|
La storia di un fallimento, quello della seconda crociata (1147-1149), e delle sue implicazioni politiche, ideologiche e militari sono al centro del libro The Second Crusade. Extending the Frontiers of Christendom del medievista Jonathan Phillips.
All’origine del fallimento, sottolinea Helen Castor nell’articolo, vi fu un eccesso di sicurezza nei propri mezzi, derivato dal trionfo conseguito dalla prima impresa, la mancanza di risorse economiche e la scarsa conoscenza da parte dei crociati della situazione politica e militare del Vicino Oriente. Secondo Castor il libro di Phillips, che rappresenta la prima ricostruzione dettagliata della spedizione a partire dal XIX secolo, mette in luce con efficacia la profonda tensione esistente fra gli stessi cristiani: i regni occidentali, i bizantini e i regni crociati.
The vast military expedition that left Europe for the Holy Land in the summer of 1147 has been the Cinderella among crusades, historiographically speaking. The first crusade, 50 years earlier, stormed dramatically into Muslim-held Jerusalem and, against towering odds, established a Christian kingdom there. The third crusade, almost 50 years later, became famous for Richard the Lionheart’s struggle with Saladin for control of the holy city. And the fourth crusade http://www.pbmstoria.it/dizionari/storia_ant/c/c221.htm, which followed after only a decade, achieved lasting infamy when its goal of recapturing Jerusalem was summarily discarded in favour of the sacking of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire and the greatest Christian city in the world.
By contrast, the second crusade - two years in the making, and led by the two greatest kings of western Europe - was a damp squib, glossed over by embarrassed contemporaries, and largely ignored by historians ever since. But of course the participants themselves had no idea that their extraordinary efforts would end in humiliating retreat. And this mismatch between expectation and achievement forms a compelling theme of Jonathan Phillips’s absorbing new book, the first detailed account of this “forgotten” crusade to be published since the 19th century.
The campaign of 1145-49 was conceived in explicit relation to the spectacular and unprecedented success of the first crusade a generation earlier. The crusaders - thousands of soldiers and pilgrims from France, Germany, Flanders, England and Italy - set out to march in their fathers’ footsteps, to win glory in this world and salvation in the next just as their predecessors had done. Crucially, however, they did so with a sense of anticipation and entitlement quite unlike the self-consciously pioneering expedition of 1096-99.
The confidence that God was with them, engendered by that improbable triumph half a century earlier, helped to bring together a remarkably ambitious campaign, aiming not only to recapture the city of Edessa (the fall of which, in December 1144, triggered the call to crusade), but, as Phillips emphasises, to “extend the frontiers of Christendom”. [...]
However, this confidence also convinced the crusaders that, in campaigning 2,000 miles from home against an enemy of alien culture as well as religion, they were dealing [...] with known knowns, or at least known unknowns. Various surprises lay in wait, not the least of which was the crippling expense of the expedition: Louis VII of France had reached no further than Hungary when he began sending urgently to Paris for extra funds.
But it was the unknown unknowns that finally scuppered the crusaders’ plans. After a difficult journey across Asia Minor, which almost claimed the life of the German king, Conrad III, and inflicted heavy casualties on his army, the forces that arrived in the Latin east discovered that their original target was no longer there to be rescued: a rebellion in Edessa had been crushed with such vehemence by its Muslim rulers that the city was now deserted, its walls in ruins. Urgent negotiations identified Damascus as a viable alternative; but, after a promising attack through the walled orchards that made up the city’s outer defences, the crusaders were driven off by impassable blockades and the imminent prospect of starvation. Riven by argument about who was to blame for the fiasco, they trailed disconsolately home.
Phillips’s book is beautifully produced [...] and, unsurprisingly for a university press, it’s also a heavyweight in academic terms. It will be required reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in crusading history, for the breadth and depth of its analysis and its reassessment not only of key moments of military and political decision-making, but of the contribution of Pope Eugenius III to the preaching of the crusade (alongside the well-recognised charisma of Bernard of Clairvaux). [...] Phillips conveys a powerful sense of the massive investment of time, money, belief and, ultimately, lives which the expedition demanded; of the less than glorious leadership of Conrad and Louis (the latter more monk than man, according to his formidable wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who accompanied him on the campaign); of the profound tensions between the rival Christian powers of western Europe, the Byzantine empire and the Latin kingdoms of the east; and of the abruptness of the crusade’s collapse after the failure at Damascus.
The book is thought-provoking about questions of identity and the fraught interaction between religious and political imperatives. There are no easy parallels between present and past, and Phillips is too fine a historian to suggest them; but one of the achievements of this subtle book is that, in learning about a lost world, we think harder about our own.
Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom, Yale 2008, pp. 364, £ 25.
The Guardian |
