SSCLE Online PhD/ECR Conference
Session 2: Wednesday, 30 June 16.00-17.30 BST
2.1 Crusader Kingship and the Kingdom of Jerusalem
Chair: Nikolas Jaspert (University of Heidelberg)
Andrew Buck (University College, Dublin): Remembering Baldwin I: The Secundam historiae Hierosolimitanae partem and the Jerusalemite monarchy in Twelfth-Century France
In recent decades, crusades scholarship has benefitted greatly from a deeper examination into how medieval Europeans memorialised the crusading past, as well as the purpose of such remembrance in shaping societal attitudes and behaviours (particular in elite circles). Above all else, this has led to a realisation that stories associated with crusading
expeditions, especially the First Crusade, held a great deal of currency in elite circles and came to influence (and be influenced by) ideals of power, social status, religiosity, kingship, and knighthood. However, whereas the importance of individual crusading ventures within these processes of crusading memorialisation and reception has been well established, the role played by the histories written about the subsequent experiences of the Latin settlements
of Outremer is rather less popular. This paper takes up the challenge of addressing this imbalance by examining a little-known and rarely utilised text relating to the early decades of the crusader states, the so-called Secundam historiae Iherosolimitane partem, written in the mid-twelfth century and often attributed to one Lisiard of Tours. After outlining the
provenance and wider context of this narrative, this chapter will explore what it can tell us about the nature and purpose of memories which circulated in Europe regarding Baldwin of Boulogne, otherwise known as King Baldwin I of Jerusalem (r. 1100–18).
Andrew Buck is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. He has published widely on the history of the principality of Antioch and the crusader states more generally, while his current research focus is on medieval historical writing in (and about) the Latin East, as well as the reception of such texts in the Latin West, with a particular focus on William of Tyre’s Chronicon.
Edward Caddy (Queen Mary, University of London): Defining the Borders of the First Crusade, 1101-2.
The conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099 is traditionally considered the terminus of the First Crusade. However, if we look beyond this date to the years that followed, we can better understand the inchoate state of crusading during this era. In the West, preaching and recruitment had not stopped once the Princes’ Crusade set out in 1096: a steady stream of Christians followed the path forged by those first crusaders. Such expeditions have received comparatively little scholarly attention, often presented as mere addendums to 1096-99. To further our understanding, this paper will explore just one of the
ventures that set out from the West in the years following the conquest of the Holy City, the so-called Crusade of 1101. It will be argued that, by considering the role that the crusade vow played, it is possible to better uncover the nature of crusading as it was conceived by contemporaries. In doing so, I will test the border of the First Crusade, exploring whether those that followed in the footsteps of the first crusaders should be considered part of the initial venture, or whether their expedition was distinct.
Danielle Park (Royal Holloway, University of London): Crusader Kingship in the Making: Fulk of Anjou’s Angevin Origins.
This paper will explore how the comital experience of Count Fulk of Anjou (King of Jerusalem 1131-43) informed his attitudes and approaches to kingship in the Latin East in terms of his alliances, projects, patronage - in particular Fontevrault and the light this may shed on the importance of Bethany to the future king of Jerusalem - and the roles of his wife and children alongside him. By examining the surviving charter evidence, I will investigate Fulk’s support base and key associates - such as the influence of his natal family through his mother Bertrade and brother Philip, and his wider circle including erstwhile ally and local lord of Le Mans Lisiard of Sablé. I will assess how he engaged with ideas surrounding comital power and the acquisition of new territories, including the case of Maine through his first marriage to Countess Eremberge r. 1109-1126. This line of questioning will shed light on first his relationship with the ruling elite in the Latin East, including his future wife Melisende of Jerusalem, and second on the impact of his first encounters with crusading had on his comital rule and particularly his relationship with female power in Western Europe. This paper will question how far Fulk fit the norms of comital power in Anjou, and more broadly the Medieval West, and what this might reveal about his personal attitudes to power, authority, gender, and history in realising his ambitions to depict himself as a great Angevin prince, patron, and protector.
Danielle is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London. Before re-joining the department in 2019 she lectured at the University of York, the University of Sheffield, the University of Leicester, the University of Reading, and Royal Holloway, University of London - where she received her PhD in 2013. Danielle's book Papal Protection and the Crusader: Flanders, Champagne and the Kingdom of France, 1095-1222 (Boydell and Brewer, 2018) is particularly interested in what happened on the home-front while the crusaders were away. In 2019 she appeared on BBC’s In Our Time to discuss Queen Melisende of Jerusalem. Her current project is a study of the reign and partnership of Queen Melisende (r.1131-52 d.1161) and King Fulk of Jerusalem (r.1131-43). She is currently researching and writing a second book on this couple and recently published a chapter exploring Melisende in public history in The Making of Crusading Heroes and Villains: Engaging the Crusades, Volume Four (Routledge, 2020).
Chair: Nikolas Jaspert (University of Heidelberg)
Andrew Buck (University College, Dublin): Remembering Baldwin I: The Secundam historiae Hierosolimitanae partem and the Jerusalemite monarchy in Twelfth-Century France
In recent decades, crusades scholarship has benefitted greatly from a deeper examination into how medieval Europeans memorialised the crusading past, as well as the purpose of such remembrance in shaping societal attitudes and behaviours (particular in elite circles). Above all else, this has led to a realisation that stories associated with crusading
expeditions, especially the First Crusade, held a great deal of currency in elite circles and came to influence (and be influenced by) ideals of power, social status, religiosity, kingship, and knighthood. However, whereas the importance of individual crusading ventures within these processes of crusading memorialisation and reception has been well established, the role played by the histories written about the subsequent experiences of the Latin settlements
of Outremer is rather less popular. This paper takes up the challenge of addressing this imbalance by examining a little-known and rarely utilised text relating to the early decades of the crusader states, the so-called Secundam historiae Iherosolimitane partem, written in the mid-twelfth century and often attributed to one Lisiard of Tours. After outlining the
provenance and wider context of this narrative, this chapter will explore what it can tell us about the nature and purpose of memories which circulated in Europe regarding Baldwin of Boulogne, otherwise known as King Baldwin I of Jerusalem (r. 1100–18).
Andrew Buck is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. He has published widely on the history of the principality of Antioch and the crusader states more generally, while his current research focus is on medieval historical writing in (and about) the Latin East, as well as the reception of such texts in the Latin West, with a particular focus on William of Tyre’s Chronicon.
Edward Caddy (Queen Mary, University of London): Defining the Borders of the First Crusade, 1101-2.
The conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099 is traditionally considered the terminus of the First Crusade. However, if we look beyond this date to the years that followed, we can better understand the inchoate state of crusading during this era. In the West, preaching and recruitment had not stopped once the Princes’ Crusade set out in 1096: a steady stream of Christians followed the path forged by those first crusaders. Such expeditions have received comparatively little scholarly attention, often presented as mere addendums to 1096-99. To further our understanding, this paper will explore just one of the
ventures that set out from the West in the years following the conquest of the Holy City, the so-called Crusade of 1101. It will be argued that, by considering the role that the crusade vow played, it is possible to better uncover the nature of crusading as it was conceived by contemporaries. In doing so, I will test the border of the First Crusade, exploring whether those that followed in the footsteps of the first crusaders should be considered part of the initial venture, or whether their expedition was distinct.
Danielle Park (Royal Holloway, University of London): Crusader Kingship in the Making: Fulk of Anjou’s Angevin Origins.
This paper will explore how the comital experience of Count Fulk of Anjou (King of Jerusalem 1131-43) informed his attitudes and approaches to kingship in the Latin East in terms of his alliances, projects, patronage - in particular Fontevrault and the light this may shed on the importance of Bethany to the future king of Jerusalem - and the roles of his wife and children alongside him. By examining the surviving charter evidence, I will investigate Fulk’s support base and key associates - such as the influence of his natal family through his mother Bertrade and brother Philip, and his wider circle including erstwhile ally and local lord of Le Mans Lisiard of Sablé. I will assess how he engaged with ideas surrounding comital power and the acquisition of new territories, including the case of Maine through his first marriage to Countess Eremberge r. 1109-1126. This line of questioning will shed light on first his relationship with the ruling elite in the Latin East, including his future wife Melisende of Jerusalem, and second on the impact of his first encounters with crusading had on his comital rule and particularly his relationship with female power in Western Europe. This paper will question how far Fulk fit the norms of comital power in Anjou, and more broadly the Medieval West, and what this might reveal about his personal attitudes to power, authority, gender, and history in realising his ambitions to depict himself as a great Angevin prince, patron, and protector.
Danielle is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London. Before re-joining the department in 2019 she lectured at the University of York, the University of Sheffield, the University of Leicester, the University of Reading, and Royal Holloway, University of London - where she received her PhD in 2013. Danielle's book Papal Protection and the Crusader: Flanders, Champagne and the Kingdom of France, 1095-1222 (Boydell and Brewer, 2018) is particularly interested in what happened on the home-front while the crusaders were away. In 2019 she appeared on BBC’s In Our Time to discuss Queen Melisende of Jerusalem. Her current project is a study of the reign and partnership of Queen Melisende (r.1131-52 d.1161) and King Fulk of Jerusalem (r.1131-43). She is currently researching and writing a second book on this couple and recently published a chapter exploring Melisende in public history in The Making of Crusading Heroes and Villains: Engaging the Crusades, Volume Four (Routledge, 2020).
2.2 Sources, Panel 1
Chair: Kirsi Salonen (University of Turku)
James Gallacher (University of Glasgow): Crusading Memory in the Expedition Narrative of Waleran de Wavrin.
In 1444-46, the Burgundian courtier Waleran de Wavrin, headed a Burgundian fleet sent to aid the Byzantine Emperor, John VIII, against the advances of the Ottoman Turks. Despite grand aspirations, however, the expedition failed to impress many contemporaries and drew much criticism. On some levels, contemporaries were justified in their disapproval of the enterprise. Waleran’s ‘crusade’ had achieved very little and, arguably, played a part in Murad II, the Ottoman Sultan’s, victory over the crusaders at Varna in 1444. The disappointing outcome of Waleran’s expedition therefore had the potential to tarnish his reputation at court and beyond. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Waleran and his uncle Jean, attempted to rectify this dilemma by composing a sizeable account of Waleran’s campaign which was housed within the Anciennes Chroniques d’Angleterre, as they sought to fashion a positive and lasting memory of the enterprise. Here, Waleran and Jean countered the lukewarm reception Waleran’s expedition had received, but they also asserted the chivalric value of Waleran’s deeds with frequent reference to the crusading past in an effort to perpetuate not only his memory but that of his family as well. This paper thus looks at the ways in which the Wavrins attempted to spin Waleran’s crusading ‘failure’ as a crusading ‘success’, examining how even the memory of participation in a failed crusading campaign could be twisted and recycled to boost an aristocratic family’s crusading legacy.
James Gallacher is a third year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Glasgow. His Ph.D. explores the role of memory in both shaping and reflecting on the phenomenon of fifteenth-century crusading. It combines two intimately related themes. The first examines how traditions and the memory of past crusading were transmitted and recreated both in court culture and within the collective memory of noble families, especially those who could claim and celebrate ancestors who had fought in earlier expeditions for the Faith. The second explores how these ideas influenced the ideals of chivalry in the fifteenth century, and how in turn nobles who undertook crusading ventures themselves desired to have the memory of their own feats of arms recorded, transmitted, and lauded.
Timothy Owens (University of St Andrews) Reading Crusade Histories in Late Fourteenth Century Paris: Philippe de Mezières’ Sources and their Uses.
The soldier, crusader, and writer Philippe de Mézières (c.1327-1405) was among the most important promoters of a new Holy Land crusade in the fourteenth century. He was active for several decades and attained positions of some influence at both the Cypriot and French royal courts. This paper examines Philippe’s use of the history of crusading in an effort to bring to light some of the sources he made use of and the way he deployed crusading’s past to further his own agenda. Previous
analyses of Philippe’s historical reading material have been limited, and have largely failed to demonstrate his use of specific texts. This paper demonstrates for the first time that Philippe made use of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis and that he is also very likely to have used Guillaume de Tyr’s Historia. Analysis of a hand-written eighteenth-century book catalogue allows the identification of a particular volume that was more than likely the copy of the Historia Orientalis personally read by Philippe. Finally the paper shows that Philippe used his knowledge of crusading’s past not to incorporate lengthy historical sections into his works, as had some earlier crusade advocates, such as Marino Sanudo and Het‘um of Corycus, but instead inserted short anecdotes, tightly focused on inspiring his own readers. Philippe provides a unique example of the way in which the “classics” of crusade history could be not only an inspiration in the later Middle Ages but also instrumentalised by those who had inherited the challenging legacy of crusading.
Timothy Owens completed his PhD in Medieval History at the University of St Andrews in 2019. His title was: 'Philippe de Mézières and the Order of the Passion: Crusade Ideology, Propaganda, and Strategy in the Late Fourteenth Century'. He is currently employed as a short-term research fellow at St Andrews.
Simone Lombardo (Catholic University, Milan): A Loss of Appeal: The Genoese Chronicle of Giorgio Stella and the Crusades of the Fourteenth Century.
Chair: Kirsi Salonen (University of Turku)
James Gallacher (University of Glasgow): Crusading Memory in the Expedition Narrative of Waleran de Wavrin.
In 1444-46, the Burgundian courtier Waleran de Wavrin, headed a Burgundian fleet sent to aid the Byzantine Emperor, John VIII, against the advances of the Ottoman Turks. Despite grand aspirations, however, the expedition failed to impress many contemporaries and drew much criticism. On some levels, contemporaries were justified in their disapproval of the enterprise. Waleran’s ‘crusade’ had achieved very little and, arguably, played a part in Murad II, the Ottoman Sultan’s, victory over the crusaders at Varna in 1444. The disappointing outcome of Waleran’s expedition therefore had the potential to tarnish his reputation at court and beyond. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Waleran and his uncle Jean, attempted to rectify this dilemma by composing a sizeable account of Waleran’s campaign which was housed within the Anciennes Chroniques d’Angleterre, as they sought to fashion a positive and lasting memory of the enterprise. Here, Waleran and Jean countered the lukewarm reception Waleran’s expedition had received, but they also asserted the chivalric value of Waleran’s deeds with frequent reference to the crusading past in an effort to perpetuate not only his memory but that of his family as well. This paper thus looks at the ways in which the Wavrins attempted to spin Waleran’s crusading ‘failure’ as a crusading ‘success’, examining how even the memory of participation in a failed crusading campaign could be twisted and recycled to boost an aristocratic family’s crusading legacy.
James Gallacher is a third year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Glasgow. His Ph.D. explores the role of memory in both shaping and reflecting on the phenomenon of fifteenth-century crusading. It combines two intimately related themes. The first examines how traditions and the memory of past crusading were transmitted and recreated both in court culture and within the collective memory of noble families, especially those who could claim and celebrate ancestors who had fought in earlier expeditions for the Faith. The second explores how these ideas influenced the ideals of chivalry in the fifteenth century, and how in turn nobles who undertook crusading ventures themselves desired to have the memory of their own feats of arms recorded, transmitted, and lauded.
Timothy Owens (University of St Andrews) Reading Crusade Histories in Late Fourteenth Century Paris: Philippe de Mezières’ Sources and their Uses.
The soldier, crusader, and writer Philippe de Mézières (c.1327-1405) was among the most important promoters of a new Holy Land crusade in the fourteenth century. He was active for several decades and attained positions of some influence at both the Cypriot and French royal courts. This paper examines Philippe’s use of the history of crusading in an effort to bring to light some of the sources he made use of and the way he deployed crusading’s past to further his own agenda. Previous
analyses of Philippe’s historical reading material have been limited, and have largely failed to demonstrate his use of specific texts. This paper demonstrates for the first time that Philippe made use of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis and that he is also very likely to have used Guillaume de Tyr’s Historia. Analysis of a hand-written eighteenth-century book catalogue allows the identification of a particular volume that was more than likely the copy of the Historia Orientalis personally read by Philippe. Finally the paper shows that Philippe used his knowledge of crusading’s past not to incorporate lengthy historical sections into his works, as had some earlier crusade advocates, such as Marino Sanudo and Het‘um of Corycus, but instead inserted short anecdotes, tightly focused on inspiring his own readers. Philippe provides a unique example of the way in which the “classics” of crusade history could be not only an inspiration in the later Middle Ages but also instrumentalised by those who had inherited the challenging legacy of crusading.
Timothy Owens completed his PhD in Medieval History at the University of St Andrews in 2019. His title was: 'Philippe de Mézières and the Order of the Passion: Crusade Ideology, Propaganda, and Strategy in the Late Fourteenth Century'. He is currently employed as a short-term research fellow at St Andrews.
Simone Lombardo (Catholic University, Milan): A Loss of Appeal: The Genoese Chronicle of Giorgio Stella and the Crusades of the Fourteenth Century.
2.3 Memory and Legacy of the Crusades, Panel 2
Chair: Andrew Elliott (University of Lincoln)
Sarah Bernhardt (University of Cambridge): Crusading Imagery in the Context of Global Contemporary Art.
This paper looks at the rise of Crusading imagery and re-appropriation in contemporary artistic practice, especially from artists outside of Western contexts. The work of Wael Shawky, in particular, has received widespread acknowledgement and circulation after a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and explores the legacy of the Crusades through film, drawing, and sculpture. Occupying a unique position in the historic imagination, the Crusades are of course especially complicated to the non-medievalist not just because of their temporal remoteness, but also because of their duration. Taking this as a starting point, this paper asks wider theoretical questions about how complex and challenging historic sources can be visually explicated to unfamiliar audiences with their own bias and assumptions. Aside from the art itself, this paper examines strategies deployed by museums and galleries to present works as a gateway to greater understanding and ‘loosened’ from ideology, while retaining complex historic detail. This paper looks at commissioned essays and press releases, deliberate aesthetic installation details, and reception in the broader public realm to explore how new audiences can engage with the Crusades.
Sarah Bernhardt is a researcher, writer and artist. She graduated from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford with a master’s degree in medieval history in 2018, and is starting a PhD at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge University. She studies the senses in medieval and Early Modern Europe, and is especially interested representations of the medieval period in contemporary art. She has worked with institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Venice Biennale, and the New Museum, and has exhibited at galleries including White Cube and MOSTYN.
Hilary Rhodes (Maryville University) Crusading Mentality, Memory and the Modern Russian State.
In the last few years, the Russian Federation has increasingly made headlines for its aggressive and erratic behaviour, especially in regard to its territorial attacks on neighbouring Ukraine. While some argue that this represents a return to a traditional Cold War-style ‘us vs them’ mentality, this paper searches for the medieval and crusading roots of the Russian preoccupation with the ‘holy land’ of Ukraine, centring on the city of Kyiv’s status as the birthplace of Christianity in the tenth-and eleventh-century Kievan Rus’. Highlighting the role of Prince Vladimir ‘the Great’ (r. 980–1015) in Ukrainian and Russian cultural memory, the paper contends that while the conflict does contain some Cold War elements, the core of the struggle lies in deeply medieval concepts of territory, religion, crusade, homeland, and identity. The present Russian
geopolitical strategy in fact represents a dramatic reversal of the institutionally atheist twentieth-century Soviet state, as several members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle have publicly converted to Orthodox Christianity, and draws instead on the tsars’ traditional mantra of ‘autocracy, orthodoxy, nationalism.’ By exploring the links to deeply embedded Russian crusading mentalities, spanning from the conflicts in Ukraine to the Yugoslavian wars, the paper illuminates the history of a region not normally associated with crusading, seeks to provide a more complete understanding of a complex international issue, and demonstrates the ways in which encounters with the crusading and medieval past still directly inform modern policy, politics, and culture.
Hilary Rhodes received her PhD from the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds in 2019. Her research interests include crusade history, medieval gender, social, and queer history, medieval and modern historiography, and
the role of the ‘imagined medieval’ in modern culture. Her first monograph, The Crown and the Cross: Burgundy, France, and the Crusades, 1095–1223 was published by Brepols in 2020. She is currently an adjunct faculty member in history at the College of Arts and Sciences, Maryville University, St Louis.
Mike Horswell (Royal Holloway, University of London): A Sleepy Topic or Playing with Fire? Wikipedia and the Reception of the Crusades Re-visited.
Wikipedia articles on the crusades are potentially the most widely read form of information about the crusades – at least the first paragraph of the ‘Crusades’ article at least. The online, freely-accessible and editable encyclopaedia birthed in 2001 is rated as one of the most visited sites on the internet. Summaries of Wikipedia articles appear in Google search results and are linked to by Facebook and YouTube as ‘fact checking’ standards, while Wikipedia is a reference point for in-home digital assistants and search engines. ‘Wikipedia’, Heather Ford has argued, ‘is important because it has become entangled in our everyday lives. Because of its ubiquity, ease of use and centrality to the Web experience, Wikipedia has become a marker of importance, a symbol of notability, a site of information power.’ How, then, are the crusades presented, and what can we gauge about their reception through this medium? What are the sources of knowledge about the crusades employed by the article’s authors? This paper will update the conclusions of the chapter published in The Crusades and the Modern World (Routledge, 2019) and broaden its scope by surveying other crusade-related articles in the Anglophone encyclopaedia and mapping connections between articles. It will demonstrate that the ‘Talk’ discussion pages behind each article represent a valuable resource for those considering the reception of the crusades in the last two decades.
Mike Horswell completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2017 and has published his doctoral work as a monograph, The Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, c. 1825-1945 (Routledge, 2018). He has taught at Royal Holloway, King’s College London, the University of Bayreuth and the University of Oxford and is the co-series editor of Engaging the Crusades (Routledge). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway; he is currently researching, teaching and writing about the memory and use of the crusades in the modern era.
Chair: Andrew Elliott (University of Lincoln)
Sarah Bernhardt (University of Cambridge): Crusading Imagery in the Context of Global Contemporary Art.
This paper looks at the rise of Crusading imagery and re-appropriation in contemporary artistic practice, especially from artists outside of Western contexts. The work of Wael Shawky, in particular, has received widespread acknowledgement and circulation after a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and explores the legacy of the Crusades through film, drawing, and sculpture. Occupying a unique position in the historic imagination, the Crusades are of course especially complicated to the non-medievalist not just because of their temporal remoteness, but also because of their duration. Taking this as a starting point, this paper asks wider theoretical questions about how complex and challenging historic sources can be visually explicated to unfamiliar audiences with their own bias and assumptions. Aside from the art itself, this paper examines strategies deployed by museums and galleries to present works as a gateway to greater understanding and ‘loosened’ from ideology, while retaining complex historic detail. This paper looks at commissioned essays and press releases, deliberate aesthetic installation details, and reception in the broader public realm to explore how new audiences can engage with the Crusades.
Sarah Bernhardt is a researcher, writer and artist. She graduated from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford with a master’s degree in medieval history in 2018, and is starting a PhD at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge University. She studies the senses in medieval and Early Modern Europe, and is especially interested representations of the medieval period in contemporary art. She has worked with institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Venice Biennale, and the New Museum, and has exhibited at galleries including White Cube and MOSTYN.
Hilary Rhodes (Maryville University) Crusading Mentality, Memory and the Modern Russian State.
In the last few years, the Russian Federation has increasingly made headlines for its aggressive and erratic behaviour, especially in regard to its territorial attacks on neighbouring Ukraine. While some argue that this represents a return to a traditional Cold War-style ‘us vs them’ mentality, this paper searches for the medieval and crusading roots of the Russian preoccupation with the ‘holy land’ of Ukraine, centring on the city of Kyiv’s status as the birthplace of Christianity in the tenth-and eleventh-century Kievan Rus’. Highlighting the role of Prince Vladimir ‘the Great’ (r. 980–1015) in Ukrainian and Russian cultural memory, the paper contends that while the conflict does contain some Cold War elements, the core of the struggle lies in deeply medieval concepts of territory, religion, crusade, homeland, and identity. The present Russian
geopolitical strategy in fact represents a dramatic reversal of the institutionally atheist twentieth-century Soviet state, as several members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle have publicly converted to Orthodox Christianity, and draws instead on the tsars’ traditional mantra of ‘autocracy, orthodoxy, nationalism.’ By exploring the links to deeply embedded Russian crusading mentalities, spanning from the conflicts in Ukraine to the Yugoslavian wars, the paper illuminates the history of a region not normally associated with crusading, seeks to provide a more complete understanding of a complex international issue, and demonstrates the ways in which encounters with the crusading and medieval past still directly inform modern policy, politics, and culture.
Hilary Rhodes received her PhD from the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds in 2019. Her research interests include crusade history, medieval gender, social, and queer history, medieval and modern historiography, and
the role of the ‘imagined medieval’ in modern culture. Her first monograph, The Crown and the Cross: Burgundy, France, and the Crusades, 1095–1223 was published by Brepols in 2020. She is currently an adjunct faculty member in history at the College of Arts and Sciences, Maryville University, St Louis.
Mike Horswell (Royal Holloway, University of London): A Sleepy Topic or Playing with Fire? Wikipedia and the Reception of the Crusades Re-visited.
Wikipedia articles on the crusades are potentially the most widely read form of information about the crusades – at least the first paragraph of the ‘Crusades’ article at least. The online, freely-accessible and editable encyclopaedia birthed in 2001 is rated as one of the most visited sites on the internet. Summaries of Wikipedia articles appear in Google search results and are linked to by Facebook and YouTube as ‘fact checking’ standards, while Wikipedia is a reference point for in-home digital assistants and search engines. ‘Wikipedia’, Heather Ford has argued, ‘is important because it has become entangled in our everyday lives. Because of its ubiquity, ease of use and centrality to the Web experience, Wikipedia has become a marker of importance, a symbol of notability, a site of information power.’ How, then, are the crusades presented, and what can we gauge about their reception through this medium? What are the sources of knowledge about the crusades employed by the article’s authors? This paper will update the conclusions of the chapter published in The Crusades and the Modern World (Routledge, 2019) and broaden its scope by surveying other crusade-related articles in the Anglophone encyclopaedia and mapping connections between articles. It will demonstrate that the ‘Talk’ discussion pages behind each article represent a valuable resource for those considering the reception of the crusades in the last two decades.
Mike Horswell completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2017 and has published his doctoral work as a monograph, The Rise and Fall of British Crusader Medievalism, c. 1825-1945 (Routledge, 2018). He has taught at Royal Holloway, King’s College London, the University of Bayreuth and the University of Oxford and is the co-series editor of Engaging the Crusades (Routledge). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway; he is currently researching, teaching and writing about the memory and use of the crusades in the modern era.