The crusades should be a natural fit for a collection of essays about nature and the environment in the Middle Ages. After all, crusading expeditions to the Holy Land, the Baltic states, Spain, and other intended and unintended destinations, such as Constantinople and Egypt, presented Europeans with exotic and unfamiliar flora and fauna that would have challenged and stimulated their perceptions of the natural world. And given the crusaders’ goals and motivations--to recover sacred, or what were considered rightfully Christian, places from Muslims, “pagans,” and other non-Catholics--their observations about the varied environments they encountered would effortlessly lend themselves to the conflation of the natural and supernatural that characterizes so much of how medieval people viewed the world. Moreover, the crusades spanned exactly those time periods--here extending from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries--when medieval people’s perceptions about nature underwent significant change and evolution, largely owing to dramatic, epochal natural events, such as the Little Ice Age or the Black Death.
As with most essay collections, this one offers a variety of contributions that are hit or miss regarding their thematic relevance and insights. First, the misses. Francesca Petrizzo’s “A Porous Boundary: Natural and Supernatural in the Hystoria de via” (43-69), aims to show that the Hystoria chronicle, which was produced at the monastery of Montecassino in the twelfth century and which focused on the contributions of the Normans of southern Italy to the crusades, is a “sophisticated text” that elides the “porous boundary” between the natural and supernatural worlds in order to showcase the “extraordinary efforts” of the crusaders. However, there are scant actual references to nature in the ensuing discussion, which leads the reader to wonder why the essay is included in this volume.
Piers Mitchell’s contribution, “Crusaders as Microcosm: Soldiers, Pilgrims, and Their Intestinal Parasites in the Medieval Mediterranean” (71-84), is the only chapter on disease in the entire collection, and even then it is very brief. It mostly addresses archaeological evidence of parasites in crusaders’ guts, as there seems little textual evidence available, but there is no discussion of how such diseases impacted crusader expeditions and campaigns.
Carol Sweetenham’s “The Wonders of Nature: Imaginary and Imagined Animals in the Fictional Universe of the First Crusade” (113-136), is meant to be a companion piece to Linda Paterson’s immediately previous essay on real animals (see below). But again, there is little here that seems relevant to the natural world actually encountered by crusaders. Obviously, the focus of the essay is on the imaginary, or the “fantastic,” but there is little discussion of how this relates to the crusades and nature, which is meant to be the overarching theme of the book.
Dan Mirkin’s “Were Medieval Seamen Aware of Mediterranean Currents?” (137-166) is an admirably detailed accounting, based on modern data, of currents in the Mediterranean that may have affected the progress of crusade expeditions by sea. But since medieval sailors were likely unaware of these currents, Mirkin concludes that they were not influenced by currents in plotting their courses as they transported crusaders to their destinations. Therefore, one has to ask, what is the point of the essay?
Francesco Dall’Aglio’s “An Encounter with Alterity: Western Chronicles of the Third and Fourth Crusade and the Natural Environment of South-Eastern Europe” (189-218) provides a welcome focus on eastern Europe, namely, the Balkans during the Third and Fourth Crusades (1189-1204). Unfortunately, the author focuses more on the “alterity” of the human inhabitants encountered by crusaders, rather than on the natural environment proper. Moreover, he admits that the sources he relies on for his study may be unreliable. Likewise, the succeeding essay, Jesse Izzo’s “The Comets of 1264 and 1299: A Comparative Look at the Near Eastern Sources” (219-237), seems barely concerned with the natural world (at least here on earth), given that its focus is on astrological events. Nor is one convinced that the contemporary authors recording these comets necessarily related them to the crusades. (The second comet of 1299 occurred after the fall of Acre, the last Latin possession in Palestine, in 1291.)
The last two essays of the book also suffer from an obscurity of relevance. G. E. M. Lippiatt’s “Darkness Visible: Nature, Superstition, and Miracles in theHistoria Albigensis of Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay” (293-310), gives us a welcome focus on the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heresy in the south of France (1209-1229), but it pays mere lip service to the subject of nature as it relates to the crusades. Jessalynn Bird’s “The Natural World as Book (Mis)Read by Paris Theologians and Competing Faiths” (311-344) suffers from the opposite problem: While it discusses the use of the natural world in Jacques de Vitry’s sermons, I fail to see what connections these have with the crusades.
Now for the hits. H. E. Crowley’s “A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey? Agrarian Environments in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem” (15-41) provides a useful comparison of literary depictions of agricultural products and landscape in the Levant--particularly wine and olive oil production--with documentary and archaeological evidence for the same. This is especially important given crusade chroniclers’ propensity to conflate the biblical with the real when describing the Holy Land.
Linda Paterson’s “Real Animals in the Siège d’Antioche” (85-111) catalogs both wild and domestic animals that occur in an Old French verse account of the First Crusade (1096-1099). Her conclusion is that the crusaders exhibited an attitude of “anthropocentric utilitarianism” toward animals--namely, that they valued animals insofar as they were useful to humans, with horses being at the top of the list.
Edward Holt’s “Estrela Do Mar: The Sea as a Destination of Crusade in the Cantigas de Santa María” (167-188) is a well-argued and innovative discussion of how the Reconquista, or the Spanish crusades, encompassed territorial acquisition and defense of the sea, not just on land, and how the cult of the Virgin Mary was enlisted in this effort. In this case, there was a fortuitous elision between mare nostrum and María nostra.
Gregory Leighton, in “Ad Terram Prusie...Quasi Vinea de Egipto Translata: The Role of the Natural World in the Written and Visual Culture of the Prussian Crusades, 1230-1390” (239-267), provides another welcome focus on eastern Europe, in this case, crusades in the Baltic led by the Teutonic knights. His essay is divided into two sections, one focusing on the practical implications of crusading in the natural environment of the Baltic, and one on the symbolic aspects of this effort.
Finally, Beth Spacey’s “‘The root of bitterness’: Crusade and the Eradication of Heresy from the Occitanian Landscape in Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay’sHistoria Albigensis,” explores natural landscapes--in both a spiritual and physical sense--with regard to how they framed and impacted the Albigensian Crusade. This is focused on the narrative of Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay, a Cistercian monk who was an eyewitness and participant in the crusade.
Obviously, the hits in this collection make up only a third of the fourteen chapters in the book--not a great track record for an article compilation of this kind. Compounding this defect is the sin of repetition--do we really need two essays on animals in the Siège d’Antioche, for example, or two on Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay’s Historia Albigensis? This repetition necessarily takes away from other subjects worthy of attention. For example, as an historian of disease, I was disappointed there was not more on the microbial landscape of the crusades and how this impacted crusaders’ efforts. Surely there was more to this than intestinal parasites. One also suspects that contact with Arab culture, which for much of the Middle Ages was far more advanced in terms of medicine than in the West and was a crucial transmitter of ancient learning, would have opened many crusaders’ eyes to this aspect of their natural landscape. Another surprising omission is the military application of the natural landscapes of the Levant. This greatly informed the location and construction of crusader castles, for example, which was a feature of the work of R. C. Smail, Christopher Marshall, and Hugh Kennedy. But an updating and extension to other crusade theaters, such as Spain and the Baltic, would have been welcome.
Even so, there is enough to make this collection worth consulting by students of the crusades, and of medieval environmental history. There is an argument to be made for expanding our definition and scope of what was “natural” in the medieval world, as some of the contributors seem anxious to do. But to convince, this argument needs to be made more persuasively, and with more relevance--in this case, to the crusades—than is done here.