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Elite and Popular Perceptions of Imitatio Christi in Twelfth-Century Crusade Spirituality*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
From the time of the proclamation of the First Crusade in 1095 to at least the first decade of the twelfth century, there was an apparently universal understanding amongst the people of Christendom that those who joined the pilgrimage-in-arms that set out to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Land should be regarded as imitators of Christ. This was remarkable, for the imitation of Christ was understood by contemporaries to be the paramount ideal of spiritual perfection and, before 1095, only attainable by a total withdrawal from the world and a commitment to a monastic way of life. Yet with Pope Urban II’s Clermont sermon, the spirituality that was previously the preserve of those milites Christi who fought spiritual battles in the cloister was now also available to those who fought for Christ in the world. As the biographer of one prominent first crusader famously put it, before the proclamation of the crusade, his subject was ‘uncertain whether to follow in the footsteps of the Gospel or the world. But after the call to arms in the service of Christ, the twofold reason for fighting inflamed him beyond belief.’
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006
Footnotes
*
I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for supporting the research that led to this paper.
References
1 For the purposes of this paper, my analysis of the sources for the First Crusade does not go further than the first generation of histories, most of which were written before 1110.
2 On the idea otimitatio Christi, see in particular Tinsley, Ernest J., The Imitation of God in Christ: an Essay on the Biblical Basis of Christian Spirituality (London, 1960)Google Scholar; Constable, Giles, ‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, in idem, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 143–248.Google Scholar
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29 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Epistolae’, 8: 314.
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33 See also Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 124, 133–4.
34 See, for example, his description of the crusader who chose to fulfil his vow by joining the Cistercian order: ‘Epistolae’, 8: 437.
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39 Die ursprüngliche Templerregel, ed. G. Schnürer (Freiburg, 1903), 136. Citation from Ps. 116:13.
40 Papsturkunden für Templer una Johanniter, ed. Rudolf Hiestand, 2 vols (Göttingen, 1972–84), 1: 215.
41 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Liber ad milites Templi de laude novae militiae’, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, 3: 214.
42 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Epistolae’, 8: 315, 436.