Ademar of Chabannes and the Early Eleventh-Century Western Roots of the Crusades

This paper seeks to set the First Crusade into the rapidly changing Western spirituality of the eleventh century by focusing on the life and writings of Ademar of Chabannes.   It is drawn from my forthcoming book The Making of a Millennial Pilgrim: Jerusalem and the Cross in the Life and Writings of Ademar of Chabannes.   The last decade of his life found Ademar becoming more and more obsessed with making a millennial pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which he did in 1033.   The paper seeks to show that it was not only the transcendental pole, that focused on the heavenly Jerusalem, that drew him but also the increasingly important incarnational pole, that connected to the earthly Jerusalem and the incarnate Son of God.   It seeks to emphasize the uniqueness of the eleventh century  when both poles became increasingly prominent, a rare phenomenon in the history of Christianity.   Based not only on the published writings of Ademar but especially on his final manuscripts, not yet in print, the paper is also indebted to the earlier work of Joshua Prawer on Jerusalem, Jonathan Riley-Smith on the crusades, Bernard Bachrach on the warrior mentality of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, Richard Landes on apocalypticism but most especially to R. W. Southern whose Making of the Middle Ages remains a vade mecum for anyone interested in these roots.   Ademar and his contemporary Ralph Glaber are our most prominent Western sources on Jerusalem in the first half of the eleventh century and have not been given sufficient attention when one considers the origins that this paper wishes to examine.