Relishing Rather than Rubbishing Byzance avant Byzance

The older I get the more I realize that too much Christian hagiography, and more generally treatment of pre-Christian history, in whatever context, traffics in tendentiousness and gives much evidence of focusing on chosen traumas and chosen glories, to use Vamik Volkan's invaluable language. Too often Christian renderings of history likes to posit a sharp before-and-after break, rubbishing everything before a designated date as "pagan" or "heathen" and portraying the coming of Christianity as unmitigated "enlightenment."

A forthcoming book rather complicates such tales and dynamics: Between the Pagan Past and Christian Present in Byzantine Visual Culture: Statues in Constantinople, 4th-13th Centuries CE by Paroma Chatterjee  (Cambridge University Press, 2022, 350pp.)

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Up to its pillage by the Crusaders in 1204, Constantinople teemed with magnificent statues of emperors, pagan gods, and mythical beasts. Yet the significance of this wealth of public sculpture has hardly been acknowledged beyond late antiquity. In this book, Paroma Chatterjee offers a new perspective on the topic, arguing that pagan statues were an integral part of Byzantine visual culture. Examining the evidence in patriographies, chronicles, novels, and epigrams, she demonstrates that the statues were admired for three specific qualities - longevity, mimesis, and prophecy; attributes that rendered them outside of imperial control and endowed them with an enduring charisma sometimes rivaling that of holy icons. Chatterjee's  interpretations refine our conceptions of imperial imagery, the Hippodrome, the Macedonian Renaissance, a corpus of secular objects, and Orthodox icons. Her book offers novel insights into Iconoclasm and proposes a more truncated trajectory of the holy icon in medieval Orthodoxy than has been previously acknowledged.

The Challenges of Historiography

It was thanks to the combined influence of the historians Robert Taft, late of the Society of Jesus, and David Reynolds of the University of Cambridge (especially in his absolutely spellbinding book In Command of History) that I first came, almost two decades ago now, to take such interest in historiography. This led one on to crucial new ways of critically understanding, e.g., how the story of the quasi-split of 1054 is told, or the Union of Brest, or the pseudo-sobor of Lviv of 1946. The usual renderings of all these--as well as other events--reveal deeply problematic tendencies on the part of Eastern Christians to amplify what Vamik Volkan has so memorably called "chosen trauma," which is so often paired with "chosen glory," both of them distorting the actual nature of the events in question and their long withdrawing roar. 

More recently that has lent itself into writing and lecturing about the shabby way in which Crusades history is recounted, with artery-clogging masses of tendentiousness more than enough to introduce a myocardial infarction in any serious historian--or, indeed, fair-minded observer. 

Along come several recent scholars to keep our historical hearts and minds in fighting form. Up first: The Saint and the Count: A Case Study for Reading Like a Historian by Leah Shopkow (University of Toronto Press, 2021), 216pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

 While historians know that history is about interpreting primary sources, students tend to think of history as a set of facts.

In The Saint and the Count, Leah Shopkow opens up the interpretive world of the historian using the biography of St. Vitalis of Savigny (d. 1122) as a case study. This biography was written around 1174 by Stephen of Fougères and provides a rich stage to demonstrate the kinds of questions historians ask about primary sources and the interpretive and conceptual frameworks they use. What is the nature of medieval sources and what are the interpretive problems they present? How does the positionality of Stephen of Fougères shape his biography of St. Vitalis? How did medieval people respond to stories of miracles? And finally, how does this biography illuminate the problem of violence in medieval society? A translation of the biography is included, so that readers can explore the text on their own.

The second book, from the same publisher, is The Devil's Historian: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past by Amy Kaufman  and Paul Sturtevant (2020), 208pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil’s Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex.

Continuing Controversy over the Crusades

There is no end to the debates around, controversies over, and myriad misunderstandings enveloping "the Crusades." This has been obvious for decades. A book set for release soon revisits some of these and extends the discussion.

Forthcoming in February of next year is a more affordable paperback edition of a hardcover that was originally published in July 2020: Controversial Histories – Current Views on the Crusades: Engaging the Crusades, Volume Three, eds. Felix Hinz and Johannes Meyer-Hamme (Routledge, Feb. 2022), 156pp. The hardcover was originally published in July 2020.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Engaging the Crusades

is a series of volumes which offer windows into a newly-emerging field of historical study: the memory and legacy of the Crusades. Together these volumes examine the reasons behind the enduring resonance of the Crusades and present the memory of crusading in the modern period as a productive, exciting and much needed area of investigation.

Controversial Histories assembles current international views on the Crusades from across Europe, Russia, Turkey, the USA and the Near and Middle East. Historians from the related countries present short narratives that deal with two questions: What were the Crusades? and What do they mean to "us" today? Narratives are from one of possible several "typical" points of view of the related country and present an international comparison of the dominant image of each respective historical culture and cultures of remembrance. Bringing together ‘victim perspectives’ and ‘perpetrator perspectives’, ‘key players’ and ‘minor players’, they reveal both shared and conflicting memories of different groups. The narratives are framed by an introduction about the historical and political significance of the Crusades, and the question of history education in a globalized world with contradicting narratives is discussed, along with guidelines on how to use the book for teaching at university level.

Offering extensive material and presenting a profile of international, academic opinions on the Crusades, Controversial Histories is the ideal resource for students and educators of Crusades history in a global context as well as military history and the history of memory.

Orthodoxy in Cyprus

I have fond memories of my (so far) only trip to Cyprus in October of 1993, and would dearly love to go back some day. I thought of that trip in seeing that next week will give us a paperback edition of a book published a few years ago: Orthodox Cyprus under the Latins, 1191–1571: Society, Spirituality, and Identities by Chrysovalantis Kyriacou (Lexington Books, 15 April 2021), 354pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Medieval and Renaissance Cyprus was a fascinating place of ethnic, cultural, and religious encounters. Following almost nine centuries of Byzantine rule, Cyprus was conquered by the Crusaders in 1191, becoming (until 1571) the most important stronghold of Latin Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean—first under the Frankish dynasty of the Lusignans, and later under the Venetians. Modern historiographical readings of Cypriot identity in medieval and early modern times have been colored by British colonialism, Greek nationalism, and Cyprocentric revisionism. Although these perspectives have offered valuable insights into the historical experience of Latin-ruled Cypriots, they have partially failed to capture the dynamics of noncoercive resistance to domination, and of identity preservation and adaptation. Orthodox Cyprus under the Latins, 1191–1571 readdresses the question of Cypriot identity by focusing on the Greek Cypriots, the island’s largest community during the medieval and early modern period. By bringing together theories from the fields of psychology, social anthropology, and sociology, this study explores continuities and discontinuities in the Byzantine culture and religious tradition of Cyprus, proposing a new methodological framework for a more comprehensive understanding of Cypriot Orthodoxy under Crusader and Venetian rule. A discussion of fresh evidence from hitherto unpublished primary sources enriches this examination, stressing the role of medieval and Renaissance Cyprus as cultural and religious province of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Orthodox world.

Monks and Crusaders Together

As I have been showing on here for over a decade, interest in "the Crusades" always remains high, even if that interest rarely translates into people properly understanding these most-misunderstood of events. A recent book continues chipping away at some of these widespread and longstanding misunderstandings: Bernard Hamilton and Andrew Jotischky, Latin and Greek Monasticism in the Crusader States (Cambridge UP, 2020), 300pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Monasticism was the dominant form of religious life both in the medieval West and in the Byzantine world. Latin and Greek Monasticism in the Crusader States explores the parallel histories of monasticism in western and Byzantine traditions in the Near East in the period c.1050-1300. Bernard Hamilton and Andrew Jotischky follow the parallel histories of new Latin foundations alongside the survival and revival of Greek Orthodox monastic life under Crusader rule. Examining the involvement of monasteries in the newly founded Crusader States, the institutional organization of monasteries, the role of monastic life in shaping expressions of piety, and the literary and cultural products of monasteries, this meticulously researched survey will facilitate a new understanding of indigenous religious institutions and culture in the Crusader states.

Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology

I have often commented on here and elsewhere over the last five years or so how fascinating and relentless is the retelling of Crusades history in our time. I am hard-pressed to think of other areas where the historiography is so controverted so regularly if not continuously. Adding to what we know of this period is a hardcover version of a book that came out in 2017 but the paperback will appear in 2021: M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Cornell University Press, April 2021), 376pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against the Muslim armies. Invisible Weapons is about the prayers and liturgical rituals that were part of the battle for the faith. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin tells the story of the greatest collective religious undertaking of the Middle Ages, putting front and center the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how liturgy was deployed in crusading, and how liturgy absorbed ideals or priorities of crusading. By connecting medieval liturgical books with the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin allows us to understand a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.

Syria in the Crusades

If you have any interest in the history and rise of Islam, and of its encounters with Eastern Christians, and especially of the Crusades, then the name of Carole Hillenbrand needs to be on your bibliography. Her previous works, including her very large earlier book, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, are rich in detail.

She has a new book out, an impressive and diverse scholarly collection: Syria in Crusader Times: Conflict and Co-Existence, ed. Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 400pp.
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About this collection the publisher tells us this:

Presenting numerous interconnected insights into life in Greater Syria in the twelfth century, this book covers a wide range of themes relating to Crusader-Muslim relations. Some chapters deal with various literary sources, including little-known Crusader chronicles, a jihad treatise, a lost Muslim history of the Franks, biographies, letters and poems. Other chapters look at material culture, from coins to urban development, internal relations between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims and between Crusader and Oriental Christians, and the role of the Turkmen. New insights into the career of Saladin are revealed, for example through the work of a little-known propagandist at his court, and Saladin's use of gift-giving for political purposes, as well as neglected aspects of the rule of his family dynasty, the Ayyubids, which succeeded him. Special attention is paid to the Christians residing in the Middle East, from Italians to Melkites and Armenians.

George Demacopoulos on Colonizing Crusaders

I had a very lovely breakfast with George Demacopolous in Romania in January at IOTA and so heard from him directly about his forthcoming book, which has just been published: Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (Fordham UP, 2019), 272pp.

Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about the book. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

GD: Methodologically, I am trained as a pre-modern historian, but I’ve spent a good deal of time among Religious Studies and Theology faculties so I suppose you could say that my interests lie in applying historical-critical methods to aspects of Church history that continue to resonate with modern believers.  In recent years, I’ve grown more appreciative of certain theoretical resources, such as discourse analysis and postcolonial critique, because I think that they offer fresh ways of interpreting pre-modern texts.

AD: This is a book that tackles three controversial things—the Crusades, colonialism, and competing Christian identities. Tell us a bit about how you came to see the connections between them, and perhaps especially how you found the critical scholarly literature on colonialism and post-colonialism to be helpful. 

GD: It all started when Aristotle Papanikolaou and I began to explore the negative reception of Augustine among modern Orthodox communities.  The more I read the various caricatures of Augustine that prevailed in Russian and Greek writing in the 19th and 20th century, the more it became apparent that there must be a “backstory” to modern Orthodox identity narration that functioned in negative juxtaposition to the West, especially Catholicism and its bogey men—Augustine, Aquinas, etc.

As it happened—and this was about 10 years ago--I was in a faculty “theory” group at Fordham at the same time and we spent a few years reading postcolonial theory.  The more I thought about modern Orthodox identity in light of the stages of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialsim, the more I became convinced that there were aspects of the Orthodox story that aligned with phenomena in other cultures and contexts.  While I found the work of many postcolonial theorists (e.g. Said, Bhabha, Young, etc.) to be enlightening and provocative for my thinking about modern Orthodox identity formation vis-à-vis the West, it was also clear to me that there were at least two really important differences from the historical setting that I was pursuing versus the ones that postcolonial theorists typically engage in Africa, India, and the Middle East.

First, whereas their stories typically involved Christianity as an important aspect of the hegemonic colonial force, the Orthodox Christian story is possibly the only one in history where a Christian community is the victim of colonization, rather than the aggressor.  I believe this has some important implications—not only for Orthodox identity but also for the ways in which it complicates our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and colonialism.  Second, unlike the vast majority of the colonial stories that animate postcolonial critics, the Orthodox experience of colonialism occurred in the Middle Ages (not the early modern period).  I’m convinced, in fact, that the Western European experience during the Crusading period served as an important reference point for subsequent colonial enterprises.

AD: Until his death a few years ago, the Cambridge Crusades scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith mentioned more than once his despair that no matter how this history is told, it will always be traduced and tendentiously misrepresented for present political purposes. Did you hesitate at all before wading into the histories of the Crusades? Did you despair at all after having done so?!

GD: Yes, Riley-Smith took the Crusaders at their word that they believed themselves to be doing the work of God, that their conquest of the Near East was an “act of love.”  I don’t think I ever hesitated to pursue this project along the lines Riley-Smith laments.  I suppose if there is one thing that I don’t want readers to do with my work it is to misread my goals for the project. When I draw attention to some of the terrible things that Western Crusaders did and the outlandish ways by which they justified them, I do not do so in order for us to dismiss Western Christianity or because I think that those people represent Western Christendom.

Rather, I draw attention to this history because it helps us to explain the political, cultural, and military context in which Eastern Christians first began to narrate an Orthodox identity that was decidedly framed by juxtaposition against the West.  My theological point of view (such as I have one) is that the breakdown of Christian unity in the thirteenth century has virtually nothing to do with theology—it was entirely born of political and cultural animus. Viewing the breakdown through the lens of a colonial encounter (supplemented by the insights of postcolonial critique) helps us to see this in ways that more traditional historical-critical methods can elide.

AD: You also suggest in your introduction that the Fourth Crusade is especially painful in the East for opening up “permanent fissures within the Orthodox community.” Tell us a bit more about that.

GD: More than anything else, the legacy of the Fourth Crusade is that Eastern Christians have become divided over the proper response to the West.  It was in the context of the Latin empire of Byzantium that some Eastern Christians began to say for the first time that Orthodox could not marry Latins and they could not receive the sacraments from Latins.  It is a common misconception that these things occurred with the Schism in 1054 (they did not).  It was also in the context of the Latin empire that some Eastern Christian began to say that other Eastern Christians who had various levels of association with Westerners could not be permitted to participate in Eastern Christian sacraments because they were tainted by the exposure to Latins.  To be clear, this was not the majority position—it was clearly a minority position—but it gave birth to a trajectory within Orthodoxy that would have profound and long-lasting implications.  In fact, I believe that every modern inner-Orthodox debate either explicitly or implicitly is concerned with the question of Western Christendom and what the proper response to it should be.

AD: Without naming him explicitly, Freud nonetheless seems to me to lurk in the background as you attempt to draw out the connections between sexuality, power, and colonialism. Messis and Said are some of your principal interlocutors here. Tell us a bit about what you found valuable in their works.

GD: Yes, I’ll admit that I was never really that enamored with employing psycho-analytic approaches to historical questions, but these methods are very important to many postcolonial theorists, especially someone like Homi Bhabha.  Moreover, Said and Robert Young are two postcolonial theorists to draw out the sexual dimensions of power relationships as well as issues of longing, fantasy, and repulsion.  I do believe that some of the pro-Crusader texts that I examine in the book give themselves easily to analysis from this perspective, even if I don’t explicitly pursue the psycho-analytic dimensions.

AD: You make it clear that Byzantium in the crusading period should not be regarded as uniformly “subaltern.” Would you elaborate a bit as to why this is an important clarification?

GD: To be “subaltern” is to have no access to power, to have no control whatsoever to one’s own discourse.  At the turn of the thirteenth century, Byzantium was, arguably, the most advanced and culturally sophisticated Christian society in the world.  So while I believe that it is very clear that the process of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialism helps us to understand Orthodox Christian history and culture from the Crusades to the present, I do not think that the situation is the identical to other regions of the globe where Western Europeans arrived and completely transformed indigenous societies.

AD: I’m especially struck by your third chapter on papal ambivalence, a phenomenon which is always so psychologically revealing. Here you discuss Pope Innocent III’s “double-bind” with the capture of Constantinople. Tell us a bit more about that bind. It seems clear that part of the bind (then as now) is that by calling Eastern Christians genuine Christians (with “valid orders” as Catholics might say today) in a real sacramental Church the pope appeared to undercut his own claim to being the fount of all validity and liceity in the Church?

The chapter argues that the unexpected capture of Constantinople in 1204 put Pope Innocent III into a rhetorical and practical double bind. On the one hand, the pontiff sternly criticized the crusaders for their brutality against fellow Christians and for compromising the larger military effort in the Holy Land.  On the other hand, Innocent saw the conquest of Constantinople as an opportunity to resolve the schism on his own terms and, at least initially, he hoped that the accrual of Byzantium to the crusaders’ Eastern network might be beneficial to his larger objectives.

But if Innocent was to capitalize on this, it meant that he would need to reformulate the very basis of crusading ideology so as to authorize the subjugation of a community that he had previously defined as Christian. Of course, one of the ways that Innocent does this is by asserting, all the more forcefully, the prerogatives of papal authority.  In the conclusion of the chapter, I assess this dimension of Innocent’s ambivalence and observe that:  “Innocent’s repeated acknowledgement that the Greeks do not accept papal rule exposes the inherent contradiction within the discourse of papal sovereignty.  Indeed, each papal recognition of Greek disobedience reveals a gap in the very premise of papal authority, whether the premise is constituted on the Petrine myth or some other foundation.  The dissonance of papal sovereignty is 'put on trial' by its every iteration."

If the bishop of Rome is truly and authentically the source of all hierarchic power and Christian teaching that its advocates claim it to be, then any acknowledgment from the bishop of Rome that there are “Christians” who do not accept such a principle undercuts all value in the claim of papal authority as a first principle.  In Bhabha’s terms, Innocent’s assertion of papal authority encodes its own inevitable undoing; its very iteration establishes an ambivalent situation that disrupts its claim to monolithic power.  As discourse, the Roman claim of papal sovereignty in the Church bears at one and the same time a striking ambivalence--both possibility and dis-possibility.

Thus, papal discourse vis-à-vis Greek Christians in this period implicitly dictates either (1) that Greeks are not Christians (because they fail to acknowledge papal authority, which is a measurement of authenticity imposed by the discourse) or (2) the recognition of papal authority is not a meaningful measurement or requirement of Christianity (because the discourse admits that no Greek acknowledges papal authority).  Either way, the assertion cannot withstand its own logical weight.

AD: As you are working towards your conclusion, you note that from this literature you review one can find clear evidence that neither Latin nor Greek views of the other were monolithic, and that the boundaries between each sacramental community were “extremely porous.” What lessons, if any, do these insights offer us today?

GD: This is an important question with broad implications.  In general terms, it teaches us is that history, even (if not especially) the history of the Church is far more complex and varied than we typically understand.  More specifically, it encourages us to see that there have always been multiple “authoritative” voices saying a variety of things about the boundaries of the Christian community and the standing of person on that borderland.  There was never a time when these questions were easy and, for me, that is a cause for hope because it means the cause of Christian unity has always been a challenge, even though the Scriptures themselves have made it a mandate.

AD: Having finished the book, what are you at work on now?

My next major project will look at the presentation of violence in late-ancient and medieval Greek hymnography.  What I’m particular interested to explore is the context in which Christians begin to ask God to destroy enemies.  It didn’t start that way.  I have a theory to explain what happened, but you’ll need to wait for the next book.

Streams of Bloody Gold

Oxford University Press, the publisher of  Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood:The Rise and Fall of Byzantine, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade by Anthony Kaldellis (2019, 440pp.) tells me that it is bringing out a paperback edition of this book on, suitably, the start of the Byzantine new year, September 1st.

About this book we are told the following:

In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests: first in the southeast against the Arabs, then in Bulgaria, and finally in the Georgian and Armenian lands. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. It was also expanding economically, demographically, and, in time, intellectually as well. Yet this imperial project came to a crashing collapse fifty years later, when political disunity, fiscal mismanagement, and defeat at the hands of the Seljuks in the east and the Normans in the west brought an end to Byzantine hegemony. By 1081, not only was its dominance of southern Italy, the Balkans, Caucasus, and northern Mesopotamia over but Byzantium's very existence was threatened.

How did this dramatic transformation happen? Based on a close examination of the relevant sources, this history-the first of its kind in over a century-offers a new reconstruction of the key events and crucial reigns as well as a different model for understanding imperial politics and wars, both civil and foreign. In addition to providing a badly needed narrative of this critical period of Byzantine history, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood offers new interpretations of key topics relevant to the medieval era. The narrative unfolds in three parts: the first covers the years 955-1025, a period of imperial conquest and consolidation of authority under the great emperor Basil "the Bulgar-Slayer." The second (1025-1059) examines the dispersal of centralized authority in Constantinople as well as the emergence of new foreign enemies (Pechenegs, Seljuks, and Normans). The last section chronicles the spectacular collapse of the empire during the second half of the eleventh century, concluding with a look at the First Crusade and its consequences for Byzantine relations with the powers of Western Europe. This briskly paced and thoroughly investigated narrative vividly brings to life one of the most exciting and transformative eras of medieval history.

The Literature of the Crusades

We do not hear quite so much about the Crusades today as we did even two years ago, when their talismanic invocation was an absolutely central part of ISIS rituals and propaganda. Nonetheless, the Crusades remain easily one of the most widely distorted and misunderstood parts of Eastern Christian and Islamic history. A new paperback edition of a recent book sheds more light on these phenomena: Anthony Bale, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades: Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 302pp.

Here is what the publisher tells us about this collection:

How were the Crusades, and the crusaders, narrated, described, and romanticised by the various communities that experienced or remembered them? This Companion provides a critical overview of the diverse and multilingual literary output connected with crusading over the last millennium, from the first writings which sought to understand and report on what was happening, to contemporary medievalism, in which crusading is a potent image of holy war and jihad. The chapters show the enduring legacy of the crusaders' imagery, from the chansons de geste to Walter Scott, from Charlemagne to Orlando Bloom. Whilst the crusaders' hold on Jerusalem was relatively short-lived, the desire for Jerusalem has had a long afterlife in many cultural contexts and media.

Liturgical Devotions in Crusader States

The Crusades remain a topic of perpetual interest, and almost equally perpetual misrepresentation in the hands of many. One area that has been opening up has been the study of ritual and liturgy in the Crusader states, treated by emerging scholars, including Daniel Galadza in his Liturgy and Byzantinization in Jerusalem.

Galadza is one of the contributors to a new scholarly collection entitled Liturgy and Devotion in the Crusader States, eds. Iris Shagrir and Cecilia Gaposchkin (Routledge, 2018), 150 pages.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Examining liturgy as historical evidence has, in recent years, developed into a flourishing field of research. The chapters in this volume offer innovative discussion of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem from the perspective of 'liturgy in history'. They demonstrate how the total liturgical experience, which was visual, emotional, motile, olfactory, and aural, can be analysed to understand the messages that liturgy was intended to convey. The chapters reveal how combining narrative sources with liturgical documents can help decode political circumstances and inter-group relations and decipher the core ideals of the community of Outremer. Moreover, understanding the Latins’ liturgical activities in the Holy Land has much to contribute to our understanding of the crusade as an institution, how crusade spirituality was practised on the ground in the Latin East, and how people engaged with the crusading movement.

This volume brings together eight original studies, forwarded by the editors’ introduction, on the liturgy of Jerusalem, spanning the immediate pre-Crusade and Crusade period (11th-13th centuries). It demonstrates the richness of a focus on the liturgy in illuminating the social, religious, and intellectual history of this critical period of ecclesiastical self-assertion, as well as conceptions of the sacred in this time and place.

We are also given the table of contents:

1. Liturgy and devotion in the crusader states: introduction (Iris Shagrir and Cecilia Gaposchkin)

2. The regular canons and the liturgy of the Latin East (Wolf Zöller)

3. The libelli of Lucca, Biblioteca Arcivescovile, MS 5: liturgy from the siege of Acre? (Cara Aspesi)

4. Rewriting the Latin liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre: text, ritual and devotion for 1149 (Sebastián Salvadó)

5. Greek liturgy in crusader Jerusalem: witnesses of liturgical life at the Holy Sepulchre and St Sabas Lavra (Daniel Galadza)

6. Greek Orthodox monasteries in the Holy Land and their liturgies in the period of the crusades (Andrew Jotischky)

7. Processing together, celebrating apart: shared processions in the Latin East (Christopher MacEvitt)

8. Holy Fire and sacral kingship in post-conquest Jerusalem (Jay Rubenstein)

9. Royal inauguration and liturgical culture in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099–1187 (Simon John)

Orthodox Cyprus Under the Latins

Well do I recall, in October 1993, being jolted out of my ignorance and naivete as a young Canadian unaccustomed to the scars of political violence when I visited Nicosia on Cyprus and saw the militarized border between Cypriot and Turkish claims to the island. I was there for a World Council of Churches conference of which I remember little now except for how hot it was relative to Ottawa, and how I almost didn't make it by developing acute appendicitis six days before I was supposed to leave. Oh, and the food. The food, of course, was wonderful. 

But back to matters at hand: a new book looking at the pivotal role Cyprus plays in the Mediterranean, not least with Crusaders coming from Western Europe to the Middle East and stopping off in various places, and sometimes never leaving, as happened in Cyprus, newly examined by Chrysovalantis Kyriacou, Orthodox Cyprus under the Latins, 1191–1571: Society, Spirituality, and Identities (Lexington Books, 2018), 354pp.
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About this book the publisher tells us this:

Medieval and Renaissance Cyprus was a fascinating place of ethnic, cultural, and religious encounters. Following almost nine centuries of Byzantine rule, Cyprus was conquered by the Crusaders in 1191, becoming (until 1571) the most important stronghold of Latin Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean—first under the Frankish dynasty of the Lusignans, and later under the Venetians. Modern historiographical readings of Cypriot identity in medieval and early modern times have been colored by British colonialism, Greek nationalism, and Cyprocentric revisionism. Although these perspectives have offered valuable insights into the historical experience of Latin-ruled Cypriots, they have partially failed to capture the dynamics of noncoercive resistance to domination, and of identity preservation and adaptation. Orthodox Cyprus under the Latins, 1191–1571 readdresses the question of Cypriot identity by focusing on the Greek Cypriots, the island’s largest community during the medieval and early modern period. By bringing together theories from the fields of psychology, social anthropology, and sociology, this study explores continuities and discontinuities in the Byzantine culture and religious tradition of Cyprus, proposing a new methodological framework for a more comprehensive understanding of Cypriot Orthodoxy under Crusader and Venetian rule. A discussion of fresh evidence from hitherto unpublished primary sources enriches this examination, stressing the role of medieval and Renaissance Cyprus as cultural and religious province of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Orthodox world.

The Three Most Interesting Parts of Late Medieval History

For those interested in late-medieval history, this new book, just released from Amsterdam University Press, captures three of the most interesting phenomena of that period: Papacy, Crusade, and Christian-Muslim Relations, ed. Jessalynn Bird (AUP, 2018), 276pp.

About this book we are told the following by the publisher (which gives further inside glimpses here):

This book examines the role of the papacy and the crusade in the religious life of the late twelfth through late thirteenth centuries and beyond. Throughout the book, the contributors ask several important questions. Was Innocent III more theologian than lawyer-pope and how did his personal experience of earlier crusade campaigns inform his own vigorous promotion of the crusades? How did the outlook and policy of Honorius III differ from that of Innocent III in crucial areas including the promotion of multiple crusades (including the Fifth Crusade and the crusade of William of Montferrat) and how were both pope’s mindsets manifested in writings associated with them? What kind of men did Honorius III and Innocent III select to promote their plans for reform and crusade? How did the laity make their own mark on the crusade through participation in the peace movements which were so crucial to the stability in Europe essential for enabling crusaders to fulfill their vows abroad and through joining in the liturgical processions and prayers deemed essential for divine favor at home and abroad? Further essays explore the commemoration of crusade campaigns through the deliberate construction of physical and literary paths of remembrance. Yet while the enemy was often constructed in a deliberately polarizing fashion, did confessional differences really determine the way in which Latin crusaders and their descendants interacted with the Muslim world or did a more pragmatic position of ‘rough tolerance’ shape mundane activities including trade agreements and treaties?

Social Media, Donald Trump, and "Normotic Illness": Notes on Christopher Bollas

Apparently in the 1990s I read at least one book by Christopher Bollas, but I have no recollection of it other than not finding it terribly interesting at the time. But what does one know, let alone understand, in one's early 20s as a callow undergraduate? Not much.

Now, however--in another interesting example of books that find one, or re-find one, when they are apparently needed, thus confirming, in an uncanny way, Bollas's perhaps most famous idea of the "unthought known"--I have returned to him and found many very valuable insights, some of which, described below, seem to fit only too well some of the people of our time, not excluding certain students I have known in this age of Trump and social media.

How and why have I rediscovered psychoanalysis, as it were? To avoid an over-long and tedious genealogy let me say that I fell into this quite unexpectedly three years ago when I began reading ISIS propaganda and lecturing about it. I read it, of course, because it has made an absolutely revealing fetish (especially as Lacan understood it of a tableau vivant) of Eastern Christian history in general, and the Crusades in particular. Struggling to figure out the purpose of what was plainly propaganda, I had a barely conscious sense (the unthought known indeed!) that Freud might be useful here. So I fell backwards into Freud again, starting with his "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" and "Mourning and Melancholia."

From there I discovered a vast body of contemporary analytic literature on mourning, trauma, and historiography, with Jeffrey Prager, Charles Strozier, and Vamik Volkan leading the way. All three, and several others, have been absolutely invaluable. From them and there I went back another generation, to those analysts between Freud and now, and thus have had occasion to read, inter alia, Fromm, Erikson, Kohut, Winnicott, and especially Adam Phillips, on whom I have several times written on here. Phillips, in turn, led me back to Bollas.

I begin at the beginning with Bollas, whose 1987 book The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known has just been republished in a 30th-anniversary edition. It reads, as many of his books do, like collections of essays only loosely stitched together usually around one theme. He begins with a chapter on the "transformational object," and those who know psychoanalytic history will at once recognize that Bollas, born and educated in the US but practicing as an analyst in England for many years, is here indebted to the British independent school, especially D.W. Winnicott and his equally famous idea of the "transitional object."

For Bollas, the "object" is not singular. Our life is a collection, largely unconscious, of memories of interactions with myriads and myriads of "objects," most of them human, including, most powerfully, our parents and families. "There is no one unified mental phenomenon that we can term self," Bollas argues, because "the person's self is the history of many internal relations," and those relations to various objects cast a shadow over the rest of our life. Many of those object relations will remain unconscious to us, but nonetheless powerful and directive of other relations. One way, Bollas says, we may discover some of these earlier object relations is by listening to "our own idiom of thinking about and talking to ourselves."

But how many of us do that today? How can we do that today when we drown out the capacity for such thoughts, filling our days with electronic stimuli so much that we cannot part with our phones even at night when sleeping, as a huge majority of us now do? If the cell phone today is not a "transformational object" in every sense then nothing is. So too are social media in their various forms, which at least sometimes seem to collude, as it were, to keep us from deeper, more wide-ranging reflection and insight. Surely one of the main goals of these media is not to encourage genuine criticism of some depth in which the very systems of our time (political and economic) are put to the question, for, as MacIntyre has said (see ch. 9, here), we are all condemned to think and act in the terms of the modern nation-state and its capitalist handmaid. Thus social media largely seek homogenization in the service of advanced capitalism, which requires the production of standardized consumers deemed to be normal, a process of definition, Bollas says, that "is typified by the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity in favor of a self that is conceived as a material object among other man-made products in the object world."

Such a self what Bollas calls "normotic," that is,

someone who is abnormally normal. He is too stable, secure, comfortable, and socially extrovert. He is fundamentally disinterested in subjective life and he is inclined to reflect on the thingness of objects, on their material reality, or on 'data' that relates to material phenomena.....Such an individual is alive in a world of meaningless plenty.

(Erich Fromm argued something loosely similar many years ago in his The Pathology of Normalcy.)

The normotic individual "is interested in facts" but not to link them together, still less to see any kind of overarching pattern or to subject them to critical analysis: "facts are collected and stored because this activity is reassuring." (That, alas, describes too many students today, and usually only around exam time.) This person loves being part of a team, thrives in institutions and corporations, enjoys committee work, and is frequently a workaholic who sees no utility at all in having a subjective interior life. This person, who sounds frightfully like Donald Trump--who is, as Jung might say, an archetype of many people today, not least political and business leaders--has managed to convince himself that the "mind itself, in particular the unconscious, is an archaism, a thing to be abandoned in the interests of human progress."

And yet it is my unwavering conviction that the unconscious does exist and does shape all of us, and is therefore a worthy subject of our investigation, not least so that we can be free of at least some of its darker aspects. The unthought known, then, must become at least a little bit more thoughtfully known for our liberation and for the liberation of the world.

Going beyond that, however, I would say that in trying to think the unthought known, we find our liberation in it because ultimately the "unthought known" is a not bad description of God. Here I would speculate a bit on the conclusion to Bollas's book when he says that, in trying to develop a "limited relation to the unthought known in ourselves we can then address the mysteries of our existence, such as the curious fact of existence itself." In thinking the "unthought known," he says, we ponder not simply the kernel of our true self, but elements of our forebears." Translated theologicaly, could one say here that in thinking the unthought known we are trying to think God, and that in thinking God, that is thinking theologically, we do so by drawing on the "elements of our forebears" which we label sacred tradition?

Perhaps speculating a little bit farther, this process of thinking God requires prayer; and thus the question did occur to me, in reading his chapter on the expressive uses of the counter-transference, whether we can conceive of prayer along the lines of the transference-countertranference relationship as Bollas describes it: "I am gradually putting out into that potential space between us those associations that are moving freely within me but are occasioned by the patient, and I am making it possible for the patient to engage meaningfully in this struggle....Part of the analysand's total recognition of this process is his being found through the analyst's registration of him, which the patient gradually values as another feature of the psychoanalytic process." That, it seems to me, is not at all a bad way to think of the changes wrought by the difficult process we call "prayer."

Bloody Byzantine Streams

Interest in all things Byzantine is as high as ever, and students of the empire's history will want to take note of a book released just in June: Anthony Kaldellis, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade (OUP, 2017), 440pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests: first in the southeast against the Arabs, then in Bulgaria, and finally in the Georgian and Armenian lands. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. It was also expanding economically, demographically, and, in time, intellectually as well. Yet this imperial project came to a crashing collapse fifty years later, when political disunity, fiscal mismanagement, and defeat at the hands of the Seljuks in the east and the Normans in the west brought an end to Byzantine hegemony. By 1081, not only was its dominance of southern Italy, the Balkans, Caucasus, and northern Mesopotamia over but Byzantium's very existence was threatened.

How did this dramatic transformation happen? Based on a close examination of the relevant sources, this history-the first of its kind in over a century-offers a new reconstruction of the key events and crucial reigns as well as a different model for understanding imperial politics and wars, both civil and foreign. In addition to providing a badly needed narrative of this critical period of Byzantine history, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood offers new interpretations of key topics relevant to the medieval era. The narrative unfolds in three parts: the first covers the years 955-1025, a period of imperial conquest and consolidation of authority under the great emperor Basil "the Bulgar-Slayer." The second (1025-1059) examines the dispersal of centralized authority in Constantinople as well as the emergence of new foreign enemies (Pechenegs, Seljuks, and Normans). The last section chronicles the spectacular collapse of the empire during the second half of the eleventh century, concluding with a look at the First Crusade and its consequences for Byzantine relations with the powers of Western Europe. This briskly paced and thoroughly investigated narrative vividly brings to life one of the most exciting and transformative eras of medieval history.

Rhetorical War as Politics By Other Means (I)

Yale University Press sent me a brand new book which I am reading with great interest: Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Words Are Weapons: Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror, trans. Dorna Khazeni (Yale UP, 2017), 256pp.

This, the publisher tells us, is:

The first book to offer a rigorous, sophisticated analysis of ISIS’s rhetoric and why it is so persuasive

ISIS wages war not only on the battlefield but also online and in the media. Through a close examination of the words and images ISIS uses, with particular attention to the “digital caliphate” on the web, Philippe-Joseph Salazar theorizes an aesthetic of ISIS and its self-presentation. As a philosopher and historian of ideas, well versed in both the Western and the Islamic traditions, Salazar posits an interpretation of Islam that places speech—the profession of faith—at the center of devotion and argues that evocation of the simple yet profound utterance of faith is what gives power to the rhetoric that ISIS and others employ. At the same time, Salazar contends that Western discourse has undergone a “rhetorical disarmament.” To win the fight against ISIS and Islamic extremism, Western democracies, their media, politicians, and counterterrorism agencies must consider radically changing their approach to Islamic extremism.

This book is of great interest to my own ongoing project into the uses and abuses of Crusades history in ISIS propaganda. I shall have more to say about all that later.

Continues. 

The Crusades, Part MMCCXVIII

The local Catholic radio station, Redeemer Radio, is interviewing me later this morning (tune in at 7am!) about my article last month in the Catholic Herald about ISIS propaganda and Crusades history.

So, for those who are seeking some places to begin in reading Crusades history, I suggest you start here with the works of Jonathan Riley-Smith, arguably the pioneer in contemporary Crusades scholarship until his death last year. Of his many books noted in that review essay, I would, if you pressed me to recommend only one, suggest--because it is both accessible and short, but with enough detail to point you onward to other sources if you wish--his The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, from 2008.

One of Riley-Smith's students, now teaching and well respected in North America, is Thomas Madden, and his book, The Concise History of the Crusades, noted here, is also a good place to begin, though it does not focus on the contemporary historiographical issues as much as Riley-Smith. Madden also authored this short but useful article.

For those wanting an introduction to Arab views of the Crusades, which are fascinating and highly counter-intuitive, go here. For more generally Islamic views of the Crusades, go here.

For much more specialized scholarship, follow the links here.

Finally, for those interested in the very challenging and ever-changing historiography of the Crusades, then Giles Constable's article is very valuable indeed.

15th Century Crusades

As I have been arguing on here, as well as here, and in other places for years now, the propaganda of ISIS about the Crusades traffics in, inter alia, general Western ignorance, and blatant Western political abuse of, Crusading history. A recently published collection, edited by a sometime student of Jonathan Riley-Smith, looks at The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and Competing Cultures, ed. Norman Housley (Routledge, 2016), 220pp.

Housley is the author of a number of other studies on the Crusades, including Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land (2008) and Contesting the Crusades, which is a good place to begin for those new to Crusading history. 

About this new collection we are told:

Increasingly, historians acknowledge the significance of crusading activity in the fifteenth century, and they have started to explore the different ways in which it shaped contemporary European society. Just as important, however, was the range of interactions which took place between the three faith communities which were most affected by crusade, namely the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and the adherents of Islam. Discussion of these interactions forms the theme of this book. Two essays consider the impact of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 on the conquering Ottomans and the conquered Byzantines. The next group of essays reviews different aspects of the crusading response to the Turks, ranging from Emperor Sigismund to Papal legates. The third set of contributions considers diplomatic and cultural interactions between Islam and Christianity, including attempts made to forge alliances of Christian and Muslim powers against the Ottomans. Last, a set of essays looks at what was arguably the most complex region of all for inter-faith relations, the Balkans, exploring the influence of crusading ideas in the eastern Adriatic, Bosnia and Romania. Viewed overall, this collection of essays makes a powerful contribution to breaking down the old and discredited view of monolithic and mutually exclusive "fortresses of faith". Nobody would question the extent and intensity of religious violence in fifteenth-century Europe, but this volume demonstrates that it was played out within a setting of turbulent diversity. Religious and ethnic identities were volatile, allegiances negotiable, and diplomacy, ideological exchange and human contact were constantly in operation between the period's major religious groupings.

And we are given the Table of Contents:

List of figures and maps

List of abbreviations
Notes on contributors

Maps

Preface

1 Introduction: Norman Housley

Conquerors and conquered

2 Crusading in the fifteenth century and its relation to the development of Ottoman dynastic legitimacy, self-image, and the Ottoman consolidation of authority: Nikolay Antov

3 Byzantine refugees as crusade propagandists: the travels of Nicholas Agallon: Jonathan Harris

The crusading response: expressions, dynamics and constraints

4 Dances, dragons and a pagan queen: Sigismund of Luxemburg and the publicizing of the Ottoman Turkish threat: Mark Whelan

5 Alfonso V and the anti-Turkish crusade:Mark Aloisio

6 Papal legates and crusading activity in central Europe: the Hussites and the Ottoman Turks: Antonin Kalous

7 Switching the tracks: Baltic crusades against Russia in the fifteenth century: Anti Selart

Diplomatic and cultural interactions

8 Tīmūr and the ‘Frankish’ powers: Michele Bernardini

9 Venetian attempts at forging an alliance with Persia and the crusade in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries: Giorgio Rota

10 Quattrocento Genoa and the legacies of crusading: Steven Epstein

Frontier zones: the Balkans and the Adriatic

11 The key to the gate of Christendom? The strategic importance of Bosnia in the struggle against the Ottomans: Emir Filippović

12 Between two worlds or a world of its own? The eastern Adriatic in the fifteenth century: Oliver Jens Schmitt

13 The Romanian concept of crusade in the fifteenth century: Sergiu Iosipescu

14 Conclusion: transformations of crusading in the long fifteenth century: Alan V. Murray

Index

Housley, a busy man, has another even newer collection released just this spring: Reconfiguring the 15th-Century Crusade (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 344pp.

About this book we are told:

This collection of essays by eight leading scholars is a landmark event in the study of crusading in the late middle ages. It is the outcome of an international network funded by the Leverhulme Trust whose members examined the persistence of crusading activity in the fifteenth century from three viewpoints, goals, agencies and resonances. The crusading fronts considered include the conflict with the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean and western Balkans, the Teutonic Order’s activities in the Baltic region, and the Hussite crusades. The authors review criticism of crusading propaganda on behalf of the crusade, the influence on crusading of demands for Church reform, the impact of printing, expanding knowledge of the world beyond the Christian lands, and new sensibilities about the sufferings of non-combatants.

The New Crusaders

My interest in the historiography surrounding the Crusades has been discussed on here several times over the years. While doing further reading of an article by the great and recently deceased doyen of Crusades scholars, Jonathan Riley-Smith, he mentioned a book I had not come across before, a book which amplifies some of his own work on the pivotal nature of the 19th century as a period in which imperial and colonial politics profoundly shaped modern mythologies about, and bogus "memories" of, the Crusades.

That book is Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries. Originally published in hardcover in 2000 by Routledge, it was, just this past November, republished in a paperback version.

About this fascinating, lucidly written, and compelling study, which I very much commend to your reading, the publisher tells us the following:

This is the first comprehensive study of the use, abuse and development of the crusade image in popular and high culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing upon a diverse range of sources, mainly from the British Isles, but with parallels from Western Europe and North America, the author shows the different approaches to the history of the crusading movement and crusade images taken by the historian, composer, artist and author.

Remembering the Crusades

I just received in the mail a new and fascinating collection edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch, Remembering the Crusades and Crusading (Routledge, 2016), 266pp. I am greatly looking forward to reading this, coming as it does in a period of increased thought on the uses and abuses of historical memory of the Crusades, as noted in many posts on here over the past 18 months.

This book, the publisher tells us,

examines the diverse contexts in which crusading was memorialised and commemorated in the medieval world and beyond. The collection not only shows how the crusades were commemorated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but also considers the longer-term remembrance of the crusades into the modern era.

This collection is divided into three sections, the first of which deals with the textual, material and visual sources used to remember. Each contributor introduces a particular body of source material and presents case studies using those sources in their own research. The second section contains four chapters examining specific communities active in commemorating the crusades, including religious communities, family groups and royal courts. Finally, the third section examines the cultural memory of crusading in the Byzantine, Iberian and Baltic regions beyond the early years, as well as the trajectory of crusading memory in the Muslim Middle East.

Remembering the Crusades and Crusading draws together and extends the current debates in the history of the crusades and the history of memory and in so doing offers a fresh synthesis of material in both fields. It will be essential reading for students of the crusades and memory.

Routledge also gives us the table of contents: 

Introduction
1. Remembering in the time of the crusades
Megan Cassidy-Welch

Sources of memory
2. Preaching and crusade memory
Jessalynn Bird
3. The liturgical memory of 15 July 1099: between history, memory and eschatology
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin
4. Crusades, Memory and Visual Culture: Representations of the Miracle of Intervention of Saints in Battle
Elizabeth Lapina
5. Remembrance of Things Past: Memory and Material Objects in the Time of the Crusades, 1095-1291
Anne E. Lester
6. Historical writing
Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński
7. "Perpetuel Memorye": Remembering History in the Crusading Romance
Lee Manion

Communities of memory
8. Monastic memories of the early crusading movement
Katherine Allen Smith
9. Royal memory
James Naus and Vincent Ryan
10. Jewish Memory and the Crusades: The Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and Protection from Christian violence
Rebecca Rist
11. Family memory and the crusades
Nicholas Paul and Jochen Schenk

Cultural memory
12. ‘A blow sent by God’: Changing Byzantine memories of the Crusades
Jonathan Harris
13. Living and remembering the crusades and the Reconquista: Iberia, 11th-13th Centuries
Ana Rodriguez
14. The Muslim Memory of the Crusades
Alex Mallett
15. Appropriating history: Remembering the crusades in Latvia and Estonia
Carsten Selch Jensen