The Preaching of the Third Crusade (1187-1192)

This book is devoted to the preaching and mobilization of the Third Crusade (1187-1192), which was unleashed by two events in the East: the fall of Jerusalem and the loss of the True Cross (on which Christ himself had been crucified, so the belief). This expedition was of enormous historical significance, straddling thousands of participants from all over Europe as well as three important princes: Frederick Barbarossa, Richard Lionheart, and Philip Augustus. The book pursues the essential question of what made so many people travel thousands of kilometers to the so-called Holy Land, including a high chance that they would not survive this journey. Since modern scholarship agrees that the crusade movement was largely driven by religious ideas, understood as an act of pious pilgrimage and a penitential practice, the book focusses on the activity of preachers. It is interested in what these told their audiences, (ab)using their authoritative position, and how they thus shaped ideas and expectations among the participants. We are lucky that preaching was not a spontaneous act in the Middle Ages (unlike how one may perhaps imagine it nowadays), but such required careful preparation and the examination of biblical sources: these delivered the foundation for teaching the people and developing a vision about the Holy Land. Thousands of sermon texts survived from the Middle Ages, which, however, have barely received attention among crusade scholars. This can be explained with the fact that many are unpublished this book derives from extensive archival research, including roughly 100 medieval manuscripts. Moreover, we are facing the essential issue that crusade sermon is not a medieval genre; the terminology of crusade and crusader in different European languages is modern, only established in the seventeenth century. As a result, one must approach sermon texts open-minded, bearing in mind the common mode of organizing such material: the liturgical calendar. Crusades were preached, for example, on Palm Sunday or All Saints. Consequently, one discovers that numerous sermons are concerned with crusade-related subjects such as Jerusalem; the book considers around 200 sermon texts, relating 42 sermons specifically to the mobilization of the Third Crusade. Examining these texts has yielded a rich array of results, for example, concerning the strong presence of eschatological beliefs (Jerusalem was believed to be the venue for the Apocalypse), or the idea that the Christians may lose their status as Gods chosen people, if they do not depart enthusiastically on crusade. Importantly, the sermons deliver insights that are often different from the chronicles (the main source of crusade scholarship). Considering that the sermons are so numerous, this delivers much more manifold and local insights, closely entangled with what is happening on the ground. Essentially, this book attempts thus to rewrite the history of the Third Crusade and its mobilization.