Crusaders with a Conscience? Encounters with Ethics and Violence in the Early Thirteenth Century

This paper will explore how crusaders decided what constituted legitimate and illegitimate conduct in combat.  Although the scholarly literature on ius ad bellum and crusading motivations is large, the question of ius in bello, or conduct within war, calls for more analysis especially outside of philosophical and jurisprudential contexts. In the thick of battle, what influenced decisions about conduct? What constituted what we would now call an ‘atrocity’ in war, and what was considered to be war’s ‘ordinary violence’? How do the narrative sources represent such acts, and why?

Historians have argued that in group settings people succumb to pressures and commit actions they would never do of their own volition; that ‘ordinary men’ will defer to authority, adapt to group activity, and create narratives about their actions that they can live with in order to explain atrocities committed. Others have identified individual disposition to violence, poor command discipline, novel situations, understandings of the need for group cohesion, and the emotional upheaval of transitioning from combat to aftermath as influencing behaviours. Others again identify the cultural contexts in which war is carried out as influencing the nature of its violence – the dehumanising of enemies, hatred, vengeance, the breakdown of moral authorities that would normally limit violence, the feeling that one can ‘get away with it’, and so on. These ideas can be useful for understanding the cultural landscape of the crusades. By looking at accounts of various early thirteenth-century sieges and their aftermath, this paper will particularly explore the treatment of ‘civilian’ populations, incidents of rape, and acts of mercy. I will use the sieges of Toulouse, Damietta, and Constantinople as case studies in order to think about how cultural conventions of violence were played out or abandoned, and how cultural vocabularies of violence were created and disseminated in relevant narrative texts.

 

Date & time

Wed 03 Jun 2020, 4.15–5pm

Location

Zoom

Speakers

Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch

School/Centre

School of History

Contacts

Joshua Black

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