It is a great time to study the historical memory of the crusades to the Holy Land. The last decade was marked by several important works published on this issue, including such collections of articles as Nicholas Paul and Susanne Yeager (eds), Remembering the crusades: myth, image and identity (Baltimore 2012), Damien Kempf and Marcus Bull (eds), Writing the early crusades: text, transmission and memory (Woodbridge–Rochester, NY 2014), Megan Cassidy-Welch (ed.), Remembering the crusades and crusading and crusades and memory (Abingdon 2017) and Andrew Buck and Thomas Smith (eds), Remembering the crusades in medieval texts and songs (Cardiff 2019). Important recent contributions on the commemoration of the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 should be mentioned too. The last decade was also marked by an increased interest in the Fifth Crusade. It is not that this expedition had not been studied before, but it was still overshadowed to some extent by the early crusades which have always been studied much more, though the fifth expedition to the Holy Land does not lack sources. In recent years the Fifth Crusade has been studied more actively than before: a conference ‘Contextualizing the Fifth Crusade’ (2012) finally resulted in E. Mylod, Guy Perry, Thomas Smith and Jan Vandeburie (eds), The Fifth Crusade in context (Abingdon 2016), and Thomas W. Smith has extensively published on the role of Pope Honorius iii in the crusading movement; and, of course, one must not forget publications by Jessalynn Bird on crusade preaching at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
The book under review continues both trends in the contemporary historiography of crusading. To my knowledge it is the first monograph on the historical memory of the Fifth Crusade. To be more specific, it addresses various issues concerning the memory of the expedition as it was constructed by its participants or contemporaries, and it does not involve sources on later commemorations of the Fifth Crusade. The questions which the book addresses are clearly formulated (p. 2): why was remembering so important in the early thirteenth century, and what purposes did remembrance serve? Primary attention is focused on such sources as the letters from the East of James of Vitry (a prominent preacher of the Fifth Crusade and bishop of Acre at that time) the Historia Damiatina of Oliver of Paderborn, the Gesta obsidionis Damiate, as well as other chronicles. Some parts of the monograph are based on articles previously published by Cassidy-Welch.
The first chapter is dedicated to what the author calls ‘preparatory memory’, that is to say, the formation of personal and collective remembrance in advance of combat, the means by which individuals and groups tried to influence and manage how they would be remembered (p. 19). As Cassidy-Welch rightly states, individuals were remembered through charters which have been already recognised as insightful in relation to motivation for crusading. It should be noted, however, that Cassidy-Welch describes various genres of crusade-related documents rather than analysing their precise content. The second part of the chapter, which aims to describe the means of collective remembrance, addresses the issue of exhortations and prayers recited before battle and written down by chroniclers. This is certainly an important point, since chronicles of the Fifth Crusade are extremely rich on this material, but I doubt that this belongs to the notion of ‘preparatory memory’.
The second, third and fourth chapters are in my opinion crucial, since they are dedicated to the image of crusaders, collective as well as sometimes individual, and the image of the crusade and its place in history. A thorough analysis is made from many points of view. Among other things, the author writes that chroniclers create an image of an ‘ideal crusader’ which is an example of behaviour. This is the crucial point of the recent book by Miika Tamminen, Crusade preaching and the ideal crusader (Turnhout 2018), which is not taken into account by Cassidy-Welch probably because both books appeared almost simultaneously. Attention is also paid to such important an issue as the conversion of Damietta's central mosque to a cathedral, which was commemorated by its eyewitnesses, James of Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, as a meaningful symbolic event.
Chapter v is a summary on the sacred topography which was present in various Fifth Crusade-related writings, mainly those by Oliver of Paderborn. This part of the book demonstrates how the importance of the expedition was reinforced by stressing the biblical connections of various geographical locations of the Holy Land and Egypt. As Cassidy-Welch rightly concludes, this was a kind of creation of places of crusading remembrance.
The last chapter represents a very curious summary on a set of sacred objects – a parchment mitre, a portable altar and ivory containers and glass vessels – currently preserved in Namur, which allegedly belonged to James of Vitry. However, it seems to me a little bit strange that this chapter was included in the book. Cassidy-Welch makes it clear that these objects are associated with the life and deeds of James of Vitry, but not especially with his crusade-related activity. Furthermore, only the mitre is said to have been fabricated in the Holy Land. As far as I can judge, this part of the book does not really address questions related to the remembrance of the Fifth Crusade.
Overall, I think that this work is an important contribution to crusade scholarship. It opens a new way for further studies and brings attention to the issue of historical memory of the ‘later crusades’, which have been rather neglected in favour of the early expeditions.
