Lançado há pouco tempo, esse livro acima de Christopher Tyerman, professor de Oxford, parece ser bom para destronar mais uma percepção absurda contra as Cruzadas. O livro responde sobre como eram planejadas as Cruzadas. Hoje em dia, os professores de história parecem dizer que os guerreiros eram um bando sem liderança, e sem objetivos militares, queriam apenas dominar economicamente as terras.
Eu usei muito Jonathan Riley-Smith no meu livro sobre guerra justa, chamado "Teoria e Tradição da Guerra Justa: do Império Romano ao Estado Islâmico".
Se o livro de Tyerman estivesse disponível na época em que eu escrevia meu livro, eu certamente teria comprado o livro dele.
Aqui vai uma parte da descrição do livro de Tyerman feita pelo Catholic World Report.
Crusading 101
How to Plan a Crusade: Religious War in the High Middle Ages, by Oxford professor Christopher Tyerman, demolishes the legend that Western crusaders were mere irrational rabble from Dark Age rubble.
It is a mark of our hyper-political and hypocritical age that those who are most ignorant of the crusades should condemn the perceived ignorance of medieval crusaders. Sprinkle in accusations of greed, thuggery, and a moral equivalence with ISIS (see former President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, 2015) and it pretty much sums up what many people think they know about the crusades. But popular understanding of the crusades lags decades behind scholars. It is as if a generation of people read Steven Runciman’s three-volume A History of the Crusades (1951-53) a half-century ago and then, along with their progeny, closed their eyes to everything published after.
In How to Plan a Crusade: Religious War in the High Middle Ages, Christopher Tyerman, Professor of the History of the Crusades at the University of Oxford, demolishes the legend that Western crusaders were mere irrational rabble from Dark Age rubble. Tyerman painstakingly documents the gargantuan efforts involved in crusade organization, recruitment, financing and logistics. He makes the irrefutable case that the crusades were based on faith and reason. He comes out swinging in the book’s Introduction saying,
The crusades have frequently been portrayed as ultimate symbols of of the power of credulity…the blind leading the deluded. What follows argues that in almost all respects this image is false.
...
How to Plan a Crusade’s structure consists in five parts: Justification, Propaganda, Recruitment, Finance, and Logistics. Each part is divided into chapters covering specific aspects of the larger whole. For example, Logistics includes chapters on coordination, health and safety, supplies, and strategy. If your eyes glaze over with the possibility of reading nearly three hundred pages of this sort of thing don’t despair. Parts of the book are admittedly a slog, reading rather like a medieval mail order catalog of crusading necessities. There is simply too much source material to be combed, collected, and considered. Tyerman also jumps around between countries and centuries, often in the same paragraph—an additional challenge for the reader. But despite these minor drawbacks, Tyerman tells a compelling tale with clarity and concision.
Justification for the crusades was the province of the Church. The writing and teaching of Bernard of Clairvaux, and papal bulls such as Quantum praedecessores, Audita tremendi, and Quia Maior, made the case for military action. Tyerman is exceptional in explaining the distinctions between Urban II’s praelia sancta—a holy war that opened the spiritual treasury of the Church for all participants—and the legitime bella, or just war. This illuminates what participants understood about their undertaking and how contemporary sources could write of crusading as an act of love (a theme explored in greater depth by historian Jonathon Riley-Smith). But getting knights and squires to leave their wives—spousal consent was required for much of the crusading period—and travel halfway across the world, risking death and disease and nearly bankrupting themselves in the process, took some persuasion.
The crusades were preached across Europe. From Pope Urban II’s first call at Clermont in 1095 to the fourteenth century (even after the fall of Acre in 1291), canons and cardinals and monks fanned out to preach the taking of the cross. And while propaganda—as a modern descriptor—is not how medieval audiences understood the preaching of the crusades, it is an apt word for readers to understand this flurry of activity. Though there were other forms of publicity for the crusades, preaching was perhaps the most fitting means of persuasion. As Tyerman observes, “crusade preaching was distinctive.” So much so that by the thirteenth century, lesser known preachers relied on sermon collections of the “stars of the genre.”
Crusade preaching manuals existed, most significantly Humbert of Romans’ erudite effort, De praedicatione s. Crucis contra Saracenos. Here again Tyerman exposes modern perceptions—prejudices really—as entirely unfounded. “One common myth of the Middle Ages,” he argues, “assumes that popular audiences, chiefly the rural peasantry, lived in a perpetual state of murky ignorance of the concerns of high politics. The crusades give the lie to this.”
Princes and paupers heard the call, understood it, and took the cross in great numbers. Recruiting “relied on organization, not emotion.” Ultimately the business of travel to, and fighting in, the Holy Land fell to the wealthy and knightly classes. Nevertheless, the Church opened her spiritual treasury to all. One did not need to wield the sword to obtain the grace. Crusader armies traveled with craftsmen, servants, and cooks. Recruitment often involved public displays and mass audiences and was regularly robed in liturgical ritual.
For all their spiritual and theological foundation, the crusades were still wars of re-conquest (as was the case in Muslim Iberia). Christianity permeated the Middle East for centuries before the arrival of Islam, and the object of crusading was always to return the region—especially Jerusalem—to Christianity. This does not mean crusaders lacked worldly incentives. The “crusade mentality,” Tyerman says, “never excluded profit.” Nor did the existence of other motives negate religious conviction.
That the crusades were first and foremost religious endeavors did not diminish the necessity of practical planning. Practical considerations of cost—as well as any gain—were as integral to medieval war fighting as they are now. Tyerman is superb in detailing all the ways in which the crusades were funded. A complex network of international finance emerges, one in which our modern financial system has roots. “Crusade finance,” Tyerman argues, “contributed to the freeing of the land market, the opening of international credit markets and the creation of novel fiscal techniques.” He also points to surplus moveable wealth as basis of taxation, another means of funding the crusades. He makes the rather depressing case that such assessments constituted the first income taxes.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário