The Gospel of Holy War: The New Testament in Chronicles of the First Crusade

In the aftermath of the crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, Christian chroniclers seeking to make sense of the events leading up to this momentous victory relied heavily on traditional methods of biblical exegesis to gauge the First Crusade’s historical and eschatological significance.  While scholars have often noted the prominence of Old Testament texts and metaphors within European chronicles of the First Crusade – which often depict the crusaders as new Israelites, and their Muslim enemies as the pagan tribes who threatened the ancient Jews – the New Testament also had an important, though hitherto largely overlooked, role to play in the reception of the holy war in the West.  Focusing on Latin histories of the First Crusade composed by European clerics between c.1099 and c.1146, this paper considers how quotations from and allusions to the Gospels and the Book of Acts serve as authorial commentary on the new enterprise of holy war.  In the first place, I argue, chroniclers selectively referenced the New Testament to present the crusade as the herald of a new apostolic age, one typologically linked to the miraculous events described in the Gospels and Acts.  Secondly, chroniclers glossed New Testament texts to help understand (and explain to readers) how the crusade could be, in Jonathan Riley-Smith’s words, an “act of love,” a legitimate interpretation of Christ’s injunctions to love one’s neighbors and live in a state of peace.  From this exegetical perspective, the call to holy war could even be regarded as a new kind of gospel.