HIST 101 The First Crusade: The Invention of Crusading, 1000 - 1146
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
SEM
This Freshman research seminar will be devoted to an intensive investigation of the nameless penitential armed pilgrimage from western Europe to Jerusalem (1095-1101) that eventually captured the city, established the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and built a distinctive idea, that of crusading, into the fabric of early European consciousness. Much later (not until the 18th century!) these events and that invention became widely known as the "First" Crusade. Among the sources of that expedition was the history of the conditional early Christian acceptance of certain kinds of violence and the competing Christian-Islamic concept of a Holy Land and the demands that it made on believers. We will consider the impact (or non-impact) of that expedition and its consequences on other societies and cultures, chiefly those of Byzantium, Judaism, the Christian world of the East, and the Arab/Islamic world. We will also study the original source materials (in English translation) as well as some of the best recent scholarship, including both the military and the intellectual context of the events and their period. In light of the contemporary usage of the term "Crusade" we will also consider the development of the term in later history— that is, how the word and idea of "Crusade" got to mean what they meant to people after the twelfth century—and into the twenty-first.
