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An Anglican View of the Crusades: Thomas Fuller’s The Historie of the Holy Warre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Bernard Hamilton
Bernard Hamilton*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
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Extract

This essay is concerned with the ways in which the English Reformation changed the understanding of the crusade movement from that held in the Middle Ages. The papally inspired crusade movement was not an attractive subject to sixteenth-century Protestant scholars. As Christopher Tyerman has remarked in his study, England and the Crusades, it was not until 1639 that ‘Thomas Fuller published his Historie of the Holy Warre, the first, and one of the more interesting histories of the crusades written by an Englishman’. The only earlier post-Reformation English work which had touched on this subject was Richard Knolles’ The Generall Historie of the Turks (1603). Its first book was entitled ‘The Generall Historie of the Turks before the Rising of the Ottoman Familie’, and inevitably contained some account of crusading activity, though that was incidental to its main theme. Knolles’ book proved popular and a second edition was published in 1610, showing that there was a public for works of this kind.

Type
Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 121 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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References

1 All references in this article are to the second edition: Fuller, Thomas, The Historie of the Holy Warre (Cambridge, 1640).Google Scholar See also Tyerman, C., England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (London, 1988), 370.Google Scholar

2 Knolles, Richard, The Generall Historie of the Turks (London, 1603).Google Scholar

3 MacLean, G., The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire (London, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem and Matar, N., Britain and the Islamic World (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar; ‘The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, 1599–1600’, in Bent, J. T., ed., Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, Hakluyt Society ser. 1, 87 (Cambridge, 1893)Google Scholar; ‘Mr Harrie Cavendish. His Journey to and from Constantinople, 1589’, ed. Wood, A. C., Camden Miscellany 17 (1940), 1–29 Google Scholar; Jardine, Lisa, ‘Gloriana Rules the Waves’, TRHS ser. 6, 14 (2004), 209–22.Google Scholar

4 Queen Elizabeth authorized the foundation of the Levant Company in 1581, but negotiations with the Ottoman authorities were not concluded until 1583: Wood, A. C., A History of the Levant Company (Oxford, 1935), 11–14 Google Scholar; on the Aleppo factory, see ibid. 75–7; Mather, J., Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World (London, 2009), 19–22.Google Scholar

5 ODNB, s.n. ‘Fuller, Thomas’.

6 Fuller, Holy Warre, Epistle Dedicatorie, 4–5.

7 The Latin term ecclesia anglicana was used during the Middle Ages (e.g. in Magna Carta) to describe the English provinces of the western church. The word ‘Anglican’ is first attested in 1635, at the time that Fuller was writing, in a letter of James Howell (c. 1593–1666), a royal official under Charles I. Howell used ‘Anglican’ and ‘Gallican’ to describe churches opposed to Rome, and that represents Fuller’s own position. See OED (Oxford, 1931), 1: 327.

8 The first Protestant historian to challenge this view was Charles Schmidt in 1848–9, who asserted that the Cathars were dualists, not proto-Protestants; because Schmidt was a Protestant pastor, his views carried weight with his co-religionists: Schmidt, C., Histoire et doctrine de la secte des Cathares ou Albiegeois, 2 vols (Paris, 1848-9).Google Scholar

9 Fuller, Holy Warre, 139–40 (3.18).

10 Ibid., Qq3v, Qq4r [sic].

11 This soon began to change. Edward Pococke was appointed to the Laudian chair of Arabic at Oxford in 1636, and in 1663, two years after Fuller’s death, produced a Latin translation of Bar Hebraeus’s history of the Near and Middle East, containing a good deal of information about the crusading period, entitled Historia Compendium Dynastiarum (this work is now generally called Chronographia): Irwin, R., For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London, 2006), 93–7.Google Scholar

12 Fuller, Holy Warre, 278–82 (5.29).

13 ‘Spain was exercised all the time of this warre in defending her self against the Moores and Saracens in her own bowels’: ibid. 266 (5.22).

14 For the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the creation of the Latin Empire, see ibid. 136–8 (3.17); for the recovery of Constantinople by the Byzantine emperor, Michael VIII, with a very brief summary of the history of the Latin Empire and the survival of Venetian rule in Greek lands, ibid. 171–2 (4.3).

15 Ibid. 172–8 (4.4–6).

16 Ibid. 234–6 (5.4).

17 Ibid. 138–50 (3.18–22).

18 Ibid. 150 (3.22).

19 Fuller described Islam as ‘the scumme of Judaisme and Paganisme sod together, and here and there strewed over with a spice of Christianitie’: ibid. 7 (1.6).

20 [Saladin] ‘wanted nothing to his eternall happinesse but the knowledge of Christ’: ibid. 133 (3.14).

21 Ibid. 7 (1.6).

22 Ibid. 15 (1.10), 244 (5.9).

23 Fuller knew from Baronius that this request had been made, though he did not himself consider it a very important cause of the First Crusade: ibid. 13 (1.9).

24 Albert of Aachen, Historia Hierosolimitana 1.2-5; ed. and transl. Edgington, S. B. (Oxford, 2007), 4–9 Google Scholar; Fuller, Holy Warre, 11–12 (1.8).

25 Fuller, Holy Warre, 136–8 (3.17); the degree of Innocent III’s involvement in the diversion of the crusade to Constantinople remains controversial. The problems inherent in the sources are discussed by Phillips, J. P., The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (London, 2004).Google Scholar

26 Fuller, Holy Warre, 211 (4.24).

27 Ibid. 241 (5.9). At the Council of Clermont in 1095 Urban II had decreed: ‘Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance [imposed for sins repented, and absolved in confession]’: Somerville, R., The Councils of Urban II. 1: Decreta Claromontensia, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, Supplementum 1 (Amsterdam, 1972), 74 Google Scholar; cited in the translation of , L. and Riley-Smith, J., The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095–1274 (London, 1981), 37.Google Scholar

28 Ibid. 256 (5.16).

29 Ibid. 113 (3.3).

30 Ibid. 124 (3.9).

31 Ibid. 211 (4.23).

32 Ibid. 216 (4.27); cf. 2 Kings 22, 23: 1–10.

33 Ibid. 67 (2.17).

34 Siberry, E., Criticism of Crusading 1095–1274 (Oxford, 1985).Google Scholar

35 Fuller, Holy Warre, 106 (2.46).

36 Ibid. 228 (4.32).

37 Ibid. 251–3 (5.13).

38 Ibid. 249–50 (5.12). For a full discussion of Pelagius’s role, see Powell, J., Anatomy of a Crusade 1213–1221 (Philadelphia, PA, 1986).Google Scholar

39 Fuller, Holy Warre, 93 (2.37).

40 Ibid. 248 (5.11).

41 The third military order, the Knights Templar, had been suppressed in 1311–12 by the Council of Vienne, and Fuller examined the reasons for this: ibid. 229–34 (5.1-3). For a fall discussion of this matter, see Barber, M. C., The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1978).Google Scholar

42 Fuller, Holy Warre, 234–6 (5.4).

43 ‘If any object that Religion is not to be beaten into men with the dint of sword; yet it may be lawfull to open the way by force, for instruction, catechizing, and such other gentle means to follow after’: ibid. 13 (1.9).

44 Ibid. 237 (5.5).

45 Milton, G., White Gold (London, 2004), 10.Google Scholar

46 Fuller, Holy Warre, 228 (4.32).

47 Ibid. 278 (5.28).

48 Ibid. 285 (5.30).

49 Ibid. 286.