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Stigmata on the First Crusade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

William J. Purkis
William J. Purkis*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

In his eyewitness account of the First Crusade, Fulcher of Chartres described the shipwreck and drowning of a boatload of crusaders who were bound for the Holy Land in 1097. After the bodies of the dead were recovered, he explained how ‘they discovered crosses evidently marked on the flesh above the shoulders’. Fulcher supposed this incident to be a miracle, ‘divinely revealed’, and that the marking was a ‘token of faith’ (pignusfidei) bestowed by God upon his servants. It was a sign to the surviving crusaders that God favoured them and would fulfil the promise he had made that ‘the just, though they shall be taken prematurely by death, shall be in peace’ (Wisd. 4, 7).

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 41: Signs, Wonders, Miracles Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church , 2005 , pp. 99 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005

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References

1 Fulcheri Carnotensis Historia Hierosolymitana (1095–1127), ed. Hagenmeyer, Heinrich (Heidelberg, 1913), 169–70 Google Scholar. All translations by the author, except where indicated.

2 Ibid. For another treatment of the appearance of the sign of the cross upon the drowned crusaders and a discussion of similar events in Scandinavian sources, see Antonsson, Haki, ‘ Insigne Crucis: a European Motif in a Nordic Setting’, in Liszka, Thomas R. and Walker, Lorna E. M., eds, The North Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of North-Westen Europe (Dublin, 2001), 15–32 Google Scholar. The symbolism of the cross is considered in Giles Constable, ‘Jerusalem and the Sign of the Cross (with Particular Reference to the Cross of Pilgrimage and Crusading in the Twelfth Century)’, in Lee I. Levine, ed., Jerusalem: its Sanctity and Centrality to judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York, 1999), 371–81.

3 Le ‘Liber’ de Raymond d’Aguilers, ed. John, H. and Hill, Laurita L. (Paris, 1969), 102.Google Scholar

4 Ibid.

5 Guibert de Nogent, Dei Gesta per Francos et cinq autres textes, ed. Robert B. C. Huygens, CChr.CM 127a (Turnhout, 1996) [hereafter: Guibert], 329.

6 See Riley-Smith, Jonathan, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London, 1986), 34, 81–2, 114.Google Scholar

7 Guibert, 330; transl. Robert Levine, The Deeds of God through the Franks: a Translation of Guibert de Nogent’s Gesta Dei per Francos (Woodbridge, 1997), 155–6.

8 Ibid.

9 Bernold of St Blasien, Chronicon, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz, MGH (Hannover, 1844), 5: 385–467,464.

10 Baldric of Bourgueil, Historia jerosolimitana, RHC Occ, 4: 1–111, 17.

11 Historia de translatione sanctorum magni Nicolai … ejusdem avunculi alterius Nicolai, Theodorique … de civitate Mirea in monasterium S. Nicolai de Littore Venetiarum, RHC Occ, 5: 253–292, 255.

12 Ekkehard of Aura, Hierosolymita, de oppressione, liberatione ac restauratione Jerosolymitanœ Ecclesia, RHC Occ, 5: 1–40, 19.

13 Vitalis, Orderic, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and transl. Chibnall, Marjorie, 6 vols (Oxford, 1969-80), 5: 30 Google Scholar. Orderic’s version was based largely on the Historia of Baldric of Bourgueil but, as Chibnall notes, ‘the information in this paragraph occurs only in Orderic’: ibid., 30, n. 2.

14 The abbot can be identified as Baldwin, chaplain to Godfrey of Bouillon, and later archbishop of Caesarea (1101–8), from William of Tyre, Chronique, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CChrCM 63–63a, 2 vols (Turnhout, 1981), 1: 472.

15 Guibert, 197; transl. Levine, Guibert de Nogent, 88, in part modified by author.

16 See Robert D. Smith, Comparative Miracles (St Louis, MO, 1965), 23–4, who noted that ‘[a] verified characteristic of [bona fide] stigmata is that the wounds do not become infected’.

17 Guibert, 197.

18 For a recent study, see Nitza Yarom, Body, Blood and Sexuality: a Psychoanalytic Study of St Francis’ Stigmata and their Historical Context (New York, 1992).

19 James of Vitry, Sermones ad fratres minores, ed. Hilarinus Felder, Spicilegium Franciscanum 5 (Rome, 1903), 35, cited in Giles Constable, ‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 143–248,219.

20 The Little Flowers of Saint Francis: with Five Considerations on the Sacred Stigmata, transl. Leo Sherley-Price (London, 1959), 166.

21 For imitatio Christi, see especially Ernest J. Tinsley, The Imitation of God in Christ: an Essay on the Biblical Basis of Christian Spirituality (London, 1960); Constable, ‘Imitation of Christ’, passim.

22 Constable, ‘Imitation of Christ’, 199–201.

23 Damian, Peter, Vita Dominici Loricati Google Scholar, PL 144, 1024A; see Constable, , ‘Imitation of Christ’, 202–3: ‘it is hard to tell how explicitly Damiani’s words should be taken Since he was certainly familiar with the figurative use of the term stigmata, he may have been referring to the signs left on Dominic’s body by his scourgings and other ascetic disciplines’Google Scholar. For Dominic Loricatus, see Thurston, Herbert J. and Attwater, Donald, eds, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 4 vols (London, 1956), 4: 110–11.Google Scholar

24 Caesarii Heisterbacensis monachi ordinis cisterciensis Dialogus miraculorum, ed. Strange, Joseph, 2 vols (Cologne, 1851; repr. Ridgewood, NJ, 1966), 2: 100.Google Scholar

25 See Thurston, Herbert, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (London, 1952), 122 Google Scholar; see also Constable, , ‘Imitation of Christ’, 218–26.Google Scholar

26 Gal. 6, 17; see Jones, Christopher P., ‘ Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco- Roman Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987), 139–55, 150 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘It is probable that he actually refers to marks caused by ill-treatment, but regards them figuratively as the tattoos imposed on him as a slave of Christ. Out of St Paul grew the medieval use of the word stigma for marks received on the body by participation in Jesus’ sufferings, either by self-laceration or mystic transmission’. See also Summers, Montague, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, with Especial Reference to the Stigmata, Divine and Diabolic (London, 1950), 181–3.Google Scholar

27 See Cowdrey, H. E. J., ‘Pope Urban II’s Preaching of the First Crusade’, History 55 (1970), 177–88, repr. in idem, Popes, Monks and Crusaders (London, 1984), XVI Google Scholar; Cole, Penny J., The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 1–36.Google Scholar

28 Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, ed. and transl. Hill, Rosalind (London, 1962), 1.Google Scholar

29 Robert of Rheims, Historia Iherosolimitana, RHC Occ, 3: 717–882, 729–30.

30 The Gesta Francorum records the positioning of the crusader cross as on the right arm or between the shoulders: ‘Deferunt arma ad bellum congrua, in dextra uel inter utrasque scapulas crucem Christi baiulant’, 7. Robert’s Historia was itself based on the Gesta. Antonsson, ‘Insigne Crucis’, 27, rightly notes that ‘this particular positioning of the mark is naturally highly symbolic for it evokes the scene of Christ carrying the cross to Golgotha’.

31 Fulcher of Chartres, who may also have attended the council, certainly drew no connection between the sign of the cross appearing on the shoulders of those crusaders who drowned and the words of Urban’s sermon; nor did he interpret those signs as an indication of vows being fulfilled.

32 Baldric of Bourgueil, Historia, 16.

33 Guibert, 117. For the adoption of the sign of the cross, see Brundage, James A., ‘ Cruce Signari: the Rite for Taking the Cross in England’, Traditio 22 (1966), 289–310 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morris, Colin, ‘Propaganda for War: the Dissemination of the Crusading Ideal in the Twelfth Century’, in Sheils, W.J., ed., The Church and War, SCH 20 (Oxford, 1983), 79–101, 83–4.Google Scholar

34 On the use of Matt. 16, 24 as a ‘[stimulus] to a life of personal reform and withdrawal from the world’, see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 125.

35 Guibert, 87, depicted the crusade as ‘a new way of gaining salvation’. For the crusade as ‘a military monastery on the move’, see Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 2, 26–7, 113–14, 118–19, 150–2, 154–5.

36 Ralph of Caen, Gesta Tancredi, RHC Occ, 3: 587–716, 605–6.

37 See Riley-Smith, Jonathan, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge, 1997), 62–3.Google Scholar

38 Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100, ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer (Innsbruck, 1901), 164.

39 Ibid., 148.

40 Guibert, 178,184; transl. Levine, Guibert de Nogent, 79, 82.

41 See H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Martyrdom and the First Crusade’, in Peter W. Edbury, ed., Crusade and Settlement: Papers Read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of Crusades and the Latin East and Presented to R. C. Smail (Cardiff, 1985), 46–56; Shmuel Shepkaru, ‘To Die for God: Martyrs’ Heaven in Hebrew and Latin Crusade Narratives’, Speculum 77 (2002), 311–41.

42 Constable, ‘Imitation of Christ’, 201.

43 Guibert, 197.

44 The phenomenon of stigmatism has continued through to modern times. For a recent discussion, see Ted Harrison, Stigmata: a Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age (London, 1994).

45 See Constable, Reformation, passim.

46 Riley-Smith, Jonathan, ‘Crusading as an Act of Love’, History 65 (1980), 177–92, 192 CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘The charity of St Francis may now appeal to us more than that of the crusaders, but both sprang from the same roots’.