Crusading could be a passionate endeavor for medieval Christians, but the importance of passionate, religious zeal should not cause us to overlook the fact that the Crusades were also a massive, complex undertaking that wouldn't have been possible without a lot of careful, detailed planning.

In Fighting For Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman writes:

Crusading was not a spontaneous act. An individual rush of conviction or the sudden collective convulsion of a crowd might provoke the initial act of commitment, the adoption of the cross. However, the translation of that obligation into action depended on personal, political, social, financial, and economic preparation and planning and generated widely diffused legal and fiscal institutions.

Armies may march on their stomachs, but it is difficult to make them fight and die without a cause, without some internal dynamic that acts beyond reason to send warriors over the top or stand their ground. But all the passion in the universe could not, cannot create war, crusading or not, without the organization and manipulation of recruitment, finance, logistics, military structure — and ideas.

Many people have sought the reasons for the Crusades in politics, economics, imperialism, etc. While all of these may have played a role at times, the ultimate reason for the Crusades has to be located in religion. People didn’t travel thousands of miles from home, risking life and fortune, out of a desire for personal conquest. They did it because they believed God willed it.

While religion was the ultimate ideological reason for the Crusades, that alone didn’t make the Crusades possible. The recruitment, finance, logistics, and military structure which Tyerman references makes it clear that the pursuit of crusading had to go well beyond passion and zeal. All of these things required careful, reasoned planning. People didn’t run off half-cocked into Palestine to slaughter Muslims; instead, they spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to accomplish their goals in the most efficient manner possible.

Crusading can be contrasted with, for example, spontaneous pogroms against Jews — these pogroms may have been encouraged by those in power, but they weren’t well-organized and highly structured. The Crusades were and they had to be in order to have any chance at success whatsoever. In all the cases that the Crusades did poorly, one of the contributing factors was a lack of planning.

 

Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.