St Bernard of Clairvaux, The Low Countries and the Lisbon Letter of the Second Crusade

1997 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The West ◽  
Latin East ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The City

On 24 December 1144 'Imad ad-Din Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, captured the Christian city of Edessa. This was the most serious setback suffered by the Frankish settlers in the Levant since their arrival in the region at the end of the eleventh century. In reaction the rulers of Antioch and Jerusalem dispatched envoys to the west appealing for help. The initial efforts of Pope Eugenius in and King Louis VII of France met with little response, but at Easter 1146, at Vézelay, Bernard of Clairvaux led a renewed call to save the Holy Land and the Second Crusade began to gather momentum. As the crusade developed, its aims grew beyond an expedition to the Latin East and it evolved into a wider movement of Christian expansion encom-passing further campaigns against the pagan Wends in the Baltic and the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula. One particular group of men participated in two elements of the crusade; namely, the northern Europeans who sailed via the Iberian peninsula to the Holy Land. In thecourse of this journey they achieved the major success of the Second Crusade when they captured the city of Lisbon in October 1147. This article will consider how this aspect of the expedition fitted into the conception of the crusade as a whole and will try to establish when Lisbon became the principal target for the crusaders. St Bernard's preaching tour of the Low Countries emerges as an important, yet hitherto neglected, event.

Western Converts to Islam (Later Eleventh to Later Fifteenth Centuries)

Traditio ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 153-231
Author(s):  
A. J. Forey
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Mediterranean Regions ◽  
Crusader States ◽  
Made In

The early expansion of Islam led in time to widespread conversions of Christians in conquered territories. In the later eleventh century, however, western Christendom was in turn launching offensives against Islam on several fronts. Territorial gains were made in various Mediterranean regions and, although by the end of the thirteenth century the Holy Land had been lost again, Sicily remained in Christian hands, and in the second half of the thirteenth century in the Iberian peninsula only Granada remained under Muslim control: the whole peninsula was under Christian rule before the end of the fifteenth century. This expansion was accompanied, especially in the thirteenth century, by attempts to convert Muslims and other non-Christians. Yet in the period from the late eleventh until the later fifteenth century some western Christians converted to Islam. The purpose of the present paper is to consider the situations that prompted the adoption of Islam, and the reasons for such conversions, although the evidence is usually insufficient to indicate exactly why a particular Christian became a Muslim: the preconceived ideas voiced in western sources about forced conversions can be misleading and, although a crude distinction might be made between conversions from conviction and those based on worldly considerations, motives did not necessarily always fit neatly into just one of these two categories. But obviously not all converts would have had an equal understanding of the nature of Islamic beliefs and practices. The response of western ecclesiastical and secular authorities to renegades will also be considered. Further conversions of Christian peoples who had already for centuries been living under Muslim rule will not be examined, but only the adoption of Islam by those whose origins lay in western Christian countries or who were normally resident in these, and by westerners whose lands were newly conquered by Muslim powers after the eleventh century; and the focus will be mainly, though not exclusively, on the crusader states and the Iberian peninsula.

Defenders of the Holy Land: Relations between the Latin East and the West, 1119-1187

1999 ◽  
Vol 104 (1) ◽  
pp. 285
Author(s):  
A. J. Forey ◽  
Jonathan Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Holy Land ◽  
The West ◽  
Land Relations ◽  
Latin East

To Constantinople and Back

2021 ◽  
pp. 170-198
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
The West ◽  
Building Activities ◽  
Imperial Family ◽  
The City ◽  
Theological Politics

Chapter 9 follows Melania as she trails her still-pagan uncle Volusian to Constantinople; he was one of two chosen to represent the West at the wedding of the eastern princess Licinia Eudoxia to the western emperor, Valentinian III. The chapter describes travel arrangements of the period, including use of the cursus publicus, and the city of Constantinople and its institutions. It traces the development of Christianity in the city, the rise of monasticism, the building of churches, and the search for relics. It describes the eastern court and Melania’s associations with high aristocracy and the Constantinopolitan imperial family. Volusian, although converted, did not live to participate in bringing the recently finished Theodosian Code to the West. The chapter also details the theological politics and Christological controversies (in which Melania participated) that disturbed the city in the fifth century. After mourning her uncle, Melania left Constantinople in late February 437, making record progress through the snow in order to reach Jerusalem in time for Easter (April 11, 437). In Jerusalem, she continued her building activities and acquisition of relics, and she greeted and escorted the empress Eudocia on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land from Constantinople. A few days before her death in December 439, Melania accompanied her cousin Paula to celebrate the nativity of Jesus in Bethlehem. Back in her monastery, she bade farewell to various groups before dying on probably December 31. Her remarkable life, according to her biographer, was crowned by a similarly spectacular death and entry to heaven.

Rebuilding Zion: the holy places of Jerusalem in the twelfth century

1977 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 105-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Primary Interest ◽  
The West ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
The City

It is unusual for a period of Christian renewal to begin with a massacre, yet that is what happened when the crusaders entered Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain of the count of Toulouse, boasted that they rode through moslem corpses heaped up in the Haram al-Sharif with blood ‘even to the horse bridles’ This should not obscure the fact that the crusading movement was motivated partly by a growing devotion to the humanity of Christ in the western church in the late eleventh century, or, as the author of the Gesta Francorum expressed it, a desire to ‘follow in the footsteps of Christ, by whom they had been redeemed from the power of hell’. It was this sentiment which led the crusaders to seek to restore the shrine churches of Jerusalem and in the eighty-eight years of their rule they filled the city with fine churches and monasteries closely resembling those which were being built in the west at the same time. It should be emphasised that the crusaders were seldom concerned to rebuild existing churches in Frankish style: their primary interest was to restore churches which had been ruined by war and persecution in the centuries of moslem rule. The pilgrim Saewulf, who visited the east four years after the Latin conquest, reported that ‘nothing has been left habitable by the Saracens, but everything has been devastated . . . in all. . . the holy places outside the walls. . . of Jerusalem’.

The Holy Land in Old Russian Culture

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 250-262
Author(s):  
Richard M. Price
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
The Church

After the Muslim conquest of Palestine there was a comparative lull in Holy Land pilgrimage until a revival in the more settled conditions of the tenth century. The first half of the eleventh century saw a marked increase in the number of pilgrims, most notably but not exclusively from the West, as well as the restoration of the Church of the Anastasis by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX. This context explains the enthusiasm with which in the same century the Christians of Russia, within decades of their adoption of the faith, took up Holy Land pilgrimage with all the enthusiasm of recent converts.

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