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ABSTRACT
In 1101 the Holy Fire failed to appear in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday, as tradition and liturgy dictated. Less a failure and more a deliberately precipitated crisis born of a political struggle of wills between Patriarch Daimbert and King Baldwin, the resolution of this event enabled the kings of Jerusalem to establish dominance over the ecclesiastical sphere for most of the kingdom’s history. A reading of the narrative sources against liturgical sources casts light on the intersection between liturgy and government and on how the simulation of miracles could be used to advance political causes.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the University of Texas at Austin Institute for Historical Studies and the London Medieval Society for earlier comments; Cecilia Gaposchkin, for help with liturgical concepts and vocabulary; and Jim Steinmeyer, who discussed this topic from the perspective of a professional magician.
Note on contributor
Jay Rubenstein is the Alvin and Sally Beaman Professor of History and the Riggsby Director of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee. He has published extensively on monastic intellectual history and on the history of the First Crusade.
Notes
1 The following abbreviations are used in this article: AA: Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana, ed. and trans. Susan Edgington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007); CCCM: Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis; FC: Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana, ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer (Heidelberg: Winters, 1913); ‘Fulcher abbreviated’ (Bartolf de Nangis): Gesta Francorum Iherusalem expugnantium, in RHC: Oc, 3: 487‒543; Kohler, ‘Un rituel’: Charles Kohler, ‘Un rituel et un breviaire du Saint-Sépulcre de Jérusalem (XIIe–XIIIe siècle)’, Revue de l’Orient Latin 8 (1900‒1): 383–500; RHC: Oc: Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens occidentaux. 5 vols. in 6 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1844‒96): Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’: Sebastián Salvadó, ‘The Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre and the Templar Rite: Edition and Analysis of the Jerusalem Ordinal (Rome, Bib. Vat., Barb. Lat. 659) with a Comparative Study of the Acre Breviary (Paris, Bib. Nat., MS Latin 10478)’ (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2011); WT: William of Tyre, Chronique, ed. R.B.C. Huygens. CCCM 63 and 63A. 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), with translations from William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. Ernest Babcock and August Krey. 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
Today, the Greek patriarch (after having his clothes searched for matches or any other implement that might kindle fire) is shut inside the Aedicule and then exits the tomb, bearing the miraculous fire with him. Described in Martin Biddle, Gideon Avni, Jon Seligman and Tamar Winter, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (New York: Rizzoli, 2000), 101–2; Andrew Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire and Holy Sepulchre: Ritual and Space in Jerusalem from the Ninth to the Fourteenth Centuries’, in Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2009 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Frances Andrews (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2011), 44–60, especially 44–7.
2 ‘Cuius pectus silicinum, fratres, tantum miraculum non emolliat? Credite mihi, bestialis homo et insulsi capitis est, cuius cor virtus divina tam presens ad fidem non everberat’: Baldric of Bourgueil, The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, ed. Steven Biddlecombe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 7–8.
3 Giles Constable, ‘Petri Venerabilis sermones tres’, Revue Bénédictine 64 (1954): 224–72 (241–2 and 251–2); see also Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 250–2; Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire’, 56.
4 Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 197–208; similarly, Dominque Iogna-Prat, Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l'hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam, 1000–1150 (Paris: Aubier, 1998).
5 Benedicta Ward, In the Company of Christ: a Pilgrimage Through Holy Week (New York: Church Publishing, 2005), viii.
6 Described as a ‘chestnut of the schools’ by Steven Justice, ‘Eucharistic Miracle and Eucharistic Doubt’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 2 (2012): 307–32 (312). Blood cults characteristic of later medieval piety have been studied by Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
7 Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Patrick Geary, ‘Humiliation of Saints’, in Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, ed. Stephen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 123–40.
8 Luke 4:9–12.
9 Susan B. Edgington, ‘The Gesta Francorum Iherusalem expugnantium of “Bartolf of Nangis”’, Crusades 13 (2014): 21–35; Albert Derolez, ‘The Abbey of Saint-Bertin, the Liber Floridus, and the Origin of the Gesta Francorum Hierusalem expugnantium’, Manuscripta 57, no. 1 (2013): 1–28; and Jay Rubenstein, ‘Guibert of Nogent, Albert of Aachen and Fulcher of Chartres: Three Crusade Chronicles Intersect’, in Writing the Early Crusades: Text, Transmission and Memory, eds. Marcus Bull and Damien Kempf (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 24–37. The so-called Bartolf material can be checked against another manuscript, called by Hagenmeyer the ‘L’ manuscript, Cambridge University MS 2079, another revised version of Fulcher’s earliest draft of his history; discussed in Rubenstein, ‘Three Chronicles’, 26–8.
10 Steven Justice, ‘Did the Middle Ages Believe in their Miracles?’, Representations 103 (2008): 1–29 (2).
11 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 17–22. The model was used directly, for example, in Amy Remensnyder, ‘Un problème de cultures ou de culture? La statue-reliquaire et les joca de Sainte Foy de Conques dans le Liber miraculorum de Bernard d’Angers’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 33, no. 132 (1990): 351–79.
12 Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Rev. edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4. See also Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), especially 37.
13 Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event 1000–1215. Rev. edn. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), writes extensively of shrine miracles as propaganda for local churches.
14 Rodulfus Glaber, The Five Books of Histories, eds. and trans. John France, Neithard Bulst and Paul Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 181–5 (4.6).
15 Translated in Guibert of Nogent, Monodies and On the Relics of Saints: the Autobiography and a Manifesto of a French Monk from the Time of the Crusades, trans. Joseph McAlhany and Jay Rubenstein (London: Penguin Classics, 2011), 206.
16 ‘Ergo si queras ab eis, qua non cadat arte, fallentes Machomis viribus hoc reputant’: in R.B.C. Huygens, ‘Otia de Machomete. Gedicht von Walter von Compiègne’, Sacris Erudiri 8 (1956): 287–328 (327).
17 Alexander Neckham would tell a similar story of a statue of Muhammad: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘The Rhetoric of Antichrist in Western Lives of Muhammad’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 8, no. 3 (1997): 297–307 (301).
18 The trick as described is technically impossible. The casket would need to have been magnetic as well (thanks to Jim Steinmeyer for that observation).
19 John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
20 ‘Non est hoc miraculum sicut protenta magorum, inane aut phastasticum, sed verum, corporale, ac solidum’: Constable, ‘Petri Venerabilis Sermones tres’, 249.
21 I have discussed the circumstances of the election in Jay Rubenstein, ‘Godfrey of Bouillon vs. Raymond of Saint-Gilles: How Carolingian Kingship Trumped Millenarianism at the End of the First Crusade’, in The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, eds. Matthew Gabriel and Jace Stuckey (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 59–75.
22 WT, 429–30 (1.9.8).
23 John France, ‘The Election and Title of Godfrey de Bouillon’, Canadian Journal of History 18 (1983): 321–9; and Alan V. Murray, ‘The Title of Godfrey of Bouillon as Ruler of Jerusalem’, Collegium Medievale 3 (1990): 163–78. In doing so, they reject the argument of Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘The Title of Godfrey de Bouillon’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 52, no. 125 (1979): 83–6, who also casts doubt on the authenticity of the title of ‘Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre’.
24 Sources are ambiguous on this point: Rosalind Hill, ed., Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962), 92, refers to Godfrey as princeps. Fulcher of Chartres (FC), 308 (1.30.1), styles Godfrey princeps regni, though the chapter title refers to him as ‘rex’; Raymond of Aguilers, Liber, eds., John H. and Laurita L. Hill (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1969), 152, says barons first offered Raymond of Saint-Gilles the regnum, but when he refused, they elected Godfrey; Albert of Aachen (AA), 450 (6.38), describes Godfrey as princeps et rector, raised up in solio regni Ierusalem. Three early twelfth-century monastic chroniclers all simply call Godfrey ‘king’: Baldric of Bourgueil, Historia, 116; Robert the Monk, The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, eds. Damien Kempf and Marcus G. Bull (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2013), 101, 103 and 104; Guibert of Nogent, Dei gesta per Francos, ed. R.B.C. Huygens. CCCM 127A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 297 (7.18); 317 (7.25); and 336 (7.37).
25 Raymond says specifically that ‘my warnings and arguments were ignored’: ‘Spreta itaque amonicione et contradictione nostra’, Raymond, Liber, 152. See also 143–4, where Raymond says he argued for an advocate instead of a king.
26 Epistola 18, in Heinrich Hagenmeyer, ed., Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100 (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen, 1901), 168, where the relevant text reads: ‘gratia Dei ecclesiae S. Sepulcri nunc advocatus’. On the manuscript tradition of this letter, see Thomas W. Smith, ‘The First Crusade Letter Written at Laodicea in 1099: Two Previously Unpublished Versions From Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 23390 and 28195’, Crusades 15 (2016): 1–25.
27 WT, 438–9 (2.9.4). A sympathetic reading of Daimbert’s, or Daibert’s, career is given in Michael Matzke, Daibert von Pisa: zwischen Pisa, Papst und erstem Kreuzzug (Simaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1998); see especially 153–67.
28 Our two best-placed sources – the Deeds of the Franks and Raymond of Aguilers – say that the Franks elected Arnulf as patriarch: Hill, ed., Gesta Francorum, 93, and Raymond of Aguilers, Liber, 154. Also, Robert the Monk, Historia, 101, says that Arnulf was elected rector animarum, and gives a glowing account of Arnulf’s character and qualifications.
29 WT, 440–1 (2.9.15).
30 WT, 456 (2.10.4).
31 WT, 41–2 (2.9.16).
32 WT, 457 (2.10.4).
33 Luigi Russo, Boemondo: figlio del Guiscardo e principe di Antiochia (Avellino: Allio Sellino Editore, 2009), 139–42.
34 On this period in general, Matzke, Daibert, 162–73, and AA, 538 (7.35). Also, Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: the Secular Church (London: Variorum, 1980), 53–7.
35 FC, 368–9 (2.3.14). Also, AA, 536–8 (7.34–5). William of Tyre, like Fulcher, mentions Daimbert’s retreat to Mount Zion and the clergy’s hatred for him, though he blames the situation on Arnulf’s villainy; WT, 461–2 (10.7).
36 For reasons noted earlier, I will be citing Bartolf de Nangis here by the name ‘Fulcher abbreviated’: ‘Fulcher abbreviated’: 522 (44).
37 Fulcher defends the decision to crown Baldwin (thus indicating the existence of opposition), saying that the Jews had not intended the crown of thorns to be a sign of honour, and that it is God, not men, who chooses kings: FC, 384–7 (2.6.1–4).
38 AA, 554–60 (7.46–51), describes Baldwin’s legal attempts to depose Daimbert from office, followed by a temporary reconciliation.
39 The twelfth-century mechanics of the ceremony are described in three different manuscripts: the mid-twelfth-century sacramentary, MS 477 at the Bibliotheca Angelica in Rome; an early thirteenth-century copy of an ordinal for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, an unnumbered manuscript now in the archives of the Church of San Sepolcro in Barletta; and an ordinal of the Knights Templar, Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barberini lat. 659, edited in Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’.
40 Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire’, 48–51, and Colin Morris, Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West: From the Beginning to 1600 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 110 and 136–8.
41 This story echoes an earlier one from the eleventh century, reported in Francis E. Peters, Jerusalem: the Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 261–3.
42 On the intersection of scepticism, magic and paranormal performances, see Peter Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs: a Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially 234–9; also, Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003), 47–70.
43 Edoardo D’Angelo, ed., Hystoria de via et recuperatione Antiochiae atque Ierusolymarum (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2009), 102, 109. According to the Barletta manuscript, the usual hour for the miracle was noon, which would have meant the Christians prayed for three hours. See Kohler, ‘Un rituel’, 383–500, where we read (420) that the patriarch is to approach the Sepulchre on Holy Saturday at the sixth hour.
44 Guibert, Dei gesta, 341–2 (7.41), claims to have heard a comparable but less dramatic story from eyewitnesses.
45 By the seventeenth century, Latins at the Holy Sepulchre had denounced the miracle as a fraud, though probably as much because it was controlled by Greeks and Armenians rather than out of any innate scepticism: Peters, Jerusalem, 523–4, 571–2.
46 The source is a fourteenth-century scholar named al-Maqrizi, who had access to a more extensive archive than survives. The translated passage is taken from Paul E. Walker, Caliph of Cairo: Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, 996–1021 (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009), 75. Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire’, 53–4, notes other instances of Muslim doubts about the miracle.
47 While Salvadó does not directly compare the miracle to a magic trick, he does remark on the ‘candid acknowledgement of the fictitious but necessary dramatic elements of the rite’; Salvadó, ‘Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre’, 155.
48 See the discussion of misdirection in Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman, Magic in Theory: an Introduction to the Theoretical and Psychological Elements of Conjuring (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1999), 28–53, and in Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (New York: Picador, 2010), 66–74. Using the technical vocabulary of stage magic, misdirection in this case puts distance between the ‘effect’ (bright light appearing inside the Aedicule) and the ‘method’ (a person concealed within the Aedicule starting a fire).
49 As observed in Lamont and Wiseman, Magic in Theory, 67: ‘It is easier for an observer to analyse than it is for a participant … When the pseudo-psychic requests the help of the spectators to achieve the desired result, the spectators become participants rather than observers, with an emotional interest in a successful outcome.’
50 Kohler, ‘Un rituel’, 421.
51 Macknik and Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind, periodically describe misdirection as ‘attention management’, e.g., 56, 57 and 66.
52 The earlier manuscript directs the clergy’s emotions as follows: ‘Concede quis omnipotens deus. ut qui festa paschalia agimus celestibus desideris accensi. Fontem vite sitiamus … benedic domine hoc lumen quod a te sanctificatum sit atque benedictum. Et praesta ut ab eo claritatis tue lumine accendantur et illuminentur mentes nostre’, Rome, Biblotheca Angelica, MS 477, ff. 59v–60r. Kohler, ‘Un rituel’, 421, directs that the crowds should be overcome with emotion at this point.
53 Kohler, ‘Un rituel’, 421. The remaining instructions discussed here appear on 421–2.
54 Pretended difficulty and initial failures are techniques shared by magicians, acrobats and jugglers alike; see Henning Nelms, Magic and Showmanship: a Handbook for Conjurers (New York: Dover, 1969), 256–8. As an example of this technique, Macknik and Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind, 162–3. Although these instructions about failures are from the later Barletta manuscript, they clearly pre-date it; see the comments of Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire’, 46–7.
55 http://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/06/movies/frank-capra-given-american-film-institute-s-10th-life-achievement-award.html (accessed 26 December 2016). The Russian pilgrim Daniel reports that the Fire failed twice during his visit to the tomb, before finally appearing after three hours: ‘The Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel in the Holy Land’, in Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 1099–1185, ed. John Wilkinson (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1988), 168–9.
56 ‘Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel’, 168. The suggestion of a secret compartment is wholly speculative on my part, but does seem likely.
57 ‘Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel’, 166.
58 ‘Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel’, 169.
59 The effect was comparable to what late nineteenth-century audiences experienced when magicians made use of electricity to effect illusions. See John Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant, Our Magic: the Art in Magic, the Theory of Magic, the Practice of Magic (New York: Dutton, 1911), 232–4.
60 Macknik and Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind, 15–24.
61 Bernard McGinn, ‘Iter Sancti Sepulchri: the Piety of the First Crusaders’, in The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures: Essays on Medieval Civilization, eds. Bede Karl Lackner and Kenneth Roy Philip (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 33–71.
62 Most recently in Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire’, 56–7.
63 Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 212–13, n. 65, and 118–19.
64 FC, 831.
65 ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 525 (48), describes Daimbert entering the Aedicule with three religious people. The ceremony sounds close to that described in the breviary published by Kohler, suggesting that its stage directions grow out of earlier traditions.
66 FC, 831–2.
67 FC, 832. Guibert, Dei gesta, 342 (7.41), says that Fulcher hastened to the Mount of Olives. Guibert was perhaps imagining the Mount of Olives, the site of Christ’s ascension, as a likely place for Holy Fire to appear (and simultaneously betraying a lack of familiarity with Jerusalem’s topography).
68 ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 525 (48). Fulcher is the only source to provide details of Daimbert’s public confession and humiliation. The repeated performance of Kyrie eleison also left an impression on the Genoese writer Caffaro, De liberatione civitatum orientis, in RHC: Oc, 5: 61 (13).
69 FC, 832. Caffaro offered a similar reading, as noted by Jotischky, ‘Holy Fire’, 58.
70 ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 525 (48), with no indication as to who spoke them.
71 All four eyewitness texts refer to this passage, a loose paraphrase of 1 Kings (3 Reg.) 9:3–4, suggesting that it was a crucial part of the day’s lesson and ceremony: FC, 833; ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 525 (48); Ekkehard of Aura, Hierosolymita: de oppresione, liberatione ac restauratione Jerosolymitanae ecclesiae, in RHC: Oc: 5: 36 (32); Caffaro, De liberatione, 61 (14).
72 A merging of details: Ekkehard reports the barefoot procession, in which his source, Heriman, participated; Ekkehard, Hierosolymita, 36 (33). ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 526 (49), and FC, 833, together describe the local Christians’ reactions, as well as the procession.
73 ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 526 (49).
74 FC, 833. Ekkehard, Hierosolymita, 36 (32) says that, according to his source, people returned from the Temple of Solomon to find that two lamps were lit.
75 Ekkehard, Hierosolymita, 36 (32), and Caffaro, De liberatione, 62 (14), agree on this figure. Guibert puts the number at almost 50: Guibert, Dei gesta, 343 (7.42).
76 ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 526 (49).
77 ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 526 (49): ‘pro more regio coronatus’; FC, 833.
78 Guibert, Dei gesta, 343 (7.42). McGinn, ‘Iter Sancti Sepulchri’, 57, n. 16, finds Guibert’s observation unconvincing and prefers to see the crown-wearing as a simple exercise of royal prerogative, which seems unlikely, given how vexed an issue this had been. ‘Fulcher abbreviated’, 525 (48), refers to Baldwin almost setting aside his diadema above, but I interpret those words symbolically rather than literally.
79 Macknik and Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind, 135–40.
80 Not unlike the wide range of reactions possible of believers who witness successful and failed paranormal experiments: Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs, 243–6.
81 ‘Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel’, 167 and 170.
82 ‘Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel’, 169.
83 John Alexander McKinven, Stage Flying: 431 B.C. to Modern Times (Glenwood: D. Meyer Magic Books, 1995), 7–17.
84 FC, 235–41 (1.18).
85 FC, 395–6 (2.8.2).