Hilary Rhodes

The Crown and the Cross examines the heretofore-unstudied role of the French province of Burgundy in the ‘traditional’ era of the crusades, from 1095–c.1220. Covering the First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Albigensian Crusades in detail, it focuses primarily on the Capetian dukes, a cadet branch of the French royal family, but uncovers substantial lay participation and some crusading traditions among Burgundian noble families as well. The book additionally uses the crusading institution to explore the development of the medieval French monarchy, and makes accessible a corpus of scholarship and documents that until now have mostly existed in French or Latin. It concludes that while piety and religion did play a central role in the experience of many everyday Burgundian crusaders, the greater political ramifications of the crusading project functioned in subtle and long-lasting ways, and had consequences for the entire institution, not just Burgundy or France. Of interest to scholars of the crusades, French history, and the formation of medieval Europe, The Crown and the Cross nuances, challenges, and expands our understanding of the intellectual genealogy of the crusades and their real-world consequences, fills a critical gap in the historiography, and poses a set of important conclusions and questions for continued study.

Since the events of 11 September 2001, and the deployment of a political, social, and cultural discourse around the ‘War on Terror’, perhaps no area of medieval studies has enjoyed more of a resurgence than crusade scholarship, attempting to connect this modern-day phenomenon with its historical iterations. The original crusades, a series of military engagements that took place largely in the Middle East and were sponsored by the Catholic church and powerful European warrior princes, are generally held to have spanned the 200 years from 1095 to 1291, and laid the groundwork for a millennium of troubled relations between ‘the West and the Rest’: a supposedly incompatible frontier of competing cultures, embedded in a distinct values-hierarchy. In this model, whereas one (the West) is rational, secular, forward, progressive, tolerant, humane, and civilised, the other (the Rest) is irrational, sectarian, backward, static, intolerant, inhumane, and uncivilised. This problematic paradigm, articulated most influentially in Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, has been central to the crafting of U.S. foreign policy over decades.  The rise of ISIS has also featured a nearly ubiquitous characterisation of it as ‘medieval,’ ‘barbaric’, or otherwise synonymous with the ‘stone age’, with a strong implication that this sort of violence is unknown to the Western societies they are attacking. The role of an ‘imagined medieval’ in this particular conflict is thus paramount – and arguably quite dishonest.