43.
17
Juan Arolas, “Himno en la destrucción de la facción de Negrı́ por el general Espartero,”
Obras, (Madrid, 1982), 2: 141–42.
18
“Proclama a los aragonenses,” in Historia del tradicionalismo español, Melchor Ferrer,
Domingo Tejera, and José F. Acedo, eds., 30 vols., (Seville, 1941– 1979), 20: 222; 23 (sup-
plement), 130.
19
Sebastián Pérez Alonso, Carta consejo a Doña Isabel de Borbón (Logroño, 1870), 5.
20
Mérimée to [French War Minister] Marshall Jean Vaillant, 4 Nov. 1859, in Prosper Mérimée,
Correspondence générale, 2e série, Maurice Paturier, ed., 9 vols. (Toulouse, 1953– 1961), 291.
300 ADAM KNOBLER
again to take its rightful place among the nations of Europe through joining in
this “new imperialism.” Traditionalist conservatives and liberals alike evoked
the Reconquista. In doing so, the former could claim legitimate authority to
conduct a war under a constitutional monarch, while the latter could ward
off fears of Carlist revival. Both could successfully appeal to a broadly
“national” sentiment by drawing parallels with the decidedly “Spanish”
nature of sixteenth-century Iberian crusading in North Africa.
Some papers, it is true, such as El clamor publico, wrote sadly that “the time
of the Crusades has already passed” (26 Oct. 1859).21 Others, such as the
moderate El estado, voiced opposition to giving the war a religious charac-
ter.22 Most, however, filled their pages with stories of a great Spanish past
that was about to be renewed. The moderate El conciliador referred to the
Spanish soldiers of the expedition as “the descendants of those illustrious
men who planted the standard of the Cross on the Barbary coasts!”23 Likewise,
El español, on the same day, declared proudly, “the blood of our fathers . . .
[who made] the Moorish multitude that refused to bow before the sacred
sign of the cross bite the dust—still runs in our veins.”24 Still others, such
as the absolutist La Esperanza, recalled the spirit of Saladin, who opposed
the Christians and the battle of Lepanto, which drove the Turks to their
knees.25
Apart from journalists, literary circles often saw crusading analogies and
parallels in the penetration of Morocco. José Maria de Ugarte, the poets
who contributed to “official” El Romancero de la Guerra de Africa collection,
and “Fernan Caballero” each wrote of the operation as an explicit renewal of
crusading.26 The Romancero collection, in particular, strove to connect the
campaigns in Morocco with a whole range of Spanish conquests and holy
wars of the past. In his poetic invitation, which begins the collection, the
Marques de Molins himself not only invoked the Reconquista and the deeds
of Cisneros, but also those of Magellan, Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro.27
Other authors in the collection, such as former Spanish premier, the Duque
de Rivas, poet and secretary to Queen Isabella, Manuel Canete, and dramatist
Manuel Tamayo y Baus all make clear reference to past crusading deeds.28
21
In Robert C. Bogard, “Africanismo and Morocco, 1830– 1912,” Ph.D. diss., University of
Texas at Austin, 1974, 29.
22
12 Nov. 1859, in Marie-Claude Lecuyer and C. Serrano, La guerre d’Afrique et ses repercus-
sions en Espagne: Ideologies et colonialisme en Espagne, 1859–1904 (Paris, 1976.), 66.
23
Issue of 22 Oct. 1859, in Bogard, “Africanismo and Morocco,” 29.
24
In Bogard, “Africanismo and Morocco,” 29–30.
25
25 Oct. 1859, in Lecuyer and Serrano, La guerre d’Afrique, 74.
26
El Romancero de la guerra de Africa, Mariano Roca de Togures, marques de Molins, ed.
(Madrid, 1860); “Fernan Caballero,” “Deudas pagodas,” in Obras completas 8. Coleccion de
escritores castellanos: Novelistas, 132 (Madrid, 1898–1914).
27
“Romance invitatorio,” in El Romancero, 9– 17.
28
Poems 2, 22, and 10, respectively, in El Romancero.
One author, Ventura de la Vega, invoked the actual crusades in concluding

his piece.29
However, perhaps because of the enormous cost of life due in large part to
disease, glorious crusading imagery quickly faded from Spanish writing about
Morocco. Others, such as Perez Galdos in his Aita Tettauen of 1905, perhaps
noting how the mosque of Tetuan was converted to a church, as had been done
by Cisneros in Oran, wrote, “The priests . . . [urged the soldiers] not to return
without destroying Islamism.”30
The year 1898 was, of course, a disastrous one for Spanish imperial ambi-
tion, as most of its remaining colonies were stripped away following their
military defeat at the hands of the United States. This loss called for much
soul searching, including attempts by traditionalist forces to lay blame at
the feet of liberal humanism: it was divine retribution for turning Spain’s
back on its religious past.31 The history referred to in the political arena as
well as that taught in the increasingly secularized schools became an import-
ant battleground for ideological discussions.32 This issue of national regener-
ation became the central topic of conversation that came to dominate Spanish
political culture for two decades, and those whose political future had relied so
much on reviving past glories seemed to many to be desperately out of touch.
Progressive forces came to the fore, and addressed their concerns to the urba-
nized working classes as well as to the middle orders of society, who together
came to view traditionalist ideology as untenable in a modern world. But the
forces of tradition remained strong among the clergy and in rural areas, where
appeals to religion and glory held far more appeal than talk of a new day for
the working class. Therein lay the political conundrum that bedeviled Spain
for much of the first thirty years of the twentieth century.
The New Byzantium

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 gave way to numerous
claims of succession to Byzantium’s place at the apex of the Orthodox
world. However, many scholars have maintained that Orthodox Chris-
tians—Greeks and Russians in particular—never developed a true concept
of crusade or of justifiable holy war.33
29
El Romancero, 218.
30
Benito Perez Galdos, Aita Tettauen (Madrid, 1905), 47.
31
See the pastoral letter of Bishop Fernández Pierola, 11 Feb. 1899, in Boletı́n eclesiástico del
obispado de Vitoria 35 (1899).
32
Manuel Merry y Colón, the catedrático of Spanish history at the University of Seville, wrote
in his school textbook that it was necessary to purge “our History of the series of errors [which] . . .
have tried to obscure our national glories.” He devotes nearly 40 percent of his text to the Recon-
quista, and emphasizes the providential destiny of Spain. See Manuel Merry y Colón and Antonio
Merry y Villaba, Compendia de historia de España: Redactado para servir de texto en los semin-
aries y colegios católicos (Seville, 1889), 7–9.
33
On what follows, see Athena Kolia-Dermitzake, Ho Vyzantinos Rhieros polemosS: He
ennoia kai he probole tou threskeutikou polemou sto Vyzantio (Athens, 1991).
302 ADAM KNOBLER
However, there are three necessary presuppositions in Byzantine thought

which make a war “holy”: the adversaries must be non-Christian; there
must be proof of some prior injury to the Christian faith, the Church, or its
believers (such as persecution or the destruction of a church); or, the war
must be in the name of re-conquering a lost part of the “Roman” patrimony.
These three conditions are, of course, nearly identical to the Augustinian
notion of a just war as used by Latin holy warriors.
Because the Byzantines did not have a Pope who could issue crusading
indulgences, it was up to the Emperor, as the leader of the chosen of God,
to publicly proclaim a holy war. The Church never officially recognized
soldiers as martyrs, yet neither did it condemn the Emperors for promising
salvation to those who fought in a holy war. In essence, this promise was
nearly identical to the papal indulgence issued in the Latin Church. Indeed,
the Russians explained their military conquests in Asia as reminders of their
common, crusading heritage in diplomatic discussions with Latin powers.34
Yet, following the Council of Florence, where the Byzantine patriarch had
agreed to the union of Greek and Roman churches, the Russians roundly con-
demned such “Latinity.” Moscow saw the fall of Constantinople as a transla-
tio imperii which granted to it succession to Rome and Constantinople.35 By
extension, since Moscow viewed itself as the sole surviving source of salva-
tion on earth, only Russia could conduct a truly holy war against the
enemies of Christendom.36
Under these theological guidelines Russian tsars viewed many of their wars
of expansion against their Muslim neighbors in terms of “crusading” ideals
and their Byzantine predecessors.37 The princes of Muscovy repeatedly har-
kened back to Byzantine liturgical sources to justify their rule—the role of
the emperor/tsar—as a conqueror for the faith.38 From the late fifteenth
century, following the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the tsars gained recognition
throughout the orthodox world as the defenders of the faith. As such, Russian
“crusading” tended to focus on the “liberation” of Orthodox Christians from
Muslim lands, as well as the “recovery” of land that “rightly” belonged to
the princes of Muscovy and the Russian crown.
34
Jaroslaw Pelenski, “Muscovite Imperial Claims to the Khazan Khanate,” Slavic Review 26
(1967), 565; Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva 59 (1887), 103.
35
Letter (1510) of Philotheus of Pskov to Vasiliy III, in Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi.
Konets XV-pervaia polovina XVI veka (Moscow, 1984), 437–41.
36
Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven, 1961),
36–41, 107n.
37
We do have an image from the Kazan Chronicle of Ivan as St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki,
trampling the Kazan khan underfoot; see Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, fig. 3 (text p. 53).
38
E. V. Barsov, “Drevne-russkie pamiatniki sviashchennogo venchaniia Tsarei na tsarstvo,”
Chteniia v imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiskikh (1883), bk. 1, 27–28, 34,
51; P. Schreider “Hochzeit und kronung kaiser Manuels II in jahre 1392,” Byzantinische Zeits-
chrift, 60 (1967), 77, ll.14–15 (from Codex Laurentianus Olut. VIII.17).
While justifying war as necessary for the “liberation” of captive Christians

begins in the 1230s, it was not until the campaigns in the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries against Kazan that Russian wars of expansion
really took on the characteristics of a crusade. In the sixteenth century, Arch-
bishop Vassijan Rylo, and Metropolitans Makarios and Daniil, led the
“charge” for anti-Muslim “crusading” against Kazan. Even at the coronation
of Ivan IV in 1547, we find Makarios asking God to “subdue unto him [the
new tsar] all barbarian nations,” using a Slavonic translation of the Byzantine
imperial coronation prayer—again, making an explicit connection between
the tsar and the Byzantine emperor—both conquerors for the Church.39
Makarios was probably instrumental in fostering the idea that the land of
the Bulgars had been rightfully Russian since the time of Vladimir I.40
Because Kazan rulership had simply carried on from the Bulgars it stood to
reason that Kazan would be rightfully part of the patrimony of the tsars.
“Seek the property of [your] ancestors,” Makarios urged Ivan IV in a 1552
letter.41 Chronicles, notably the Otryvok russkoi letopisi, were commissioned
expressly to justify these claims by proving dynastic continuity from Vladimir
I to Ivan IV.42 The Kniga stepennaia (which may have been commissioned by
Makarios himself) also argued for continuity, especially when dealing with
Tsar Ivan’s victories over Kazan.43 Kazan and Astrakhan were conquered
by Ivan in the years 1552 to 1557.
During the late seventeenth century, Russia began to break with its earlier
rather isolationist tradition, and begin to undertake cultural and political
forays to the west. The Russians maintained a tenuous and sometimes antag-
onistic relationship with the Ottoman Turks on their southern border. The
tension that developed at the court over the following three hundred years
between “westernizers” and “traditionalists” had a profound effect on
the holy war imagery generated in Russia. During the regency of Sophia
Alekseevna (1682 – 1689), the Russians briefly joined the newly formed
Holy League in 1686. The Russians were not, as it happened, able to be par-
ticularly helpful allies to the Venetians, Poles, or the Holy Roman Empire.
Following the Treaty of Radzin (1681), the Ottomans could not afford to
antagonize Moscow, and they strove mightily to pacify the Russians. Under
Peter the Great the Russian court turned its diplomatic and cultural focus west-
ward, and even toward western notions of crusading. Peter sent an embassy in
1697 to Malta to enlist the Hospitallers, and though it was but a small and
39
“Hupotakhon auto panta ta barbara ethne.”
40
Otryvok letopisi voskresenskomu novierusalimskomu spisku, sub anno 1526–1527, 1528,
1532, and 1535, in Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Letopisei [hereafter PSRL] 6: 282, 284–86, 289,
296 –97.
41
Letter in Otryvok letopisi voskresenskomu novierusalimskomu spisku, sub anno 1552, in
PSRL 6: 308– 9.
42
Otryvok letopisi voskresenskomu novierusalimskomu spisku, in PSRL 6: 277– 315.
43
Kniga stepennaia tsarskogo rodosloviia: Pervaia stepen, in PSRL 21: 1: 63.
304 ADAM KNOBLER
rather ineffectual piece of diplomacy on the greater stage of Russo-Ottoman

relations, it did represent a curious overture toward the distinctly Catholic
crusading entity.44
Militant anti-Muslim tendencies typified the policy of the government until
Catherine the Great issued the edict of Toleration of All Faiths in 1773.45
Many members of the conservative aristocracy opposed Catherine’s liberaliz-
ing initiatives. Most vocal among these was Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, who
noted that Muslims were born enemies of Christians and “as once they ruled
over Russia, it should be Russia’s policy to treat them as her enemies.” The
Muslims, he noted, would always be loyal to the Ottoman sultan over the
tsar, and should be eternally suspect as enemies of the faith and crown.46
Despite such vehement concern regarding Muslims as an “Asian” problem,
during Catherine’s reign Russians renewed their former vision of their
relationship to the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire within the context of a
united European “Christian” front. For example, during this period the
Russian word krestonosets acquired the meaning of “crusader,” in a western
sense. Before this time, the term referred to someone who simply propagated
the faith, wore crosses on their clothing, or simply bore the cross in a church
procession.47 In May 1769, Catherine asked assistance from the Hospitallers
of Malta to fight the Turks. The Hospitallers, not wishing to offend the
French crown, politely declined. In 1774 the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji
granted the Russians the full right of protection over all the Christians resident
in the Ottoman Empire. In 1780, Catherine and Foreign Affairs Minister
Prince Bezborodko drafted plans for a more ambitious crusade—the actual
restoration of the Byzantine Empire, under the rulership of her second grand-
son the appropriately named Constantine.48 Much of Catherine’s attention
throughout the 1780s was dedicated to this project. A triumphal arch was con-
structed at the fortress of Kherson on the estuary of the river Bug which read
“the way to Byzantium.” But the Russo-Turkish war did not fulfill Catherine’s
expectations, and the project was abandoned.
44
Peter to Order of Malta (Moscow, 30 Apr. 1697), in Pis’ma i bumagi imperatora Petra Veli-
kago (Saint Petersburg, 1887), 1, 154–55.
45
PSRL, 19: no. 13996 (17 June 1773).
46
Mikhail M. Shcherbatov “Statistika v razsuzhdeni Rossii,” Chteniia v imperatorskom
obshchestve istorii i drevnostei pri Moskovskom Universitete, 30 (1859), 3, 2: 61–62.
47
Slovar russkogo iazyka XI–XVII vv (Moscow, 1981), 8: 46. A far cry from the newer Russian
crusader, exemplified by Andrei Malov, the chaplain of the 4th Orenburg Line battalion at the
siege of Tashkent in 1865, who led an assault holding his cross on high. See Turkestanskii
krai: sbornik materialov dlia istorii ego zavoevaniia, A. G. Serebrennikov, ed., 19 vols. (Tashkent,
1914), 19, 1: 210; Mikhail Afrikanovich Terent’ev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 3 vols. in 2
(Saint Petersburg, 1906), 1: 315.
48
On this “Greek Project” see Vladen Nikolaevich Vinogradov, “Vek Ekateriny II: proryv na
Balkany,” Novaia I Noveishaia Istoriia (1996) 4: 43–64; Hugh Ragsdale, “Evaluating the Tra-
ditions of Russian Aggression: Catherine II and the Greek Project,” Slavonic and East European
Review 66, 1 (1988): 91– 117. Sochineniia Imperatritsy Ekateriny II (St. Petersburg, 1901), 2:
259–304.
One critic called for a grand Orthodox Christian empire, centered in Rome,
with the Pope subordinate to the Tsar in Petersburg.49 The Byzantine emperors
Justinian and Constantine were posited as the models for Russian expansion
into Central Asia.50 The solution to the “Eastern Question,”—the conflict
among the powers of Europe concerning the fate of the Balkans and the
Eastern Mediterranean—was, in the eyes of Fyodor Dostoevskii writing in
1877, to liberate Constantinople.51 By the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Greek nationalists had already rallied behind this concept in the so-
called Megale idea, which envisioned a re-establishment of a Greater Greek
kingdom with a capital at Constantinople.52 Perhaps the best-known articula-
tion of the Megale idea, in the context of Greek territorial expansion, or irre-
dentism, was that by John Kolettes, who combined French-influenced
nationalism with an almost messianic concept of Greek destiny. As early as
1834 he proposed that any new Greek state should “forego an official
capital as a solemn reminder that only Constantinople could serve that lofty
purpose, as a sign of Greek faith in the imminence of its acquisition.”53
Some politicians took this idea one step further and envisioned Greece in
the widest possible geographical context, stretching from the Danube and
the Black Sea in the north to the Euphrates in the east, the Adriatic in the
west and the Mediterranean in the south.54 A “crusade” was even called for
to establish the Greek Christian empire.55
This desire for the re-conquest of Constantinople and the re-establishment
of a Christian state in the eastern Mediterranean was sustained well into the
twentieth century. It was used to bridge the gap between the often-liberal
nationalism of the politicians and the vehement traditionalism of the church
leaders and their large popular followings, and Balkan monarchs and their pro-
pagandists invoked repeatedly the theme of holy war.56
49
Note, for example, the plans of the mystic poet Fyodor Tiutchev (1803–1873). Fedor
I. Tiutchev, Sochineniia: stikhotvoreniia i politicheskiia stati (Saint Petersburg, 1886), 141, 193.
50
See Nikolai IA. Danilevsky, Rossiia i Evropa (New York, 1966), 419.
51
Fyodor Dostoevskii, Dnevnik Pisatelia za 1877 god (Paris, 1951), Mar. 1877, 97.
52
See R. Clogg, “The Byzantine Legacy in the Modern Greek World: The Megali Idea,” in,
L. Clucas, ed., The Byzantine Legacy in Eastern Europe (Boulder, Colo., 1988), 253–81.
53
Quoted in Theodore George Tatsios, The Megali Idea and the Greek-Turkish War of 1897:
The Impact of the Cretan Problem on Greek Irredentism, 1866–1897 (Boulder, Colo., 1984), 16.
See also Kolettes’ speech to the Greek National Assembly, in Eduard Driault and Michel
Lheretier, Histoire diplomatique de la Grèce de 1821 à nos jours, 5 vols. (Paris, 1925–1926),
2: 252– 53.
54
See the speech of Kleominis Oikonomou [Logos en ti Vouli peris tis ikonopoliseos i polemou
kentia tis Tourkias (Athens, 1898)]; the anonymous 1855 pamphlet Panellenis (Ermopoulis,
1855); and the citations from the newspapers Aion (especially 1 Jan. 1854) and Athina, which
broadcast such ideas to the public at large, as noted by John S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a
Cause: Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece, 1821–1919 (Oxford, 1987), 308 –9,
notes 43, 44, and 45.
55
Koliopoulos, Brigands, 309–10, and note.
56
See Madame Guy Chantepleure’s observations of Greek demonstrations in 1913, in
Eduard Driault, Le roi Constantin (Versailles, 1930), 65– 66. Queen Maria of Romania
306 ADAM KNOBLER
Ethiopia
Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia (r. 1855– 1868) stated throughout his
career that one of his ultimate goals was the re-conquest of Jerusalem in
the name of Christendom.57 He initially gained his power and notoriety
in battles and skirmishes against the armies of Mehmet Ali of Egypt, and
upon coronation he chose the name Tewodros because an old Ethiopian
legend prophesied that Jerusalem would fall to a man with such a
name.58 In wishing to fight “the Turk” (his term encompassing all
Muslims) and liberate Jerusalem, Tewodros was perceived by outsiders
and, on occasion, presented himself as following in the tradition of the
Solomonic sainted kings of Ethiopia’s Middle Ages such as Dawit,
whose victories against the Mamluks and whose stated ambitions in re-con-
quering Jerusalem had become legend. Yet Tewodros was not himself of
Solomonic or royal descent. Therefore the dream of Jerusalem, the claim
of being a holy warrior, and the adoption of the persona of a crusader,
were merely means of bolstering his claim to legitimacy at home, and
gaining respectability as an equal among the “Christian” nations in
Europe.59 Toward this end, Tewodros worked incessantly to demonstrate
his piety to both the monarchs of Europe and his own people, and his
status as a legitimate holy warrior.60
One of the most curious aspects of Tewodros’ career is the uncomfortable
balance between his desire to bring Ethiopia into the modern technological
age and his insistence on perceiving the world in terms of a Christian-
Muslim dichotomy. One of his most important advisors, Mahdere Qal
Tewelde Medhiin, was one of the first modern Ethiopians to be educated in
Europe, at a college in Malta, where he would have been surrounded by the
memories of the Knights.61 Tewodros must have been shocked at the
British alliance with the Ottomans, considering what he felt was the religious
specifically ordered a Byzantine/medieval theme for her official coronation in 1922. See. Mabel
Daggett, Marie of Roumania: The Intimate Story of the Radiant Queen (New York, 1926),
294–95.
57
David Appleyard and Richard Pankhurst, “The Last Two Letters of Emperor Tewodros II of
Ethiopia (11 and 12 April 1868),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1987), 31.
58
Appleyard and Pankhurst, “The Last Two letters,” 23; Richard Pankhurst, “‘Tewodros’: The
Question of a Greco-Romanian or Russian Hermit or Adventurer in Nineteenth-Century Ethiopia,”
Abba Salama 5(1974): 136–42.
59
Tewodros was very conscious of his non-Solomonic birth. H. A. Stern, Wanderings among
the Falashas in Abyssinia (London, 1862), 63, 80f.
60
Tewodros to Victoria (Nov. 1857), in, Sven Rubenson, ed., Tewodros and His Contempor-
aries 1855–1868 (Addis Ababa/Lund, 1994), no. 24, where he attempted to establish a common-
ality based on common faith. The same may be found in a letter written nearly a decade later
(29 Jan. 1866), in ibid., no. 162.
61
See Tewodros and His Contemporaries, no. 1, and note.
basis of his relationship with the British.62 The theme of Christian solidarity
against Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world runs through much of his cor-
respondence, and he expected any warfare against the Ottomans to be con-
ducted by a united Christian front.63 In a final testimony Tewodros
addressed to the English in 1868, shortly before his suicide, he wrote,
“Let alone my Ethiopian enemies, it had seemed to me that I should march
to Jerusalem and drive out the Turks.”64 Tewodros’ historical legacy is that
of an Ethiopian crusader bent on capturing Jerusalem. Contemporary Ethio-
pian writers still commemorate him as such.65
By claiming a direct linear claim to holy warriors of the past, or compar-
ing their own actions to those of past rulers, nineteenth-century leaders
could link themselves with a great martial tradition at a time when the
tenor of politics called into question monarchial legitimacy. While the
Spanish might have been divided regarding who was the rightful ruler of
Spain at mid-century, none would dare deny that Spanish kings in the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries had created the greatest global empire of its
day, had spread Spanish culture over half the globe, and had expelled
Muslim invaders from the Iberian Peninsula under the banner of Santiago
and with crusading bulls from the Papacy. Nor would any Frenchman
have questioned the role of “French” soldiers in fighting and defeating
Muslims in the first crusade. Any king who could revive those glories
would gain the respect of not only his own people but also the entire
Christian world. Following the Revolutions of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, that would be no small accomplishment. Like-
wise, Orthodox monarchs had, indeed, ruled the vast Byzantine Empire,
which was the linear inheritor of Rome but had in its own right spread
from Italy to Western Asia.
Secondly, the declaration of holy war also provided curious comfort. The
Middle Ages recalled a time of moral absolutes, romantic heroism, and
noble deeds—a far cry from the Gatling guns and artillery that marked
the modern military experience. A war couched as a crusade, re-conquest,
or holy war was one where death meant more than simply burial in the
Moroccan desert, Balkan forest, Ethiopian mountaintop, or Central Asian
plateau. It gave hope for a salvation that seemed desperately far from the
modern battlefield.
62
On the difficulties of British-Turkish alliance, see Plowden to [British Foreign Secretary] the
Earl of Clarendon, 7 Apr. 1855, in K. V. Ram, The Barren Relationship: Britain and Ethiopia,
1805 to 1868: A Study of British Policy (New Delhi, 1985), 85.
63
See his letter to Queen Victoria with a similar letter to Napoleon III on 29 Oct. 1862, in.
Tewodros and His Contemporaries, nos. 117 –18.
64
Appleyard and Pankhurst, “The Last Two Letters,” 31.
65
See Alämayähu Mogäs, Yamarinna Qene Mastamärya (Addis Ababa, 1959), 29, cited in
Taye Assefa, “Tewodros in Ethiopian Historical Fiction,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 16
(1983): 122.
308 ADAM KNOBLER
The use of crusading images corresponded to a need on the part of tradition-

alist forces to forge cultural symbols of their own that contrasted with the
Revolutionary symbols of liberty used by liberals in France and Spain.
History lessons taught by priests in local schools were sure to include tales
of St. Louis, El Cid, and the great era of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II’s
global crusading vision.66 The same was true in Greece and Russia, where
schoolbooks and popular literature emphasized the Byzantine legacy of
their cultures and the continuing need to expel the Turkish enemy from Ortho-
doxy’s rightful home. By the time children so schooled had reached adult-
hood, these heroes of the past were more likely to seize their imaginations
than more abstract notions of choice, freedom, and liberty presented by poli-
ticians from Paris and Madrid, Athens and St. Petersburg. Traditionalists
placed their political hopes on just this sort of sentiment of collective
memory. In Ethiopia, Tewodros wished to be seen as a modernizer but also
a man who respected and indeed revered tradition, and he used titles and
legal practice to reestablish what he felt was a lost sense of a single Ethiopian
kingdom. All of these tactics failed in the end to restore the past as envisioned,
but they established precedents for the twentieth-century nation builders who
followed.
THE CREATION OF CRUSADING HEROES
Russia Under Paul I

In November 1796 Paul I acceded to the throne at the death of his mother,
Catherine the Great.67 Paul was Orthodox by birth if not by ancestry or incli-
nation. He had been educated in the history and traditions of French historio-
graphy and from childhood he developed a fascination with the Middle Ages
and medieval chivalry of the Hospitallers,68 as well as an interest in military
spectacle.69 This played itself out after the fall of Malta, when, blaming the
collapse on incompetence, the Russian priory of the Order declared Paul the
new Grand Master of the Hospitallers.70 At face value this was curious: an
Orthodox monarch claiming leadership of the most Roman Catholic of
orders, whose historical traditions had little impact on prior Russian
66
See Christian Amalvi, Les héros de l’Histoire de France: Recherché iconographique sur le
pantheon scolaire de la troisième République (Paris, 1979), 144– 48, 252.
67
For more details, see Roderick E. McGrew, “Paul I and the Knights of Malta,” in, Hugh
Ragsdale, ed., Paul I: A Reassessment of His Life and Reign (Pittsburgh, 1979), 44–75; Idem.,
Paul I of Russia (Oxford, 1992), 258ff.
68
Dmitrii Kobeko, Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich, 1754–1796 (St. Petersburg, 1887), 166–67.
Following his marriage, Paul staged mock medieval tournaments regularly.
69
Semen Poroshin, Zapiski (St. Petersburg, 1881), 327– 33, 416, 517 –18; N. K. Shil’der,
Imperator Pavel Pervyi (St. Petersburg, 1901), 61–64.
70
Paul’s manifesto in Michel, Comte de Pierredon, Histoire politique de l’ordre souverain de
Jérusalem (Ordre de Malte) de 1789 à 1955, 3 vols. (Paris, 1956), 1: 341–47; his Ukase in ibid.,
348–49.
history.71 On the other hand, Paul could claim a role as protector over all
Christians both Latin and Orthodox.72
Paul saw in the Hospitallers something of an opportunity for Russia to
return to a golden age. He conceived of the past in almost wholly western
rather than Russian terms. He declared that the Knights, with their history
of glory and grand ceremony, were a “means for states to increase strength,
serenity, and glory . . . which will offer to OUR faithful nobility a further
motive to stimulate the love of glory.”73 Their formal establishment in
Russia would allow the nation and its nobility to recapture its past, yet
without returning to what he felt was the barbarism of Russia’s Middle
Ages. The Knights represented a “new” old order into which the Russian nobi-
lity could be brought in order to stave off revolutionary change, preserve tra-
ditional political and social values, and, in essence, restore the elaborate pomp
and ceremony of the great monarchies of the past. It would introduce into
Russian autocracy formalized ritual traditions of the sort the Latin West had
in such abundance but the tsar felt the Russian nobility lacked. With traditions
would come strength, and with strength a rejuvenated golden age. Paul intro-
duced the Order into the life of Russian nobility, and the result was highly
compatible with his love of ceremony.74
Perhaps not surprisingly, Paul’s schemes drew opposition and ridicule from
those who saw the entire project as a masquerade.75 Yet, Paul continued to
search for a neo-medieval revival, going so far as to build his own medieval-
esque castle, the Michael Castle, moving there from the Winter Palace in early
1801. The new building even contained a “Resurrection Hall” designed
specifically for the ceremonies of the Knights. Within five weeks the Tsar
was dead from an assassin’s bullet, and his castle and other medieval simula-
cra were seen by many as merely an example of his mental instability.
Britain
The Protestant British had to refashion thoroughly a medieval heritage that
they had, in large part, rejected as outmoded Catholic barbarism less than a
century before. Yet there can be no question that the British popular imagin-
ation of the nineteenth century still looked upon the notion of medieval
71
For the history of relations between the Order and Russia, see Cyril Toumanoff and Olgerd
P. de Sherbowitz-Wetzor, L’Ordre de Malte et l’Empire de Russie (Rome, 1979); Petr Perminov,
Pod sen’iu vos’mikonechnogo kresta: Mal’tiiskii orden i ego sviazi s Rossiei (Moscow, 1991);
Andrew P. Vella, Malta and the Czars: Diplomatic Relations between the Order of Saint John
and Russia, 1697–1802 (Valletta, 1972).
72
On this see Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian
Monarch, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1995–2000), 1: 185f.
73
“Appel de l’Empereur Paul Ier,” in Pierredon, Histoire politique, 1, 377–79.
74
McGrew, “Paul I and the Knights,” 59– 60; N. IA. Eidel’man, Gran’ vekov: politicheskaia
bor’ba Rossii, konets XVIII-nachala XIX stoletiia (Moscow, 1986), 79– 80.
75
Adam Czartoryski, Gran’ vekov, 189.
310 ADAM KNOBLER
chivalry and gentlemanly honor with great fondness and fascination. Marc
Girouard and others have discussed at great length how, despite the admoni-
tions of historians, the romance of the crusades and crusading remained very
much part of both the literary output of romantic authors such as Sir Walter
Scott and the iconographic, artistic, and public self-presentation of Britain’s
elite classes. Through such self-presentation they attempted to cling to their
own sense of class privilege at a time when earned capital and inherited,
landed wealth could control the political and social fortunes of the nation.76
The crusades were de-Catholicized and gradually blended into “the cult of
Christian militarism” which first took hold in Britain at the time of the
Crimean War.77 Those with apocalyptic expectations could cite a variety of
Biblical passages (e.g., Dan. 8:9; Rev. 12:12) as predicting the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire.78 The image of the crusades and the crusader reentered
the public sphere as part of popular political discourse of empire to such an
extent that, by World War One, war campaigns and war heroes were regularly
lauded as crusaders in the popular press, from the pulpit, and in the official
propaganda of the British war machine. Military failures as much as victories
became the birthplace for “soldier-saints”: men of arms who carried with them
all of the knightly virtues associated with “crusading.” The convergence of
three separate, but ultimately integrated phenomena of the Regency and
early Victorian periods prompted this phenomenon: the feminization of
British religion, the rise of public, patriotic rhetoric, and, gradually, the chan-
ging nature of warfare and the realities of war as the century progressed.
Until recently, most twentieth-century historians have downplayed the
importance of religion and religious instruction in forming national and com-
munal identities in Victorian Britain. Instead, they have seen religion and reli-
gious teaching as a means of social control foisted upon the lower orders from
above. Religion has been interpreted as something quite apart from the self-
identification of the working classes, in particular, and as only peripheral to
the mainstream of political narrative. While many churches, particularly
Anglican and Roman Catholic, were hierarchical in their presentation of
scripture, members of the so-called dissenting denominations (Methodists,
Baptists, Congregationalists) held a far more egalitarian view of religion.
This is significant because the Victorian public was, in large part, educated
not merely in school but also from the pulpit.79 The Churches and their
76
See Marc Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New
Haven, 1981). The most recent and complete study is Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders:
Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000).
77
On this phenomenon, see the seminal article by Olive Anderson, “The Growth of Christian
Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain,” English Historical Review 86 (1971): 46–72.
78
Ernest Peter Cachemaille, Turkey: Past, Present, and Future in Prophecy, Aids to Prophetic
Study 9 (London, 1916).
79
Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-
Century England (Stanford, 1999), 5.
parishioners’ study of scripture created a sense of identity based upon a

common interpretation of certain texts, images, and stories, and this identity
transcended boundaries of class.80 Many of these archetypes were taught,
learned, and memorized through the Sunday School movement, which even
un-churched adults had attended as children. Churches had been under terrific
pressure to retain in their pews those men who had attended Sunday school but
to whom the more worldly concerns of workplace, male camaraderie, and
financial success were more enticing than stories taken from the patriarchs
or the Gospels. Scholars have referred to the increasing imbalance between
men’s and women’s participation and attendance in church activities as a fem-
inization of nineteenth-century religion. The phenomenon existed not only in
Britain but in America, where British traveler Frances Trollope observed, in
the 1820s, she had never seen “or read, of any country where religion had
so strong a hold upon the women, or a slighter hold upon the men.”81 This
state of affairs posed both a spiritual and a financial problem for churches
on both sides of the Atlantic for while women filled the pews men paid the
clergymen’s salaries.82 In order to redress this imbalance, churches tried to
associate themselves with causes and rhetoric designed specifically to lure
men back to services and away from the more worldly temptations available
to post-Sunday School, school leavers. Most consistently, they attempted to
incorporate manly and martial images into the presentation of religion, the
church, and the life of Jesus. The goal was to counter the common view
that devoutly religious men and male missionaries were, in Charles Dickens’s
words, akin to “weird old women,” or, as others put it, “not quite men.”83 The
churches themselves were keenly aware of this broad, public notion of their
activities as being somehow antithetical to accepted forms of masculine beha-
vior. The Congregationalist preacher, C. H. Spurgeon wrote at the end of the
nineteenth century, “There has got abroad a notion, somehow, that if you
become a Christian, you sink your manliness.”84
This attitude was most notable in an era when the call to arms and the right
to defend and extend Britain’s empire through soldiering became intimately
80
Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in
the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983).
81
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York, 1960[1832]), 75.
82
Terry D. Bilhartz, “Sex and the Second Great Awakening: The Feminization of American
Religion Reconsidered,” in, Philip R. Vandermeer and Robert P. Swierenga, eds., Belief and Beha-
vior: Essays in the New Religious History (New Brunswick, 1991), 123.
83
Charles Dickens, “The Niger Expedition,” in Miscellaneous Papers 1 (London, 1848; repr.,
Millwood, N.Y., 1983). See also William Thackeray’s coeval portrayal of Pitt Crawley as “Miss
Crawley” whilst at Eton, in, Peter L. Shillingsburg, ed., Vanity Fair, (New York, 1989), ch. 9;
Thorne, Congregational Missions, 90.
84
C. H. Spurgeon, A Good Start: A Book for Young Men and Women (London, 1898), 16, 24.
This idea was echoed by William Alexander Smith, founder of the Boys’ Brigades, who stated that
most boys equated being a Christian to being a “molly-coddle.” See William Smith, “The Boys’
Brigade: Its Organization and Methods,” Boys’ Brigade Gazette 1 (2 Feb. 1891), 168–69.
312 ADAM KNOBLER
attached to notions of manliness, an idea reinforced for the elites through the
development of military corps in the Public Schools, and for the middle and
working classes through the development of the Volunteer Forces. As the
century progressed, soldiering developed into a moral mandate for British
men. The solution to the disconnection between religion and masculinity
came in a variety of forms: hellfire preaching replete with images of battle
and warfare in the form of revivalism, education and socialization techniques
for boys which combined Christian teachings with sport and other “mascu-
line” pursuits, and the search for iconic heroes (both fictional and in life)
who combined strong manly actions in war with deep and devoted piety,
without contradiction between them. This attempt to marry martial imagery
with Christian teachings has been deemed “Christian militarism.”
For the elites, for whom there had long been a military pedigree and for
whom soldiering was often seen as a traditional calling, the public schools
served to meld Christianity and masculinity quite well. Particularly important
were the teachings of Charles Kingsley, which promoted a “Healthful and
manful Christianity . . . which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclu-
sion of the masculine.” Kingsley’s teachings became central to the educational
philosophies of schools such as Eton and Rugby. Some observers, such as the
writer Thomas Hughes, went so far as to see Christian virtue in violence.85
The task of getting the message to the working classes was more difficult.
One of the most common methods in this regard was the development of
mutual improvement societies and organizations such as the Young Men’s
Christian Association and the Boys’ Brigade. The founding purpose of such
organizations was to serve both as vehicles for bringing the ideals of Christian
manliness to the lower middle and working classes, and also to ease the
transition of young men both from Sunday and state school leaving, and to
adulthood in the workplace or army. However, given the deeply ingrained
antipathy between the image of the religious molly-coddle and the desire
for true manliness, which every boy was supposed to desire, the success of
such organizations was marginal.86
Nonetheless, success was found in the propagation of the manly, Christian
military icon—both fictional and factual—whose martial deeds in service of
the empire never overshadowed his devout faith and humble piety.87 Such
soldier saints and heroes of the empire and their deeds were most frequently
portrayed in terms of crusading and crusaders, with parallels to Richard I,
England’s most notable crusading king in great evidence. This is no surprise,
since the crusades of the late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were
85
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days at Rugby (Cambridge, 1857).
86
See Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (Boston, 1870), passim, esp. Introduction.
87
The most famous of these early fictional soldier saints was the eponymous hero of Catherine
Marsh, Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, 97th regiment (London, 1856), which was written
expressly to serve as an instrument of evangelism among young men.
the most obvious historic unification of religious piety and manly, martial
virtues. Publications became one of the primary means of education, most
notably the Boy’s Own Paper founded by the Religious Tract Society,
which, with its lauding of soldier-saints became for wealthy and impover-
ished boys alike the “unofficial organ” of the muscular Christianity
movement.88
From the 1840s the language of chivalry and crusading was used within the
army with increasing self-consciousness. Even before Crimea, soldier-writers
such as Sir William Napier were fond of describing the early heroes of British
campaigns in India, especially, in crusading terms.89 By the 1860s, the associ-
ation of religion and femininity had largely been obliterated from the minds of
those who sought inspiration from new, militaristic hymns such as Sabine
Baring-Gould’s “Onward Christian Soldiers,” written initially in 1864 for
schoolchildren at Baring-Gould’s Horbury Bridge mission.90 Some prominent
Englishmen attempted to take crusading to its ultimate extreme. In his second
will (September 1877), Cecil Rhodes instructed his executors to establish a
secret society dedicated to, among other things, encouraging British occu-
pation of the Holy Land.91
Crusading imagery was used most vividly in the development of personality
cults around military heroes of the empire. The disasters of the Indian Mutiny
bore a number of “crusaders.” King Baldwin I of Jerusalem and King Richard
the Lion-hearted themselves would “look very poor beside many whom we
could mention,” one commentator noted.92 Perhaps no English warrior in
India was lauded more for his crusading virtues than Sir Henry Havelock
the Christian martyr par excellence. Havelock, it was written, was concerned
88
Note such stories as G. Demage’s “A Plunge into the Sahara” [translated from selections of À
travers le Sahara. Adventures merveileuses de Marius Mercurin (Paris, 1894)], in Boy’s Own
Paper 16 (1893–1894), which noted that the preaching of Christianity in the Sahara was “a
noble revenge for the death of St. Louis and the Mohammedan Conquest of the Holy Sepulchre.”
By the late 1880s, Boy’s Own had a circulation in excess of a half-million.
89
William Napier was the brother of Sir Charles Napier, who undertook the conquest of Sind in
1842. See William Napier, The Conquest of Scinde, 2d ed. (London, 1845).
90
Other hymns from this period with crusading themes included J.S.B. Monsell’s “Fight the
Good Fight”; W. W. How’s “For All the Saints”; E. P. Hammond’s “Marching Along, We are
Marching Along”; and George Duffield’s “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, Ye Soldiers of the
Cross.” I should like to thank Elisabeth Jill Henderson-Wild, Thalia Wild, and the late James
Wild for helping me identify some of these themes through their deep knowledge of Anglican
hymnody.
91
W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 61–62.
92
E. P. Hood, Havelock: The Broad Sword of Honour. A Tribute of the Tongue and Pen
(London, 1858), 8. Also see descriptions of Sir Herbert Edwardes, commander of British troops
against the Sikhs in the 1840s, and reconciled the Afghans during the 1857 uprising, who was
described as a “Christian Knight.” See Edward Gilliat, Heroes of Modern India (London,
1911), 198. See, too, stories of the “stern and just knight” John Nicholson, who was killed
leading the first British assault on Delhi in 1857; John Kaye, Lives of Indian Officers (London,
1889), 2: 488 –89, quoting Edwardes; and that of Sir Henry Lawrence, killed at Lucknow in
1857, whose deeds were likened to “an old knight in a story.” See Gilliat, Heroes, 312.
314 ADAM KNOBLER
“for the honour of the Cross and for the honour of England.”93 His religious
virtues were lauded by John Ruskin, who referred to Havelock and his men
as “Crusaders . . . indeed.”94 The Nonconformist journalist Hugh Shimmin,
in his exposés of the conditions of Liverpool’s working class, wrote how pic-
tures of Havelock were commonplace on sitting room walls, demonstrating
the widespread popularity of the new crusading saints even in the meanest
of social circumstances.95
Exceeding even Havelock in his resemblance to a medieval crusader was
General Charles George Gordon, hero of China and martyr of Sudan. This
is not surprising, since Gordon’s final enemies were Muslims, and the parallels
with the Muslim opponents of the crusades could be made readily manifest.
Even before his death at Khartoum, Gordon was presented publicly as a
crusader, as “the very exemplar of muscular Christianity.”96 Books referred
to his faith and his symbolic place in the English mind by their very titles
such as Abraham Kingdon’s Gordon: The Christian Hero (1885) and the
anonymous England’s Hero and Christian Soldier (1886).
Gordon’s life was described as divided “naturally into three portions . . .
three distinct campaigns in one Crusade.”97 “The old symbols of the Holy
War, of the ceaseless Crusade,” one encomiast wrote, “wake up to a new
life through this man who was so essentially a soldier, and so essentially a
Christian.”98 Another encomiast referred to Gordon as a “Christian knight
errant,” whose life proved that “the age of chivalry [was] not gone.”99 No
less a public figure than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw the ultimate victory of
the British over the forces of the Mahdi in Sudan as a clear triumph of Chris-
tianity over Islam.100
Gordon’s death was portrayed as a passion play, “teaching, not preaching,
how soldier-saints die.”101 One author spoke in tones reminiscent medieval
millennialists in predicting the overthrow and conversion of Egypt, the restor-
ation of the houses of Israel, and the return of the “remnant of God’s people
93
Hood, Havelock, 61.
94
John Ruskin, “A Knight’s Faith,” in, Edward T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., The
Works of Ruskin, Vol. 31 (London, 1907), 506.
95
Hugh Shimmin, Liverpool Sketches (London, 1860), 115.
96
Edward Gilliat, for example, presents him as one of his “heroes of modern crusades,” though
as much for his work with youth in England as for his victories or “martyrdom” on the battlefield,
in, Heroes of Modern Crusades: True Stories of the Undaunted Chivalry of Champions of the
Down-Trodden in Many Lands (London, 1909), ch. 13.
97
Elizabeth R. Charles, Three Martyrs of the Nineteenth Century: Studies from the Lives of
Livingstone, Gordon and Patteson (London, 1885), 172.
98
Charles, Three Martyrs, 173.
99
The former is the title of chapter 6 of Robert E. Speer’s Some Great Leaders in the World
Movement (New York, 1911); the latter is from England’s Hero and Christian Soldier: A Biogra-
phical and Historical Sketch of the Life of General C. G. Gordon (London, 1886), 230.
100
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Tragedy of the Korosko (London, 1898), 320, 329ff.
101
“General Gordon of Khartoum,” in, Ella May Gordon, White Heather (London, 1909),
207–9, line 20.
from the land of Cush.”102 There was, he wrote “no clear and definite evidence
of General Gordon’s death,” and scriptural arguments favored his survival.103
He then characterized Gordon as a modern Joshua, the savior and deliverer of
Egypt.104 By the century’s conclusion, Professor J. A. Cramb, an ardently
militaristic professor of modern history at London, could write conclusively
that “this ideal of Imperial Britain—to bring the peoples of the earth
beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher justice—the world has
known none fairer, none more exalted, since that for which Godfrey and
Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St. Louis died.”105
World War One provided perhaps the widest berth for those wishing to
evoke crusading imagery.106 Politicians and preachers alike declared the
war against the Germans a crusade. As early as November 1914 the M. P.
Lord Halifax called for the formal declaration of a holy war against
Germany.107 Not surprisingly, such sentiment was echoed manifold from
the prominent pulpits of Britain.108
Crusading imagery became even more vivid with the actual development of
military operations against the Muslim, Ottoman Turks in and around the Holy
Land, with its direct historical connections with the crusades.109 However, a
wide range of commentators and participants looked upon the Palestine cam-
paign, both during the action and in retrospect, as nothing less than the last
crusade, destined to restore Jerusalem to the forces of Christendom. While
the government (and General Allenby, for that matter) chose to keep their
public pronouncements on the campaign purely secular, the War Office was
102
John Meaburn Bright, Who Is the White Pasha? A Story of Coming Victory (London, 1889), 4.
103
Ibid., 23, 29.
104
Ibid., 45– 47, 104–65.
105
J. A. Cramb, “Lecture IV: The War in South Africa (29 May 1900),” in Reflections on the
Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain (London, 1900), 160.
106
For an in-depth study of World War I and chivalry, see Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good:
Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago, 2004).
107
He was echoed by the Lord Chancellor Lord Haldane and the principal of Newnham
College, Cambridge, Eleanor Sidgwick (who was the sister of the future Foreign Secretary,
A. J. Balfour). See Church Times (27 Nov. 1914); Church Family Newspaper (12 Feb. 1915).
108
“There is a sense, as with the ancient knights, in which these roaring guns of yours may be
baptized for the service of goodness and truth. . ..” James Black, Around the Guns: Sundays in
Camp (London, 1915), 21. The American clergyman Randolph McKim proclaimed the war to
be “indeed a crusade” (R. H. McKim, For God and Country; or the Christian Pulpit in
Wartime Addresses [New York, 1918], 116 –17). Bishop Arthur Winnington-Ingram (1858–
1946), the so-called “Bishop of the Battlefields,” appealed to the Church to “Mobilize the
Nation for a Holy War.” (Guardian, 10 June, 24 June, and 1 July 1915; and Church Times, 1
Oct. 1915).
109
Note that this ‘crusading’ was never condoned as an official ideology in the houses of Parlia-
ment. The fall of Jerusalem in 1917 was described in wholly secular terms by both Chancellor
Andrew Bonar Law (who made the initial report on behalf of the government) and Prime Minister
David Lloyd-George (Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., 100 (1917), cols. 875, 1180–
81). However, Lloyd-George, looking back upon his political career later in life, wrote that, with
Allenby, Christendom had been able to regain possession of its sacred shrines. See David Lloyd-
George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 6 vols. (London, 1933–1936), 1879.
316 ADAM KNOBLER
not above using a crusading image to garner popular support, entitling one of
their films on the campaign “The New Crusaders.”110 Clearly, the crusades
were a readily identifiable image for the British public at large.
The actor Vivian Gilbert, who served under Allenby and then commenced a
Trans-Atlantic lecture tour about his experiences, repeatedly talked about the
“Tenth Crusade,” making the medieval-modern contrast explicit.111 “The
spirit of the Crusaders was in all these men of mine,” he wrote, “Was not
their courage just as great, their idealism just as fine, as that of the knights
of old who had set out with such dauntless faith under the leadership of
Richard the Lion Hearted to free the Holy Land?”112
Among the elites, nowhere was this imagery stronger (or more dramatized)
than in the musings of the poet Rupert Brooke. Writing in February and March
of 1915, Brooke told of his life-long desire to go on a military expedition
against Constantinople, and even referred to himself, somewhat disparagingly,
as a crusader.113 This image, self-conscious though it might have been,
remained with Brooke until his death. Even the legend on Brooke’s grave
reads “Here lies the servant of God, Sub-Lieutenant in the English Navy,
who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks.”114
Allenby’s name is, of course, most clearly attached to the Palestine
campaign and the capture of Jerusalem. In truth, he became irritated by any
“crusading” imagery attached to his campaigns. Speaking in Jerusalem in
1937, he said, “Our campaign has been called ‘The Last Crusade.’ It was
not a crusade. There is still a current idea that our object was to deliver
Jerusalem from the Moslem. Not so. Many of my soldiers were
Moslems.”115 This statement is a far cry from the over-dramatized crusading
sentiment found in Ernest Raymond’s fictionalized autobiography meant for a
more middle class audience. Recalling speeches made while he served at the
Gallipoli campaign, Raymond placed the following words in the mouth of a
zealous and veteran colonel of troops: “I say the Gallipoli campaign is a
New Crusade . . . Constantinople is a sacred city. It’s the only ancient city
purely Christian in its origin . . . In their fight to wrest this city from the
Turk, the three great divisions of the Church are united once more . . .
Christendom United fights for Constantinople, under the leadership of the
110
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 75.
111
Vivian Gilbert, The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem (New York,
1923), 171.
112
Ibid., 37.
113
Brooke to Violet Asquith, Feb. 1915, in Rupert Brooke, Letters, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed.
(London, 1968), 662–63; Brooke to Jacques Raverat, 8 Mar. 1915, in Brooke, Letters, 668.
114
W. Denis Browne to Edward Marsh, 25 Apr. 1915, in Brooke, Letters, 686. Both men were
Cambridge friends of Brooke, and Marsh authored The Memoir of Rupert Brooke (London, 1918).
115
Notes from a lecture given by Allenby at Y.M.C.A., Jerusalem, 19 Apr. 1933, 6/VIII/70,
Allenby papers [now MS. London, King’s College, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives,
Allenby papers 3/5], in Jonathan Newell, “Allenby and the Palestine Campaign,” in, Brian
Bond, ed., The First World War and British Military History (Oxford, 1991), 193.
British, whose flag is made up of the crosses of the saints. The army opposing
the Christian fights under the crescent of Islam . . . It’s the Cross against the
Crescent, again, my lads.”116
Allenby, a veteran of campaigns dating back to the Victorian period of colo-
nial and guerilla warfare, pointed out what Raymond concealed: there was
little romance to actual battlefield operations. The gradual mechanization of
warfare from the time of the Napoleonic Wars had changed the battlefield
experience forever. The romances of sword and cannon that filled the pages
of the Boy’s Own in the 1880s bore little resemblance to the hellish conditions
and mass execution brought by the machine gun, long distance artillery, and
trench warfare. As contemporary historians of the Gallipoli campaign have
pointed out from their interviews with veterans from the common soldiery,
crusading romance was difficult to cull from a sea “absolutely red with
blood” for fifty yards from the shore, or where the corpses floating in the
bay could be likened to a stranded shoal of fish, or where soldiers wept, not
from fear, but because of the foul, lice-infested, fecal-ridden conditions of
their existence. These grim realities help explain the need for that most roman-
tic of martial images: the medieval crusader whose just war, in a Christian
cause, was a comforting and universally understood metaphor for “fighting
the good fight.” As Michael Adams has put it succinctly, “Chivalry veneered
the naked use of force.”117
Bulgaria
If the British felt it necessary to reinterpret crusading for the nineteenth
century and reestablish a crusading heritage in the case of late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Bulgaria, we find a monarch who attempted to
import a western crusading ideology with which he was comfortable into a
country which had no crusading traditions. Ferdinand I of Bulgaria
(r.1887 –1918) worked during the central part of his reign to portray
himself, both to his people and to the diplomatic community of Europe, as
the logical leader of a newly formed Byzantine Empire. In this he came to
follow both the historiographic traditions with which he was raised and the
view posited by some Bulgarian historians that the Byzantine Empire was a
Slavic rather than a Greek enterprise.118
Born of a German father and a French mother, Ferdinand became keenly
aware of his position between Western and Eastern traditions. After an
early reign during which the new king displayed a great insensitivity toward
116
Ernest Raymond, Tell England: A Study in a Generation (New York, 1922), 196–97.
117
Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I
(Bloomington, 1990), 71.
118
This was most notably true with an 1874 history, edited by Dragan Manchov, intended for
use for the national schools. Dragan V. Manchov, Bulgarska istoriia za nardony uchilishta: ot
razny suchineniia po bulgarsku-tu istorii-u (Plovdiv, 1874).
318 ADAM KNOBLER
Orthodoxy, Bulgarian nationalists were justifiably wary of his loyalties and

faith. Thereafter, Ferdinand worked to appease traditionalist forces in the
society, notably the Church hierarchy and the army, by a skillful blending
of religious and militaristic imagery, which, for a German-born prince,
would have been typified by crusading.119 He was keenly aware of his
French heritage, as imbued in him by his mother Clémentine d’Orleans, the
daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. His first wife, Marie-Louise of
Bourbon-Parma, was a direct descendant of Charles X. Ferdinand declared
proudly at his marriage reception in 1893, “In my veins too flows the blood
of St. Louis.”120 During a visit to Constantinople in March and April of
1896, Ferdinand first began to play upon such crusading themes in his
foreign policy.121 The subsequent formation of the Balkan League in 1912
as a union of Christian states raised the specter of a true crusade of recovery
intended to eliminate Muslim power from Europe.122 In declaring war against
the Ottomans in October 1912, in the interest of “humanity and Christendom,”
Ferdinand, joined with the kings of Greece and Serbia, in a “struggle of the
Cross against the Crescent.”123 The Bulgarian declarations in the Balkan
War were, in essence, a western method applied to an eastern ambition.
Rumors spread in Europe that the Bulgarian monarch’s burning desire to
hear a Te Deum sung in Hagia Sophia was spurred on by religious
visions.124 The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue described a painting
of Constantinople, kept in a palace drawing room, which depicted Ferdinand
as a knight of the apocalypse, in clouds of purple and gold, riding toward
119
A notable example is his founding of the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius in 1909.
120
Joachim von Königslow, Ferdinand von Bulgarien (Munich, 1970), 14.
121
For Ferdinand’s reminiscences regarding the St. Sophia, see Maurice Paleologue, The
Tragic Empress: The Story of a Record of Intimate Talks with the Empress Eugenie,
1901–1919 (London, 1928), 174–75. Paul Cambon, the French ambassador to the Porte,
remarked that Ferdinand merely had a fantasy for pomp and ceremony. See Paul Cambon, Corres-
pondence 1870–1924, vol. 1 (Paris, 1940), 402.
122
Sir H. Bax-Ironside, British minister in Sofia, noted that, while Ferdinand “for many years
dreamed of the creation of a Byzantine Empire, of which he would be the Emperor, with its capital
at Constantinople,” he has now “turned towards the Confederation of the Balkan States, to be fol-
lowed by the creation of a Balkan Empire, of which His Majesty, or his successor, would be the
chief” (Bax-Ironside to [British Foreign Secretary] Sir Edward Grey, 24 Feb. 1912, in British
Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898– 1914, 9, 1: no. 554.
123
Speech in John MacDonald, Czar Ferdinand and His People (New York, 1971), 333–34;
see also, [German Foreign Minister] Kiderlen-Wächter to [German ambassador in London]
Richard von Kuhlmann, 20 Oct. 1912, in Die grosse Politik der europaischen Kabinette,
1871–1914. 68 vols. (Berlin, 1926– 1927), 33, no. 12287.
124
The desire for mass in Saint Sophia was noted by Albert, Graft von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Die-
trichstein [Austro-Hungarian ambassador in London] in a dispatch to Vienna (8 Nov. 1912), in
Österreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik von der bosnischen Krise 1908 bis zum Kriegsausbruch
1914, bd. 4 (Vienna, 1930), no. 4321. A similar report came from the Russian ambassador to
Britain, Count Benckendorff, via the German chargé d’affaires in London; see Die grosse
Politik der europı̈aschen Kabinette, v. 33, no. 12318.
Byzantium.125 The painter, Ivan Mrkvicka, had painted portraits of the

emperor and empress in full Byzantine imperial robes similar to those that por-
trayed the Bulgarian tsar John Alexander Asen in the fourteenth century.126 At
each point, Ferdinand’s public image employed historical allusions intended
to establish his legitimacy as a true leader among the Bulgarian people, and
the right of the Bulgarian nation to claim its proper inheritance to a grand
and glorious martial legacy. As the war progressed and Bulgarian forces
neared Constantinople itself in November and December of 1912, Ferdinand’s
dream approached reality to such a point that his own secretary, the French
poet Paul de Chèvremont, upon reflection noted that it was a case of fantasy
taking over political reality.127 Even the Ottoman Foreign Minister believed
that Ferdinand was “determined to enter and install himself in the
palaces.”128 Many in the courts of Europe felt that his bravado, if taken to
its logical conclusion, would have truly disastrous effects. George V of
Britain noted that all of the major powers that had Muslim subjects would
suffer uprisings should the cross be restored atop the Hagia Sophia.129 Ferdi-
nand himself believed victory was imminent and, perhaps in the ultimate
expression of new “invented crusading traditions,” he sent orders to Sofia to
bring six white horses and, according to the Russian minister, his Byzantine
emperor’s costume.130 This crusading propaganda was not limited to the
private dreams of the emperor—chromolithographs were distributed among
the Balkan troops that showed a ghostly Constantine XI, the last Byzantine
emperor, guiding the Balkan kings “toward St. Sophia in the distance.”131
In the end the Ottomans were able to hold Constantinople. This, combined
with the later disasters of the second Balkan War and World War One, resulted
in Ferdinand’s abdication and return to Germany. His grandson Simeon, after
years in exile himself, now serves as Prime Minister of Bulgaria and, ironi-
cally, is the first Bulgarian premier to have substantial Turkish representation
in his cabinet.
125
See Maurice Paléologue, Au quai d’Orsay a la veille de la tourmente: Journal, 1913–14
(Paris, 1947), 171 (16 July 1913). Paléologue, then French minister in Sofia (1907–1912), and
later French ambassador to Russia (1914– 1917), and director-general of the French foreign
office (1921–1925), was thought to be a collateral descendant of Constantine XI Palaeologus,
the last Byzantine Emperor.
126
See illustration 001; Andrei Protich, I.V. M’rkvichka: Zhivot i tvorchestvo (Sofia, 1955), 45;
Anatoli Vasilevich Nekliudov, the Russian minister at Sofia during the First Balkan War,
remarked that he was content to have himself portrayed by “third-rate painters.” See Anatoli
V. Nekliudov, Diplomatic Reminiscences before and during the World War, 1911– 1917, Alexan-
dra Paget, trans., 2d ed. (London, 1920), 12.
127
Madol, Ferdinand, 174.
128
Ibid., 172 –73.
129
Noted by Albert, Graft von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein in Österreich-Ungarns Aus-
senpolitik, no. 4321.
130
Nekludoff, Diplomatic Reminiscences, 120.
131
Constant, Foxy Ferdinand, 259.
320 ADAM KNOBLER
CRUSADING SUBVERTED: CRUSADING IN MUSLIM WRITING
Perhaps the most notable usage of portable crusading in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries was not found in the West at all, but rather, in
Muslim critiques of western imperialism. Muslim commentators looked
upon western imperialism as simply an extension of Medieval crusading,
accepting in essence a western historiography of Christian-Muslim conflict,
but appropriating and indeed subverting it to Muslim needs.
The Egyptian historian Sayyid Ali al-Hariri was the first Muslim to attempt
a full-scale study of the crusades. In 1899 he wrote that European attacks
against the Ottoman Empire bore “a great resemblance to the deeds of these
people in bygone times. Our most glorious Sultan, ‘Abd al-Hamı̂d II, has
rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us in
the form of a political campaign.”132 The battle was later described by theor-
ists such as the Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp as one of the crescent defend-
ing itself against the depredations of the cross.133 The “conscience of Europe,”
Gökalp wrote, was simply, as it had always been, the conscience of
Christianity.134
The call to religious struggle had great appeal, and during the 1870s the
Ottoman press often couched conflict with the west in terms of “Crescent
versus Cross,” particularly after most of the Ottoman Balkan Christian pro-
vinces had been lost. An attack on the Ottoman Empire, decrepit and faltering
as it may have been, not only threatened a now more fully Muslim polity, but
also challenged Sultan Abdülhamı̂d’s claim on the caliphate and thus on pan-
Islamic religious authority. Yet, the pan-Islam of the Ottoman Empire was
couched in secular and even outright western terms, in this case those of “cru-
sades” and “crusading.” Western military and missionizing attacks on the
Empire were interpreted as attacks on the moral and physical heart of Islam
itself. The medieval crusades, with their combination of missionary zeal
and frontal military assault, were the logical historical parallel. Only
Muslim unity could oppose these new crusades, some argued, and the crusad-
ing threat became an important theme in the writings of the pan-Islamic
movement.
The Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya in 1911 was one of the primary
stimulants of crusading imagery. Ottoman poet-politician Süleyman Nazı̂f,
in a piece entitled “Hayal değil, hakikat” (Truth, not fantasy), pointed to
the losses in Libya and the Balkans as further links in the chain of
132
Note al-Akhbar al-saniyya fi’l-hurub al-salibiyya (Cairo, 1899), 6 in Emanuel Sivan,
Modern Arab Historiography of the Crusades, (1973), 12.
133
Ziya Gökalp, Kizil Elma (1941), 81 –82, in Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationa-
lism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp (London, 1950), 99.
134
Ziya Gökalp, “Uç Cereyan,” in, Niyazi Berkes, ed., Turkish Nationalism and Western Civi-
lization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (New York, 1959), 75; Ziya Gökalp, “Cemaat Mede-
niyeti, Cemiyet Medeniyeti,” in Turkish Nationalism, 101 –2.
continuing Crusades, ones that demanded a pan-Islamic response.135

Muslims in India petitioned the Home Secretary to intervene against the
Italian action. Mirza Kazim Hosain, secretary of the London All-India
Muslim League, wrote to the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,
“As the seizure of Tripoli is represented by the Italians as a triumph of
the Cross over the Crescent they fear an impression will be created in the
Mussulman world that it is a religious war at which the rest of Christendom
[sic] is looking on unmoved.”136 The thoroughly secular tone of much of the
Italian propaganda regarding Libya in particular is striking. Yet the Viceroy
Lord Hardinge himself wrote: “The Turco-Italian war is producing a great
deal of agitation amongst the Mahommedans of India. I hear from the
North-West Frontier Province . . . that the war between Italy and Turkey
is the sole topic of discussion in the villages and amongst the tribes, and
the bazaar version is that we have conspired with Italy to help her seize
Tripoli.”137
The Balkan Wars evoked a similar reaction in the Muslim world. Syed Amir
Ali, the first Indian appointed as a Privy Council judge, reported from England
to the Indian Muslim paper The Comrade that the Balkan War had been pro-
claimed a crusade.138 Lord Hardinge again commented, “the Mahommedans
attribute our action or inaction to the fact of the Balkan States being Chris-
tians.”139 A correspondent of The Times noted how Ferdinand I of Bulgaria
used the term “crusade” at the beginning of the Balkan Wars, and that the
Muslim World perceived “that an unholy alliance exist[s] amongst the Chris-
tian Powers of the world not only to expel the Turks from Europe, but to put an
end to their existence as an independent . . . nation.”140
Mohammed Ali, the Muslim political leader who would later lead the Non-
Cooperation Movement with Gandhi, echoed this view in The Comrade,
stating, “The armies of the [Balkan] Confederacy have marched to battle
under the intoxication of religion. They have been proudly acclaimed by
135
Written as an appendix to Celal Nuri [Ileri], Ittihad-i Islâm: Islamin mazisi, hali, istikbali
(Istanbul, 1913); Landau, Politics, 84. In truth, only a small minority of Italian commentators
ever couched the Libyan invasion in crusading terms, and they tended to be on the Catholic
far-right: see “Mentra si volge l’imprese tripolina,” L’Unità Cattolica (15 Oct. 1911); “La nota
giusta nella Guerra presente,” in L’Unità Cattolica (17 Oct. 1911); “Cronaca contemporanea,”
in La Civiltà Cattolica (1911) 4: 363. Indeed, L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican
paper, denied the Vatican had sanctioned the invasion as a “holy war.” See [Vaticanus],
“Vatican Views and the War with Tripoli,” Outlook 29 (1911): 723 –24.
136
The Comrade, 18 Nov. 1911, in, Shan Muhammad, ed., The Indian Muslims: A Documen-
tary Record, 8 vols. (Meerut, 1980–), 3: 118.
137
Lord Hardinge to [Colonial Secretary] The Marquess of Crewe, 12 Oct. 1911, in MS,
Cambridge, University Library, Hardinge Papers, vol. 117, p. 261.
138
The Comrade, 26 Oct. 1912, in Indian Muslims, 3: 157.
139
Lord Hardinge to Marquess of Crewe, Simla, 14 Aug. 1913, in MS, Cambridge, University
Library, Hardinge Papers, vol. 119, 106–7.
140
The Comrade, 8 Nov. 1913, in Indian Muslims, 3: 317.
322 ADAM KNOBLER
their chiefs as soldiers of Christ.” In the same speech he compared Ferdinand

with Peter the Hermit.141
Such worry and criticism continued into the First World War, which was
often characterized in Muslim propaganda as a Christian War against all
Muslims. The Ottoman Empire itself sought to liberate Muslims from the
yoke of foreign imperialism, whether in India or Azerbaijan, and on 11
November 1914 the Ottomans proclaimed Jihad against Russia, Britain, and
France, though to little effect.142
The portrayal in the Muslim world of Allenby’s campaign as a crusade
became just one more crusading fiction, perpetuated by, among others,
Gamal Abdel Nasser, born the year after Allenby marched into Jerusalem.
The thirty-eight-year-old Egyptian in a 1956 speech proclaimed: “It was
England and France that attacked this region under the name of the Crusades,
and the Crusades were nothing else but British-French imperialism . . . it was
no accident at all that General Allenby . . . said on arriving in Jerusalem,
‘Today the wars of the Crusades are completed.’ Nor is it in any way an acci-
dent that when General Gouraud arrived in Damascus, he said, ‘Behold we
have returned, Saladin.’”143
Once again we find the image of the crusades deployed to couch new issues,
this time on behalf of those against whom the original crusades had been
waged.144 This transplantation has been brought into vivid relief in more
recent events in the Middle East. While ultra-Islamist groups such as al-
Qaeeda, Hizb Allah, and Hamas have used crusading imagery since the
early 1980s,145 the recent conflicts in Iraq have inspired some of the most
vivid use of holy war rhetoric and medieval imagery to date. Both American
and Iraqi propagandists have littered their statements with references to his-
torical conflict. Saddam Hussayn, as already noted, worked to make explicit
connections between himself and Saladin, going so far as to Arabize the med-
ieval Kurdish hero.146 Contemporary Muslim observers continue to complain
that Western diplomatic policies regarding Islamic states are based upon a
141
The Comrade, 16–23 Nov. 1912, in Indian Muslims, 3: 179.
142
G. L. Lewis, “The Ottoman Proclamation of Jihad in 1914,” Islamic Quarterly 19 (1975):
157–63.
143
“Speech delivered by President Gamal Abdel Nasser at Goumhouria Square, Cairo, [20
Mar. 1958]” in President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Speeches and Press Interviews 1958 (Cairo,
1958), 129. This same fiction regarding Gouraud is followed in Abd ar-Rahman al-Basha, Ard
al-butulat (Cairo, 1969).
144
The “necessity” of rewriting history to serve the interests of the Muslim state has been a
focal point of the Iraqi “Project for the Rewriting of History,” of which Saddam Husayn was
the head. See Saddam Husayn, Hawla kitabat al-tarikh (Baghdad, 1979).
145
A. Taheri, Holy Terror (London, 1987), 111; Newsweek, 17 Aug. 1998, 20; A. Nüsse, “The
Ideology of Hamas: Palestinian Islamic Fundamentalist Thought on the Jews, Israel and Islam,” in,
R. L. Nettler, ed., Studies in Muslim-Jewish relations 1 (Chur, 1993), 97–127.
146
Ofra Bengio, [‘Irak shel Tsadam. English] Saddam’s Word: Political Discourse in Iraq
(New York, 1998), 82ff.
crusading ethos.147 American political rhetoric has indeed been quite explicit
in its crusading references. In September 2001, George W. Bush declared his
“war on terrorism” a “crusade”—a statement he was later forced to recant due
to its religious implications.148 Nonetheless, in 2004 Montana governor Marc
Racicot used similar words in a nationally published and distributed endorse-
ment of President Bush’s reelection campaign. Racicot lauded Bush for
“leading a global crusade against terrorism,” only to retract his words later
just as Bush had.149
CONCLUSIONS
What are we to make from all of this modern crusading, and why have the cru-
sades been so readily transformable, adaptable, and portable? On one hand, we
find in the crusades a very convenient way for elites to assert their own politi-
cal power and justify their imperial enterprises through the manipulation and
creation of acceptable cultural symbols. The imperial mission of the British, in
particular, was seen as a crusade because the elites had deemed it so, and it
proved to be a persuasive symbol that met with relatively little resistance,
or even negotiation. Of course, the western rhetoric of imperial crusading
also proved an easy target for subjugated peoples (such as the Muslims of
India), who inverted the West’s positive associations of the crusades.
Muslims could point to what they saw as a continuation of 900-year-old
anti-Muslim sentiments even in an increasingly secularized Europe, which
belied any pretense of western beneficence.
This brings us back to the question of how and why the crusader proved
such an enduring and potent image. First of all, it allowed the iconic marriage
of churchgoing (female) with military service and patriotism (male), which
many had thought to be irreconcilable. The crusades represented the most
Christian of historical enterprises in a martial (and thus manly) context. In
the Anglo-American and French worlds, at least, the reintroduction of crusad-
ing imagery into political and public life, like the Christian athleticism so pro-
minent in Victorian Britain, was an effort to re-masculinize Christianity at a
time when men were drifting away from religion.
Secondly, the crusaders provide a simple and almost universally understood
message of justice, virtue, and piety at times when there are few such abso-
lutes, and there are increasing social and political uncertainties in western
public and social life.150 They have provided a symbol around which a
textual community can be formed, regardless of its members’ station,
147
Sunday Observer, 3 Feb. 2002; Turkish Daily News, 2 Apr. 2001.
148
See Associated Press reports of 17 and 18 Sept. 2001.
149
Reuters report, 19 Apr. 2004.
150
This point is emphasized by the French ultramontanist writer Louis Veuillot. See his Le
droit du seigneur au Moyen Âge (1854), in Oeuvres completes, 31 vols. (Paris, 1924–1940),
ser. 1: Oeuvres diverses, vol. 6, 26.
324 ADAM KNOBLER
education, or religion. With the benefit of several centuries of hindsight, the

crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries provided the
perfect historical precedent for such contemporary dilemmas. Whether
one sees such medieval actions as blessed with romance or contaminated
with barbarism, the crusading metaphor has been readily transferable. The
crusades have been seen as the epitome of the moral absolute: good and
evil, without hint of confusion. Their feudal hierarchy of soldiers following
the commands of great men has been easily readapted to highlight the
strengths of old-style feudal kings, modern nation states, and iconic heroes.
Spanish Carlists and French legitimists alike have been able to re-appropriate
the symbols of pre-revolutionary Europe to post-revolutionary settings, to
serve as unambiguous representations of good versus evil.
There was, of course, also the romanticism of the crusader and the distant
past that allowed nineteenth-century regimes to create a tabula rasa upon
which they could create their own mythologized histories. They could
connect their own, perhaps unstable rules with a grand and glorious past
and reassure a dubious citizenry or church of their good intentions. Paul I
had a personal vision along these very lines in trying to create an order of
knighthood in Russia, as did Tewodros of Ethiopia.
Finally, the crusades romanticized warfare by contextualizing ongoing con-
flicts historically as wars with true and just causes, despite warfare’s changing
and increasingly impersonalized face. The original intent of crusading was a
warfare which gave special and unqualified benefit and blessing to its partici-
pants, in a society where the admonition “thou shalt not kill” (Ex. 20:13; Mt. 5:
21– 22) was itself the central abiding corollary: a moral oxymoron that
absolved men of war by the context and intent of their actions, if not pardoning
the actions in and of themselves. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as
conscription made participation in war a more universal activity, while at the
same time mechanization made killing increasingly impersonal and grand in
scale, it became all the more essential to justify its “rightness” and provide
moral absolution. The crusades represented the ultimate victory of character
over mechanization and industrial warfare. Mechanization had made the
“fair fight” between equals—gentlemen who understood the skills and rules
of war—increasingly difficult. By century’s turn, such valor was no longer
the sole province of gentlemen knights, but belonged to the middle and
working classes as well. Only an inherent understanding of valor and chivalry
distinguished a “gentleman” from one of lower rank. As the soldier George
Hodson put it, British valor during the Indian Mutiny in 1857 proved “that
even the Enfield rifle has not reduced all men to a dead level, but there is
still a place to be found for individual prowess.”151During the opening
stages of the First World War, the Times of London ran articles with titles
151
George H. Hodson, Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India (Boston, 1860), 50–51.
like “Bayonet or Gun: Man’s Supremacy over the Machine,” and “Triumph of
Moral over Machines,” and voiced the sentiment that the knights of the past,
unlike the politicians of the present, could hold the financier in contempt.152
The crusader was not merely a medieval figure of romance—he brought a
level of common understanding to the people of Britain, both rich and poor,
and allowed the imperial and military enterprises of the modern age to be com-
municated to a mass audience and a single community
The great irony, of course, was that in claiming to transform feudal ideas
into modern political discourse, the elite and bourgeois leaders of nine-
teenth-century Europe opened themselves up to accusations of a new feudal-
ism—life imitated simulacra. And yet, in the condemnation of such invented
traditions, the critics themselves, in this case Arab historians and propagan-
dists, concocted their own in the course of furthering the polemic. While
the French and English might have returned in the 1920s (or even 1956) to
stake their claims to Jerusalem and Damascus, as Nasser supposed, they
found themselves challenged by new Saladins, ready to meet them in battle
once again.153
152
Times (London) 3 Oct. 1914, and 14 Dec. 1914.
153
A notable contemporary and self-conscious use of the new Saladin image has been that of
the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, who had a picture of Saladin’s 1187 victory at Hittin in
his office. He also renamed a former crusader castle in his home region Qasr Saladin.

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Holy Wars, Empires, and the

Portability of the Past: The Modern

On 12 June 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte took control of the islands of Malta.

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THE CREATION OF CRUSADING HEROES

Russia Under Paul I

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Byzantium.125 The painter, Ivan Mrkvicka, had painted portraits of the

CRUSADING SUBVERTED: CRUSADING IN MUSLIM WRITING

continuing Crusades, ones that demanded a pan-Islamic response.135

their chiefs as soldiers of Christ.” In the same speech he compared Ferdinand

education, or religion. With the benefit of several centuries of hindsight, the

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